Messages

241

Hardware / New X600's for SNAP users in the UK

« on: November 23, 2014, 02:47:51 pm »

Just a heads up for those in the UK that still use Scitech SNAP,

A gent on Ebay has new stocks of the 256MB dual screen DELL X600's that he is selling for about 13 smackers inc. postage and both types of adapter cables

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ATI-Radeon-X600-256Mb-PCIe-F9595-/290592069592?pt=UK_Computing_Computer_Components_Graphics_Video_TV_Cards_TW&hash=item43a8a317d8

the X600 is one of the few chipsets were SNAP supports both DVI and VGA connectors and in addition is fully accelerated.

Important to get the 256Mb version since there were gazillion different versions of the X300/X550/X600 that are all more or less the same chip with some features enabled so on so forth, only the 256 X600 are guaranteed to have full bandwidth, the 128 versions of this Dell card for instance were much slower.

242

Hardware / Re: Motherboard woes

« on: November 12, 2014, 08:00:09 pm »

I went to Frys' and spent 2 hours going over the motherboards they had and have narrowed my choices down to 5. 3 from MSI and 2 from Gigabyte.
The MSI model numbers are A88x-g43 runs a AMD pross. and uses realtech chip sets as both lan and sound. 84. USD
                                                     Z87-G41 PC Mate runs Intel pross. and uses the same chip set as the above board listed above. 109 USD
                                                     Z97-Gaming 3 runs Intel pross. a realteck sound and an off brand lan chip set. 139. USD
The Gigabyte boards model numbers are GA-Z97X-UD5H runs Intel pross. real tech sound chips and a lan chip I never heard of.
                                                                            GA-Z97X-SL1  Same specs as above.
If I choose the Gigabyte board I may have to get a generic lan card in case the on board chip set doesn't work.
I called customer service for both companies and I was not impressed with MSI.  Finally was told to push the F11 key on boot up to get legacy support.  Rep for Gigabyte said I should be able to change the settings in the Bios. Neither of them would would commit to whether I could get Legacy mode. Both of course have a UEFI Bios.
When I go back to Fry's I'm going to talk with the techs there (Maybe I'll luck out and find one that runs Linux)and see if they know.
I'm going back this Friday to purchase 1 of the above, but would like some feedback from you all.  If I choose one and it does not work I will go to  Linux until  there is a new release of OS/2 that supports UEFI.


Marc

The networking chip on the Z97-Gaming 3 is an Atheros chip, Qualcomm bought out the company and has been renaming the products with "gamer syntax", you should not worry about EFI, all boards I have seen come with a BIOS emulator, you might need to switch that on in the BIOS but most appear to have that automatic.

That AMD A88X board looks qewl, but who needs 8 SATA ports on a budget motherboard?

243

Hardware / Re: ESS 1869 sound card drivers for eCS 2.1?

« on: November 09, 2014, 06:15:00 pm »

Just use anonymous login (user=anonymous, password=email address)

Or even user=anonymous password=password

email addresses as passwords were more common in the olden days, modern browsers usually try an anonymous access before they ask for a password so if he uses a browser there should not be a problem

244

Programming / Re: Pascal through visual

« on: November 03, 2014, 08:49:18 pm »

Hi Mick,

You are probably referring to Sybil? (Sort of like Delphi, I think it shares class names etc)

WDSybil is the open source version: http://www.wdsibyl.org/en

There is also Virtual Pascal but I don't know whether the GUI part (Lazarus) is available for OS/2

Speedsoft Pascal became Sybil that in turn was forked into WDSybil and Lazarus. The original poster should download WDSybil (note that he has to register at the site listed above to be able to download the package). Lazarus is the frontend to FreePascal rather than Virtual Pascal and the first thing the Lazarus developers did when they started the project was to throw out the OS/2 part of the source and in general showed hostility to the idea of continuing OS/2 development of Lazarus, so despite the existence of a current FreePascal port to OS/2-eCS, a Lazarus port has never existed and probably never will.

245

Hardware / Re: Motherboard woes

« on: October 31, 2014, 11:52:26 pm »

Am running it 24 hours a day now. I'm looking for a new board.  I need 2 pci slots (3 would even be nicer). I'm running EC/S 2.1. Can anyone steer me to a motherboard that will work?

I will order this AMD one the next days: http://geizhals.de/msi-a88x-g41-pc-mate-7793-037r-a1074142.html

Before that, I looked at this Intel board (together with a cheap Intel CPU): http://geizhals.de/msi-h87-g41-pc-mate-7850-001r-a953906.html

I can't say that these boards work well. But from the infos I sampled over a longer time, I think they should.

Would he not be better off with a AMD board with a AM3+ socket? under eCS the GPU portion of the FM chip is kind of wasted and you can get a faster AM3+ or FX with an AM3+ pin layout than a comparable FM1/FM2 chip. A cheap GPU card would be a better buy ....

A cheap 760 board  like:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-760ga-p43-(fx)-amd-760g-s-am3plus-ddr3-sata-iii-6gb-s-sata-raid-pcie-20-(x16)-d-sub-atx

Or even a cheap 970 board that is much more up to date if he runs other OS's as well:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigabyte-ga-970a-ud3p-amd-970-sam3-am3plus-ddr3-pcie-20-(x16)-2-way-crossfirex-atx

246

Hardware / Re: Compaq Armada 1750 [Laptop]

« on: October 31, 2014, 05:09:48 am »

I have a few 1750 Armadas that I used to use for compatibility testing and debugging of software since virtual machines sometimes hiccuped on software that ran fine under real hardware. There was an incompatibility with eCS 2.0 Beta (mouse driver? CD ROM driver?, cannot remember) that we or Mensys never solved, but I do not think I ever tried 2.0 release or 2.1, I just vent back to 1.2, Amouse was OK under 1.2 and the system in general ran very well especially if you maxed out the memory.

Hi. Are you saying Amouse driver worked well with the touchpad, or with a ps/2 mouse? Because if you say it worked well with the touchpad I can try to install that version...
 Mine is a Compaq Armada 1750 Notebook PC 6366/T/6400/D/M/1.

With the internal trackpad & pointer

BTW the Armada 7800, 7400 and 1750 are basically the same model with different processors and some other very minor diffs, the 73xx has similar hardware to the 1750 but is lighter and thinner and slightly older thus not offering USB, you can share a base and batteries with all these models.

247

Hardware / Re: Compaq Armada 1750 [Laptop]

« on: October 30, 2014, 03:16:31 am »

I have a few 1750 Armadas that I used to use for compatibility testing and debugging of software since virtual machines sometimes hiccuped on software that ran fine under real hardware. There was an incompatibility with eCS 2.0 Beta (mouse driver? CD ROM driver?, cannot remember) that we or Mensys never solved, but I do not think I ever tried 2.0 release or 2.1, I just vent back to 1.2, Amouse was OK under 1.2 and the system in general ran very well especially if you maxed out the memory.

BTW the best video driver for them is the old pre-gradd driver, it has a minor bug in that the video display file does not have/create the correct size/frequency setting for the screen but that can be fixed by editing the file in text mode. Overall the original driver is much faster and less problematic than SNAP or Panorama.

There are more than one version of the 1750, the mouse and audio boards have different but closely related hardware, but very different layout. Audio is slightly flaky under any OS (Shitty chip), but works using the original drivers, did not test genaud.

The USB chip is a very early custom Compaq unit and has a known hardware bug in that it reset itself every now and then, but apart from that works fine in eCS, Win NT, Win9x, Win2K and WinXP, just as long as you realise that it is the hardware that is glitching on an occasion and not the drivers.

Although the reason I bought them at the time was simply that I could pick them up for 20 pounds apiece, they were actually quite usable, I ended up using one as may main OS/2 system and an alternative WinXP system for a few years. eCS ran fine but XP needed to be stripped to the bone to run in the rather meagre memory on offer, but the system could take larger disks than advertised and I managed to have a shared fat32 data partition so I could keep just one browser and email profile for both Windows and eCS.

248

Comments, Suggestions & Questions / Links on front page

« on: October 08, 2014, 08:05:01 pm »

Why on earth are there no links to the OS/2 Wiki, Edm/2 wiki etc. from the front page?

249

Programming / Re: ObjectVision

« on: September 28, 2014, 04:34:49 am »

Ah thanks

I'll give that a go.

I do remember that there was a native OS/2 version though. The windows version might work though.

There was, Version 1.x was 16bit but there was a version 2 (and possibly v2.1) for 32 bit OS/2 v2, however it came out only shortly before Borland dropped the development of Object Vision altogether and it was slower than the 16 bit version. A late beta of OV was shipped on an early Devcon disk, possibly DC1.

250

Programming / Re: Discussion about Open Source - Was: eCS 2.2 C API documentation

« on: August 28, 2014, 05:14:51 am »

I do not think it is fair to take MIT sources and convert the project based on them to this virus-like GPL.

I can also say that is not fair to use BSD code create an close source OS (NeXTSTEP was based on the Mach kernel and BSD, later NeXTSTEP was converted into Mac OS X). But that was complete legal according to the BSD license, and again, that is a personal opinion.

OS/2 PPC is based on the Mach kernel as well, most TCP/IP stacks were originally based on BSD code, includin most implementations that are now GPL, there is nothing dihonest about that, that is how the BSD lisence is intended to function.

What is dishonest is the tendency of GPL maintainers to strip the credits of the original programmers from the GPL'd code and only mention the "politically correct" later maintainers.

P.S. The mach kernel is a big pile of poo and one of the major minuses of the Mac OS. It was originally designed to take advantage of the fast context switching that PDP's, 68xxx and some early RISC processors offered, that made it torelable on 68030+ and PPC processors. That it is now only available on ARM and x86 which are both notoriusly slow at context switching is piss yourself funny.

251

Programming / Re: Closed source parts of eComStation

« on: March 28, 2014, 07:21:02 pm »

Regarding the multimedia subsystem, as far as the audio portion goes it would basically be better to start from anew since the OS/2 MM implementation was the first modern MM subsystem and is starting to show its age. In 1999 or 2000 Bob from Serenity systems said that the sourece code for the MM subsystem was available for those that wanted to work on it although it was not possible to open source it, does anyone know if the source was ever made available ?

I vaguely recall sending someone a mail about it at the time and not getting an answer ....

252

Article Discussions / Re: Happy Birthday OS2World - 14 years online

« on: March 28, 2014, 07:12:22 pm »

Kudos all round

253

Off Topic discussions / Re: MS DOS and Word for Windows source code released

« on: March 28, 2014, 07:10:07 pm »

XP will not be open sourced any time soon, XP embedded is supported to 2015 or even 2016 and the POS version of XP is technically still available even if it is considered legacy and is supported until 2019. MS is not going to open source something that will lead to competition against their own products