Arctic wrote:

@Solarstorm
oooh nice! NEC!

ikr! 😀

Bought parts for the possible cheapest external midi device in excistance. (Only 14.51 US Dollars)
So cheap and compact, that it would be stupid not to explore it for the sound quality.
It is however a 50% diy thing, so I might be buying an case for it in the future. It all depends.

Solarstorm wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/SC7HjFAl.jpg 2 x NEC LCD2170NX with a 1600x1200 resolution in 4:3 ratio […]
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2 x NEC LCD2170NX with a 1600x1200 resolution in 4:3 ratio

Nice. These are awesome, I have a white one myself. It doesn't display odd resolutions and refresh rates like the samsung does, but it has slightly nicer colors and black levels.

As a matter of fact I bought a second one a couple of days ago, since Samsung LCDs aren't the most reliable of things, and I wanted a backup.

Together with a huge load of other 1980-> software - I got Norton Commander disks for the rest of my life 😁

Also a single 5.25" colourfull copy of this 😀

Cool.... I have never ever seen those colours before, here in DK. (on floppy disks that is)

Bought an AST Bravo MS 5166 on eBay

amnesia wrote:

Together with a huge load of other 1980-> software - I got Norton Commander disks for the rest of my life 😁

Also a single 5.25" colourfull copy of this 😀

Nice. Love norton commander. Still one of the best filemanager. Love those colors on the 5 1/4" disks.

+1 on NC.
I have been using it since 1994, still do today in DOSbox and retro PC.

I was looking for a perfect VLB motherboard for some time now. I went through buying some rather mediocre opti-based boards, but today...

... I won the ASUS VL/I-486SV2GX4. For just 15 USD equiv.

Provided it works, I think this is as good as a VLB motherboard can get. Or am I wrong?

Good layout, 4 voltage settings, PS/2 connector, button battery, SIS chipset, 1024kb cache support, etc. What's more to want. Maybe an on-board IDE controller, but those rather don't populate VLB mobos.

Looks like a really good board. 😀

Needs more EISA slots.

But for an ISA/VL board it would be hard to do better. Maybe a later version of the SiS chipset with proper support for writeback when using DMA VLB SCSI controllers would be slightly better.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

But for an ISA/VL board it would be hard to do better. Maybe a later version of the SiS chipset with proper support for writeback when using DMA VLB SCSI controllers would be slightly better.

I agree, it is my favorite ISA/VL board and it's very fast. Drawbacks are as mentioned using DMA VLB SCSI controllers with writeback L1 cache, but also LBA BIOS support limited to 2GB. To get around the SCSI limitation you can use an VLB EIDE controller and a quick modern harddrive/SSD which in practice is much faster than SCSI on these systems, but then again, SCSI has the "cool" factor.

Glad to hear it.

I'm planning to use the board with some Promise VLB cacheing IDE controller. It has it's own bios, so maybe it could let me overcome 2gb limitation. I guess the relatively new models at least. The problem is those controllers are hard to get.

tikoellner wrote:

Glad to hear it.

I'm planning to use the board with some Promise VLB cacheing IDE controller. It has it's own bios, so maybe it could let me overcome 2gb limitation. I guess the relatively new models at least. The problem is those controllers are hard to get.

From my experience, stay away from cache controllers EXCEPT if you're a using a timeperiod correct harddrive. The CPU on the controllers create a bottleneck when the drive becomes too new/fast. That cache controller might have its own BIOS which supports LBA, but there are also other options to get around the limitation, both hardware and software.

See benchmarks here: VLB IDE cache controllers, benchmark

Got this recently off eBay. Amazed that the prices are actually quite low. Compared to the 480, this is a much better card. Although it also has 8 and 6 pin power connectors, it's very quiet. Needs a bit of cleaning but otherwise works well.

tikoellner wrote:

I'm planning to use the board with some Promise VLB cacheing IDE controller. It has it's own bios, so maybe it could let me overcome 2gb limitation. I guess the relatively new models at least. The problem is those controllers are hard to get.

The slogan my brother and I used to have for Promise back in the day was "We Promise to lose your data". Their caching controllers required a perfectly stable system, and power loss prevention (which didn't exist at the consumer level back then), otherwise you risk borking your system if data doesn't get written back before said system crashes or there's a power loss.

To this day, I even turn write-back caching off on smartdrv due to a couple of bad experiences 20+ yrs ago.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Got this recently off eBay. Amazed that the prices are actually quite low. Compared to the 480, this is a much better card. Although it also has 8 and 6 pin power connectors, it's very quiet. Needs a bit of cleaning but otherwise works well.

Nice. Actually planning on getting a GTX 580 myself for my dx 9/10 rig. I've got a couple of 480's but I'm afraid to use them because they run close to 88-89C.

kanecvr wrote:

I've got a couple of 480's but I'm afraid to use them because they run close to 88-89C.

Yea so does mine.

A GTX580 is retro?
I'm still using a GTX660 in my current i7 3770K which does the job 100% for all my needs and purposes.

Ironically I don't play games older than 2004 which is where I stopped playing games...
But I still love Emulators, DOSBox, and of course my retro Pentium build.

Decided to get some XP era hardware while its dirt cheap and asked my dad if he could get me a decommissioned PC from his workplace. This is what I got:

2GHz Celeron (Socket 478, not sure if netburst or northwood yet)
GF2 MX400
512MB DDR266
Sticker says it was manufactured in 2003

Was missing the PSU which I couldn't fully replace due to the form factor (standard ATX works fine, just cant fit it inside the case), however the main thing I want from this is the motherboard - I'm planning on turning this into a 2003 beast with a Radeon 9800pro and a higher-end P4.
Sadly I'm unable to get much more info on the hardware now as the hardrive is making clicking noises and windows installation keeps freezing.