I had an itch to do some retro computing 😀 My roots are Atari800, then some #286 and finally my own #486. With popularity of #retrocomputing , highish prices, space requirements and need to recap old hw, I looked for emulation. #Dosbox was ok, #dosbox -x was better, but still paravirtualizes OS and IO, and had compatibility issues. Finally tried #86box 4.2! I went with late 286-20 with 4MiB, VGA and SB2.0, but modern FreeDos 1.3. Here is a little demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9RO-RDrUFw
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286s are tricky to setup as most real memory optimizations require 386, while 286 bioses don’t shadow ram into 640-1024KiB. Between installing a 128KiB ram board into UMB and enabling it with hiram.exe, then himem.sys to get HMA and XMS and emm286 to get XMS->EMS for older business apps, I was able to make real good use of those 4MiB :) I had to grab himem from msdos 6.22, as well as smartdrv.exe as Freedos needed 386 for equivalents and ncache.exe and ncache2.exe didn’t like 286.
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ATAPI CDROM was not recognized in 286 bios (wai), but uniide.exe package came to the rescue. Freedos iso9660 driver didn’t like 286, so I went with mscdex.exe from 6.22. It all worked out, wolf3d.exe plays great, as does attack of petsci robots and keen4 :) Even Desqview 2.80 runs perfectly for business apps as long as EMM286 is disabled. Not bad for a late 286 machine :)
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@FeCO if your bios has shadow memory then enable it, otherwise you need an ISA memory card which allows mapping into umb. Once you have actual RAM in UMB then you can use hiram. I configured it from freedos boot up scripts (forgot the names atm - let me know if you want them).
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@FeCO sg, I’ll look it up when I’m home. Note this is with freedos 1.3 but a bunch of files from msdos 6.22 since those still support 286. Msg me your email on priv and I can send you a bunch of files.
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@FeCO posting important snippets from my FDCONFIG.SYS: 1?DEVICE=C:\freedos\drivers\hiram\hiram.exe 1?DEVICEHIGH=C:\SYS\HIMEM.SYS /A20CONTROL:ON /SHADOWRAM:ON /TESTMEM:ON /VERBOSE:ON 1?DEVICEHIGH=C:\SYS\EMM286.EXE 512 1?DOS=high,umb 1?DOSDATA=high,umb 1?DEVICE=C:\SYS\SMARTDRV.EXE 1?DEVICEHIGH=C:\SYS\CDPRO\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:MSCD001 /P:1F0,14 /P:170,15 /P:1E8,12 /P:168,10
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@FeCO sent!