bushwack wrote:

PICTURES! 😁 Oh wait, did you find a descent case yet?

I'll see if I can get some soon. The case is a bit on the large (and gaudy) side, but it works fine. It used to belong to my dad's previous PC before the CPU fan crapped out, so I just stripped it down to the bare case and PSU and stuck my parts in.

So I decided to try out my AWE64 card tonight on a whim, and I realized I just wasted $3. I had a hell of a time even getting the thing to work (the SB Pro 2.0 was a breeze to set up by comparison), and even on most games I got no music. Once I got it working though, I quickly realized just how bad the "FM" is compared to my SB Pro 2.0. I'm not a big fan of the AWE32 sound either, so now I'd like to just get rid of this thing. I haven't tried my SB 16 WavEffects yet, but I can't imagine the "FM" being any better.

Also, it produced random loud garbage which scared the hell out of me when I configured Doom to work with it, and the garbage noise didn't go away until I rebooted the PC. Nice.

Strange...I'm having some similar issue with a SB Live! in an XP rig of mine.
It will give normal sound, then suddenly start giving static noise that starts highly amplified and right away volumes down. When the sound is almost inaudible it'll start with the very loud static again, rinse and repeat.

All I do then is turn off the speaker and hope it'll die down after 5 or 10 minutes 😜

Sorry it took so long, but I finally got pics of my setup.

Very nice! Great choice of parts!

I like the Pentium (1). Because with the L1 and L2 Cache you can slow it down to a 386 or 486 and it's fast enough to play some of the more demanding DOS 3D games.

Well done!

Lol, the first pic always reminds me of someone playing a guitar 😜

What's so gaudy about the case? I have that same case in silver and I like it. Plus, you can ogle the hardware this way.

*thinks about his vintage rigs*

I am curious - what CPU cooler is that?

ncmark wrote:

I am curious - what CPU cooler is that?

It's a generic one I found for $2.

Tetrium wrote:

Only problem with 8x and below drives is that the older the drives are, the greater the chances are it will have trouble reading burned disks.
Btw, aren't the most modern CDROM drives quieter anyway?

Very good point. Older drives have a lot of issues with short strategy cd-r media. I have about 4 drives sitting here that cant read the stuff at all, but can read long strategy and pressed disc fine.

ApolloBoy wrote:

Sorry it took so long, but I finally got pics of my setup.

Looking at the pics, looks like you have empty space where the keyboard ports are. If you have a dremel kit, you can get a piece of clear thin plastic and cut out the port holes you need to make it fit there in the back. After that you can stick it in there and on use a dab of hot glue on the corners to make sure it stays in place and blocks dust from entering in at that area.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

Looking at the pics, looks like you have empty space where the keyboard ports are. If you have a dremel kit, you can get a piece of clear thin plastic and cut out the port holes you need to make it fit there in the back. After that you can stick it in there and on use a dab of hot glue on the corners to make sure it stays in place and blocks dust from entering in at that area.

You can use a dremel to make custom i/o plates? Wouldn't some of the corners be too small for the dremel to cut out?

Btw, using thin plastic is a very good idea (if you don't mind radio interference to cross through the plastic. But theres always aluminium foil 😜

Tetrium wrote:

You can use a dremel to make custom i/o plates? Wouldn't some of the corners be too small for the dremel to cut out?

Btw, using thin plastic is a very good idea (if you don't mind radio interference to cross through the plastic. But theres always aluminium foil 😜

Depends on what kind of dremel kit you have. I have one with a lot of cutting wheels, but also a kinda diamond shaped cutter thing that can do fine shapes. I used to build Jamma Supergun kits and do different game system mods, and the dremel kit I use was the key tool for that other then my soldering iron and phillips screwdriver .
(Old pics of a prior one I did):

And yeah, you can use foil or get some thin tin and cut it with heavy duty scissors for shielding if needed.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

-snip-

You, sir, are my modding god ;D

There are plenty of people out there better then me at modding definitely. I try to stick to the basics these days due to time limits, but I do love solving problems and figuring out new stuff when I can. Its all fun in the end, and thats what it should be, fun. 😀

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

There are plenty of people out there better then me at modding definitely. I try to stick to the basics these days due to time limits, but I do love solving problems and figuring out new stuff when I can. Its all fun in the end, and thats what it should be, fun. 😀

Hehe, I'm a problem solver myself. But I got 2 left hands when it comes to modding with tools beyond a common screwdriver. When I put together those metal racks for my attic, I spend some time at the hospital heh 😵

Heck, I can't even fix a flat tire for my bike!
I fix my bike with iron wire and sticky tape 😜 😜 😜

A friend of mine did the jigsaw thing, I only filed the rough edges 😜

Update on this:
Apollboy's Advanced/ML system is now running a Pentium MMX 200, 128 MB EDO DRAM, 4 MB Riva (Velocity 128), 40 GB HDD, USB card, and Win98SE installed. Now using circa 2000/2001 (forget which) beige desktop case I gave him.
I think he's considering adding an ethernet card too.

The Pentium is overvolted at 3.3V, but still runs pretty cool. (that "generic" heatsink he's using also seems to be solid copper 😉)

Some of this was already mentioned here: P55C in a Marl (Advanced/ML) board?

On another note, would anyone happen to know whether the Advanced/ML ever supported the caching beyond 64 MB (with extended tag RAM), or are all stuck at 64 MB? I know the HX chipset can support 512 MB cached, but only with the "optional" wider tag RAM.

If models with both configurations exist, we'll have to take a look at the tag RAM on the board, I guess.

If it's stuck with 64 MB, I'm wondering whether it's worth keeping 128 MB in there. It's primarily a gaming box, so he's not doing much multitasking, and I don't think many/any of the games are memory-hungry enough to need more than 64 MB total (even under 98SE), so the system would probably benefit from using 64 MB of fully cacheable RAM.

Update:
It's definitely got a 64 MB cache limit. We dropped it down to 64 MB of EDO DRAM and 3DMark99MAX went from 1100 CPU marks to nearly 1500 with no other changes to the system. (the PCI Velocity 128 4MB got graphics 3DMarks in the 700s in both cases, running at 640x480x16-bit)

I didn't write down the exact figures, but I remembered well enough to list those approximate values. (which is just about right for a P55C-200, going by Feipoa's Ultimate 686 comparison)

Another update, me and kool kitty managed to find a FIC VA-503A board and I decided to pick it up for grins to see how it compared to my old Advanced/ML board. It's definitely nicer in some ways, it has DIP switches for the voltage and clock multiplier options for the CPU and it supports SDRAM, which was neat since I had a single stick of 64 MB SDRAM laying around. Unfortunately it had several bad caps including one between a couple of the PCI slots which actually popped (!).

Even with the bad caps we managed to get the board to POST, but it kept locking up after a while so we didn't get that far with it. It also had a strange problem with recognizing the secondary IDE port with the floppy enabled so I had to disable the floppy to get my CD drive recognized as D. I managed to replace all the bulging and blown caps on the board and I'm pleased to say everything works perfectly now.

I forgot about TEAC brand.. had one of their drives. Also had a P133 back n the day.. good lil cpu.

F2bnp wrote:

That's pretty nice 😀. Any special reason you used the Pentium 133 though? For example I'd use it because it was my first CPU ever 😀

Same here! 😁