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I have an AST 486 that is bugging me about the serial and asset tag no longer being valid, and no matter what I try I just get errors where I try to set it using the tools I found. So I decided to investigate... I disassembled one of the tools that at least seems to read an empty asset tag but...

Hi all, I just acquired this AST 486. It's a lovely machine but on every boot I am greeted with this message 11.31 The serial number and asset management tag are no longer valid. Followed by 2 beeps and I have to press F1 to continue. And needless to say it's driving me nuts! The BIOS setup...

Hi all, My 4865 drive has started acting up :( It won't read anything whatsoever any more, or write for that matter. It used to work fine connected in the same setup as it is now, but it hasn't been used for a couple of years. The floppys I'm testing with are working fine in a different drive...

Hi all, I have this Normerel ATCompact machine and I'm looking for any info on it. Jumper settings are of the biggest interest right now. The seller said he believed it was made under license for Xerox. It has a 20 MB NEC MFM drive with a black front as well as a 3.5'' floppydrive with a...

Hi all, I'm having some trouble getting my PS/2 to recognize the 80287 coprocessor that is installed. The reference software doesn't recognize it when I do an automatic configuration and manual configuration won't let me select it either. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong (maybe need...

So I finally got my old PCs installed again yesterday, after moving over a year ago. I figured I'd share my simple http server, maybe someone has a use for it. It uses my homebaked TCP lib, which has only really been properly tested over here on my AT and Dosbox. The main focus has been on...

I got myself some new network cards, but obviously didn't bother to check the system requirements before I bought them. It says a 386 is required but I have a 286.. I found a packet driver for it which says I need to run the configuration utility, which just hangs my AT. A disassembly showed me...

I'm working on a program/lib that sometimes needs to allocate more memory while in an interrupt handler. I guess this is generally frowned upon but I like the idea better than hogging memory in advance, not knowing if we actually need it or not. I'm using the regular malloc()/_fmalloc() (using...

I'm writing my own little DOS networking library in C++ (Watcom). So far it's going okay and I'm at the point where an application using the library can communicate with the rest of the network over UDP. I got some basic TCP stuff as well but I figured I'd finish UDP first as it's a lot easier...

I'm not sure when MEM was introduced but my DOS 3.3 doesn't have it and I've actually missed it a bit.. So I baked my own version and figured I may as well share it here :) It turned out to be 41 bytes, if anyone can see a way to make it smaller please post! Download below, and here is the...

I've taken up oldschool programming again and I'm wondering if there are any optimizations to do a regular memory copy? I'm concentrating on performance on a 286 and so far rep movsw seems to be as fast as it gets. I've tried unrolling the loop, reading 8 bytes at a time into 4 registers and...

I have an ST4038 drive in my AT and while it works fine, the sound it produces is absolutely deafening. It's tightened properly into the case and everything so I'm pretty sure it's something inside the drive that's causing the noise. Sometimes it will all of a sudden go relatively quiet, but...

So I spent the past 8 or so hours figuring out how to get a 4865 drive working with my XT. It turned out to be pretty easy once you know how, so I figured I'd write a little guide, may save someone else a lot of trouble. The first thing to figure out was how to power the thing. It doesn't have...

Thanks to the help I got here my 5170 is now up and running, so it was time to start with the 5160. Its original power supply was dead and its contents have been replaced with a modified generic AT power supply - original wiring from the XT PSU hooked up to the inners of the newer PSU, a couple...

So I have this 512k memory expansion card that I would like to put in my 5170. It's an IBM 1501518 card. The trouble is, it's not working at all and I'm having a hard time finding any documentation for the card. It has a total of 16 switches, 8 for each bank, and I have no idea how to set them...

I recently added 2 more IBM machines to my collection, namely a 5160 and a 5170. Each came with a color monitor. I suspect the 5160 has had a little electricity accident as the power supply is dead and one of the monitors won't power on either. My father will try to repair the monitor but for...

Today was a bit of a special day, I got reunited with my first PC, a Compaq SLT/286! Or "my", that would be my father's.. We had this laptop back in 1989 and it was the very first PC I got to use every now and then. Without this machine my life would probably have looked pretty different. I...

I was wondering if anyone has an original IBM reference disk, and if that someone would be willing to scan or take a picture of the label on it. I want to put something better on my disk than a bit of painters tape with handwritten text ;)

I have kind of a weird problem with my A600HD.. If I have the mouse connected when I start it up, the display just shows garbage. I've tried waiting for it to load workbench and all, but it never recovers. Other than not being able to see what's going on it's not hanging or anything. It seems to...

I wrote a little menu tool for DOS and figured maybe you guys want to take a look at it. I think it's pretty neat, altho not quite finished yet. I started out with a menu thingy written in C (TC 2), but that ended up being larger than I liked and taking up too much memory, so asm it was. It's...