I don't even consider that stuff retro. Anything post-Pentium Pro is commodity junk. The boards look prettier but that's it. Big woop, it runs XP/2000/whatever and is almost impossible to differentiate from any other machine. There's no specialty hardware or components and it's an absolute pain to repair.

iirc there is no dallas chip in these ps/2 systems its actually a large camera battery. yours is missing. goto your local battery store and look for a 223 battery or crp2.

I can clearly see one below the power supply as well. It looks like this machine has seen a planar upgrade.

Tetrium wrote:

I really couldn't care less where someone is from and I'm glad this forum is more about people and less about politics.

Stiletto wrote:

It always pleases me immensely to see that a forum has traffic not just from nations that are so-called "allies" but also those that differ ideologically, as well as even seeing effort from people to write in the forum's adopted language just so that they can contribute. Russians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, etc. - we've built an international community here, having heard from almost all continents (lookin' at you Antarctica)- you all have my thanks. 😀

PCBONEZ wrote:

There are no permanent human residents there so I don't think Antarctica counts. Everyone there is 'from' another continent and […]
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There are no permanent human residents there so I don't think Antarctica counts.
Everyone there is 'from' another continent and that other continent is where they would say they are from.
~ So you already have everybody.
.

devius wrote:

Group hug :')

I hope nobody minds if I continue this off-topic talks. 😉

Well, one thing I have noticed --and really like-- since I joined Vogons is that we are, to quote Tetrium, more about people (and their hobbies) and less about politics. Politics suck. Political people tend to hurt each other's feelings --whether intentionally or unintentionally, and even friends could turn enemies. Believe me, I have experienced this kind of crap in 2014 Indonesia's presidential election, where supporters of (then) presidential candidate Joko Widodo were running amok in social medias, insulting and berating everyone else who doesn't support their beloved Joko Widodo. In fact, I have a quite old friend (I knew her from the year 2000) who labelled me "ISIS sympathizer" and "Muslim terrorist" because I was merely being skeptical about (then) presidential candidate Widodo's abilities, so even a neutral guy like me are branded "terrorist" simply for being neutral. "There's no neutral ground, you either support Joko Widodo or become our enemy," such kind of attitude that makes me hate politics even more than ever.

See, that's why I hate politics so much; it corrupts ordinary people, it turns friends into enemies, and it has happened here in my country. And that's one of the reasons I love Vogons, because it's among the most politics-free forum I've ever joined. Another similar forum I knew is Audiokarma, where the denizens care so much about vintage audio gears and generally don't give a damn about your political views.

I also notice TechReport had politically-themed sub-forum until they had to close it down, I guess for good reasons. 😉

Anyway, the nice things been said on this thread remind me of what Malik has said.

Malik wrote:

Precisely.

We come from all walks of life, from different professions, from different countries across the globe, and unite here for a common interest : Classic Gaming. And gaming is for fun. Our hobby here is having fun by playing (not only) classic games!! Or should I put it in another different way?

Though we talk about war in this thread, we're UNITED in sharing this fun, gaming experience.

So, I'm glad we're united in sharing this fun, retro gaming or hardware experience.

One thing I also notice is that Vogons doesn't have rules and regulations, yet we mostly stay civil. Most forums I knew have "READ THIS FIRST" and "FORUM RULES" threads sprawling everywhere, with occasional bans here and here. Vogons, on the other hand, doesn't have such rules, yet people stay nice and civil. I remember nice and helpful Vogoners like 5u3 and Great Hierophant, who helped me a lot with 3dfx and MIDI sound cards during my early days in Vogons. It seems the reason Vogons doesn't have rules and regulations is because it doesn't need them on the first place. In fact, when I asked Snover if Vogons actually had rules of some sort, his only reply is "no goatse, no tubgirl, and no lemonparty", which means I cannot do this sort of thing here (though I didn't get banned after posting that ewe vaginal prolapse). 🤣

Not saying things are always perfect; there are occasional flames here and here, and one of them that has made a good friend of mine leave the board 🙁 He is a nice and helpful member, and he is already tired of such flames

Nonetheless, I think Vogons has very nice and helpful board culture, and I hope we stay that way.

Back to the purpose of this thread, well, I just bought myself a Creative Home Theater Connect DTS-610.

Not exactly a retro hardware, but it's useful in connecting Diamond MX300 --a retro sound card-- to modern AV receiver. You see, Aureal Vortex 2 is 4.0, while a typical home theater setup is 5.1 (or 6.1 etc). So if you connect the Diamond MX300's multichannel analog output directly to an AV receiver, you would lose bass management and center channel, since most (except the very high end) AV receivers cannot upmix their multichannel analog input; you'd need DTS or Dolby signal to do so.

An Aureal Vortex 2 sound card, on the other hand, doesn't have either Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect capability --it's an old sound card, remember? So the only way to get center channel and bass management from Aueral 3D games by using the Creative DTS-610.

Now, I don't understand why such nice and useful hardware like this aren't made anymore. As more and more AV receivers abandon multichannel analog input (I'm lucky to have such retro AV receiver --a Yamaha RX-V663, which still has multichannel analog input), device like this becomes more and more needed among SACD users.

Anyway, special thanks to obobskivich for suggesting this wonderful device.

retrofanatic wrote:

rein_ein wrote:

If you dont mind i'll bring on pics of stuff i got today :lol: First one - Asus based Riva 128 Second one Ati Mach64 And last o […]
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If you dont mind i'll bring on pics of stuff i got today 🤣
First one - Asus based Riva 128
Second one Ati Mach64
And last one,not sure about brand but for sure it Vortex 1 and it works 🤣

Nice find! (Re: Vortex 1). What O/S are you planning to use it with?

I finally got legit copy of Win98 so this is main purpose to check out how A3D works,also probably will try it on NT

HunterZ wrote:

It makes me feel old that people are now collecting "retro" computers that are from the same era as the one I used when I first joined VOGONS almost exactly 13 years ago! (Gigabyte GA-6BXC, PII-450, nVidia Riva TNT (Diamond Viper V550 I think), Sound Blaster PCI128 (basically a rebranded Ensoniq card) - but upgraded by the time I joined VOGONS to a PIII-550, nVidia Geforce 2 MX, Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer). I still have that machine in the garage, mainly because I want to keep something around that can read floppy disks (I *still* need to archive my personal floppies, but fortunately archived most of my retail ones around 4-5 years ago).

No retro news here, but I did finally get a new Dell Alienware 17 R3 laptop (Core i7-6820HK, GTX 980M 8GB) to replace my 7-year old Dell XPS M1730 laptop (Core 2 Duo, Geforce 8700M GT SLI) and 6-year old custom Core i7-860 (overclocked to 4.2GHz) + Radeon HD5870 desktop. Now I can play newer games on high settings again for the first time in a few years (not that I play many new ones 😀 ).

So can we count for example 10 years old core 2 family as neo-classic? 😈

CelGen wrote:

I don't even consider that stuff retro. Anything post-Pentium Pro is commodity junk. The boards look prettier but that's it. Big woop, it runs XP/2000/whatever and is almost impossible to differentiate from any other machine. There's no specialty hardware or components and it's an absolute pain to repair.

I figure anything's retro hardware if it's not off the shelf anymore and you need it to run older software. I consider DOSBox to be retro hardware (albeit virtual).

CelGen wrote:

I can clearly see one below the power supply as well.

There are two, one of them was removed for that photo.

The previous owner had already tried to battery-mod the RTC chip.

My assumption is that they are both dead, and will both need replacement or coin-cell battery modding.

Arctic wrote:

Wow. Where do you have the Voodoo 5 6000 from? Is it a HiNT 3700A ?

Eastern Europe 😀
Yes, a HiNT 3700A.

CelGen wrote:

I don't even consider that stuff retro. Anything post-Pentium Pro is commodity junk. The boards look prettier but that's it. Big woop, it runs XP/2000/whatever and is almost impossible to differentiate from any other machine.

That's what they said about XT machines in the 486 era. And what they said about 486es in the Pentium 2 era. Give it a few years and so many people will have thrown out their "commodity junk" that it will become as rare and desirable as everything else has. Of course now is the time to collect that sort of stuff, when it's cheap and usually free!

Malvineous wrote:

CelGen wrote:

I don't even consider that stuff retro. Anything post-Pentium Pro is commodity junk. The boards look prettier but that's it. Big woop, it runs XP/2000/whatever and is almost impossible to differentiate from any other machine.

That's what they said about XT machines in the 486 era. And what they said about 486es in the Pentium 2 era. Give it a few years and so many people will have thrown out their "commodity junk" that it will become as rare and desirable as everything else has. Of course now is the time to collect that sort of stuff, when it's cheap and usually free!

^This

People who can't see this logic, can't see logic

Btw, this gives everybody who might want to go retro in the future, a chance to actually go retro without having to pay with a couple ribs for stuff we got tossed for nothing these days, why would anyone want to deny other this fabulous experience? Because that's just being self-centered...and illogical of course! 😜

CelGen wrote:

I don't even consider that stuff retro. Anything post-Pentium Pro is commodity junk. The boards look prettier but that's it. Big woop, it runs XP/2000/whatever and is almost impossible to differentiate from any other machine. There's no specialty hardware or components and it's an absolute pain to repair.

Wow, elitist much?

No specialty hardware also means there's no MIDI crap for people to price gouge, to take one example.

As others have said, it's plentiful now, but that won't always be the case. Grab it while you can.

Different people consider different things retro, and it largely depends on their age. To me, PIII and early P4 era stuff now just about counts as retro, because that's what I grew up with. And there are plenty of interesting little experiments that went on at that time, like dual PIII boards, various experimental laptops, the Internet PCs (most of them are probably completely useless now), early PDA-type things, early tablets/convertibles...

I will never have any interest in post-Athlon machines personally, but I am sure aware of their potential. Undoubtedly a generation after my own would have started out on that hardware and some day the demand for it may be higher. As it was so mass produced though, it may may not be as hard to source as 486/Pentium gear.

I started keeping hold of things when the Pentium was still a relevant processor, people told me I was mental and it would never be anything but trash. Wish I could see those people again so I could laugh right in their fucking face... Then again, I laughed anyway, my argument at the time being the same as it is now; If you find it useful or enjoy messing with it, it's worth having. When a bunch of sad fucks were struggling to run Duke3D on VDMSound and any Google search to try and fix it started leading to this forum with no solution in sight I was still running it just fine on a Slot 1 machine, though I did manage to keep DOS compatibility on all my machines until my Duron died in 2004. Even my friend at the time held on to all of his old machines knowing he would hit compatibility problems later on, and though why on earth he kept some of them was questionable to me I never thought he was dumb for keeping them. Sure, I have no use for a Tandy or an Apple 128, but he obviously did or he wouldn't have been running them on a regular basis.

The Pentium D I am still abusing (from 2005) was the first XP machine I ever had and the first which couldn't run DOS applications on the bare hardware. I have run WFW3.11 from a USB drive for fun though, it is silly fast but has no practical use unless you want to play Ski Free with almost no CPU overhead.

Rawrl wrote:

As others have said, it's plentiful now, but that won't always be the case. Grab it while you can.

Great advice. All the high end gaming gear is already not easy to find. E.g. Extreme Edition, FX, Ultra, PE and whatnot.

Every generation has their "retro period", but I find all periods fascinating and jump back and forth quite a bit 🤣

Rawrl wrote:

Wow, elitist much? […]
Show full quote

CelGen wrote:

I don't even consider that stuff retro. Anything post-Pentium Pro is commodity junk. The boards look prettier but that's it. Big woop, it runs XP/2000/whatever and is almost impossible to differentiate from any other machine. There's no specialty hardware or components and it's an absolute pain to repair.

Wow, elitist much?

No specialty hardware also means there's no MIDI crap for people to price gouge, to take one example.

As others have said, it's plentiful now, but that won't always be the case. Grab it while you can.

My niche is specialty systems. I dabble a lot in windows/DOS machines as well but I have a really big soft spot for high-end workstations. Stuff from Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, HP, IBM.....the people selling boxes with a base price of $20K in the 90's. There's still a lot of cool x86 stuff though with specialty hardware. Things like the PS/2 model 95 with its programmable LED front panel and interchangable CPU boards or just about any PS/2 series machine with the microchannel bus or the 386 era AMI and clone boards with the dedicated memory expansion slots Or for the higher end the ALR 6x6. Even VLB is a touch more interesting beyond a machine with just ISA/PCI or an AGP slot. I just find stuff in the ATX form factor era rather boring. A lot of the hardware is interchangeable with other machines, the cases are different shapes and sizes but all fit otherwise identical boards and well, in comparison to say the NeXT Cube there's a heck of a lot more of it out there and enough that still works with some of the latest hardware that I really don't need to worry about the supply chain thinning out for a long, long time like how we saw PC/XT/AT clones right up into the 21st century. A dual Pentium pro box? Sure, I'll bite on that. Core2? Blah. I keep one nice box under the desk here with an Athlon64 X2, 4gb ram and a graphics brick consisting of two 7950 GX2's and Ageia's PCI express PhysX card (DirectX 9 is amazing once you have four-way SLI and a hardware physics engine) to bridge my XP and earlier days to my current setup but that's it. I don't plan on collecting anything newer for quite a while.

Anyways, I'm sorry for the massive derailment. How about some actual content? This card perhaps? 😀

ATI 8514/Ultra. Both an emulated IBM 8514/A and I believe the ATI VGA Wonder on one board which if you flip the header over and swap baseplates converts form an MCA card to an ISA card. It was $5 in a bin at the recycler. I asked if it possibly came out of a machine and said it might of been a pull so he'll tell me by Monday what machine it was...if it's still around.

HighTreason wrote:

I started keeping hold of things when the Pentium was still a relevant processor, people told me I was mental and it would never be anything but trash. Wish I could see those people again so I could laugh right in their fucking face

Actually, when I moved the second last time, people kinda kept telling me all these piles of old parts would only make me depressed and get stuck in my life (stuck till I ditched all of it again). Oh man, the arguments about "Hey, maybe you could just keep 1 rig and ditch the rest? Ok, then just keep only 2, the rest is just a burdon, trust me" were slung at me so often it actually started to get so annoying and bored by them that I started evading them and stick with the ones who were less close-minded (these people saw how much better it made my life).

These days it's so much easier! I only need to show em some component (like Voodoo 4 or Socket 3 board) and then show em a page on ebay what this stuff actually sells for. Instant success! 😁

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Rawrl wrote:

As others have said, it's plentiful now, but that won't always be the case. Grab it while you can.

Great advice. All the high end gaming gear is already not easy to find. E.g. Extreme Edition, FX, Ultra, PE and whatnot.

Every generation has their "retro period", but I find all periods fascinating and jump back and forth quite a bit 🤣

I can wholeheartily agree. The single best way to acquire the parts you want fastest, cheapest and easiest, is by buying them when their price is lowest and supply is highest. I also noticed that as soon as parts start to become more scarce and prices go up, more of the hardware that is available, seems to be more problematic.

Often people who have this kind of old hardware, find this stuff in a box somewhere, google a bit and then see the ultra-low prices and think "wow! If I don't sell this stuff now I won't ever find buyers again!" and sell at very low price as the competition is so great (the Sapphire AGP 3850s were like €10 each about a year ago. If I had more money I would've stock up more of them 🤣!) and these usually work fine.

When stuff gets older, I somehow find that (this next bit does rely a lot more on how trustful a certain seller is) more of the stuff is broken, but they sell it anyway as the supply dried up and people still want them, so they are easy to sell.

This dynamic is very fascinating to me! It's kinda a wave which progresses through hardware technology. Some hardware stays cheap for a longer time (like s754/s939), get it cheap while you can! 😁

HighTreason wrote:

When a bunch of sad fucks were struggling to run Duke3D on VDMSound

Ah, the beginning of VOGONS. DosFreak and I should take offense. 🤣

VDMS was in its infancy, so it would have been unfair to expect miracles. Other than that, I never really ended up here, so whether the forum was different back then or something I don't know. I only know I had no reason to come here, instead being present on some long dead (As in, me and my fruend trolled it until the admin locked the board) generic computer forum full of the sorts mentioned above.

"Why do you want to play Duke 3D? It's old!"
"Why are you running Windows 98SE? Your computer sucks!" - Says a guy with a Celeron 333 to me running a Duron 950 at the time.
"You're an idiot and you don't know what you're talking about!" - Only with a fine selection of profanities. Apparently the XP NTVDM is 100% compatible with the SB16 out of the box.
"You dropcick. - Biggles / Stewart, I remember you losers. I was amused when the forum re-appeared as you don't seem to be around anymore. Oh, and you spelled the insult wrong.

Strange thing was, if you got a bunch of DOS/9X boxes at a LAN, everyone would end up playing Duke/Quake/UT99 instead of CS. As for VDMS, I remember it being inefficient as it did not work well on the Athlon 1000 I tested it on the most (My mother's system running XP Home). Most games lagged like crazy with it running or flat out failed to detect the audio whilst lagging anyway.

I may also add on the subject of the forum, that sure I have an issue with one mod here (though I still hold the whole team responsible) but he's just a dick. The guys on that forum were outright bullies, I would try to help a member with a simple answer. If they needed a driver, I would find it and post a link offering to write detailed instructions if they required them. The mods would then come in and erase the link or replace it with one to malware or porn, say I was being an idiot/breaking rules/posting porn and then make no effort to help the member. People who signed up rarely stayed more than a few days. Me and my friend took to helping them by PM until the mods caught on and started "imposter"ing as us to insult other members or erase and PM we sent. This was the reason me and my friend trolled it, the Admin was never around and we knew the mods had no ban powers - they made the mistake of explicitly stating this - so we made such a scene that the admin had to show up. He took the easy route and locked the board down, realizing his whole forum was a piece of shit he quickly pulled the plug. The site doesn't appear to be around anymore, so it has been offline over a decade now.

I'd like to dig that crap up some time, given I am sure I took screenies and some of it would be funny to look back on. The walls of peni and the rant about work I posted a while before the plug got pulled... That was a fun thread, though you can probably imagine how it ended.

HighTreason wrote:

I may also add on the subject of the forum, that sure I have an issue with one mod here (though I still hold the whole team responsible) but he's just a dick. The guys on that forum were outright bullies, I would try to help a member with a simple answer. If they needed a driver, I would find it and post a link offering to write detailed instructions if they required them. The mods would then come in and erase the link or replace it with one to malware or porn, say I was being an idiot/breaking rules/posting porn and then make no effort to help the member. People who signed up rarely stayed more than a few days. Me and my friend took to helping them by PM until the mods caught on and started "imposter"ing as us to insult other members or erase and PM we sent. This was the reason me and my friend trolled it, the Admin was never around and we knew the mods had no ban powers - they made the mistake of explicitly stating this - so we made such a scene that the admin had to show up. He took the easy route and locked the board down, realizing his whole forum was a piece of shit he quickly pulled the plug. The site doesn't appear to be around anymore, so it has been offline over a decade now.

Personally I find it more intriguing as to why these mods all seemed to behave like this 😜
There has to be some kind of explanation for it?

I mean, obviously some admin put those mods in power, now why would an admin even want to put people in power who misbehave and don't care they destroy 'their' own forum while doing it. How could an admin fall for that? And I mean multiple times if he put several of these mods in charge, that's just stupid 🤣

It was a glorious day yesterday:

Soyo 6ba+iii, Intel desktop board i815, 17 cpus (from p55c 200 to Pentium iii 933), 56 dimm modules (all sizes, 52 are working perfectly and three are waiting for a good cleaning and test), a msi Geforce MX4000 128mb AGP, a Voodoo 3 16mb agp, a S3 trio 64 2mb, a S3 Virge 2mb, three mpeg/dvd decoders, and a 15" color CRT.

All of this is working. Bought it for 20 dollars. I think the Soyo will make a nice Pentium II rig with the Voodoo 3 (I already have a Pentium III 933 rig) to fill the emptiness while I wait to repair my Pentium MMX motherboard.

ramiro77 wrote:

It was a glorious day yesterday: […]
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It was a glorious day yesterday:

Soyo 6ba+iii, Intel desktop board i815, 17 cpus (from p55c 200 to Pentium iii 933), 56 dimm modules (all sizes, 52 are working perfectly and three are waiting for a good cleaning and test), a msi Geforce MX4000 128mb AGP, a Voodoo 3 16mb agp, a S3 trio 64 2mb, a S3 Virge 2mb, three mpeg/dvd decoders, and a 15" color CRT.

All of this is working. Bought it for 20 dollars. I think the Soyo will make a nice Pentium II rig with the Voodoo 3 (I already have a Pentium III 933 rig) to fill the emptiness while I wait to repair my Pentium MMX motherboard.

Nice.... I have one of those Intel boards, just not shure if it is the same i815 Intel board.
They are rock solid and stable. Not the fastest though, just in the middle somewere.

Tetrium wrote:

This dynamic is very fascinating to me! It's kinda a wave which progresses through hardware technology. Some hardware stays cheap for a longer time (like s754/s939), get it cheap while you can! 😁

Yes it is interesting to watch. I remember how cheap ATX super socket 7 boards went for years ago. I started raving about my time machine and most just stuck with building 386 or 486 machines. Not it's very hard to find a nice ATX super socket 7 system.

What will be interesting about the next era of retro hardware is that on one hand, yes there is a lot more gear around, however there will also be a lot more people looking for these parts. And lots of stuff has been thrown out too.