🤐

What are you doing in my room...

🤣

Nah, just kidding, but I also have this HP and a NeoWare.

I noticed on My HP that the video-output is only 1024x768 whit the on-board card. I could go higher, but than I get a scrolling 1024x768. Even whit the newest drivers, But I have to say that I run Windows 2000. And I fitted an 160 gig harddisk in it. But you gave me the idea of using the PCI bus for an extra videocard.

So the NeoWare, it supports DOS sound. I have one whit a DOC2000 (disk on chip, kind of SSD). And also I could connect a IDE harddisk, or IDE2SD kind of stuff. An IDE2SD makes software transfers easy. So I installed DOS on the DOC and can use the SD card as second harddisk just for games. Works fine. But I had some problems wile playing Lemmings, the graphics were kind of strange. Well I did not much testing.

I think i got the onboard SiS vga chip to 1280x800 (in 16 bit i think) without the scroll thing, but then came the sound weirdness which wasnt worth the trouble as i dont play that much FIFA anyway. I havent got a clue why it would mess up the sound. I wanted to test with a TNT2 PCI card that i think would have better retro support, but when i went looking for it i found out that my wife had thrown the box with old PCI cards out =/

Very interesting about the Neoware capio! Quite excited that it supports dos sound, so i look forward to try that. How is the performance and did you just use the standard soundblaster driver in dos?

I can't really remember, mostly I just don't install soundblaster drivers. Only use setsound in each game. But I'll hock it up the next days, than I can give you some more info.

Somehow your nickname sounds familiar... are you from Germany? DosForum, A1K, VZEKC?

Thanks a lot!

Im from none of the above and this is the first computing forum im on 😀 Maybe someone has a similar username?

Very nice project!

Could you perhaps run a 3DMark benchmark like 99Max or 2000?

In 3DMark 99 it got 6016 3DMarks and 18159 CPU 3DMarks

Thank you!

I used an old thin client to "fake" a dedicated DOS machine, just had them start up DOS full-screen directly after booting into XP embedded. They had nowhere near the horsepower of your thin client but I was quite surprised at how well they managed.

Sound had quite a few problems, it was only a slow single-core CPU but generic Soundblaster/PC Speaker worked well enough.

Tried a Radeon 9200SE PCI and it works better in some ways.

GTA1, FIFA98 and FIFA99 now works perfectly, and build engine games no longer need nolfb for VESA modes. The original OpenGL renderers in UT99 works (no need to find alternative renderers online), and in Shogo the main menu now works as well (uses DirectX). The performance in Shogo and UT99 is a lot worse though. I get max 30-40 fps in UT 720p and 20fps or less in 1080p, going to even lower resolutions does not help a lot. Luckily it is a lot cooler than the GeForce FX 5200 based Quadro NVS280, but the GeForce FX series were notorious for their heat.

Had to use PowerStrip 2.78 to enforce 1080p desktop resolution though. Seems like DDC isnt working for this card.

The 3dMark99 scores were:
Default GPU settings: 4795
GPU core 200MHz -> 230MHz: 4726 (!? wtf)
Graphics RAM 133MHz -> 150MHz: 4850 (Gives weird lags and severe audio distortion in UT99)

The card seems crippled by the 64 bit memory bus and slow RAM. Overclocking didnt help much, and it caused other issues. It was however a lot easier to get working and works better with some games. Cant decide which card to keep...

Awesome thread, thanks for sharing your experience. I was wondering if you had tried a PCI sound card and used it with the onboard video. Seems like that would make it work for gaming with native SoundBlaster support.

I also got HP T5720 and recently found out some awesome tricks I wrote about in general thin client thread but decided to share them here as well so information is more readily available for T5720 owners... So the main trick is that somebody finally was able to create custom BIOS and unlock all menu entries on this thing. Just search "T5720 unlocked bios" and you should find v1.13 BIOS. Then following tweaks can be done:

- Set IRQ 5 (or 7) reserved in BIOS. Now SBEMU starts to work, before there were no free IRQs for emulated SB as some ACPI redirector stuff took them. No even when COM and LPT were disabled. Not sure if there would be enough IRQs if USB and ethernet would be disabled or PCI graphics card would be removed, but i really wanted keep them enabled for Win98.
- UDMA can be enabled for IDE which doubles transfer speeds under Win98 from 16MB/s to 33MB/s; however, on DOS this does something nasty as QEMM no longer works (JEMMEX and EMM386 do) so pick your poison
- Disable USB mouse and keyboard support and suddenly QEMM memory scan is 10x faster than before (!). Additionally you get 16 kB more free space in high memory as "ROM" now reserves only 8 kB instead of 24 kB. Not sure what is the deal here but USB keyboard and mouse emulation is so bad that it is unusable under DOS (huge slowdowns when using peripherals).
- Disable LAN boot ROM and "ROM" in high memory decreases 8 kB in size. If USB keyboard and mouse support was disabled then whole "ROM" disappears from high memory and now there is plenty of free continuous space for TSRs.

With all these ROM tricks there is so much high memory available that I get 625 kb of free conventional memory under QEMM or JEMMEX even if I load ethernet packet drivers in addition to 4dos, smartdrv, doslfn, keyb, ctmouse, sbemu...

P.s. SBEMU compatibility seems to be hit and miss, not sure if it is my settings, but I hope this will improve and this little computer would be finally perfect DOS/Win98 retro machine.

Edit: For the record, legacy USB support is indeed poor in this device , huge slowdowns, but BIOS PS/2 support is poor as well. Not as bad slowdowns but bad in any case. Cutemouse 2.0 which directly commands PS/2 devices will work without slowdowns in DOS (not 2.1 which uses BIOS -> slowdowns).

It doesn't search my bios you mention, can you share this unofficial bios v1.13? I would appreciate it.
Greetings!

https://gitlab.com/gitendo/t5720

Thank you very much.
By the way, I would ask if you have heard of a similar bios but for the 5710?

I think, the main reason why a modded 5720 BIOS even available is due to it being just a squished Athlon XP system on a common SiS desktop chipset. 5710 has a Transmeta CPU and would require much more involved modding.

Fact, it makes sense. Thank You very much for the clarification 😀

On mine enabling DMA doesnt increase the transfer speed over 15MB/s

jarp wrote on 2024-03-31, 09:11:

I also got HP T5720 and recently found out some awesome tricks I wrote about in general thin client thread but decided to share […]
Show full quote

I also got HP T5720 and recently found out some awesome tricks I wrote about in general thin client thread but decided to share them here as well so information is more readily available for T5720 owners... So the main trick is that somebody finally was able to create custom BIOS and unlock all menu entries on this thing. Just search "T5720 unlocked bios" and you should find v1.13 BIOS. Then following tweaks can be done:

- Set IRQ 5 (or 7) reserved in BIOS. Now SBEMU starts to work, before there were no free IRQs for emulated SB as some ACPI redirector stuff took them. No even when COM and LPT were disabled. Not sure if there would be enough IRQs if USB and ethernet would be disabled or PCI graphics card would be removed, but i really wanted keep them enabled for Win98.
- UDMA can be enabled for IDE which doubles transfer speeds under Win98 from 16MB/s to 33MB/s; however, on DOS this does something nasty as QEMM no longer works (JEMMEX and EMM386 do) so pick your poison
- Disable USB mouse and keyboard support and suddenly QEMM memory scan is 10x faster than before (!). Additionally you get 16 kB more free space in high memory as "ROM" now reserves only 8 kB instead of 24 kB. Not sure what is the deal here but USB keyboard and mouse emulation is so bad that it is unusable under DOS (huge slowdowns when using peripherals).
- Disable LAN boot ROM and "ROM" in high memory decreases 8 kB in size. If USB keyboard and mouse support was disabled then whole "ROM" disappears from high memory and now there is plenty of free continuous space for TSRs.

With all these ROM tricks there is so much high memory available that I get 625 kb of free conventional memory under QEMM or JEMMEX even if I load ethernet packet drivers in addition to 4dos, smartdrv, doslfn, keyb, ctmouse, sbemu...

P.s. SBEMU compatibility seems to be hit and miss, not sure if it is my settings, but I hope this will improve and this little computer would be finally perfect DOS/Win98 retro machine.

Edit: For the record, legacy USB support is indeed poor in this device , huge slowdowns, but BIOS PS/2 support is poor as well. Not as bad slowdowns but bad in any case. Cutemouse 2.0 which directly commands PS/2 devices will work without slowdowns in DOS (not 2.1 which uses BIOS -> slowdowns).

Thank you so much for these tips!

I have managed to get a t5720 too and been playing around with it.

From the HP Manual/QuickSpecs, I saw that with the PCI expansion module comes a different power supply. This particular thin client states that it works with a 12V, 3.33A, 40W power supply. The one with the PCI Expansion module is a 12V, 4.16A, 50W unit.

Maybe that's why the PCI module doesn't work with most sound cards, if one is just using the "original" power supply? I managed to get a 50W unit but I'm still fearing I might fry my t5720... Anyone has tried this 50W power supply and can confirm it works safely?

I also managed to get sound for lots of games inside Windows98SE! After watching phil's video about this thin client's and the bit about the sound card, I decided to investigate the reason why it wasn't working properly. He stated that DOOM got only sound effects and Duke3D only music, so I checked the cards drivers (it's a SiS 7012, drivers are usually inside a file named a12112d__sound.zip )and they actually give General Midi and Soundblaster Pro 2 compatibility to lots of different games.
The trick is to install first the VxD drivers (the ones for Win95/98FE) and only afterwards the WDM drivers. Somewhere along the way, the line BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4 P330 gets added to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. I changed it to SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4 P330 and it stopped working, so it's important to NOT add SET to the line...
For my surprise, DOOM, DOOM2, DUKE3D, Warcraft2, X-Wing, Tie Fighter and lots of others worked perfectly!!! Music must be set to General Midi and Sound effects to Soundblaster or soundblaster 2.
Wolfenstein 3D worked with sound effects but no music because it has no option for General Midi, afaik...
Dune2 would get some sound effects during the House choosing but no music...

Also tried some LucasArts games that have Roland support and they all worked (Monkey2 sounded a bit off, though).

Anyway, I hope this is useful for anyone with this HP t5720 Thin Client! 😀

Update for the HP t5710 and the HP t5530: the sound in WIN98SE behaves exactly like in the t5720. I used the vinyl_v700b.zip drivers and all the games i mentioned worked with SBPRO2 for FX and General Midi for music. It wasn't even necessary to add any SET BLASTER line to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on these models! In fact, the sound won't work if that line is present... 😀

The power supply is not feeding anything but 12v directly. So incompatibility with sound lies solely on motherboard VRM.