RetroLizard wrote on 2020-06-03, 11:27:

Alright, I'll get on it as soon as I can and send you a PM with the info when done.

Thank you again. No need to make it a priority if you have other things to take care of, though. All of these icon-related projects seem to be uprooting a lot of Win95 capabilities that would have been a godsend twenty-five years ago. Still wondering why I had to steal a registry value from Win98 to bump up the icon bit depth, though.

I understand the reasons why you are modifying the w95 icons, but as a designer myself, my preferred icon set are the ones from original w9x, never liked much the newer windows icon sets (I hated specially the xp ones). However it may change in the future with the new win10 icon sets, following the “fluent design” trend of 2020.

I have that set of icons from newer win10, in case anyone is interested.

https://www.windowscentral.com/do-you-microso … cons-windows-10

appiah4 wrote on 2020-06-02, 20:49:

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-06-02, 19:21:

Since my dual core motherboard doesn't support two floppy drives, I bought this Gotek floppy drive equiped with mini USB connection, which I connected into internal pinout of the board. I use this dual core system for Windows XP.

Can you boot from it as a USB floppy on that motherboard?

I don't know. My primary goal was to have a second floppy drive to transfer files more easily. Will let you know when I'll be thinkering with the system.

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-06-03, 18:11:

I don't know. My primary goal was to have a second floppy drive to transfer files more easily. Will let you know when I'll be thinkering with the system.

You connected a Gotek via USB for easier file transfer? Much easier than using the USB thumb stick itself for file transfer, no..? 🤣

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-03, 18:56:

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-06-03, 18:11:

I don't know. My primary goal was to have a second floppy drive to transfer files more easily. Will let you know when I'll be thinkering with the system.

You connected a Gotek via USB for easier file transfer? Much easier than using the USB thumb stick itself for file transfer, no..? 🤣

I think I am missing the point of the USB connected Gotek as well . Could you explain your use case for that ?

He did say his motherboard only supports one floppy drive

Yes, that's why he connected the Gotek via USB. But if that's for file transfer, there's no sense in it when he could also just use USB sticks for file transfer. He's now using a USB stick to mount floppy images on a Gotek which is connected via USB by itself. He has USB and he has a real floppy drive, so why the Gotek? Maybe there is a reason, but I don't get it.

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-03, 20:28:

Yes, that's why he connected the Gotek via USB. But if that's for file transfer, there's no sense in it when he could also just use USB sticks for file transfer. He's now using a USB stick to mount floppy images on a Gotek which is connected via USB by itself. He has USB and he has a real floppy drive, so why the Gotek? Maybe there is a reason, but I don't get it.

Maybe he also has a normal Gotek on on another PC.

That's exactly what I was thinking

I was researching on Web Archive for some old FIFA 98/World Cup 98 patches. Most notably, the FGO Champions League patch and WC98 Libertadores Cup patch. All links broken. Oh dear, a big part of my childhood has been gone. Whatever.

Ah yes. The Gotek MiniUSB version - the one that comes with dual ARM Cortex microcontrollers, each with its own firmware. Both HxC and Flashfloppy stays the heck away from it (which means you can’t flash it to mount/load/write disk images...which is very useful for, say, installing OS2 Warp 4 on machines without floppy drive controllers...but probably won’t work as a USB device anyways).

I am sure that if you have a normal 34 pin Gotek with a USB thumbdrive-of-a-thousand 1.44MB partitions (seriously, you need to use a poorly implemented Chinese utility to divvy up a drive to a thousand partitions to simulate different floppies...which is fairly ridiculous), then yeah, it kinda makes sense to use it on a Gotek MiniUSB. It makes less sense if you modified your Gotek to run Flashfloppy instead.

Pulled CMedia based AOpen AW850 audio card out of the router of doom and installed a Yamaha YMF724EV in its place - it was like the AOpen YMF744B Cobra...except the audio worked fine out of the box (no PCI bus noise, didn’t have to crank the audio up)...and unlike the CMedia, FM and SFX worked out of the box for the most part and it sounded pretty good.

Then I started running into random lockups and reboots in certain games (TIE fighter, Microprose F-15 III and wing commander 2 will seemingly loop a single audio sample and then lock up while FM synth is playing just fine). The router is supposed to have a VT82C686B Southbridge with distributed DMA rather than the VT8231 (which doesn’t). My guess is that DDMA was disabled in the limited BIOS which restricted my choices significantly. Oddly enough, old games like SQ3 works just fine...

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-06-04, 05:37:

Pulled CMedia based AOpen AW850 audio card out of the router of doom and installed a Yamaha YMF724EV in its place - it was like […]
Show full quote

Pulled CMedia based AOpen AW850 audio card out of the router of doom and installed a Yamaha YMF724EV in its place - it was like the AOpen YMF744B Cobra...except the audio worked fine out of the box (no PCI bus noise, didn’t have to crank the audio up)...and unlike the CMedia, FM and SFX worked out of the box for the most part and it sounded pretty good.

7584F0A2-DF03-4BB8-B747-0AEFB4316B7F.jpeg

Then I started running into random lockups and reboots in certain games (TIE fighter, Microprose F-15 III and wing commander 2 will seemingly loop a single audio sample and then lock up while FM synth is playing just fine). The router is supposed to have a VT82C686B Southbridge with distributed DMA rather than the VT8231 (which doesn’t). My guess is that DDMA was disabled in the limited BIOS which restricted my choices significantly. Oddly enough, old games like SQ3 works just fine...

D1A210F1-2FCF-41E5-802F-26128A6DF5F7.jpeg

Mmmmh .. Tie Fighter .. Would I be completely out of the line, if I remembered it as being played on my 486DX2/66? It seems it launched in 1994? But would it run on a DX2?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2020-06-04, 08:59:

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-06-04, 05:37:

Pulled CMedia based AOpen AW850 audio card out of the router of doom and installed a Yamaha YMF724EV in its place - it was like […]
Show full quote

Pulled CMedia based AOpen AW850 audio card out of the router of doom and installed a Yamaha YMF724EV in its place - it was like the AOpen YMF744B Cobra...except the audio worked fine out of the box (no PCI bus noise, didn’t have to crank the audio up)...and unlike the CMedia, FM and SFX worked out of the box for the most part and it sounded pretty good.

7584F0A2-DF03-4BB8-B747-0AEFB4316B7F.jpeg

Then I started running into random lockups and reboots in certain games (TIE fighter, Microprose F-15 III and wing commander 2 will seemingly loop a single audio sample and then lock up while FM synth is playing just fine). The router is supposed to have a VT82C686B Southbridge with distributed DMA rather than the VT8231 (which doesn’t). My guess is that DDMA was disabled in the limited BIOS which restricted my choices significantly. Oddly enough, old games like SQ3 works just fine...

D1A210F1-2FCF-41E5-802F-26128A6DF5F7.jpeg

Mmmmh .. Tie Fighter .. Would I be completely out of the line, if I remembered it as being played on my 486DX2/66? It seems it launched in 1994? But would it run on a DX2?

I played the original Tie Fighter ona DX33 and it ran fine. The CD-ROM version was 640x480 and I played that on my DX4-100 and it ran fine as well.

It really annoyed me that I was not able to use older versions of Outlook / Outlook Express to read my email because they don't support modern encryption protocols.

I did some research and found that stunnel seems to be the way to go to solve this problem. I could have installed it on my Win10 machine and called it a day, but as a bit of an extra challenge I chose to run it in a Docker container on my VPS and have my home router establish an IPsec site-to-site VPN tunnel to access it from my home network in a secure manner. This was more of a personal learning project and took quite a while to get everything up and running, but in the end it turned out to work pretty well and I am now able to connect my OE5 on Win95 to my mail providers IMAP and SMTP servers. Win! 😁

Bruninho wrote on 2020-06-04, 04:54:

I was researching on Web Archive for some old FIFA 98/World Cup 98 patches. Most notably, the FGO Champions League patch and WC98 Libertadores Cup patch. All links broken. Oh dear, a big part of my childhood has been gone. Whatever.

Don't give up, you might find it when/where you least expect it.

Received my new video cards this week:

a) Western Digital VLB WD90c33-ZZ card with 1meg ram .... tested it's performance on my 486-DX2/66. It was pretty decent, but not quite as fast as my S3 805 card. I'll have to play with the jumper settings on the card a bit more, see if I can get it to go any faster.

b) Cirrus Logic GD5428 ISA card ... testing it's performance in my 486-DX2/66, it was actually pretty good. Certainly not as fast as the VLB cards, but even and good performance in windows, clearly beating both the Tseng Labs ET4000AX and the older CL5424 cards. A combination of both bitblt and colour expansion acceleration features of the GD5428 give it quite a good punch of performance for an ISA video card. And surprisingly under DOS, it both the CL5424 (when set to 0 wait states) and the CL5428 cards perform just as well as my Tseng Labs ET4000AX card. My new favorite ISA card is definitely now the Cirrus Logic GD5428. Too bad I can't find a good S3 ISA based video card to test the Cirrus logic card against.

Spent half an hour trying to understand what's wrong with my Cherry G80-3000 which had stopped working again. Last time I had to replace a leaking capacitor, this time everything looks ok at first sight. It briefly flashes its lights after I turn on the PC but then the PC starts beeping furiously and spits out the keyboard error. I will examine it in more detail tomorrow when I have more time.

I got a lot done today, by my standards.

1. Got the Packard Bell Legend 401CD to POST again, and installed the Trident PCI video card and Aztech ISA sound card into the machine. Still needs drivers but that least it works now.

2. Moved the Tandy 1000SX setup to a more convenient location and finally got it to boot off a DOS floppy when for some reason it wouldn't before, though the hardcard remains a problem, it seems.

There's certainly more work to be done with both, but new toys from eBay are arriving soon to steal my attention...

Played a bit of FIFA 98 RTWC, tweaked a bit the Windows XP Pro "98 theme". Not much here to say.