Re: Investigating old ISA VGA cards

Posted on 2011-02-09, 22:47

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The RAM chips say -10 on them, which I think is 100ns. A bit on the slow side, perhaps? Sounds about right, 100ns is about 10MHz and the card is probably designed for an 8MHz ISA bus give or take My Headland cards have a buggy BIOS that detects a monochrome monitor on faster (~486) CPUs... You know …

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Re: CGa monitor how to' Use with modern pc..?

Posted on 2011-02-07, 11:13

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes windows XP does indeed support dual monitor output on two different video cards. As far as I know, you can't use onboard graphics on your motherboard and another video card; you need two seperate video cards. As for a PCI CGA card, I very much doubt such a thing exists, CGA was obsolete before …

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Re: CGa monitor how to' Use with modern pc..?

Posted on 2011-02-07, 09:49

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Your best bet might be to ask on an arcade/MAME forum about the CGA adapter. A lot of old arcade machines used some variant of CGA and some people build MAME cabinets with CGA monitors in them. One thing I noted with that adapter you linked: Output CGA Signal: 480i@60 Hz I didn't think this was a …

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-02-06, 21:53

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I'm guessing this is RG100's father?

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Re: Memory parity error on 386 mobo. Memtest says that RAM is OK

Posted on 2011-02-06, 02:40

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

RG100: destroyer of hardware :P lol I only bought one of those boards and its still chugging along fine although maybe I should buy a spare before they are all destroyed lol Seriously though I'm glad that modern RAM goes in vertically and has plastic clips, because the angled SIMMs are a pain. I …

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-02-05, 21:21

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Yes that's what I meant. I've already maxed my BIOS settings so lower NS memory gives no advantage

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Re: Totally Unrelated To Computers

Posted on 2011-02-05, 02:09

by

by DonutKing

in Milliways

in Milliways

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Re: 486 temperature

Posted on 2011-02-05, 00:31

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I currently have a 100mhz Intel DX4 overdrive chip with a heatsink built on but no fan. I've never used it in a computer for more than an hour at a time but it'd get hotter than I'd feel comfortable with a chip running at. Yes the Intel DX4's definitely need a heatsink/fan. I have one and with a …

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-02-05, 00:24

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

OK cool, thanks for that, saves me a lot of effort 😁 I suspected that would be the case. My understanding is that with identical bus speeds and wait states, RAM with a lower NS rating won't increase performance. I think you just got a freakishly good motherboard 😀

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Re: A good day at the dump...

Posted on 2011-02-04, 00:01

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Which is absolutely the WORST form of recycling. It is better to repurpose older computers than to break them up for scrap metal and parts. I agree but apparently someone makes more money in scrap metal. There are a few charity organizations here that take donations of obsolete equipment and send …

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Re: FS: PC Chips 486 mobo and Almost Everything Else needed to Put Together a 486

Posted on 2011-02-03, 08:30

by

by DonutKing

in Milliways

in Milliways

Yes that's my experience too. I had an M919 with fake cache and with a bit of tweaking I could actually get respectable performance out of it. It was quite flaky with hard lockups and EMM386 errors which seemed to get worse the more I used it. I've since replaced it with a different board with real …

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Re: NEW BUILD

Posted on 2011-02-03, 02:02

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Some of the later Thunderbirds even came unlocked from the factory. My mate had a 1.33GHz Athlon which was factory unlocked. I think it was only a certain revision/stepping though, not all of the 1.33GHz Athlons were unlocked. But even so, the procedure for unlocking them is simple.

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Re: A good day at the dump...

Posted on 2011-02-02, 07:49

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't know what its like in other countries, but over here all the discarded computer stuff gets recycled for scrap metal such as gold and copper.

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Re: Autoexec.bat & Config.sys Advice

Posted on 2011-01-30, 21:23

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm pretty sure lastdrive=z is the default setting for new installations of DOS. At least what I installed 6.22 recently that what I remember it being set to. As Davros said it makes little difference anyway.

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-01-29, 22:24

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Ugh don't get me started on that guy, not only are his prices ridiculous but he only sends express mail so his postage is daylight robbery as well. One suggestion is to use the ebay.com site instead of your own country's ebay site, I find a lot of things come up that don't otherwise and you can …

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Re: Compact flash recommendation needed please

Posted on 2011-01-29, 10:34

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ive been using the Transcend 133x cards on various machines under dos and I've noticed that they will work fine for a while then randomly get a disk read error, sometimes when running a program but most often during big file copies. No rhyme or reason to it, if you restart the operation it will …

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-01-25, 04:38

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Perhaps my board was built on a Friday before a long weekend and your boards were all made in the middle of the week 😀

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-01-24, 21:32

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

You might have already posted this but do you have a sound card installed in this system that works ok at the 25MHz bus speed? My SB Pro would just crackle andf hiss at higher bus speeds. I've just tested this. I set the mobo bus speed to 25 MHz, with the 100 MHz osci, and so the CPU runs at 50 MHz …

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-01-23, 23:59

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

You might have already posted this but do you have a sound card installed in this system that works ok at the 25MHz bus speed? My SB Pro would just crackle andf hiss at higher bus speeds.

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Re: 386DX40 build

Posted on 2011-01-20, 23:49

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

dirkmirk had a SIIG controller as well but instead of having IDE/floppy ports on it, it lookes like it simply loaded a BIOS extension that added LBA mode support: http://i.imgur.com/A2nY6.jpg He did say he got a HDD performance hit in speedsys from it though. Thread here: http://forums.overclockers. …

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