This is a socket 370 system...

more pictures + info http://imgur.com/a/LsAfS

oeuvre wrote:

This... is my main desktop (Skylake rig). Put it in an older Dell chassis. More details and pictures here http://imgur.com/a/W5Xnw

I love it! And did something similar recently, so now you have made me wish to take pics and post them. So thank you!

Please share!

oeuvre wrote:

This is a socket 370 system...

more pictures + info http://imgur.com/a/LsAfS

Nice rig you got there. Guessing the OS is original to the system, including the programs that came with it?

I had a Socket 370 system once, but it had the Intel Extreme GPU, no AGP whatsoever, and a Celeron processor. Later upgraded to a Socket 754 system, and it runs faster than the Socket 370 since the Socket 370 used PC-133 RAM and my 754 uses DDR-400 and AHCI SATA over the on-board SATA that has the same speed as the PATA 133.

Nah, I installed all the software. SATA is nice

A little while ago I picked up a Compaq Deskpro EN P450 for 10$ from the recycling place - it had a fairly modern WiFi card in it that I wanted, and they were going to ask 5 for the WiFi card so it made sense to take the whole unit. When I plugged it in at the place it threw a beep code suggesting a faulty VGA card.

Finally got around to working on it - swapped out the faulty Rage Pro Turbo for a Rage 128 Pro I had on hand, which was the only card I had that fit due to the oddball Compaq layout. This machine will only accept AGP cards that only have a single connector near the top of the bracket, and a cutout at the bottom to fit the card over the Serial ports, see the picture below.

Powered it on to find that it comprised of a Pentium II 450, 384 MB of RAM, 10 GB Maxtor hard drive, ESS 1869 onboard ISA audio chipset, Intel 10/100 Ethernet, the aforementioned Rage 128 Pro I added, and a totally overwhelmed copy of Windows XP with all of the graphical features turned on. Judging by the fairly recent model D-Link WiFi card, this machine was probably being used up until fairly recently and online at that 😵 .

I went ahead and wiped it and after much fussing about with the FM synth not cooperating in DOS games, I've ended up with WIndows 98SE on the machine, removed the superfluous cards (the D-Link WiFi card and a Modem) and been playing around with the machine. I'm generally quite impressed by the stability and performance of this machine, and I actually really like the ESS OPL3 clone's sound in DOS games.

Only one issue.

There's no Game Port.

None.

The BIOS reports a Joystick port configured for the ESS chipset, but there's no port, not even a header I can find. I'd hate to turn off the actually quite nice ESS chipset just to add another card with a game port, but the machine gives me very few configuration options in BIOS, basically just giving me options to set some predefined assignments or disable it.

Not sure what I plan to do with this machine - it's otherwise a very solid all-in-one 90's gaming PC. Just sad that I can't use my Gravis GamePad or my MS SideWinder 3d Pro.

You could add an ESS Isa card that features the Gameport and disable the onboard 😀

attempted to get this old quadram board working. picked up an old 5150 with a XT-IDE drive that has bad sectors. Unfortunately older versions of spinrite and ndd won't recognize the drive. newer versions of either that may see the drive won't run on only 256k of RAM. So this quadram board is myt only hope.

As luck would have it, it's a rarer quadram silverboard (not quadboard 1/2) so theres no documentation anywhere. can't figure out the dip switch settings. maybe i'll randomly switch them on and off. can't be that many permutations 😀

ODwilly wrote:

You could add an ESS Isa card that features the Gameport and disable the onboard 😀

I would if I had one on hand - the full list of ISA cards I have include an AWE64 Value, a Jazz 16, an Opti based card, an Aztech 2316 based card, and an untested YMF719 based card. No ESS cards 😢 Not to mention that would preclude using the onboard speaker which actually sounds pretty decent.

LHN91 wrote:

I would if I had one on hand - the full list of ISA cards I have include an AWE64 Value, a Jazz 16, an Opti based card, an Aztech 2316 based card, and an untested YMF719 based card. No ESS cards 😢 Not to mention that would preclude using the onboard speaker which actually sounds pretty decent.

Hmm, how about one of those ISA or pci "Gameport" cards. I remember seeing those arounds.

Sorting through the collection, to find parts I know that I will never use.
They need to get out in the wild again, for other people to use them.
Taking pictures of the items, and setting up sales add on local sites.

brostenen wrote:

Sorting through the collection, to find parts I know that I will never use.
They need to get out in the wild again, for other people to use them.
Taking pictures of the items, and setting up sales add on local sites.

Interesting.

Trying to decide on which system to build, (I have no room for both so it's one of the other) a Coppermine 800MHz on a 440BX or a Tualeron 1300 on a 815EP.. The Tualatin board has no ISA slots but I don't think I'll be losing out on anything by not having an ISA slot for hardware for 99/2000; I did not use an ISA card in my Slot 1 system and went for a Live! and soundfonts instead of an ISA card and a wave table.. Still, decisions..

Im messing with my Conroe "summer system".

I'm benching FEAR to see if a faster video card than a Geforce 7900 GTX with a slight GPU overclock makes sense for DX9 games in XP. With the the 1280*1024 screen I use with this system the answer seem to be, no not really.

I'm going to mess with some G80 cards anyhow as I have a bunch I never tested. Also having a system built to draw little electricity that actually draws little electricity makes too much sense, did I mention I bumped the Conroe E6700 to 3600 MHz? 😉

Yey! This time I only had to test 3 Geforce 8800 GTX cards before finding a working one.

One of the non working ones (dead as a doornail) is a dumpster find so I can live with that one not working but I'm pretty sure the other one (artifacts all over the POST screen) was bought as tested and working on the Swedish Ebay clone Tradera. I only paid ~6 euro + 6 euro shipping if I remember right so I didn't bother testing it last year when I bought it. On Tradera it's not really worth arguing about items costing that little any how as buyers can get negative reviews. I think the third working card is a dumpster find so I guess that evens everything out. The working 8800 GTX is a MSI card just like one of the cards in my year 2006 QX6700 + 8800GTX SLI build so I guess the card will end up there as matched pairs looks nice. 😁

Received the sound card in the mail today, installed it (5 attempts later and soon realizing I had the wrong driver installed) in my K6-2 300 system and it does work, but it needs DOS TSR programs to play DOS games with sound effects and voices. However, the General MIDI works with DOS games without the use of the external MIDI box within Windows 98SE and DOS, and the OPL3 chipset works in DOS as well as Windows 98SE.

Edit: just installed drivers for MS-DOS for the sound card and all is well. Now, to figure out why my left speaker isn't playing on the left channel.

bjwil1991 wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Sorting through the collection, to find parts I know that I will never use.
They need to get out in the wild again, for other people to use them.
Taking pictures of the items, and setting up sales add on local sites.

Interesting.

Yeah... Most of the stuff is up on a local site and a couple of items went up on Amibay.

The last few days I've been doing partial inventory of my stuff and I've done maybe about 15% - around 40 boxes of different sizes, filled with bare cards and motherboards. Don't know if I'll have the time do to full inventory any time soon. But I have a feeling I have too much stuff 🤣

Playing with mouse drivers I haven't used in 22 years 😜

(I remember this crashing/BSOD'ing Win95 hard)

Decided to play around again with the worst Mac of my collection - an iMac G3 333MHz. It needed a RAM upgrade, but is extremely picky about the memory chips it will accept. Most of the spare SODIMM memory chips in my collection would either be utilised at half their capacity or would just plain cause erratic behaviour. Mac OS 9 was a lot more forgiving of dodgy RAM, whilst Mac OS X just couldn't deal with it 🤣.

Finally found a working stick of 256MB that was fully recognised by the system and decided to pair it with a 128MB stick that was recognised only as 64MB, to gain a total of 320MB RAM. A bit of an improvement over the 128MB it previously had.

It's currently running both Mac OS 9.1 & Mac OS X 10.3.9. This Mac had more usage in OS X in the past, but I think I prefer Mac OS 9 nowadays for it's overall speediness.

I've been playing Tomb Raider II, III & The Last Revelation on this. TR III struggles a bit and TR4 is near unplayable with the rubbish onboard Rage Pro 6MB Graphics.