When the Libretto 50CT shipped brand new in 1997, it came preloaded with Windows 95. Windows 95 is kinda of useless to me though since I’m mostly interested in running dos games.
That being said, I was digging through my old CDs and found a MSDN CD I picked up from somewhere years ago that had Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. There were about 20 languages on the disc but only 3.11 had an English version.
I pulled the flash card that I’m running the Libretto off of out and stuck in in another system so I could copy the entire 11MB directory off the CD onto the card. It was about 560 files total. If only modern graphical desktops were 11MB’s these days…
After I stuck the card back into the Libretto, I ran setup.exe and opted for the express installation. From start to finish it was done installing in under 3 minutes I think. After the install it wanted me to reboot so, for the full retro experience, I was happy to oblige. When the dos prompt came back up, I typed “win” and thought of Charlie Sheen for some reason.
The Windows For Workgroups splash screen came up and the full desktop was showing in under 15 seconds or so. WFW is blazing fast on this ancient hardware.
I poked around the settings a bit and remembered how both crude and elegant this piece software was in it’s day. All of the bundled applications run flawlessly of course. I wish I had some third party software to try out though. Perhaps I’ll dig a bit deeper in my box of goodies…
If you like the content on this site, please support it by using this link to order from Amazon. You know you were going to go there and buy stuff anyhow so why not help me pay the hosting bill.
If you need old Win 3.x software, try the Garbo archives [1]; for updates look at the Win 3.x page [2] at MGDX’s site and for drivers my best suggestions are the manifacturer site, especially if i’ts well known and old enough (es. 3Com site, IBM support, Intel’s ftp archive, etc.), filesearch.com’s Drivers page [3] o its search through semiforgotten university ftp archives.
I’d install at least all system updates, most recent drivers, the TCP/IP stack, Win32s, Winzip 6.3 or WiZ 4.01for unpacking archives and try the 32 bit drive access if the Libretto’s IDE controller is compliant.
elf
[1] http://garbo.uwasa.fi/windows/
[2] http://www.mdgx.com/w31toy.htm
[3] http://www.filesearching.com/drivers/
Interesting project – but can you use the floppy drive (or cd) with that setup.
If you can, let me know! I have a use (2 in fact) for a compact win3.1 or 3.11 machine.
Pretty sure I can since it’s just a matter of getting the drivers working under DOS. Judging by the fact I managed to make wifi work under DOS, I don’t see the CD and/or floppy being an issue.
Looks like my floppy drive isn’t working at all at the moment for some reason. The guaranteed way to get a CD to run would be using an Adaptec PCMCIA scsi card and a portable scsi CD-ROM. I know dos drivers exist on that for a fact. I believe there are drivers for the libretto cd too though. I’ll have to research it more later. What I’ve been doing is using a CD-ROM emulator and just putting ISO’s straight on the CF HDD for old games that insist on running off a CD.
How did you get the video drivers working? I don’t like the 16 colors at all.
Did you ever have luck getting the sound to work? I’m trying the 70CT and the Yamaha drivers and it keeps telling me it can’t even detect my card.
I have the 70ct. I used WFW for a while, if you have a pcmcia floppy you need to restart the machine with it plugged in. I liked WFW, but needed to use a pcmcia SD card reader for transferring large files and needed to put 98SE back on it. You can just run 98SE in restarted DOS mode and I’ve found that to be the best solution to everything for DOS gaming. You can even start it up in that, but it won’t let you install WFW along with it. Maybe if you do a straight DOS 7.1 install. Well good luck. What wifi you use btw? I have orinoco gold, but it only does WEP security and that’s pretty much useless these days. Can’t find a 16-bit pcmcia that has WPSK support. :/
I’ve been using freedos on mine exclusively for a couple of years now. Works great for my needs which are just purely games. Mostly Nesticle these days but also Maniac Mansion 1&2 and all of the Sierra classics. I get an occasional lockup but I remember similar lockups back in the mid nineties as well. 🙂