Re: Taming the pile, specs to target?

Posted on 2017-10-19, 00:56

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Maybe I should build this first... http://www.philscomputerlab.com/4-in-1-retro-gaming-pc.html I've got pretty much identical parts. Edit: General note though, that elastic band would probably drop the fan in about 8 months in our climate (The cycling humidity from 0 to 100% tends to rot rubber bad …

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Re: PcChips sucks!

Posted on 2017-10-19, 00:54

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

JidaiGeki wrote: Also can't get serial ports to work on it, and it's not playing nice with a controller card. Otherwise it's perfect 😉 Did the serial headers come in the box with it? There's at least 3 different ways they can be wired, likewise any other headers, so maybe you have the wrong ones.

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Re: Advice for building a Pentium 3 gaming PC?

Posted on 2017-10-19, 00:52

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just came across this, interesting to see the difference between a high end P2 and high end P3 with various Voodoos... http://thandor.net/object/25 Though I'd like it if there was a PIII 600 in the middle, and maybe a 1G one as well to get some idea of how it scales. So the magic formula is fast …

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Re: So I had a stupid idea about how to build a really fast 486...

Posted on 2017-10-18, 21:46

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You can use whatever RAM you like, but you're not going to get data into or out of a 486 faster than it's base clock time bus width, divided by 8 for bytes. Which is 160MByte per sec at 40Mhz... which is what decent speed FPM RAM with no wait states should be doing anyway.

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Re: Taming the pile, specs to target?

Posted on 2017-10-18, 21:12

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

... 286es... Now I just eyeballed the stack and there's 2 early AT class cases in there I don't remember much about, one of those also says 286-12 on it, not sure what's in the other one. I believe I deliberately saved one EGA capable monitor, I think it's a Mitsubishi multi sync type with a 9 pin …

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Re: 486 system freezes

Posted on 2017-10-18, 19:56

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Flip the board and look for dry solder joints on the back of the slots.

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Re: PcChips sucks!

Posted on 2017-10-18, 18:00

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I quite like PCChips, I'm at a success rate of about 8 for 9 whereas gigabyte, I'm 0 for 3. Anyway, could be a number of things... firstly, BIOS doesn't really, really detect RAM, it reads the presence detect bits on the last few pins of the SIMM which are encoded with zero ohm resistors or just …

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Re: Abit LX6 (Intel 440LX chipset) Driver Installation and Sanity Check

Posted on 2017-10-18, 13:27

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

IIRC you just used to get a single download of "intel chipset drivers" and it would install for everything that needed one.

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Re: U5SX 486-33F Build

Posted on 2017-10-18, 13:23

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

They were more common in early 486 era I think, Intel sx25s and sx33s, with about the only real use case for a 487 socket. I did see a "high end" EISA system with a dx40 on once, at time of production it would have been the fastest AutoCAD system you could get. Later in the game there might have …

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Re: Taming the pile, specs to target?

Posted on 2017-10-17, 01:46

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Canadians are a bunch of hosers anyway eh... I'm assuming we're just talking about machines for a little nostalgia and gaming, nothing super focused or special case. I don't have anything special case in mind, except maybe Need for Speed, it was tweaky about CPUs and CDROM speeds, but that might …

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Re: Zida 4DPS (Tomatoboard) Socket 4 SiS PS/2 mouse not working

Posted on 2017-10-13, 03:48

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It is unlikely that a Cyrix 5x86-120/4x will work stable at 133 MHz. Mine does not. My 5x86-120GP/2X works fine at 66x2, even with fast FP on @ 3.7 volts - BUT - the mainboard I used it in died. It was a Pine PT-430A from a PoS machine. I guess running it at 66MHz killed it - either that or …

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Re: Taming the pile, specs to target?

Posted on 2017-10-13, 02:16

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Hi Tetrium thanks for getting the ball rolling. Yah, mostly those organisation threads seem like what I've tried to do, get smaller boxes that stack nice together etc. I had a real good system with frozen burger boxes that fit exactly inside these veggie boxes I could get in a stack, but I only …

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Re: 3Com Etherlink III 509B ISA - Driver Doesn't Find Card

Posted on 2017-10-12, 23:04

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If it is blown though I might be afraid about why its blown... a short on the board I can't see? So if you fix the fuse and don't see anything else wrong, you can try powering it on in an ATX/ISA machine, soft power button, it shouldn't turn on if there's any shorts, or it will turn on and turn off …

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Re: CL-GD5401-42QC-Bvs TVGA-9000B ISA

Posted on 2017-10-12, 22:54

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Yah I wouldn't really recommend ISA for a DX4 build. However, I did have an ISA CL 5434 that was only about 15% slower than a PCI one... so that would be a hotrod for an ISA card. TVGA cards, damn I hate those things :-D I couldn't believe actually that they turned up in some Summit Direct built …

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Re: Is there any point in building a DX2/4 instead of a P54C?

Posted on 2017-10-12, 18:18

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For reference, the Pentium 100 came out right around the same time as DX4 (March 94) so it would have been very expensive. I don't recall seeing Pentium on home PC's commonly until 1996, unless you were buying at the high-end. Games were still targeted to 486 until at least the Quake release... I …

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Re: SOYO 5XAE and AMD k6 II

Posted on 2017-10-12, 12:06

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If you set it to 2x it will run 6x

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Re: Socket 462 mATX build: modern, silent, and future proof

Posted on 2017-10-12, 11:58

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Sorry, couldn't find any reliable references, think there used to be, but being "out of date" now seem to have dropped off the web... however embedded in this older online calculator are values for older stuff https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator Also yes most socket A were 5V thirsty... …

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Re: IDE to Compact Flash as MS-DOS boot drive.

Posted on 2017-10-12, 01:30

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Edit: I recommend to run Spur0Kill ("track zero kill") to get away with any spurious MBR and paritition data. And boot viruses, like LiLo . It was written by German(?) author Dirk Arnold in '93 and works very well under plain DOS. As far as I know, all access is done solely via the BIOS. This makes …

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Re: Socket 462 mATX build: modern, silent, and future proof

Posted on 2017-10-12, 01:23

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Photos? Seems nice. Mainly I wonder how much of a speed bottleneck conventional PCI places on your USB 3.0 card. Well it is and it isn't a bottleneck, PCI does just over a gigabit per sec while 3.0 is 5Gbit, however, a lot of the first crop of non-enthusiast stuff only does about a gigabit, like …

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Re: Getting around that soundcard mess

Posted on 2017-10-11, 22:48

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by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

In the actual 90s, I only got the cheap cards, Aztech, Crystal, ESS etc, and had very few problems, one game had some weird probe routine where it pushed the PnP settings around, one game insisted on irq 5 for SBPro emulation... so as the years go by creative labs stuff turns up dirt cheap, SB16s, …

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