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Got my first 486! Now, what do you do with one?

Does this laptop have sound? If not, I would recommend picking up a pcmcia card with good sb emulation. These are often bundled with various external CDROM options.

My other suggestion, is even though it may have a working floppy drive, is to find a way to load software onto it without using a floppy. Either a pcmcia ethernet card, or using a null modem cable. Being prepared for either a dead floppy drive or a dead boot disk is very important. Remember, even when your floppy drive is completely dead, you always have the option of removing the hd and mounting it in a pc (or externally) and putting a minimal boot image on it. When I put my 486 desktop together about 2 years ago, I had no working dos floppy, and the floppy drive in my more modern PC was on its way out. You could put the 486's drive in an external enclosure to copy files to it, but sometimes its hard to make it a proper bootable drive. Especially making a fat16 bootable drive from inside of a modern OS.

I did this:

-Install DOS and Win 3.1 floppy images into Bochs (a good emulator you should google if you don't know)
-Make a boot disk image inside Bochs (with format a: /s ).
-Make a bootable cd from the floppy image. (You can get these premade on the internet as well. Dos 6.22, Win95 or Win98 'dos' boot cd should work)
-Boot modern PC desktop up the dos boot cd you just made. Do it with its own HDD disconnected, with the intended 486 hdd plugged in.
-From the modern PC's 'a:' drive (which is really a floppy emulated off the cd), fdisk the 486's drive, and then format /s c:

Now that the 486 drive is properly bootable, you can:

-Turn off modern PC and reconnect it's own drive. Boot with 486's drive attached (as the 'd' drive), or put 486 drive in an enclosure
-Copy all the other files from the Bochs image onto the drive This is also where you want to take advantage of the opportunity to copy on installers for all the games or drivers you will want.
-Put 486's drive back into the 486. It's now bootable and loaded with everything.
 
Also... 486... Unless it was designed for Win95 use, it shouldn't have a USB... and even if it does, the hardware/chipset behind it might not be "complete" (remember USB was in its infancy in the Win95B days), so you might not even be able to use it for a USB floppy.

Better to invest in a parallel port ZIP drive and use those to transfer stuff. Or if available to you,a rewritable CD.

Have fun with it! I have an old Compaq P120 that I once setup for a portable retro machine. On the to-do list for it is a screen replacement (the current one has issues), and maybe even a battery rebuild so it can truly be portable again.
 
Maverick1978 said:
Also... 486... Unless it was designed for Win95 use, it shouldn't have a USB... and even if it does, the hardware/chipset behind it might not be "complete" (remember USB was in its infancy in the Win95B days), so you might not even be able to use it for a USB floppy.
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The USB floppy was for my modern computer, so I could write to floppies and then use those with the built in drive on the 486. As far as having fun with it, I've already had a pretty good time making nonsense spreadsheets in Lotus 1,2,3 haha.

@carangil It doesn't have sound so a PCI sound card is a really good idea. I forgot that was an option! Also, thank you for the tips. I know floppies aren't the most reliable option, so it's good to know I have other paths to try for transferring data.
 
pcmcia* not pci ;-) You have a plethora of dos games that'll all run smoothly on the system. Depends on free time if you're ever gonna beat them though. Search the forums for the favorite dos games thread or any of the sort. Most of them support pc speaker if anything which older games it was all there was for the most part. The 486 was the first system we had that we ended up with a real sound card in, but that was a desktop and an expensive MIDI purchase.

Also with a null modem cable you can use interlnk/intersvr in dos to mount a drive remotely and copy files from one system to another at little cost. Zip drives are pretty handy too but also about the same speed as the serial/parallel laplink connection.
 
barythrin said:
pcmcia* not pci ;-) You have a plethora of dos games that'll all run smoothly on the system. Depends on free time if you're ever gonna beat them though. Search the forums for the favorite dos games thread or any of the sort. Most of them support pc speaker if anything which older games it was all there was for the most part. The 486 was the first system we had that we ended up with a real sound card in, but that was a desktop and an expensive MIDI purchase.

Also with a null modem cable you can use interlnk/intersvr in dos to mount a drive remotely and copy files from one system to another at little cost. Zip drives are pretty handy too but also about the same speed as the serial/parallel laplink connection.
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I actually have no experience or knowledge of these "null modem cables" you all keep mentioning, haha. Care to elaborate on that, please? :D

And yeah, I didn't mean PCI, haha. If this thing was large enough for a PCI card, yikes. Forget portability!
 
A null-modem cable connects one computer's serial port directly to another's, so you can transfer stuff across. It's slower than Ethernet to be sure, but it's not a bad solution.
 
Just like a serial cable to connect your serial port to a modem, these were cables that you connected one serial port to another computers serial port and it would cross the tx/rx lines so they could talk and receive without any hardware in the middle. Hence "null modem" but still transferring files like you had one. You're limited to the speed of the serial port so it's the same speed as uploading a file via dial-up but for transferring smaller files or even larger if you have all night you could back things up, copy files over, share a hard drive of a larger system with your laptop before you take it on the road, etc. It was the "poor" man's network. The other option was floppy drives and archiving/zipping software that eventually supported "spanning" which means if the file it's creating was larger than your floppy it would continue on the next and next floppy until you're done. Then you could unzip the spanned zip on the destination system, it would ask you for the first then last disk, then unzip it in order of the disk sets (you'd need to keep track of what disk was what number of course). Those were the techniques I ran around with most of my systems with until I could afford a network card and hub. At the time they weren't in my hobbyist budget.
 
Calirma is actually what I run as a shell on 3.11 on the machine I was talking about! It is indeed really close to win95. :)

As for the wireless networking, ya no WAP. Wep-PSK still works a treat though. I use a Cisco 350 (cisco branded orinoco gold) :)
For usb, if you can find one, there are pcmcia usb adapters with nec chipset. These will work with 16 bit pcmcia, in win95 only. They do not support booting, but thumbsticks, mice and keyboards all seem to work.

As for teh soundcard, good luck finding one. If you do people want insane prices. I've looked for years for one , for the toshiba I mentioned earlier. Look for IBM Mwave pcmcia cards, as well as external cdroms. Sadly my pcmcia cdrom does not have a soundcard. I seem to recall there being one by Phillips? or was it Panasonic?

And lastly, I say grab an interlink cable if your going to do cable pc transfers. Much faster then serial, and around the same price, if you don't have either. :)
 
Wow, thanks for all the info everyone. I certainly have more options than I originally thought, that's for sure. It's sad to hear about the sound cards, but it's not a big deal. It would be nice to have, but I'm sure I'm not missing out on a whole lot. I'll probably try to find both a Null and interlink cable. Whenever I learn about something new like this I always am excited to try everything out :D
 
I think the the original creator of Calmira ended up being employed by MS. You can also do file transfer using parrallel ports. This is what twolazy is refering to. It's quicker than transferring serial port. These parrallell port file transfer cables were also refered to as "laplink" cables IIRC due to the fact LapLink software was bundled with them many moons ago. Both types can be used with utilities in Dos 6.x file transfer utilities intersvr and interlnk as barythrin mentioned.
 
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I suppose if you can't get a PCMCIA sound card, you might dig up a Disney Sound Source or other parallel-port DAC; I know iD Software at least supports that, I think a few other games might too.
 
I have one of those as well! >.< TBH in doom it doesn't even play music, your pc speaker still does. All it does are the gun effects, which tbh can be done with the pc speaker as well. The DSS neat toy to have to own, but its no where near SB quality effects. Bout par with the PC speaker, using the SB emulation driver. So might as well just use that. Supports SB as well as Tandy sound effects if I recall correctly. :)

http://cs.ozerki.net/zap/pub/vsb/
^ have to assemble that one yourself. I cant seem to find the compiled version. Its called "virtual sound blaster"

http://cd.textfiles.com/darkdomain/programs/dos/emulators/remus04g.zip
Another emulator, similar but more features. No source code available.
 
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As commodorejohn and twolazy said above,if you don't have a sound card don't worry!:)
There is a solution for you (even on windows).It is very simple and you can built it yourself.It is the old covox speech thing or LPTDAC.From here: http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hs_freeware/free.var you can download the drivers (the file you want is lptdac.zip).The driver from this site is better than the older one (that freezes the computer when the sound is played).You can also try Winplay3 with it (winplay3 plays mp3's fine with lptdac on my 486DX/66-I don't know how good it is on yours).With the above driver you can also have sound in a dos box from win 3.1 with some dos games (it emulates a soundblaster).There is also a special program that plays midi files from win3.1 with it but I must check my 486 to tell you what this is.The schematic to construct the LPTDAC is in the help file of the driver and is also available on the web!
 
angel_grig said:
As commodorejohn and twolazy said above,if you don't have a sound card don't worry!:)
There is a solution for you (even on windows).It is very simple and you can built it yourself.It is the old covox speech thing or LPTDAC.From here: http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hs_freeware/free.var you can download the drivers (the file you want is lptdac.zip).The driver from this site is better than the older one (that freezes the computer when the sound is played).You can also try Winplay3 with it (winplay3 plays mp3's fine with lptdac on my 486DX/66-I don't know how good it is on yours).With the above driver you can also have sound in a dos box from win 3.1 with some dos games (it emulates a soundblaster).There is also a special program that plays midi files from win3.1 with it but I must check my 486 to tell you what this is.The schematic to construct the LPTDAC is in the help file of the driver and is also available on the web!
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:facepalm:

facepalm.jpg
 
Well, I certainly have a lot to look for now. Thanks, everyone. Step one is going to be acquiring those cables. After I get some files on this and get a little more use out of it, I'll work on the sound. It just sounds like it's going to be a bit expensive for something I don't actively need. I certainly look forward to getting into a day-to-day use relationship with this :D
 
If you dbl read my post, it has a emulation driver for the pc speaker. It allows it to play soundblaster effects, among other cards. Totally free. Sounds pretty close to the LPT dac as well.
 
twolazy said:
If you dbl read my post, it has a emulation driver for the pc speaker. It allows it to play soundblaster effects, among other cards. Totally free. Sounds pretty close to the LPT dac as well.
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Ah yeah, for some reason I assumed that would require extra hardware, haha. Once I can start moving files I'll get on using one of those emulators!
 
Well, Professor, I can tell you that I just loaded Windows 98SE on 4.1 GB Toshiba hard drive, and Windows 2000 Professional on a 10.06 GB IBM hard drive, and both run flawlessly in my Contura 430CX, DX4-100 mHz, 32 mb RAM that I'm attempting to bring into the 21st century. I am using the IBM DiskGo Ontrack dynamic overlay software so the Compaq Bios is fooled into thinking that they are compatible hard drives. The Ontrack software partitioned the 4.1 gb hard drive into two usable partitions, and the IBM into 5 usable partitions, each being logical as a stand-alone drive.

The problem? Drivers for the Eigermedia PCMCIA SCSI card bus adapter are not available for Win 98 and Win2K, only Win95 and Win3.1. Both OS will recognize and start to install the card, but alas, it's all for not. I also purchased a Dynex USB 2.0 PCMCIA that does have drivers available for both OS, but the computer won't recognize that the card is inserted when it is. I bought a 5V DC adapter thinking that would correct, but it still didn't. The USB card loads fine on my HP Pavilion ZD-7010. I currently have a request on this forum for any information pertaining to making these cards work on the 430CX. After researching, I'm afraid the Eiger is history for me, and I plan to get an Adaptec 1460 or 1480 that Win98 and Win2000 has drivers for. Let me know if you are interested in the Eiger SCSI card. I'll make you a great deal on it. I've ran an Media Vision external CD-ROM on it back in it's Win95 days with no problems. Sadly, Gremlins invaded the CD-ROM unit during storage for several years, and now it doesn't read data discs correctly.

Glad to know there are folks out there still playing around with these old Compaqs.
 
You play doom and make great music with Cooledit, and maybe you go on with some autocad to construct your first car. There was also these cool programs creating your own worlds like Bryce 3D, and other programs supporting 3D mapping with raytracing. I think there was another good 3D render program which i do not remember the name on.

But off course you must make some music a midi keyboard, awe32->awe 64 gold->or a turtle beach card(or professional card if you can afford). And a nice sound module of Canvas series or why not a Korg. And then you need a sequensing program the simpler the better. Then you go on and blow out Gorillaz, Rihanna and lady Gaga hits. Or maybe just make the next one hit wonder ala LMFAO ;D

Oh and do not forget the old play the old sierras hits Monkey Island, Leisure suit Larry, maybe you can get Duke Nukem working with a VooDoo card inside great fun.

Off you go, and do not forget to post your last hit.

JT
 
Take a look on the bottom of this model laptop for any panels that come out without screws, I had an older laptop like this that had a 16-bit ISA slot on the bottom and had room for a sound blaster 16 card to be installed and I used that as sound on it for years. I'd love to find a 486 laptop like that.. I'd take it with me on trips and play doom.. God i'm such a nerd.

Anyway if that doesn't work there's always.. http://www.ebay.com/itm/110740655631 They're a tad expensive today to find some in RJ-45 ethernet edition but basicly they go onto the parallel / printer port and provide network connectivity. And I'd have to look but I'm fairly sure they're even included in the list of adapters in windows 3.11's default driver database so it would pretty much work out of the box, too. They're usually a little slow though, I think parellel can only push at about 32 KB/sec either direction, maybe even less than that.
 
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