Author Archives: Michal Necasek

Windows 9x Video Minidriver HD+

Posted on June 6, 2022 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox. The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, VirtualBox, Watcom, Windows 95 | 66 Comments

Compaq EGA Technical Reference Guide

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Michal Necasek

A rater nice Compaq EGA Tech Ref recently turned up on archive.org, under the title COMPAQ Enhanced Color Graphics Board Technical Reference Guide. It’s from December 1986, relatively late in EGA’s life (given that it was about to be obsoleted … Continue reading →

Posted in Compaq, Documentation, PC history | Leave a comment

NT video miniport UHD

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Michal Necasek

I’ve finally managed to update the previously released NT video miniport. The reason for the update was indirect, hacking up the video “hardware” access code to support other environments. That led me to separate the generic mode set code from … Continue reading →

Posted in NT, VirtualBox | 1 Comment

IDENTIFY ESDI DRIVE

Posted on May 25, 2022 by Michal Necasek

As previously mentioned on this site, the IDENTIFY DRIVE command in the ATA specification almost certainly first appeared in ESDI controllers supplied to Compaq by Western Digital. Since I have now finally secured a working ESDI hard disk, I could … Continue reading →

Posted in ESDI, IDE, PC hardware, PC history, Western Digital | 19 Comments

The Strange Case of GetEnvironmentStringsA

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Michal Necasek

It was recently pointed out to me that a simple “hello world” style application built with Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9 does not run on Win32s version 1.30, even though the same executable runs just fine on Windows NT 3.51, Windows … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, NT, Watcom | 22 Comments

1989 Networking: OS/2 NetWare Requester 1.1

Posted on May 7, 2022 by Michal Necasek

When I wrote about the pre-release NetWare Requester for OS/2, the oldest archived officially released NetWare OS/2 Requester was version 1.2 from 1990. In the meantime, version 1.1 of the requester showed up, although I only became aware of that … Continue reading →

Posted in NetWare, Networking, OS/2, PC history, Virtualization | 11 Comments

Learn Something Old Every Day, Part V: Early IBM PS/2 Hard Disks

Posted on May 1, 2022 by Michal Necasek

So I have been (again) trying to properly archive old MS OS/2 SDKs. The version 1.02 SDK from December 1987 (corresponding to OS/2 1.0) turned out to be a bit of a poser. The SDK came on both 3.5″ and … Continue reading →

Posted in ESDI, IBM, PC history, PS/2 | 16 Comments

OS/2 6.304: Finally Complete

Posted on April 29, 2022 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago, I lamented that even though the OS/2 Museum had a good number of disks of the final OS/2 2.0 beta, level 6.304, there wasn’t enough to install the OS, let alone any of the development tools or … Continue reading →

Posted in CD-ROM, IBM, OS/2, PC history, Pre-release | 5 Comments

Page Too Big

Posted on April 22, 2022 by Michal Necasek

The other day I was able to look at an IBM OS/2 pre-release CD-ROM from early 1992. The CD-ROM appears to have been produced by IBM UK under the DAP (Developer Assistance Program) umbrella. The CD-ROM contains about 250 MB … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, IBM, OS/2, PC history | 4 Comments

Xenix 2.2 vs. VGA

Posted on April 15, 2022 by Michal Necasek

The other day I started wondering why certain old versions of 286 and 386 XENIX look a bit weird in emulation: The characters are cut off, because XENIX sets up an EGA text mode with 8×14 character matrix but uses … Continue reading →

Posted in 286, 386, PC architecture, PC history, VGA, Xenix | 14 Comments