Funny... I recently picked up the same exact machine but mine came with a 3.5 floppy drive so I can't help ya there. Hopefully you can score a floppy drive and make a boot disk.

What I can tell you is that motherboard is an intel classic R (https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/I/I … -CLASSIC-R.html)

So far, I've done the same as you...maxed memory and cache. I also installed DOS 6.22 and soon will install Win95.

Love it! I have a Gateway 2000 4DX2-50 in almost the same configuration (I use 32MB RAM, POD83, a 40GB HDD, a 12x CD-ROM, and a GOTEK even though mine came with the floppy drive). I'm impressed you got a DVD-ROM drive to work. My on-board IDE won't interface with any of the ATAPI drives I've tried. I use the IDE/ATAPI interface on a WSS/SB compatible sound card for the CD-ROM drive.

You could prep a bootable hard drive in another computer, and then install it into the Gateway. Be aware that the on-board IDE has a 512MB address limit (I get around that with drive overlay software). The drive overlay software even lets me boot off of CD's as long as the software can initialize the drive (it's a little wonky with the sound card interface).

I kind of like Windows NT 4 with mine. Win95 GUI with rock solid stability.

I wish I had an Anykey keyboard. They're a little expensive in the auction scene.

I haven’t gotten far enough to test the dvd drive. I have it plugged into the sound card now though.

I’m working on this at a friends house far away from my resources. We are trying to get windows on it without a boot disk and it is proving to be very challenging

We tried a 2.4gb hdd but it seems to be above the bios limit

So we tried a 200 mb hdd and it seems to be empty and the usb to ide will not read it.

We have no floppy disks and no way to write one.

I miss my gotek 🤣.

I’m wondering if the bios for this can be patched? 🤔

1 OxCats wrote: Aight I've gone over all the docs
2This board:
3https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/3126
4Is:
5https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/3127

Btw^

Redhawk wrote on 2022-07-17, 22:30:

Funny... I recently picked up the same exact machine but mine came with a 3.5 floppy drive so I can't help ya there. Hopefully you can score a floppy drive and make a boot disk.

What I can tell you is that motherboard is an intel classic R (https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/I/I … -CLASSIC-R.html)

So far, I've done the same as you...maxed memory and cache. I also installed DOS 6.22 and soon will install Win95.

Can you confirm 256k is max?

Overdrive 83 is the fastest without a interposer right?

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-17, 23:22:

Overdrive 83 is the fastest without a interposer right?

I put a dx4-100 overdrive in mine which works.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-17, 23:22:

I’m wondering if the bios for this can be patched?

I also couldn't find a BIOS patch 🙁 Just noticed one of the links you had contained bios files..the one we want is the 4.05 yet its readme states for it to upgrade, a previous micro firmware bios must be resident...which in my case it isnt 🙁

Redhawk wrote on 2022-07-17, 23:31:

I put a dx4-100 overdrive in mine which works. […]
Show full quote

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-17, 23:22:

Overdrive 83 is the fastest without a interposer right?

I put a dx4-100 overdrive in mine which works.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-17, 23:22:

I’m wondering if the bios for this can be patched?

I also couldn't find a BIOS patch 🙁

🤔 the one I have is pentium based though yes?

Wondering if that makes it faster than a dx4-100

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-17, 23:38:

🤔 the one I have is pentium based though yes?

Wondering if that makes it faster than a dx4-100

Yea, didnt notice your's was pentium 😀

The POD83 would be much faster than a DX4-100 in floating point, and about the same in integer work.

Yes, you would need an imposer to run anything faster than a DX2-66 (the POD has one built into the CPU package).

BTW, I use the drive overlay software from Phil's Computer Lab on my Gateway. Here's the link:

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ontrack-disk-manager.html

Phil has permission to distribute it since it's essentially abandon-ware at this point.

If you can burn CD's on another computer, you could burn the files and installers you need to a CD in the boot sector. You might need to create several CDs, though (I do this a lot).

You can make a CD to install DOS 6.22 to start. There are a number of ISOs out there for DOS. You could use a program like UltraISO to modify the ISO to include your sound card's drivers in a separate folder so you can set up the sound card's CD driver. Then burn the installation disk.

Next, you'll need to burn a CD just for the drive overlay software. I use UltraISO to create a new CD image, and I simply put the Ontrack floppy image into the boot sector and burn the disk. It's a little wasteful, but I've got tons of CD-Rs to use up.

Use the drive overlay CD to boot a donor computer via CD into the drive overlay software to prep a large hard drive (your 2.4GB would do). Tell Ontrack that you have the BIOS set to a 512MB HD (it really doesn't matter if the donor computer can handle more than that). Then use the DOS CD to install the OS through the drive overlay. Finally, install the sound card's drivers. Then put the hard drive into the Gateway. Make sure to set the Gateway BIOS to a 512MB drive.

Once you have Ontrack working, you can use it to boot from CD into another OS. Just be aware that this won't work on a cold boot because the IDE interface on a sound card won't have pre-initialized. You need to boot into DOS (or some other OS) first and run the IDE interface driver to initialize the card. Once initialized, you can Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart the computer, and Ontrack can boot from the CD. Pretty handy.

That thing is awesome

Thanks 😀

So we have a 212mb drive and a 2.4gb drive

This bios seems to have a limit for the drive size making only the 212mb work.

We finally got a computer that can read it and transfer files but it seems to have a bad sector. So this is the end of the adventure for this computer until I get it home.

Once home I can use a xt-ide to boot this.

And by then maybe jan will have a new patched bios for it. I put in a request 😀

I’m probably going to try putting windows ME on this first, but kinda expext it to be terrible on 32 mb of ram, so will probably fall back to 95 or 3.11

Is there any way to get usb on this?

Seems like you could upgrade VIDEO-RAM with 4 additional chips for a total of 2MB or 4MB.

Any idea where I could get the chips from?

Also, anyone able to confirm if 256k really is the max cache? Or if there are some lower ns chips I can use?

Btw,

Chkcpu wrote on 2022-07-18, 09:46:

Hi Shere, […]
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Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-17, 23:28:

This one desperately needs patching 🤣 :p able to help? :p

Re: Gateway 2000 overdrive build

Hi Shere,

This BIOS reverse engineering/patching hobby took me through a lot of BIOSes over the years. Especially 486 and Pentium socket 5/7 BIOSes had my attention and I more or less specialized in the Award (and some AMI) socket 3/5/7 BIOSes from the 1994-2000 era.

I also tried my hand at the Phoenix BIOS and OEM BIOSes from Compaq and IBM, but was never able to crack their encryption. They apparently use some propriety encoding. 🙁

So I’m unable to help you with this Phoenix BIOS on the Gateway 2000.

But this old 504MB BIOS limit isn’t hard to circumvent with Ontracks Drive Overlay software or the XT-IDE BIOS. These solutions are especially made to bypass this limitation! 😀

Have fun with this build,
Jan

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-18, 14:01:

Any idea where I could get the chips from?

Also, anyone able to confirm if 256k really is the max cache? Or if there are some lower ns chips I can use?

When there´s a limit of 32MB RAM, a L2 cache > 256K will probably be useless, because the current 256K can already cache the whole of the 32MB.
Besides that all larger chips (512K, 1MB) are DIL32...
Don´t worry about L2 cache speed / nS, as long as the thing runs stable.

Are the 4 onboard Video-RAM chips 256K each?

The board maxes out at 1MB of VRAM. Those sockets would take 4x 128KB chips. My board uses Sanyo LC324256BP-70 in the expansion sockets.

You don´t get far with 512K Video-RAM so the upgrade is highly recommended.
Adding a better ISA graphics card would also be an option.

That bios probably has a 420mb Hard drive size limit.
To get around this your best bet is to use a CF card and IDE adapter

I have a isa ATI In there but it occasionally gives me errors about one of the chips.

What is the best ISA graphics card? Maybe I can order one?

How would the CompactFlash to IDE adapter get around the size limit wouldn’t it still be constrained to so many megabytes?

When I get it back to the house I will probably use a xt-ide

What is the maximum size that I can use with that?I have one, but I forgot what size hard drives it will support up to.

Without an xt-ide, you'd still need drive software. I used ontrack with a 3GB drive and made 2 partitions. I wanted to install DOS 6.22 which has a 2GB max partition size.