Some more random stuff.

Well while I was playing with NeXTSTEP on my P4, I managed to screw up the BIOS settings… The sound card I have is the AWE 64, one of those great ISA Plug & Play cards. The crazy thing is the only way to configure it properly is with a Pnp capable OS..

But back in the day, you could configure these things under MS-DOS with the ICU, or ISA configuration utility.. Which has become nearly impossible to track down, but I did manage to find a copy from Dell ICU-143N.EXE. It’s a bit crazy to setup, but once you go through the motion you can setup the IRQ dma etc etc, and with one more bit of ‘trickery’ on the nextstep pnp sb16 driver it’ll work. Naturally mine needed a different hex code 0x08ec009d

phew.

With that out of the way, I found another program for the NeXT, str a port of a SUN mod player.. Oddly enough it’s too slow to run on my m68k next cube, but it runs great on my white box now that I’ve managed to run the thing. At least it’ll be some kind of starting point for audio for Quake.

In other news Artyom managed to get Solaris 2.3 installed & running on Qemu.

I know people wanted me to go over AIX for the pc, but it tends to corrupt itself like crazy, however I got a tip that if you boot from floppy all the time, then have it mount the hard disk as multi user it doens’t freak out with hdintr issues…

That’s about it for today.

2 thoughts on “Some more random stuff.

  1. Hi,
    Do you remember how you got the ICU to work?
    I have a Dell Precision 410MT workstation that I need to configure the ISA slot, but I can’t seem to get the disk to work.

    If you can provide any information, it would be greatly appreciated!

    • its been decades but I can remember it needing driver bits like the MCA cards, or it would try to auto configure stuff.. icu should let you steer aorund.

      I’d look on archive.org for Sound Blaster 16 CD-ROM/Setup disks as they should have ICU

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