486 100MHz MS-DOS PC Build!

today I'm finally ready to put together my four 86-dos PC this is going to be a little bit relaxed of a video there isn't a scrip or a plan or anything we're just gonna go ahead and put the computer together and see what happens a few of the parts I'm putting in the computer today were sent to me by some very awesome and generous viewers and I want to say thank you to those who sent something in I'm not putting in all of the parts I have for this computer today and I'm going to happen to evolve over time this probably also isn't going to be the only das computer I build as I have a need for having a couple of these on hand now let's begin by taking a look at what parts were going to be putting in here starting with the case this is an in win a 500 the smaller version of the in win q 500 that I built my new windows 98 PC in I really like the in win 500 series of computer cases for their removable motherboard tray and other myriad of usability features it just makes them really awesome to work with I was so dead set on using this I even bought a brand new ATX style 80 power supply that I could put in here and it fits and works tremendously so I was all ready to move forward using the a 500 matching my windows 98 PC that is until I found this an even taller case than the in wind q500 this behemoth is over 26 inches tall features an awesome huge red power switch a turbo button and frequency display but most importantly it is unused like new this thing is crying out to be built so today we're going to do that so it's time to move on and put the first parts in here which will be the motherboard and processor the motherboard I'll be using is a biostar mb 84 33 uu d - a now this is a socket 3 motherboard and I was sent this pre-configured with an Intel DX 4 0 0 PR 1 overdrive chip the intel OverDrive's are an interesting little subclass of processors available at the time this doesn't say 486 anywhere on it but it is in fact a 486 DX for 100 it is a 100 megahertz processor some of the differences on here are obviously the heatsink in the fact that it has built-in voltage regulation so some other boards that may not be able to support a processor that uses the voltage that this one does could be used with it because of the onboard regulation you had weird processors like the Intel OverDrive's because mother bird support was a bit Wild West 4 processors at the time these jumpers are used to configure which processor you're using on the motherboard matter of fact those aren't even the only ones there are some more over here if you don't have these set correctly you could end up damaging your CPU when you go to install it because you might feed it the wrong voltage or have it set for the wrong clock well that wouldn't damage it but it wouldn't run optimally so knowing how to set your motherboard is something you have to do with an older computer like this one of the reasons it's taken me so long to get to this video is I wanted to make sure I got it right so I know that this motherboard is configured correctly for this processor the jumper settings are actually for an am 46 DX for but it's been working just fine with this one now interestingly I have the processor in the socket here but it's not keyed and you can put it in four different ways obviously only one of these ways is going to work correctly so you need to know which way to put it which you'll know by this dot matching up over here so yeah kind of crazy the processors with the time now there's one more thing I need to mention before we move on and that is the Dallas clock chip now these chips have a battery inside for keeping track of time while the computer is off these batteries are known to go bad and then the clock doesn't work but some computers like this one also rely on that battery for holding motherboard settings so if the battery goes bad motherboard kind of doesn't work because it won't keep any of your settings after a restart now it's popular and common to modify these to use an external battery I've gone ahead and done this already and I'm not going to be showing you how I did that in this video that's a bit beyond the scope of what I want to do here but in the future I will show you how I did that for now I'll put some pictures up over here because I was able to do it in a very nice way where you can't really tell that it was modified other than the fact that now there's wires running out of it and there's a battery over there well that's it for the microscopic features on this thing microscopically it's got four 16-bit is a slots three PCI slots for eto memory slots an 80 keyboard connector a ps2 mouse connector on board IDE floppy parallel serial it's a really nice motherboard that's got a lot of features and for the memory I'm actually going to be putting in that now now this uses eto memory and I have a couple sticks here and I believe this comes out to 24 megabytes of memory when it's all added together this was a the only configuration of the memory I could get to work that I have I don't have a lot of this type of memory so that's what I've got maybe in the future all upgrade this to max which is a hundred and twenty eight megabytes but really don't think I'm ever gonna need that much on here alright now that we're done with the motherboard it's time to go back to the case but we have a problem this is kind of weird I can't believe I didn't notice this until just now looking more at the bottom of the case this is not a three and a half inch hard drive bay this is two sideways half-height five and a quarter bays so there's no weird amount of three and a half inch IDE drive in here which is fine I'm not planning on using one of those I'm gonna use an SD card adapter but that's an XT motherboard backing remember that ps2 mouse port yeah you're not gonna be able to get to that if that's put in here so that's a bit of a problem well after some deliberation I've decided I can live without the ps2 port so I'm gonna move forward with this case despite its somewhat incompatibilities and faults this case is also next my new table here in a couple places so that's annoying yep also annoying is the fact that the only screw that holds us in place is underneath the battery connection now so that sucks yeah of course I hot-glued the battery down so now I can't get to that cool let's rip it off so dumb alright I'll fix that in a moment ok something kind of interesting is happened here now I figured since I can't use this ps2 port that I need to find a serial connector that I could connect to these to have over here so I can actually use a mouse rather than trying to fit a another serial card in there because I'm probably not going to be able to with all the parts I want to put in here so I went looking for other 80 computer cases I have that have serial ports on a cable and these two computers both do I remembered that and sure enough I was able to find one now something else interesting happened well two things here for one I didn't buy these two computers at the same time I got one of these for free from someone and one I bought I'll remember which is which now totally different times separated by years and it turned out I got two of the exact same case which is hilarious one of these is a very very poor sod that's actually a Pentium one running Windows XP but an interesting thing is that these cases would support the ps2 motherboard port on the board I'm using so that's kind of hilarious but even more importantly one of them had this in it which is a parallel port and ps2 breakout now this board has the ps2 port on board but it also has a ps2 port header so it should be possible for me to put this right here or down here now right here where there's a slot that's not able to be accessed and then I should have whoops the ps2 port again so going in collecting old weird computers paid off in this regard I try not to do that but every now and then I know I have to honestly I pick these up mostly for the floppy cables because I just don't have a ton of those and this one's going to be very useful because it has the five and a quarter to three and a half inch adapters that this does not have any three and a half inch bays at all so those will be nice but yeah now I might be able to have ps2 it's just one slight problem this is a keyed cable and the connector on here is not key so I'm gonna have to pull out the motherboard and try and figure out which of these pins is not being used because I think it's the same pin out the serial port cable here has eight pins but one of them doesn't actually have a wire running through it so that would be missing and I've seen keyed serial port connectors before so I think these are standard and I just need to do that so this is slightly better than I thought it was gonna be I won't have any sacrifices using this case now oh that feels good because I really want to use this thing now I just I just have to hope that the power supply doesn't end up being a dud because I don't have any other XT power supplies to swap in here get eighty power supplies four days in the ATX form factor but yeah none of the XT form factor I only have the one and that's an actually oh no I do have more XT power supplies that's right the same goodwill I bought that other socket seven motherboard from I got an XT power supply okay Wow I'm better off than I thought cool anyway let's let's get the motherboard out so I can figure out the pin out and use this I have way too many computers and parts this is this is this is how my day goes any day you're using a multimeter to work on a computer you're having a bad day all right now thankfully the keyed connector on the ps2 header actually had a pin that could be taken out so it wasn't glued or melted shutter anything so it's really easy to just get on there and I can test the pin out matches by using continuity mode on my multimeter here and it actually matches up perfectly so I don't have to make any modifications at all four pins out of the six match up over continuity test and this only has four wires so it's gonna work it's perfect so yeah I'm not gonna lose the ps2 port because there we go all right so there are all the breakout cables I'm confused with this motherboard that is a lot I'm thinking for the battery I should glue it sideways so I can get to this stuff easily and the screw won't be obscured now does have exposed pins on the bottom this one's kind of blocked I can put a piece of tape over it but this one will touch the shroud here but a coin cell has positive on the top negative on the bottom this is the bottom and the ground is connected to the shroud of the ps2 port so it's already connected so I can push this right up against that and it's not a problem I will put a piece of tape over that just for safety and I will have no problem gluing that right there okay the motherboards back in the batteries good the ps2 port is going to work and I just need to get that and all the other ports mounted now so let's go ahead and get started on that okay now that that problems all taken care of it's time to get this thing wired into the case so the 80 power connections easy enough just go around the ground that worked in there and really snap very satisfyingly but I think that's good okay the molex powers we don't need yet the PC speaker is mounted all the way up at the top of the case and the PC speaker connection is all the way at the other bottom of the case so it unscrews and releases thankfully let's see if we can find somewhere else to put it now that was designed with this locking pin mmm that kind of sucks I don't know how else that can be mounted maybe I could just put it somewhere like right here maybe facing inside that doesn't seem bad see if that'll work well that's not desirable but it's better not having a PC speaker okay so this is one through four on jp1 which is all the way down there alright and now the other ones which are unlabeled so I have to trace them back up to the top and then figure out where they go down there okay I've got all the front panel headers connected now after a bit of a complication and I've set up the turbo indicator as well now I started out doing a segment on how to determine how to set up a turbo indicator that you don't know the pinout for but it ended up getting a little more advanced than I thought and became six minutes long so I'm gonna release that as a separate video and add a little bit more information to it because I think it's worth covering on its own but back to this we should be ready to go the motherboard has power we have the inputs all fully connected the only thing left to put in there to fire it up for the first time is video and for that I'm going to be going with this diamond stealth 24 now I've already got this out of the box but this should be a very good card for this computer this is an SVG a card that has one megabyte of memory uses an s3 chip and is VGA now I do actually have some of the documentation and software that goes with this including the windows driver so it should be fully possible to install windows on here although I'm not sure if this disk works I think it might actually be bad but this should be a card good enough to last through the life of this computer although it is ISA and I've heard that is a cards are generally slower than PCI once so I might swap this over to a PCI video card at some point but for now this seems like a good route to go all right so let's go ahead and just pop that in there and with that the computer is basically ready to be booted up for the first time so we're just going to need a monitor and a keyboard the monitor is just a leading edge of 14-inch CRT there's nothing particularly special about it and the keyboard is a gateway 2080 keyboard I was originally going to use a model M with an 80 adaptor for the ps2 interface but I found this recently and well I don't have a lot of 80 keyboards so I figured let's go ahead and give this a shot the case is way too tall to fit it in the monitor in frame at once so we're gonna go ahead and two-step this so let's turn on the computer for the first time and see how this goes Oh successful turbo Eng and if I turn turbo on we drop down to 33 oh yeah and down here with the interface devices we can see everything is going just fine the processor is dx4 at 100 megahertz with 20 megabytes of RAM and it's all looking good we have CMOS check some air so the batteries I guess not working right I don't know and floppy disks are not installed which we know because we haven't put them in yet which if we're going to want to load an operating system on here we should do that next all right so for floppy drives on this system the most important one we're going to need is for installing the operating system which is going to be DOS 6 to 2 now it says right up here that this boss uses three-and-a-half inch high density disks which means we're going to want a 1.4 4 megabyte floppy drive now this case is weird and it has no three and a half inch base I'm gonna use this five and a quarter adapter here but this case is also weird or I should say the power supply in that it doesn't have any three and a half inch floppy drive power connectors none I don't know what the deal is with this case and setup and thing I'm I'm wondering if this is meant for it to 86 actually not for 86 Walton i386 is what I saw on the power supply so it's just it's strange so anyway I'm going to need a power adapter I didn't have one on hand so I just hacked up an old bad ATX power supply and a 4-pin big connector splitter so now I can connect the power for the floppy drive through there but while I'm in here installing that floppy drive I may as well take care of dry B as well which is a bit of a conundrum now here we have a 1.2 megabyte drive which would be more appropriate for an 80 and down here we have a 360 K drive which would be backwards compatible with xt class systems now the 1.2 megabytes drive would be better for software that I would actually use on this computer but for now I'm gonna go with the 360 K drive because I would like this to be an intermediary computer for stuff like my compact portable or IBM 5150 obviously those computers have xt ide s in them and they could I could just pull out the compact flash cards but I really like using disks and I have software on disks so it's going to be most useful to have this floppy drive in here now I do know that on this floppy drive which is a Teac FD 55 GFR there is a way to configure the jumpers on here to run this drive at 300 rpm instead of 300 in 60 rpm and I might investigate that later and put this drive in here this Drive also is a T track so if I remember correctly and this one will be 40 so this one has to double step but anyway that's beside the point that I might look into later but for now I just want to go the easy route on this and we'll actually be adding a couple more floppy drives to this later really as this computer actually started out with the moniker floppy monster and I had plans to have four floppy drive connections real floppy drive connections but that proved to be very very difficult to get a second floppy controller working and I still don't know how I can get that going so once I get this whole system put together that's gonna be the first thing I take a look at but for now let's go ahead and get these drives installed and then take a look at what storage we're gonna use for fixed disks now I'm going to be putting these two floppy drives up top but something interesting to point out about this case down here are these screws these screws hold in little tabs that give you half height rests for the drives this is cool because this means if you put a half inch drive right here or half height then it has something to rest on but you can remove these and fit a full height drive like this IBM Tandon Drive and it will be just fine in here other cases I have with lots of drive bays like this just have two that are missing the tab in between so it's really nice that this one has an option to change it instead floppy drives are always the worst thing to cable managed the five and a quarter inch drives and the three and a half inch drives have the pins in opposite order so you have to flip the cable and rotate it around to get them to connect on it just it never looks good all right with the floppy drives in there all that's left is to get the disc out we're going to install from so let's go ahead and unseal this copy of DOS six to two before we think about putting a hard-disk in here and getting the install going I want to open up these floppies and try booting from the first one just to make sure that they work right old floppies can be a bit finicky so far it's looking good all right that's totally fine it shouldn't find a hard disk so as long as we have this going that's working just fine all right so let's take a look at what I am going to do for a hard drive now it'd be more period-correct to go with something like this two-and-a-half gigabyte Seagate drive that's just IDE and pretty simple but as I said I want this to be an intermediary computer between my modern computers and my older XT class computers so instead I'm going to go for one of these SD two IDE adapters with an SD card that'll be easy to load the software into and off of this computer now I've actually already fully done everything on here because I wanted to make sure that this would work these are kind of notorious for not functioning correctly so this SD card currently has a fully bootable install of DOS on here but we're gonna go ahead and wipe that and start from scratch here so I know this is going to work and this is going to be very easy in the long run now I get to experience another fun part of this case it just has no where this can really go this is the five and a half inch bay four hard drives like I mentioned and I think I'm gonna go ahead and put this here I put cardboard on the bottom side of this because I like it when I don't burn down my house because I shorted a 20 year old power supply so that'll work well for now in the future though I'm going to 3d print a mount to attach to these two bolt points and then make a adapter to let me do access from one of the copious 25 pin ports on the back so that'll be really useful but for now I'm gonna reach in they're all awkward like and through this in place right there actually I found if I folded it forward like this then I could get the other part of the IDE cable to reach up here which should be able to fit on the back of my IDE CD drive I'll be putting in here which I always want it at the bottom so that's gonna be nice the drive I'm putting in there is really long so I'm very confident that it will reach so with that installed we're now ready to install the operating system so let's go ahead and do that alright we're all ready to up daus on here but first there's one thing I have to know the case is 26 and a half inches tall and the monitor is 13 and a quarter so the case is exactly twice as tall as the maunder yeah this might be a slight mismatch well anyway let's turn it on and start the install now the process I'm going to use here is going to be familiar to anyone who watched my video on installing das 5 on an xt ide in an IBM 5150 before we install the base operating system i'm going to use a tool called wipe disk to clear the hard drive so windows will be able to create all part dos will be able to create all the partitions at once easily elsewise it's a bit messy to do so let me go ahead and put the disc with wipe disc on it in the computer and I will drop to Doss here go over to the disk and run wipe desk alrighty type-c and it's gonna nuke the drive it's done now we need to restart wipe disk does more than just delete the partitions it actually zeros out to the area of the hard drive that has all of the partition structure in it das needs this because it doesn't very cleanly manage partitions hmm so 6 to 2 will run on a personal computer with an 808 eight or higher processor but it has to have 512 K of RAM yeah that was an odd configuration anyway back to this we're gonna drop down to F disk now and that may not be on the first disk of the setup process here or it will be alright so we're going to create a partition and C create a primary yep fixed disk drive maximum available so I don't think this is going to work out right let's see what it says though okay I feel like that didn't do anything that's what I thought after reboot we can see it says the total disk is 8 gigs which makes sense and it created a 2 gigabyte partition so I should be able to create another partition and then I think I can have two primary and Arnall 3 primary and one extended let's just see what we can do here primary ok primary partition already exists I might be thinking of LVM on linux anyway we'll just go ahead and create a extended partition and then no way won't let me make a 6 gig partition let's find out it's no way it's gonna let that fly no logical drives defined mmm oh ok yeah now I have to make yeah alright there we go yep if this is what I was thinking BAM perfect ok escape to continue alright let's play drive info the extended partitions yes and there we go awesome alright so we have all the drives we can this is a 32 gig card it's only gonna show the 8 gigs if I had an 8 gig card that it worked correctly with what abuse that but I couldn't find one so maybe someday I'll swap it down to a smaller Drive but that should be it we gotta restart now and then we can start formatting the partitions mmm I didn't know that just hold down shift or press f5 to skip your config sis and Auto exe dot bat that's nice already let's drop back to this we're going to go ahead and do format C and I'll throw the S on there just for fun that may not work setting capital I see that looks like it is this isn't going to be the full install on here this I still have to run through the setup process but this will work out fine for now and then the setup process will be good volume label boss ok now we're going to format I would see next will be D alright now I'm just gonna go ahead and format the remaining three drives on here each of these is going to have a particular use dos will be four games II or D will be four games e will be four what was I had a particular use case well just make that temp space and then no it's not temp space F is stamp space those ones easy games and then I don't I don't know I'll just what is this one gonna be now let's make this programs just whatever frog then the last one will be temp all right it's time to run the install so let's go ahead and do this hard disk is found das files nope we're gonna replace those and that's just because I formatted with the slash s option so yep let's see here if that will have confused it it this says upgrade on it but it's not really an upgrade it will still do a full clean install so it's kind of tricky like that okay see here that all looks good I'll put everything in DOS yep all right now we'll just end up swapping out between disks as it goes along [Music] disc 2 Wow only 21% for disc one huh that's there's a lot on just two and three then [Music] is free and we're only halfway done that's interesting [Music] move all disks I believe we are done oh yeah all right let's see what happens yes I can take the white disk floppy out now that looks pretty good to me I believe we have das fully installed so I'm curious what it stuffed in config let's see that and know EMM 386 so I'm wondering if I should add that probably but yeah uh that's pretty good okay that's bare-bones das install so we have more hardware dad still now the first thing we need to do is finish installing our storage devices there were a lot of DOS games that came out on floppy disk but das came out in the middle of the CD revolution so there are just as many great dos games on CD so we're going to need a CD drive and they drive I'm going to go with four that is my NEC multi spin four disc changer drive now you may remember if you've been watching this channel for a while but I actually put this in my old windows 98 machine I would also like to iterate that I have to in wind q500 windows 98 builds so yeah it gets a bit confusing anyway I'm deciding to put this in the DOS PC I'm building here because really the drivers for this are best suited to Doss I couldn't get this to work in single Drive mode in Windows 98 so I'm hoping das is going to be a better fit for it now they had to fit quite a few really awesome parts in here to make this thing work so it is a very long disk drive and hopefully it's properly configured to be slave so I don't have to worry about that but it fits in here just fine with the cable being so short there is no flex at all so yeah that was convenient and now is where I get to reap the benefits of having the hard drive be an SD card because I was just able to copy the drivers for it directly onto the SD card from my main computer so getting that set up was extremely easy all right I also went ahead and added a little prompt here to let me know what drive is what on this computer so let's go ahead and test out our CD drive with whiplash so we can make sure that that's working correctly change over to G and get the directory listing awesome alright let's go ahead and and install it so this will be the first game on this computer now fun fact I believe whiplash is known as fatal inertia in some other territories so if this game looks familiar but you don't recognize the name that might be why that might be wrong it might be something else also curse people who cut off the UPC to mail it in but at least they kind of left it intact I don't know already and there we go it's working but um there's no sound hmm I guess we'll have to install the sound card next now the sound card for this build has been a bit of a sticking point and this is the one that I'm going to go with now this isn't my ideal sound card this is an ESS audio drive and it is a sound blaster 16 clone now this isn't a bad sound card it's got our genuine OPL on it game port all the same ports as the sound blasters it's just not the one I want to go with I've actually been building up quite a collection of sound cards and aa 32 multi media vision pro audio spectrum this is a sound blaster - and this is a sound blaster 16 but none of these are going to work for me well maybe the sound blaster - but supposedly this one doesn't work I haven't tested it yet and I need to spend some time debugging it but none of these except for that have the feature that I need of being able to disable the MIDI on the card because I want to do some external MIDI sound module testing in the future so I'm gonna need that ability and as far as I'm aware based on the configuration on the back of this I should be able to disable the game port which I believe means that the MIDI will be disabled so hopefully that will work but we'll find out now for my speakers I didn't find exactly what I was looking for either I found something better this is a complete little realistic hi-fi set up and I think it's just absolutely perfect for using with an old computer like this I mean this is really tiny here's a cassette near the speakers for comparison this is perfect now I have a si p5 cassette player si 10 amplifier and a tape control center which if I start playing something in the tape player you can see I can use to switch sources now what's awesome about that is I'm likely to have a sound card and many MIDI sources so I'm going to want to be able to switch between those and something like this is perfect now I will eventually need to have a way of mixing channels as well and I have that covered but we'll get to that later because I don't think I'm gonna get to any MIDI stuff in this video okay I popped the sound card in there connected the speakers reconfigured whiplash which side know the ESS Audio Drive chip in there is actually a sound blaster Pro clone not a sound blaster 16 so I learned that and I've got whiplash here now but whiplash isn't quite working right I swapped out the monitor because I didn't know what was going on so it seems like whiplash isn't always outputting video for some reason I can skip through some stuff and get to the track to scream like an arcade machine Lin views and that seems to work and obviously it makes Sam now [Music] there we go uh-huh yeah that works but the instant you tried to go to a menu it stops outputting video for some reason so hmm still have some weird issues to work out but I think for right now I should try a different game a game more likely to work and what's one of the easiest games to run doom but dooms actually a little too easy so let's make it just a little more difficult and run sigil [Music] I was thinking that Sidwell wasn't running quite as well as it should and I decided to check out original doom here to make sure that this is running correctly and I don't think this is hitting the frame rates that it really should be so I think we might need to change something about the build here now originally I wanted to go with this diamond stealth 24 s3 based one megabyte SVGA card mostly because I have the box but I think I should go with this diamond SPE a mirage video which uses an s3 and has one megabyte of video memory and is SVGA instead for one simple fact the connector this one's a PCI card and this one's a 16-bit is a card and I do believe that's going to make a world of a difference all right here I've put in the PCI card in Doom is running a lot smoother now if it's hard to tell how much smoother let's overlay the 16-bit is a card footage alongside it yeah the difference air is pretty dang noticeable [Music] now the performance benefit alone is worth it to switch over to the PCI card but I have a little question here with this fixed whiplash it would be weird if it just didn't work because of this is a well whiplash works fine now I have full graphics and everything [Music] it maybe runs a little bit faster not too much though but most importantly this time the menu actually works so you could start a game I can't right now though because I don't have the CD and it's gonna complain about that but there's something more important that I want to check if it's going to work strife guess I am aware that the theme of this video is I like doom because well it's true now strife is of particular interest to me because it took me a really long time to find a copy of this game and it was very excited to play it when I finally got it and I couldn't get it to work I actually spent quite a bit of time trying to troubleshoot exactly what was going on and I've made a big long threat on Twitter about it and in the end I couldn't get it working but all of that was before I had the PCI video card so maybe strife will work now I intend to find out I would say that is a complete success oh it's really good to get this running I look and try to get this on working on this computer well maybe not this exact configuration but the test configuration I've been using these parts in since December so hopefully this is all the magic of that PCI VGA card okay for now I think we need to go from the complete opposite spectrum from a game where you start out as a prisoner who shanks a guard to escape to a Disney game about building rollercoasters but there's one thing we're going to need to do before we can play this why Disney coaster because it's a game that has under its requirements a mouse alright so let's take a look at getting this working by getting this working now I haven't been focusing too much about what I've been putting in my autoexec file so let's go ahead and take a look at what I've got in there now I've got a go to and some labels in here and I'll get to that in a little bit but for now I just want you to see that well okay so I put the generic CD driver in here as a troubleshooting step for getting the CD drive working but I have that commented out because I don't need that here I have the driver that's unique to the CD changer and then down here we have the mouse driver so all you have to do to get the mounts working is just run this program your matter of fact you don't even need to put this in your autoexec you could just leave the executable somewhere and when you want to run a mouse driven application you can just start this file but it's nice to have it loaded when the computer starts so you don't have to worry about that so let's go ahead and shut the computer off and then restart it with the mouse driver being loaded in the autoexec file it's important to shut the computer off before you plug in a PS - device because ps2 was not originally designed to be a hot plug interface and you can cause problems with overloading the power supply when you plug something in and I've heard about damaging motherboards from doing that so just as a precaution you probably don't want to plug in a ps2 device while the computer is on all right we're loaded up with the mouse driver having been launched and I've already installed coaster so let's go ahead and try it out [Music] alright let's go ahead and give that mouse a try yep working perfectly fine now the track editor in this game is why you really need a mouse because it's it's a pretty complicated setup here you could do this with a keyboard if you were really really determined but yeah implementing the mouse just made this off a lot simpler alright so the mouse is working just fine because we have the program loaded we've got the CD drive fixed so we're doing pretty good but loading those two things can cause a bit of an issue now I don't have a lot of games that are an example of this but I do have at least one and that is hyper speed so let's go ahead and try and launch hyper speed and see what happens 28k more free memory needed we have 20 Meg's of RAM in this and you're telling me this dos game is trying to use all 20 Meg's not quite this is a game that goes right up to the limits of conventional memory and really needs as much for you as possible so what's happening is our CD and Mouse drivers are loaded into this same space of memory and it's not leaving enough left for the game so we're gonna have to go ahead and disable those and then try and run the game but it would be really inconvenient to have to remark out all the drivers you want to load just for one game so there's actually a very useful option you can add to your config sis you can create a menu that will allow you to choose what lines are run when the computer is started so I've gone ahead and created two different categories here TSR which is terminate and stay resident programs like these cd-rom drivers and mouse and mem Lite Ram which try slowed as few things as possible so under TSR I have high mem which can confuse some software as well the cd-rom drivers and mouse is actually in the auto exec so let's go and take a look at that back in autoexec we can use the config variable to choose which label to go to and that will allow us to run similar options over here so again I have TSR which runs the smart drive the cd-rom drivers and then runs cute Mouse mem does nothing again and then it prints my little greeting which makes life a bit easier to remember exactly what swear when you have eight drives oh no I have ten drives and Doss already but with that now we can restart and choose light Ram for my little boot menu and then hyperspeed should run and right after this we get our menu so I made it a three second time out on here as well you do that at the default menu item option so here we can choose which one we want I'm gonna pick light Ram and there we go booted super quick because it skipped all of the CD drivers which the CD driver for the change hurts really really slow so let's go ahead and try changing to the folder where hyper speed is and running it now we don't have a mouse after this I'll see if I can load the mouse driver and solve enough free RAM to do this but here we go the game runs just fine ah these types of conquer protection are the most annoying ah there we go this is definitely one of those games we also need the controls right next to you now ways this guy shooting me oh we're gonna take care of this problem I missed all righty there we go yep games running fine okay so I ran cute mouse directly so we can see if we can load this game with the mouse enabled we can run a five hundred and seventy K program so let's go back over to games see how big hyper speed is it is oh it's only 82 Wow oh gosh we well might maybe it'll work let's see yes I have a mouse now what does Mouse do aa mouse does work Oh inverted Mouse is weird BAM awesome all right we've got software pretty much figured out now so now it's time to add in some more hardware and I said it wasn't sure if I was gonna do MIDI in this but I decided let's go ahead and do it this isn't going to be a full look into MIDI on here but a quick preview of what's coming up so I want to use my roland SC 55 obviously and to do that I'm going to be using a PC MIDI card now it was sent this a while back and I haven't been able to use it in anything because well it's not gonna run that great in the 5150 so I've needed a 46 type PC and I finally have one now this is really really easy to setup all you have to do is just plug it in and then it works all the drivers and software to use this are built into the games like most of the hardware in here I haven't even set the blaster environment variable for the sound card yet I should really do that but yeah let me throw this in the computer and then we'll try it out now you may have noticed this card doesn't exactly have a MIDI out port on it and that's because it's a little different it's not the typical MIDI out like a game blaster it just goes direct to MIDI connectors on here because this thing emulates an MP you 401 so you don't need that so it's not exactly compatible with the game port output on a standard sound card now I'm finally ready to show you why I'm so happy with this setup to use with my SC 55 and oh hey an MT 32 now I'm gonna go into all of this in a bit more detail when I do a review of the MIDI card because there's a little bit more going on here then you can see and that's part of why I like this because there's some stuff in the back but I don't need to ever touch that but this is it now sound is actually live and I can select whatever sound source I want from here without you needing to change anything else so I can switch now to mt-32 and it works fine I can switch to SC 55 and I can even switch to Cosette but I have one more trick up my sleeve there's a fourth switch input that allows me to select this little audio cable I have coming out here for whatever music I want to play at the time [Music] now this setup does leave all of the MIDI devices on and at all times and always running all of the music but I can just go ahead and turn them off if I'm not gonna use that source so it's not that big of a deal but I'm really really happy with the simplicity of this setup it's just gonna be so nice to use in the long run so yeah I'm I'm pretty pleased with this the ease of connecting the SE 55 the mt-32 is entirely down to the PC MIDI card because I don't need to have a switcher like say a Roland MP 104 so this is just the best possible setup that I can imagine now if you wanted to add in more MIDI sound sources it would get a bit more complicated but I'm happy with just these two I mean if I can track down some more like I could actually connect my Yamaha disc Orchestra to this then I would need to get a little bit more creative with the MIDI channel routing but for now yeah I'm super happy with this alright I am really happy with the progress that we've been making on this today and I think that I'm almost done with this there's just one more part I really want to get in here right now and that is a network card now I'm going with this gig of fast ethernet card it's just a real tech chipset internally I'm only going with this because I have the driver disk so it's going to be very easy to set up a matter of fact this is super easy to set up it's basically exactly the same thing as cute Mouse let me go ahead and get this plugged in and I'll show you what I mean alright so I've got the card installed I mean you've seen PCI cards plugged in before so I just skip that I also put in the driver disk which is in Drive a and if we list out the folders here we can see the one that we actually need up here at the top RTS pkt or read real-time send packet I'm not sure where our TS stands for but pka's packet so we can go over to that yes PK t and in here is the only file we really need to worry about which is the comm file because that is the driver so I'm just going to go ahead and copy that file over to the little driver folder I've been building up and now we're going to add that to our autoexec file and we will load that on startup which will activate the PCI card well it'll define a software port that software will use to access the card so let's go ahead and do that all right that's all that needs to be added in there and it should work fine I'm gonna go ahead and save this and then open up the config sis file and make a little note in the TSR loader here that this also loads internet stuff and then now I am done okay now that the computer is restarted with the network driver installed I can use it to do stuff so obviously there's a lot of cool things you could do with this you could probably connect to VBS is you could connect to a network multiplayer game but what I'm going to use it for most is FTP so let me go ahead and demonstrate this I'm going to be using em TCP which is by Mike bruckman which is a whole suite of tools that allows you to connect using dos to other computers over the Internet now I'm just going to be connecting to my server locally using FTP which is very convenient for me because this means that I don't have to sneak ernet files on to here and that I just did while I was talking is all it takes to connect you just write the FTP and the IP address then log in now here we have my server where I like to put all my files for old computers I like to access this from windows 98 as well so this is very useful now the first thing I want to do here is try archiving a game so we're going to Hoek go ahead and change to the games folder I'm going to make a directory and I'm going to call it coaster there we go now we can see D coaster now what I'm going to do here is I can see where I am on the local machine and I can change to coaster here as well and now I can upload all the files in the coaster folder to the server I believe I changed into coaster so yes I think there is a way of doing this without having to say yes to all of them but I don't remember it and there we go coaster has now been uploaded to the server so if I wanted to copy that from the server to another computer I could do it right from there it's very convenient for backing stuff up now obviously a better way of backing stuff up is making disk images okay so this is a folder of just a bunch of batch files and a bin folder that I'll have to manually copy over that allows me to create disk images of any floppy disk I put in my DOS computer so let me go ahead and download all of this so I can try doing that on here okay that should be everything I need so let me go ahead and quit and Here I am in image now I'm gonna put the disk for the network card back in and we're going to run our 144 which is read a 1.44 megabyte floppy and there we go successfully imaging the network driver disk this tool I'm using is a dsk image which is also written by Mike bruckman actually I would say this is my favorite disk image utility here at least that I can run from dass so I'm very happy for all of the software he's written it's really good and very useful okay no sectors were unrecoverable that's a good image so what I can do now is go to from I can see I have the 144 IMG I'll rent that to PCI net now actually I pick one for 42 PCI net dot IMG there we go now I'm going to go back to my server go to the drivers folder and from here I actually already image that floppy that's hilarious well I'm gonna show you we'll do put PCI net dot IMG and there we go I've successfully uploaded the disk image file to my server so it's very easy for me to go ahead and write disc images or create disk images I can write them just as easily actually and upload them to my server so it makes this a really useful archiving computer alright that's it I'd say the computer is fully finished I went ahead and completely reassembled it put the rest of the filler plates back in and I think it's done I got my network card set up sound MIDI video it's it's awesome I'm really gonna enjoy this thing and speaking of that I think it's time that we in this video and I need to play some sigil because I haven't actually had a chance to play that yet fun little side thing since I posted the video of me playing that before someone clued me into a modified version of the original doom exe that will let you run sigil as the fifth episode so sweet but for now that's it there will be more parts added to this later for one I didn't get to the scuzzy card just like last time with the windows 98 build most of these scuzzy stuff that I've found really only wants to work in daus I've tried to get it working on the windows 98 PC but without much luck so this is going to be the computer to use for that in the future but for now that's it I hope you guys enjoyed this for 86-dos PC build if you want to support the channel I am on patreon but for now that's it I'll see you next time

Channel: Tech Tangents

Views: 215,083

Rating: 4.9196134 out of 5

Keywords: AkBKukU, main, 486, intel, MS-DOS, DOS, 100MHz, build, computer, 1990s, retro, hardware

Id: TxrAoQYoAO0

Length: 60min 4sec (3604 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019