Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-09-15, 00:00

by

by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I know, it's perfection. lol I love small motherboards for some reason. I should be able to put this in a small mATX case. I've been wanting to do a reverse sleeper 486 DX4 build in a nice Lian Li or Silverstone case. That would be awesome. I've been working on a couple projects like this, but I'm …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-09-14, 23:21

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

wiretap wrote on 2020-09-14, 19:19: Just grabbed one of these. (seller photo) Such a cute, tiny board!

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2020-09-14, 23:19

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I missed playing SC3000, so decided to install it on my Pentium 4 system. Put the CD in the drive, closed the door, and somehow the CD shifted in the tray and got stuck between the door and the drive. The disc was slightly scratched. The game then installed fine, but apparently the disc got damaged …

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Re: Orpheus Soundcard: a new DOS soundcard with SPDIF/OPL3/MPU support

Posted on 2020-09-14, 23:14

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

welcome! none atm, prototype cards were in the hands of testers and technical people but none are yt reviewers I have received some request about this and I will fulfill all so at least at some point there will be something to see as well :) I'm looking forward to this! Though I still anticipate …

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Re: Orpheus Soundcard: a new DOS soundcard with SPDIF/OPL3/MPU support

Posted on 2020-09-14, 23:13

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

In other words, the Wave Blaster header allows the equivalent of a MIDI capable synthesizer module to be mounted internally on a sound card . There exist adapter adapter boards to connect a Wave Blaster compatible daughter board to a standard DIN (round plug) MIDI port, essentially converting a …

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Re: Orpheus Soundcard: a new DOS soundcard with SPDIF/OPL3/MPU support

Posted on 2020-09-14, 03:30

by

by Thallanor

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This is such awesome news! This is going to be a dumb question though, but there are a _lot_ of you here who know a lot more about this than me. I've seen lots of sound cards over the years that support daughterboards, and have been poking at the Waveblaster stuff on Serdashop for a little while. …

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Re: Looking for a specific air hockey game

Posted on 2020-09-12, 01:30

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Installing WineVDM should ease some of the quick Win16 testing difficulties (most of them are usually VBRUN*00.DLL at worst) That is fair! Honestly, while I've got the physical hardware for "actual" use, I've been meaning for _ages_ to setup a VM for each major release of Windows, and setup a …

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Re: Looking for a specific air hockey game

Posted on 2020-09-11, 02:55

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

WSLAM/Slam!'s usually the go-to Win3x air hockey, but i've never heard of this profane version haha. now I'M curious. It was such a goofy game. It was great! :) I've done digging on again, off again over the years. I've dug through almost every air hockey game from various archives, but nothing. …

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Re: Windows 95 OSR2.5 vs Windows 98 SE for a 486 build with 32MB of ram

Posted on 2020-09-11, 00:47

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was trying out both Windows 95 OSR2.5 and Windows 98 SE on my latest 486 build with a Pentium Overdrive 83Mhz and 32MB of ram on a 486 PCI motherboard with a SIS 496 chipset. I ended up using Windows 95 OSR2.5 as it ran smoother than Windows 98 SE. I was just curious if anyone else had a …

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Looking for a specific air hockey game

Posted on 2020-09-10, 23:58

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

As the subject line indicates, there is a specific air hockey game that I have been looking for for years. I believe it was for Windows, possibly as early as Windows 3.11. The graphics were, as expected, incredibly simple The real standout thing about the game is the audio it would play when you …

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Re: Enough CPU power for calculating disk space / disk sizes.

Posted on 2020-09-10, 23:47

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How would you even get an IBM 5150 to recognize that..? Wouldn't you need a version of DOS that exceeds the system requirements in terms of RAM? I use a simple 8-bit ISA XT-IDE. 1 GB was the smallest CF card I had at the time. I am using MS-DOS 6.22. My 5150 itself has an AST SixPakPlus to bring …

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Re: Enough CPU power for calculating disk space / disk sizes.

Posted on 2020-09-10, 23:25

by

by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I can tell you from personal experience that an IBM 5150 w/ a 1 GB CF is _not_ acceptable when it does the free space calculation. 😉

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Re: Could you build a retro PC right now?

Posted on 2020-08-20, 21:09

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by Thallanor

in Milliways

in Milliways

For me, cases are what are in short order. I finally have a spare one now, after buying one from a member of a local vintage computing group - he even rebuilt the PSU for me. :) So now I'm looking at getting some builds together. I'm actually bogged down in these older-era builds because of the case …

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Re: What's the dumbest retro mistake you've made?

Posted on 2020-08-20, 21:06

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by Thallanor

in Milliways

in Milliways

I would like to know more about SMARTDRV killing drives . You are referring to Microsoft' SMARTDRV , right ? I am asking because, if memory serves, Tandy used to use the SMART DRIVE qualifier/name/brand on some their hardware products (hard drives, I believe). This might turn into a fun Google …

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Re: IBM 5150, correct period considerations and more

Posted on 2020-08-20, 21:00

by

by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thanks for your experience, what stop me now is the fact that mine board come with only 64kb of ram. Much like waterbeesje said, I think you'll be able to find solutions. I know that since I bought my AST SixPakPlus, I've seen other 8-bit memory boards that claim to host up to a full 640K of RAM. …

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Re: Games set in the future, on a date that is now in the past

Posted on 2020-08-17, 17:05

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by Thallanor

in Milliways

in Milliways

Manhunter: New York Look what happened in 2002! I remember playing this when I was younger, and was actually researching this again a couple weeks ago. What I find cool is that the family that wrote this game for Sierra still exists. The name is Evryware. (http://www.evryware.com/) While they …

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Re: IBM 5150, correct period considerations and more

Posted on 2020-08-17, 17:02

by

by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I bought an IBM 5150 a few months ago but have only recently started working on it. Much like you, I needed/wanted to upgrade a couple components in order to make the PC a little easier to use. For me, the biggest issue was the video card, as I do not have much room, so my monitors are LCD. For this …

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Re: What's the dumbest retro mistake you've made?

Posted on 2020-08-17, 16:20

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by Thallanor

in Milliways

in Milliways

I once pinched, I believe it was a floppy ribbon cable, in between the case and cover. Dead shorted. Turned the computer on and something caught fire. I was nerding out and had a plexiglass window installed (this would have been late 90s/early 2000s) and so you could see the flames. Turn off the …

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Re: Memory Tests Terminated by Keystroke

Posted on 2020-08-17, 16:03

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I would be curious what your experience is replacing the keyboard, or better yet, disconnecting the keyboard. It might help you to narrow down the cause of the issue. I can't imagine a stuck key would cause Windows to hang on boot, but then again, back in the day, looking at your computer strange …

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Re: Most reliable 2.5 inch IDE hard drives?

Posted on 2020-08-17, 15:59

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by Thallanor

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I always use IBM or HGST and Hitachi 72,000rpm , 2.5” IDE drives in old laptops. That has got to be the fastest spinning disk that I have ever heard of. ;) At those speeds, I'd expect a space-time rift to open up, allowing it to retrieve data from the past. I always joked that if time travel became …

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