Did you load the special drivers necessary for using a sound card IDE interface? IIRC you need specific ones (that said I've never had one work, not that I've tried more than once or twice). Anyway I'd rather have era-appropriate external solutions that are slow than something ugly - however, I guess you could always use a round IDE cable and make/repurpose a slot cover for it to make it prettier.

Somewhat off-topic but I got a CDS coming in the mail in the next week or two, the successor to the 400 series - excited!

Yushatak wrote:

Did you load the special drivers necessary for using a sound card IDE interface? IIRC you need specific ones (that said I've never had one work, not that I've tried more than once or twice). Anyway I'd rather have era-appropriate external solutions that are slow than something ugly - however, I guess you could always use a round IDE cable and make/repurpose a slot cover for it to make it prettier.

Somewhat off-topic but I got a CDS coming in the mail in the next week or two, the successor to the 400 series - excited!

If I'm not mistaken, I've been doing that with Mediamagic ISP-16 that has IDE options right in its configuration tool. But doesn't matter now.

Really cool to hear about your CDS! They even supposed to have a built-in ESS sound chip, AFAIK. On the downside that probably means that you have to get external speakers if you want to use a different card.

I've wired internal speakers into cards before, my Toshiba T6600C had such poor SB16 support that I ran a cable back into the machine and wired it into the speakers..

But in this case I'd just deal with the built-in chip, as I have plenty of fully DOS-compatible boxen to use when I need that if it doesn't do everything.

So I finally found an Iwill ECP/EPP-enabled multi I/O. Gonna get it tomorrow. All in all, a Backpack CD drive and this card came down to around 17 bucks. The multi I/O is about 11 bucks, almost twice as expensive as the CD drive, ironically — even though basic ISA multicards (think Goldstar Prime 2) are often sold for 1,5 bucks. On the other side, this one comes with all the original packaging in perfect condition.

My only concern at this point is that it turns out to be extremely CPU-taxing — making gaming impossible and thus defeating the whole purpose. There is one comment on this forum and I quote:

I use to have a Backpack parallel port CDROM that I used for emergencies (honestly don't remember what "emergencies" any more). It worked in DOS, but it had horrible performance because it spiked the CPU to 100% during usage. You couldn't tell your CPU usage in DOS, but when I used it in Win95, there were programs that did.

Because the parallel port is being maxed and CPU usage was high, it was unusable for playing any games, listening to music, etc. All it was good for was installing programs or copying files from a data CDROM. Just FYI.

I haven't been able to find any other reports on this issue. For all I know that guy could be using Backpack with a 386 machine or something.

Also, I've been looking for this thing for a month now, and I've stumbled across a bunch of old computer shops price lists while doing so. Looks like this kind of controllers mostly started coming to Russia around the time Pentium MMX/II was on the market (or about to be released). So, motherboards already had integrated COM/LPT (already supporting high transfer rates) and didn't need multi I/O at all. Which is probably why I wasn't able to find any of these cards on the market now — simply put, nobody bought them back then and nobody knows what they are for.

In 99% of cases you can copy the contents of a CD-ROM to a drive to run a game, and/or crack it so that you don't need the CD - the downside of that is of course when a game uses CD audio.. Personally I end up mostly playing games with ADLIB music on this machine - let me know if you run into anything that needs CD audio and uses a lot of the CPU so I can try it out with parallel SCSI for comparison (on the stock parallel port, which I could have sworn was EPP but maybe I mis-remembered).

jheronimus wrote:

Also, I've been looking for this thing for a month now, and I've stumbled across a bunch of old computer shops price lists while doing so. Looks like this kind of controllers mostly started coming to Russia around the time Pentium MMX/II was on the market (or about to be released). So, motherboards already had integrated COM/LPT (already supporting high transfer rates) and didn't need multi I/O at all. Which is probably why I wasn't able to find any of these cards on the market now — simply put, nobody bought them back then and nobody knows what they are for.

I don't know about Russia, but I know it kind of came into being around the time 28.8 kbps and higher modems came out. I remember purchasing a VLB disk and I/O controller around the 1995 era which had both 16550A UARTs and EPP LPT. I'm not sure if the mouse nuked it or it nuked the mouse, but something went bad and I never got to try that card in the 486 the family had at the time. Bought an ISA I/O card to replace the 16450 based one instead.

Got the controller — it's a Iwill Side-2610.

An I/O controller is probably not the sexiest thing in the world, but still, the condition of this thing (released around 1994) is impressive. I think the previous owner only took it out to make the photos for a listing.

I can also confirm it works beautifully. I used the installer on CD version of the Dune game (the first one) to benchmark the transfer speeds. It used to be 140-150 KB/s — now it's around 850 KB/s. Also tried Full Throttle — no significant stuttering, so I guess the CPU is not too stressed by this controller.

Also got an OPL-3 enabled CT2770 in this machine. I guess, I can say it's complete now.

Thanks everyone for all your help! It's been a long road — took me 2,5 months to finish this system but I feel like it's worth it. Guess, my next step would be getting a DOS-friendly GM device.

I tested my Backpack enclosure with Cyberwar and Rebel Assault 2

1in SPP mode:
2Cyberwar 180KB
3Rebel assault 2 (% of CPU used)
440% 80Kps
550% 93Kps
660% 116Kps
7
8Bidirection:
9Cyberwar 323KB
10Rebel Assault 2
1140% 139Kps
1250% 162Kps
1360% 198Kps
14
15EPP mode:
16Cyberwar 1000KB
17Rebel Assault 2
1840% 510Kps
1950% 454Kps
2060% 531Kps
21
22And with my PCMCIA CD-ROM drive connected to a ISA/PCMCIA interface card:
23cyberwar 941
24RA2
2540% 418
2650% 403
2760% 455

You should be fine, unless the game is using all the CPU for itself...

Is there anyone that know where i could maybe find the copy of the recovery disk for Compaq Presario 433?

tabm0de wrote:

Is there anyone that know where i could maybe find the copy of the recovery disk for Compaq Presario 433?

You can use these files for CDS520. I can't confirm that they have all of the same stuff a 433 would come with, but it will work. Particularly the F1 menu and the slowdown utility are very useful.

Hi! I'm just reading your post about the Compaq 433 with great interest. This was my first computer, and I have been searching for a long time for stuff I can barely remember now. So I was wondering if you can help.
I just registered in this forum just for this ^^

My computer was provided with several games including "Mario is Missing", but also two games I was unable to find :
- the first is a 3D ping pong game with mesh render
- the second is an educational game where you search for stuff on a lost island. The stuff you search for are PC components, and that way you would eventually learn how a computer works

Does your computer has these games? If yes could you please provide me with their names? Thanks a lot 😀

Hi! Unfortunately, I did not keep the contents of the original HDD.

Ohh, too bad... anyway, can't even be sure if the original software provided was the same on every country.. thanks anyway! But if by any chance you kept the original documentation and it contains info on the software package, I would be interested ^^

Are you still using that computer?

RaoulDuke wrote:

Are you still using that computer?

Not really. I moved to another apartment and now I don't have as many tables to put retro PCs on, unfortunately. So I mostly stick to one PC at a time. Right now I'm still playing with my Pentium 60 machine but will soon build a Super Socket 7 machine.

Besides it's not a really practical machine. Two ISA slots means I have to choose between a sound card, a network controller and an external CD-ROM. Besides, it has no cache and no support for faster CPU options. So basically it's too fast for 386 games and too slow for a lot of non-accelerated DOS games (like Duke Nukem or any other Build engine game).

Just discovered this thread. And now I want one...

The Presario 520 CDS has built-in CD-Rom and a DX2 66 Mhz, but it just doesn't look as cool 😐

I'm also quite partial to the Siemens FD 200/201/210 models, which are sort of as compact and, uselessly, have an integrated TV tuner.

Found one 433 on local ads, but very dirty and all the computer insides have been ripped out. 🙁 Essentially, it's a monitor in fancy shape. And dirty. Oh gosh, so dirty.

Perhaps someone with money, time and purpose would be able to squeeze in something more advanced (Pentium, good sound card, good graphics card) and build a decent rig out of it - but I have quite limited resources recently, so I had to pass. Pity.

jheronimus wrote on 2016-04-23, 14:01:

2) What kind of RAM are you using? I feel like I've tried a bunch of RAM but could still only get it to work with 16 MB (i.e. 4MB onboard + 4MB + 8MB).

It requires 72-pin FPM non-Parity SIMMs. It can be ECC or non-ECC. It can be 70 or 60 ns. I've tried both.
I'm currently using these in my Presario 425 (max 2x8+4 onboard MB supported):
https://www.memoryx.com/aaj.html

Yay thread resurrection! 🤣.. I wanted to try to expand the RAM capacity so it could run Win95 better so bad that I was doing research into the chipset and its pinout, wondering if a riser for the RAM or something that plops onto the chipset and provides more RAM slots would be feasible. I vaguely recall thinking it was doable but out of my skillset at the time.

Hi guys,

Let me follow-up on this thread. I recently acquired a Compaq Presario 460 all-in-one PC, unfortunately with quite a bad screen burn-in.
Would any of you have any idea where to get hold of CRT picture tube for this line of computers?

Thanks,

V.