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Compaq Deskpro XL 590

L

Laura

Member
Joined
Mar 4, 2004
Messages
13
Hey again, everyone. It's Laura the newb, in over her head as usual.

In continuing my quest to find a computer on which I can play my old Sierra adventure games, I recently bought secondhand a Compaq Deskpro XL 590, running MS-DOS 6.22. I have a couple of questions about it.

1. It has an integrated sound card, but I have a soundblaster card that I want to use. How do I make it the default soundcard? I have the driver for it.

2. When I tried to install the CD-ROM driver, it installed successfully but doesn't recognize the drive.

I would appreciate any advice, and thanks in advance!
 
Hey Laura!

I used to have a couple of those, too...in another lifetime. Bad news is that I don't rembr much about them. Good news is taht I do rembr there is a sticker attached on the inside of the case with all the switch & jumper settings on it. As best as I do rembr, the on-board sound is enabled by simply loading the driver (pnp), so not loading the driver should disable it (I think). That model of Compaq doesn't have a user-configurable CMOS, it's all done automatically for you at boot-time, which makes it extremly difficult to change anything from the factory set-up. Good luck, I wish I could be of more help...

--T
 
Well, I found out why my CD-ROM driver wasn't working. Unfortunately, has only led to other problems.

The driver I had was for an ATAPI CD-ROM, and it turns out that the drive I have in my wonderful new machine is SCSI, a concept I am totally unfamiliar with. I've read up on the SCSI basics, and I understand that I need two drivers--one for the SCSI card, and one for the CD-ROM drive. What I can't figure out is how to identify my SCSI card so that I'll know what driver I need. Is there a program I can run to find out what SCSI card I have?
 
After a little searching, I found the SCSI controller. It's integrated into the motherboard. Here is what it says:

PCNet -- SCSI
AM79C974KC
9530APB A4
(c) 1993 AMD
 
 
No good. This stuff is just too old. Neither the AMD or Compaq websites have any documentation on these products, and I can't get support because the computer isn't under warranty anymore. I don't even have the computer's serial number.

So here's another question. How hard would it be to change out this SCSI drive for an ATAPI drive? Can it be done on this insane computer?
 
I dunno, it seems to me that I ran IDE drives in mine, but it's been a long time, and I may not be remembering correctly. I was running a lot of SCSI stuff at about that time, too. I believe that you can just ignore the SCSI host adapter and install an IDE controller into one of the PCI slots and there's no reason I can think of for it not to work, provided you have the right drivers for it.

--T
 
It seems that chip is a combined network and SCSI controller (as if the name of the chip didn't say that already) :

http://www.amd.com/files/connectivitysolutions/networking/archivednetworking/18681.pdf

If you want to dump MS-DOS, maybe NetBSD will have working drivers for the SCSI controller:

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/1999/03/31/0001.html

HP/Compaq has some sort of SCSI driver for Windows 95, but not for DOS:

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/Deskpro/us/download/153.html

On DriverGuide (user: drivers, password: all), you can get some unknown softpaq which is said to possibly contain what you're looking for:

http://members.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=66292

At least a year ago, there still was a "hidden" old Compaq site which HP hadn't taken over. It was loaded with docs and softpaqs that for some reason was thrown overboard onto the new HP/Compaq site. Unfortunately I can't remember how to get to the hidden site.

Good luck!
 
Compaq Computer

Compaq Computer

Look online for CD-ROM Drivers for dos and windows then see what happens.

If that doen't work change the cd-rom's jumper settings
 
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