After work went to look at all the goodies acquired over the decades and decided to go drink a beer and ponder what am I going to do with all this when I retire soon and move.... ugh !

On today's menu, there's a 386DX-40, 486DX4-100 and Pentium MMX 266.
Which one will we have today? 😀

GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-10-20, 18:01:

On today's menu, there's a 386DX-40, 486DX4-100 and Pentium MMX 266.
Which one will we have today? 😀

oh man can they even breathe in those little boxes? deftineately would repack MMX 266 into something more hitler (breathing room)
looks good tthough

For my sixty second birthday had a proffesional sign writer make up Tux stickers for all of my Linux systems. Aren't they cute? Best NZ$40 I've spent on computers in years 😉

GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-10-20, 18:01:

Pentium MMX 266.

But the fastest desktop Pentium MMX was 233, there even no x4 multiplier in 430TX.

LoK wrote on 2021-10-21, 21:30:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-10-20, 18:01:

Pentium MMX 266.

But the fastest desktop Pentium MMX was 233, there even no x4 multiplier in 430TX.

Embedded 266 MX in socket 7 (SL2Z4) could be run in a desktop system. Also some mobile chips were used in socket 7 adapters.

Tested the newly acquired Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT and it turns on (surprised the main battery has a charge) and taking it apart to fix the power button is a chore.

Going to fix the button and do more testing to make sure that everything is alright. The display works without issues and it'll get an HDD, 4x CD-ROM, and enclosure for the FDD, which in turn will be my portable DOS gaming laptop (640x480 TFT) since it allows the display to have the stretching disabled within the BIOS.

debs3759 wrote on 2021-10-21, 21:37:

LoK wrote on 2021-10-21, 21:30:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-10-20, 18:01:

Pentium MMX 266.

But the fastest desktop Pentium MMX was 233, there even no x4 multiplier in 430TX.

Embedded 266 MX in socket 7 (SL2Z4) could be run in a desktop system. Also some mobile chips were used in socket 7 adapters.

It's running at 3x87MHz. 😀 Gotta get out as much as i can from the PC-133 SD-RAM in this machine. 😁

GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-10-22, 06:12:

debs3759 wrote on 2021-10-21, 21:37:

LoK wrote on 2021-10-21, 21:30:

But the fastest desktop Pentium MMX was 233, there even no x4 multiplier in 430TX.

Embedded 266 MX in socket 7 (SL2Z4) could be run in a desktop system. Also some mobile chips were used in socket 7 adapters.

It's running at 3x87MHz. 😀 Gotta get out as much as i can from the PC-133 SD-RAM in this machine. 😁

What video card are you running on a 43.5MHz PCI Bus? Are you sure a different PCI divider isn't kicking in and gimping your whole PCI Bus including graphics? I know of very few PCI cards in my collection that can actually handle this..

appiah4 wrote on 2021-10-22, 06:26:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-10-22, 06:12:

debs3759 wrote on 2021-10-21, 21:37:

Embedded 266 MX in socket 7 (SL2Z4) could be run in a desktop system. Also some mobile chips were used in socket 7 adapters.

It's running at 3x87MHz. 😀 Gotta get out as much as i can from the PC-133 SD-RAM in this machine. 😁

What video card are you running on a 43.5MHz PCI Bus? Are you sure a different PCI divider isn't kicking in and gimping your whole PCI Bus including graphics? I know of very few PCI cards in my collection that can actually handle this..

I don't have equipment to actually measure the PCI clock, but by all the settings, it should be overclocked to 43,5MHz. That's correct.
The machine is rocking GF2 MX400 PCI version in it.

Some LAN cards have been picky on this machine, when they sit on PCI bus, so i believe the PCI bus is overclocked...

I'm mulling over the decision on whether or not to replace the Am5x86 in this tower with my actual 486SX-25

ODwilly wrote on 2021-10-17, 11:34:

Popped open a fresh stack of Memorex CD-R's.

Is life? No, Demorez!

Played around with some simple batch files today. Wanted to automate back up of FireFox history, cookies, etc on my older PC's that I still use for some research but on rare /not-thinking/drunk nights have accidentally deleted the days or weeks history.
Found you have to use 8.3 naming with the copy command (even under Win7 64bit) to proper copy files like places.sqlite (= places~1.sql) for it to work proper.
Nothing special but am adding it to the startup run so I don't screw up again 😁
Yes could write a vbs script to do it but that would not be as Vintage 🤣...

Setup a BlueSCSI as the boot drive of my Quadra 650. All worked surprisingly well.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-10-16, 18:54:

After finishing off the Trio3D, I decided to give myself a different kind of fun. Which is this specific ATI Rage 128 Pro I got […]
Show full quote

After finishing off the Trio3D, I decided to give myself a different kind of fun. Which is this specific ATI Rage 128 Pro I got about a week ago. It feels like getting out of water after you almost drowned. I've got through the test runs in Quake, Quake 2, Tomb Raider 2, International Rally Championship, Half-Life, Colin McRae Rally 2.0 and Quake 3 Arena. Half of all the games I chose for testing.

There was only two oddity I've encountered so far. That Half-Life is locked to 72fps and I can't unlock it. The game reaches that both in 640x480 and 800x600. The other is some transparency error in IRC:

Sometimes for a brief moment the bug disappears (like on the screenshot the head and tail lights aren't buggy). I don't know if it's the Rage or I made some mistake when setting it up. I'll do a Psaki with this one.

After running the same tests on my TNT2 (non-Pro), I find the performance difference very weird. I went in expecting they are roughly similar with the R128 being marginally faster, but they are all over the place one blowing the other out of the water.

1┌──────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────┬───────────────────────┐
2│                                  │        TNT2 32MB      │    Rage 128Pro 32MB   │
3╞══════════════════════════════════╪═══════════════════════╪═══════════════════════╡
4│ International Rally Championship │           38          │           67          │
5├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
6│        Quake II (640×480)        │          41.6         │          87.2         │
7├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
8│        Quake II (800×600)        │          35.8         │          59.3         │
9├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
10│  Need for Speed 4 (640×480@16)   │           64          │           38          │
11├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
12│  Need for Speed 4 (640×480@32)   │           43          │           38          │
13├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
14│  Need for Speed 4 (800×600@16)   │           49          │           38          │
15├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
16│  Need for Speed 4 (800×600@32)   │           32          │           26          │
17├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
18│   Quake 3 Arena (640×480@16)     │          70.5         │          37.8         │
19├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
20│   Quake 3 Arena (640×480@32)     │          42.5         │          25.1         │
21├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
22│   Quake 3 Arena (800×600@16)     │          45.6         │          28.6         │
23├──────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┤
24│   Quake 3 Arena (800×600@32)     │          27.9         │           18          │
25└──────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────────────┘

Close to 100% performace difference is unreal. The weirdest one is Need for Speed which stutters horribly on the Rage128 regardless of the settings.

i got my retro pc in post yesterday been working on it.
So far the gpu freezes, the ram is non matching pair of half capacity i bought
it has original windows 7 no sp
the foxconn motherboard based on via p4m800 chipset accepts Both DDR and DDR2 ram up to 2gb
the built in chipset graphics (64mb) has no official download for windows 7 but lower.
I am currently upgrading to sp1 with generic vga driver integrated graphics (low res ugh) then i will try find a chipset gpu driver .... does windows update still have drivers for seven?
it has the 3.06ghz P4 socket 478 Prescott
nice sata disk 1tb
It has misbehaved with 4 gpu's so far i limited agp to 4x mode and tried 2 x nvidias and 2x ati's they all crashed.
The memory modules crashed the integrated gpu so i swapped to ddr400 modules (brand new) to install sp1
In ddr2 it only supports 533mhz so 100mhz isn't much of a deal except single data rate will be needing to get some ddr2 533 later I am all out of that snail speed.
I have got official gpu driver to try out the ati that came with this tower again but if it freezes its in the bin.
Hopefully one of the others will work proper (experience index shouldn't crash)
If this effort fails I shall abort and move to xp but i hear prescott not so good on 32bit? I suppose I shall find out as last resort missed out on vista didn't need it with xp at all. 64bit well the multimedia part of that is mostly 32bit.
stupid gpu i have etch a scetch graphics because of you and i may have to settle for xp just to run you.

Grabbed an ASUS P5Q Pro mobo to replace the Intel board in my XP machine; latter's been throwing strange fits, doesn't have the PS/2 ports my kvm uses (which means my KB+M gets disabled under UEFI boot on, which plays into the next problem), and often complains about a failure to post due to changes or something asking if I wanna go into BIOS and fix things or reboot (then proceeds to run fine, likes to happen when updating windows/drivers). Kinda hard finding something that supports the C2Extreme QX9770 my grandad left in there and also doesn't cost too much

Repaired the Arlec air compressor. This is the third time in a 1/4 of a century. Cheap shit it is......

Was working 12 hours straight yesterday on installing and setting up my killer Windows 98 machine into this IBM Aptiva case. I apologize to the retro community, but I had to modify the case a little bit in the back, because newer power supplies wouldn't fit inside, due to their orientation. Generally, I try to avoid modifications like this. I installed Win98 on a P4 2,4 GHz CPU and used Asrock P4i65G motherboard with 512 Mb DDR Ram, as I was following on one of Phil's videos. As for the graphics card, I used a card that I currently had at hand - ATI Radeon 9250 to which I added 4 cm fan on it's heatsink, to help it cool a bit more. For the sound, I used a Creative SB100 PCI card. I also installed a PCI TV/FM card.

I guess people will go crazy about the p4 part.

(Soon s478 will be rare partly because of cap plague, and then the haters will stand there with there s370 looking very sad!)

But I'm more curios, did you run out of beige floppy drives?

Joakim wrote on 2021-10-24, 09:54:

But I'm more curios, did you run out of beige floppy drives?

I do have them, but I was currently taking out the parts from existing (previous) Windows 98 machine, that I had, so I used this one which is also working fine. For the time being it's OK, since the black components are hidden with Aptiva's front cover. In time I will probably swap the black floppy with the beige one, and also I will make a beige (white ?) 5,25" front for CF adapter.