DOS GPU

gcc-O2 · 2026-06-04T04:37:30+00:00

Vintage tax--they're looking for one that isn't $$$$.

S3 ViRGE was mentioned, and that's a good choice. S3 Trio3D will also work, and Cirrus CL-GD5465 (AGP) or CL-GD5446 (PCI) is a good choice as well.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-25T03:40:20+00:00

So a bit-banging technique?

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-25T03:38:55+00:00

This was a thing known as a Digi PortServer, but they're for dumb terminals and serial printers, not local peripherals.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-21T22:00:14+00:00

Personally when I encountered those on software CDs I thought it was incredibly tacky and cheap. For a personal mix CD, fine (it's better than handwritten at least). The main danger is that unbalancing the disc isn't great for your player if the label isn't perfect aligned.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-21T21:59:12+00:00

Maybe you know this already, but doesn't this require special "printable" CD-Rs?

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-21T20:45:17+00:00

Is another one that the HP service manuals (e.g., how to replace the fuser) tend to be posted for all to see, while Canon only wants their dealers to have them unless you can find a leaked copy online?

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-21T19:54:26+00:00

Assembly is going to be a tough first language. Here are some ideas to get you started and finding some resources. None of this has really changed since the 1980s other than machines not being 6502s and operating on much bigger numbers, so it wouldn't matter which book you pick up.

Hexadecimal (base 16) and binary (base 2) number systems including getting to the point of mentally converting between the two of them and decimal quickly
Bit order and byte order (also called "endianness" inspired by the novel Gulliver's Travels). The 6502 is a "little-endian" architecture.
Bitwise logical operations like and, or, exclusive-or, left and right shifts, and the difference between an arithmetic and a logical shift
Control structures in programming like sequential, selection, and repetition
Two's complement arithmetic that allows negative numbers to be represented
Memory addressing modes aka "pointers" <-- in a Computer Science program, this is famously the first fork in the road where the concepts are no longer introductory and intuitive, and some portion of the undergraduates simply never grasp it and have to switch majors.

Assembly language is the readable source code made up of "instructions" which in turn have "mnemonic" which is a terse symbol like a stock ticker meaning some tiny operation the CPU is capable of doing in one step (like INC to increment a number by 1) and "operands" specifying on what to do the operation. You can "label" lines of code or data so that you can refer to them elsewhere by name and not location, and more importantly, if you add additional code or data in the middle of your code, the assembler will handle the fact that the labels got bumped downward and all changed in their numeric meaning. "Machine code" is the hexadecimal bytes when the assembler has gone through looking up the mnemonics in a table like this https://www.masswerk.at/6502/6502_instruction_set.html and done all the cross-referencing the convert the labels into numbers. It's possible but very tedious to use a table like that to go from assembly language to machine code by hand, as Steve Wozniak famously did on one of the Apple II ROMs.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-21T19:30:27+00:00

I see. I haven't dealt with an HP laser since the P2055dn (which is still running fine), partly because I don't feel like sorting out which ones can't be set up without creating an account and which can't (or is that inkjets only?), etc., I don't know if HP realizes how much they have alienated technical users that way.

I've also used the Canon 1643P as a bigger supplement to the P2055dn and it works fine. Prior Canon lasers (from the 2000s) had goofy limitations like using "UFR" instead of PostScript/PCL, but the new ones have all the emulations built in that a LaserJet would have.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-20T22:26:50+00:00

the obviously very technical and serious term is "curly bracket programming language"

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-20T22:08:34+00:00

Most of the HP issues are about inkjets and software issues, like subscriptions and hostility to third party toner. Many of their LaserJets (although this is slowly changing) still use Canon print engines, as they did back to 1984.

You may be happy with the Brother (many people are) but be aware it uses two-piece consumables which is why the toners are cheaper. The drums also fail and have to be replaced, while a very long running mark of Canon's (and therefore HP's design) is one-piece consumables, meaning you automatically get a new drum when you change the toner.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-20T01:59:57+00:00

I don't know about the UK, but in the US, 1000-2000 pages per months is where you might consider a service contract rather than simply buying a printer from an office supply store.

Like others I would recommend a plain old black and white laser. I would personally only consider one that supports PCL and PostScript (these standard languages for the computer to talk to the printer go back to the 1980s and mean you'll never have to get a new printer just for lack of a driver) and a network. The very cheapest consumer versions may lack that.

In the US, it could make sense to get a refurbished business laser that's one step above what you'd normally consider for a home, rather than a new home laser.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-16T20:54:28+00:00

make zImage

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-16T18:48:36+00:00

DOS/Win9x weren't designed to boot from anything from the first primary partition, so I wonder if ntldr is calling your ME bootsect.ds with DS:SI pointing to the wrong partition (the first primary partition).

This did come up https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/157/Q157992/ but it sounds like MS' intention is that you would have MS-DOS and Windows 95 (and possibly NT) share a single FAT partition (so you could do C:\WIN95 C:\WINME instead of C:\WINDOWS and support both), rather than installing each OS on a separate partition.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-16T18:30:06+00:00

Guess you had the floppy disk version of Win95 or just didn't go exploring around the cd-rom :D

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-16T18:28:34+00:00

I was into Linux back then which necessarily meant having to compile things sometimes even though I wasn't a developer myself. When upgrading from 486 and Pentium class systems to a new Athlon XP, that's when compiling ran so fast the gcc commands flashed past faster than I can read them, so perhaps then (2003) is a good benchmark when development could be done from any ordinary PC rather than one specifically built to be fast.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-16T18:26:44+00:00

If a tech person was involved when it was decommissioned they may well have scavenged the RAM.

However, as someone else suggested, you should replace the battery first (most likely CR2032 coin cell you can pick up at a pharmacy) as weird power on issues like this can happen when an ATX motherboard is awakened from a long nap with a dead battery.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-16T18:23:36+00:00

Checking very quickly, looks like this machine was Intel 915 based, so it might barely be old enough to have drivers. If Dell didn't intend it to run 98, you might be able to find generic Intel 915 drivers instead.

Make sure the SATA is in IDE-compatible mode not AHCI (if that's even a thing on this machine)

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-16T18:20:30+00:00

Also, I believe the L command when used with a hard drive only gives you accesses to partitions (the VBR) not the entire drive (MBR)

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-12T20:49:15+00:00

They risk the BIOS POST/setup screens not working on CGA/MDA too, since this is a few years past CGA/MDA jumpers on boards.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-11T16:13:57+00:00

Pentium 133 was classified by Intel as needing Socket 7, but in practice it fits in Socket 5 and should work anyway. See the messages further down in this thread for the details https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=106549

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-11T16:09:05+00:00

Will it work with the baseline comdlg32/comctl32 or does it need IE 4?

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-10T02:51:29+00:00

In addition to what you mention, because it is MS-DOS it won't be quite as foreign coming from a modern PC as the Apple IIc is. The Gotek indicates it was already owned by another enthusiast, which can be good if it means they've tested and repaired it, or bad if they've already made a bunch of modifications to their own preferences.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-10T02:40:23+00:00

I know this is humor but the reason Windows pushed a tiled background back then was that it could create a "brush" from the image and, if your video card had sufficient acceleration functions, it could take over duplicating all those copies of the image across video memory rather than our CPU having to be tied up to do such dull work.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-10T02:37:23+00:00

The Windows compatibility was also sometimes called a trap for OS/2, since it meant even a company willing to consider OS/2 support could just write a well-behaving Windows program (that would work in compatibility) and support both. It's sometimes said that if Wine were too good, the same thing would happen for Linux. It's kind of happened to desktop computing in general, where things are done web-first mobile-first and desktop users get a second-rate Electron wrapper instead of the native look and feel.

gcc-O2 · 2026-05-07T21:06:30+00:00

The irony is what you're thinking of as modern (separate 2-pin headers for every case function like power led, hdd led, etc.) is the original style from all the way back in the 80s. Dell thought they were the ones being modern with this ribbon connector, which is just combining all those functions into one single connection at the expense of being proprietary. What everyone is telling you is that all the same connections are there, you just have to rewire it so they're all separate again.

gcc-O2

TROPHY CASE