Re: Was the amd 133adz a rebranded 160?

Posted on 2024-02-01, 22:36

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'vé tried a few dozen 5x86s and I can't say that they're very strictly binned. More ADZs can do 160 at 3.45V than ADYs but definitely not all of them while there were some 160 capable ADYs too.

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Re: Crimes Against Silicon: Scuffed CPU/GPU cores

Posted on 2024-01-21, 19:08

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Coppermines on the other hand somehow had much harder die. Must have been somehow treated in the fab to make it tougher. I've seen an awful lot of chipped Thunderbird/Spitfire chips but somewhat fewer damaged Palominos/Tbreds/Bartons. My hypothesis is that the stiff ceramic base of the earlier …

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Re: Do you have a backup motherboard for your build.

Posted on 2023-12-19, 19:59

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For many platforms, yes, I have spare boards. Not necessarily the same model but sometimes I do have a preferred model or family or chipset. P3B-F of P4C800 are good examples, partly because of the adapters they support.

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Re: how does k5 overclock?

Posted on 2023-12-12, 20:26

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hmm mm, reading this all I started to appreciate my pr166 that apparently runs at 133mhz even more. True though that I've never tried it outside DOS. It may or may not be fully stable... And I haven't tried it over 133mhz either.

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2023-11-25, 17:06

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have the same board (although in it's "555A" revision, the original 555 had a Dallas chip), there's a patched bios for it if you ever need to connect larger capacity hard drives. Oh and whatever you try, there's an unlabeled jumper that mustn't be taken off, otherwise it will raise the CPU core …

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2023-11-25, 11:21

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Most notable scrap find lately is a Shuttle HOT-555 which works and has managed to impress me, as it's a late revision. It has coin cell battery, supports dual voltage CPUS down to 2.8V, has both SIMM and DIMM sockets (not a given for a VX board), silkscreened 75MHz setting and I found in the docs …

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Re: I pulled out a PCI card while a system was powered on today

Posted on 2023-11-04, 03:26

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Last time I did this was in my childhood, I connected a SID card into my Videoton TVC while it was on. It didn't work then and I was scared witless. Thankfully a power cycle brought it to life.

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Re: Fast way to test 486 stability in DOS? Please recommend software

Posted on 2023-10-29, 20:15

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Quake interleaves fpu and integer instructions hammering both simultaneously. At least on Pentiums. A 486 will really wait for its FPU to finish before going on with those integer operations. But I don't really know how good of a stability test it is for them. On Pentiums it's quite nitpicky, it …

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Re: Is there any reason to install more than 1 MB RAM on a 286 PC?

Posted on 2023-10-07, 07:49

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, this is what I found comparing the VLSI 286-20 and the Opti 283 386sx-25 system. RAM is the same 5MB, in similar composition, if we can call 8x44256 chips equivalent of 8x256k SIMM. The 4PCs of 1M modules are just 4x1M modules, both 30.... pin. Pad. Whatever. VGA was the same WD90C31 which …

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Re: Is there any reason to install more than 1 MB RAM on a 286 PC?

Posted on 2023-10-06, 16:39

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Let us know how well it runs! I remember recently reading somewhere that at the same clock speed, 286 CPUs were actually faster than 386sx CPUs. :slight_smile: I tried and it kinda crawled. It worked but, especially with a dozen units on screen, the controls had inconveniently big delay, the frame …

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Re: Is there any reason to install more than 1 MB RAM on a 286 PC?

Posted on 2023-10-06, 14:02

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's a real mode game, so it runs on a 286. So that's at least one game that you can only play in its full glory on a 286 when you have at least 2MB of RAM installed. :slight_smile: Let's split this statement into two. It's a real mode game and it runs on a 286. The new 32-bit EUs and GPRs of the …

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Re: Is there any reason to install more than 1 MB RAM on a 286 PC?

Posted on 2023-10-05, 16:41

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You could use HIMEM.SYS to load DOS high. This was because of a quirk in the design of the 286 which let the first 60k of extended memory be available to 16-bit programs. By doing so you freed up some memory for hungry DOS games. This means there is a very good reason to have more than 1MB in your …

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Re: Boxes to store RAM modules

Posted on 2023-09-12, 20:30

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A less professional but cost effective way I use - are 3.5" HDD boxes. As long as as a DIMM, as wide as a SIMM-72, they contain many modules in my cupboard.

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Re: Abit AB-PB4 twin paradox

Posted on 2023-08-28, 18:55

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ok, two years have passed since then. In the meantime I grabbed all the ALI M1489 boards I could get my hands on. Now I could even allocate some more time for more testing and research and it seems to me that the older "SC" variant is really the faster of the two and the crossover apparently …

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Re: How can i make an 1:1 copy of my HDD on a 486 machine.

Posted on 2023-08-09, 02:29

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Fortunately DOS is a rather polite OS - you just partition/format the target drive, sys it if you didn't format it with the /s switch, run a "fdisk 2 /mbr" which I never had to back in the days yet I do a lot lately. Then you can simply copy over all the files, using the very NC you mentioned. Given …

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Re: GPUs that auto-resize to the correct Aspect Ratio on DOS (4:3 on a 16:9 monitor, DVI output)

Posted on 2023-07-26, 21:06

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

On a funny side note - 256-byte intros (which run, in most cases, at 320x200) usually just don't have the space to deal with non-square pixels and despite being "classic" DOS programs they look best on a 16:10 display that has no idea that 320x200 should be a 4:3 resolution. But they're the …

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Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz

Posted on 2023-06-11, 14:22

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Do you have a link to the file format ? Hell no... Damn, I read something back, like 25 years ago... IIIRC it's a very simple format with uncompressed 9*64 patterns that can change instruments any time but default to the first 9 instruments by default. I surely can't make up a detailed description …

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Re: Cirrus Logic CL-5446

Posted on 2023-05-18, 02:54

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Though Riva128 is supported by UniVBE to get those 15-bit modes. And it has superb DOS performance. And when it's not about 15-bit, it supports a great pile of crazy low res VESA modes like 400x300. The main difference between this and Voodoo3 is that its truecolor modes are 32-bit while Voodoo …

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Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz

Posted on 2023-04-12, 18:44

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

No problem, I have enough common sense not to try to play OPL music on the GUS, especially not on an XT 😁 Oh, OPL. I have a pile of .HSC music, do you plan to support these? They have a very simple structure, exactly like some uncompressed module - with OPL2 instruments.

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Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz

Posted on 2023-04-11, 18:16

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I bit the bullet this afternoon and set up a GUS in this XT board. Well, two different ones as the ACE I tried first didn't really work as I wanted it to. After two unsuccessful tries it finally started to play music in ModMaster but it was quite garbled. When I removed the turbo jumper it started …

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