Hp T5720

[Olowookere Devost]

Ijust received a HP Compaq t5720 Thin Client and I want to install Windows XP Embedded on that machine. However, I can not find where to download the driver for my thin client PC. I wonder if somebody could tell me where to those drivers. Thank you!

I decided to go with a thin client setup, and went for a HP t5720 with a nVidia Quatro NVS 280 (its one of the standard configurations) running Windows 98SE - even though i have 486 and Pentium I computers on storage. The setup is as follows:

Video:

The nVidia Quatro NVS 280 offers excellent performance for playing Unreal Tournament in full HD and Half-Life 1, and thats about the newest games i want to play. It does not work at all with FIFA soccer 98, 99, and 2000 though. I also tried with nGlide but at most i got a 99% black screen with a lot of glitches going on. GTA1 is also flickering, and build games like Duke3D needs the nolfb patch to work in VESA modes.

I tried the on-board SiS GPU as well, but then i could not get sound to work in some games like Duke Nukem 3D (!). The on-board supported screen resolutions also left a lot to desire.

Audio:

Some games, like Duke Nukem 3D works fine with the Windows 98 supplied soundblaster emulation. I installed VDMSound for some dos games, but it only works with a few titles. Astrofire, Magic Carpet, and others, do not work at all with neither Win98 sound or VDMSound unfortunately. Also, if i have used VDMSound, and then later run Duke Nukem 3D, the windows 98 soundblaster emulation thing doesnt work and i have to reboot - even if i run the VDMSound unload programb (btw anyone know how to disable the tip of the day popup?).

I noticed on My HP that the video-output is only 1024x768 whit the on-board card. I could go higher, but than I get a scrolling 1024x768. Even whit the newest drivers, But I have to say that I run Windows 2000. And I fitted an 160 gig harddisk in it. But you gave me the idea of using the PCI bus for an extra videocard.

So the NeoWare, it supports DOS sound. I have one whit a DOC2000 (disk on chip, kind of SSD). And also I could connect a IDE harddisk, or IDE2SD kind of stuff. An IDE2SD makes software transfers easy. So I installed DOS on the DOC and can use the SD card as second harddisk just for games. Works fine. But I had some problems wile playing Lemmings, the graphics were kind of strange. Well I did not much testing.

I think i got the onboard SiS vga chip to 1280x800 (in 16 bit i think) without the scroll thing, but then came the sound weirdness which wasnt worth the trouble as i dont play that much FIFA anyway. I havent got a clue why it would mess up the sound. I wanted to test with a TNT2 PCI card that i think would have better retro support, but when i went looking for it i found out that my wife had thrown the box with old PCI cards out =/

I used an old thin client to "fake" a dedicated DOS machine, just had them start up DOS full-screen directly after booting into XP embedded. They had nowhere near the horsepower of your thin client but I was quite surprised at how well they managed.

GTA1, FIFA98 and FIFA99 now works perfectly, and build engine games no longer need nolfb for VESA modes. The original OpenGL renderers in UT99 works (no need to find alternative renderers online), and in Shogo the main menu now works as well (uses DirectX). The performance in Shogo and UT99 is a lot worse though. I get max 30-40 fps in UT 720p and 20fps or less in 1080p, going to even lower resolutions does not help a lot. Luckily it is a lot cooler than the GeForce FX 5200 based Quadro NVS280, but the GeForce FX series were notorious for their heat.

The card seems crippled by the 64 bit memory bus and slow RAM. Overclocking didnt help much, and it caused other issues. It was however a lot easier to get working and works better with some games. Cant decide which card to keep...

Awesome thread, thanks for sharing your experience. I was wondering if you had tried a PCI sound card and used it with the onboard video. Seems like that would make it work for gaming with native SoundBlaster support.

I also got HP T5720 and recently found out some awesome tricks I wrote about in general thin client thread but decided to share them here as well so information is more readily available for T5720 owners... So the main trick is that somebody finally was able to create custom BIOS and unlock all menu entries on this thing. Just search "T5720 unlocked bios" and you should find v1.13 BIOS. Then following tweaks can be done:

- Set IRQ 5 (or 7) reserved in BIOS. Now SBEMU starts to work, before there were no free IRQs for emulated SB as some ACPI redirector stuff took them. No even when COM and LPT were disabled. Not sure if there would be enough IRQs if USB and ethernet would be disabled or PCI graphics card would be removed, but i really wanted keep them enabled for Win98.

- UDMA can be enabled for IDE which doubles transfer speeds under Win98 from 16MB/s to 33MB/s; however, on DOS this does something nasty as QEMM no longer works (JEMMEX and EMM386 do) so pick your poison

- Disable USB mouse and keyboard support and suddenly QEMM memory scan is 10x faster than before (!). Additionally you get 16 kB more free space in high memory as "ROM" now reserves only 8 kB instead of 24 kB. Not sure what is the deal here but USB keyboard and mouse emulation is so bad that it is unusable under DOS (huge slowdowns when using peripherals).

- Disable LAN boot ROM and "ROM" in high memory decreases 8 kB in size. If USB keyboard and mouse support was disabled then whole "ROM" disappears from high memory and now there is plenty of free continuous space for TSRs.

With all these ROM tricks there is so much high memory available that I get 625 kb of free conventional memory under QEMM or JEMMEX even if I load ethernet packet drivers in addition to 4dos, smartdrv, doslfn, keyb, ctmouse, sbemu...

Edit: For the record, legacy USB support is indeed poor in this device , huge slowdowns, but BIOS PS/2 support is poor as well. Not as bad slowdowns but bad in any case. Cutemouse 2.0 which directly commands PS/2 devices will work without slowdowns in DOS (not 2.1 which uses BIOS -> slowdowns).

I think, the main reason why a modded 5720 BIOS even available is due to it being just a squished Athlon XP system on a common SiS desktop chipset. 5710 has a Transmeta CPU and would require much more involved modding.

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