Launch DOS games on the 2006 HP Compaq t5520 thin client

The other day I was on business at a company in which my old friend works in the same office with the system administrator.

The entourage of the cabinet can be imagined, cabinets are bursting with all kinds of iron. About 8 years ago, I also worked as a system administrator, and began my career as a computer assembler.

As it’s not hard to guess, I ended up in Geek's paradise. Having talked with the administrator, I told him about my secret passion - computer necrophilia, love of old hardware and the like.

I asked the administrator if he had anything interesting to satisfy my passion. Without saying anything, I was taken to a secret cold room under the stairs, it contained a large server rack, cluttered with all kinds of cool servers, entangled in a bunch of wires, but it was not the goal of our trip, the goal of our trip was a large cardboard box littered with a bunch of all kinds of iron, standing at the time of more than one state.

Under the cut a lot of heavy images.

From this box I was gifted with a large Intel motherboard and 300 megahertz processor for Slot 1. In addition, I got the HP Compaq t5520 branded corporate thin client of 2006, which will be the victim of today's experiment:



It should be noted that the experiments will not be carried out in a virtual machine, but on a living, real hardware. My plans are not just to start old games, I plan to fully enjoy the hardware itself and see how the t5520 works, so this review will also be of a technical nature.

I really like warm soft colors in photos and really do not like cold white, so the photos will be without a flash, with an absolutely wrong white balance and with very pronounced yellowness. In addition, we still have a rather old, somewhat somewhat rare computer, so everything will be logical, although I think that everyone has already noticed everything from the first image.

So, what is the HP Compaq t5520: it is a rather weak computer designed for classic terminal use, that is, it allows you to remotely connect to the server and work on it, just by displaying a remote desktop on the monitor and transmitting mouse and keyboard commands.

To save space, the t5520 is equipped with a stand that allows you to set it upright, and this stand can be easily removed by unscrewing two screws with a convenient grip from the bottom:





Once on the t5520 there was Windows CE with a terminal client, but I got the t5520 with a completely dead system, apparently not Experimented colleagues.

One way or another, this is still a computer, with a VIA processor at 800 megahertz, 128 megabytes of DDR RAM and a 64 megabyte flash drive that replaces the hard drive.

Let me remind you that we have a computer 10 years old that has the grandfather of modern SSDs. In those days it was just space.

It's time to look inside the miracle device. There are only two bolts at the back and in front of us is the protective cover of the motherboard:



Having unscrewed two more bolts on the sides, we see almost a work of engineering:



The motherboard is very compact, but at the same time it does not require an upgrade, all you can replace is a battery that supplies CMOS and flash drive. The RAM chip is soldered directly on the board, the processor hidden under the heatsink, I assume that it is also tightly soldered.

It is logical that the server will upgrade, and terminal stations do not make sense to upgrade. But the solid-state drive can fail, so it was made removable.

The T5520 was kept in excellent condition even though it had lain in a box for several years almost in the midst of computer trash. It is absolutely quiet, that is, it should not make any sounds at all, except for those that the speaker gives out. You may notice that the t5520 has only one moving mechanical part - the power on / off button.

For the office, this is generally an ideal tool. This is not the buzz of 10-15 system drivers with non-lubricated coolers!

The processor frequency is enough for the eyes for old DOS games, the 64 megabyte drive is certainly not enough, but I still succeed in putting the system on it, and indeed, my first computer was Spark 1031 with 640 kilobytes of RAM and it loaded with 360 kilobytes 5, 25 "floppy disk, since my computer didn’t have a hard drive.

But I digress, it's time to find out what interfaces the t5520 has. And it has serial and parallel COM ports, a monitor output, a 12-volt power input (that is, in fact, it doesn’t need some specific power adapter with a bunch of voltages, but just a rather powerful 12-volt DC source at 3.33 ampere), the t5520 has a PS / 2 connector for connecting a mouse or keyboard, an audio output, a microphone input, 4 USB 2.0 and one RJ-45, that is, a socket of a regular network card with 100 megabits:



I got the T5520 without a power supply, but on my happiness a few years ago I bought a PSU for creeping line experiments. It just turned out to be 12 volts by 3 amps with again the same connector:



The only thing I didn’t know was whether it had the right polarity and I didn’t come up with anything better than just plugging the power adapter into a power outlet and turning on the t5520.

Yes, I was absolutely lucky: the



HP Compaq t5520 was really tenacious and started the first time.

The first thing, of course, we go to the BIOS: the



BIOS is fairly standard, Award, but not quite simple, in the header we see the HP t5000, which means that this BIOS is made specifically for the 5000th series of thin clients from HP, BIOSes for laptops are being adapted in this way now.

Further, of course, we are interested in information about the system:



And on the page of disk drives an interesting typo awaits us, we see that the disk we have is really 64 megabytes, only it is signed as Flas without h at the end. The letter h would fit easily there and it is absolutely not clear how such a bug got into corporate sales:



Nevertheless, the type of drive called is not affected by its operation. Why can I download the t5520?



From the henchman, we can only use USB booting. FreeDos from a flash drive is realizable, but not sporty. In those years, we did not have FreeDos, we basically only had MS-DOS. That is, our task is to download MS-DOS from USB, which it generally does not support, since we don’t have a floppy drive or CD-ROM on the t5520. And we only have a USB keyboard and a USB mouse.
And how do we even implement all this?

In the old days, when laptops appeared on the market, or rather, when laptops became more or less accessible for mere mortals, there were practically no floppy drives in them, and floppy disks were often needed, such a Japanese miracle of technology was produced:



Yes, it’s A USB drive for NEC’s 3.5 "floppy disks. And yes, I have something to feed it:



There are probably people on the GT who don’t know what it is, I specifically inform them that it is a storage medium that was popular 10 -20 years ago. On such a diskette could write the amount of information 700 times smaller than you can write to a flash drive with a capacity of 1 gigabyte.That is, your modern phone can contain information in the amount of 5,000 - 90,000 times more than such a floppy disk

.

Well, we can now make a bootable floppy disk with MS-DOS, but it will also be on a USB floppy drive, and DOS does not know how to USB and we can’t boot the system.

But DOS does not work with devices directly, but through the BIOS. This is already Windows will later learn how to manage devices directly and for each we need drivers. Our BIOS can use USB, which means the keyboard will work and the external floppy drive must also.

I’ve been using Linux for 10 years already, but on my old, and I’m not afraid to say, the first, the laptop has Windows XP, and since we have a retro review, we will already use retro products from Microsoft.

First of all, download the MS-DOS 6.22 distribution kit. Why exactly him? Because this is the last real DOS, and not a layer for launching the first versions of Windows:



So, we hook the external floppod to the Windows laptop and run the bat file, which writes the image of the boot floppy 1.44 MB to the floppy itself. We write the boot diskette:



We hook up the floppy drive to t5520, in the BIOS we set the boot from USB and:



We get such a surprise. But in theory, everything should have worked! When booting t5520 rustled diskette and tried to read something. What really is a floppy disk not bootable?

Yes, the floppy disk turned out to be none, that is, simply killed. Having written the image to another diskette and booted from it, I already saw a completely different picture:



MS-DOS booted successfully, the floppy disk is read even though it is in the USB drive. The USB keyboard also works. Looking ahead, I’ll say that I couldn’t start the USB mouse, since even a mouse for the COM port at one time required the mouse.com driver. I tried using special drivers to support USB for DOS, but it didn’t end with anything good, usually the USB keyboard just stopped working.

So, we have successfully loaded the MS-DOS operating system, it's time to see what we have:



And we have everything we need to format our “hard disk” and put the MS-DOS operating system on it:



It's time to start settling in, writing down some utilities and drivers. It makes sense to put a file manager. For professionals in the post-Soviet space, it was somehow customary to install not Norton Commander, but his lightweight clone Volkov Commander of the Ukrainian developer Vsevolod Volkov:



Well, I could not help but recall this programmer who influenced the fate of millions of IT people from around the world. Volkov Commander can still be downloaded from the developer's site http://vvv.kiev.ua .

You can start downloading games from floppy disks that have been preserved since then. These are my wife’s floppy disks, written long before she knew which one I would get in the future.

And I still have my first 3.5 "floppy disk, I bought it when we started computer science in grade 5. The floppy disk is still alive and does not have a single bad block. In the technical school, I wrote QBASIC to this floppy disk from the same ones since then he stayed on it.It should be noted that I have a basic version with a compiler that allows you to make full executable exe files:



In the technical school I wrote my first two graphic programs, one displays the current date and time, and also, in random order, draws colored dots on the screen:



My second program draws colored quad rats:



At the turn of the century, I had a computer with a 486 Intel processor at 33 megahertz and at that time a lot of rustling was caused by the so-called “2000 Problem”, when no one could predict how computers would behave when the date changed from 1999 to 2000. The fact is that the date was encoded with just two characters, for example, 1999 was encoded as 99. And what could happen to the computer when 2000 came, no one knew.

This problem was not bypassed by my computer either, at each boot it was necessary to set the current date, since it always woke up after boot in 2021, although he remembered the month and the day.

But I had a basic with a compiler, I was like a programmer, so I solved the 2000 problem in the most natural way. I just wrote a program that takes the date and month from the system time, adds the desired year and sets a new date. The compiled program was thrown into autoexec.bat and all. My computer kept pace with the times:



Once again I was distracted, in general, I pumped up games to the eyeballs:



Well, I admit, I counted so that I don’t write to a diskette 100,500 times, stick the drive and write t5520 games to the “hard disk” in small pieces, I just made a bootable USB flash drive with FreeDos, threw games on it, booted from it and uploaded the games to the t5520 hard drive.

Yes, MS-DOS can even be downloaded from a USB flash drive, just put Grub4Dos on it and feed command.com to it, but that’s not sporty, is it?

The games uploaded how much came in at 64 megabytes.

Of course, many people know and remember domestic games, for example, the well-known Dmitry Bashurov, by the way, who lives on the GT. Dmitry, hello to you from the past:



Who remembers the Komsomolka subscription index? Yes, why remember it, it is written in small print in the text on the right. But I just noticed a great Easter egg. Newspaper Release Date - Today! Of course, such coincidences do not happen, but automatically substituting the current date is a great idea.



But the most recognizable game is of course:





But I could not play this landmark game:



The system hung tight.

We had more games:













And in order to play the next game, I had to play up the locale settings:





Well, the game itself: The



name of the developer is painfully familiar, but the name of something does not converge. But the author is the same, somewhere it popped up either here, on the Civil Code or on the Habr.



Flags of Ukraine are turned upside down and Baku is somehow ours. No matter what happens again:





Electronic Arts already existed at that time:







And of course Hudson Soft with Dyna Blaster:







Yes, we will see this game called “Bomberman” on Famicom, which we know as Dandy and Super Nintendo.

I only know a couple of games from Accolade, Super Bubsy (its most cropped version weighs 26 megabytes and I did not record it) and this game, which was very famous and popular with us:





I bet you have already played this music in your head, torn in the speaker. For 88, it's just something incredible!









The most patient, who have read up to this point, can begin to exhale with relief, as the text ends and it is time to show the games left for dessert.

Yes, these are the most famous games, for example:











Modern sound cards, including those integrated into motherboards, are in most cases compatible with Sound Blaster, therefore, sounds from the Wolfenstein 3-D game can be heard in the speakers of the music center connected to the t5520.

But from these games, as I did not try, I could not squeeze out the sound:













There were, of course, less well-known games on the same engine, but quite playable:













I think that some images are not quite enough, nowadays everyone wants a video, so I have to do it. Only now my camera can’t shoot video, so I’ll use my wife’s soap dish:



Yes, that was the last image for today.

UPD: YouTube video finally flooded


Also popular now: