snorg wrote:So I went ahead and ended up getting something as close to my first PC as I could manage: a Tandy 1000 TX (I think I actually ha […]
Show full quote
So I went ahead and ended up getting something as close to my first PC as I could manage: a Tandy 1000 TX (I think I actually had a 1000A or 1000SX but wanted something with a little more legroom and the TX seemed like better option as it was about the same price).
I'm going to try and see if I can get a full 1MB of RAM on it via an ISA expansion board. I may end up with closer to 900k, though, if I'm not able to find proper DRAM chips (there is a bank not populated).
I suspect the answer to my question is some version of DOS (pretty sure win 3.1 won't run and I can't find info on previous versions of OS/2 prior to v 2.0 as far as system requirements, and I know that OS/2 was pretty beefy w/ regard to system requirements. So I think those are right out.
I was thinking of maybe FreeDOS or Dr DOS, with an Open GEM shell? Is there any version of GEM that supports 256 color graphics?
I am most likely going to stick with the stock sound, but would like to see if I can get a VGA board of some type in there.
RE: OS/2 - 1.3 is the last version that supports the 286. The 286 was actually one of the many reasons Microsoft & IBM came to a divorce - Microsoft wanted to dump 286 support sooner than Big Blue (there's that famous quote of BillG saying the 286 was brain dead because it couldn't jump back to real mode once in protected mode and there was no V86 mode yet). IBM, which was pushing the PS/2s (several models of which were 286-based) and had made commitments to businesses regarding support, wasn't keen on the idea of orphaning the new machines.
OS/2 is perhaps one of the most "modern" operating systems one can run on a 286. I believe it's multithreaded in addition to being *mostly* protected mode (and of course GUI-driven). It did some interesting things on a 286 to make it more or less work - utilizing the undocumented LOADALL instruction to access memory without having to go into protected mode and (iirc) triple faulting the CPU to get around the lack of switching between real & protected modes. LOADALL would be brought to DOS with Microsoft's HIMEM driver (only when running on a 286 of course) - although I don't believe Microsoft documented it there either.
Unfortunately the list of hardware for OS/2 1.x leaves something to be desired: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102628/en-us (KB102628: OS/2 1.3 Hardware Compatibility List) and you could probably count the # of OS/2 1.x 286 apps (that's what we have to call them now, right?) on one hand.
There's also the *nix variant Minix, which had a version that supported the 286 through 2.x - if you're in to that sort of thing: http://minix1.woodhull.com/hints.html#small