I oiled the fan of the PSU of my new 386. Now it doesn't sound like a plane anymore ^^. I hope it'll stay silent for a while.

Deksor wrote:

I oiled the fan of the PSU of my new 386. Now it doesn't sound like a plane anymore ^^. I hope it'll stay silent for a while.

IMO A PC should both perform AND sound like a Muscle Car.

Today I decided to install an S3 Virge 325 2MB PCI Graphics card into my Socket 5 PC. Did this for no other reason than I had the card in storage and decided it might be a slight upgrade, as originally this PC was using it's onboard S3 Trio64 1MB Graphics. Seems to work well enough though I've yet to try any S3D compatible games on it, only playing DOS games at present.

The spec as it currently stands:

Digital Venturis 575 (LPX Desktop form factor)
CPU: IDT Winchip C6 200MHz
72MB RAM (2x32MB EDO sticks + 8MB Onboard)
640MB Quantum Fireball IDE HDD
S3 ViRGE 325 2MB PCI Graphics
ESS AudioDrive 1868 ISA Sound Card
RealTek RTL8139B PCI 10/100Mbps Ethernet Card

OS: Windows 95 (OSR 2.5)

Also, I played around with turning off the caches in the BIOS and it seems to perform around 386 territory, according to several benchmarks. Overall it's a nice little system, though it could certainly do with a Hard Drive upgrade as the current drive was simply the last of my spare IDE drives.

PTherapist wrote:

Today I decided to install an S3 Virge 325 2MB PCI Graphics card into my Socket 5 PC. Did this for no other reason than I had t […]
Show full quote

Today I decided to install an S3 Virge 325 2MB PCI Graphics card into my Socket 5 PC. Did this for no other reason than I had the card in storage and decided it might be a slight upgrade, as originally this PC was using it's onboard S3 Trio64 1MB Graphics. Seems to work well enough though I've yet to try any S3D compatible games on it, only playing DOS games at present.

The spec as it currently stands:

Digital Venturis 575 (LPX Desktop form factor)
CPU: IDT Winchip C6 200MHz
72MB RAM (2x32MB EDO sticks + 8MB Onboard)
640MB Quantum Fireball IDE HDD
S3 ViRGE 325 2MB PCI Graphics
ESS AudioDrive 1868 ISA Sound Card
RealTek RTL8139B PCI 10/100Mbps Ethernet Card

OS: Windows 95 (OSR 2.5)

Also, I played around with turning off the caches in the BIOS and it seems to perform around 386 territory, according to several benchmarks. Overall it's a nice little system, though it could certainly do with a Hard Drive upgrade as the current drive was simply the last of my spare IDE drives.

I have a Virge 325 as well (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000). It's basically identical to the Trio in 2D. Actually, it IS identical. The ViRGE is a trio core with 3D silicon thrown on. @640x480 InterState 76 needs to be lowered to medium to run acceptably.

The world's first 3D Decelerator.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

That has nothing on the nightmarish hell that was my BFG FX5900. Silver grease based thermal compound on everything as the result of the previous owners poor application.

So I finally got the FX5900 heatsink clean, but it was a complete pain in the arse. Those baked on thermal pads on the underbelly of the heatsink had turned to solid rock essentially. Arctic Clean No. 1 Thermal Remover which usually works a charm did not even scratch the surface. This post from cdoublejj over @ overclock.net saved the day. Nail polish remover soaked pads for an hour on top of the hardened material. I actually had to soak for two hours before it would come up completely. Super clean now, but definitely the most challenging thermal clean up yet for me.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1361817/hardened-t … al-paste-solved

Well, I got a lot of stuff from the neighbors with all the vintage bitten fruit equipment that I got my Power Mac 6500 and iBook G4 from, since they were moving out and knew I'd put it to good use. Here's the short list:

-Macintosh IIcx (Macintosh Display Card 4*8, uncertain amount of RAM except that all eight SIMM slots are filled and there's two more unused SIMMs)
-AppleColor 13" monitor
-Apple Extended Keyboard II
-quad-speed external SCSI CD-ROM
-Caere Typist SCSI text scanner
-Connectix webcam (the orb-shaped kind that Logitech later bought 'em out for)
-Apple StyleWriter
-bins full of floppy disks and software, more than I can count

-iMac G3 (indigo 350 MHz, 256 + 64 MB SDRAM, noisy 7 GB Quantum Fireball HDD)
-Apple Pro Keyboard

-Marantz TA-70 integrated receiver + SP-1250 speakers with replaced woofers

So, yeah, whole lot of stuff for the awesome price of FREE! But not everything's smooth going...

-The IIcx is dead as a doornail, even after swapping out the PRAM battery. Time to order some capacitors and break out the soldering iron, if I had to guess.
-Said box full of floppy disks has *tons* of unreadable disks, according to the 6500 and its floppy drive. I'm pretty sure it's a known good drive too, because I've used floppies to shuttle over small driver files to it for installation before I got a compatible Ethernet card and could just FTP to my heart's content.
-The iMac generally works, but one of the speakers sounds kinda off in testing, and the CD drive refuses to eject properly, albeit reading the one disc that is inserted just fine. I guess it wants the user to play The Sims... FOREVER!
-The IIcx, AppleColor monitor and Extended II all need retr0brite direly! They all look more yellow than beige at this point...
-The IIcx is also about as egregiously dusty inside as the 6500 was when I got it, and that Pro Keyboard is so filthy I had to disassemble it for cleaning on principle.
-The StyleWriter still seems to work once I get the correct drivers (StyleWriter II 1.2 seems to suffice, but Mac OS 9 doesn't include it by default), except pages come out blank because the cartridge is, predictably, out of ink. I might be able to refill it, but I seem to have lost the ink bottles for this refill kit we've kept around for years and years...

The good news, at least, is that I've verified that every key on the Extended II works fine, and the AppleColor monitor runs just fine off the 6500. 640x480@67Hz is a bit limiting, but for a little Trinitron, it looks nice and doesn't lose its focus like the Multiple Scan 15AV I got with the 6500 (which went to a recycler due to the focus problem and speakers not working, possibly a dead internal amp).

So yeah, I've got a lot of work to do here, and hopefully once everything's sorted out, I can find good new homes for all this vintage Apple stuff. Alas, it's too much for me to actually keep for very long; with all the original boxes included, I'm getting too many wasted space complaints.

I liked the IIcx. almost as much as my Quadra 700. 😀

luckybob wrote:

I liked the IIcx. almost as much as my Quadra 700. 😀

Don't they use the same case design, down to being able to put a Quadra 700 mobo in a IIcx as a sort of 68040 upgrade? It does require some destructive case modification to add a cutout for the DB-15 video port, though.

I will say, it's certainly a splendidly easy system to work in once you know where the latches are. I only needed to use a Philips screwdriver twice! I can't even say that for a lot of modern computers with cases bearing a lot of tool-less features.

The IIcx does feel awfully limited compared to the later IIci and Quadra 700, but hey, might as well work with what I've got here. All I need are some capacitors...

PTherapist wrote:

Today I decided to install an S3 Virge 325 2MB PCI Graphics card into my Socket 5 PC. Did this for no other reason than I had t […]
Show full quote

Today I decided to install an S3 Virge 325 2MB PCI Graphics card into my Socket 5 PC. Did this for no other reason than I had the card in storage and decided it might be a slight upgrade, as originally this PC was using it's onboard S3 Trio64 1MB Graphics. Seems to work well enough though I've yet to try any S3D compatible games on it, only playing DOS games at present.

The spec as it currently stands:

Digital Venturis 575 (LPX Desktop form factor)
CPU: IDT Winchip C6 200MHz
72MB RAM (2x32MB EDO sticks + 8MB Onboard)
640MB Quantum Fireball IDE HDD
S3 ViRGE 325 2MB PCI Graphics
ESS AudioDrive 1868 ISA Sound Card
RealTek RTL8139B PCI 10/100Mbps Ethernet Card

OS: Windows 95 (OSR 2.5)

Also, I played around with turning off the caches in the BIOS and it seems to perform around 386 territory, according to several benchmarks. Overall it's a nice little system, though it could certainly do with a Hard Drive upgrade as the current drive was simply the last of my spare IDE drives.

The specs of your system seem to be close to my recently-built Socket 7 build, the GPU and NIC are the same, the RAM and CPU are close enough but the Sound card and hard drive (capacity-wise) are different.

+1 to the S3 Virge user club, I have a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 in that build as a cost-efficient alternative to the Trio64 cards because most of the Trios I've found didn't have enough RAM to comfortably drive a 1024x768 screen at 16-bit color or were too expensive, it's a good card for general DOS usage/gaming, sounds like an upgrade to me.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Deksor wrote:

I oiled the fan of the PSU of my new 386. Now it doesn't sound like a plane anymore ^^. I hope it'll stay silent for a while.

IMO A PC should both perform AND sound like a Muscle Car.

Sounds to me like you should have a SCSI array in every rig of yours 😁
I prefer my rigs to be as silent as reasonable (I don't like the howling whining sounds, but don't mind coffee grinding noises when doing read/writes).

Same here ^^
Though I quite like the spinning sound of some hdds, especially the oldest ones such as MFM drives

Stiletto wrote:

Hah, great. I very nearly just bought a NVMe drive and PCIe x1 adapter for a 2008 Dell running I58/ICH10R, but I thought getting it to boot would be too problematic on a crippled AMI BIOS, chickened out and ordered a Samsung 850 Pro instead. We'll see how it runs on the ICH10R, I ordered a PCI x1 Marvell "SATA 3" adapter too in case it runs any better. The amount of ballpark estimating throughput to compare all that in my head was a bit grueling.

Are you using DUET or Clover to host UEFI on a USB boot drive? 😀

I need USB ports (board only has 4). So, I'm using Clover from RaptorX hard drive 😀

It's actually not that hard to do, preperations are the hardest part (Win 7 x64 SP1 w/NVMe updated image on USB stick, Hiren's Boot on another and Bootdisk Utility with pre-downloaded Clover repository).
Instalation goes like this :
Using Hiren's boot Win XP install Clover on hard disk (there is option which needs to be ticked to enable installation on hard disks). Then you copy NVMe driver (ie. file NvmExpressDxe-64.efi) from Offline drivers folder to "active" one.
To get autoboot you need to edit four lines in config.plist file :

<key>DefaultLoader</key> <string>\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi</string> <key>DefaultVolume</key> <string>EFI</string> […]
Show full quote

<key>DefaultLoader</key>
<string>\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi</string>
<key>DefaultVolume</key>
<string>EFI</string>

After all that you set booting from hard drive in BIOS, and from Clover Boot Maintenance Maneger/Boot From File menu, pick file from efi\boot\bootx64.efi folder on Windows 7 installation pendrive.
Add NVMe driver in Windows instalator to see drive itself, and all is done 😀

Key thing is to have UEFI boot pendrive Windows 7 installation with updated bootx64.efi file (if file is from 2010, it will not work with Clover).

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Well, I got a lot of stuff from the neighbors with all the vintage bitten fruit equipment that I got my Power Mac 6500 and iBook […]
Show full quote

Well, I got a lot of stuff from the neighbors with all the vintage bitten fruit equipment that I got my Power Mac 6500 and iBook G4 from, since they were moving out and knew I'd put it to good use. Here's the short list:

-Macintosh IIcx (Macintosh Display Card 4*8, uncertain amount of RAM except that all eight SIMM slots are filled and there's two more unused SIMMs)
-AppleColor 13" monitor
-Apple Extended Keyboard II
-quad-speed external SCSI CD-ROM
-Caere Typist SCSI text scanner
-Connectix webcam (the orb-shaped kind that Logitech later bought 'em out for)
-Apple StyleWriter
-bins full of floppy disks and software, more than I can count

-iMac G3 (indigo 350 MHz, 256 + 64 MB SDRAM, noisy 7 GB Quantum Fireball HDD)
-Apple Pro Keyboard

-Marantz TA-70 integrated receiver + SP-1250 speakers with replaced woofers

So, yeah, whole lot of stuff for the awesome price of FREE! But not everything's smooth going...

-The IIcx is dead as a doornail, even after swapping out the PRAM battery. Time to order some capacitors and break out the soldering iron, if I had to guess.
-Said box full of floppy disks has *tons* of unreadable disks, according to the 6500 and its floppy drive. I'm pretty sure it's a known good drive too, because I've used floppies to shuttle over small driver files to it for installation before I got a compatible Ethernet card and could just FTP to my heart's content.
-The iMac generally works, but one of the speakers sounds kinda off in testing, and the CD drive refuses to eject properly, albeit reading the one disc that is inserted just fine. I guess it wants the user to play The Sims... FOREVER!
-The IIcx, AppleColor monitor and Extended II all need retr0brite direly! They all look more yellow than beige at this point...
-The IIcx is also about as egregiously dusty inside as the 6500 was when I got it, and that Pro Keyboard is so filthy I had to disassemble it for cleaning on principle.
-The StyleWriter still seems to work once I get the correct drivers (StyleWriter II 1.2 seems to suffice, but Mac OS 9 doesn't include it by default), except pages come out blank because the cartridge is, predictably, out of ink. I might be able to refill it, but I seem to have lost the ink bottles for this refill kit we've kept around for years and years...

The good news, at least, is that I've verified that every key on the Extended II works fine, and the AppleColor monitor runs just fine off the 6500. 640x480@67Hz is a bit limiting, but for a little Trinitron, it looks nice and doesn't lose its focus like the Multiple Scan 15AV I got with the 6500 (which went to a recycler due to the focus problem and speakers not working, possibly a dead internal amp).

So yeah, I've got a lot of work to do here, and hopefully once everything's sorted out, I can find good new homes for all this vintage Apple stuff. Alas, it's too much for me to actually keep for very long; with all the original boxes included, I'm getting too many wasted space complaints.

I thought focus was usually fixable via 2 internal knobs (which on one occasion I've made externally accessible by cutting a hole in the casing). Why throw it away over such an easy fix? Even if you have to adjust it every couple of days it's only 2-5 minutes of work.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I have a Virge 325 as well (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000). It's basically identical to the Trio in 2D. Actually, it IS identical. The ViRGE is a trio core with 3D silicon thrown on. @640x480 InterState 76 needs to be lowered to medium to run acceptably.

The world's first 3D Decelerator.

I thought that may be the case, re- the Virge.

Glad you posted this too, I was thinking about what 3D games I was going to test on it and your post reminded me that I had Nitro Riders in my collection. I installed it and yeah it basically does run like crap without lowering settings. Not really a big deal though, as this PC is primarily for DOS gaming anyway, the limited 3D is just a bonus.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

The specs of your system seem to be close to my recently-built Socket 7 build, the GPU and NIC are the same, the RAM and CPU are close enough but the Sound card and hard drive (capacity-wise) are different.

+1 to the S3 Virge user club, I have a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 in that build as a cost-efficient alternative to the Trio64 cards because most of the Trios I've found didn't have enough RAM to comfortably drive a 1024x768 screen at 16-bit color or were too expensive, it's a good card for general DOS usage/gaming, sounds like an upgrade to me.

Yeah I thought the S3 Virge might be a slight improvement over the Trio, I acquired the card years ago and can't remember where or why. I had a more powerful Graphics Card that I could have put in instead, but the CPU is rather poor and it would have been a waste.

Your CPU is actually miles better than my poor IDT Winchip, which struggles to compete with a Pentium 166. But I think it's about the fastest processor I can get for this Socket 5.

Decided to solder on 2 new jacks for my Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro since the left channel was getting weak/erratic at times. The jacks that were the culprits were the line in and microphone jacks and fortunately, I have a lot of jacks left and they did fit nicely on the card and it was successful, even though my soldering skills aren't great, and my MacGyver mode was set to full throttle to remove the busted jacks.

The next project for that card is a new potentiometer, which is hard to find that online these days, unless I can find a sound card parts website and purchase a new One, a desoldering iron with the pump, and desoldering braid as well (solder wick).

bjwil1991 wrote:

Decided to solder on 2 new jacks for my Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro since the left channel was getting weak/erratic at times. The jacks that were the culprits were the line in and microphone jacks and fortunately, I have a lot of jacks left and they did fit nicely on the card and it was successful, even though my soldering skills aren't great, and my MacGyver mode was set to full throttle to remove the busted jacks.

The next project for that card is a new potentiometer, which is hard to find that online these days, unless I can find a sound card parts website and purchase a new One, a desoldering iron with the pump, and desoldering braid as well (solder wick).

Looking at one of my cards here and you could pretty easily retrofit a regular modern 5-post wheel volume control onto the card. You would just have to run a couple wires for posts that don't line up with the holes on the card.

Really cheap on eBay. Just search for:
volume potentiometer wheel
and match up the value you need. Measured my card and it looks like it used close to 10k for the max resistance. Make sure to get the 5 post + ground... I think they should work, you just have to work out what legs to use.

Here is an instructable that may help.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Universal-Ear … Volume-Control/

agent_x007 wrote:

It's actually not that hard to do, preperations are the hardest part

Nice. The things that worried me the most were:
a. The Dell BIOS is crippled. For booting from the BIOS, you can select IDE or RAID or USB but not AHCI. I guess once Clover is loaded, that doesn't matter...
b. All the motherboard I was using had was PCIe 2.0 x1 slots available (3 of them). There was an x16 slot, but it was in use. So NVMe drive would ultimately be bottlenecked to maybe max 500MBps throughput. Still, better than the 300-400 I'll be getting from the ICH10R's SATA 2.0 support maybe
c. I was transferring a pre-existing Windows 10 install (which had been upgraded over the years all the way from Vista).

Hopefully I made the right decsion to go with the full-size Samsung 850 SATA SSD, not NVMe or micro.

Deksor wrote:

I oiled the fan of the PSU of my new 386. Now it doesn't sound like a plane anymore ^^. I hope it'll stay silent for a while.

By oiling the fan I hope you mean repacking the barrings. Oiling the daft will only last so long

And I hope you did not use wd-40 because that's not a lubricating oil.

Added a 5.5V 0.22F super capacitor to my 386 motherboard. Works like a charm !

All I need now is to glue it in place as only one of it's leg is really soldered in, as you can see, that cap was too short so I had to add a wire

Been trying out M2I compilations of hard to get working multi disk D64's on my C64 with SD2IEC adaptor.

So far, testdrive and california games are working like a charm as M2I, as compared to multidisk D64 versions.