Re: Abit KT7A (KT133A/VIA686B), Athlon XP Mobile 2500+

Posted on 2022-04-08, 22:31

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Check any voltages you can and see if they're fluctuating under load. Check if the 3.3V supply to the AGP slot is powered directly from the ATX connector. If so, the PSU could be an important factor. I'm kind of curious about this myself now, but my board is buried somewhere. I also wonder if the …

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Re: Help in making a CR-2032 mod on EXP 8049 motherboard.

Posted on 2022-04-08, 21:16

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Those pins above the battery provide a connection for a battery, but I don't know if the board would charge the battery through that connector. There might be a standard convention for that, I just don't know. You could try probing with a meter on those pins to see if voltage is present when power …

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Re: How often do you purchase retro hardware?

Posted on 2022-04-05, 21:05

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

Every once in a while I start digging into eBay, maybe just out of boredom, but if I keep it up I will inevitably find something that I want to buy. This leads to more searching and more buying. Then after I think I've spent too much I stop. It happens a few times a year.

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Re: What games to use as benchmarks for milestone memory capacities?

Posted on 2022-04-05, 08:04

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Depending on how it's used, I still see it as a useful technology. It allows assets to be loaded from disk into fast system memory and copied into even faster video memory as needed. The alternative would be to read from disk in demand. And, realistically, this was not actually a viable alternative …

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Re: Pc hangs up as soon gpu is accessed

Posted on 2022-04-04, 19:31

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Do you have a multimeter? If so, check supply voltages. If they look good, then check if they stay stable when the system is put under stress. If you see them sagging much while Windows boots, for example, it's likely a problem. Failing that, at least look at the BIOS readings, but keep in mind …

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Re: BeOS

Posted on 2022-04-04, 04:20

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

^Which version? I can’t seem to get it to run. Anyone else running it on socket 7? What iso did you use? On my K6-3 I just remember it being version 5. It was a free version that could be launched from within Windows98. I don't seem to have anything left of it in my archived files so I can't …

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Re: BeOS

Posted on 2022-04-03, 01:35

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I ran that "Personal Edition" version 5 of BeOS on my K6-3 back around 2000 or so. I was very impressed with it, but it's usefulness was of course limited by the fact that we were living in a Windows world. Up to that point I had not used the WinNT series yet so BeOS' stability felt like a …

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Re: I was offered some free "flat screen" monitors, but it was not what I had expected

Posted on 2022-04-02, 13:40

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The usage of the term unfortunately got mangled later on, but that's exactly what "flat screen" actually means. :) I had a late flat-screened Sony Trinitron but it didn't last long due to some manufacturing defect. For a while it was beautiful though. A family member had a 17" NEC FE700+ or FE770 or …

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Re: What games to use as benchmarks for milestone memory capacities?

Posted on 2022-04-02, 02:08

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I think I ran into a texture memory issue in Fallout 3 several years ago. I was trying to benchmark the game on some late AGP cards by running around in a predetermined path. With a 7600GS AGP card with 256MB, the game would stutter and struggle for a while, and then either crash, or start running …

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

Posted on 2022-04-01, 23:58

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A Geforce4 MX420 GPU (NV17?) runs on 1.60V. Let it be known. I'm about to recap a card, so I was figuring out how each of the caps are connected. 2 of them are on the GPU Vcore output. I'm tempted to use polys for those caps, but since they come in lower voltage specs I needed to figure out what …

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Re: Who cares about ebay prices when you can do this!

Posted on 2022-03-31, 21:12

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I watched somebody play that game on youtube 2-3 years ago. It looks kind of cool, but I could quickly tell I would get irritated at the assumptions the game makes about how it thinks you should go about troubleshooting and what "must" be wrong. I don't approach problems the same way the game's …

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Re: Any Unreal Tournament gamers here?

Posted on 2022-03-31, 08:53

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I'm not much of an FPS guy, but I do like UT99, relatively speaking for the genre. I don't like playing much of anything online, but I can enjoy UT99 if I play against bots that I can beat. If I'm actually having a struggle, then I just get frustrated and don't enjoy it. That to me is a good sign …

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Re: Geforce 2 mx 400 woes

Posted on 2022-03-30, 23:50

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I don't know about the booting issues, but -It won’t display in the bios from dvi but will from vga are you using a KVM? Cards with dual output sometimes don't realize which port is connected when a KVM is involved, so you're forced to use whichever it has defaulted to enabling. Something similar …

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Re: A graphics card I bought lasted only a few seconds before dying

Posted on 2022-03-30, 23:36

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I've had lots of things arrive dead, but it's harder to think of things that legitimately worked for at least a few seconds and then quickly died. One that comes to mind was an MSI 440BX motherboard. I remember booting it up on the first try, and thinking it was interesting that it reported onboard …

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Re: Windows 3.1 will turn 30 soon

Posted on 2022-03-30, 23:15

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I was curious what the last version of Office is that runs on Windows 3.1. I'm surprised to find even Office 95 won't run on it, that version actually required Windows 95 (or NT 3.51). Windows 3.1 was a whole 3 years old, or only ~6 months old to somebody who just bought it recently. Microsoft said …

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Re: omg in heaven duck duck go is worse then google!!!

Posted on 2022-03-27, 11:54

by

by shamino

in Milliways

in Milliways

I've grown to despise Google as a company, and I want to support competition to knock them off their powerful perch. So I use DuckDuckGo by default, but if the results suck, then I'll use Google as a fallback. DDG always gets the first crack though. I vaguely remember StartPage, I should look at it …

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Re: One of these things is not like the others

Posted on 2022-03-25, 21:40

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

@Cuttoon - ouch. Power cables are a much more destructive affair, it really sucks to have a screwup with those. [hr] I found mention on an old newsgroup post about some IBMs having SCSI cables with a backwards connector like this for some reason. I got this out of an HP, but I really don't remember …

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Re: Trying to fix a broken Socket 3 Motherboard

Posted on 2022-03-24, 13:26

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It seems this hardware is getting so old now that nothing can be taken for granted. Can't even trust ROMs to hold their bits anymore. 😀

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Re: Voodoo 5 preventative maintenance

Posted on 2022-03-24, 12:42

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

It looks great, should be nice and cool now. As long as it's handy, it's also a good idea to touch up the solder on the pins of the power connector, just in case those joints are getting weak. The only thing that worries me is the plastic push pins. They can break or pop loose sometimes and I had a …

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One of these things is not like the others

Posted on 2022-03-24, 08:52

by

by shamino

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've had this SCSI cable for 20 years. 50pin SCSI cable backwards key - was in Kayak 533x600.jpg I just accidentally noticed this today. I stared at it. I can't be seeing what I'm seeing. Now I'm thinking back to all the little SCSI episodes over the years when I couldn't get something to work right …

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