Re: AN430TX/LT430TX Owners?

Posted on 2021-02-12, 06:47

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

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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Re: MSI MS-5169 dead - blown MOSFET?

Posted on 2020-07-16, 04:58

by

by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

At least your MS-5196 board appears to have better caps than my (rev 4.0) did, mine was straight out of the Taiwanese capacitor plague era, and had a few leaking 1000µF caps. I ended up recapping the board, and stability improved quite a bit. I'm surprised by how different the mosfet and capacitor …

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

Posted on 2020-07-16, 04:46

by

by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Also got the AWE64 DOS utilities and drivers installed and got the card to work (missed one of the files in autoexec.bat to add C:\CTCM\CTCM) and the card does work, except the AWE32 music portion acts strange for some odd reason, so I need to get that all sorted out, but the card works regardless. …

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Re: SIL3114 sata card, need ide firmware.

Posted on 2020-07-14, 06:09

by

by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's running Bios 5.4.03 ( I have the screen to setup the raid on boot ) and both DOS and Windows are working fine without using the "Base" Bios. Just the speed that seems to be very low. Do you think that flashing the Bios to the Base one will improve the speed under w98 ? So, the BIOS version …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-07-01, 01:02

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Nice! Is that a miro OPL4 card? Would love to know which OPL4 cards have DOS drivers. In many cases the OPL4 is connected to a PCM/SoundBlaster compatible sound chip on the board as a wavetable device, so it's accessible through an MPU-401 compatible interface, no special dos drivers needed. I have …

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Re: IBM Aptiva 2137 - IBM theme files found!

Posted on 2020-06-11, 19:56

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by kepstin

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

So I gave it a try… The startlogo.oem file you've included is identical to the one included with the Windows 95 OSR2. The "oemlogo" and "oeminfo" files need to go into C:\Windows\System, at least on Windows 95. https://www.kepstin.ca/dump/ibm-aptiva-screenshot.png Looks great, and the screensaver …

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Re: IBM Aptiva 2137 - IBM theme files found!

Posted on 2020-06-10, 22:42

by

by kepstin

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Ah, I would love to see this! I personally have an IBM 2137 E46 with the original windows install long gone, and it would be neat to make it look a bit more authentic. I know there have been other threads here for sharing OEM wallpapers and graphics, so I don't think it would be a problem?

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