I found an old Windows 95 CDROM recently. How would I prepare a CDROM's contents in order to copy it onto a CF card. What sofware (besides the usual media sofware). Is Ghost needed and where can I find it. Thanks.

Just had a look at the CDROM and it's an official Microsoft Windows 95 Upgrade CDROM complete with product key. I must have used way back when I upgraded my old 486DX4-100 AMD PC back in the early to mid 1990's. Glad I kept all my old software now. Still got MSDOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 for workgroups on Floppy as well (98SE, NT, WinME, Win2k and the rest as well on CD).

For the install files, you don't need to do anything special, just xcopy the whole lot from DOS or drag and drop in windoze.

There are some tutorials around here, probably also videos, of how to install 95 from CD (considering that the W95 CD is NOT bootable, it usually involves creating a bootable floppy or a bootable partition on the target HD with DOS). In any case, for an update CD, you'll likely be forced to install DOS first anyway.
One of the challenges is partitioning, specially with the pocket386 which can only boot from CF (so partitioning from the p386 itself is difficult). You have to be mindful of the p386 limits (no LBA), FAT16 limits, etc. (this would probably be made easier if one could boot from the Ch375/USB, which should be possible with a custom BIOS)
What I have seen many people do I think even on this thread is to use a Virtual machine or emulator configured with an X GB hard disk (where X = size of your CF), do the installation in the emulator, then copy the hard disk image from the emulator into the real CF.

Is anyone running Freedos on this? Has anyone tried any C programming with the Open Watcom compiler? There are a series of tutorial on the Freedos YouTube channel. I'm keeping the machine as is for the time being and trying it out as a portable programming environment. I might try Windows 95 later, but I'm in no rush. Freedos looks quite interesting.

I've got my hands on one of these and did some experiments with various OSes.

NetBSD 1.4.3 (last version from the 1990s) loads fine, but memory consumption isn't great - the generic kernel alone is 3.5 Mb. Still fairly usable in text mode, but booting into X is very slow even with the most basic setup (blackbox, ratpoison) - you get to watch things redraw slowly when moving windows etc; I wouldn't call it usable. I trimmed the kernel down to 1.6 Mb so far but I don't think even the leanest possible config would leave enough RAM free for X. Nano-X might be another option for some apps though... In general, the problem is that even in text mode things add up quickly. E.g. if you run Bash, each shell is ~1M reserved mem. Stock sh (which is much more basic) is still 250K. Midnight Commander is ~1.5M. And so on.

I also tried Debian 1.3 with similar results, however, I haven't tried a slimmed down kernel with that one yet. It does have a smaller kernel to begin with so I have some more hopes there.

I want to try some of the oldest FreeBSD releases to see how well they fare. If FreeBSD 2.x can run with reasonable memory usage that would offer a pretty decent Unix-like base.

Minix VMD (a fork of Minix 2.0 with X) is another promising candidate.

QNX 6.2.1 doesn't boot, but perhaps 4.25 would work.

With DOS, you can use Breadbox Ensemble (late GEOS) as a decently fast Win95-like shell that includes some software like office suite and simple web browser. However, I couldn't get it to use any SVGA modes; the video card for mine is Cirrus (Win95 reports it as GD5240 rev0 512Kb).

int19h wrote on 2024-08-10, 23:11:

With DOS, you can use Breadbox Ensemble (late GEOS) as a decently fast Win95-like shell that includes some software like office suite and simple web browser. However, I couldn't get it to use any SVGA modes; the video card for mine is Cirrus (Win95 reports it as GD5240 rev0 512Kb).

Yeah I wish GEOS / Breadbox was more popular back in the day. So much great software that I didn’t hear about until decades later. Maybe loading a version of Univbe 5.1+ (VESA 2.0) would help expose the SVGA modes.

int19h wrote on 2024-08-10, 23:11:

I've got my hands on one of these and did some experiments with various OSes.

There's a reason early os' were basic and had no security.
I've seen people in the past complain about Microsoft's complete lack of file system and os security in the early days.
But when you realise the constraints, it makes more sense

Hello!

I want bay (pocket386 and) PD-trigger.
Could someone help me with size of power jack?
Thanks!

Hello!

I want bay (pocket386 and) PD-trigger.
Could someone help me with size of power jack?
Thanks!

The power supply required is one with a 12V output and 1.5A current capacity. It should have a 2.1mm jack plug and the jack plug should be centre pin positive.

Just tried the included Borland Turbo C 2.00 compiler with a Hello world.c example file and after correcting the include and library directories the example code compiled cleanly with exit code 13. I was able to go to the user screen and DOS shell and clearly see "Hello world" displayed as expected. I feel this device will be very useful for practising my C code.

djsb wrote on 2024-08-11, 20:21:

Just tried the included Borland Turbo C 2.00 compiler with a Hello world.c example file and after correcting the include and library directories the example code compiled cleanly with exit code 13. I was able to go to the user screen and DOS shell and clearly see "Hello world" displayed as expected. I feel this device will be very useful for practising my C code.

Nice. I plan to try Visual Basic 3 for Win3.x and Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS. Those are more my speed.

I do want to try TASM to make a utility to toggle AT bus speed. The DMP data sheet for the M6117 lists which programming index to change and even has some similar example source code, but it’s still a big mountain for me to climb at this point.

I've also started working on gradually recreating the schematics in Altium Designer (which the original where done in anyway) just so I can get some practice in using the software. It will take a while, but when I've finished them I'll import them into Kicad (which will probably be Kicad V9.00 by early 2025).

I bought a stack of CF cards and use them to run many different configs. one of which is DOS 6.22 + Win 3.11 + as much software as I could cram there, with a heavy emphasis on developer tools.

Aside from VB3, Delphi is another interesting one to consider - v1.0 was 16-bit and it does work, if not exactly fast.

BC++3.1 also has a pretty decent dev story there. It's not exactly RAD, but they had this thing called OWL, Object Windows Library, which is kind of a VCL predecessor.

And speaking of Pascal/Delphi, a reminder that modern Free Pascal releases for i386 still work on that kind of hardware. I haven't tried Lazarus, but the FP.EXE text mode IDE works just fine and is a very easy way to target 32-bit DOS with a reasonably modern language.

Oh, also you can get the Digital Mars C++ compiler to run using HX DOS extender (in Win32 PE loader mode). Which gives you a C++98'ish compiler that can target 16-bit DOS and even build .COM files.

It did make me wonder how much HX-DOS could be extended into a real UI. It already has basic windowing for games; perhaps it would be possible to take code for the standard window decorations and widgets from Wine and graft it there somehow? If it worked, it could provide a lightweight shell for some single-process Win9x apps; proper Win95 is still hella slow on Pocket386.

Regarding the CF cards. Is the maximum capacity that can be used 2GB? Is there any particular TYPE of CF card I should choose and any type to avoid ? Can the Pocket 386 make use of a CF card that has multiple 2GB partitions? Can some kind of boot manager be used in MSDOS 6.22 to boot different operating systems placed on ONE CF card, but that are contained in separate 2GB partitions. I'm tempted to just buy the cheapest CF cards I can find, but maybe it's best to pay a bit more for a branded card. What would you recommend? Thanks.

DOS has a restriction related to INT13/ECHS that restricts it to 2gb.

(More accurately, DOS6.xx will only let you make a FAT volume that is 2GB in size, no larger, even though ECHS should let it address up to 8gb of disk. In theory, with multiple partitions inside an extended dos partition, AND a DDO that can work on a 386, you MIGHT be able to do larger than 8gb...)

If you managed to shoehorn win98's (or FreeDos's) LBA-Aware version on, you might be able to use a bigger one.

I thought DOS 6.22 can do 4x 2gb partitions for max of 8gb.

Other OS like FreeDos, DOS 7, Win9x should let you use more, not sure what the BIOS will limit you to.

I bought some 8gb CF cards to swap around OS too, but having lots of fun with DOS + Win3.11 and 8gb feels pretty massive right now. If I’m happy with the AdlibW sound quality in Win3.11 , I probably will fill a 2gb partition with music in *.wav format.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2024-08-12, 06:27:

I thought DOS 6.22 can do 4x 2gb partitions for max of 8gb.

Other OS like FreeDos, DOS 7, Win9x should let you use more, not sure what the BIOS will limit you to.

I bought some 8gb CF cards to swap around OS too, but having lots of fun with DOS + Win3.11 and 8gb feels pretty massive right now. If I’m happy with the AdlibW sound quality in Win3.11 , I probably will fill a 2gb partition with music in *.wav format.

That would be 4 primaries, which is an MBR partition table limitation.

If you do 1 primary, and one ext-dos, (with many logical volumes inside), you can have up to 24 volumes, each 2gb in size. (you'll run out of drive letters at that point.)

You will still run into the ECHS limit without LBA support though. So, I'd say the reasonable limit is a single 2gb primary boot partition, and 3 2gb logical volumes, inside a 6gb EXT-DOS partition.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-08-12, 06:13:

DOS has a restriction related to INT13/ECHS that restricts it to 2gb.

(More accurately, DOS6.xx will only let you make a FAT volume that is 2GB in size, no larger, even though ECHS should let it address up to 8gb of disk. In theory, with multiple partitions inside an extended dos partition, AND a DDO that can work on a 386, you MIGHT be able to do larger than 8gb...)

If you managed to shoehorn win98's (or FreeDos's) LBA-Aware version on, you might be able to use a bigger one.

The per-disk int13 limit is 1023 cylinders, not 2GB. Depending on the BIOS this may be 500 MiB or 8GiB. As the p386 BIOS supports ECHS, the limit is 8GiB (slightly more).
The p386 does NOT support LBA, so you cannot exceed this 8GiB limit with any DOS version, nor 9x. Other non-DOS bases OSes like Linux or NT may be able to exceed the 8GiB limit (booting it being a problem...). Another workaround would be to use a DDO, or a custom BIOS.

So, not much point to get a >8GiB CF card (albeit extra capacity will not hurt, just be unusable).

The 2GiB per-partition limit is because DOS 6.22 uses FAT16. This also applies to USB disks using CH375, which is otherwise not affected by int13/LBA limitations, since the driver shows the first partition raw to DOS which can only understand FAT16. This can be exceeded by using FreeDOS or DOS 7.x with FAT32 support (starting win95b). However, in my short experience, it seems using FAT32 on win95 slightly increases memory usage.