I am using stand-alone DOS 7.1 (boot disk) without Windows 98 and I am pretty happy of the final result.
I have full Sound Blaster Pro compatibility, I can slow down the processor with THROTTLE and load ISOs with SUSHCDX (but not redbook audio). I even get MT-32 hardware emulation through serial port and MT32-Pi.

This T5710 Thin Client is a beast! 😉

Jo22 wrote on 2020-10-30, 08:01:

What about a stand-alone DOS, like Caldera DOS, FreeDOS or IBM DOS 7/2000?
Does it work the same in this case as MS-DOS 7.x does?

I have a working FreeDOS installation. It detects USB flash drives as ordinary hard drives, provided that they have been plugged in before the BIOS POST.

Benedikt wrote on 2020-10-30, 13:44:

Jo22 wrote on 2020-10-30, 08:01:

What about a stand-alone DOS, like Caldera DOS, FreeDOS or IBM DOS 7/2000?
Does it work the same in this case as MS-DOS 7.x does?

I have a working FreeDOS installation. It detects USB flash drives as ordinary hard drives, provided that they have been plugged in before the BIOS POST.

Hi! Thanks a lot for the information! 😀

Small life hack:
If the brutally loud beeper annoys you, but you don't want to mod the hardware, just grab a headphone plug from your parts drawer, plug it in and enjoy the silence!

(The beeper is controlled by the sound chip, internally, and the sound chip will reroute everything to the audio output jack as soon as it detects a plug.)

Don't see the context of the message??

Digidreamer wrote on 2020-12-10, 16:30:

Don't see the context of the message??

The HP 5710 beeper is very loud. 😉

Not heard it...

Tried viasbcfg ?, may be able to control it. I've used it with dos games, works a treat.

Just remembered, my speaker is in the loft. Not attached so very quiet. Lol

I believe the Win98 drivers largely eliminate the BIOS-triggered beeping.
In pure DOS, however, the system will beep whenever you press a few keys too many or whenever the keyboard buffer is full.
With this type of built-in speaker at maximum volume the resulting beep comes closer to a smoke alarm than to an alarm clock.

You can en- and disable the speaker in the BIOS configuration, obviously, but you cannot do so while the system is running.

EDIT: This thing supports Sound Blaster emulation?? I didn't know that!

Yes Sound Blaster emulation works pretty well. And you can also get a MT-32 bare metal emulation with a MT32-PI via serial port.

Added a t5300 to the collection, for Dos 6.22 only with viasbcfg and VIAFMTSR, Jedi Knight dark forces works with full sound, but having memory issues with epic pinball,

Scandy wrote on 2020-12-12, 22:49:

Yes Sound Blaster emulation works pretty well. And you can also get a MT-32 bare metal emulation with a MT32-PI via serial port.

Can you show me how to connect the mt32-pi to the HP T5710? I wasn’t sure about buying one of these but if I can play mt32 games on it I will definitely do.

Everything in pure DOS?

Thank you.

franky52 wrote on 2020-12-14, 19:31:

Can you show me how to connect the mt32-pi to the HP T5710? I wasn’t sure about buying one of these but if I can play mt32 games on it I will definitely do.

Everything in pure DOS?

Thank you.

Hi, sure! 😉
You can play MT-32 games (and now also different soundfonts) in pure DOS.

Hardware: you will need a DB9 adapter like this, just check it supports 3.3 v.

Connect it to the RPi GPIO in this way:
VCC --> Pi Pin 1 (3.3V)
GND --> Pi Pin 6 (GND)
RXD --> Pi Pin 10 (UART RX)
You can leave TX disconnected.

If you remove the "screws" you can connect the DB9 adapter directly to the T5710.

Software: First configure mt32-pi to use a baud rate of 38400 (there is an option in the config file).

Then you need SOFTMPU on your DOS machine.
Run it with "SOFTMPU.EXE /MPU:330 /OUTPUT:COM1" and start your game.

Enjoy! 😁

Thank you!!!

I didn´t know this could be possible.

So a T5710+mt32-pi+OPL3LPT = A perfect DOS portable box

ok, new project beckons ,

so this is now on flea bay if anyone's interested.

with a few changes to spec

RichB93 wrote on 2020-10-17, 01:53:

I have one of these; works well with UNISOUND to get DOS compatible audio from the onboard soundcard.

Hello, are you sure that you are using UNISOUND with this thinclient model (T5710)? thanks

Scandy wrote on 2021-04-18, 19:59:

RichB93 wrote on 2020-10-17, 01:53:

I have one of these; works well with UNISOUND to get DOS compatible audio from the onboard soundcard.

Hello, are you sure that you are using UNISOUND with this thinclient model (T5710)? thanks

Yes - bear in mind that mine was the 800MHz version which is noticeably different to the 1.2GHz revision. See here: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t5710/

henk717 wrote on 2020-06-01, 20:26:

I also got my own T5710 and made this USB Stick image for it : http://henk.tech/udbs
It is made with WinImage so if ran as an administrator it can create a T5710 bootable USB stick for you, but you can also use the file extract option and make a bootable usb with the HP Storage Format utility instead.

Dear henk717, please re-upload your image file described on the quote above.
I'm trying to setup a T5710 machine I just got to become a pure DOS game PC, but haven't succeed so far.

Thankyou.

Updated the link, its been changed a lot since i last posted that with much better tools and tweaks.

In case i dropped the mentioned gdisk command the following command should do the partitioning : fdisk 2 /clearall /auto

If what you want is just a pure dos build run SETUP C: D: without adding the Windows 98 setup folder. It will format the partition (If it gives can access error choose the fail option, the check if Win98 is installed fails if the partition hasn't been formatted before but it will allow to format directly after).

After this you should have my exact MSDOS 7.1 setup with slowdown tools and memory managers preconfigured. And it gives a lot of different options to choose from since this is also aimed at modern PC's that have bad dos support.

Hope this will help you get up and running, all you will need to add is the sound driver for the thin client or pci soundcard of choice.

(Oh and to make the stick choose the second reformat the whole drive option, that will properly partition the stick so its bootable and i haven't had that fail with the T5710).

Thanks Henk!

I've got your tools and tried creating USB boot. It finished the reformat & write on the whole drive process but the usb drive cannot boot on the machine. The behavior is the same as HerrK told here. Then I tried to follow these path:

• extract your UDBS tool to some folder and then use HP USB Format Tool -> failed to make device dos-bootable
• tried fixing it using diskpart & regedit -> HP USB Format Tool still failed
• figured out that using Windows disk management tool to Delete Volume of the whole usb disk and leave it "Unalocated" makes the HP USB tool able to finish the process
• but still, the usb drive cannot boot on the T5710 machine 🙁
• tried another tool to create bootable dos flashdisk like: DOS-on-USB, win98boot, boot98sc -> none of them work (able to create the usb, but cannot boot on the machine)
• the only thing works for me is rufus freedos bootable creation tool -> this made the flashdisk bootable on the T5710 machine!

But I don't know what to do after it was booted with rufus freedos. It does not contain any tools like you have prepared on the UDBS kit. So I tried to copy the dos & tools folder from your UDBS kit to the freedos flashdisk, edit the autoexec.bat so it has the same path as yours do and then tried to run the setup.bat. It cannot finish running it. I forgot on what tools it stopped, but my thought was because those tools cannot work under freedos.

So I redo all the step above using several flashdisk on my possession, but all behave the same. Maybe they were too modern?
I also tried to run those steps using Windows XP (on virtualbox). But the result is still the same 🙁

I give up on trying to create a USB bootable dos stick for now. I'm thinking to do these things next:

• hunting for old 2nd-hand flashdisk on the market (the one with under 1GB size), probably it's more compatible with the machine.
• buy USB version of Gotek floppy emulator like demonstrated by Phils here, it's gonna be hard though as none available on my local market, must buy overseas if any even available
• buy this DOM reader (DOM to usb) to be able to mount it directly on my Windows 10 PC, I'm thinking it would make everything easier. No basis for this though, is it even viable solution?

Any suggestion guys? 🙏

I don't understand why the thin client would reject it in both methods, so ill just post some general steps i'd take that work for me fine with my kingston USB stick.
The easiest method that works for me is the reformat on whole device option which unlocks if you run the tool as administrator. This should automatically create a 2GB partition that is bootable and in my case i am good to go from there.

Method 2 would be the HP USB Storage Format tool, you want to use this with the bootable dos option and point it to a copy of MS-Dos 7.1 (My image extracted should work but its been many versions ago since i last tried this so the compression i applied to IO.SYS to reduce the size could have broken this route). You could replace the IO.SYS with one from a 98 boot floppy and see if it generates the generic DOS boot disk then. And if that works you can always put my original IO.SYS back to regain the Windows 3.1 support and smaller footprint.

Method 3 would use Easy2boot, this is very slow on the T5710 but if you use WinRAR on the .exe file to obtain the original .IMA file this works to and it should be enough to place the IMA file (I rename them to IMG) on the DOS folder of Easy2Boot. Keep in mind this might cause the drive letters to be different so don't accidentally overwrite your USB stick.

My tools are specifically designed for MS-Dos 7.1, so you will not get a working result with FreeDOS. You can however just copy my files on top of a MS-DOS 7.1 USB stick if you manage to create one. Let me know if any of these methods work for you or whats going wrong with them.

And another thing you could try is make a BIOS update USB stick (Theirs is based on FreeDOS so that should work great), mine runs the latest bios so if yours is older it could be a reason its failing.