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Unisys CWD 486 computer

J

jonnymacuser

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2011
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california
This is a shout out to UNISYS for making such a neat business-class "workstation"!!!

Someone even made an entire website *dedicated* to these boxes:
http://www.sworks.com/keng/unisys.shtml

And a youtube video:
http://youtu.be/8gZtEgd_TjU

Where's my DOS viruses floppy???

InforWorld article (Apr 10, 1995):
http://books.google.com/books?id=oT...CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=unisys cwd 486&f=false


This is how you do it:
011-1.jpg



p.s., actually I'm looking for malware to test on this thing, pm me.
 
Unisys CWD 486 computer

My machine came with a 486 DX2/33 but others have put faster CPUs in these machines.The Unisys CWD a brand of 486 computers from the late 90's that are tiny in form factor.


Sarkari Naukri
 
JonSon said:
My machine came with a 486 DX2/33 but others have put faster CPUs in these machines.The Unisys CWD a brand of 486 computers from the late 90's that are tiny in form factor.


Sarkari Naukri
Click to expand...

I know I am being a thread necro.. but I have two of those PC's and a 5001, and I have to know.. what are you using for the CD drive? Is it a scsi and you don't have a sound card.. or do you have a serial/parallel one by chance? Just want to know what I should be looking for because getting games on mine is a hassle lol.
 
I just recieved my 486/DX2/66 and currently think about the soundcard for it. I think an AWE64 is not the right thing, because it does not support sb-pro in stereo.
A sb-pro (ct1600) does not work with softmpu, so hooking up to an mt32 is not possible. I think I will go for an audician32plus with softmpu. Perhaps the DX2/66
is too fast, I think about downsizing to a 486/DX33. That should be a really good dosgame-basis.
 
It's a really tricky machine when it comes to using all components like the onboard LAN and a soundcard.
It's some strange PNP Bios, you can't really control :(
Getting MSDOS right and working with LAN and SOUND, can lead to a crash in NT351 and afterwords no Dos-LAN and Sound.

NT351 leads to a freeze, but I managed to get Win95 working alongside with Dos. Both do install the same resources now, but I had to do manual configuration within win95.
I deactivated the Lan and Soundcard-Detection. Installed the ESS1868 Manager first, then the PNP Audiodrive and configured it manually to the Dos-Settings (A220 I5 D1 D3 330 201).
After that I installed a NE2000 and changed it from 15 to 10 and from 240 to 300, so exactly what is used and configured in dos.

Now OS/2 Warp3 is getting tested, hopefully the sound can be installed without killing the actual configuration. After that I will have another attempt on NT351.

Any Idea where I can find the latest BIOS and DRIVERS for that thing? I use Intel ICU PNP manager, without this nothing works with that damn thing :)

Before the Intel PNP manager this thing did not accept ANY soundcard https://www.flickr.com/photos/94839221@N05/albums/72157683681646872
 
I recently acquired one of these little 486s, and I'm a fan. Mine's the CWD4001. I thought I'd give a brief status of mine as I learn about it and configure it.

BIOS:
No luck updating the BIOS. There don't seem to have been any updates made available for this machine. Using the BIOS ID, I've located some compatible BIOSes, but haven't had any luck flashing them so far. No biggie, things seem to work, so I'm tabling this for now.

RAM:
I expected the system to top out at 16MB modules, but it happily accepts 32MB SIMMs. Note that if the modules have a 2nd row of chips, they'll be tall enough to block the ISA slot.

IDE:
The coolest thing I've been able to do is get XTIDE running directly on the motherboard. There's an undocumented boot ROM socket (marked U11 on my board) for the onboard NE2000 NIC. If you search for "Accton UK0022," you can find the driver and setup utility for this NIC. I enabled the NIC's boot ROM and voila! The only odd thing is, when enabling the ROM it lets you pick the address but not the ROM size. I tried a 16kb chip for XTIDE and that worked perfectly.

More to come...

HTH
 
I am using 2x2GB CF-Cards on the internal IDE-Controller. What will be the advantage of having XTIDE working on the IDE-port?
 
There's many advantages of the XTIDE ROM, but I'm mostly using it for large-device addressing. For the moment, I'm booting off a 4GB SSD and using a 64GB CF as a data volume.
 
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