RacoonRider wrote:

btw, how do you access DOS partitions? I see only A:, B:, C: HPFS Partition in media, while there is also FAT Primary DOS partition on the disk.

When I ran Warp 4, I used the IBM Boot Manager to dual-boot between it and DOS v6.22. If I remember correctly, Warp 4 had the same limitation that DOS and Win9x have regarding primary partitions: It can only see the active primary partition at any given time. I seem to remember that this was how I kept my DOS and Warp 4 systems completely separate from each other. So, if you have two primary partitions, you can only see the one you booted from. You'll need to create extended/logical partitions if you want to access both your primary boot partition as well as the others.

The reason I upgraded to Warp 4 was because my next door neighbor had been running Warp 3 for years and was a huge advocate of the system. Based on what I saw of his system running Warp 3, Warp 4 was a HUGE upgrade and improvement over the previous version. It was like going from Win98 to WinXP. If you're serious about playing with OS/2, I would recommend locating a copy of Warp 4 or the current iteration: eComStation.

Warp was a great OS. It's a shame that IBM was so determined to shoot themselves in the foot over and over and over again.

I ran across this article on OS/2 and found it very interesting:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half- … tragedy-of-os2/

I seem to recall you actually being able to use NTLDR to boot OS/2 if your OS/2 partition was FAT. Memory about that is fuzzy though...

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Wasn't the Windows NT architecture heavily based on OS/2, to the point that versions up to Windows 2000 had backwards compatibility with certain OS/2 applications?

While some of the original NT code was developed from what would have been Microsoft's contribution to OS/2 2.0, most of it was new in-house stuff from Dave Cutler's team.

They do share similar philosophies. You can see that in some of the file names (NTOSKRNL - OS2KRNL; NTLDR, OS2LDR, etc). You can also see that in the file system and configuration structure, although much of that is historical from the DOS days.

Microsoft's (relative) support of OS/2 into the late 90s was largely because even after Microsoft and IBM divorced circa 90-ish, Microsoft was still three years away from having an enterprise product (NT).

Their enterprise server package at the time was LAN Manager, which was OS/2 1.x-based and this continued to be the case until Windows NT "Advanced" Server in 1993.

Windows support for OS/2 was confined to two elements - support for the HPFS file system - which was a "first class" citizen through NT 3.50. Support for installing to HPFS from Setup was dropped with NT 3.51. Windows NT 4.0 had no out-of-the-box support unless the system was upgraded from an HPFS-based NT 3.5x base or the user installed the HPFS driver manually (it was on the NT4 CD). As it so happened, the HPFS driver (which went by some funny name if I recall - paintball.sys?) could also install on Windows 2000 though it had a number of limitations.

The other aspect was the OS/2 subsystem which allowed you to run some text-only OS/2 1.x applications from inside Windows NT/2000. That wasn't eliminated until Windows XP.

Thank you guys for the new information. I'm getting the impression that OS/2 is a perfect OS for a high-end 486 once propperly configured. What I really dig is being able to use software like Pulse (CPU load monitor) and system clock as gadgets. Unless you close them before you shut down your system, they are on when you start it. On windows this stuff became practical only in Vista (or 7?).

However, configuring it to work is not easy and it's very easy to break something just by expanding the list to see available options. So far I totally understand why common people had problems with it.

Most OS/2 users disable its default habit of restarting any programs/interface objects that were loaded on shutdown 😉.

You can bring Warp 3 reasonably up to date but it requires a *lot* of fixpacks, and my memory is a little rusty. Something like fixpack 34 (ish..) needs applying - this may have a pre-requisite. Once that has been applied, the system is then at Warp 4 kernel and userland level and future fix packs must be Warp 4 based. The differences you'll notice between the two are a better network layer and the interface improvements in Warp 4.

There are articles on the web on how to bring it up to date. Do not try and figure it out yourself, it took me long enough when I was using it as my main OS.. Also note, it is not necessary to write all the fixpacks to floppy - there are scripts that make it easier (even easier than the original 'ok when you know how to do it' response file method) .Installing things like the Scitech Display Doctor make graphic card installation a lot easier, too.

There were a number of particularly good applications for OS/2, especially on the graphics side, but getting hold of anything now is tricky. Most of it has now been superceded.

Games wise, it didn't do too badly for a minority platform, but Galactic Civilisations 2 is the only one I'd really recommend. It's still insanely addictive even now, even if it lacks the complexity of the Windows versions that developed from it.

It has excellent DOS and Windows 3.1 virtualisation capability, if that helps (although if you're running Warp 3 'redbox' (for Windows), you'll need to supply your own copy of Windows 3.1)

ynari wrote:

Most OS/2 users disable its default habit of restarting any programs/interface objects that were loaded on shutdown ;). […]
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Most OS/2 users disable its default habit of restarting any programs/interface objects that were loaded on shutdown 😉.

You can bring Warp 3 reasonably up to date but it requires a *lot* of fixpacks, and my memory is a little rusty. Something like fixpack 34 (ish..) needs applying - this may have a pre-requisite. Once that has been applied, the system is then at Warp 4 kernel and userland level and future fix packs must be Warp 4 based. The differences you'll notice between the two are a better network layer and the interface improvements in Warp 4.

There are articles on the web on how to bring it up to date. Do not try and figure it out yourself, it took me long enough when I was using it as my main OS.. Also note, it is not necessary to write all the fixpacks to floppy - there are scripts that make it easier (even easier than the original 'ok when you know how to do it' response file method) .Installing things like the Scitech Display Doctor make graphic card installation a lot easier, too.

There were a number of particularly good applications for OS/2, especially on the graphics side, but getting hold of anything now is tricky. Most of it has now been superceded.

Games wise, it didn't do too badly for a minority platform, but Galactic Civilisations 2 is the only one I'd really recommend. It's still insanely addictive even now, even if it lacks the complexity of the Windows versions that developed from it.

It has excellent DOS and Windows 3.1 virtualisation capability, if that helps (although if you're running Warp 3 'redbox' (for Windows), you'll need to supply your own copy of Windows 3.1)

Thanks mate! I've got Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22 floppies included in OS/2 Warp 3 package, yet I don't see why they would be there. 😵

"Games wise, it didn't do too badly for a minority platform, but Galactic Civilisations 2 is the only one I'd really recommend. It's still insanely addictive even now, even if it lacks the complexity of the Windows versions that developed from it."

Sim City Classic is infamous for it's freezes and error boxes on OS/2. It's not really worth hunting down except just to fill a hole in your OS/2 collection. Get the DOS/Windows version if you actually want to be able to play.

sliderider wrote:

Sim City Classic is infamous for it's freezes and error boxes on OS/2. It's not really worth hunting down except just to fill a hole in your OS/2 collection. Get the DOS/Windows version if you actually want to be able to play.

I think I only ever played the demo of that. I'd agree - stick to native OS/2 games only.

The other games I can think of are Avarice - which was an interesting, if flawed, Myst-ish type adventure, and Mahjonng built into OS/2 (The Warp 4 version was especially good).

There were several other games that were either ported to, or had multiplatform releases including on OS/2, but given the timeline they should be available on 32 bit Windows too. Trials of Battle was appalling; don't believe the spin on that one..

There was a company named Polyex that ported a few obscure games to OS/2, such as Vigilance on Talos V and Hopkins FBI. But indeed, those were available on other platforms.

ynari wrote:

I think I only ever played the demo of that. I'd agree - stick to native OS/2 games only. […]
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sliderider wrote:

Sim City Classic is infamous for it's freezes and error boxes on OS/2. It's not really worth hunting down except just to fill a hole in your OS/2 collection. Get the DOS/Windows version if you actually want to be able to play.

I think I only ever played the demo of that. I'd agree - stick to native OS/2 games only.

The other games I can think of are Avarice - which was an interesting, if flawed, Myst-ish type adventure, and Mahjonng built into OS/2 (The Warp 4 version was especially good).

There were several other games that were either ported to, or had multiplatform releases including on OS/2, but given the timeline they should be available on 32 bit Windows too. Trials of Battle was appalling; don't believe the spin on that one..

I was actually referring to the OS/2 version. It wasn't done by Maxis, but a company called Dux. I have a sealed copy of it here in front of me and I have no reason to break the seal since I have no desire to be tortured by cyber-gremlins while trying to play it. It's actually not going badly so far, trying to compile a library of OS/2 games. It seems a new one that I don't have pops up every couple of weeks or so. Still no Lemmings games, though. Maybe when I've finished the OS/2 games collection I'll start hunting down boxed versions of games for Linux.

Here's an interesting project.

http://odin.netlabs.org/en/site/index.xml

Lets you run 32-bit (Windows 9x and NT) apps from within OS/2.

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

If you're feeling adventurous, you might want to take a look at Odin. It was a Wine-like project to run Win32 applications on OS/2 Warp. I recall Quake 2 (& 3 iirc) running via it. Of course you're not going to be playing Quake 2+ on a 486. 😉

sliderider wrote:

Here's an interesting project.

http://odin.netlabs.org/en/site/index.xml

Lets you run 32-bit (Windows 9x and NT) apps from within OS/2.

Now I just have no right not to download it 😁

Btw, is there a way to install a soundcard that only supports DOS/Win3.1 so that there is sound in DOS games? I already have Terratec Gold 16/96 beeping all these obscure OS/2 sounds, but I want to have Orchid MT-32 emulation and I want it bad 😀