OS/2 Hardware & Drivers

— I no longer develop this legacy resource —

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Most of the drivers listed on this page are no longer available. Arca Noae offers a driver update subscription package for OS/2:

OS/2 & eCS Drivers & Software Subscription — personal edition

Video Cards and Drivers

S3 video cards are a mixed bag, depending upon which chipset is used in your card. If you're looking for a better video driver, search for SciTech Doctor OS/2 drivers.

SciTech Display Doctor 7.0 for OS/2 IBM Special Edition offers GRADD display adapters that work quite well with all newer video cards, including the SiS chipsets that are included on many of the recent computers.

I particularly appreciate the fact that these drivers recognize and use all 8 MB of my ATI RAGE video card (the ATI driver only recognizes 4 MB and is very slow compared to the SciTech driver. I've experienced some problems with a few WIN-OS/2 programs, but nothing significant, mostly a white shadow effect.

Look for the drivers under the Display Adapters SciTech suite of drivers section on IBM OS/2 Device Driver Pak [no longer available].

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Sound Card Drivers

Creative Sound Blaster was pretty much the standard for games under most platforms for a long time and OS/2 support has been built in.

However, there is no OS/2 drivers for newer PCI sound cards (AWE-64 and later) and many have problems running the PnP versions. There is also problems with sound under the OS/2 System and Win-OS/2 at the same time with Sound Blaster drivers (and several others).

The OS/2 drivers for Sound Blaster Live! have been ported from the Linux drivers provided by Creative and are available from Netlabs (via FTP).

OS/2 Sound Card Fixes

Getting Your Sound Card to Work under OS/2

The OS/2 drivers for Sound Blaster Live! have been ported from the Linux drivers provided by Creative and were available from Netlabs sound page (no longer available).

See also, installing AWE64 support under OS/2 or try searching for your sound card at os2world.com.

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Scanner Drivers

SCOUG covers Scanners and TWAIN under OS/2 in their January, 1999 issue of Ink.

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Removable Media Drivers

Iomega Zip 100 and Jaz Drives now have better support under OS/2 (including HPFS and multiple partitions in the case of the Jaz). Iomega Zip 100 USB Drives are supported under OS/2 but the drivers may no longer be available from IBM.

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Universal Serial Bus (USB) Devices

USB is everywhere now. You will need both the USB Basic Device Support and the driver specific to your device. The OS/2 Device Driver Pak supported 29 USB devices at last count (but is no longer available).

USB and OS/2 (Part 1: Basic USB support: controllers).
USB drivers (OS2site.com).
USB drivers for OS/2 (US$49.00).

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Other Hardware Lists and Drivers

The hardware vendors in this list are not extensive. Because of the huge varieties of hardware that will run OS/2 systems with varying degrees of success I have included these few sites:

Hardware (205) includes various users' experiences with hardware by type.

Aging Resources

Current OS/2 hardware information is getting much harder to obtain. Most of the information on this page is very old and the hardware is no longer manufactured or sold.

The missing IBM databases of hardware drivers is a critical shortcoming. That is why ArcaOS provides a better avenue to obtaining software that will run on current hardware.

OS/2 Resources Pages

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