VOGONS


Bought these (retro) hardware today

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Reply 12342 of 52805, by brassicGamer

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rein_ein wrote:
Bought today this boards together with 100 mhz Pentium […]
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Bought today this boards together with 100 mhz Pentium

qoeKWZ9l.jpg
pVbpoP3l.jpg

and Genius joystick

os6k49Sl.jpg

EISA / PCI - interesting!

Check out my blog and YouTube channel for thoughts, articles, system profiles, and tips.

Reply 12343 of 52805, by Anonymous Coward

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Ah, I think I recognise that board. Is that the Acer M5?
http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/m/A-B/36029.htm
http://insight.actapricot.org/insight/product … 2x/f2x-laym.htm

It's pretty interesting that the main chipset is ALi, but the EISA bridge is by Intel. Looks like your CPU card is not listed on the Mitsubishi website.

It's very similar to my Acer J3 except that it's PCI rather than VLB.
http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/m/A-B/32504.htm

All the chips on mine are by OPTi.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 12344 of 52805, by luckybob

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CduA0TULnow

http://www.ebay.com/itm/301969642018

yea, it's Ramen noodles for me for a while.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 12345 of 52805, by kithylin

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luckybob wrote:

If only that thing had AGP on it.........

Reply 12347 of 52805, by stamasd

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Congrats, that looks like a sweet build is coming up. I have something somewhat similar http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/tomcativd.html Dual socket 7, haven't used it for a build yet (lately I've been busy with P4-era builds).

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 12348 of 52805, by devius

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You can count me as another victim of terrible packaging:

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This is what the package looked like immediately after opening it. Notice the lack of any padding material which is particularly worrisome considering this includes 7 HDDs. I haven't tested anything but I already know the SCSI controller card won't work because I can see at least 2 spots where the SMD components were ripped from the board and I could only find one of them inside the box. I'll have to solder some random value replacement component in hopes that it works.

Anyway, the package includes:

- 4 SCSI IBM UltraStar 18ES 9,1GB 7200rpm HDDs
- 3 SCSI IBM branded Seagate Chester Cheetah 18,2GB 10krpm HDDs
- 1 Adaptec AAA-131U2 with unknown cache memory size (supposedly 2MB, but the DIMM has 5 chips in it and the label reads mumbo-jumbo-5M)
- 2 sets of SCSI cables (one of them in terrible condition) with terminators
- 4 brackets for attaching 3,5" drives to 5,25" bays
- 1 PS/2 to Serial connector (for connecting a PS/2 mouse to a COM port)
- 1 4-way KVM switch with no cables whatsoever

All for the grand total of 32€ including shipping and I hope that's not 32€ worth of trash.

PS: I may or may not have made up the Chester Cheetah part name.

Reply 12349 of 52805, by Lukeno94

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Some day, I must get a SCSI capable rig, as I've got three drives in a box I've never done more than check that they power on... and the one SCSI card I do have is for the older type.

Reply 12350 of 52805, by stamasd

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Lukeno94 wrote:

Some day, I must get a SCSI capable rig, as I've got three drives in a box I've never done more than check that they power on... and the one SCSI card I do have is for the older type.

I have a dozen or more SCSI cards of various generations, starting with AHA1542 (ISA) and ending with AHA3940UW (PCI-X) none of which are in use right now in any of my rigs. I find SCSI to be more trouble than it's worth, SCSI drives are becoming scarce and the cheaper ones are usually in terrible condition, plus with the ubiquity of IDE and quirkiness and multiple standards for SCSI, it's usually not worth bothering. Find the correct drive, the correct cable, the correct terminator, etc.

I do have the odd duck in the stack, such as an DPT SmartRaid IV UltraSCSI controller which I acquired second-hand a long time ago, a few months before DPT was bought by Adaptec and basically buried under a mountain of oblivion. The card came with unlimited lifetime free support (which became nil after the buyout FWIW), but in the few months before that I got stellar support from DPT. I had a problem with a drive compatibility with the card, and even though I wasn't the original buyer and had no proof of purchase, DPT gave me the white-glove treatment with priority email and phone support; when it became apparent that the issue was in their BIOS, they overnighted me a BIOS chip that had been especially compiled for my needs (the BIOS was not flashable, but it was replaceable as it was a socketed chip) completely free of any charge. I never had such a customer support experience before, or since.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 12351 of 52805, by luckybob

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kithylin wrote:
luckybob wrote:

If only that thing had AGP on it.........

like this? P/I P65UP8

I had one, sold it. nice board!

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 12352 of 52805, by clueless1

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clueless1 wrote:
Ozzuneoj wrote:
clueless1 wrote:

Are you using any Aztech utilities such has hwset.exe or diagnose.exe? Those should help you out.

I can't seem to find those in any of the driver packages I have for Aztech, but I'll keep looking.

Keep in mind this is a non-PNP card. I don't think those programs are meant for cards like this.

I don't know if this will work or not, but this is what I use for my Aztech card in DOS. Got it from gdjacobs. The UTILITY folder holds the DOS utilities, but I'm including the other folders in case they are useful.

Ozzuneoj,

Did those DOS utilities end up working out for you?

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 12353 of 52805, by dustyjo

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This retro enough for you guys?

EHgR62nm.jpg

Recently I found a Hyperion portable kinda-almost PC compatible, an external monitor, all the software you see here, and the carry bag at a thrift store for $35. Having a bit of trouble getting it to work though. It seems to respond to commands with the DOS disk in, but nothing shows on either of the screens.

Reply 12354 of 52805, by Ozzuneoj

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clueless1 wrote:

Ozzuneoj,

Did those DOS utilities end up working out for you?

I actually just got to try them out. Thanks for uploading them!

Sadly, they seem to be strictly for the PnP cards, as they don't detect a sound card at all when used with my Sound Galaxy BXII.

However, I did make an incredible discovery.

I figured out how to get the BXII drivers installed (had to dump the install files onto the root of C: and modify the .inf settings a little to make it only look for one disk) and the DOS "SG2.exe" utility in that package seems to actually work. And get this... IT OUTPUTS MIDI THROUGH THE GAME PORT!!!!!!!!!

I'll admit, I'm not as well versed in this old stuff as most around here, but I believe that an 8-bit ISA sound card with SB and SBPro (Mono only) compatibility with a real OPL2 and a functional midi output is a bit of a rarity.

Am I wrong in stating this?

Is there a good way to test the compatibility of the MIDI port as far as full MPU-401 compatibility? Also, I still can't figure out what stinking IO address the MIDI port uses. The tester program simply has a button to "Test Midi OUT" and it just works... no indicator of what address is being tapped into though. I'd love to find a program that could simply check\test ports for midi functionality.

Last edited by Ozzuneoj on 2016-06-07, 03:53. Edited 1 time in total.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 12355 of 52805, by stamasd

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Inspired by the Sound Galaxy saga above, I just bought this:
Aztech Sound Galaxy Pro II

s-l1600.jpg

Based on the fact that it lacks connections on the ISA bus for data bits 8-15 this is basically also a 8-bit card, correct?

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 12356 of 52805, by SquallStrife

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Just like the SoundBlaster Pro, yes. Any pins on the 16-bit section of the edge connector are just there to access higher IRQ and DMA levels on 286+ machines.

VogonsDrivers.com | Link | News Thread

Reply 12358 of 52805, by FaSMaN

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So I am making my way trough a sizable lot of parts that a friend of mine gave me, probably 6x 386 motherboards (2 have leaky batteries but rest are fine) 4x 486 Motherboards (most are probably okay) 1x P5C motherboard and CPU (I think its P5C as its a 75mhz Pentuim), etc and a box full of ISA and VLB cards.

I have a lot of ISA and VLB cards I need some help identifying,

One of them seems to be very interesting , its a 8-bit ISA card marked "Wizard" it looks like a all in one controller card, doing RS232, FDD? Gameport, and Either CGA or EGA (cant tell which)

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There is also a sound card that looks like it had a home made CD-rom Attachment for it, and another sound card that looks pretty good,

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If anyone has any info on the cards please let me know as I am at a loss?

PS Will make an official thread about the 4x VLB VGA cards , as I dont know which is actually good, there is a Oki one, Western Digital and two others I dont know...

Reply 12359 of 52805, by devius

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The last sound card with the daughterboard is a MediaSonic Sound Commander Gold. My guess is that it's a simple Sound Blaster clone or maybe Adlib Gold clone judging by the name. I have a Sound Commander EX which seems to be a Sound Blaster clone but I can't find any info on it.