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My Pentium I Build Thread

I plan to use this machine chiefly under DOS, but I wanted to have windows95 installed as well because reasons. Since I already have a bootable dos 7.1 install present I did what I usually do for installing windows: copied the folder over to the drive, then ran setup from DOS. I do this regularly on windows 98 but have never installed 95.

Got this error:

Error SU0013

Setup could not create files on your startup drive and cannot set up Windows.

If you have HPFS or Windows NT file system, you must create an MS-DOS Boot Partition. If you have LANtastic server or SuperStor compression, disable it before running Setup. See Setup.TXT on Setup Disk 1 or the Windows CR-ROM.
 
ok, apparently this error means I have a FAT32 drive and win95 dunt play nice with win95 out the box.

I found an ISO for a fixed CD that should work, but I cann't figure out what drive letter my CDROM drive is being assigned and the machine is not booting to it.

In a few more hours I may break down and load windows 98 instead. But I've never had a win95 computer and sort of want one.
 
The original release of Windows 95 didn't have FAT32 support. You need Windows 95 OSR2 for FAT32 support and OSR 2.5 for USB support.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
The original release of Windows 95 didn't have FAT32 support. You need Windows 95 OSR2 for FAT32 support and OSR 2.5 for USB support.
Click to expand...
Yes, gathered as much. Where I'm hitting a wall is finding a good ISO that has it as the win95 folder and not tarred up in other places.

The Zulu handles virtual drives fine but nothing tells me what letters are getting assigned, allI know is its not D:\(or any of the first half of the alphabet). So I need to copy the win95 folder over to the virtual hard drive.
 
Well I found a nicely patched version and have win95 boot!

Slight snag: there's no Physical PS2 port and I can't get a serial mouse to work. I had to order a part, so I guess this project is on hold again for a bit.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Yes, gathered as much. Where I'm hitting a wall is finding a good ISO that has it as the win95 folder and not tarred up in other places.
Click to expand...
I'm not personally into fan-made ISOs/boot disks, so the way I approached this when I needed to bootstrap getting back into retro-computing about 10 yrs ago, was to install Win95 OSR2 in a VM (using pristine DOS 6.22 to make a boot floppy with mscdex, and xcdrom.sys from freedos, and from there a pristine Win95OSR2 CD), then use Win95's ability to make a boot disk (even during install) to get a boot floppy with FAT32 support, and continue from there.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Slight snag: there's no Physical PS2 port and I can't get a serial mouse to work. I had to order a part, so I guess this project is on hold again for a bit.
Click to expand...
You may be hitting the issue where there are two serial pinouts.

One keeps the pin numbering consistent between the DE-9 port and the header (i.e., header pin 5 is ground).
The other keeps the physical position consistent between the DE-9 port and the header (i.e., header pin 9 is ground).

If the DE-9-on-a-ribbon didn't come on the board you may have this issue.
TheRetroWeb lists a manual for it that is actually for the M538. Assuming it's close enough, it lists the serial pinout and also the PS/2 port pinout. It's common to be able (and to need) to rearrange the wires in the PS/2 connector to match the board's pinout.

Also, the Super I/O is software-configured on each boot by the BIOS using settings stored in CMOS, so if you still have the resetting issue from the dead battery in the Dallas, you may want to fix that before further troubleshooting of Super I/O issues.
 
I have it booting into OSR2.5 now. How do I modify it so the win95 install remains but when I hit the power button, the machine boots into DOS? I want to have to manually start 95 when I feel like using it.
 
Check for a MSDOS.SYS file in the root of the boot drive. It will be hidden. It should have a line BootGUI. Set that to 0 and booting will stop at the MS-DOS 7 prompt.

Note that if the MSDOS.SYS file isn't in text, that means you have opened the file from an earlier DOS version and will need to find where the Win95 version is stashed,
 
Nice motherboard.

This is a pretty interesting motherboard. It has a 10-pin usb pinhead (not the standard 9-pin), and a (also non-standard) 8-pin pinhead for ps/2 mouse.
Mine does not have the cache slot, but it already has the maximum 512KB cache on board.

For the Dallas clock chip, I drilled and soldered a CR2032 battery holder to it, so it is working on external battery.

I have a Pentium MMX 200MHz CPU overclocked to 233MHz, and 128MB SDRAM. The clipset supports 66MHz SDRAM, but some 100MHz ones also work.

The bios chip is a bit tricky -- the one I have on my motherboard is a read-only chip. Will need a rewritable replacement if I want to update the bios.
 
MMX isn't Pentium 1 :D

Jokes aside, Windows 95B on MMX is blazingly fast. For period correct software those machines are a beast.
 
All right, since the motherboard's serial ports are plausibly non-standard, what about using a serial port expansion card? I guess nobody makes a peripheral card with PS2 ports...
 
So I found this in a 486 in my garage:

1758510934995.png

Could I potentially make this give me a working serial port?
 
up next: the SCSI optical drive I had planned to use with this thing appears to just not work. So that's fun.
 
Might need to be recapped. Those things suffer from SMD capacitor plague like anything else. The QFP ASICs can also come desoldered from the PCB.
 
The serial port card has worked great. My next goal is to see if I can't get USB to work. Supposedly its physically possible under windows 95 OSR2.5. Although whether it will still work under DOS or not is another question. IF I can get it all working I can use this machine with my video capture card and play with it at my desk.
 
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