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Acer Acros 486dx2/66

Caluser2000

Caluser2000

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Jan 3, 2010
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Just aquired one of these. It's an AT sized case. The earlier square front facia. Comes with 32megs of ram (its max), 1 meg video memory and 256k cache. It was going to only have the 500meg hdd fitted and early sound blaster card. The owner ends up throwing in a sealed OEM NT4 Workstation package, fdd and 1x cdrom. Funny how my last purchases have included NT4. I have about half a dozen copies now.

Needless to say I'm rapped. Now have a home for the Big Foot drive and will transfer its hdd to the Dec. From the auction pics it looks well used but that's ok. By all accounts the Acros was one of the better dx2/66 available.

So I have my dedicated dos box. Well that's the plan at this stage anywhoo. Who knows what twist and turns will happen along the way....

Edit- found this 486dx/2 66 comparison http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=...&resnum=4&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
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It arrived today the previous owner also through in a spare chip, unsure what it is though at moment. Very well made and spotless inside. the facia and cover clip on, no screws. Very handy. Also has feet which add extra support if stood vertically. A plastic tab hold the 5.25" mounting tray in place. Cd drive ended up being a x48 item.

Has Dos 6.22 and Wolfenstien on it, including backups in a different directory. I was almost going to type folder then ;).

Putting it through its paces. Loaded GeoWorks Pro to test the fdd as well as confirm the disks are still mint and installed the cutemouse driver to test the mouse and notepad to test the keyboard. Wolfenstien confirms the sound card works. All running as it should so far. Just got to test the network card now.
 

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Spent a bit of time in town today looking around second hand shops. Stumbled on a 19" AOC flat screen monitor for $10. Couldn't believe my luck. Had forgotten how heavy the damn things are though. In very good nick and it works like a charm. Have had one of these on the family machine for a number of years and really like it.

Been playing with the Acer. The bigfoot is picked up by the bios but wont boot. I know the drive is fine as it loads up on a test rig I put together out of my spare parts, a caseless AMD K6 266 setup, just fine. So overlay software is obviously the go. Tried making MaxBlast disks on the XP box but no go. Seemed to create the disk ok but when I tried them out on the 486 got some sort of error. Twice. Two different disks. Will access some older ol software tomorrow. The more I look at the Acer the more it appears it was manufactured with recycling in mind. Even the backplane and hdd supports are plastic. The machine has obviously been kept away from sunlight, geeks basement maybe ;), as there's no yellowing at all apart from the cdrom face, which is obviously fitted from another machine. It's certainly lighter than the slimline Dec.
 
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Craigslist?

Craigslist?

Craigslist has some ridiculous deals too, you should also be checking out their ads. Also make sure you look in the "free" section, I found plenty of old electronics there.

IT Audit Services
 
Caluser2000 said:
Spent a bit of time in town today looking around second hand shops. Stumbled on a 19" AOC flat screen monitor for $10. Couldn't believe my luck. Had forgotten how heavy the damn things are though. In very good nick and it works like a charm. Have had one of these on the family machine for a number of years and really like it.

Been playing with the Acer. The bigfoot is picked up by the bios but wont boot. I know the drive is fine as it loads up on a test rig I put togetter out of my spare parts, a caseless AMD K6 266 setup, just fine. So overlay software is obviously the go. Tried making MaxBlast disks on the XP box but no go. Seemed to create the disk ok but when I tried them out on the 486 got some sort of error. Twice. Two different disks. Will access some older ol software tomorrow. The more I look at the Acer the more it appears it was manufactured with recycling in mind. Even the backplane and hdd supports are plastic. The machine has obviously been kept away from sunlight, geeks basement maybe ;), as there's no yellowing at all apart from the cdrom face, which is obviously fitted from another machine. It's certainly lighter than the slimline Dec.
Click to expand...

Use EZ-DRIVE or OnTrack, other stuff is just rebrandings and OEM-specific versions. I have the latest versions of each, as well as the most popular version of OnTrack (9.57 is most popular, I have a copy of 10.46 too though). If you can't track down something that works for ya shoot me a PM.
 
Cheers Raven. Managed to get Ontrack on the thing. Just for the hell of it I installed DrDos 6. Ontrack created 3 1.3 gig fat16 partitions in the process. Just fiddling with disk and did something I shouldn't have. In the process of formating a partition. Looks like it going to take forever lol. About an hour and at 10%.......... Curious thing was DrDos detected there was an error in the MBR compared with the Bios info something I'm sure MSDos wouldn't have picked up.

Took the grandson for the the park for a couple of hours and only 17% formated so decided to do the 3 finger salute and run Ontrack again. Ran Partition Magic 6.0 and it showed a bit of space being unused. Got that sorted then reinstalled DrDos with a few different options. Even edited the config.sys using it's text editor. It certainly brings back old memories. A lot more configuration options compared to MSDos. Just type "setup" and away you go. I'd forgotten all about ViewMax the GEM based gui as well. Not all that pretty but does the job. Have to remember this OS was released around 1991, around 3 years before the Acros was manufactered.
 
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Had another play today. Installed the DrDos 6 updates, overcomes a little glitch when installing Win 3.1 IIRC (not that I'm in any hurry to install that), then installed New Deal Office 3 off the backups I made when I received the original disks. No errors at all this time like one of the original disks had when installing it on the Dec. After installation I tried running its setup program and the DrDos setup routine kept popping up. Got it sorted now though. Renamed the DrDos one su.exe and some autoexec.bat shuffling in the path statement.

Had a play with setup(now su) again. DrDos has a delwatch utility which keeps an eye out on what you delete and can retrieve files if needed. http://www.drdos.net/documentation/usergeng/15ugch15.htm Can be quite usefull for those woopsy moments. So have set that up. More out of interest and reliving past times than anything else.

Why this combo, NDO/DrDos, you may ask? DrDos funnily enough were the first set of OS disks out of the fdd holder. Could this be an Omen from the Gods? Also NDO(PCGeos) integrates well with DrDos 6s TaskMax utility. Ok, I could go without a GUI no worries but this era machine just begs to have one installed. A bit newer than what was available at the time admittedly, but 16 colours just didn't seem right somehow and using the Motif interface looks retro enough. CDrom driver installed. Got to do a bit more jiggery pokery to increase the conventional memory, although MemMax does do a stirling job.

Still haven't tested the nic. The next mission will be to source the packet drivers. I've never networked in pure dos so this will prove to be an interesting experience. In the mean time here's a link to MSs dos client ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/clients/msclient/

I'll retire the 19" monitor to storage, now that I know it works ok.
 
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Couldn't stop fiddling. Disconnected the bigfoot a connected the old drive with MSDos 6.22 on it up. Took ages to find some reliable floppies to copy the MS client to. Damp storage I guess. Man that client is a resource hog. Leaves only around 400k conventinal memory if that. The good thing was that the nic works fine and it connected to the XP box no worries as can be seen by the mapped E: drive in screenshot below. So can transfer files if I need to. Might even try a text browser. For those that haven't used the MS client before it's fairly easy to setup and use. The "net" command allows you connect to a shared directory with the option of connecting to it on startup.

One thing to be aware of was when I chose to install TCPIP the installation routine promply rebooted the machine without bothering to ask if I was happy with the setup then promptly went searching for a DHCP server. Had to rem out a few commands upon reboot using the boot disk, reboot again then set it up as user defined and manually set the IP /subnet in the protocol.ini file. The curious thing is there's no dots but spaces between the Ip and subnet numbers.
 

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Basic Microsoft peer-to-peer NetBIOS networking isn't too bad, but the TCP/IP client is a huge hog. Back in the day, I'd load and unload TCP/IP as needed just to make sufficient memory available for other things.
 
I recommend a newer DOS than the one you're using, specifically for FAT32 support - OnTrack and friends can format a large drive into a single partition this way, and imo it's less annoying to have one partition than three or four tiny ones (or more, depending on the size of your disk). FAT16 maxes at 2GB under DOS, after all.

Mind sharing that GUI in the screenshot, btw? I've never messed with that particular incarnation of GEOS (it looks nice! :D).
 
Chuck(G) said:
Basic Microsoft peer-to-peer NetBIOS networking isn't too bad, but the TCP/IP client is a huge hog. Back in the day, I'd load and unload TCP/IP as needed just to make sufficient memory available for other things.
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I still do that with NETBIOS, but couldn't figure out how to completely unload it without rebooting; any tips?
 
Raven said:
IMind sharing that GUI in the screenshot, btw? I've never messed with that particular incarnation of GEOS (it looks nice! :D).
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I do respect copyright holders. In this case its now BreadBox Inc Yip it's nice. I prefer the Motif look over the win9x for it.
There is a cut down version readily available from http://www.breadbox.com/ I beleive it also can be hacked using ealier Geos 2x stuff to give it more functionality, though I've not tried it.
 
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MikeS said:
Well, either you didn't read the "completely" or I'm missing something. With my configuration NET stop leaves behind 30.5 KB of the 117KB NET start used; PROTMAN, the NIC driver and NDISHLP remain resident. Any more tips?
Click to expand...

Ah, I never actually checked if stuff remained in memory after a NET STOP - dunno then.

There's probably a tool to force things out of memory somewhere, though that isn't the most elegant solution.

As for Ensemble, I didn't realize that it was that - there are all kinds of GEOS. :p
 
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It's an earlier version of PCGeos called GeoWorks Pro 1.2, which had Qutro Pro SE bundled with it, from around 1991. Note the AOL icon. There also was an AOL client for Dos on a single floppy disk which was PC Geos based. 1.x bineries and docs are not compatible with PCGeos 2 and above, although there is a conversion utilities for the docs. It's a credit to the original developers that it's still around. The Motif theme looks the same. I really was surprised it started considering the lack of base memory.

On the networking side someones made a nice easy to read tutorial http://forums.techarena.in/guides-tutorials/1357884.htm

Another winfall today. Was just given a 17" lcd flat screen monitor from a workmate.
 
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Just out of curiosity today I tried the Lite version. Ran fine with no networking but locked the system with the network client running and the share selected.
 
The cpu fan was starting to make a awfull chatter on start up. It would run fine for a while then chatter again. Sounded a bit like marbles in a tin can. Found a replacement and now all sorted. Quite a lot of play in the old one. Not that it really needs a fan. The Dec and Presario run fine with a DX2/66 without one. I'll keep the old one to disect.

Just been researching packet drivers and have found what I want. Seems straight fwd enough. Load nic packet driver then protocol driver after setting up the configuration file and pointing diver to it using the set command depending on the protocol driver. I've chosen to give mTCP a shot.

Found the Thrumpet TCPIP driver in my travels as well ftp://ftp.tsoft.net/pub/tsoft/trumpet-abi/

For the hell of it I tried the Thrumpet setup. It took just two lines in a batchfile. Quite easy to load and unload these totally compared with the MS Client. 512ks base memory free without any tweaking. Just looking for some more utilities. The text browsers I've found seem to rely on wattcp.

Tried the MS client again. Seems GeoWorks is ok for a bit, say accessing the share and managed to transfer some files. But once something a bit more usefull needs to be done like running an app or two it locks solid. Needless to say is fine when the client isn't in action.
 
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Arachne. Arachne, arachne - arachne.

This is the godsend from retro PC heaven. Try it.

Only needs a packet driver, which usually one would have for DOS networking anyway regardless of what stack their other tools use (there are some cases where you wouldn't, i.e., NDIS/ODI).

That tutorial is quite good, but the grammar is quite broken.
 
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