I got my ASUS TX97-XV (HP OEM) working with the Award BIOS. I prefer that BIOS over the crippled Phoenix BIOS. I just replaced the 2mbit bios chip with a 1mbit bios chip and hotflashed it with a asus p2b.

Pulled a KTX and Genius parallel port A4 flatbed scanners out of storage. I'm going to tidy the Genius one up as that is my first flatbed scanner. Both glass plates have separated from the body but is an easy fix with double sided tape . As you can see from the photos both have exactly the same internals with minor changes like different lids and stickers. Luckily the KTX scanner had has the driver disk and application CD when I picked it up at a garage sale. My ColourPage-View software CD for the Genius scanner has a huge crack though it but I've got the diver disk somewhere.. KYE, KTX and Genius hardware/products were all basically the same with different detail differences. I've used a lot of their gear over the years (nics, sound cards, hand scanners, mice etc) without any issues at all.

Since I have a lot of time at home (the spoils of 14 broken ribs, ha-ha) I decided to go through the piled up 20-120GB PATA HDDs. After some trial and error I ended up using an Asus P5A with a patched BIOS. To my surprise, this one can understand the souls of these metal plated Barracudas much better than that FuSi i815 and MSI694T Pro, and much faster at reading/writing them. The k6-3@450 CPU is just the icing on the cake, it doesn't have too much to do while licking through the HDD's surfaces but much more interesting when I actually get up and sit there to watch a few demos or play late DOS games.
And it's not even wasted energy, just some more, rather insufficient, heating for the house.
Ah, and the partitioning is done under pure DOS, with the joint operation of fdisk and pqmagic. Crazy, eh? 😁

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-15, 07:52:

Since I have a lot of time at home (the spoils of 14 broken ribs, ha-ha) ...

My god what happened?

I met a Volkswagen Golf, frontally. All I had was a bicycle.

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-15, 18:53:

I met a Volkswagen Golf, frontally. All I had was a bicycle.

Wow, I'm glad you pulled through, get better ASAP and build some great vintage machines in the meantime!

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-15, 18:53:

I met a Volkswagen Golf, frontally. All I had was a bicycle.

Get well soon, man!

Got a boxed, semi-used copy of an old RPG game from the early 2000's - Dungeon Siege.

Anybody know if it can run on a Voodoo3 3000? If so, how well?

I have an option to buy this among a commodore PC 20III
I cant seem to identify it, anyone?:)

Didn't know Alcatel made notebooks...

bearking wrote on 2020-12-15, 22:49:

Didn't know Alcatel made notebooks...

They did. I think I saw some two decades ago being used by Prost GP in Formula One.

Got the family IBM PC300GL with Celeron 400 back up and running. This was our main computer system between 1999 and the mid 2000s running the original Windows 98 without any major issues at all. Never needed to reload Win98 during that time. Just regular maintenance using CrapCleaner, AVG and had Kario as the software firewall. The Windows install is giving a dll error at present and easy enough to sort out. While I was mucking around with it I tried some Linux, OS2 v3 and OS/2 v4 installations. To my dismay non of them loaded giving kernal panics or OS/2 spitting out trap errors. The culpret was the Legend 128meg PC133 ram stick. Removed than and everything ran nicely from then on with only the 256meg ram stick.

Picked up my old family's home computer from my parents basement along with a ton of junk I had been storing in their basement for years. Most of the original bundle of sofware was there in perfect condition from ~ 1995/1996.

So I am now the proud new owner of a near perfect IBM Aptiva 2176-CX3. And I just re-loaded all the factory software from the official IBM product recovery CD. Fresh install of Windows 95 with MS Plus, Going to grab a Win98 SE upgrade ISO from REMOVED....

Even have the original 14" 640x480 CRT.

bearking wrote on 2020-12-15, 22:49:

Didn't know Alcatel made notebooks...

It was probably made by an OEM for them..

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-12-15, 21:19:

Got a boxed, semi-used copy of an old RPG game from the early 2000's - Dungeon Siege.

Anybody know if it can run on a Voodoo3 3000? If so, how well?

The answer is yes, kinda - Main menu runs around 60+ FPS, but in game runs around 15-20 or less.

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-15, 18:53:

I met a Volkswagen Golf, frontally. All I had was a bicycle.

ahhahhahah gl

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-15, 18:53:

I met a Volkswagen Golf, frontally. All I had was a bicycle.

I hope you had some choice words with the owner of said Volkswagen Golf.
Speedy recovery and best wishes.

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-15, 18:53:

I met a Volkswagen Golf, frontally. All I had was a bicycle.

Holy shit, dude. Get well soon, and I hope your bike didn't get too badly damaged either...

The bike is completely done for. Unfortunately. But thanks anyway, everyone.

And today I finished with the 20-120GB HDDs so I continued my tests with FDDs and CFs. Storage days, I say.

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-16, 19:53:

The bike is completely done for. Unfortunately. But thanks anyway, everyone.

And today I finished with the 20-120GB HDDs so I continued my tests with FDDs and CFs. Storage days, I say.

Well, if the frame isn't bent, it should be fixable. Worst case scenario, you might salvage some spare parts from it.