After a little while gathering dust, I managed to score a 1.1 BIOS card for the Omnibook 300 off eBay. This means that the beast can finally use Compact Flash cards, and provides great resting place for some of the pile of CF cards under 1G that I have accumulated. The machine actually pre-dated the PCMCIA ATA specification so, on release, it could only use linear flash cards or one specific WD drive with a somewhat home-grown ATA-over-PCMCIA spec.
If you insert a blank (FAT, not FAT 32) formatted CF and boot up, the ROM DOS will ask you if you want to format it. This puts Doublespace on the drive which just takes up processing power and RAM. This made sense when all you could get was a 10MB flash card or a little 40MB WD hard drive but not with 256MB of CF goodness. So, politely decline and all the necessary boot-up files will be copied to the uncompressed drive.
I have been experimenting with alternative shells to Win 3.1 Program Manager since it's a bit painful. Back in the day I was fond of the IBM Workplace Shell for Windows which gave Win 3.1 an OS2 like look-and-feel with things like right-click context menus. However, it doesn't perform very well on the Omnibook and the OS/2 grey dialogues don't render very nicely on the unlit mono display. The next thing to try was Calmira II which attempts to replicate the Win95 shell and performs rather better.
I also rediscovered and joined the Omnibook mailing list - targetted at the classic OB's it hasn't got a lot of traffic now but if you post it lights up with activity as OB fans come out of the woodwork. The archives are a mine of information.
2 comments:
I am glad I came across your blog. I just got an Omnibook 300 and intend to use for writing DOS based programs on the go for usb boot thumb drive applications.
What would you recommend for a setup to be able to transfer files between OB300 and other computers?
My preferred method would be via CF card. I have a 128mb cf card with PCMCIA adapter that I hope to use. You mentioned upgrading the BIOS to 1.1 would help. Where can I start or where to go to update the BIOS?
I would also like to know the feasibility of installing OS/2 Warp 3.0? Maybe installing it on another machine and ghosting it on the 128mb CF? Or would it not boot from CF? My OB300 has 4mb RAM which is min for 3.0. I consider that IBM's most reliable release.
BIOS 1.1 is a replacement BIOS card (bottom left hand slot). I got mine off ebay. I was intending to see if I could write a BIOS image to a linear flash card as an alternative but haven't got round to it yet.
Otherwise it has Laplink built in so you can transfer over a serial port.
OS/2 Warp won't work. The inbuilt Windows and XIP apps on a 300 force the CPU to operate in standard rather than protected mode.
Post a Comment