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Some random pics of Win 95/98 games that got added to SW list so far:

















TODO: try to make a Japanese Win 95/98 CHD disk.
Also fix the damn VGA bugs ...

What emulated graphics card?

I am playing with the ibm5170 driver. I created a standard type 3 hard disk (chdman createhd -o 30MB.hd -chs 615,6,17) and use it as harddisk1. Booting with the diagnostic diskette image allows me to set the hard disk to type 3. Diagnostics of the disk work fine with the exception of the "error correction" test: This one shows a "time out" error.

After rebooting with a DOS 3.3 diskette I can FDISK and FORMAT the hard disk. I can also create a directory DOS and copy the contents of the floppy to this directory. I can successfully "type" (i.e. read back) the autoexec.bat file.

Apart from this, the disk does not work: When I execute BASICA I get a read error, CHKDSK shows multiple errors and then tells me the disk is not ready, and the disk is not bootable.

The default slot allocation looks suspicious: "IDE Fixed Drive Adapter". Didn't the 5170 still use an MFM controller, just like the IBM5160? And didn't the controller card do both floppies and hard disks? On the other hand: When I switch to the "hdc" controller, I get a "1782-Disk Controller Failure" from BIOS.

All in all I am a bit confused. Maybe the ibm5170 is just not ready to be played with Thanks for any insight or additional information.

I had to use "-c none" to get a writeable hard disk, so i'd recommend

createhd -c none -chs 615,6,17 -ss 512 -o 30MB.hd

Thanks for your recommendation. The defaults are already for 512 byte sectors and no compression, so unfortunately this does not change the result.
The generated disk as such is fine. When I use it with another driver (e.g. atvga, or ibm5160) it works as expected.

Yes, but not like the 5160. The AT HDD controller is the ancestor of IDE and the earliest IDE drives are 100% compatible. There is some bug in our emulation that is causing the problem.

A few weeks ago I tried to talk a guy through dumping the ROM of his COMPAQ Portable 386 from inside DOS over email. The resulting file must have been corrupted by a banking scheme as the driver complained about a "ROM error".



I the meantime I got a Portable 386 by myself, and I dumped the ROMs by reading them out directly, but simply plugging them into the at386 driver doesn't work - the RAM is counted until 128K or 192K, and then a "Memory error" is shown.



My machine comes with the regular 2MB RAM on board and a 4MB expansion, counting up to 6144KB during the POST.

Interestingly enough, the machine has been modded to accept a 210MB harddisk as "Type 1", and this is reflected on the handwritten ROM labels. This Portable 386 has a Seagate 1239A drive installed that is chock-full with a boot manager (Bootcon) and company software in DOS and Windows 3.1 flavours. Exiting Windows or the DOS file manager forces a shutdown.

Here and on the FTP are the ROMs, docs, DOS distributions and a bootdisk made on the Portable 386 as well as photos

After some coaxing I managed to dump the harddisk on a Linux machine via dd, but after converting the image to CHD, I can see the contents, but the image doesn't boot (I used ct486 to autodetect the harddisk parameters).



Could someone please find out the C-H-S parameters for the modified Type 1 210MB harddisk from the Portable 386 BIOS, so I can try to image the harddisk again with those parameters? Is there another trick to get a bootable disk image using dd (I used "sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=filename"; sda was determined by "sudo fdisk -l" first).

While I won't be able to release the hard disk image (the company this machine belonged to still exists), I'd like to preserve the unique setup.

Look at the mbr and use the geometry shown there. That drive only supports a limited number of geometry translations.

I read 8 heads, 45 sectors/track, 813 cylinders in the MBR posted below.
Is that correct? (Sorry, doing that for the first time )
There appears to be a discrepancy in the LBA value of the partition entry - is that even used in an early drive like this?

Looks like 1015,8,45 to me. That's an odd translation becuase it gives only 187MB on a 211MB drive.