Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2022-04-19, 14:18

by

by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Took delivery of an MSI MS5169 V4 board today (with K6-2 500 processor). Unfortunately it had been shipped with the heatsink attached and it broke off during shipping. After a cursory inspection, I don't think there is any other damage. Which is fortunate considering it had a chunky metal heatsink …

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Re: Getting Windows 98 SE working on Physical Hardware

Posted on 2022-04-06, 15:10

by

by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How much RAM do you have in that machine? Thankfully I had a 1 Gig stick so I was able to get it booted 1GB is actually too much RAM for Windows 98. I would expect the installation to crash partway through with that much RAM, and the system is likely to either fail to boot or be unstable. There's …

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Re: Are all OEM creative labs sound cards trashes and what "value" mean in creative labs denomination?

Posted on 2022-04-05, 21:30

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

it has a front panel audio connector which can be easily converted to the current HDA specs (adapter cables for this are readily available) do you have a pic to illustrate ? Sure. https://www.kepstin.ca/dump/vogons-forums/2022-04-05/DSC_0003_600.JPG The grey adapter cable from the white connector …

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Re: Are all OEM creative labs sound cards trashes and what "value" mean in creative labs denomination?

Posted on 2022-03-19, 20:10

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yeah, in one case I decided that I'd actually prefer an OEM card over the regular model - I picked up the Dell SB0220 SB Live card for a Windows 98SE PC which I was putting into a modern case, because it has a front panel audio connector which can be easily converted to the current HDA specs ( …

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Re: Promise PCI Sata and Win98SE

Posted on 2022-03-19, 19:54

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The 137GB (128GiB) limit is specifically an issue with the standard IDE/ATA drivers included with Windows 98. If you're using a SATA controller that requires third party drivers, then there should be no problem accessing larger filesystems ... once the drivers are loaded. So, I think the key point …

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Re: post up pics of your "computing area"

Posted on 2021-03-21, 19:01

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Got this cleaned up… enough, I guess. https://www.kepstin.ca/dump/vogons-forums/2021-03-21/DSC_0006_720.jpg From left to right on top of the table: Pentium-MMX 233MHz build on an Intel AN430TX board (Yamaha OPL3-SA3 + OPL4 midi onboard audio), plus a Matrox Millenium II, 3Dfx Voodoo 2, and Creative …

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Re: AN430TX/LT430TX Owners?

Posted on 2021-02-12, 06:47

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Interesting, I had thought there would be a bios option to disable the onboard VGA. One thing to note is that the version of the board with VGA has 1 fewer PCI slot than the version without VGA (presumably they wired up the Rage chip electrically to the "removed" PCI slot). I actually have the …

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Re: VxD SoundBlaster driver slows down 98 Loading a lot

Posted on 2020-11-10, 00:55

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The usual cause for slow windows load with the SB drivers installed is that you have a large soundfont selected. The drivers - maybe just the VXD drivers? not sure - are very slow at loading soundfonts during boot. If you can pick a smaller soundfont, it might help. On one of my computers with a …

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Re: Wanted: full BIOS dumps from Intel 430TX/440*X motherboards

Posted on 2020-11-10, 00:29

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've got an AN430TX and I used UniFlash to make a backup of the BIOS it shipped with (P3) before upgrading it to the latest (P10). Here's the link: AN430TXP3.zip - let me know if you also want the P10 version.

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Re: Good motherboards for Pentium MMX?

Posted on 2020-11-10, 00:17

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A few people have mentioned 430TX chipset as a good choice... one interesting board with that chipset is the Intel AN430TX. That's an ATX board, and notably includes Yamaha OPL3-SA3 onboard audio (WSS & SB Pro compatible, use UNISOUND for DOS) and OPL4 (YMF704) wavetable midi accessible via MPU-401 …

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Re: Tell us about your 3DFX collection

Posted on 2020-09-18, 04:05

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I have a pretty boring 3Dfx collection compared to a lot of the other people on here... Just a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP (Purchased new! Used this for a while in the early 2000s before storing it for years.) and an unidentified Voodoo 2 (12MB) board pulled out of an old computer given to me by an …

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Re: Options for connecting internal 5.25 / 3.5 / ZIP drives to modern system

Posted on 2020-09-14, 00:57

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

One thing I find slightly annoying under Windows 10 is the absence of a sofware eject option on the context menu of the LS120 . Software eject does work on the SATA/IDE ZIP drives in Windows 10. And on Linux, fwiw. Edit: Instructions HOWTO fix ZIP drive icon in Windows 10 Create a new text file …

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Re: Options for connecting internal 5.25 / 3.5 / ZIP drives to modern system

Posted on 2020-09-14, 00:38

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think I had very much the same idea as you, heh! (picture link) You'll quickly find that cooling/airflow will be your biggest problems to overcome. You might end up having to mod in additional cooling. For what it's worth, you can use an IDE-SATA adapter to plug an IDE ZIP drive into a SATA port - …

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Re: OPL3-SAX in DOS

Posted on 2020-08-31, 02:02

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The OPL3-SAx cards can be initialized by UNISOUND: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=72553 That's much easier to get working than the official drivers! It will initialize the card in SB Pro compatibility mode by default, and will automatically set up the mixer up with reasonable values …

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Re: The best Sound Blaster Live! for Windows 98 gaming

Posted on 2020-08-25, 02:34

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Maybe not a popular choice, but I'm personally a fan of the SB0220. It's a Dell OEM card, and requires a specific driver CD - but it's a full EMU10k1 chip, equivalent to the standard Live! 5.1 cards and includes the VXD/WDM driver switcher app . The reason I like this card specifically is that some …

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

Posted on 2020-08-23, 16:28

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Pardon the definitely not-retro visual on screen (most of my retro things are packed, and was testing with the laptop I had available), but I just received an HP P910 19" monitor from a family member. Needs a clean up, but seems to work fairly well. Photo below is the screen running at 1600x1200 / …

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Re: overwhelmed by motherboard and CPU selection for 486 build

Posted on 2020-08-09, 03:48

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

One more important question... For games that support AWE32 MIDI, does the AWE 64 provide compatibility or do I actually need the 32 for that version of MIDI? AWE64 is completely compatible with software designed for the AWE32. (The "64" actually refers to the fact that the windows drivers include …

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Re: what SSD for XP ?

Posted on 2020-08-09, 03:16

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

.. [*] Overprovision the drive by leaving some space unpartitioned. I recommend around 25% unused space, but if you're using a drive larger than 250GB you would probably be fine with less. SSD over-provisioning is a feature found on high end drives (e.g. available on Samsung Pro but not Evo models) …

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Re: what SSD for XP ?

Posted on 2020-08-04, 01:55

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Honestly, any modern SATA SSD should work fine with WinXP. Drives with a RAM cache will perform better, but it's unclear whether that makes a different to longevity. All current model drives will do background garbage collection, and can use unwritten (unpartitioned) space for wear levelling and to …

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Re: MSI MS-5169 dead - blown MOSFET?

Posted on 2020-08-04, 01:34

by

by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have now flashed the latest beta BIOS (v. 3.83) and successfully tested with a K6-2 + 550 MHz, which gets detected correctly :) Interesting! I ended up not using the V3.83 BIOS on my Rev 4.0 board, since it did not correctly detect my K6-III+ CPU. (I've tried a bunch of BIOS versions, so my …

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