Bringing a Pentium 100 Back to Life

I've been working on bringing an old Pentium 100 MHz computer back into operation. The machine uses an Iwill P54TSW motherboard and has 36 MB of RAM. My goal was to get it running DOS and Windows 95, partly for nostalgia, but also to use it as a development and testing platform for software I've been writing for period hardware.

What I initially thought would be a straightforward restoration turned into a series of hardware and software troubleshooting problems.

A major hurdle was the dead battery in the DS12887A module that can't be readily changed without a soldering iron. There was a cascade of other issues to deal with because of this particularly with hardware resource conflicts, and certain peripheral configurations.

Since there was no battery for the bios, ESCD would hang up and I would be forced to use a boot disk on the floppy to use the machine. I had to cobble together a Dos boot disk from Windows 95 on my 486. Frankly it was a major pain to get this thing going with plain old DOS.

Then getting the mouse to work was difficult because the DB9 serial connectors are apparently different in pin layout than what I was anticipating and had to run individual wires to each pin on the board to get ctmouse to work and detect a mouse.

The SoundBlaster Card worked fine until I put a network card on it and found that the two cards were conflicting with each other with its IRQ address. I couldn't get the firmware on the card to set the way I wanted to and I couldn't manually save anything in the bios. So i had to make a two boot options for using the sound card and one for networking.

I'm using MTCP and it's FTP service to move files from a modern windowed environment onto DOS.

Got the old Space Simulator installed on it and shareware Quake and they both run fairly well, all considering.