Is this the first time you're using the CF card to boot DOS?

Boot from the GOTEK again, then run

fdisk /mbr

If you have the issue I think you have, it's a very common thing 😀 I have to do this with every factory new CF or SD card. But only once 😀

Nice motherboard BTW!

Phil, that was it! Thank you so much!

Btw, I love your videos, I installed MSDOS 7.1 via your method this morning.

And yeah, it's a pretty nice late-era 486 motherboard. Picked up it up on ebay from a guy in the Ukraine that has a bunch of them.

Excellent 😀

Good on you for installing MS-DOS 7.1. It's great having a bit more space than with FAT 16. I also did such an installation today, on a 486 DX2 66 and played some System Shock.

There are a lot of motherboards from the Ukraine I found. It would be awesome if you stick around, maybe share how you go with your Tomato board.

I'll definitely stick around. It's because of videos from you and LGR that I got interested in older computer hardware!

Nice 😀

Just installed the drivers for my SB AWE64 PnP and it worked great

Without getting too off topic, I have both an S3 Virge Stealth 3D 2000 and 3000. Both have 2MB of RAM. Any opinions as to which one is better or are they both about the same?

I'd be surprised if you can measure a difference 😀

Good to know, thanks!

A few things I've noticed so far:

1. It seems like I'm able to run my AMD486DX4 at 120MHz (instead of 100MHz) with no problems. Neat. Yes, I am using a fan and heatsink.
2. After installing the drivers for my AWE64, when rebooting I would get a message about AWE32 initialization failing. Running diagnose.exe would then report it couldn't set the base address. I then found that running ctcm.exe fixed the issue, so I put that in my autoexec before all the other creative stuff gets run. Now I no longer see the error during boot. Is this a normal issue?
3. Speaking of diagnose.exe, it reports I have some faulty DRAM. Everything sounds fine though, so I don't know how worried I should be.
4. Descent runs pretty slow 🙁. Is this normal for my setup? I remember running it on a Pentium 133MHz back in the day but maybe the 486 just can't keep up with the game.

There should be an entry for CTCM in CONFIG.SYS. Not sure what happened, but you can just put an entry in AUTOEXEC.BAT as well if you like. Maybe the installer ran into an issue?

Descent does indeed struggle to run well on a 486. At least on my DX2 66 it was not something I would call playable.

If the RAM is faulty, that shouldn't affect anything but uploading SoundFonts into memory 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

There should be an entry for CTCM in CONFIG.SYS. Not sure what happened, but you can just put an entry in AUTOEXEC.BAT as well if you like. Maybe the installer ran into an issue?

Descent does indeed struggle to run well on a 486. At least on my DX2 66 it was not something I would call playable.

If the RAM is faulty, that shouldn't affect anything but uploading SoundFonts into memory 😀

Would performance improve much with a 586?

Hmm, I don't think it will be a massive difference to be honest.

amino glycine wrote:

Would performance improve much with a 586?

The AMD 5x86 133 is really just "fast 486".

Without going to a Skt3 Pentium Overdrive, or changing out to a Pentium motherboard, the increased performance is only vaguely proportional to the increased clock speed.

At stock clocks, I would expect higher clock CPUs like the 5x86 to hit limits due to the FSB. Generalized Amdahl's law at work.