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I work in a country computer store and what follows is a sort of distillation of what we have learned on our own machines and machines we have built for customers over the last year or so. I`m not sure what use can be made of it in the Warp Pharmacy, as I get a bit hazy on detail with so many machines to remember. On the other hand, I think we get a good feel for what things usually work with the least fuss and bother, and that is probably worth communicating to other users.
Tony Wilson
Configurations tested: Intel 486DX/4-100 CPU, 20Mb RAM, DSTN color Seagate 520Mb and Conner 240Mb hard drives Warp Red, Warp Blue.
Some fairly minor video shimmer. Only occurs with OS/2 (not DOS), and is unrelated to LCD or external monitor. I have observed this before with the Western Digital WD90C24 chipset, on desktop machines. Especially noticeable on plain grey backgrounds.
PCMCIA not detected. Will try fix suggested in Warp Pharmacy for Gateway notebook (same Cirrus Logic PCMCIA chipset is involved) and report progress. Nutting out Lantastic 6.0 and the Accton PCMCIA network card under plain old DOS took me 14 hours and left me 450k free, so I`m not in a hurry to get started!
Excellent board. All known problems resolved on newer ones. Feature: can have 12Mb RAM (2 x 72-pin plus 4 x 1Mb 30-pin).
As above for Opti 895
Features: 4 x 72-pin RAM sockets allows almost any RAM combination.
Largely as above.
Another good board.
Many problems with this previously well-regarded chipset which ran OS/2 2.1 and Warp Beta 1 perfectly but cannot run Warp Beta 2 or Warp Red Box. Have not tried Blue Box.
Great board but expensive. Used with most of the hardware mentioned above. Feature: Superb Award BIOS with hardware floppy swap which works under Warp.
Work fine under Red Box with patch or Blue Box. Need a little tweaking to actually run at quad speed. (Warp detects them as a double spin.) Details to follow. PS: The DOS drivers are still a bit problematic. Isn`t it great to find some hardware which gives more problems under DOS than it does under OS/2!
Works fine.
(Cardex and others similar) Work well with the standard Warp drivers. These, along the VESA Tseng ET4000W32p cards are our favourite choice for Warp. (Cirrus VESA 5429 is reliable but a bit slow.) Only observed problem so far: In combination with SiS PCI/VESA board only, video card hangs on soft reset from Warp Red or Blue. Hit the reset switch and it is fine. Have not tried 5434 specific drivers yet.
Have tried two or three different ones. Work perfectly with DOS & Windows. Fail utterly under Warp Red. Tried two or three different main boards, including FIC VIP (VIA chipset) and SiS. Have not tried them with Warp Blue.
Nowhere near as good as the wonderful old Trident TVGA 9000 and TVGA 8900 ISA cards. Too many software problems under Windows, let alone OS/2. Have managed to make them work reasonably well most of the time, but it`s easier to use a Cirrus or a Tseng in the first place.
Avoid these. They are fast but buggy under Windows. Under OS/2 they are just buggy.
A joke. Now off the market, I think. Cirrus Logic chipset. Billed on the box as `the fastest video accellerator on the planet`! Slow and buggy under Windows. Hopeless under OS/2. Have had to replace most of them under warranty with something that works.
Very difficult to install correctly with Lantastic for OS/2. Install program behaves inconsistently and only gets PROTOCOL.INI right about one time in ten. Really a Lantastic problem, I think. The cards are great. Details to follow if I can remember them. (That was another epic weekend stuck in the office.)