ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

Good work man. Looks nice and solid in there.

Cheers 😉

Though I haven't tried FEAR yet though, but I reckon it wouldn't have many problems (unless the wires do start to melt 😜)
It played TA perfectly as well.
Actually, it seems to have fewer problems then my 2 standard LAN rigs (which is 1 short for 3 people of course, it's why I'm building these, so noone has to bring their own rigs anymore. Just trying to be a good host hehe 😁).
The Barton 3200+ seems to have issues with it's sound card, but only like once a day. The other one has a case fan on a 7v connector I sometimes need to give a push for it to start rotating 😜

I just haven't gotten around to fixing the minor issues my rigs have yet, it seems so much easier to simply build another.
Only other gripe I have is:I should have one single flash drive with all drivers and such. Now I have 3 or 4 flash drives and it's a mess on them right now.

My offline database is also a mess (on the harddrive that is 😁), only installed the sound drivers last friday.

I'm wondering, am I the only one on Vogons that builds computers and have friends play on them?
Maybe an idea for a topic 🤣

Due to the LAN party I hosted (well...LAN party, just a small bunch of friends having fun 😁 I just call it LAN party as it's the main reason we come together every couple weeks. Next time the LAN party will not be at my place though, and if the weather permits it, BBQ!!! 😁)

The only ones who play on the comps here are me and my kids, and my nephews when they visit. I used to host Shogo matches a few years back for people from another forum that would jump on for a few matches. Other then that most of my online play has revolved around Wolfenstein ET, Split Second, Quake 3, Bionic Commando, BIA: Hells Highway, and Quake Wars mainly.

I actually considered Quake Wars but chose to go with BF2142. Still have a copy which I never even gave a shot (still wrapped up 🤣), is it a fun game?

Yeah Quake Wars is pretty good, though I hate that your Xp resets after campaigns. Part of the joy of Wolf ET was the fact that most servers saved your XP forever, so I thought it was pretty screwed up that they started doing Xp resets. Kinda made earning xp pointless. That is my only real issue with the game. If you want to max out the details and get a solid 40fps on up at a decent res you def have to use a Geforce 8800/Radeon 3850 minimum it seems like. When I ran the game maxed out on both a GF 7900 GS and a Radeon X1950GT it kinda lagged in some spots.

Resetting XP? Bleh, sounds pretty lame.

At least I'm keeping all my XP (or career points 🤣, all the same 😜)

No pics so far but wanted to report on my progress.
It's been somewhat an uphill struggle with all kinds of silly problems but theres 2 rigs in the making (even though 2 of my "modern" LAN rigs aren't even fully completed yet, but have 2 more weeks for them anyway), both using Windows ME.

1 rig has a Tuanatin-s 1.4Ghz with a Ti200 and the other a 1Ghz Coppermine with a Voodoo3. Both have 256MB RAM and both have a 20GB laptop harddrive, made in 2005 or so. They are nearly silent and very fast! I had lots of trouble getting the adapters right, including breaking a few pins and finding out the screw holes in the brackets are in the wrong place making me resort to using the green wires again! 😜

The basic idea is to equip them both with Live!'s and a network card, upgrade an existing ME rig (a Celeron 800) and build one more ME rig so I have 3 + a spare.

I tried the Nehemiah first but the combo was dead, couldn't get it to work anymore. The reasons could be anything but for now the Nehemiah is left to the side for now.

I won't have any time this weekend, maybe some time next week I can test the CPU to see if it got killed (and for all I know, it might have been nearly dead when I got it, it was second hand).

Both new ME systems are mounted in silver cases, because well...it's a difference I guess 🤣 😜

The systems boot and shut down very fast right now. Shutdown is under 2 seconds!
One system is tweaked and basically ready to start testing with. The other has a fresh untweaked ME on it.
I used a tweaked version of the ME install disk (with a modified and automated msbatch.inf, I never have to touch anything except to enter a name and click away one silly and insignificant little error) which took me some time to perfect. I had been struggling for days to get the ME disk to be bootable, only to find out it was the program that somehow couldn't cut it. Switched program et voila, bootable ME disk with msbatch.inf 😁

Those look like they're gonna be nice systems. My personal favorite so far is the Tualatin build. What motherboard did you have worked out for it?

I never liked ME when it came out and I never gave it a second chance, how has that been working out for you (is it worth giving a try)?

Thanks. I'll go check what board it is exactly...

I'd say the best and most flexible 9x OS's are either 98SE or ME and which one you choose is rather more a matter of personal taste. Both OS's can be run with great enjoyment (for 9x that is 😜) but both require quite a different approach and behave differently.

So far on these forums people tend to either go with 98SE or with ME. I chose ME because of 2 reasons which are basically that I ran ME years ago before I even ever got my hands on it and secondly, the first time I tried 98SE I didn't like certain differences. 98SE is better with DOS while ME is better with build-in drivers and faster startup-shutdown. The list of differences is rather large and technical so I won't go there now. It's on MSFN.org.

ME had lots of bad press because of it had to compete with 2k. Back then, 2k would've been the more sane choice under most circumstances. Now things are different. Theres no real reason to prefer 2k over either XP or ME so, looking from a retro-computer-hobbyist's perspective, ME or 98SE are the way to go when XP is too low-specced for any particular system. And ME flies on any Coppermine!

One thing I don't really like about ME is:You need to tweak it before it becomes a stable platform. I disable pc-health, do some memory tweaks (in the ini file thingies) and install newer versions of IE and WMP. This with the intent to get it to crash less often (something 98SE is good at as well).

Maybe we should start a new topic about ME and it's tweaks?

Anyway, Gigabyte mobo model number coming in a minute!

Edit:The board is a "GA-60XT"...or "GA-6OXT"

Edit2:I liked ME when I upgraded to it from 98FE. A vast difference, lot less BSoD's using ME! 😁
I'd say give it a shot using a spare rig 😉
Something along the lines of 400Mhz, 128MB RAM, 4GB harddrive and a 4meg graphics card should be enough to have it doing windows tasks in a snappy enough way 😉

Tetrium wrote:

One thing I don't really like about ME is:You need to tweak it before it becomes a stable platform. I disable pc-health, do some memory tweaks (in the ini file thingies) and install newer versions of IE and WMP. This with the intent to get it to crash less often (something 98SE is good at as well).

Maybe we should start a new topic about ME and it's tweaks?

Could explain why i somehow never liked ME, i remember it as glitchy, although i never gave it much of a chance i admit. Used it very briefly and went back to 98se for a multitude of details i cannot really recall. I was a regular user of dos games under w98se, that and soundfonts with sblive for sequencing music.

The reason I didn't like 98SE was because of no compressed folder support out of the box and the need to install more programs to get the features I want. Second is no native mass storage driver out of the box. These 2 are a nuisance to me as I use both very frequently. Also I like the look of ME more then I do 98SE. COurse theres the unofficial SP for that, but that's just 1 more program I'd need to install 🙁

Then again, I'm still willing to give 98SE another shot, as I think you can only give a fair opinion if your opinion is auto-didactic 😉
98SE had it's own glitches and annoyances. Btw, ME has the fastest bootup and shutdown of any Windows I ever tried. The 1.4 Tully shuts down in just over 1 second!

I admit the lack of mass storage drivers is a pain in 98 ...
i eventually quit at my early attempts to get my usb key to work, it would detect it, but could never read it...
I use lan file sharing alot so i can survive without the mass storage, but its still very useful.

My 98 usually shuts down in 1-2 second, but once in a while it will do something funny and get stuck at the "its now safe to turn off your computer" and just freeze there.

Piccy time!

Even though I've been sidetracked with many other projects (including having RSI and modding some games for my LAN parties) I've (nearly) completed 2 rigs.

Rig one is the third and final new LAN rig (though a spare spare LAN rig is in the back of my mind 🤣).
This one is the highest specced rig of the 3 with the other 2 being a Socket A sempron 2600+ and Athlon 64 3200+ s754.
Specs are:
ASUS AM2 mATX board with an Athlon 3800+ 2.4Ghz
2GB DDR2-800
ASUS GF8600 I think PCIe
500GB "sold for dead" WD SATA2 harddrive
Onboard sound
9.2cm LED system fan brand new
Windows XP
350W dual-rail FSP PSU with a big fan
Black DVD drive (and CD burner which I don't plan on using)
And all in a nice little black case with the drive cage missing 🤣

The basic idea is that, as this rig is the fastest, it'll also be used to host MP/COOP games

I noticed it was missing it's hatrddrive cage so I resorted to using a floppy 5.25/3.5 adapter which has an opening for cooling the drive (even though that may not even be needed, this adapter was just so easy to install...and it was laying around...so...Lol 😜)

This rig is ready top be tested, gonna try out Unreal Tournament 3 on it first before I declare it LAN-ready. Building rigs is nice but useless if it turns out to be unstable.

I left the thumb drive in it just for the heck of it 😁

The second rig is my now tweaked but still missing DirectX retro LAN rig. I made this as a 1st in a line of 3 9x LAN rigs for playing games that for whatever reason won't run properly on XP (for instance the game "Z").

Specs:
GA-6OXT (or GA-60XT I dunno yet 🤣), i815 chipset
The extremely rare and uncommon *joke!* Tualatin-s 1.4Ghz 512kb cache
256MB PC-133 (can upgrade to 512 if need be)
Geforce 3 Ti200 64MB
20GB laptop drive using a few adapters
Black optical drive
Silver case
FSP 300W PSU
8cm system fan
A modded HSF with the noisy 6cm fan replaced with a much more quiet 7cm AMD s754/s939 stock fan
Soundblaster Live! possibly on the way but it's onboard sound is working so might just let it stay that way and see what happens 😉
Windows ME tweaked

This rig was a fun project as I tweaked the ME install CD first (including lots of testing in Virtual PC). The ME disk I in the end created now boots like a floppy and is almost fully unattended straight from the disk 😁

The laptop adapters I bought a loooong time ago and were realy cheap. As I was mounting the laptop drive I found out why it was so cheap:The metal brackets have the screw holes too high, I couldn't for the life of me mount it in the harddrive cage!
But no worries, I decided to use some more of the green stuff (as I now call the wires 😜) and it's fixed into place very solidly 😀

As you can see from the pics, theres still a few things that need to be done like sealing the holes in the front and back, but all in due time 😀

I still need to figure out what version of DX is best to install. Probably DX8, DX8.1 or DX9 perhaps. Right now I lean towards DX8 more as the hardware has no DX9 to be used, including the games I plan to play on it.

Great work as usual Tetrium mate! That Athlon X2 rig is awfully similar to one of my rigs, even down to using the excellent but very noisy AMD heatpipe cooler. And that s370 board has no business looking that modern. 🤣

sgt76 wrote:

Great work as usual Tetrium mate! That Athlon X2 rig is awfully similar to one of my rigs, even down to using the excellent but very noisy AMD heatpipe cooler. And that s370 board has no business looking that modern. 🤣

It's a single core actually...atleast I think it is?

Lol, I just wanted a case that had ok cooling. One 8cm fan should be enough 😀

GA-6OXT (or GA-60XT I dunno yet ), i815 chipset

It's "ga-6oxt" not "ga-60xt" *(I hope that clears it up for you 😀 )... I have the GA-6OXET-C which is great with tuallys. Now, for a matter of curiosity, do you have a Turbo PLL ability in BIOS? One of the reasons I didn't get the 6oxt vs the 6oxet or 6oxet-c was that I wasn't sure for one if it could really support 1.4GHz tually and if it supported the divider in BIOS (not that I'm recommending you to overclock your system, just curious if you have Turbo PLL).

Edit: Thanks for the info on Win ME, cleared up a lot for me.

Tetrium wrote:

It's a single core actually...atleast I think it is?

Lol, I just wanted a case that had ok cooling. One 8cm fan should be enough 😀

Oops, silly me. Thought its a 3800 x2, but it's a 3800+ 2.4 gigger with 1mb cache 😊 . My rig has a Athlon LE1600, 2.2ghz single core with 1mb L2 cache, basically a rebadged Opteron with only 45w TDP, and that's before undervolting.

nemesis wrote:

GA-6OXT (or GA-60XT I dunno yet ), i815 chipset

It's "ga-6oxt" not "ga-60xt" *(I hope that clears it up for you 😀 )... I have the GA-6OXET-C which is great with tuallys. Now, for a matter of curiosity, do you have a Turbo PLL ability in BIOS? One of the reasons I didn't get the 6oxt vs the 6oxet or 6oxet-c was that I wasn't sure for one if it could really support 1.4GHz tually and if it supported the divider in BIOS (not that I'm recommending you to overclock your system, just curious if you have Turbo PLL).

Edit: Thanks for the info on Win ME, cleared up a lot for me.

Thanks for clearing the name thing up! Another worldly mystery solved 😁
I suppose I can see what you mean if I can select the multiplier and voltage and such? Sure, I'll go check next time I fire the rig up (perhaps even today) and I'll post about it here in this thread 😉

And no prob about ME. It's not a super duper OS or anything and I think it's quite delicate, but I just keep my fingers crossed and usually things don't go wrong Lol 😀

sgt76 wrote:

[
Oops, silly me. Thought its a 3800 x2, but it's a 3800+ 2.4 gigger with 1mb cache 😊 . My rig has a Athlon LE1600, 2.2ghz single core with 1mb L2 cache, basically a rebadged Opteron with only 45w TDP, and that's before undervolting.

1MB cache...nice! I didn't even know that 🤣. I bought it second hand about half a year ago. Haven't had time to test it for gaming stability yet. Same goes for the Tully rig. I'm currently working on the second ME machine, it seems to have a little trouble with it's NIC and I was too busy playing BF2 offline AIX mod the last couple days. The second ME rig is close to completion though.

Next is playtesting the 3 rigs (the 3800+, the 1.4Tu and the 1.0Cu).

The second ME rig is completed now!
Specs:
Gateway s370 board with 1Ghz Coppermine
256MB RAM (2x128MB) PC-133
20GB laptop drive, same type as the other ME rig
Voodoo3 3000 AGP
Soundblaster Live!
Network card
Black CDROM
300W FSP PSU
8cm case fan with a fan adapter

Building this rig was relatively without major problems. The only problem was figuring out a way to mount the (very silent) harddrive and to mount the case fan.
So what's the deal with the case fan? Well...turned out the outer square frame of the fan was made of metal Lol! Coudn't use any screws so I used some more of that green stuff again 😁
The back of the fan doesn't look pretty with all the wires and a little accident with the side panel caused the panel to become a bit buckled.
It's because this silver case is made out of the flimsy metal as well, same as the other silver rig.

One special precaution I took when mounting the case fan was to add 4 little pieces of rubber to prevent resonating noises, and it worked 😀
The system isn't silent, but at least theres no annoying resonating sound, nor an audible harddrive.
I used the same trick with this CPU cooler as the Tualatin ME rig:mounted a 7cm stock AMD fan, that's why it looks a bit odd.

I played some Quake II on it just about an hour or so ago, so far everything worked smoothly.
Pics!

I'm contemplating on adding a Voodoo 2 to the Tualatin rig for backward compatibility with a few older titles, like Quake II

Edit:I forgot to add, to make the heatsink fit the taller Coppermine's heatspreader (it's a Coppermine with a heatspreader just like Tualatin), I used a Socket 7 clip instead of the plastic green/black Intel one.

This thread is just fun cause we can see how ingeniously you use your stock pile to make some nice rigs... more to come I hope?

I've been very busy lately remodeling my computer room, but I've managed to squeeze in some time to build a couple more new rigs... one a P3 1ghz in an old stumpy beige case and another a P4 (still in midst of building). It's like 24 hours in a day is just not enough.

sgt76 wrote:

This thread is just fun cause we can see how ingeniously you use your stock pile to make some nice rigs... more to come I hope?

I've been very busy lately remodeling my computer room, but I've managed to squeeze in some time to build a couple more new rigs... one a P3 1ghz in an old stumpy beige case and another a P4 (still in midst of building). It's like 24 hours in a day is just not enough.

Hey thanks mate for the compliment! 😊

Theres always more in the back of my mind (worst part is, I can't say I can't build it because I'm missing part xyz 😜), perhaps a Pentium Pro with NT4?
But first I have a few games to install on the LAN rigs, mainly UT3 and BF2+AIX mod (and perhaps BF2142 but I'm running out of keys 🤣, only got the game 3x).

And I still want to try out "Z" in a network on my ME rigs. Playing Z in a network would be awesome! I might throw in some Dune2k while I'm at it 😁

But right now theres no other rigs half-done, though I still want that Nehemiah rig but I found out my 1.2Ghz processor may be dead. Might have to replace it with a 1Ghz part and then build the rig.

But thanks all for the good advice, the comments and the compliments! Been a fun (and sometimes frustrating L0L!!) ride so far hehe! 😁