Gaming on a Transmeta Crusoe HP Thin Client

Overview

The HP T5500 thin client is powered by a rare Transmeta Crusoe processor running at 533MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 1GB solid state disk. I’ve configured it to run Windows 98 and pure DOS with full SoundBlaster emulation through VIA DOS drivers. This little machine handles classic games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Descent, and Warcraft 2 surprisingly well. The Transmeta Crusoe is fascinating technology—it translates x86 instructions to its native instruction set in real-time through software emulation built into the chip itself. Made in Canada in 2010, these chips were short-lived in PCs but still live on in embedded systems.

Key Moments

• Overview of the HP T5500 thin client internals
• Transmeta Crusoe CPU exposed: 533MHz with software x86 translation
• Installing 1GB solid state disk upgrade
• ATI Rage XL video chip with VIA sound chipset
• Configuring VIA SoundBlaster emulation in DOS
• Gaming in pure DOS: Duke 3D, Quake, Descent
• Windows 98 gaming with full music support
• USB keyboard challenges and PS/2 adapter workaround

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey there YouTube, I’m back and I’m here to show you another little thin PC. This right here is the HP T5500 and it’s powered by a Transmeta Crusoe processor. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that was a short-lived processor. Actually, it probably still lives on in different kinds of embedded systems but not in computers anymore. And I have this little guy here running Windows 98.

I’m going to be showing you what it looks like inside, what I’ve done to set it up with Windows 98, and how it performs running some common games and applications. So let’s get started.

Internals

So I did acquire several of these units and most of them work perfectly fine as you can see in this one here. But some of them arrived dead on arrival. So in this particular case I’m pretty sure this one is dead. It doesn’t power on because some of the capacitors have pretty much blown up. But maybe in a later video I will attempt to repair these because that would also be an interesting thing to see if we can make these work.

But for now I can use this to show you what one of these thin clients looks like internally. As you can see here, most of the components in this model are soldered on the motherboard with the exception of the flash IDE module. This is the hard drive that uses a 2.5 millimeter style hard drive connector connecting up on the board, and that goes here on this header on the board.

What I’ve done here to get these running Windows 98 is I’ve removed the low capacity ones that are on the machine itself and replaced it with a higher capacity model. In this case, it’s a 1 gig solid state disk that holds Windows 98 and the apps that I have installed.

Memory Configuration

These machines come with 64 megabytes of onboard RAM, which is pretty much the bare minimum that I would ever run Windows 98 with. But it runs well, especially for DOS games, and it does a good job. So I haven’t had any issues with it.

Windows 98 does tend to use virtual memory on the solid state disk to make up the difference when an app needs more memory. So given that this is a 533 megahertz CPU, it performs really well.

The Transmeta Crusoe CPU

Yeah, underneath here is the Transmeta Crusoe processor and I’ll take this off in a second to let you see this chip. It’s kind of cool to see. Let me see if I can just do that right now. I can take off these clips because you’ll see this chip is kind of cool to see.

All right, and if we kind of rock back and forth, there you go to break off the thermal paste. And you’re ready, this is the Transmeta Crusoe chip. It’s kind of a cool design, looks like an Athlon CPU, but it’s a Transmeta Crusoe.

And these chips were very interesting because they run x86 microcode that were used to from Intel and AMD through their through some software emulation that is built into this chip. So they translate in real time instructions from x86 instructions to their own native instructions. And that was kind of interesting in their architecture.

If I flip it around so you can see, it was made in Canada in 2010. So yeah, that’s the CPU. I’ll put a link to the Wikipedia article for this CPU in the description.

Other Components

Another cool thing about this machine is that it has an ATI Rage XL video chip and this is the memory module that is for that. The irony is that I believe this actually uses memory from the system for the video as well. So from 64 megs we are left with 56 megabytes of usable memory.

And then it has a VIA chipset with a VIA sound chip, which I believe is this guy right here. And the nice thing about this chipset is that it’s one of the sound chips that works with the VIA DOS drivers. And I do have it set up in this machine, so we have SoundBlaster emulation in DOS using a TSR.

I/O Ports

One thing that you’ll notice is there is no PS/2 port for a keyboard. And we all know, well not all of us, but if you’re not familiar with it, Windows 98 doesn’t come with native USB support. I’ve added it here on this installation using some of the known ways that we can add some of the Windows Millennium drivers to Windows 98 to get USB drives and USB devices working correctly.

But even with that, getting this to recognize a USB keyboard and mouse that has never seen before is a complicated task. And the way I’ve managed to do that is by using a USB to PS/2 adapter. I’ve set one up using another keyboard that is recognized without having to have drivers, and now I can plug in any PS/2 keyboard that I have laying around so that I can at least when I’m prompted I can press enter and install the driver. But yeah, that was a huge hassle getting a keyboard that worked in Windows 98, but I managed to make it happen.

In the back you’ll have four USB ports, an ethernet port, sound in and out, a VGA port, and a 12 volt AC adapter.

DOS Gaming with SoundBlaster

All right, so we’re going to start by powering up the unit. Let me show you first how to enter setup here. You press F10 and it’s got a typical BIOS like you’ve seen in other systems.

You see here that we have a Transmeta 5600 running at 533 megahertz and it’s got a one gig of solid state space and it’s got 56 megabytes of RAM. Remember that I mentioned that it shares some memory with the video chip, so 64 minus 8 will give us 56. 8 megabytes is what’s dedicated for the video chip.

The way I have this set up is that you’re presented with a Windows 98 startup menu. We can go straight to DOS or we can go to Windows. So I’m going to start with DOS because I have some cool stuff here.

I’m going to press Command Prompt Only. From this command prompt, one thing that I have enabled here is the sound support. Well, I haven’t enabled it, I have to enable it manually because this is a special card in here. The sound card uses special drivers that need to be installed into resident memory.

So I have a little batch script called sound on and it goes ahead and uses VIA SoundBlaster config file to set the SoundBlaster emulation on for this chip. And it’ll set it for an address of 220 with an IRQ of 5 and DMA of 1. It also sets MPU and joystick values, but those are not really available in DOS. But we do have some blaster support.

This sound-on.bat basically just sets the blaster variable and it runs this VIA SoundBlaster config file. And now that we have some blaster support enabled in DOS, we can go into the games directory here.

We have Duke 3D and I previously ran setup here. If you go to setup, you can go to sound setup, and if you choose sound effects card, I have Sound Blaster and it’s set for 220, 5, and 1 and 5, just like the output in the sound-on batch file showed.

[Tests Duke Nukem 3D with sound effects working perfectly]

The music in DOS doesn’t quite work. In Windows 98 it does work and I’ll show you that in this game afterwards. So you can see that the general MIDI does work, but in DOS I haven’t been able to get the music to work. But in Windows 98 general MIDI does work.

Windows 98 Gaming

I actually like running these games on this machine through Windows 98 even though there’s a little slight performance hit. You get everything else working without dealing with mouse drivers or sound drivers or anything like that. And you’ll get the music, you’ll get the sound effects, you get the mouse support.

So let’s try it again with Duke 3D. I’m gonna load W3D here and you get the music, you see you get the whole entire gameplay and the music. And yeah, so now I can play LA Meltdown. Let’s rock and drop.

And as you can see I’m moving the mouse over here and everything works as expected. Can use the arrow keys to move around and then the mouse to shoot and aim. And I’ll go, I am awful by the way. I’m not a gamer, I’m a computer guy, computer and car guy, not a gamer. But you know, I can shoot.

So you get the idea. Everything works in Windows 98 as expected, including music and sound. So that helps a lot.

Why the HP T5500 is Great

That’s it, that’s the little HP computer that lets you play your old favorite DOS games and it also lets you play music using some blaster emulation and it does a pretty good job. If you like this kind of stuff, make sure you subscribe because I post videos every week or so, and it’s a mixture of things. Sometimes it’s car related, sometimes it’s computer related, but I like to do strange things where I look at vintage computers or make something happen with computers that was not designed to do what I’m doing here.