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Orchid Conquest drivers?

db2

Member
Joined
Sep 18, 2021
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29
Location
MI, USA
I've acquired a Compaq Portable that has an Orchid Conquest card inside of it. I'm assuming I'll need the driver software to use the EMS capabilities, and possibly the real-time clock. Is there a copy of the driver software floating around anywhere? I've done a little searching but haven't come up with anything so far.

The Portable also came with a hard disk - looks like a Seagate ST-251 MFM drive and WDXT-GEN2 Plus controller card - but so far I haven't gotten the disk to spin up or boot. I'd say there's a fair chance that the software is (or was at one time) on that disk...
 
For the real-time clock, there is a fair chance that one of the real-time clock programs at [here] will work.
Of those, I suggest that you try the four PC TIMER ones first.
 
For the real-time clock, there is a fair chance that one of the real-time clock programs at [here] will work.
Of those, I suggest that you try the four PC TIMER ones first.

Cool, thanks. I'm really hoping I can get the EMS working, since that would make Lotus 1-2-3 a lot more workable. It looks like the card has 1.5 MB on it, and I think it's configured to allocate 384 KB of that to the conventional memory area to max that out at 640 KB.

Once I get the keyboard rebuilt so I can actually use this thing, I'll probably do some more experimenting on the hard drive that came with it to see if I can get it spinning and pull any of the software off of it.
 
The keyboard is rebuilt, and I got the hard drive to spin up! I found what I believe are the drivers for the card - CLOCK.SYS, EMM.SYS, and RAMDISK.SYS. I think there might also be a disk cache utility on there somewhere, so I'll have to go back in for another look. There were some bad spots on the disk (I couldn't get Lotus 1-2-3 to start), but fortunately all these drivers appeared to be intact. I also have the manual for the card, so that'll have to make a trip through my scanner.
 
db2 Hi could you please share the three drivers? I have the same card but no drivers!
 
db2 Hi could you please share the three drivers? I have the same card but no drivers!

But of course! I wasn't able to salvage the cache program, but I couldn't tell if it was actually the Orchid Conquest cache utility, or one that was included with DOS. But I was able to save the EMS, RAM disk, and clock drivers, which are the most important pieces in my opinion.

http://dave.brittens.org/OrchidConquest.zip

This includes the three drivers I pulled off the old hard drive, as well as the documentation that I transcribed from the manual.
 
Thank you so much db2 ! The drivers worked great, tried them out last night, and I can now use my conquest expanded mem and clock.

One of the ram chips is bad though "PARITY ERROR 2" so will have to find it out which one it is...
 
BTW, If you do end up finding more drivers and scanning the manual, please let me know! This card has a lot of configuration options and I am not sure about the memory configuration if I were to change it..
 
I have this same card and need the jumper settings so I can install it into an IBM 5150 that has 64K on the motherboard.
 
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