Last modified - 18 December 2000 -- but I think I still need to fix a few things, including links
This information is my opinion only and relates to my experiences using OS/2
Warp 4. I am not any kind of an expert, and it's quite likely that those more
knowledgeable than I will have achieved better results. Conversely, if your system is set up differently to mine you may experience troubles I haven't. :-(
If you think anything I've written is incorrect, please e-mail
me (Andrew Bolton)
Unfortunately much of the software often bundled with hardware is useless, being written for Windows 95. The Win32-OS/2 Project are writing software to run Windows 95 programmes under OS/2, but results are not guaranteed.
The first place to look for OS/2 drivers is at the OS/2 Device Driver pak at IBM.
To the best of my knowledge, no scanner manufacturer provides an OS/2 driver. If you want to use a scanner under OS/2 you have two options: use the Windows 3.1 software usually (but not always) supplied with the scanner, under Win-OS/2; or purchase OS/2 TWAIN drivers and buy a compatible SCSI scanner.
There are two companies who sell OS/2 TWAIN drivers. For more information, including which scanners are supported, see this page from the people who sell the excellent PMVIEW image viewer.
If you want to save money by buying a parallel port scanner, you'll have to use Windows 3.1 software. This obviously means you should stay clear of any scanner which only comes with Win95 software.
I would also suggest you avoid the Plustek brand. I had a Plustek OpticPro 600P, and spent quite some time trying to get it to work. The software would
install, but when it came to actually scanning it couldn't find the scanner. Eventually
I wrote to Plustek. I explained that I used OS/2, but that I knew that they didn't provide OS/2 drivers. I explained that OS/2 could run Win 3.1 software, and I
requested specific Win 3.1 information (specifically, which DLLs it looked for, and
in what directories. And what changes the Installation procedure made to the various
system (config.sys, or .ini ) files.
Unfortunately Plustek don't seem to read their e-mails that well, and responded with a polite 'sorry, but we don't do OS/2 drivers' type of message.
After further correspondence they wrote: "Our scanner driver can run on Windows 31 but cannot run on OS/2's win31. We got the message from our software department but they don't have plan to develop the OS/2 driver at this moment."
Fortunately the store it was purchased from was good about returning it, and I then got a Relisys Avec E4800. This is basically the same scanner as the Umax 610p, and apart from leaving out PhotoDeluxe it includes identical software. This scanner works fairly well under Win-OS/2. I've experienced two limitations:
Worked: Relisys Avec E4800 / Umax 610P
Didn't work: Plustek OpticPro 600P
Although IBM provides several 'one size fits all' drivers (such as OMNI.EXE, which when I last looked at it supported 286 printers from 16 manufacturers) which cover most printers on the market, it is preferable to use a specially written driver if one is available. Specially written drivers often include a wider range of adjustments, and other features such as ink level displays.
I would recommend Lexmark because they provide OS/2 drivers for many of their printers (but not all, so check).
I have a Lexmark Color Jetprinter 7000. OS/2 drivers were not included on the accompanying CD, but were available
for download from Lexmark's web site. I'm quite pleased with it. It does place a bit of a load on system resources when printing moderately high
resolution photographs (say, 300dpi), but I think all inkjets do? When printing text, and set to Quick Print 600 dpi, it positively chucks out pages faster than you can catch them.
Well, almost.
At one stage I had a problem when printing from Star Office 5. The printer kept going off-line, and the job would have to be restarted, only to go off-line again - sometimes at the same point, sometimes a different one. I thought that the printer wasn't coping with a number of images on the page, but eventually concluded that the problem was with Star Office. If you're experiencing such a problem, see here.
In October 1998 at least, the Lexmark 5700 was well spoken of in the comp.periphs.printers newsgroup. Another newsgroup worth checking out is comp.os.os2.setup.misc. If your news server doesn't carry these groups, try comp.periphs.printers and comp.os.os2.setup.misc at Dejanews.
Prior to this I had an Epson Stylus Color 300. I bought it because it was desperately cheap in a sale. I downloaded the latest driver from IBM (which happened to be OMNI.EXE) but wasn't able to get it to work properly. It wouldn't print true black, only a composite black with easily seen colour fringes.
An article on 'Printing and Scanning on the OS/2 Platform' from the Southern California OS/2 Users' Group recommends Epson printers using OS/2 drivers written by Epson Germany (the drivers are in English and German). (Unfortunately for me these drivers didn't support the Stylus Color 300). Click here to view the readme for the drivers, or here to download them from www.leo.org.
Worked: C. Itoh C-420, Panasonic KX-P2123 (dot matrix); Lexmark 7000 (inkjet)
Didn't work: Epson Stylus Color 300
If the manufacturer of your video card doesn't provide OS/2 drivers, try the company making the chips on the card. For example, Diamond don't provide OS/2 drivers for their Stealth 3D 2000, but the chip maker, S3, does. These 'generic' drivers may or may not work correctly, depending on the card manufacturer's particular implementation of the chip.
Two other things worth trying are IBM's
GRADD drivers and the GRADD based Scitech Display
Doctor (which you have to pay for after a trial period).
GRADD drivers may be worth trying even if the card or chip manufacturer does provide an OS/2 driver. I tried
GRADD version 0.077 with a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 and the performance increase was dramatic. See here for details.
Scitech Display Doctor handles a wider range of chips than GRADD, and has a few other extra things included.
Even if your card isn't specifically supported by GRADD or SDD, remember that both of these provide a generic un-accelerated SVGA driver that should work with most cards.
3dfx based cards should generally be avoided. 3dfx don't even provide generic drivers, so don't bother with them. Matrox on the other hand seem particularly good in their OS/2 support (but do check their web site first, before buying anything.)
I had a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (using S3's Virge chip) which did work with S3's driver, but I couldn't get an Eagle S375 (an S3 Virge DX card) to work properly. It worked fine at 640x480 and 1024x768, but had problems at 800x600. At 256 and 65536 colours, when playing mpegs some of the colours were separated into two duplicate images. This gave a main central image with coloured ghost images on the left and right. When set to 16 million colours, this card played MPEGs correctly but gave a strong blue cast to some still images. I tried versions 1.01.11, 1.03.11 and 1.03.20 of the S3 driver, but could not resolve these problems.
After the Eagle card I tried another S3 Virge DX based card, a Legend 3DV+. This card had similar problems to the Eagle card. Virge DX was not explicitly listed as supported by the GRADD drivers, but I tried them anyway. They seemed to undervalue the capabilities of the card, because whatever monitor was selected in page 2 of the System Properties notebook, there was a very limited range of colour depths and desktop sizes. Refresh rate was limited to 60Hz. But I eventually stumbled across a solution - if you have this problem, see here for
details.
I didn't think of using the GRADD drivers (or Scitech Display Doctor) while I had the Eagle card, but I suspect that it
would have worked too if I had.
I've also used a Legend Argon 16. Several things lead me to suspect that this card isn't made by Legend, but rather is a Joytech card with a Legend sticker on it. Anyway, it's a 16 meg S3 Savage 4 card. No OS/2 drivers are provided by Legend, Joytech or S3. I've tried running it with GENGRADD (unaccelerated, generic SVGA) from GRADD 0.08 and 0.077, and also Scitech Display Doctor. All worked.
I should actually stop buying S3 products, because S3 have a bad attitude. They seem to have stopped providing OS/2 drivers, and when I asked if one of the OS/2 drivers they did provide for an AGP card would work with their newer AGPx2 chip, they wrote back that I should ask IBM about driver support.
Worked: Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (2mb), Legend 3DV+ (4mb), Legend Argon 16 (Joytech??)
Might work: Eagle S375 (4mb)
Base OS/2 Warp 4.0 didn't support high capacity removable storage such as the
LS-120 and various SyQuest and Iomega models, but more recent fixpacks have
enabled this. If you don't want to install the whole fixpack, the individual file is
available from the OS/2 Device Driver Pack. This should be used in preference to
any older software provided by the device manufacturer.
NOTE: This support is for internal drives only. For Parallel Port models, check with the device manufacturer.
Imation does not currently provide OS/2 drivers for the parallel port SuperDisk.
I've also tried an internal Mitsubishi LS-120. It's the most disappointing piece of hardware I've ever owned. It
doesn't work reliably with OS/2's Drive objects - almost invariably, if a window is open for a: drive, opening another
window for a folder on the a: drive will cause that window, or both windows, to collapse. I've used it successfully
with Clear & Simple's DiskJockey Lite (but that programme doesn't seem to support long file names on FAT partitions?), but even when it does work it's very slow. A
'display directory size including sub-directories' operation (in DJ Lite) which took 1 second with a SCSI
Syquest drive, took one minute and 50 seconds with the LS-120. (I'm not sure what difference it made that the
Syquest was HPFS, while the LS-120 was FAT).
I also had a file in the a: drive root directory that I was unable to move to a folder on a: drive. I had to move it to the hard drive, then move it again to the folder on a:.
Doing anything with this drives takes a couple of minutes, and the minutes soon add up to hours.
For a stack of advice about OS/2 and LS-120 (plus a more positive view of the LS-120), see this article at OS/2 VOICE.
Worked like a dream: SyQuest EZ-135S (internal) with Asus SC-200 SCSI card
Worked poorly: Mitsubishi IDE LS-120
Didn't work: Imation Superdisk (parallel port)
I've used a Creative Vibra 16 card (ISA), a card using the Crystal 4235 chipset (ISA) and a card using the ESS Solo 1 (PCI). All worked - but the ESS needed a few extra steps. Firstly, the drivers aren't available from the OS/2 ddpak. Instead go to Leo or Hobbes. After that, although they seemed to install OK I still had no sound. Timur Tabi's Crystal Semiconductor and OS/2 Web Page has stacks of useful info, mostly about cards with Crystal chips, but his advice solved my problem too. Basically, the order of the drivers in the 'Ampmix' line of the \MMOS2\MMPM2.INI file needed to be changed. As per his instructions, before editing this file I removed system sounds by running \MMOS2\INSTALL\dinstsnd.cmd. Then rebooted, edited mmpm2.ini, rebooted again, and ran \MMOS2\INSTALL\instsnd.cmd to bring back sound. Re-boot, and my computer greeted me with the familiar grandiose OS/2 start-up noise. Yay!
I've installed a Hauppauge TV-GO (model 708) and it works fine. Hauppauge don't supply OS/2 drivers, but these kind people provide free WarpTV driversThe documentation isn't the best, and I'm still not sure how do a screen capture (except by using PMView's File-Capture-Window Interior), but they do work. They don't look anywhere near as pretty as the provided Windows software, but then ... do you buy a TV to look at the TV, or the picture it shows?
Worked (with a bit of fiddling to understand the software)Hauppauge TV-GO model 708.
I have a Soltek SL-54 motherboard with an AMD K6-2 400 CPU. I changed the multiplier to 4.5 to run it at 450MHz, but the system was unstable. It also doesn't like being run at 4 x 112 = 448MHz
I also have a Cyrix MII P333 in an Octek (= Diamond Flower International (DFI) ?) board, but it runs so hot I'm scared to try anything. I'm just glad that the board has a temperature sensor.
Prior to this I had an A-Bit IT5V motherboard with an Intel Pentium 200MMX CPU. It ran at 225MHz (75MHz bus x 3) with no problems. Simple Count and Video Performance Measurement (included in Performance Plus v4) showed a CPU improvement of 10.5% and video improvement of 7.1%. I also tried 208MHz (83MHz bus x 2.5) - the system physically booted OK, but Warp consistently stopped with a Trap error before fully booting.
I also had a Cyrix P150+ in a no-name board. This board was missing a few jumpers - things which the manual said to adjust were soldered. After a while the board took it upon itself to run the chip as a P-166+, and it did this with no problems (despite the well-known aversion of Cyrix chips to overclocking).
PC Systems and devices compatible with OS/2 at IBM
Warp Xperience