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My new Super Socket 7 tweener build.

RWallmow

RWallmow

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
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Location
Anoka, MN USA
Decided I wanted a new "tweener" machine that has ISA slots...

I knew I had a super 7 board with ISA lying out in the garage in parts box, found it was a Gigabyte GA-5SMM with a Cyrix 266 in it. Took a scrapped Compaq DeskPro EXD desktop style mini-ATX case (originally a Celeron 800 by its sticker), 20gb HD, 128mb RAM, CD-ROM, 3.5 & 5.25" floppies, Intel Pro/100 NIC and tossed it all together to make a new rig.

Got Win95b loaded up on it, don't have USB working yet, but the rest is running like a champ. I haven't investigated the USB issues, but I believe the driver was just not part of any of the packages on gigabytes site, I might need to dig around SIS's site for a while to see if they have 95b drivers for the USB chipset. USB is not real critical to me in this build though, since any file transfer will likely be from the network, but it would be nice to say its working ;-)

I will do an entry on my blog site too once I have some pics of this thing.
It's kind of ironic I stuck this in a Compaq case, because I guess this particular GA-5SMM was out of a Compaq with its nice big red "Compaq" BIOS splash :geek:

I should note I was inspired to do this because of bettablue's posting, so props to him :)
 
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I never had USB until 98 but I thought that Win95c was the first to have support for it. I could be wrong though, I really had never jumped on the technology since it seemed slow and I didn't trust external connections that didn't have screws at the time lol.

Congrats though. Having a nice in between system is very convenient for a reliable system to image media from.
 
Here's a bit of a usb guide http://www.usbman.com/Win95 USB Guide.htm NT 4.0 didn't officially it but using Dell and other third party drivers I managed to get it talking to usb sticks, sd cards and the like. Didn't cost anything other than a bit of time doing research. Basicly did it to see how far I'd get. Compared to what was available to Win98 and W2k up though both win95b/c and NT are fairly limited though.
 
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Caluser2000 said:
Here's a bit of a usb guide http://www.usbman.com/Win95 USB Guide.htm NT 4.0 didn't officially it but using Dell and other third party drivers I managed to get it recognising usb sticks, sd cards and the like.
Click to expand...

Yeah my work was on NT4 till 2003ish, we had some working USB hardware like zip and flash drives. But I have no experience with 95 and USB till this rig. I will give it a go later, really only spent about 15 min on it tonight.
 
The tweener I've been using for some time now has three ISA and four PCI slots with a Cyrix 266 processor. It's in a tower with five external and two or three internal bays. It has a CD, 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. But the best part is its Lian Li Mobile (removeable) Hard Drive Rack.

http://www.jclcompany.com/mobile/rh10.php

http://www.silverpcs.com/lian-li-rh-12-ide-mobile-rack/

With this I change hard drives in a second or two and reboot. I've got one cartridge with ME, one with XP, and one with DOS & 32-bit FAT from 98SE. The latter allows for large partititions in a DOS-like environment and that provides for lots of flexibility and needless to say, lots of room for DOS activities.
 
Very nondescript and beige just seems so right some how. I've got the smaller EN complete with. It has just the one 51/2" bay. Haven't decided what to do with it yet.

I hope you get a lot of use out of your one.
 
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Careful now, you know using IE is like signing pact with the devil ;) Hack-a-day would wet their pants if you submit a screen shot to them with their home page on it.
 
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Caluser2000 said:
Careful now, you know using IE is like signing pact with the devil ;) Hack-a-day would wet their pants if you submit a screen shot to them with their home page on it.
Click to expand...

If anyone remembers how to hack IE 5.5 that is ;-)

It's not like Win95b is all that secure to begin with, Its like leaving on vacation (holiday for you) and not locking any of your doors, running IE 5.5 is like taking all your doors with you lol ;-)
 
Looks like it renders the VCF site ok. Any js errors at all?

Just went and had a gander at your blog. I see you've got a brother of my CDS 524.
 
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Caluser2000 said:
Looks like it renders the VCF site ok. Any js errors at all?
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Tons, and it crashes a lot, lol.

Was just for proof of concept really, I wont be doing much, if any browsing from this PC.

Caluser2000 said:
Just went and had a gander at your blog. I see you've got a brother of my CDS 524.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have the CDTV 520, though I removed (but still have) the TV Tuner since it had no driver support past Windows 3.1. Even if I were to load 3.1 on this thing, it was not that great of a TV tuner to begin with.
 
You know, I did some more digging, and I found a AMD K6-300AFR, there just might be an upgrade in this boxes near future, I was always much more of an AMD fan back in this era, would be a fitting swap. Though I will need to pick up a proper Socket 7 fan/heatsink. I am currently cooling the Cyrix with a socket 370 heatsink (missing its fan) and some cardboard ducting to the rear case fan, lol.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Here's a bit of a usb guide http://www.usbman.com/Win95 USB Guide.htm NT 4.0 didn't officially it but using Dell and other third party drivers I managed to get it talking to usb sticks, sd cards and the like. Didn't cost anything other than a bit of time doing research. Basicly did it to see how far I'd get. Compared to what was available to Win98 and W2k up though both win95b/c and NT are fairly limited though.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the mention. And, thanks for including the link to the Windows 95 Guide. Do you think that given what I've done with my socket 7 build that Windows 95 B or C would be of any real benefit over Win 98? Personally, I really would prefer Win 95 over Win 98. At the same time, I know device support is much better in 98. The Windows 95 guide seems to provide excellent information for adding USB support, so things like my card reader, and USB cards shouldn't have any problem with a bit of tweaking that is.

Do you have any other tips, or items I should be aware of?
 
The single benefit to running Windows 95 B or C over Win98 that I can think of is that a number of MPEG decoder expansion cards had drivers that work with Win 95 but not Win 98. The cards tend to be really cheap; finding the correct cable to link the card to the video card is very difficult. How much do you want to showoff the capabilities of Pentium class systems?
 
If you're going to use this build to transfer and make disk images, and you've got Windows 95 to recognize removable flash media, then I think you're good as it is. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

One minor annoyance is that you have to take the time to "eject" removable drives in these early Windows versions. Not being able to disable background caching hinders the hot swap ability.
 
I have been kind of toying with the idea of NT4 on this box now, I could join it to my domain, plus I remember the 3rd party USB support I used actually seemed pretty decent, I know I had quite a few USB peripherals working on my work PC back when we ran NT4 there. I know I had a USB CD drive, Zip, and flash drives working perfectly, a Windows mobile PDA, a USB scroll mouse (native USB, NOT via BIOS PS2 emulation), and I seem to recall a scanner too (thought that may have been SCSI, its been almost a decade, memory is a little hazy).

I don't remember which USB driver packs, or combination of driver packs I used back then, but it was pretty stable, I do remember I WASN'T using the Iomega drivers though, they BSOD'd, A LOT.

Man, now I am getting all nostalgic for NT4, lol
 
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