Omnibook 430- Other Operating Systems

[Dave Britten]

(01-07-2017 11:50 AM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  If this would be down to the Omnibook's disk hardware being non-standard (which, I think, is quite likely), it could well be that there is no other solution. Is it still necessary to disable this on later Omnibook models like the 430? I take it that you have to disable 32-bit disk access completely, and that disabling 32-bit disk write access, but keeping 32-bit disk read access enabled doesn't work, right?

It's actually not that the OB disk hardware doesn't support it, but rather it appears to be some weird conflict with the power management. Using POWER.EXE to dial power management back to either STD or OFF also seems to prevent the freeze, but doing that causes some other problems (like the loss of suspend/resume functionality).

(01-07-2017 11:50 AM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  Is the OBSTATUS for the OB300 different (older) than the version for the OB430?
Where is the OBCONFIG.DLL installed on your system?

I still need to verify that. I can probably find a few different versions of those files on omnibooks.info/archive and do some comparisons to see which ones differ and which are the same. I simply installed OBCONFIG.DLL into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM; that file appears to provide the OmniBook control panel, and that was running just fine.

(01-07-2017 11:50 AM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  Does this TrackMan require the standard Logitech "MouseWare" DOS mouse driver (which version?), or does it use a special trackball driver?

The one I bought (which was still brand new and unopened!) came with MouseWare 7.0 floppies in the box, along with the necessary PS/2-to-serial adapter for use with the OmniBook. Thankfully, the floppies were still pristine and not suffering from any bit rot. I suspect the TrackMan would be pretty flexible about the version of MouseWare you use, and it may even be generic enough to function with any basic serial mouse driver. You would likely lose the ability to adjust the orientation or redefine the buttons, of course.

(01-07-2017 11:50 AM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  Does the built-in HP mouse require the OBMOUSE driver under DOS, or does it also work with more "generic" DOS mouse drivers? Background of the question are possible optimizations - some mouse drivers are smaller / better than others, but they might not work for the built-in mouse, if it uses proprietary hardware.

I honestly haven't messed with the built-in mouse under DOS much at all - it's clumsy enough under Windows. But I would highly doubt that it would work with generic mouse drivers, since it's actually a 2-axis analog input more akin to a joystick (i.e. absolute positioning) rather than the relative tracking of a typical mouse.