Joakim wrote on 2021-10-24, 09:54:

(Soon s478 will be rare partly because of cap plague, and then the haters will stand there with there s370 looking very sad!)

I guess that might happen, but what I think about are the high performance aftermarket CPU coolers. Those are already rare. I regret I sold my AC Super Silent 4 all those years ago with my then daily driver s478 Celeron PC and I'm happy I could score a Zalman CNPS7000-CU for my P4 build. These cost more used than when they were new.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-10-18, 10:36:

It didn't feel all that short if I look back. Around 2000 was when our computer science teacher brought in a device, held up and […]
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gerry wrote on 2021-10-18, 09:56:

ODwilly wrote on 2021-10-17, 11:34:

Popped open a fresh stack of Memorex CD-R's.

I was looking at that pile of CDs thinking that i remember when a single CD contained what once took a pile of floppy discs. Now a single middle of the road USB stick contains what once took a pile of CDs.

thinking about it CD burning at home was actually quite a short 'era' if we consider the 'middle' period when it was commonplace, before being replaced by early USB and card memory devices, i still have a pile of CD-R's left over from that time which will likely never be used

It didn't feel all that short if I look back. Around 2000 was when our computer science teacher brought in a device, held up and asked what that is. Only one knew (not me). It was a USB stick whith an unbelievable 16MB storage capacity he bought for around $60-70. It was a great replacement for floppies, but it wasn't until 2006-ish when the 512MB sticks became really affordable (for a penniless student's wallet). I was burning disks until around 2010-2012.

And also that was the time when I got into the habit of using mobil racks as easily (re)movable data drives. They sort of grew on me. I still prefer using them in retro machines. If I want to try something it's easy to switch drives without going elbow deep in the case.

I find it a little weird how hard it is to find old used USB sticks. A couple of times I tried looking for 256MB or smaller ones and I never found any. The failure rate must have been high. The smallest I have is a 512MB Kingston Data Travaller from my high school years and a 512MB MP3 player from the same time.

Back in 2000 (I think) I bought an IBM a21e which was my first computer without a floppy drive, so I bought the biggest available USB memory stick back then for the equivalent of USD100 a whopping 64Megs. I still have that, somewhere .. Oh yeah, also the a21e 😎

H3nrik V! wrote on 2021-10-24, 18:22:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-10-18, 10:36:

It didn't feel all that short if I look back. Around 2000 was when our computer science teacher brought in a device, held up and […]
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gerry wrote on 2021-10-18, 09:56:

I was looking at that pile of CDs thinking that i remember when a single CD contained what once took a pile of floppy discs. Now a single middle of the road USB stick contains what once took a pile of CDs.

thinking about it CD burning at home was actually quite a short 'era' if we consider the 'middle' period when it was commonplace, before being replaced by early USB and card memory devices, i still have a pile of CD-R's left over from that time which will likely never be used

It didn't feel all that short if I look back. Around 2000 was when our computer science teacher brought in a device, held up and asked what that is. Only one knew (not me). It was a USB stick whith an unbelievable 16MB storage capacity he bought for around $60-70. It was a great replacement for floppies, but it wasn't until 2006-ish when the 512MB sticks became really affordable (for a penniless student's wallet). I was burning disks until around 2010-2012.

And also that was the time when I got into the habit of using mobil racks as easily (re)movable data drives. They sort of grew on me. I still prefer using them in retro machines. If I want to try something it's easy to switch drives without going elbow deep in the case.

I find it a little weird how hard it is to find old used USB sticks. A couple of times I tried looking for 256MB or smaller ones and I never found any. The failure rate must have been high. The smallest I have is a 512MB Kingston Data Travaller from my high school years and a 512MB MP3 player from the same time.

Back in 2000 (I think) I bought an IBM a21e which was my first computer without a floppy drive, so I bought the biggest available USB memory stick back then for the equivalent of USD100 a whopping 64Megs. I still have that, somewhere .. Oh yeah, also the a21e 😎

I'd swap ya for a 64gb stick simply for the 1st generation of bootable usb flash were low capacity so it'll be still useful somewhere

I'm currently looking at the MSXVR retro PC. It's an MSX PC-compatible hardware and software build from a RPi board that is customized for MSX cartridge compatibility. I hope to use dreamblaster's X2GS Waveblaster board with it, though I don't know if the system will recognize it via USB. There were MIDI output cartridges for MSX, but they primarily use the old standard MIDI interface, which the X2GS external case does not support.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-10-24, 13:51:

Joakim wrote on 2021-10-24, 09:54:

(Soon s478 will be rare partly because of cap plague, and then the haters will stand there with there s370 looking very sad!)

I guess that might happen, but what I think about are the high performance aftermarket CPU coolers. Those are already rare. I regret I sold my AC Super Silent 4 all those years ago with my then daily driver s478 Celeron PC and I'm happy I could score a Zalman CNPS7000-CU for my P4 build. These cost more used than when they were new.

As for the originals, quite so. 3D printing is going to help with actually cooling older systems better, but the parts won't be original. I'm working (loosely speaking) on using less expensive modern heatsinks and fans with older systems by making mounts for them.

Eventually, however, early i-era copper core Intel coolers will get rare as well.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2021-10-24, 19:11:

I'm currently looking at the MSXVR retro PC. It's an MSX PC-compatible hardware and software build from a RPi board that is customized for MSX cartridge compatibility. I hope to use dreamblaster's X2GS Waveblaster board with it, though I don't know if the system will recognize it via USB. There were MIDI output cartridges for MSX, but they primarily use the old standard MIDI interface, which the X2GS external case does not support.

As much as I love my original hardware, I also love the variety of emulation options we're getting.

Also that's very on-brand for VOGONS.

Downloading a bunch from usenet, mostly DOS and Win3.1 stuff posted back in 2011 era. Mostly shareware (but not 🤣)...
Found a few hardware docs but no manuals that cannot be found elsewhere....

Dual Boot in my Haswell system.

It starts Windows 10 when no floppy is in the drive.
Otherwise it is booting from the LS120 that is connected via USB.
(It is connectecd via USB because it seems that the Windows 10 SATA system requires UDMA and does not run with my PIO only LS120 floppy.)
The boot floppy loads the ASPI & disk driver for my Adaptec 19160 PCI SCSI controller.

I faced the problem that I cannot set my system to boot from SCSI HDD.
Then I had the problem that the DOS SCSI disk driver aborts with an error message although the ASPI driver is loaded without an issue.
I just could solve it by excluding all SCSI devices from the Adaptecs BIOS SCSI scan.
(It took hours to find this problem)

I have a bootable floppy with DOS 7.10 from Windows 98 SE
The Adaptec 19160 has support from DOS to Windows 7 x64. The Windows 7 driver runs in Windows 10 without any problem.

I tried to add Coppermine CPU support to the BIOS for PCPartner 440LX - normally they work in the slotket, only they identify as Pentium II MMX. Everything in Cbrom went seemingly fine, I threw out some of the old microcodes to get the vacancy, kept the ones for Klamath, Covington, Mendocino and added Klamath with Coppermine. But there were problems trying to flash: none of the awardflashers were able to upload the BIOS - they were always left hanging with the blinking cursor in one of the steps.
It was only with Uniflash that the update was completed.
But then another disappointment - the board failed to pass POST. Black screen only, attempting to access the floppy disk and flashing the keyboard (boot block alive!:) and nothing more. So the emergency disc with autoexec.bat and reflash of the original BIOS and I'm back to square one. Now how to find out what went wrong and why the board with the modified BIOS didn't want to post...

This week I'm doing hard drive testing and repair. It's by no means a fast job, and perhaps a bit pointless given how cheap used drives are, but doing what many people think it's impossible (How many times have you read/heard that hard drives cannot be fixed and that one reallocated sector means junk!) makes me feel pretty smug. I can also play the green card as I've saved these drives from the incinerator.

I'm amazed at how capable WD Marvel is.

Unfortunately, not all drives can be fixed. I haven't seen such a good headcrash in a while.

I caution to anyone, replacing failed components on a hard drive is dandy but many has firmware kept in a large chipset. Other than that, cannot open the internal guts where platters are.
The data recovery vendors who do heads swap consider this data recovery only. Once done it is trashed.

The software that scan and marks them bad is not recommended either and wastes time.

If I find any issues and with good back up habits, you can just toss and get another.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-25, 17:13:

I caution to anyone, replacing failed components on a hard drive is dandy but many has firmware kept in a large chipset. Ot […]
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I caution to anyone, replacing failed components on a hard drive is dandy but many has firmware kept in a large chipset. Other than that, cannot open the internal guts where platters are.
The data recovery vendors who do heads swap consider this data recovery only. Once done it is trashed.

The software that scan and marks them bad is not recommended either and wastes time.

If I find any issues and with good back up habits, you can just toss and get another.

Cheers,

Of course I'm never going to open them up, I'm talking "software" fixing.
But not nonsense like HDD Regenerator and the like, but at firmware level.

Most of my drives are WD, so I can do the following:

A few bad sectors? Self Scan it
More bad sectors? ARCO
Got a bad head? disable it.

To the best of my knowledge an ARCO test should be the same thing the factory does when they recertify RMA returns.

Now, the usefulness of a 4 head 500GB so degraded that after ARCO qualified as a 2 head 160GB disk is debatable, but the fact that I can is more important to me.

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-24, 18:33:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2021-10-24, 18:22:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-10-18, 10:36:

It didn't feel all that short if I look back. Around 2000 was when our computer science teacher brought in a device, held up and asked what that is. Only one knew (not me). It was a USB stick whith an unbelievable 16MB storage capacity he bought for around $60-70. It was a great replacement for floppies, but it wasn't until 2006-ish when the 512MB sticks became really affordable (for a penniless student's wallet). I was burning disks until around 2010-2012.

And also that was the time when I got into the habit of using mobil racks as easily (re)movable data drives. They sort of grew on me. I still prefer using them in retro machines. If I want to try something it's easy to switch drives without going elbow deep in the case.

I find it a little weird how hard it is to find old used USB sticks. A couple of times I tried looking for 256MB or smaller ones and I never found any. The failure rate must have been high. The smallest I have is a 512MB Kingston Data Travaller from my high school years and a 512MB MP3 player from the same time.

Back in 2000 (I think) I bought an IBM a21e which was my first computer without a floppy drive, so I bought the biggest available USB memory stick back then for the equivalent of USD100 a whopping 64Megs. I still have that, somewhere .. Oh yeah, also the a21e 😎

I'd swap ya for a 64gb stick simply for the 1st generation of bootable usb flash were low capacity so it'll be still useful somewhere

Thanks, but I'll just "stick" with it 😎

H3nrik V! wrote on 2021-10-25, 17:33:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-24, 18:33:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2021-10-24, 18:22:

Back in 2000 (I think) I bought an IBM a21e which was my first computer without a floppy drive, so I bought the biggest available USB memory stick back then for the equivalent of USD100 a whopping 64Megs. I still have that, somewhere .. Oh yeah, also the a21e 😎

I'd swap ya for a 64gb stick simply for the 1st generation of bootable usb flash were low capacity so it'll be still useful somewhere

Thanks, but I'll just "stick" with it 😎

That was clever 🤣

Rebuilt Windows 95 OSR 2.5 on my 486 XT monster truck pc. Still more to do but at least the upgrades and software are done.

Been poking at my newest aquisition....a Fit-PC slim. Basically it looks like a Thin Client in a project enclosure. I put 98SE on it but now thinking maybe FreeDOS with UniSound might be better due to lousy driver support for anything before XP.

And waiting for the VGA to S-Video converter to arrive for running my old boxes into the TV as well as recording my gameplay off said devices for YouTube.

Decided to get into some 90's Linux and installed 6.1 Mandrake on a Pentium 2 PC. Install was successful, however note of the graphical environments want to launch. I'm guessing it's because I didn't install any 8 bit pallet modes?

Given the reputation of 90's Linux I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Will not back down until I have at least one of the Quake games or Unreal Tournament running on this thing 😁

Remember when NT could be installed on PowerPC machines? Well, yesterday to celebrate WinXP's birthday, I pretended that my bog standard copy of XP Pro was a special PPC edition and installed it on my PM G5. Though I (unsurprisingly) couldn't get 3D acceleration working, general Windows performance actually wasn't too bad - I'd estimate around that of a P2-400 with an epic amount of RAM. If you were a Mac user during the PPC days and needed Windows to run your income tax software, a G5 running 2000 or XP in an emulator probably would've been just fine!

Five years from now I'll probably be celebrating Vista's 20th in much the same way. 😜

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-24, 13:22:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-23, 17:11:

i got my retro pc in post yesterday been working on it. So far the gpu freezes, the ram is non matching pair of half capacity i […]
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i got my retro pc in post yesterday been working on it.
So far the gpu freezes, the ram is non matching pair of half capacity i bought
it has original windows 7 no sp
the foxconn motherboard based on via p4m800 chipset accepts Both DDR and DDR2 ram up to 2gb
the built in chipset graphics (64mb) has no official download for windows 7 but lower.
I am currently upgrading to sp1 with generic vga driver integrated graphics (low res ugh) then i will try find a chipset gpu driver .... does windows update still have drivers for seven?
it has the 3.06ghz P4 socket 478 Prescott
nice sata disk 1tb
It has misbehaved with 4 gpu's so far i limited agp to 4x mode and tried 2 x nvidias and 2x ati's they all crashed.
The memory modules crashed the integrated gpu so i swapped to ddr400 modules (brand new) to install sp1
In ddr2 it only supports 533mhz so 100mhz isn't much of a deal except single data rate will be needing to get some ddr2 533 later I am all out of that snail speed.
I have got official gpu driver to try out the ati that came with this tower again but if it freezes its in the bin.
Hopefully one of the others will work proper (experience index shouldn't crash)
If this effort fails I shall abort and move to xp but i hear prescott not so good on 32bit? I suppose I shall find out as last resort missed out on vista didn't need it with xp at all. 64bit well the multimedia part of that is mostly 32bit.
stupid gpu i have etch a scetch graphics because of you and i may have to settle for xp just to run you.

As an update its been installing 2gb patches today and just about to test the gpu's again.
Hopefully the updates, latest drivers and replaced system ram will encourage normal operation or its recycle time and although i have a sis 315 coming for another pc it'll have to do for this because I'm not loading xp after an all day update just for the chipset gpu 😀

Its finished. After replacing the DDR2 memory with DDR400, patching and driver updates the included GPU runs like new. The windows 7 experience index completed with latest Direct X installed without hang or BSOD. Ready to be my new favourite P4 HT except for the wind tunnel small fan PSU which is being replace by SATA era PSU and that means SATA to MOLEX adapters for the optical arrangements.
Future uses will be DOSBOX, console emulation, and a bunch of pre 2010 games (some i missed out on)

Got my new VGA to Composite/S-Video...Forsmark/Forsman adapter....MILES AHEAD of the old one! Crisp Youtube PC footage here I come.

Sadly my 286s SCSI adapter Died (Adaptec. aHA-1542CF). Its future hangs on whether I still have my Future Domain Dual IDE or not. Might also be a good time to remove the old CMOS battery (Varta style) and put in a CR 2302 or CR 2540 coin cell. I may just fix it up and auction it....I use my Tandy 1000 way more. Real foot in mouth after my post yesterday.

Right now the FitPC is on there....toying with RetroPie on it.....or maybe giving ReactOS a go.

I ran the Versa M75 through it.....Abuse looks like a late 90s game system game, 🤣. Want to fix that dock and throw in a soundblaster now...and a wireless ps/2 keyboard mouse setup.

Still cooking up Win 95......might need to consider network security a little more...ran for 15 minutes....already 24 connections, could be my linux box though.

creepingnet wrote on 2021-10-26, 17:55:

Still cooking up Win 95......might need to consider network security a little more...ran for 15 minutes....already 24 connections, could be my linux box though.

I like to use a router with a Stateful Packet Inspection Firewall, then watching logs real time it's as if .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCdYMZecBns