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

Posted on Yesterday, 16:14

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

ME is kinda... not a good choice, IMO. Win2k had much better driver support and reliability, and win98SE had much better DOS support. I'd do dual booting 98se and 2k on a super-7.

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

Posted on Yesterday, 14:10

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Moar play with the penplotter, mostly. I've been doing experiments with modified pens again. Still keep coming back to refilled pilot v5 pens.

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Re: I miss physical media ;)

Posted on 2025-04-16, 04:22

by

by wierd_w

in Milliways

in Milliways

I am actually surprised that things dont ship on SDCards. The format supports being made read only, and various forms of encryption to discourage duplication . It's also reasonably common to have a reader in modern laptops, it's small, light, reasonably performant, and inexpensive. I can only …

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Re: NT 4.0 Installation woes

Posted on 2025-04-16, 04:17

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Is the ram healthy? The error in question happens when memory owned by a driver fails to be either read or written to, at the correct IRQ Level. If it is being serviced by an emergency handler, that would do it-- such as from a general failure. Try running memtest on this system.

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Re: Troubleshooting 486 Motherboard

Posted on 2025-04-13, 08:33

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I just looked at his high res photos of the board. The ram slots are very clear, and in GREAT focus. I do not see either foreign matter or bent pins. The two centermost slots have an odd circular pattern on the bottom end, which might be a crack. It would be very unusual for that to be a molding …

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Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-04-12, 04:51

by

by wierd_w

in Milliways

in Milliways

Mentioned, because I have to contend with them at work. they are enforced by our RMM provider, and my company issued laptop ONLY has an SSD. I noticed this was happening when I checked the fragmentation level and about had my eyeballs pop out. Forensic investigation revealed these two as the …

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Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-04-12, 03:31

by

by wierd_w

in Milliways

in Milliways

Sadly, there are application developers that have chosen to die on the hill of "Disk is plentiful, cheap, and I can write all over it as much as I want!" This is especially true in the windows ecosystem. there are at least two very high profile antivirus and security suites that are guilty as hell …

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Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-04-12, 01:58

by

by wierd_w

in Milliways

in Milliways

I prefer to think that QLC SSDs just need special care and feeding, which is how I approach them. (I have waxed enough about this topic in previous threads. There are technological ways to properly handle the foibles of an SSD, and those dont really translate for a slow SMR drive.) If you approach …

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Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-04-11, 18:14

by

by wierd_w

in Milliways

in Milliways

It will suffer terribly on routine raid scrubs, which occur to catch/combat bitrot.

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Re: SMR drives

Posted on 2025-04-11, 15:22

by

by wierd_w

in Milliways

in Milliways

I detest SMR drives for a multitude of reasons. However - In a typical external drive workload use case, the difference would probably not be noticable. I disagree here, as SMR drives need long periods of being powered and spun up, without accesses happening, to reshingle. Otherwise data rots in …

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Re: Troubleshooting 486 Motherboard

Posted on 2025-04-11, 14:58

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Possible foriegn matter in card slots? Double check no shorts caused by screws or standoffs? (I know it feels insulting to ask this, but really.)

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Re: I miss physical media ;)

Posted on 2025-04-10, 12:35

by

by wierd_w

in Milliways

in Milliways

This was the case with the atari 2600's Yar's Revenge. It had a full on mini comic book inside the box to explain the story. https://www.atarimania.com/documents/atari_co … ars_revenge.pdf

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Re: Help configuring an XT motherboard

Posted on 2025-04-10, 10:29

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Dosdays has the switch settings for IBM XT. https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/xt_dip_switches.php Yours is clearly an aftermarket clone board, so their info will be of limited use. I'd expect the switches on switch bank 1 to more or less match the dip block on your board though.

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Re: Windows NT4 2024+ setup and summary + WIP overview

Posted on 2025-04-10, 10:17

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Starcraft is just DirectDraw, im not sure about Wacraft2 in my be only Windows 95 editor, but MS-DOS one main executable, im not sure, maybe they is Windows patch - .Battlenet edition or something like that. War2 bne is directdraw and directsound, with mci cdrom audio playback. It's aimed at win95, …

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Re: Floppy 5.25" cable problem

Posted on 2025-04-09, 11:40

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

No. It may in fact be a low density drive.

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Re: Floppy 5.25" cable problem

Posted on 2025-04-08, 20:17

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It cannot be 'special'. The only 'special condition' is if you have fiddled with jumpers on the drives, and most late production ones dont have jumpers to fiddle. 😁

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Re: Floppy 5.25" cable problem

Posted on 2025-04-08, 19:09

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

After twist is always drive A. before twist is always drive B. The kind of drive does not matter in terms of connector placement on the ribbon. Only the connector type. Edit: You can get quality premade cables that are correct, and brand new on amazon. https://a.co/d/i8LWPTJ

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Re: Identify ISA sound card

Posted on 2025-04-08, 19:04

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Possible variant of ALS based soundcard? Essentially a single chip soundblaster 16 clone? See what unisound says about it. UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.81b

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Re: Micron ClientPro help request

Posted on 2025-04-07, 21:35

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It may be hanging trying to interrogate IDE drives. Have you messed around in the cmos?

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Re: Windows NT4 2024+ setup and summary + WIP overview

Posted on 2025-04-06, 15:56

by

by wierd_w

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There's also the potential to just'rock of Sisyphus' that whole thing with Mesa for windows, and draw on GDI backend... it would *require* modern iron to do that much work though. From what I am reading, the NT4 methodology for using OpenGL is 'MCD' based client model, not ICD. This approach has …

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