MiSTer FPGA Forum

Guys, an exciting update following-on from this work. I have got Windows NT 4 working! Thread here: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4175

Another bit of info that may be useful to someone. I'm testing with OS/2. None of them (I tested 1.0, 1.2, 1.3, 2.0 and 3.0-CD) work except for the installer for 2.1, which throws an interesting error which is in line with what Windows NT 3.51 does.

Just before partitioning the system drive with HPFS, the installer throws an error stating that the floppy drive isn't ready. It actually *does* start formatting the hard drive when you retry the operation.

This gives me a hint as to some sort of timing issue somewhere that may fudge up the floppy drive if only for a very short period of time. This is also what NT 3.51 complains about: inaccessible boot device. The boot device at that point in time is the floppy disk.

The installer is now proceeding. I'm doing the floppy juggle as I'm typing this, but partitioning and formatting C: works for OS/2 2.1 with an unpatched AO486 now.

Just thought I'd share this bit here, might be useful to someone.

Any clues about the floppy drive issue are definitely appreciated, as that was a big problem for my NT install. It's something I would like to try and fix long-term but may not have the skills to do so.

Regarding whether or not your drive is formatting, I have found that some disk operations are very slow on NT due to an excess of debug information being sent to the MiSTer's UART console. Commenting-out many of the printf commands has provided some speed boosts. You might find it interesting to plug in a USB cable to see if your console is spamming with debug logs right now. If that's the case it might be why things are taking so long.

It's indeed taking forever, but working. Installing OS/2 2.1 right now.

Sadly, no dice.. The installation seems to work until the first reboot from C:, then the system crashes. I'll redo the process, take detailed notes and record the VHD image at every step. Maybe the modern OS/2 community has an alternative ATA driver as well but I'm very rusty at this bit. I literally haven't touched OS/2 since 1993.

All other OS/2 versions I tried crash with either an error about $SCREEN (mostly the 1.x series) or the IBMS506 driver, which is the IDE controller.

eComStation can get passed the IBMS506 driver issue as it uses the Dani version. It still won't boot though. I did have some luck by either turning off L1 or L2 as well, but it still wasn't stable or 100% working from an install.

Trying to graft that driver onto older revisions of OS/2. Slow progress..

Excellent work @alexoughton, just tested and my Gentoo image boots now.

Glad to hear it @sajattack. Thank you as well for providing the image. Having a working Linux image has been incredibly useful for the other troubleshooting I’ve been doing for NT. If you have a guide you could provide for how to compile the kernel correctly for the MiSTer, I would really appreciate it!

alexoughton wrote: ↑Sun Feb 27, 2022 2:14 pm Glad to hear it @sajattack. Thank you as well for providing the image. Having a working Linux image has been incredibly useful for the other troubleshooting I’ve been doing for NT. If you have a guide you could provide for how to compile the kernel correctly for the MiSTer, I would really appreciate it!

I used this config for the kernel https://github.com/scanlime/avc-edge-li ... nel/config (from a 486 voting machine with no fpu) and this guide for the rootfs https://github.com/yeokm1/gentoo-on-486