techThursday, October 28, 2004
got a new(to me) pentium
yes, that's "pentium", not "Pentium 4" or even "Pentium 3". It's a 200 Mhz P1. 32 Mb RAM. No Harddrive.
I plan to stick a 8 gig HD in there and maybe use it for a router or something. Or just play some old DOS games on it. I'll need to get the DOS drivers for the integrated audio though - which means that I'll have to figure out what the audio chipset is and all that.
I already have all the dos games setup on a 400mb HD that I picked up a while ago. I'd setup a 100Mhz Pentium with a bunch of old games and given it to my brother. I put 2 hd's in there a 500 and a 400, but all the games don't come close to filling the 500, so I copied them all over to the 400 and kept it.
I stuck the 400 in a non-outdated computer and burned all the games along with dosbox to a cd for playing on faster computers. It works pretty well. A lot of the stuff will even run directly from the cd - no need to copy it to the hd first.
While setting up the hd's with all the games and trying to copy large directories in DOS on a 100Mhz Pentium (and probably ATA-33 HD), I was reminded that MS-DOS really is a piece of junk operating system. Much of my command line work has been in linux lately, so I really miss some of the features which DOS is lacking of - like the ability to recursively copy several directories without typing a seperate command for each one or instead writing a very long "for ... in ... do ..." command and wanting to kill the fool who came up with the syntax (for copy, xcopy, and for/in/do)
And what is with dos's copy command.... it can't handle recursive copies at all. Is the operating system so poorly designed that they have to have a seperate program (xcopy is a seperate executable) just to offer recursive copying? And if you think the copy command is bad, just take a look at the move command - what a worthless piece of junk that is. It's barely more functional than rename - I think it may be just another alias for rename in fact.
I'll have to see if DOSEmu can handle soundblaster emulation very well.
I plan to stick a 8 gig HD in there and maybe use it for a router or something. Or just play some old DOS games on it. I'll need to get the DOS drivers for the integrated audio though - which means that I'll have to figure out what the audio chipset is and all that.
I already have all the dos games setup on a 400mb HD that I picked up a while ago. I'd setup a 100Mhz Pentium with a bunch of old games and given it to my brother. I put 2 hd's in there a 500 and a 400, but all the games don't come close to filling the 500, so I copied them all over to the 400 and kept it.
I stuck the 400 in a non-outdated computer and burned all the games along with dosbox to a cd for playing on faster computers. It works pretty well. A lot of the stuff will even run directly from the cd - no need to copy it to the hd first.
While setting up the hd's with all the games and trying to copy large directories in DOS on a 100Mhz Pentium (and probably ATA-33 HD), I was reminded that MS-DOS really is a piece of junk operating system. Much of my command line work has been in linux lately, so I really miss some of the features which DOS is lacking of - like the ability to recursively copy several directories without typing a seperate command for each one or instead writing a very long "for ... in ... do ..." command and wanting to kill the fool who came up with the syntax (for copy, xcopy, and for/in/do)
And what is with dos's copy command.... it can't handle recursive copies at all. Is the operating system so poorly designed that they have to have a seperate program (xcopy is a seperate executable) just to offer recursive copying? And if you think the copy command is bad, just take a look at the move command - what a worthless piece of junk that is. It's barely more functional than rename - I think it may be just another alias for rename in fact.
I'll have to see if DOSEmu can handle soundblaster emulation very well.
