Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Yole, my memory is fading somewhat.

I'm right now, putting together an old 586 PC.

The specs so far..
2GB Disk drive IDE
Zip Drive IDE
Floppy
CD Rom IDE
Colorado 5GB HP Drive (hopefully).
Memory 128MB (I think this is enough?)
Video S2 something
Also has an ISA network card.

Hopefully I will have a £3 Sound blaster (if I win today).

So first off, I'm currently using it for Word Rescue on PC Dos (my son). and obviously there is the 640kb restriction + What extended it allows me.

I may fancy popping OS/2 4 on it, if I can find he disks.

The specs seem fine? I can't recall what was good in those days, OS/2 4 recommends about 16MB of RAM

Question, The Colorado drive is IDE, but the BIOS is complaining it's not ATAPI compatible. Would this actually register in the BIOS? I pop a tape a tape in and it makes hard assed super noises, but not sure how I'm going to get this recognized. The Master/Slave settings are correct.

AND IT HAS A WINDOWS 'ME' BADGE ON THE FRONT!!!!

The spec is terrific for the Pentium era. When the Pentium came out initially, RAM and HDD sizes were much smaller than what you have in your system. Check out the ad below, from 1994:



I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this box. I've really enjoyed my Gateway 486. Read all about it (and see pics) here:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum ... -of-images )&highlight=gateway+486

I've been struggling to get a Linux or FreeBSD install working on it, but Windows 3.1 and DOS have been running great. I was thinking about trying OS/2 Warp 4, though the voice recognition capabilities require a better spec... will work for you, however:

OS/2 Warp 4 Processor and Memory Requirements
Minimum 486 33MHz, or higher, with 12MB to 16MB memory
For speech navigation, Pentium* 75MHz, or higher, and 4MB additional memory
For speech navigation and dictation, Pentium 100MHz, or higher, with 8MB to 12MB additional memory recommended
Disk space: 100MB to 300MB free

My "retro PC" is an Am5x86 with VLB graphics and lots of ISA slots. Handles a lot of old DOS games that balk at my old P75.

uunix wrote: I may fancy popping OS/2 4 on it, if I can find he disks.

I think you will be happier with Warp 3 Connect. Blue Spine (with Winos 2, head down to the bowery and you could jack it up to Winos 3 or 4, maybe Has everything you need, nfs and tcpip and smb and all that.

3 and 4 are almost identical. 4 has voice type, which would probably work on a new fast cpu but was way too much work for a Pennytum. 4 also has that crappy pseudo-3d interface which is (to me) ugly. Worse, they moved some stuff around in the lower levels of the system so that 3 is "snappier" than 4. This wouldn't matter if you were running on something new but on elderly slow processors, it counts.

You can stuff almost all of the parts of 4 you might want into 3, if you insist. The only things that won't work on the 3 kernel are some of the latest goofy stuff, like PE-to-LX and the fossy type things some people got into. You can install emx or mxe or whatever it was called. That will give you a gcc-driven XFree/86 subsystem that will talk almost-happily (SGI bitches about missing extensions) to your SGI kompewters. For compilers, there's also Watcom. That should make the Canadians happy

The VDM's (virtual dos machine) are excellent, they work great and are advanced enough to where you can install any DOS you want or even CP/M or other weirdass primitive x86 systems. People have done Xenix.

You probably could have even installed Windows 95 but our good buddies at Mickeysoft purposely put a block of memory right where OS/2 could not use it. You know that blob of system-reserved memory at 512k ? The only reason it's there is to put a roadblock in the way of OS/2 running Win95 apps. IBM could have fixed that - they are smarter than Mickey ever will be - but right about then, IBM lost more money in one quarter than any other company ever had. Ever. Hey, we gotta pay them CEO's the big bucks, 'cuz they have the big responsibilities and create big wealth, eh ? Americans are so stupid.

And oh yeah, watch out for multi-booting Windows 2000. Mickey also "accidentally" wiped out any OS/2 partitions if you install W-2000 on your existing boot manager OS/2 box. Thank you so much, Bill. Hope you rot in hell.

Mickey was scared to death of OS/2, 'cuz OS/2 was a real operating system instead of a joke, like the crap they were selling.

The specs seem fine? I can't recall what was good in those days, OS/2 4 recommends about 16MB of RAM

Yeah, I don't think I ever had 16 mb of ram. My last primitive OS/2 desktop was a very early Z-Pro with dual Pentium Pros. Everything was fine and snappy except for video. Video would drop a lot of frames and be glitchy. Overclocked the PPro's to 260 and they broke up a lot, backed down to 240 and it was much better. Then upgraded to two Overdrives (basically P6 @ 333 mhz) and the thing was perfect. Even video worked well. That's all the computer anyone needs

Question, The Colorado drive is IDE, but the BIOS is complaining it's not ATAPI compatible.

First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyer ... no, wrong script. First thing you do after installation is ditch the factory IBM IDE driver and replace it with Danis506. Smart lady. She took the IBM Device Driver Kit and developed a better IDE driver with MUCH more capabiliities.

Oh wait, you have to get past the BIOS first . Oh-oh, chicken-egg BIOS update ?

Here, you need this :

Http://hobbes.nmsu.edu

Everything you could ask for. Well, no CAD. There isn't any. But everything else, OS/2 gots it.

Also look for EDM/2. Tons and tons of good programming stuff.

The thing that's going to piss you off is the SIQ. Badly-written programs lock you out of the desktop. The system is still running but you can't get to it. The short-term solution is to telnet in, kill the desktop and restart it. The long term solution is, whenever you come across one of these poorly-written programs, ditch it. That was going to be the next fix in OS/2-land but Akers drove the company off a cliff about then, so that was all she wrote for major changes.

AND IT HAS A WINDOWS 'ME' BADGE ON THE FRONT!!!!

OMG ! That's like so kewl, d00d !

Lol my current PC (c2q, geforce) still has a windows ME badge on it because the case and power supply are vintage-2001.

Ignore that OS/2 crap; dos 6.2 does everything for everybody

guardian452 wrote: Ignore that OS/2 crap; dos 6.2 does everything for everybody

Everything after 3.3 was really bloated

redundancy boards, two boards, each one has a serial line and a BDM interface

guardian452 wrote: Ignore that OS/2 crap; dos 6.2 does everything for everybody

eheh OS/2 Warp3 was my salvation when I had to handle two identical dos programs, and each one runs in its sandbox and accesses its hardware.

BDM is an hardware debug protocol, directly connected to the CPU. I have built a redundancy boards, two independent boards connected with shared ram, each one has a serial line and a BDM interface. I have two LPT cards in my 586 box, each LPT port is attached to a target trough a BDM cable, and each BDM cable is handled by a DOS program.

• LPT1: IRQ 7, addr=0x378..0x37f -----> BDM cable 1 ------> board 1 <-------- DOS BDM mon session 1
• LPT2: IRQ 5, base=0x278..0x27f -----> BDM cable 2 ------> board 2 <-------- DOS BDM mon session 2

each LPT has its ports set

• Data port : Base (e.g. base=0x378 for LPT1, base=0x278 for LPT2)
• Status port : Base+1 (e.g. Status=0x379 for LPT1, Status=0x279 for LPT2)
• Control port : Base+2 (e.g. Control=0x37a for LPT1, Control=0x27a for LPT2)

With MSDOS you can't handle more than one cable a time because DOS is not multitasking so to switch from cable n1 to cable n2 you have to close the current program, and to launch the other. Life is too short for these boring solutions.

From Windows95 to WindowsXP the BDM software is horribly crashing, it seems it has trouble handling the low level driver, I can't understand why, each "DOS BDM mon" runs in its session and each BDM cable access a different address (base=0x378 for LPT1, base=0x278 for LPT2, different IRQ, etc), but Windows crashed in doing that while I had success with OS/2, which can perform multitask in real sandbox, so you can have two DOS programs running at the same time, and each program handles its cable. This means better Low Level multitasking than Windows, and it's wonderful, I am able to control two target-boards without the need to buy a professional equipment.




Never tried OS/2 v4


p.s. ohhh, friend, in case you need, I have here an original box, OS/2 Warp3 NET. Two floppies, 3 CD, 3 manuals.
CD1: install
CD2: bonus pack with a few Apps
CD3: wizCollections, a few freeware OS/2 Apps from the lands of BBS and internet.

hamei wrote: Oh wait, you have to get past the BIOS first . Oh-oh, chicken-egg BIOS update ?

Well, I've fsck'ed up a bit.
BIOS update has caused a FDC error, and I can't revert back as I can't boot from floppy. No USB port to attach a USB floppy.
I'll have to get a USB card from work and hope I can select it from the boot up menu.

Seems it has on-board USB

When something goes wrong, it's always something that causes the most head aches.

Plus it still hasn't picked up the Colorado drive.
Not bothering with that, I've fitted a DAT4 SCSI drive.
I could boot from the Zip drive, but I can't produce a bootable zip disk (format /s isn't available).

uunix wrote: Memory 128MB (I think this is enough?)

You might want to shrink that down to 64MB. Earlier Intel 430 chipsets for Pentium-compatible devices limit cacheable memory to the low 64MB, and putting more memory in them with an operating system which can make proper use of it can reduce performance... See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets#Pentium_chipsets for a comprehensive list.

miod wrote: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets#Pentium_chipsets for a comprehensive list

unbelievable funny
I have bought a book called " PC bible " which is also reporting the funny news, but … never read so carefully

Mistake Edition sticker you say? My archaeological deductive skills places that around 2000? in which case it is later 586 (P2/3 era). I had a K6/233 with 32MB ram and an SGI320 then (still got the 320). Windows 2000 would be a good choice for functionality, but maybe not games... the compatibility modes in 98/2K were awful, but DOSBox was great and ran all my old DOS games. I used DOSBox a lot on XP, with no problems that I can remember.

USB and ISA on the same mobo? Nice... My memory is vague with this (and certainly not extended ), but tbh I don't remember ISA and USB as being overlapping technologies on mobos? I could be very wrong though as I do remember ISA slots being present on mobo's for legacy reasons a while after the market was saturated with AGP and PCI. USB was crap back then... 'plug and pray' !

uunix wrote: Video S2 something

s2 gfx? any more info on this?.... I used to have s3 ViRGE? The s3 tbh is old for 2000-era (more 95-97 ish). Given the era of your system I would expect there to be an AGP slot on the mobo... in which case imho the ATiRage 128, or one of the later voodoos were excellent (without going to high end FireGL/Quadro)... certainly better than the s3...The ATi Rage played Quake (1,2&3) better than my sgi320 at the time.... 320 left it for dust when doing 2D work though.

uunix wrote: Also has an ISA network card.
Hopefully I will have a £3 Sound blaster (if I win today).

Since you have an ISA... imho the best sound card you could get was the AWE64 gold (there was even a 5.25 bay external interface with different audio connectors and remote that controlled the mouse... all gold plated connectors) It was the only card (that I knew of) at the time which gave absolutely no 'microphonics'... when you get your soundblaster put some headphones in and then do various tasks on the computer.. you'll hear clicking and static in the background, which bleeds into audio playback (during quiet section of DVD film, once you hear it you can't not hear it... if you know what I mean)... not with the 64 gold... in fact I used this old system to play DVD/CD (as a media centre, with minimal MP3's and an even smaller amount of AVI's)... hooked into a quad306/34 with ESS AMT's (the AMT transducer picked out every little sound in a recording, but it was 'clear as light' with the AWE64 Gold). It was the last 'internal' sound card I had, before going external and haven't looked back since... no particular reason though so I'm not saying internal sound cards are crap. I just remember it fondly, and nothing else at the time impressed me enough.

uunix wrote: Question, The Colorado drive is IDE, but the BIOS is complaining it's not ATAPI compatible. Would this actually register in the BIOS? I pop a tape a tape in and it makes hard assed super noises, but not sure how I'm going to get this recognized. The Master/Slave settings are correct.

ATA (or more specifically PATA) was another name for (E)IDE... IDE itself was phased out mid 90's I think????, and it became (Extended)IDE [EDIT:'Enhanced', not 'Extended'..apologies]. IDE was designed for a storage device to be attached at all times I believe... like a HDD...not like a CD-ROM or tape drive which was eject-able... this is why ATAPI was used. ATAPI allowed eject-able media to be attached and used. Under the hood it was essentially SCSI on an IDE cable! Your drive should NOT be using ATAPI so that is a problem. It sounds like a BIOS issue, perhaps it cannot read the drive and is thus falling back on ATAPI, which won't work with HDD's. Does your BIOS give any other information about the attached device, such as sectors or anything?

uunix wrote: BIOS update has caused a FDC error, and I can't revert back as I can't boot from floppy.

Is the light/LED stuck on the floppy drive? or the whole thing not working at all?

sgifanatic wrote: though the voice recognition capabilities require a better spec

For dictation software on the 586 (I think a 486 might struggle)... I used to use something called 'Dragon Dictate' for speech recognition on windows98 (it was on the K6/233 I had with 32Mb RAM!) with no problems at all.. you had to train it by talking to it which I can only assume built up a better phonetic signature for the program to understand... it did get a few words wrong but I do remember it working quite well overall... one had to speak in ones proper english like .... 'goto sleep'

ivelegacy wrote: With MSDOS you can't handle more than one cable a time because DOS is not multitasking

Terminate Stay Resident (TSR's), is how DOS performed psuedo multitasking... this is how some device drivers (and viruses) worked in DOS (otherwise unless the executable being executed contained device drivers... hardware usage would be pretty limited). Pre 386, expect to clog the 640KB base.... post 386 you can load into extended/expanded memory!

spiroyster wrote: Terminate Stay Resident (TSR's), is how DOS performed pseudo multitasking

the BDM control program crashes if I try the TSR, I have already tried under MSDOS v6.22, and PCDOS v7. May be the TSR model is OK only with simple applications, also I need to have two BDM control programs running at the same time, I can't switch from one to the other: debug purpose of two concurrent boards.

spiroyster wrote:

sgifanatic wrote: though the voice recognition capabilities require a better spec

For dictation software on the 586 (I think a 486 might struggle)... I used to use something called 'Dragon Dictate' for speech recognition on windows98 (it was on the K6/233 I had with 32Mb RAM!) with no problems at all.. you had to train it by talking to it which I can only assume built up a better phonetic signature for the program to understand... it did get a few words wrong but I do remember it working quite well overall... one had to speak in ones proper english like .... 'goto sleep'

Very familiar with Dragon. Pre-deep-learning neural networks exhibit a restricted ability to learn with the network getting stuck in local error minima during training; this is what caused 90s era ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks3) to never really achieve a high-enough recognition rate. Alternative techniques such as HMMs and GMMs don't rival the accuracies achieved in current DNN (Deep Neural Network) systems... MSFT, Google and FB all use Deep Learning extensively now.

This passage from a Nuance publication specifically addresses how DNNs address the shortcomings of older techniques.

"Another poignant example of an innovation which is not only “hidden” but also based on a rather old concept is Deep Belief Networks which have revolutionized the architecture of ASR (and related systems) over the last few years; This topic was highlighted at the conference by a number of talks and posters on everything from acoustic and language modeling to text-to-speech (TTS) and voice biometrics. As the more recent term “Deep Neural Networks” already indicates, this is the renaissance of the Neural Networks (NNs) of the 1990s. Back then these networks were hugely appealing to AI researchers as they, modeled after the human brain, seemed to have a superior explanatory and modeling power over the Hidden Markov Models/ Gaussian Mixture Models (HMMs/GMMs) combination, which had dominated acoustic modeling in ASR since long before. But yet again it turned out that when applied to “real problems” training methods for NNs were either vulnerable to get stuck in local minima or computationally too consuming to be of practical value. And so HMMs/GMMs continued to rule, bringing error rates down and accuracy up by piling many smaller optimization and (yes) innovations within this framework. Again, the combination of several factors – modern, more powerful hardware including GPUs (chips originally developed for graphical processing, think: computer games) and new ideas about how to train NNs – changed this picture radically over the last few years. Once researchers knew how to make them work, “deep” NNs helped researchers to bring error rates down by 25% or even more with just this one [at its core, rather old] innovation. After this first revolutionary wave swept over ASR and its relatives of TTS and voice biometrics a couple of years ago it was followed again by a phase in which many smaller innovations saw the day of light day, now within the framework of DNNs."

http://whatsnext.nuance.com/in-the-labs ... ence-2014/

ivelegacy wrote:

spiroyster wrote: Terminate Stay Resident (TSR's), is how DOS performed pseudo multitasking

the BDM control program crashes if I try the TSR, I have already tried under MSDOS v6.22, and PCDOS v7. May be the TSR model is OK only with simple applications, also I need to have two BDM control programs running at the same time, I can't switch from one to the other: debug purpose of two concurrent boards.

Yes, reading back, I see your requirements, I think you have hit the nail on the head here...

ivelegacy wrote: multitask in real sandbox

TSR's are not real multitasking, they are an afterthought . I think with some clever programming you could acheive what you need, but it may be far too much effort for too little gain getting TSR's to work. Good luck with your project ivelegacy.

sgifanatic wrote:

spiroyster wrote:

sgifanatic wrote: though the voice recognition capabilities require a better spec

For dictation software on the 586 (I think a 486 might struggle)... I used to use something called 'Dragon Dictate' for speech recognition on windows98 (it was on the K6/233 I had with 32Mb RAM!) with no problems at all.. you had to train it by talking to it which I can only assume built up a better phonetic signature for the program to understand... it did get a few words wrong but I do remember it working quite well overall... one had to speak in ones proper english like .... 'goto sleep'

Very familiar with Dragon. Pre-deep-learning neural networks exhibit a restricted ability to learn with the network getting stuck in local error minima during training; this is what caused 90s era ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks3) to never really achieve a high-enough recognition rate. Alternative techniques such as HMMs and GMMs don't rival the accuracies achieved in current DNN (Deep Neural Network) systems... MSFT, Google and FB all use Deep Learning extensively now.

This passage from a Nuance publication specifically addresses how DNNs address the shortcomings of older techniques.

"Another poignant example of an innovation which is not only “hidden” but also based on a rather old concept is Deep Belief Networks which have revolutionized the architecture of ASR (and related systems) over the last few years; This topic was highlighted at the conference by a number of talks and posters on everything from acoustic and language modeling to text-to-speech (TTS) and voice biometrics. As the more recent term “Deep Neural Networks” already indicates, this is the renaissance of the Neural Networks (NNs) of the 1990s. Back then these networks were hugely appealing to AI researchers as they, modeled after the human brain, seemed to have a superior explanatory and modeling power over the Hidden Markov Models/ Gaussian Mixture Models (HMMs/GMMs) combination, which had dominated acoustic modeling in ASR since long before. But yet again it turned out that when applied to “real problems” training methods for NNs were either vulnerable to get stuck in local minima or computationally too consuming to be of practical value. And so HMMs/GMMs continued to rule, bringing error rates down and accuracy up by piling many smaller optimization and (yes) innovations within this framework. Again, the combination of several factors – modern, more powerful hardware including GPUs (chips originally developed for graphical processing, think: computer games) and new ideas about how to train NNs – changed this picture radically over the last few years. Once researchers knew how to make them work, “deep” NNs helped researchers to bring error rates down by 25% or even more with just this one [at its core, rather old] innovation. After this first revolutionary wave swept over ASR and its relatives of TTS and voice biometrics a couple of years ago it was followed again by a phase in which many smaller innovations saw the day of light day, now within the framework of DNNs."

http://whatsnext.nuance.com/in-the-labs ... ence-2014/

Uh oh... looks like a night of heavy reading ahead of me...that, and rummaging in me box of old software to find this program again!.... I never gave it much thought at the time, but now I am extremely intrigued.

thankyou very much for this information sgifanatic!

Getting a bit carried away with myself here.. must remain focused on original plan.. running word rescue for my son & EF2000 for myself..

OS/2 - Lotus notes server etc is project 2.

So, Video card is S3 ViRGE/VX - Crystal VR4000

SVideo & TV out.

The USB part of things, well the BIOS allows me to enable On-Board USB, but the only thing I can see (and it's not labelled) are these pins:

I've tried a few combinations but see no life yet. I have a cable that goes pin outs to 4 USB ports.

The Sound Blaster I have won of ebay for £3 is a SB0220 5.1

I may though have fscked up as the minimum spec is stated as

I'm guessing it will work in all honesty.

The CPU is a Cyrix M II 300.

So apart from the tape back up, which the Colorado failed to register so I changed to a SCSI Dat, that has the wrong cable pin type and the only correct DAT drives I have are the wrong colour.

The biggest pain, is re-flashing the BIOS, I just can't get it to boot from the CD image I made and I've got 9 DVD/CD-roms to try (two have already physically broke).

I love the sound of a floppy seeking, it's all great fun. I picked some nice matching IDE cables today also.


What the heck is up with my posts formatting?

sgifanatic wrote: I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this box. I've really enjoyed my Gateway 486.

I found this interesting looking CD ROM

eComStation server £1,400 .. jeeze..
http://www.ecomstation.co.uk/html/prices.html

uunix wrote: eComStation server £1,400 .. jeeze..
http://www.ecomstation.co.uk/html/prices.html

"eComStation Server Edition is a business-oriented package which contains all of the features needed to set up or extend a client-server network. It is available to special order"

Wonder what it is ... customized installation with support ? 'Cuz their own price list shows normal ecomstation at 215 lbs. Or a bunch less if you can scrounge up an old Warp 4 CD ... that shouldn't be too difficult

Is Jill St John still involved in that or did he retire ?

Oh boy, are these guys misguided ...

http://ewiki.ecomstation.nl/testbackground

the proper answer is, "It works fine for me ! Just use gcc ! No, I'm not going to waste my time on that old deprecated junk ! It's not modern ! "

eedit : the "biz edition" at Serenity's site is $300 so this must include some personal service. And maybe a happy ending

https://shop.ecomstation.com/ecomstation-2-1.html

Oh ... "System fixes are available to all registered eComStation customers through this website, Software Subscription Service is not required for those "

Helllooooooo SGI ! Anybody home ? N-3 will always be available for free download ? And any security-related fixes will be available immediately ?

Hellloooooo Bozo ! Anybody home ? OS/2 has been reportedly dead since about 1998 ? And "out of support" for nine years ? Every single computer rag has declared it dead about thirty times ? But current customers still get fixes free ?

SGI, liar liar pants on fire

Creeps.

And you, too, RACKABLE assholes. You bought it, you run under the name, you get the responsibilities. If you can't run with the honest dogs, get back on the porch. Lying, unethical, worthless jerks.

Never heard of the Cyrix, Just reading an old review ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/170/2 ), and it doesn't seem like it would be 'great' for EF2000 . Although having said that it would probably run fine since EF2000 came out '95 (486-ish). That Cyrix apparently supports MMX (x86's first SIMD extensions), but it's FPU performance is not rated high so unsure how much benefit it would give in everyday performance. Shouldn't be any problems with Lotus.

I suspect this will be one of those cases where running it using software renderer will be better than using 3D accelration with the ViRGE.... not only were S3 one of the first 3D hardware accelerators (slightly beaten by 3Dfx I think???) on the PC market (using S3D framework), the ViRGE was also known as the worlds first '3D decelerator' because it was diabolical with anything other than basic 3D geometry display (one of the reason's I went Rage 128 back int day).

The S3 card accelerates S3D which was only used by a handful of games (terminal velocity and descent spring to mind)...EF2000 has been 3Dfx'ed so a voodoo would be best actual physical hardware to use for it. When they came out the S3 Virge was considered good, but lack of support from developers meant that 3Dfx's Glide quickly became to goto 3D framework for developers... well that and D3D a bit later. OpenGL didn't get popular for anything other than CAD until later... it was all about D3D and Glide/3Dfx...

Some SGI relevance here... as the name suggests (GL)ide WAS modelled on OpenGL, and 3Dfx Interactive (the makers of Glide) was started by ex-SGI engineers!

If you still have that 540... you *might* get better performance running EF2000 with a Glide wrapper which will use GL to render 3Dfx without 3Dfx hardware. 320/540's came out only 3 years after EF2000!

uunix wrote: I found this interesting looking CD ROM

I always thought it was some homage to a Friesian cow... Is a Friesian cow classified as Piebald? or is it just horses?

P.S

uunix wrote: I love the sound of a floppy seeking

You should get an AMIGA!

warning, this post is super OT

spiroyster wrote: You should get an AMIGA!

have you ever heard about the apollo project ? It sounds like bullshits to me, I mean it's too complex to be handled by a few guys, btw if they will ever complete it … then it will improve projects like mist or minimig , amigaOS classic on fpga hw.