IBM PC compatible retro tech enthusiast who likes trying out unique retro experiments!
First, where did I get this, and what does it do? I picked this up from AliExpress, and this device basically lets you access USB drives from DOS systems. And it does support boot ROMs like the M-Systems Disk on Chip. We'll be using that today. 
First of all, let's take some time to admire the property sticker on the back! This card was allegedly property of America Online at some point š¤£ 
In case you missed it, I recently got a device to display BIOS diagnostic codes on powerup, and we learned that the system was getting stuck when it was testing the keyboard controller:
First, a little about the tester card. It's an AliExpress special. That said, it did get here pretty fast. I'm impressed! 
First of all, if this ends up being permanent, I won't be too sad. The Philips drive that was in the system is starting to look a little ratty š
. Granted, for form over function, it is an 8X drive, so TECHNICALLY this is a downgrade! 
Pics 2/4 
First, I'll cut right to the chase! You saw one keyboard in the opening post, here's the other! This second one didn't turn out "quite as good" (have a look at the "slash" key above the enter key... and the enter key is slightly marbled), but I felt it was good enough! 
Here we are, connected up using a "phantom" power cable that connects to a PS/2 port. You can also use a wall adapter. And I also plugged in Ethernet with an RJ45 cable. Here we go! 
So, first, to recap from yesterday, due to a bad SATA cable, we ended up with some corruption, and this is what we got on startup. Let's boot up the Win2K CD then! 
So, step 1 was deciding which operating system to use to do the benchmarks. I chose Windows 2000 to start. I thought I would go with SiSoft Sandra 99, but, well, that's too old, and I couldn't find a better version. Alright, no problem. Quick reboot... uh oh... 
As some may recall, here was the next thing I was going to try: copying over the Windows 95A Media Player to Windows 95 OSR2.5. But as it ends up, that wasn't necessary!! I'll explain.
Let's start with the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX. Oh my.. maybe this card has bad caps. NEXT! 
First things first, just like they taught in science class, always start with a baseline! So, I am going to make a copy of my Windows 98 installation so that we don't foul up the main install, and we'll check out device manager. Looking good! Let's roll. 
The first thing I did was to populate this gorgeous motherboard with a full 640K RAM, and also popped in a NEC V20 processor for the 8088. Flawless! No issues whatsoever with this! 
So, first some background: what's the story with MPEG-1 decoders? Well, back when PCs weren't quite powerful enough to play full-motion video, hardware options like this were popular. This machine has a S3 Scenic/MX2 (86C443) chip to do just that. 
As we saw from the first picture, this is a Pentium 75 system with 72MB RAM and a 1.0 GB HDD. As we look at the bezel, we can see it is not in perfect shape. But perhaps we can fix that up later! 
Okay, here we go. First up is a Toshiba XM-5302B. This is a 4X IDE drive! I loaded a Microsoft Money '99 CD into the drive, and this drive works GREAT!! 
First, why did I buy this? Well, the plan was to do a case swap with another system I had, which had some strange "fit" issues. However, that planned got smashed... literally. So, I thought we might as well explore what's left of this PC!
So, first of all, what is ELKS? It's the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset, and it will run on a wide range of hardware, including 8088 systems. Pretty wild for a modern product! If you want to read more or try it out, GitHub repo is here: github.com/ghaerr/elks
First, if you are interested in reading about these, there is a thread on Vogons! Included in that thread is where I found the DOS drivers for it, you can go here for that, and to read about this device! vogons.org/viewtopic.php?ā¦