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Evie's Conquests

rickrob said:
That one is clean.  I saw all those when I was there and I was wondering how many Model 70's were in that stack...

What version of OS/2 are you planning to run on it?
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Probably 2.1 or 2.11. Anything newer might have issues on a 386.

 
I doubt you'd *technically* have a problem with any version of OS/2 on a 386. (Or at least any IBM released version, your mileage may vary if you start talking about eComstation and all its pre-installed add-ons.) I suspect the biggest limiter is going to to be RAM. 6MB is going to be pretty tight even for 2.x. (I ran it briefly in 4MB, and that wasn't pretty. 8MB was... okay. Just okay.)

 
Oh, I plan to upgrade the RAM to 16MB anyway. 6MB is only good enough for DOS and Windows 3.1.

Just will need to find some 8MB parity SIMMs, since there's no other way to get 16MB with 3 RAM slots.

 
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I'm pretty sure that 2mb is the biggest SIMM those boards accept, IE, if you want more than six megs of RAM you'll need to add a memory card. (Silly, I know.)

 
Well, you CAN install a memory expansion board.  This memory isn't as quick as mainboard memory, but its a far sight better than hard drive cacheing or having programs NOT run at all.

 
Gorgonops said:
I'm pretty sure that 2mb is the biggest SIMM those boards accept, IE, if you want more than six megs of RAM you'll need to add a memory card. (Silly, I know.)
Click to expand...
Seriously? That's lame as hell. God I hate old RAM limitations.

That's another card I gotta track down...

 
Yeah. You'd think IBM might have had at least enough foresight to support 4MB but, no.

Another oddity of the first-gen 386 PS/2s (70, 80) is the DMA controller on the motherboard only supports a 24 bit address space. Therefore going above 16MB of RAM even with an expansion card requires some trickery. TL;DR basically boils down to if you're looking to go over 14MB of RAM look for a third-party card that has the BIOS extensions and memory controller to work "plug and play". (It's possible to break the 16MB barrier with options IBM sold but there's some mickey-mouse limitations and config nastiness.)

 
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I've only found one MCA memory expansion card so far (made by some company called Boca) and I don't know what it does or doesn't support.

 
Yep, definitely looks like the Bocaram/2 Plus to me. So with 8 1MB SIMMs that would give me 14MB, which should be serviceable enough for old versions of OS/2.

 
It looks to me like that Boca card is only 16 bit? Googling for compatibility it looks like it will work in a Model 70, but I can only assume it'll be slower than a 32 bit card. Maybe it's not going to matter that much.

20 years ago I had a small pile of RAM cards for PS/2s that I ended up with... somehow, I don't even remember. Had a couple Orchard 16/32 cards that I think took up to 32MB. Sort of wish I'd held onto them now...

 
I'm not a fan of that card to be honest.  Double so at that price.

Onboard is fine.  I've never had any real issues.  That said, the XGA2 card is what I would use if onboard was insufficient.  

 
125 dollars?! I wasn't even sure if I was going to buy a video card...not unless I got a good deal on an IBM XGA card.

 
luckybob said:
I'm not a fan of that card to be honest.  Double so at that price.
Click to expand...
I was being mostly tongue-in-cheek, of course. The ATI 8514 Ultra cards are significantly better than IBM's original 8514/A adapters but they're still by no means great. It's just the flippy-form-factor that makes them awesome. (There may have been a few other dual AT/Microchannel cards made but I can't name any off the top of my head.)

The Microchannel version of the ATI Mach 32 Ultra would be one heck of a find. I'm sure eBay would want ONE MILLION DOLLARS for that.

 
yes, I would REALLY want one of those for my model 95.  I have little hope in finding one, but stranger things have happened.  I mean I did just find the dual Tualatin board I've spent 10+ years looking for.  

 
When it comes to uncommon stuff, I'd be happy just to find a dual-PPro workstation without having to spend ~500 dollars building one.

 
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