Finally convinced the owner at the recycling center to watch for old Super Socket 7 boards.
(The ones that have both the ATX/AT, 72pin/30pin memory combination with AGP socket)
Found one with a AMD K6-III-450 that posted once I pulled it out of the worst mounting I've ever seen in an old case.
Posted perfectly and set aside for EBay sometime in the future.
Another board saved from destruction. 😀 Someone will get a neat system from this.
Playing around with a GM map on my Korg. Would anyone be interested in hearing how the O1 sounds in a few games?
I'm not sure what the Korg is, but I assume some sort of MIDI thing. So yes I'm interested in hearing MIDI music from games on different MIDI gear. Make a thread about it somewhere and either PM me a link or reply here with a link to it.
Been chasing with an 8" floppy drive all weekend. Stepper circuit isn't working right because he reset bus is stuck. Getting close to tracking the fault down but damn if it's not annoying without a schematic.
Im trying to use a 20 year old HP 2x CD-RW disc with a Samsung Blu-Ray/DVD-RW... Not a great success so far, the Samsung drive really really wants to burn the disc at 48x speed which the disc of course cant handle... Perhaps if I do the full wipe 10 times in a row first...
I think I remember something about there being a significant distinction between CR-RW <= 4x and higher speeds. AFAIR those are just not compatible. Just use those old discs with an old drive and new discs with a newer drive. This has also been my personal experience, but that was only with one batch of 2x CD-RWs.
The Wikipedia article on CD-RW says something different.
I think it's probably not worth the trouble.
Yesterday I binned the 27x P200 CPUs I bought two weeks ago.
Using a PC Chips M577 MVP3 motherboard 7 of 27 were able to boot DOS at 3x83 = 250 MHz (PCI=33MHz as the board supports a 2.5 divider) but none could run Windows 98 even if a few came very close. I did also test those 7 CPUs at 2x100 MHz but not a single one of them were flawless at 100 MHz FSB. I tried a Pentium MMX at 2.5x100 MHz just to make sure this spare motherboard could still do 100MHz FSB and sure enough it worked flawlessly at stock voltage.
The conclusion is that the P54C Pentium 200 is a very poor clocker but I have at least found some candidates for my two i430FX motherboards, 3x80=240 MHz seems very possible.
Today Im going to test my 30x new P233 MMX CPUs to see if I find one that will do 3x100 MHz at less voltage than my current best Pentium MMX.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.
Been chasing with an 8" floppy drive all weekend. Stepper circuit isn't working right because he reset bus is stuck. Getting close to tracking the fault down but damn if it's not annoying without a schematic.
Interesting... i've just repaired an IBM PS/2 3.5" floppy drive. Now i've been looking to get a hold of an 8" drive, but I see none are working so it would be another repair job / project in itself.
Yesterday I binned the 27x P200 CPUs I bought two weeks ago.
No!! 😢
You threw out 27 P-200 non-MMX chips? These were never good overclockers, Intel had trouble producing enough that could run at that speed.
With the 233 MMX it's different as Intel sorta purposefully didn't want to see higher-clocked MMX chips for s7 as this would hurt their P2 sales...or something like that. They could've been factory-clocked higher, it's probably why those are a lot easier to overclock.
Intel could have sold these at higher clock rates but Intel chose not to do so.
Been chasing with an 8" floppy drive all weekend. Stepper circuit isn't working right because he reset bus is stuck. Getting close to tracking the fault down but damn if it's not annoying without a schematic.
Interesting... i've just repaired an IBM PS/2 3.5" floppy drive. Now i've been looking to get a hold of an 8" drive, but I see none are working so it would be another repair job / project in itself.
8" drives are from another era relative to DOS/Windows so getting them to work even with machines in the late 80's was weird. I've heard stories of getting some models working with an adapter board (they aren't 34 pin) and finger crossing but typically it was for using programs like imgdisk to archive or create new diskettes for other machines.
8" drives are from another era relative to DOS/Windows so getting them to work even with machines in the late 80's was weird. I've heard stories of getting some models working with an adapter board (they aren't 34 pin) and finger crossing but typically it was for using programs like imgdisk to archive or create new diskettes for other machines.
When you say adapter board... you mean, floppy disk controller? I'm sure there were 8-bit ISA cards that had a compatible IDE-type port to communicate with the drive?
Last edited by 386_junkie on 2016-01-26, 06:35. Edited 1 time in total.
Trying to ready my benchmarking suite for release. Trying to mend a bug in the menu which skews the results. Turns out it might not be a bug as I tried again and found that the bug then went in reverse, implying it is just fluctuation in DOSBox, I do test on the real hardware before fully committing anything anyway and guess I will have to do that again now.
I do plan to make a small optimization to system memory though, as I had something eating a few KB before which might have lowered scores, this is simple to remove but requires clearing the screen at a certain time - luckily, the screen is blank already at this point so the end user won't notice much of anything unless they have a slow machine, in which case they might see a quick blink of text on their display.
EDIT: But maybe don't use the FDIV Pentium and Quake to test as that system is prone to occasional Divide overflow's in Quake when it switches demo. Looks like Pentium OverDrive will save the day again... Or maybe I'll use Doom, given I went to the trouble of raking out the "Theme music" for the Pentium, plus I really like this machine right now.
Also sick of my workstation and my laptop silently switching me to UK keyboard layout, sure, I live in the UK, but I use US International keyboards where possible as I much prefer the layout and the ability to type umlauts and whatnot.
Edit 2: Indeed, the problem is non-existent on the real hardware. Though the optimization still wouldn't go amiss because not every machine is going to have 64MB of RAM to throw at it, I can't really see eating 2-3K of conventional doing much but as I can free it up prior to running anything and just reload the TSR before bringing the menu back up it is probably worth what little effort will be involved.
Last edited by HighTreason on 2016-01-26, 07:02. Edited 2 times in total.
8" drives are from another era relative to DOS/Windows so getting them to work even with machines in the late 80's was weird. I've heard stories of getting some models working with an adapter board (they aren't 34 pin) and finger crossing but typically it was for using programs like imgdisk to archive or create new diskettes for other machines.
There is also the FDADAP which lets you connect 8" drives to a standard PC floppy bus. I used this to connect an 8" drive to a Kryoflux and I was able to image some 8" disks successfully.
If you're looking for an 8" drive, the key seems to be to get one that matches your local utility power - e.g. 240V 50Hz. For some reason many were made for 60Hz at voltages used in 50Hz countries and vice-versa, so you might get one that matches your local voltage but chances are it will be for the wrong mains frequency. This will cause the motor to run at the wrong speed making disks unreadable (seems this is why the drives show up on eBay - buyers realise they won't work and then on-sell them.)
Also sick of my workstation and my laptop silently switching me to UK keyboard layout, sure, I live in the UK, but I use US International keyboards where possible as I much prefer the layout and the ability to type umlauts and whatnot.
Which OS?
You are probably hitting Alt-Shift accidentally without any other keys. The default behaviour of Windows for this combo is to switch keyboard layouts.
You can either remove the UK keyboard layout, or just turn off the hotkey if you still need the UK layout occasionally.
The setting is not hard to find, either in the control panel (exact location depends on the version of Windows), or you can go there with the corresponding icon in the systray if there is one (might say "EN" or "UK", probably blue background).
"It's science. I ain't gotta explain sh*t" 
