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The continuing saga of Windows 3.1 in enhanced mode on OmniBook 300
08-03-2017, 01:24 PM
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The continuing saga of Windows 3.1 in enhanced mode on OmniBook 300
Yup, I'm still trying to get this to work, and I think I'm making a bit of progress. I don't have everything working 100% yet, but this is what I've done so far (I've only tested with a 2.0 ROM card as of yet, not with the ROM-based DOS/Windows that it came with):

1. Pop in the 2.0 ROM card, and boot to D:.
2. OBFDISK C:, and FORMAT C: /S to prep your C: card and make it bootable. Copy the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to C:.
3. Install DOS 6.20 in VirtualBox, or another suitable virtual machine platform. Shut down the VM after you're done.
4. Mount the .VHD from the DOS 6.20 VM, attach your C: CF card to your PC, and copy the DOS directory over.
5. Put the C: card back in the OmniBook.
6. Copy the following files from D:\ to C:\DOS, and edit both AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS on C: to point to the new paths where necessary: OBCRDDRV.EXE, POWER.EXE, OBMGM.EXE, OBFDISK.EXE, FORMAT.COM. You can skip PRSPF.SYS and REM it out; it's for a parallel port floppy drive, I believe.

Okay, that gets you a working DOS 6.20 installation. Now for Windows:

1. Extract all files from a set of Windows 3.11 floppy disks/images to the root of another empty CF card.
2. Pop that card into your OmniBook's A: slot, and run A:\SETUP.EXE.
3. Install Windows like normal (it'll be easier if you've got a serial mouse attached at this point). You shouldn't have to change the hardware config, as far as I can tell. You may want to shrink the virtual memory swap file to something like 8192 KB, though.
4. After installation, make sure you edit C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI and add this to the "386Enh" section: EMMExclude=d000-dfff
5. Edit AUTOEXEC.BAT, and alter the SMARTDRV line to have these arguments: "c d- /L". That will disable write caching on C: (I don't trust that with a system that can suspend/resume at any moment), and disable caching entirely on D: (you don't need it).
6. Reboot.
7. WIN /3, open up "MS-DOS Prompt", hit Alt-Enter, and... hooray!

Still working on getting the other things figured out, e.g. Windows power management, the OmniBook control panel, the OmniBook mouse driver, etc.

Note that this really only makes sense to do if your OB300 has a RAM upgrade. In my case, I've got the full 8 MB.
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The continuing saga of Windows 3.1 in enhanced mode on OmniBook 300 - Dave Britten - 08-03-2017 01:24 PM



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