Merge286 with Leading Edge,Paradise Autoswitch,MS Windows 2

[Charles Hedrick]

Since the official word on Merge286 seems to be "this is known to work
on real IBM hardware and Televideo.  For anything else we make no
guarantees", I thought I'd report my results.  I just brought it up on
a Leading Edge D2 with a Western Digital 1003 disk controller.  (The
original D2 disk controller is an 8-bit XT-style controller, which
won't work with Microport.  Since you have to replace the disk
controller, this tends to make the D2 not be a cost-effective machine
for System V, though it might be reasonable to buy one with only a
floppy drive and then add your own hard disk.)  I'm using a NEC
Multisync II monitor.  The D2 uses a Paradise Autoswitch display
controller.  I had trouble bringing up Merge initially.  The attempt
to generate the saved DOS image would hang right after saying "saving
DOS image" and printing about 100 dots.  I did finally manage to get
the thing working.  Without spending a whole day trying various
combinations, it's hard to be 100% sure of what is going on, but it
seems almost 95% certain that what did it was locking the display
controller so its "autoswitch" feature is disabled.  You should
probably power the system off and power it on after doing this to make
sure it takes effect.  I assume this advice would apply to the
Paradise controller in general, and not just to the D2.  By the way,
MS Windows version 2 works under Merge286.  (Uport knew that version
1.03 worked, but hadn't tried 2 yet.)  I'm using a Mouse Systems mouse
on port COM2.  I had to allocate the port to DOS in order to get the
mouse to work.  I also had to define TEMP as being E: (the DOS disk).
For some reason it wouldn't work defined as C: (the Unix file system)
or c:/tmp.  You need a fair amount of free space on the TEMP system,
since MS Windows puts swap files there.