Re: Dual Pentium3 motherboard, Is it worth it?

Posted on 2018-10-05, 23:56

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Dual processors are pointless for retro computers pre windows XP - and for those you are much better off with a core 2 era setup. I can't think of a single game that can make use of dual processors that also needs either an ISA sound card or windows 98

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Re: Value Time Machine... Best bang for your buck.

Posted on 2018-10-01, 23:45

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Cheap and K6-3 don't go together. I was lucky to find a board cheap but in hindsight i haven't needed to slow that system down to play the games i play. If it wasn't for my interest in vintage hardware i would have gone for something nore conventional and disabled the caches in the bios and/or used …

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Re: Painting Motherboards

Posted on 2018-09-22, 14:17

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There is no issue if you cover all the slots and contacts etc. You can do other cool things like trace circuit board traces with UV pens

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Re: Matrox Mystique: opinions?

Posted on 2018-09-21, 14:15

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Matrox cards have very average drivers, dos compatibility and 3D performance. A voodoo 3 or banshee is a much better option, or if 3D support isn't an issue, pick from a pile of S3 cards to find the one with the best image quality

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Re: Voodoo 3 and Banshe pci versions on socket 775

Posted on 2018-09-17, 06:03

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Glide is a very basic API.. a fx5500 should be fine

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Re: Voodoo 3 and Banshe pci versions on socket 775

Posted on 2018-09-17, 01:21

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

shouldn't be an issue but glide wrappers are so good it's not worth putting a card that slow in a 775 setup

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Re: Sound Blaster 16 Clones

Posted on 2018-09-10, 11:49

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The Serpent Rider wrote: Am i missing something or ALS100+ actually can't properly emulate SB16? 16-bit mixing has DMA range from 0 to 3, but Duke3D, ROTT and others allow only DMA 5 of higher. It seems that high DMA support vanished with the plus version

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Re: Looking for a special socket 370 motherboard

Posted on 2018-09-10, 03:45

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You know you can swap IO shields right? If you really wanted to keep the case, I would sell or swap the voodoo 3 for an AGP version, get a micro atx board with AGP and ISA and that comes with an IO shield and buy a pci network card Then maybe you can find the rare micro atx board that does both …

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Re: ATI cards for retro builds... any benefits?

Posted on 2018-09-02, 04:56

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

For significant periods from 2000-2010 (and for that matter 1987-~1991) ATi cards offered the best performance of the day and several times ATi was the first to introduce new features or support new DirectX standards. It really depends on your timeframe and goals with your retro system. This At the …

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Re: Socket 939 FX-60/Opteron 185 cooler recommendation for 110W TDP

Posted on 2018-08-30, 06:42

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

feipoa wrote: Aside from gaming and CAD, is there any advantage in upgrading? If you get a 4K monitor, you often need to upgrade - either to a Haswell cpu (4000 series) or a $100+ video card that supports it

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Re: Future storage media for old computers?

Posted on 2018-08-26, 07:01

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There is still a lot of industrial equipment that uses both floppy and IDE ports so there will be aftermarket solutions that exist for a long time. The Gotek floppy emulators are a great example and I have found the IDE to SD adapters on ebay to be far more reliable than compact flash for IDE If you …

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Re: Does the Voodoo 3 scale beyond Pentium II?

Posted on 2018-07-31, 08:12

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Depending on how much newer you go hardware wise, you might find a glide wrapper with a faster video card to work just as well as a voodoo 3. All depends on your hardware and what games you want to play.

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Re: 2D Quality: Rage Pro vs Millennium, how much of a difference is there?

Posted on 2018-07-31, 08:10

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

2D image quality depends entirely on the board design and the VGA cable. A different Virge card may give you a crisp image

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Re: Sound Blaster 32/64 questions

Posted on 2018-07-29, 10:56

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Do you know of any games where selecting AWE32 for music would give drastically better results with a real AWE32 than another card with an external midi synth?

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Re: U320 Scsi in MS-DOS

Posted on 2018-07-27, 05:45

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Another option is sticking with IDE and using SD to IDE adapters. I have found them to be far less trouble than trying to find CF cards that play nice - the only downside is that they don't like sharing the IDE bus with another device I would really be looking at driver support as well - regardless …

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Re: Is a pentium pro worth it?

Posted on 2018-07-26, 07:04

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a pentium pro board and CPU lying around somewhere... I am tempted to play with it a little, but only because we had pentium pro posters all over the IT department at school and I thought they looked cool. Dual processors aren't useful for gaming right up until maybe the late XP era (think …

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Re: List of DOS Games won't start in DOS

Posted on 2018-07-25, 10:36

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

There are lots of old games that won't run for various reasons. By definition, a DOS game should run in DOS, so there must be some other issue Jetfighter (the first one) is a game I have fond memories of, but apparently it relies on something specific to the 386 or 486, so I can't run it on newer …

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Re: U320 Scsi in MS-DOS

Posted on 2018-07-25, 10:20

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Back in the windows XP heyday I had a crazy setup with a P4C800, a CT-479 socket adapter and a mobile cpu. This combined with a 15k scsi drive for the operating system was an incredibly beastly setup. If i was building an XP rig, I would probably do that again

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Re: U320 Scsi in MS-DOS

Posted on 2018-07-25, 05:37

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I can't think of any real reason to have a super fast hard drive in a retro system. That said, maybe you can get an adaptec ultra160 card and a 15K scsi drive https://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/en-us/support/_eol/scsi_sw/ez-scsi_3.11/ I'm not sure if this will work for your application, but if you …

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Re: [FINISHED] My Intel 486DX-33 Build-Log. (The: 90/91-Buttload-Of-Cash-Machine)

Posted on 2018-07-25, 05:06

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

If you really want to go for a 'buttload of cash' from that era, look at EISA and SCSI - there is some crazy hardware from that era but I can imagine it would be hard to source

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