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New Tweener Build

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zombienerd

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 31, 2017
Messages
558
Location
New Hampshire
I'd been using a few different machines for Tweener tasks, and decided to finally just build one that can do everything I need in one box.

Started with an Asus P5A-B (AT/ATX) Super Socket 7 Board with ISA, PCI, and AGP. 164mb of RAM (Will be upgrading to 192 when I get another 64mb stick, although the board can handle 768 ). Has USB 1.1 on board, which was one of my requirements.

I tossed in a Cyrix MII-300 (the board came with a P75, but I wanted a tad more oomph), Nvidia MX200, PCI 10/100, SB Vibra16. One each of 3.5" 1.44mb and 5" 1.2mb Floppies. 8X CD burner.

For storage, I have a 2gb DOM and a 20gb Maxtor IDE. I'm planning to use PLOP on MBR to dual boot 6.22/Win3.11 on the 2gb DOM and Windows 98SE on the 20gb Drive. Why? Because I want to. :)

I messed around with getting the dual boot working last night for 2-3 hours, and had to start over 5 times before I figured out how I had to do it. By then, it was 2am, and I had to get some sleep. I'll hopefully be finishing that tonight, if my plan works.

PLOP reorders the drive letters depending on which drive you boot, and I didn't realize that before I started... So booting off a floppy used the standard Bios layout and had the DOM as C and the 20gb as D. Installing windows to D worked, but when using plop to select hard drive 2, it overrides standard BIOS layouts, making it the C drive, and then windows doesn't work, looking for D:\Windows.

So, I'm going to have to install DOS first on the DOM, then disable the drive in BIOS and make the 20GB the only drive.. Install windows on there (which will then be seen as C by default), then re-enable the DOM, reinstall Plop to the MBR there, and everything *should* chooch as expected.

If everything goes to plan, I'll be able to boot Dos 6.22, which will only see the DOM (as the 20gb drive is FAT32), but when I boot Windows, it should be able to see both drives (DOM as D: ) so I can use networking / USB to copy stuff to the dos drive.

I considered (for a moment) even installing XP on a 3rd drive, as the machine *just* meets the requirements, but I don't see any use I'd get from it that I won't get with 98. I might do it eventually anyway just for the heck of it.

Also, if anyone needs an Intel P75 chip with permanently affixed heatsink / fan (tested - works) - send me a PM, you can take it for $5 + shipping.
 
You might want to explore getting an AMD K6-2 CPU for that board. I've got two of the P5A's and use the K6 CPUs in them. They compete quite well against P3.
 
Chuck(G) said:
You might want to explore getting an AMD K6-2 CPU for that board. I've got two of the P5A's and use the K6 CPUs in them. They compete quite well against P3.
Click to expand...

I may go that route eventually. I just happened to have the MII laying around. Cyrix chips are a bit nostalgic for me, though - all my P5 and P6 machines were budget boxes back in the day and had the 5x86, 6x86, etc. I'd imagine that the K6-2/3+ could probably even handle a bit of modern web browsing if you were smart about it.
 
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Chuck(G), do you happen to have an image of the original CD that came with the board? I'm getting a few unsupported devices in Win98, and besides the AGP / IDE drivers that were on the Asus site, I'm not sure what I'm missing. My board does not have the optional onboard sound.
 
I'm not sure, but I can look for it. I don't recall having a lot of problems installing Win98SE or even XP.

What devices in particular do you need drivers for?
 
That's the rub, I'm not sure! They show up as "Unsupported Device" under "Other devices" in Device Manager. Two of them. IO addresses are 0100-0100 and 0108-0108, but no further details listed.

I'm also getting a Code 10 failure to start on the Primary and Secondary IDE drivers. Installed a hotfix that is supposed to get rid of Code 10 errors, but it didn't work. I'm wondering if I've got a problem with the board somewhere. Before I installed the Busmaster driver, everything seemed to work, now the CD drive doesn't show up, and those two devices are flagging yellow and throwing Code 10, cannot start.

Worst case scenario, I'll just wipe and reinstall without the busmaster drivers... Everything seemed to work fine before I installed those, and I can deal with the slightly less "optimized" access.
 
Hmmm, that doesn't sound familiar. IIRC, installation with Win98SE required only my NIC and AGP card drivers. I've even got a PCI SCSI controller installed--as well as a 4-floppy controller (disabled the onboard one). 768MB memory (I think that's the limit). IDE HD and DVD.
 
I just disabled the busmaster device. Loaded DOS-based CD drivers. Everything is working now, although slower than it could if the busmaster was working :p The system also crashes if I try to use WinImage to write a floppy image. It was a VXD Blue Screen of Death. Didn't write down which one, I'll have to pay attention next time it happens. Using normal floppy operations (format, read, write) are all fine, but winimage popped a blue screen right after I press the write button.

DOS partition is working great. Copied all my DOS games to it using USB from Win98, then was able to reboot and play natively. The machine is quite functional and seems stable. PLOP is awesome. QEMM's quickboot drops me right back to PLOP when I press CTRL ALT DEL. I can't recommend that boot loader enough lol.

Next project: Restoring / Making the Packard Bell 300SX (386) work properly!
 
Is your Win98 up to date? You might want to look for the "Win98SE Unofficial Update" package. Lots of good stuff there and plenty of patches.

On my systems, I boot to MSDOS (edit the MSDOS.SYS file) and go to the GUI only when I start it explicitly with "win". If you're doing low-level stuff, it's best to keep it all in DOS. For example, for diskette imaging, I use IMD.
 
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