Welcome back to part 2 of my DOScember series, and if you’re wondering why it’s so late…
Well, lets just say I ran into a few issues - which of course I’ll talk about in this video.
In part 1 I took a look around this electronic Point Of Sale terminal with a view to turning
it into a dedicated DOS gaming powerhouse. I showed off the onboard diagnostic function
that runs DOS from a flash chip, tore it down to clean it out and checked out its
unique and interesting power supply situation, and even recovered some interesting files from
its previous life, so be sure to check that video out if you haven’t already.
In this one I’ll be fitting a new PSU, getting it all set up with its new OS, and investigating
sound and video options - with some very interesting unforeseen pitfalls along the way.
So without further ado, lets get to it.
First things first, I wanted a bit more space than the original 4GB hard drive could provide.
Usually I upgrade all of my old PCs to solid state using a Compact Flash card, but I didn’t have an
adapter spare for this one, so I’ve swapped this 40GB Seagate IDE hard drive in instead.
Of course when I realised I had one from the same rubbery coated range as the original unit,
I just knew it had to be done.
Formatting is just a case of booting from a Windows 98 startup disk and then running
FDISK to create the partition and formatting to FAT32. I’ll be installing Windows 98 on
here which of course sits on top of MS-DOS 7.1 - a perfectly legitimate version of DOS that was
released in 1996 alongside Windows 95 OSR2 and added some nice things like FAT32 support - and
once it’s all installed I’ll configure it to skip Windows and boot straight to the command line.
This machine doesn’t have a CD drive, so again I’ve hooked up the hard drive to my Raspberry
Pi to get the installation files copied across - at a bare minimum, the Windows 98 CAB files, a
few essential patches like the USB supplement so I can use USB flash drives with it, and the chipset
and network drivers so I can copy anything else I need from my NAS once it’s all up and running.
I always install Windows 9x using this method anyway because it means I don’t need to go
hunting for the original installation media every time I update something.
Incidentally, this Raspberry Pi is incredibly handy for this kind of stuff,
so if you want to see how I got it all set up as well as this cool case,
be sure to check out my video on it which I’ll link up above and down below in the description.
Back on the PC, it’s just a case of booting from that floppy again and then setting off the Windows
98 installation process from those local files as always, which of course all goes without a hitch.
After a couple of reboots I can install those drivers and we’re all ready to go.
Being a retail appliance of course, the DigiPOS doesn’t have a soundcard, so I decided to
install an old favourite - the trusty old ESS AudioDrive ES1868, a card that’s very common
and still pretty inexpensive to pick up, but also sounds great and is SoundBlaster Pro compatible.
It’s a plug and play card and this machine has a plug and play BIOS, so no issues there.
But this is where I ran into my first problem - despite the card
being recognised with no issues whatsoever, there was just no audio output from it.
So I borrowed a known working 1868 from my S3 ViRGE machine - link to that video in
the usual places - and that one was just making horrible distorted farting noises.
I thought this might be due to some kind of conflict, so spent a fair bit of time
messing around with IRQs and DMA channels and cursing plug and play for not being
all it was cracked up to be - an authentic late 90s PC experience, if nothing else.
After a huge amount of wasted time and frustration - and I’m talking literally a week or so - my good
friend Rich pointed out on my Discord server that I might be missing -12V on the ISA bus,
which of course should be on pin 7 of the back side of the card.
This voltage is required for some op amps to function and so is generally used by sound cards,
and I could see from the fingers on the AudioDrive cards that it was indeed being utilised. I tested
with a multimeter and confirmed that - indeed, there was nothing coming through on the -12V pin.
This pin did have continuity with the orange wire on that weird original power supply, which I’d
previously written off as useless as there was no voltage coming from it. So I put the whole
thing down to a faulty PSU which, to be honest, I’d been planning on swapping all along anyway.
I did a few further experiments with other PSUs with the -12V either connected or disconnected,
and interestingly enough had one that seemed to go into some kind of protection mode and refuse
to work at all with it connected, adding to the frustration. Nevertheless, I forged ahead anyway.
As you’ll remember from part 1, the PSU in this machine is mainly external,
with an internal power distribution board that supplies 9V, 12V or even 24V volts to the serial
ports for various bits of proprietary hardware, and of course this had to go.
In its place I decided to fit this medical grade power supply which I bought from mouser - and
I’m not kidding about that, with the manual mentioning things like an oral irrigator,
dialysis machines and various other scary sounding devices.
But it’s the right size for the hole and provides the required voltages - just bear in mind that as
an open frame PSU, there are live parts exposed including the heatsinks, so don’t touch those.
I decided to mount it to the case using some brass standoffs, so after marking the position
I drilled some holes for the screws. Despite my nonexistent metalworking skills the holes
ended up in the right places and nobody lost any fingers, so I count that as a success.
While I remembered, I also decided to pop a new CMOS battery in,
as I was getting pretty bored of having to set the time and date on every single boot.
Those proprietary powered serial ports that I mentioned are of course no longer required,
but they’ll work just fine as normal COM ports and so I decided to keep them despite not having
an immediate use for them as the motherboard also supports PS/2 and USB. I removed the wiring for
the extra voltage - this connects to pin 9, which is usually used as the Ring Indicator to indicate
to the OS that a connected modem is receiving an incoming call. I’m actually not really sure
how the original power distribution board passed this signal through to the motherboard - although
the manual tells me it was indeed supported - but it’s not a function I’ll be using anyway.
Of course, removing the black wire means that these ports are no longer grounded on
pin 5 - and it’s something I want to sort out in future by either grounding them to the case or
rewiring them to the motherboard connectors properly, which do seem to be fully wired,
but that’s very low priority for the moment so I’ll add it to the to-do list.
Onto the cooling situation now, and the original case fans were incredibly rattly and old,
so I ordered some cheap supposedly silent replacements made by a company
called Fractal Design. Thankfully they make a 50mm 12V fan which fit the bill
for this machine’s heat pipe based cooling setup.
The original screws weren’t long enough for the new fan, but I managed to find some
longer M3 bolts and used some washers to get everything installed securely.
I also swapped the modern connector for the one from the original fan,
a step apparently so boring that I forgot to record any footage of it.
As far as the other 40mm fan on the PSU side is concerned…
Well, I’m still waiting for that one to arrive, so I guess I’m stuck with the original for now.
Incidentally I certainly can’t grumble about the Fractal Design fan for the price - it’s
pretty quiet, and most of the noise you hear is being picked up from that other 40mm fan.
Back on to the PSU, and I decided to adapt the original wiring just for convenience.
The pinout is slightly different and of course the type of plug is different too,
this one using JVH connectors on the input and output sides,
so I crimped those on for a nice tidy, professional finish.
Being an industrial PSU, I also had to hook up the IEC socket,
and found this nice switched one that was originally intended for my arcade cab project.
This point of sale terminal doesn’t support ACPI shutdown so a mains switch is a must.
I crimped the JVH connector on as before and reused the original earth wire from the old PSU.
This all fits quite nicely into the original opening on the back of the
case where those custom connectors were before,
and although I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not the neatest job in the world, it’ll certainly
do for now and is something I’d like to revisit in future with a custom 3D printed solution.
First power on, and all seems to be working as it should. I left that
orange wire for the -12V disconnected as I knew it wasn’t required for the PC to boot
and was well aware that it had caused issues with that previous test PSU,
but plugging it in and testing confirmed that everything seemed to be working great.
With everything back together I could finally start playing some games, and it was when copying
stuff over from my NAS I discovered this cool little feature that I’d never seen before. This
machine has a LAN activity LED on the front panel. Well, you know what they say about simple things.
So as you can hear, the sound card is now working amazingly well - success!
The great thing about this machine being such a high spec is that it
can run a very broad range of stuff from Commander Keen..
To Carmageddon.
And of course everything else in between.
Of course, you’d think that this would also make for a very capable Windows 98
gaming machine considering the specs - after all,
there’s plenty of early Windows 9x stuff that runs just fine on my Pentium MMX machine.
But as ably demonstrated by our old friend Tony Hawk here (hello) - a game that should supposedly
run on a system half the speed of this one - there are evidently serious performance issues
in both hardware and software rendering modes, and that’s something I still need to look into.
Perhaps using Daemon Tools to emulate the CD is eating up too many CPU cycles, but hey,
this is DOScember, and now we’re into Windows stuff, so that’s definitely something for a future
video - and if you’re interested in that, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so you don’t
miss any future updates on this and indeed my other retro computing and gaming stuff.
So, you may have spotted in a few shots that I actually put an original Orchid Righteous3D
Voodoo graphics card in here, and indeed early 3D DOS gaming was something I wanted to touch on
in this video, but that card just doesn’t seem to work in this machine despite being perfectly
fine in a couple of others - it’s recognised, the relays click when a game attempts to use
it - but then I either get a black screen or a weird scrambled static image. I’d love to
get it working so I can demo it properly so it’s another thing that’s on the to-do list.
As you can also see I’m now using this machine with a CRT,
so you can all stop moaning at me about that on Instagram. Obviously that was the plan all
along but I really needed the desk space to be able to work on this, and I’d love to try to
source a smaller CRT to use with this if I can as - well - this 17” one just looks ridiculous.
As far as other upgrades are concerned - I did have a look into a K6-2+ CPU or maybe even a K6-3,
but they’re very rare and expensive and to be honest, I don’t think would offer much
gain for my purposes anyway. I’ll keep an eye out but it’s certainly not a priority.
But for now I think I’ve fulfilled my original brief of turning this rather
boring electronic point of sale system into a really capable DOS gaming machine,
and despite the various challenges it has been a lot of fun to put together.
I hope you’ve enjoyed joining me on this journey as well as checking out everything else DOScember
has had to offer this year, and as always there’s a link to the playlist in the description.
So all that’s left is for me to thank you for watching, big thanks as always
to my patrons and channel members whose names you can see on screen as I speak.
Please do feel free to give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it,
it helps increase the visibility of my videos and helps me grow the channel into the future.
I hope you have a fantastic new year,
all the best for 2022, and I’ll hopefully see you again next time.