AST 386SX Utilities Disk 910401-033

[Bytedruid]

I've recently come into possession of an AST 386sx/20 laptop, which has been a lot fun!

Early on the dead hard-drive was replaced with a CF card and after writing more floppies then I care to admit, etherDFS running over a Xircom PE3-10BT providing backups and a package source for fdimples. Life is good, except: I can't turn on the external video output. Turns out I need the ASTIVGA.EXE program or similar from the disk:

Premium Exec 386SX Utilities Part No. 910401-033 (image attached)​

in order to toggle the output to an external monitor, as there's no keyboard shortcut nor BIOS option. I've attached an image of the disk in question from a current ebay sale. I've offered the seller to pay for a copy of the contents before the normal item sale goes through, and I've searched the intenet archive to see anyone has uploaded a copy, both to no avail so far.

Does anyone have a copy of ASTIVGA.EXE from the 386sx utilities disk, or know where I can find it?

Alternately if there's a bit of assembly that would handle the same job, I'd be interested in that as well, though I doubt that knowledge ever made it outside of AST Research.

Thanks,

 

[AlexC]

I had a couple of those laptops. Really liked them. Replaced the hard drives with CF adapters, used them as silent desktops with a VGA monitor attached. The graphics chip can do good CGA, Hercules emulation, etc. I got the drivers from here:

http://www.sandyflat.net/digerati/ast486/drivers/p-other/index.htm

Great resource. I sent the site owner a "thank you" email at the time, but it bounced.

 

[Bytedruid]

I've been looking for these for weeks. Thank you SO MUCH!

As evidence below, ASTIVGA.COM was in the file named http://www.sandyflat.net/digerati/ast486/drivers/p-other/pexec386.zip and it worked!

I've also sent along a thank you message to the site owner, hopefully it won't bounce. In case anyone else has old AST laptops, I've mirrored the "p-other" directory locally and can re-post the files if there's a suitable location you would recommend.

 

[AlexC]

You're welcome. I used to have this in my autoexec.bat file:

REM switch to external display mode, enforce VGA, etc., and set high speed \ast\astivga vga crt color 16bit>nul \ast\speed high>nul

I also set Turbo mode on in the BIOS, and the option to disable the lid switch so I could leave the laptop closed whilst using an external monitor (the keyboards, at least on mine, were hard and uncomfortable, but there's a PS/2 port at the back).