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Packard Bell 300SX Boot up video.

zombienerd

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Mar 31, 2017
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A short video of my Packard Bell 300sx booting into DOS 6.22, then manually starting Windows 3.1

386SX-16, 5MB Ram, 200mb HDD. Monitor is an IBM 14" CRT.

I didn't have speakers plugged in, but it does have a Soundblaster Pro 2.0.

The video was really just a test to see if my camera could pick up the screen nicely, as I plan to make some interesting videos in the future. First up will be loading this same machine with Windows 95 from floppy, just for kicks. Once I get some better lighting and a few more boxes of floppies, you can expect me to be posting that one here :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdvEbDPYbL0
 
Nice video! There's nothing bad with the machine, per say. I'm also looking to get the BIOS dumped from one of them, since one, they have a cool boot logo, and two, that I'm speculating that they perhaps use a derivative of AMI's "NEAT" chipsets (useful for emulation purposes).
 
Nice video! There's nothing bad with the machine, per say. I'm also looking to get the BIOS dumped from one of them, since one, they have a cool boot logo, and two, that I'm speculating that they perhaps use a derivative of AMI's "NEAT" chipsets (useful for emulation purposes).

I don't have the tools to do so, but if you wanted to mail them to me on loan, with a step-by-step guide on how to pull the bios, I'd be more than glad to accommodate.
 
I don't have the tools to do so, but if you wanted to mail them to me on loan, with a step-by-step guide on how to pull the bios, I'd be more than glad to accommodate.

Usually not too hard to dump a BIOS, no tools needed, can do it with DOS debug command if you know the size and memory range the bios resides in. Otherwise there's some DOS tools that are easy point and click type BIOS dumpers too (some from the various BIOS vendors themselves even).
 
Usually not too hard to dump a BIOS, no tools needed, can do it with DOS debug command if you know the size and memory range the bios resides in. Otherwise there's some DOS tools that are easy point and click type BIOS dumpers too (some from the various BIOS vendors themselves even).

Oh! I thought you'd need an chip reader or something. If you want to point me in the right direction software wise, I can dump it tonight or tomorrow (if it gives me trouble). I have no idea the size of the BIOS, nor where it lives.
 
Remove all MMIO cards where possible, download https://www.mess.org/_media/dumping/dumpat.zip and follow the instructions where it tells you to disable BIOS shadow (if possible) and not to enable any memory drivers when running the program.

I'll give it a shot tonight if I remember. The only expansion card is a SB Pro, I'll pull that. Can't remember if the BIOS had shadow options, but I'll kill those if it does. Boot up off a clean floppy and run the program.
 
FYI, you can reduce screen flicking/beating by filming in 60p instead of 30p.

Camera doesn't support different framerates. I was actually surprised at how little flicker there was being the camera is from 2010 or so. I want to get a proper 1080 camera eventually, but for now the little 720p Lumix will have to do.
 
I think it's because he didn't have enough space on the floppy. dumpat should dump a file of 1008/1032.192 kibibytes/kilobytes, whereas your dump is 192 kilobytes. Dumping the whole ROM memory output from my L40SX, I had to remove a bunch of a slew of programs from a DOS 6.22 bootdisk so that it fitted that size, and only had a few bytes left to spare!
 
Glad I left the SB out... I'll wipe the disk except command.com and dumpat and try again now. Be back with the new file in 10-15.
 
OK, just what I needed! I ran the thing through a hex editor and was able to see the integrated VGA BIOS and the main BIOS. All is well, thank you very much.
 
I have a PB 486 machine, I forget the exact model right now. Would a BIOS dump of that machine be of any use?
 
I just received my Zenith laptop today as well, Model ZFL-181-93 if you need a dump of that. I'd need a different utility though, as it only has 720k drives, and is an 80C88 CPU.
 
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