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Status update on retro gaming on ms-dos 6.22 on dreampc from 2006 in 2020



 
 
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  #1  
Old January 7th 20, 09:08 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
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Default Status update on retro gaming on ms-dos 6.22 on dreampc from 2006 in 2020

YOyoyoyoHOhohohoh,

Wow, it's quite an undertaking to try and get ms-dos and it's games working in a real execution environment.

So far I've been messing with zipdrives and zipdisks but got that working as well, under real and virtualize environments which is kinda cool.

FAT16 was created on a 4 TB usb drive.

USB protocol specification was read but I still don't understand how USB mass storage devices are circumventing MBR and BIOS 2 TB limitations.

VMWare 8 cannot work with larger than 2 TB drives, partitions are also not working in that case.

I did buy a new internal harddisk to try and install windows 10 32 bit on it maybe...

And bought about 4 or 5 usb sticks to experiment with other operating sytems.

I had a scare with wrong zipdrive drivers from internet, virtualized my own floppy disk driver made it available see other post.

Some Turbo pascal 7 programs don't work in ms-dos on fast machine if they used crt, division by zero problem runtime error 200, tppatch can be used to fix those, still need to find crt replacement unit if I want to develop in tp7.

WinImage 9 don't work on windows 98, fortunately winimage 8.1 does work, to virtualize floppies, not really necessary, but nice anyway, is only necessary for boot floppies I guess, otherwise files can just be copied, then again, maybe floppy image also copies floppy partition if such a thing exists ? not sure, could be usefull.

USB analyzer software failed to install properly first time, disabled usb mouse and usb keyboard, fortunately ps/2 and ps/2 mouse was available and kept working allowing me to re-install this ****ty trail software and eventually removed it, that **** almost nuked my windows 7, accidenly removed vmdk to vhd converter from t2ware software but reinstalled it later.

Turns out I already installed wireshark with usbcap or something and does allow some analysis of usb protocols.

So far seen usbms (mass storage) and scsi protocol over usb but still hard to determine how this exactly works, will dive into this deeper maybe later..

usb 2 usb transfer cable seems interesting, might wanna buy that, but might need new software, I also found null modem cable lol, while searching through a whole bunch of floppy disks, about a 100 or so, kinda funny to see how many floppy disks we used to have back then, Though I swapped some of my best with somebody elses, there's kinda ****ty and mine good, never got them back, kinda regret that a little bit, but fortunately whatever is missing can be downloaded from internet, like dune 2 perhaps and others, though some are still pay-ware wow... that kind sucks... I also found a dune 1 disk.... would be funny if that could run and such... I also find some other slightly interesting disks... an pcm magazine anti virus disk but it's probably very old and inferior to f-prot... this pcm disk is from 1992. Also found a funny floppy disk with junky virus on it, boot sector virus, harmless if put into floppy disk and scan it, and f-prot finds it... but don't restart computer and forget to pull it out otherwise virus boots from floppy disk and becomes active lol, almost forgot to pull it out on time lol, quite funny, got lucky ! =D

It's a very good idea to install f-prot or some other as recent as possible ms-dos virus scanner if you are going to try retro gaming ! =D

I still have to scan all the files/games I downloaded form the internet and extracted.

There is little risk to C drive I guess cause ms-dos can't see it anyway,but still, better be safe than sorry, for hardware too, but it would be quite funny to scan those files, see if there are any virusses in there!

Now some bad news:

Realtek Audio AC97 has no audio drivers for ms-dos as far as I know, I did find some via audio ac97 audio drivers did not try them yet.

Creative X-Fi also has no ms-dos audio drivers.

There is fortunately still pc-speaker so that could at least give some joy to gaming.

Doom was tried and was quite funny to hear on pc-speaker.

I also look forward to duke nukem cause it has this iconic pc speaker sound =D

Another game I look forward to is captain comic ! I can remember that game, it was one of the first graphical games I had on the PC !

I completely didn't understand how to play it so I never get very far in this game, so I hope now that manuals are also available on the internet to get much further and see how far I get, though maybe I will find the game boring, don't know yet. I think this game inspired me to become a PC programmer, though I already was inspired by C64 and a programming book for C64 But still it needs some guts and convincing to program on a new computer/architecture and this game probably did that =D

UFO enemy unknown which happened to be on one of the zipdisks for whatever reasons won't run on it, it will go to intro but then it won't show menu, don't know why yet, maybe this distribution/files are simply broken or perhaps there is a deeper issue.

Loading from parallel port takes quite long but is kinda funny/amazing to watch. VMWare can work with zipdrive by adding parallel port to it... I recommend not to run games from zipdrive parallel port version Unless they very small.

So far it was an amazing experience this trip down retro-lane !

I had to make all kinds of decisions, think it through, find virtualization solutions, tranfer solutions, all kinds of stuff, it's quite technical, amazing.

Best decision was to not try and install an usb floppy disk 7-in-1 drive cause if I misplace the usb header *AGAIN* I would *AGAIN* blow up my motherboard like I did many years ago and I certainly do not want that to happen ever again, so that kind sucks the way that plug is designed but ok. It's very tempting to install the floppy drive for easy moving of tiny little files between computers, but today it kinda hit me there is also the risk of boot sector infection and that is probably not worth the risk, though I run so much software, kinda crazy.

Anyway I don't even know if I have another usb header available, and this would add another 4 or 5 usb drives possibly to my system and that would be totally crazy cause I am already short on drive letters, so also for that reason, better not, I will miss you floppy drive ! =D

But if I really need it I can read it from other computers !

Had some boot menu issues, boot menu would not show up, ps/2 keyboard would somehow freeze the boot process, this was quite annoying.

USB Keyboard better for entering boot menu.

However this was also some weird kind of electrical issue, probably motherboard power leakage or maybe static eletric discharge from body/cloths onto chasis entering motherboard, maybe gsm/wireless interference not sure.

After 2 days of using laptop only and letting PC "cool down electrically" boot menu worked again. Alternative would be to de-plug literally all cables and let it rest for 2 minutes onto floor or so, but was lazy and did other things with laptop which also was kinda cool.

Glad to be back in the saddle again with windows 7 and dreampc, cause this 10-year old PC has a pretty big software stack that new PC users can only dream off, so that makes this old PC kinda quite powerfull SOFTWARE which is kinda funny.

FEEEEEELS VERY POWEEERFULLL let me assure you.

Also nothing beat nice CRT or LCD monitors... bending neck down to see laptop screen is kinda annoying.

Also laptops have ****ed up keyboards which is awfull to type on, literally AWFULL.

Funny enough though, laptop can also boot into ms-dos usb drive and I played doom on laptop with laptop pc-like-speaker haha, sounded funny.

Had some video of that, not sure if I am going to upload let me know if you want me to upload that otherwise I will have to make that decision myself, might be boring to watch, then again kinda interesting to prove all of this can be done on existing hardware, laptop from 2012, icore/hdmi and so forth.

Also laptop does not have any ms-dos drivers for it's sound chip as far as I know so that is also very unfortunate.

So far nothing beats real hardware. VMWare cannot scroll x-mode fluently, not on AMD X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz system, slightly surprising but not really, kinda expected it, still does run better than expected and window can be moved around and such which was funny to see, but it was also very convincing that real hardware is needed to get that true ms-dos dedicated CPU-vibe.

Sad to see no sound drives available for newer audio cards and chips.

I may have to fall back to pentium 166 and clean it's little cpu fan, which makes a lot of noise, probably out of oil. Would need to clean power supply as well just to be safe, bit risky to do that.

Or fall back to Pentium 3, 450 MHz.

And now comes a bit of a surprise. I also have my old parents PC which is an Athlon 2600XP or something like that.

Forgot exactly what it is, never powered it on since it's in my appartment, don't know why I don't power on, cause I just don't like computers that are not "Skybuck-approved" or something, or just a weird little duck.

Bought that PC together with my dad at Makro, went for the cheaper option just to save them some bucks, wasn't a totally terrible decision, but I consider that PC a bit weird, it's a Hewlet Packard and it's PURPLE for gods's/****'s sakes ?!

It just looks to weird to fit in my apparement wooden look I guess.

But maybe I should give it another look to see if it can do retro gaming.

That would be kinda funny. I am a bit curious towards it's audio solution/chip.

It also had a very weird thing in the back ieee 1984 or 1994 not sure what the **** that is ?! maybe firewire or something ?? Not sure.

It has 256 MB ram if I recall while Pentium 3 has 512 MB ram, which I upgraded a few years ago, didn't really get to use it that much unless dreampc is down for some reason still nice to internet on it.

The 256 MB ram is limitting the atlon xp way too much to be of any serious use in todays windows world.

So that PC should have never been sold with that low ammount of RAM, haha, what a sham/shame ! =D But ok, it was kinda cheap, now you kinda known why, and it was a very weird CPU duct inside of it which kinda freaks me out lol, and it's powersupply probably also needs cleaning, cause I remember slapping the **** out of it cause I got annoyed last time I used it at "mother's/parent's" place. Hmmm, I am actually using it's LCD monitor was kinda went with it, though the original had CRT monitor with speakers which gave beautifull sound at least in that room, LCD was bought by a priest HAHA ! At first didn't like it, but this LCD from fujitsu siemens is quite cool ! =D

Perhaps it was this LCD monitor that kinda inspired me slowly to give retro a try or so

I also watched the threadripper 3 64 core announcement, amazing to see these specs and also it's better than their server chips in some ways, which is almost crazy as seeing it's half the cost ! WOW.

So still lot's of work/stuff to do but slowly getting there, can't wait to play captain cosmic, but I am taking my time to do it right =D

I guess so far it's the journey to get there that I am kinda enjoying, this technical journey and usb protocol and scsi is/was fascinating the **** out of me and I really want to know how it's able to use 4 TB disks on Windows 7/MBR/BIOS that was pretty mind blowing yes when I started realizing what it is capable of =D

Multi-partition/multi-boot/multi-operating system is very risky though, because of different operating systems and bugs and the way the handle/write partitions and such that's why I went with many usb sticks for now, to circumvent those issues and risks and to not have to learn grub for now, maybe in future I will learn grub.

For only 4 primary partitions, not so sure it's worth learning grub and wasting time if operating systems overwrite partition/file/disk allocation tables and what not, but might experiment with that too.

I also kinda wanna try ubuntu to see if it has zipdrive support build in or how easy it is to enable it, I tried with sparky linux and failed, driver might not be there, don't know how to download driver from internet and install it, that kinda sucked, so I went back to windows and ms-dos and such and eventually had great success with it as written in differen thread !

Linux should get some "driver download store" for rare/historical drives or such. Instead of removing them from kernel never to be seen again hint hint: (Windows-killer).

So yes that was also tried, trying to get zipdrive working under sparky linux

So there ya have it folks, quite an undertaking.

I also learned ms-dos/windows xp/bioses have all kinds of hardisk size limitations, but for now 2 GB should be ok for most bios based systems.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.
  #2  
Old January 10th 20, 09:09 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
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Default Status update on retro gaming on ms-dos 6.22 on dreampc from 2006in 2020

I just had a cool idea:

I can move the SB Live! Soundblaster from the pentium 166 to the DreamPC 2006, since it has at least one free pci slot under the GT 1030 graphics card.

And since the SBLive! probably does have ms-dos drivers, it should work just fine in ms-dos 6.22 !

So now it's getting very interesting ! =D

So far the ms-dos games are kinda crap, but I do want to be able to ms-dos game just fine on this DreamPC 2006, otherwise it's not really a DreamPC, it should be capable of doing anything ! =D

Bye for now,
Skybuck.
  #3  
Old January 10th 20, 09:22 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
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Default Status update on retro gaming on ms-dos 6.22 on dreampc from 2006in 2020

Right now I want to boot into ms-dos really bad, cause the zipdrive via parallel port is very slow right now and I am not sure why.

Could be bad setting of parallel port in bios, or it's not assigned it's own IRQ 7 and DMA 3.

I think it was set to ECP+EPP.

Another cause could be the VMWare virtualization... perhaps it is slowing things down.

Read failure so far, it only copied up to 30 MB and it felt like forever, so this another reason why do want the real thing.

In ms-dos it will probably be a whole lot faster.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.
  #4  
Old January 10th 20, 09:30 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
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Default Status update on retro gaming on ms-dos 6.22 on dreampc from 2006in 2020

This was a funny experiment I must now come to the conclusion that:

1. Using a zipdrive and zipdisk to transfer data has failed.

Perhaps this particular zipdisk has a bad sector, perhaps I knew that back then, perhaps I could use another zipdisk.

however:

2. It's also super slow when trying to do this in VMWare on Windows with parallel port and so forth.

However I will continue reading data of of zipdisk, but probably on pentium 166 in real dos or so, and then transfer everything via network to my dreampc, via my own udp file transfer tool, from win98 to windows 7 64 bit, since my tool will run just fine on both operating systems.

And this would only take a few minutes at best.

WinRar or WinZip all the files I want to have and voila.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.
  #5  
Old January 10th 20, 10:06 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul[_28_]
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Default Status update on retro gaming on ms-dos 6.22 on dreampc from2006 in 2020

wrote:
This was a funny experiment I must now come to the conclusion that:

1. Using a zipdrive and zipdisk to transfer data has failed.

Perhaps this particular zipdisk has a bad sector, perhaps I knew that back then, perhaps I could use another zipdisk.

however:

2. It's also super slow when trying to do this in VMWare on Windows with parallel port and so forth.

However I will continue reading data of of zipdisk, but probably on pentium 166 in real dos or so, and then transfer everything via network to my dreampc, via my own udp file transfer tool, from win98 to windows 7 64 bit, since my tool will run just fine on both operating systems.

And this would only take a few minutes at best.

WinRar or WinZip all the files I want to have and voila.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.


ZIPdisks don't come with any sort of guarantees on operation.

If mine were to tip over and start clicking the next time
I used it, I would not be surprised.

The USB port ZIP drive, would probably be a bit safer as
an interface. But, you'd want a USB2 port for it, which
you don't have on the old machine.

You claim that you can't use your USB key, but all that
you need is a Linux boot CD and then you will be able
to use the USB stick. The Linux boot CD must be carefully
selected from the ones that don't use much RAM, such as
something in the DSL (Damn Small Linux) line or a Puppy
family (BionicPup) CD.

Paul
 




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