alyssavance
New Member
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2024
- Messages
- 1
I really, really wanted to like this computer. A genuine 8088 PC, but factory new and built with modern parts, for less than $200? Sign me up! Unfortunately, the problems kept multiplying, so I thought I would record my tales of woe for posterity. I expect weird issues when I buy very old hardware off eBay, but this is largely brand new equipment, so I'm a lot less forgiving here. (I'm far from infallible, but I'm a senior software engineer with a decade of experience and several other vintage machines, so I don't think I'm a total noob. If anyone has ideas, please do tell me, but I'm honestly close to just giving up at this point.)
- To start with the obvious, the keyboard is fairly small and annoying to type on. I often had to hit keys many times before the key press would register. There is no PS/2 port, so no easy way to use an external keyboard.
- As the other thread documents (https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/book-8088-discovery-and-modification-thread.1245155/), VGA graphics often do not work at all, either on Windows 3.0 or some other software like MATLAB 3.5. The screen goes completely dark when the machine uses VGA mode.
- EGA graphics sort of work, but the entire image is shifted to the left somewhat, so there's a black bar on the right and the left side of the screen is cut off. There is no video-out port, so no way to use an external monitor without installing an add-on video card. (The "mode 80" trick did not work.)
- The expansion slots are only 8-bit, so various 16-bit (long) ISA cards do not work.
- There is a slot for an 8087 FPU co-processor, but when I bought one and installed it, not only did the chip not function, but the entire BIOS refused to boot. (Granted, I'm not totally sure if this is a computer issue or a chip issue, but the chip was sold as working on eBay.)
- There is no A: floppy drive, either a real drive or an emulated drive. This became a problem with various old DOS software, which came on disk images and expected to be installed via disk. Several programs refused to install, since the only way to install them was to copy them off their images and put them on a USB drive (assigned to D, but the installers refused to run without being located on A:. This also means there's no backup boot method if anything happens to the main C: CompactFlash drive.
- There's no CD-ROM drive, or way to boot from CD-ROM. This may be expected for a machine meant to act like a PC/AT - I think CD-ROM boot wasn't invented until the 90s? - but makes things harder when there's also no floppy drive.
- The game Star Control II did not work due to out-of-memory errors, although it should work on an 8088 with 640K. It failed to start even when mem said there was more free memory than it was asking for, maybe because of a memory map issue (?).
- I tried to install FreeDOS on the machine, since it's more modern and conveniently comes packaged with tons of useful software. This didn't work, on boot there were cryptic errors about partition table bytes. I contacted the manufacturer, and they said that FreeDOS wasn't expected to work on this machine, but they didn't say why (it should work on 8088s, AFAICT).
- After trying FreeDOS, I tried to restore the original OS, but it kept not working. First, I had saved a copy of the files on the CompactFlash card, so I tried just wiping the partition and putting those files back on the card. Boot failed. Then, since there was no floppy or CD-ROM drive, I started up 86Box, created a virtual hard disk, installed MS-DOS to that, and then copied the disk bytes over to the card. I tried both MS-DOS 5 and MS-DOS 6.22, neither would boot. Either the BIOS said operating system not found, or after saying "Booting C>>C", it just froze completely.
- I asked the manufacturer for a copy of the original disk image, which they did give me, to their credit. Unfortunately, it was a .GHO Norton Ghost file, a proprietary format only used by an obsolete Windows-only disk backup program which was discontinued years ago, so it was annoying to actually use it. However, when I converted it to a standard FAT image and then flashed that to the card, even that didn't work and it still wouldn't boot.
- The CompactFlash card I got with the computer acted very strangely. The initial disk partition was 512 MB, which was reasonable. But when I tried to use dd to wipe it before writing a new partition table, it kept writing bytes all the way out to 64 GB of data. I'm not sure if it was actually a 64 GB card with a 512 MB image on it, or if it was 512 MB and was misreporting somehow as being 64 GB. Using standard Linux disk tools (fdisk, gparted, etc.) gave weird results - sometimes I'd delete a partition and then it seemed to still be there, sometimes I'd make a partition and it was created in the wrong size, etc.