The first Linux distro I installed at home was Red Hat 6.2. It came as a cover CD on Australian Personal Computer magazine along with BeOS 5.0 PE and OS/2 v4 Warp. Linux installed without a hitch detecting all my hardware at the time including the sound card so no driver hunting but a bit weird compared to what I was use to. At bit later on I installed RH 7.3 on a hashed together Pentium 200mmx slimline HP system which I saved from the rubbish. Slimmed down as much of it I could, Nautilus in Gnome 1.2 just dragged it to it's knees. Mind you it only had 1meg of vram and 32megs of system ram. Once trimmed down using Window Maker and smaller applications It ran quite well. Over time I maxed out the on board vram and system ram when I got some spare from scrapped systems. My main system ran Windows 98 but I was spending my time more on the wee linux box. Now it runs Xandros 2.5 because that has far better usb detection.

I'm testing out sound cards for my 486 and making recordings of FM Synth tracker and game music.

Yamaha YMF719 so far, CS428 and ES1868 next, them probably some CMI and ALS stuff.

Feel free to follow the playlist on Sound Cloud:

https://soundcloud.com/user-470084971/sets/vi … esis-comparison

Cool. Just installed Mandrake 6.1 background graphics on to my Turbo linux 6 setup using it's package management tool. Who said it was hard to install stuff on old linuxs?

I recapped my Matsonic MS7177CT motherboard, updated the BIOS to latest and removed the AMR slot so that I could prepare it for addition of ISA slots. Tualatin boards without ISA are worthless to me, but this board has some potential ~

Tiido wrote:

I recapped my Matsonic MS7177CT motherboard, updated the BIOS to latest and removed the AMR slot so that I could prepare it for addition of ISA slots. Tualatin boards without ISA are worthless to me, but this board has some potential ~

Matsonic.jpg

How are you going to add ISA to that board?

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Tiido wrote:

I recapped my Matsonic MS7177CT motherboard, updated the BIOS to latest and removed the AMR slot so that I could prepare it for addition of ISA slots. Tualatin boards without ISA are worthless to me, but this board has some potential ~

Matsonic.jpg

How are you going to add ISA to that board?

What kind of sorcery is this!?

Never again

I like your workshop 😁

I remember I had used Red Hat linux in one occasion. It was quite complicated tbh

Received an EEPROM chip that I ordered from China and programmed the latest BIOS for my PC Chips M507 Socket 7 Motherboard, BIOS version dated 2000. Old BIOS was from 1996.

It didn't fix the main issue I was having - my COAST module isn't recognised (possibly faulty). But at least the BIOS now reports correctly whether it has cache or not, instead of being hardcoded to say it always has.

The new BIOS now recognises the installed AMD K6-2 CPU rather than displaying it as an 80486. It does get the model number/clock speed wrong though, naming a K6-2 500 as K6-2 488, but that could be down to the way the jumpers are set as I have it underclocked to 300MHz. I might play around with the clock settings on this new BIOS version at some point and see if I can get a bit more speed out of it.

The newer BIOS also brings things like Plug N Play options, as well as CD-ROM detection & CD booting.

In a way it's kind of a shame to run this board with a more recent BIOS. Takes away a bit of the nostalgic value. 🤣

Some further retro activity. Cleaned out my Xbox console - wasn't too bad inside really, a couple of cobwebs and tiny amount of dust.

Whilst I had the thing dissassembled, I decided to attempt upgrading the HDD. I looked at what spare parts I had laying about in storage and as luck would have it, I had everything I needed - 80-pin IDE cable, compatible IDE-SATA adapter, Molex Splitter and most importantly the spare 500GB SATA drive I chose was on the supported list. Must have been fate! 😎

All upgraded and working great. The drive I went with was a WD Blue WDC WD5000AAKX 500GB SATA HDD and I had no problems at all. 500GB is sufficient for my needs.

Had a couple of near-miss kind of mishaps, first the IDE-SATA adapter when moved a certain way made contact with the bare metal of the HDD. I insulated that pretty quickly. Secondly, I didn't tidy the IDE cable properly before trying to put the lid back on and almost destroyed the cable. Oh well, only near-misses so could have been worse. 🤣

bfcastello wrote:

I remember I had used Red Hat linux in one occasion. It was quite complicated tbh

Underbpinnings of OSX is *nix. It just has a pretty face. Jobs was a marketing man.

The LNE100TX I ordered finally arrived, and installed without issue. I don't have any other useful PCI or ISA cards kicking around, so I guess I'm done with Apophis. I could add another 64MB DIMM if I had one, before maxing out the RAM, but I have no need for that much in Win95. If my mood improves, I may look into making 8bit icons for Win95. Without a better video card, I wouldn't be able to use them all that well, since their palettes would drive Windows nuts with the desktop bit depth maxed out at 8 bit color. Ah well.

Apophis wrote:

Shuttle HOT-569 v2A59IH2H with Intel Triton 82430TX chipset Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG Intel Pentium MMX 166 revision 0543h 128 […]
Show full quote

Shuttle HOT-569 v2A59IH2H with Intel Triton 82430TX chipset
Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG
Intel Pentium MMX 166 revision 0543h
128MB DIMM (2X 64MB)
SoundBlaster 16 ????
Trident GUI9660XGi/968x/938x
Linksys LNE100TX
Windows 95c

The only systems left to really work on have dead Dallas chips, and I'm in no mood to fuss with those. Each system is respectively slower than their companion operational systems I've been playing with this year, both 486 and Pentium, so I have no real incentive to get on those any time soon.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

How are you going to add ISA to that board?

See those resistor arrays under the PCI slots ? Most of those connect to the ISA bus of the 686 southbridge. I only have to figure out where all the signals are which will take a bit of effort but nothing insurmountable. Most of the signals I can get from BIOS socket already actually.

Very interesting. Have fun, man. Signed into Shockwave with an old account my mom made years ago and the account I made years ago. Still remember the login info and was still able to sign into the site. Kept the sign in info for the site in my head.

Went through some boxes out in the shed an did some sorting. Few video and sound cards. Lots of real pci modems not shown and in a box. A few Socket 7 mobos with some P2/3 and later mobos. Never really realized I'd scrapped so many systems over the years. Any way it was interesting going through it.

Haul!

Caluser2000 wrote:

did some sorting.

I need to do that sometime... preferably soon before I get lost in the boxes full of cards 🤣

imi wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

did some sorting.

I need to do that sometime... preferably soon before I get lost in the boxes full of cards 🤣

It's taken a few years to get around to it but worth it.

Was planning to have a nice quiet restful day today playing retro games on my Xbox console, but an old PC had other ideas.

An old Socket AM2 / Athlon 64 X2 PC running Linux that I use as a Server was not responding to network requests this morning when I woke up. So I switched it off and attempted to boot back up, then during the boot process I was met with a flash & POP! Out goes the PSU. It's true what everybody says, Corsair VS series power supplies are indeed utter garbage!

Luckily there was no damage done and I installed a spare PSU to get things back up and running again. I did have to reseat the RAM before the motherboard would POST though, which was strange. Ordered a better, less cheapskate, PSU as replacement.