Great stuff. Dual CPUs are always fun.

Bridging or routing IPX is tricky. For IPX You generally want to be on the same ethernet segment or have a very special setup.

Consider creating a topic for your system in System Specs

Those are the two cases I had back in 1990's / 2000.

I think I had a Pentium lll 500 in the InWin 500 with Win 2000
And a Pentium ll 400 in the Enlight 700 with Win98se

It was DDWRT with Wireless Client mode.. doesn't like IPX.. =)

Dual CPU is fun, but not in DOS (or Win <2000) as it isn't SMP aware/capable, so at best it runs as fast as a single CPU. This machine deserves a multiprocessing OS. Windows 2000 would run on it, WinNT4.0, OS/2 Warp 4 SMP or BeOS would fly. Leave DOS and Win9x for the single-CPU boxes.

Given how thin DOS is, I suspect you could code up a multi cpu application to run in DOS. You would have no OS or library support to do it, but maybe a support layer could be ported across from RTEMS or NuttX.

DOS doesn’t even really support multitasking, I imagine it would be a Herculean task to add support for multiple cpus and then use them in any meaningful way. And I’m assuming you want to maintain compatibility with existing dos software.

It would pretty much be an operating system on top of DOS with the application layered on top.

gdjacobs wrote on 2020-01-12, 02:23:

It would pretty much be an operating system on top of DOS with the application layered on top.

I could see that. Maybe using linux to support two complete instances of DOS and then you could switch back and forth between them. It would have been interesting back-in-the-day for those dual socket 3 or dual socket 7 systems. I don't know if anyone would go thru the hassle of doing that now for original hardware when its easy to do that with a modern OS and DoSBox.

Think it's a great build, maybe swap out the modem for a isa soundcard if your playing many games in pure dos though.
Duel boot between Win98 and 2000
Use 2000 for the majority of Win9x games from here. Once you try it you'll never look back.
Use Win98 for the few games that refuse to work in Win2k and to drop back to pure dos if needed and give that 2nd CPU a rest.

Are 2 CPU's really needed? no, but while a retro PC is more fun then dosbox a duel CPU PC is more fun then a single CPU 😀