If I couldn’t find a vintage cable, I’d probably just take a drill and make a hole …. although I wonder how long it’ll take until finding parallel IDE cables is impossible…

@Chris M.: I usually like to use a knife to start the hole, first – then, the extra pin will punch it the rest of the way even more easily.

I had a Plug & Play mis-adventure I was going to actually write up, but it turns out that when I set the BIOS to PNP aware OS, and basically handed the wheel to the proverbial PNP Jesus, it decided that my AMD PCNet card should have IRQ 5, and a whole host of other fun things that basically Windows could figure it out fine as it could just query the PnP bus, but not so for MS-DOS. I had to go and reserve IRQ 5 DMA 1 & 3 for the Sound Blaster AWE64, so that it would be in the normalized spots.

Booting into DOS it does run some weird diag program, I never checked to see how much conventional RAM is left as I use it to run 32bit DOS Extended stuff….

Actually I just checked, 607Kb conventional.

I have an AWE32 Value PnP card in that machine and it’s a pain: 98SE can use it all right, but in MS-DOS it’s not visible until I run tests in diagnose.exe . And it doesn’t work in the silent mode (/s switch), only in the interactive. And for some reason only with the French version of the drivers.

Btw, not sure about 95, but 98se is a very bad DOS: it takes too much RAM. In order to run Space Quest I VGA I had to boot from a MS-DOS 6.22 floppy, otherwise it complained that it has too little RAM to use AWE32.

It has failed not because of qemu or PPC issues: I can pass through a S3-Trio64V+ all right and my firmware can use it on the emulated PPC machine. The problem will be: neither NetBSD nor AIX can use a V+ card.
If there is some magic switch I missed which would allow the old (as in non V+) PCI VGA cards run on modern motherboards – I’ll get back to the experiments.
So if you (or any of the readers) have got a modern motherboard (any with IOMMU would do) and an old PCI VGA card, please do me a favor: try it there and report if it has worked.

I went thru the whole episode years ago after finding the patches for going beyond 2.1Ghz. I only loaded 95 for it’s network requester, otherwise I do everything else in MS-DOS.

There was far more users by then. Just as there was a time when the 386 was king, and there was a group of people who thought 10 and 12Mhz XT class machines were the end all be all. But two things happened, the 16Mhz 286, and we finally got software that took advantage of the 286. The biggest one being Windows 3.0 & 3.1

Even Windows 386 Enhanced mode, still runs the 286 protected version of Windows complete with 64kb segments, and the usual nonsense. There also was OS/2 1.x and Xenix for the 286 as well. It wasn’t a completely useless processor.

As more and more people use and dispose of machines, naturally there will be more ‘newer’ older machines. And yes, there will be more core2 machines than 8086/80286/80386/80486 class machines.

There were FAR more Pentium 4 and Core machines built compared to the older stuff (many Core2Duo systems are still in active use!). PC hardware hit widespread commoditization by 2001-02 so after that point there is a TON of hardware out there.

286 machines really weren’t all that desirable as they couldn’t run much more than a 8088 XT class machine. 386s are overshadowed by the much faster 486s and they all ran the same protected mode software. The latter also had better I/O with commonly available local bus video and storage adapters.

The original release of Windows 95 had a patch to resolve the timing issues with fast CPUs. You really should be running OSR2.1 (with USB supplement) on a PII, as its period correct and has less issues. It was always supported by 440BX boards and has AGP GART support.

You don’t have to cut any pins. I’ve taken keyed cables and just firmly pressed them onto the un-keyed IDE headers (common on 486 era machines), that blocked out pin gets punched out pretty easily.