Uncreative Labs

Joined: 04 Jun 2006 Posts: 23 Location: Poland

Simple thread.

What soft do you use on your XTs?
Of course if anybody from here use thier XTs anymore...

I use PC-DOS 3.30, World Star 4.0 for some writings, of course in English, because my language needs some extra characters.
I don't have many games installed, I don't have many soft at all, because I have working hard drive in my XT just since two weeks.
I have of course Alley Cat, Bouncing Babes, California Games...
And... that's it Laughing

, I don't use any buisness software or disk managers, it don't like 'em.

How about you? Would be nice If you can recommend me some nice soft.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

Autocad 5.0, lynx, geos, digger and too many other games to bother listing, qbasic

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

On my recently hard-disk'd XT half-clone (XT board, clone case), I have the following

DR-DOS 6.0
Ultima I-V
The original Microsoft Mouse Software (paint will be installed after I get 640K in)
a bunch of GW-BASIC games (using the internal ROM Basic with BASICA.COM)
a buncha old DOS games
the original Microsoft Notepad

Joined: 03 Dec 2005 Posts: 41 Location: Netherlands

Oh hello Luke, you're here too Very Happy

DOS 3.3, Wordstar 3.3 and I tried to run 5

Turbo pascal 3.0

quattro

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

the big thing that drove mne away from xt's and eventually from 286's was the lack of wysiwyg
i coulf not even run wordperfect 6/dos on a system slower that 386/25.
and i wanted the page on the screen to look like the printed page.
that said, I still have xtree and wordstar 4.0 on w/98 systems.
they were intended for xt's. I still use qsort and a few other pre-1990 utilities.

Joined: 04 Jun 2006 Posts: 23 Location: Poland

Rayan, you mean version 2.0 R5? How did you get it?

I got confused using SideKick, it's great tool, but it only work in 80 col. text mode...
If you try to run it in 40 col. text mode or any graphics it will crash whole screen.

I also added nice ChiWriter clone and Windows 1.01 wich is useless in my opinion.
I think, that all GUI systems are useless on XTs, just eats a lot of memory and complicate operating on files.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

I think, that all GUI systems are useless on XTs, just eats a lot of memory and complicate operating on files.

Actually, I remember Geoworks Ensemble (v1.0) being quite snappy on my old XT (even when loaded down). V.2.1 wasn't too bad either, but NDO 2.5 and 2000 really loaded it down...

Just my 2¢ worth...

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

I'm pretty sure I have DOS 5.0 loaded on mine. It's either that or 3.x... Anycase, I pretty much only use Editor (edit.com) and Qbasic.

I had this nice TUI program similar to Dos Shell on it before the original hard drive crashed. (Also a lot more games. Razz

)

On my clone I have Windows 3.0 loaded. It's a shame that it only runs in monochrome CGA graphics though. (Granted it eats up memory like it's no ones business also.)

Joined: 28 Nov 2006 Posts: 10

i don't have a hard drive controller that works on an XT, even though i have a seagate ST-251 MFM drive for whenever i find one.

what i have done is put in a 3com etherlink II-TP (3c503) and rigged the MS Net Client v3.0 to work off a floppy boot disk. i set up a share on my linux box called "XT" and just use that for the 8088's "hard drive" Smile

does the job, and it's very fast!

i also put in an NE1000 compatible card which i use for other networking purposes (IRC, telnet, etc)

as for software, i have a few old games on the thing... (anybody remember janitor joe??) Electric Desk for writing things, quickbasic 4.5 and 7.1 for all the DOS TCP/IP programming i do. various other progs on there too i mess around with sometimes (BBS software, etc)

using a network drive on the thing gives me... ohhhh, about 100 GB i can mess with on the XT Razz

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

Try ebay for ide. Sadly prices are insane. Glad I got my 3 while prices were low.

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?cgiurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2Fws%2F&fkr=1&from=R8&satitle=8-bit+ide&category0=

of for mfm I found one on ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-5150-MFM-Hard-Disk-Controller-1501492-with-Cables_W0QQitemZ230061112403QQihZ013QQcategoryZ74946QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

Mike, you have your XT hooked up to your network?

Was it hard to set the drivers up? I had a problem with a 3Com cards DOS drivers for TCP/IP and that was a 16bit ISA card on a 486. I couldn't imagine an 8bit on an XT. Razz

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

Nuke wrote:

Mike, you have your XT hooked up to your network?

Was it hard to set the drivers up? I had a problem with a 3Com cards DOS drivers for TCP/IP and that was a 16bit ISA card on a 486. I couldn't imagine an 8bit on an XT. Razz

Sorry about the late reply, been out

Not yet, but it's in the works. My current XT is awaiting a RAM upgrade to 640K (+ a Multiplexer chip and a jumper, it's a 64K-256K machine). I'm saving the other board for an actual XT case.

I did have another XT class machine, an XT Clone running on my old 7 computer home LAN a few years back. I used a 16 bit Intel EtherExpress card (8/16) running in 8-bit mode, it used standard Cat5 Ethernet, and used NetBeui and IPX/SPX as the protocols. I think I may have gotten TCP/IP working on it once too, which was a cosmic balancing act, but it worked great I recall. I used Microsoft LAN Manager 3.0 to connect to my other machines. That was quite a mighty rig......here's everything, which was all hooked up to a 6 port KVM to a 17" SVGA monitor, I could run darn near any piece of software in it's natural habitat from the comfort of my modified Tandy desk.

Micro Config Corp XT Clone - 4.77 Mhz, 640K, 30MB RLL X2l, DOS 622
Compaq Deskpro 286 - 12 MHz, 12MB, 20MB MFM, DOS 622
Compaq Deskpro 386 - 16 MHz, 2MB, 40MB IDE, DOS 622
Flight 386 SX - 486 DX4-100, 20MB RAM, 520 & 428 MB HDD, DOS/WFWG
Home Brew XT Clone Pentium - P 200 MMX, 64MB, 8GB, Linux RedHat 6
GEM Celeron 500 MHz "ATXT" - Celeron, 196MB, Windows 98 SE