@Dietmar @roytam1 amazing work I’ve held off trying the iso on real hardware as yet but look forward to doing so.
As the above user has mentioned it would be good to try other O/S on unsupported hardware.
I have a similar challenge where your expertise might be just what is needed to progress.
Theres a group of XT owners with an Intel Inboard 386/PC which has 4mb ram on the same card.
So far by modifying files that were released with the Inboard 386 Windows 286 version it has been possible to load Windows 3.1 and last year 3.11 WFW fully including being able to run Win32s so Freecell that came with that runs fine showing the setup is 32bit capable.
The next challenge / hurdle was to try to get Windows 95 running but I think things then get more tricky due to the underlying XT architecture that the board is running in. So for example the IRQ 14 for disk and IRQ 8 for clock are in places that don’t exist on an XT.
However it’s shown above the board is capable of 32bit within the card itself and has direct access to ram on the card.
Theres been a number of attempts already to try and get past this limit by using BIOS extenders / virtualisation such as Netroom 3 and Syscloak or 2M ABIOS/ XBIOS respectively.
As your above project shows that pushing the once impassible limits of hardware can be overcome by changing the software to adapt for these nuances.
Disk can be overcome using XTIDE to provide 2GB. The CPU is also swapped out from a 386 to a CPU with 486 instructions also using a Cyrix CX486DRX2 (clocked doubled processor), also there’s SCSI CD rom, ad-lib sound and network all working within 3.11 even 1.44mb FDD using a card with rom to boot the support into place by Sergei Kiselev.
The CPU can be fully clocked also to its full potential by changing the Crystal on the Inboard to get to 40Mhz some users have already done this modification successfully.
The CPU is capable of running Win95 in a standard machine but the architecture it plugs into via the Inboard is proving a blocker though I’m convinced this is a software limitation over hardware.
The Inboard itself has recently also been fully emulated so anyone could spin up an environment where this is emulated fully to develop against with a view then that it could be used to then build something that could run on real hardware.
I feel there’s enough knowledge in this forum to perhaps make this possible.
Emulator is found here written by a user called Superfury
https://superfury.itch.io/unipcemu/devlog/515451/unipcemu-build-20230411-1833-is-now-live
Would you perhaps be interested to help progress this further, it would of course be another thing that was said couldn’t be done much like XP on a 486
An image of 3.11 that works fully on the inboard 386 in a 5160 can be found here as described above.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/60u4cep0r0bgeoskfur2o/InBoard_WFW_3.11_May2024_TCPIP_3c509_ATIGFXULTRA.zip?rlkey=1kg39x543kb7zswgz8b6grvux&dl=0
I would have reached out directly and not on the forum, but it appears that is not an option so I hope it’s OK that I post this here. Of course also that I post this up locally I can also get input by others here with sufficient experience who also may be able to advise if this is merely a pipe dream and not possible.
I look forward to responses
Thanks in advance
Mike
