Issue's trying to get Secret of Monkey Island to work.

Posted on 2012-01-29, 09:00

by

by maddmaxstar

in DOS

in DOS

Hey there! I'm having a few issues with trying to get the Secret of Monkey Island to run on my Am486DX4. The version that I have is on Floppy, and has both the 5.25" and 3.5" floppy sets. I've tried installing the game using both sets of floppies. I had no issues during the install and disks read OK …

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Re: Sound Blaster 16 of Choice?

Posted on 2012-01-29, 03:20

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The Volume dial is more of a retro thing, having it there would be old school. I didn't think of using the line out jack - or the added resistiance incurred by using a potentiometer dial in series with the audio line. Might be something worthwhile doing. Other than that, are there any real …

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Re: Need help replacing "screeching" hard drive

Posted on 2012-01-29, 01:23

by

by maddmaxstar

in Milliways

in Milliways

Sounds like your R2 unit has a bad motivator. I'd personally find a copy of Ghost 2003, that's the one I've used to the most in work enviroments. Boot off a Ghost 03 floppy (or a bootable CD) and do a Copy>Disk>to Disk. Should even work with Non-DOS partitions and SATA/RAID setups. It'll even have …

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Re: Sound Blaster 16 of Choice?

Posted on 2012-01-29, 00:42

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've got another card I found here called an "Ahead Sound Origins A007". It has a weird "Diamond Technologies" main IC that I've never heard of, but it does have a genuine Yamaha OPL3 onboard. The main thing I was wondering was, what's the best Sound Blaster 16. I don't know alot about the …

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Sound Blaster 16 of Choice?

Posted on 2012-01-28, 21:16

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm thinking of doing some part swapping between my 486DX4's, and I've often heard folks here discussing that some of Creative's Sound Blasters are better at some things than others. Personally, I've always just thought of a Sound Blaster 16 as an SB16, one of the best cards for DOS game …

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Re: Finally got my K6-2+ 500, did some Benchmarks.

Posted on 2012-01-28, 20:54

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think the board has a setting for 3.45v, which I believe is what it's set at. And I didn't know what the CPU Burst Write was, just assumed it was a Cyrix thing. I enabled it, seems stable, no performance increase, same test results. I might try swapping Cache and TAG chips between boards to see if …

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Re: Super Socket 7: VIA MVP3 vs. ALi Aladdin V

Posted on 2012-01-28, 20:43

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

But even then you're still better off building a Pentium II/III/Celeron or Athlon system because even overclocked to 600mhz the FPU in the K6 line is still too far behind to keep up in games. There are also issues with AGP in some SS7 motherboards and even if you have a SS7 motherboard designed for …

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Re: Finally got my K6-2+ 500, did some Benchmarks.

Posted on 2012-01-28, 09:53

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I tweaked the Memory settings in the BIOS to the following below: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7027/6773790165_fb565c8f84.jpg And reran SpeedSys: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7020/6773784989_babd714698.jpg The speeds improved slightly, but still slow. As I mentioned earlier, the performance might …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2012-01-28, 09:32

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've been planning a Slot A build for a while but I just haven't got around to it yet. I've got an 800MHz Slot A Thunderbird to throw in there, and an AGP Voodoo 5 5500 :) Then it's a good thing it's running the AMD 750 chipset. As I recall, the Thunderbirds didn't like the VIA KX133 boards, …

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Re: A look at my Retro PC Collection, 486's and more.

Posted on 2012-01-28, 09:19

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

How did you get that chip? It could be a remarked chip I scavenged the chip out of a pile of computer parts for Recycling at work a couple of years ago. I literally just saw it in a stack of chips and grabbed it for my 486. I don't know what it came out of before that. According to the AM486 entry …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2012-01-28, 08:35

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Shuttle HOT-591P rev 3.1 At first I thought this was a no name super 7 board, but in tiny text in the very corner I found 591p. Doesn't look like anything special at first glance, however in onboard silkscreen, it has OFFICIAL settings for K6-3 processors. KEWL! http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/ …

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Re: Cyrix appreciation thread

Posted on 2012-01-28, 08:13

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

gwb wrote: A coworker kindly donated this to me today...now to build up a proper system to do some testing! I have that exact CPU! It used to be my main CPU in 97-98. Yours is in pretty good shape too. Good working little chip, but not of much use these days if you've got 6x86MX's lying around.

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Re: Super Socket 7: VIA MVP3 vs. ALi Aladdin V

Posted on 2012-01-28, 07:48

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Here's a cool guide for those era of chipsets, I haven't read the whole thing over, but appears to have a ton of information on P5/P5 and SS7 era chipsets. Looking at it briefly, the TAG RAM chip of the ALi's cache system was integrated into the chipset, and has a limit of 1MB L2 Cache, whereas VIA …

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Re: Super Socket 7: VIA MVP3 vs. ALi Aladdin V

Posted on 2012-01-28, 07:37

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The VIA MVP3 chipset on my FIC VA-503+ has been a rock stable board for as long as I've had it. However, for any sort of modern usefulness, the VIA chipsets that I've seen have a limitation of 128mb of RAM per DIMM slot, meaning that the typical board is stuck using 256mb/384mb RAM. Some ALI boards …

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Re: Cyrix appreciation thread

Posted on 2012-01-28, 01:55

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Oh that makes me want to vom... I've seen busted open chips at work before, but not like this. And the killer is theres some chunked up Socket 4 Pentiums and a broken Pentium pro in there. Ugh.

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Re: A look at my Retro PC Collection, 486's and more.

Posted on 2012-01-28, 01:40

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Cyrix is the only one who actually made a real Pentium-class P5-clone for the Socket 2/3 systems, they were literally cut-down 6x86's modified for the 32bit 486 bus, but they weren't on the market long due to 6x86's success, and are now getting quite rare. You forgot about Intel's Pentium Overdrive …

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Re: Finally got my K6-2+ 500, did some Benchmarks.

Posted on 2012-01-28, 00:25

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

One possible slowdown issue is that I had to disable the Writeback jumper on the motherboard a while back as it wasn't running stable at normal speeds. I might have tuned down the memory timings as well during troubleshooting and didn't set them back. I'll check.

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Re: The All-amazing super-de-douper SuperPi thread!

Posted on 2012-01-27, 22:34

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

DrSwizz wrote: Intel 386SX-16, 8MB RAM, Win 3.11 + Win32S Result: 27days 19h 31min 43sec Wow, the difference a Coprocessor can make in this test 😜

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Re: If you were building a 486 - would you go VLB or PCI?

Posted on 2012-01-27, 22:25

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My Preference would be for PCI, both of my DX4 boxes use PCI boards, it's easier to find parts for them, compatible with a wider range of CPUs, and usually have Button Cell 3V CR2032 batteries rather than the barrel type NiCad rechargables that are notorious for corroding on older boards. Though I …

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Re: Finally got my K6-2+ 500, did some Benchmarks.

Posted on 2012-01-27, 22:00

by

by maddmaxstar

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Here's a closeup of my DX4-120. Date code shows 9th week of 96. http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7167/6772692205_9407710501.jpg And here's what I got when I Set the bus to 33MHz and enabled the 2x/4x jumper: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7162/6772727399_575cb8a17d.jpg http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7149 …

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