In trying to distract myself from lots of things I'm supposed to do, I got the integrated DVD-ROM decoder card working on my Pentium 233 MMX equipped Toshiba Tecra 750DVD laptop.

It actually works! It was so difficult to find the drivers!! They were apparently scrubbed from the Internet because of licensing issues with the DVD player software and I don't think I'll ever find the recover CDs for this thing. Driverguide of all places had the driver and software: https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php … driverid=104622
Then followed this guide to get it operational with the proper video chip driver for the S3 Virge/MX: https://support.dynabook.com/support/viewCont … ontentId=107612
It's janky and apparently can't even zoom the DVD video to full screen, but it's state of the art for mid-1997. This thing apparently cost $5,799 when new 😀

Also tried watching the same DVD on the Satellite 2800-500 to give it some use and see how the sound is, it couldn't read the DVD, but I cleaned the laser's lens with an ESD-safe cotton swap soaked with IPA and to my surprise that worked, it could actually read DVD again. I don't think that's ever worked for me before.
Then got annoyed that there was a bit of dirt inside the LCD (a little black dot) on there, so took apart the LCD and cleaned it out from between the LCD panel and the backlight. Now the LCD looks as good as a 15" toshiba from 2001 can.

Well, I think I'm done actively looking for CEDs. I managed to find ESB locally, and that's probably my peak.

I also went over to my Co-Worker's place earlier to see if the discs I own actually work, and was pleased to learn that they actually do. Of course, they sped ESB up hilariously in order to fit it on to a single disk.

I got sidetracked into what I'd call a KoOGOKoNS (Kind of Old Games On Kind of New Systems) thing to try to save some space, but a 10-year-old Optiplex seems to have a dead mobo and an even earlier one seems to have a dead CPU. So thos projects go on hold (for the mini 980 I even had a low profile video card lined up, and I do technically have two other i5-650s but they're in AIO systems and I don't want to strip one of those just yet, they're actually nice).

I even got all the XP drivers lined up for the SFF Optiplex 980, the i5 650, with a GT 720 for now and maybe a 745 later. A compact late XP system. The 980 is actually about 2/3 the size of a typical SFF system, but bigger than a USFF, so I like the for factor. I have an i7 2600 that would serve fine but I'm annoyed because I like the smaller case - but the i7 has a better PSU and can fit a 3.5" HDD.

I really want compact systems that can serve as horizontal desktop-style systems, which I've actually had a hard time finding other than the SFF Optiplexes. If they were more common (and easier to search for since everything but laptops is a desktop now, there's no practical desktop/tower distinction), I would be looking for some cool older desktop ATX cases like Netvistas, but they're rare and pricey around here - and I'm trying to trim down my collection not spend money growing it. I'm also about out of DDR3, but BOY do I have PC1xx, DDR, and DDR2.

I checked craigslist and everyone was listing laptops, so I listed some newer desktops for sale, and within 24 hours about 40 other people did the same. Filled the whole front page. So far I have an offer to trade for a bicycle.

I did get my 3D printer running again after a disastrous experiment with PETG (I think the reel was bad) and clearing out 3 print heads. I printed a short bracket for a low-profile card but I had to trim it a lot to get it to fit, the 980 case requires a paper-thin bracket.

I don't feel very energetic but I did a lot of stuff. Hopefully tomorrow will be a green light day.

Here's a pic of testing a Radeon 3870 in a low-profile socket 775. Janky enough?

I'm close to divesting myself of most XP era hardware. Issues like capacitor plague and bumpgate are annoying. I don't have enough nostalgia for those years to make it worthwhile. 286-to-Tualatin is my personal retroland, as far as PCs go.

Setting up Development Software on the Versa V/50 while handling a bloody firesale of DOS games on e-bay.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-04-12, 07:02:

I'm close to divesting myself of most XP era hardware. Issues like capacitor plague and bumpgate are annoying. I don't have enough nostalgia for those years to make it worthwhile. 286-to-Tualatin is my personal retroland, as far as PCs go.

This is where I am now.. Unless it is a special project case such as running Windows 98 on PCIe or something I am retretting having storage space for these things. I will probably sell off anything I own beyond Socket A and AGP.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-04-12, 07:53:

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-04-12, 07:02:

I'm close to divesting myself of most XP era hardware. Issues like capacitor plague and bumpgate are annoying. I don't have enough nostalgia for those years to make it worthwhile. 286-to-Tualatin is my personal retroland, as far as PCs go.

This is where I am now.. Unless it is a special project case such as running Windows 98 on PCIe or something I am retretting having storage space for these things. I will probably sell off anything I own beyond Socket A and AGP.

is this up to about 2003/4? (Tualatin carried until then for PCs i think). To me that early 2000's period i the XP era; Athlons and P4s. Just interested in the kinds of motherboard/cpu combo era machines you guys had problems with. I've been lucky i think in having relatively few hardware problems in machines of the early 2000's age.

gerry wrote on 2022-04-12, 08:40:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-04-12, 07:53:

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-04-12, 07:02:

I'm close to divesting myself of most XP era hardware. Issues like capacitor plague and bumpgate are annoying. I don't have enough nostalgia for those years to make it worthwhile. 286-to-Tualatin is my personal retroland, as far as PCs go.

This is where I am now.. Unless it is a special project case such as running Windows 98 on PCIe or something I am retretting having storage space for these things. I will probably sell off anything I own beyond Socket A and AGP.

is this up to about 2003/4? (Tualatin carried until then for PCs i think). To me that early 2000's period i the XP era; Athlons and P4s. Just interested in the kinds of motherboard/cpu combo era machines you guys had problems with. I've been lucky i think in having relatively few hardware problems in machines of the early 2000's age.

Socket A Athlons are a bit complicated; T-Bird Athlons are basically Tualatin era CPUs, but once you get to Palomino AthlonXPs and beyond you are now in P4 land. It's cleaner to just stop at Socket 370 with Intel, but for AMD the Socket A was a veeeeery long journey from basically Coppermine era through to Williamette.

Personally I draw the line at Athlon64/Northwood as platforms that simply disregarded Win9x as targets. Prove me I'm wrong 🤣

Got the SunTek RAM card to work on my Compaq Portable 286 machine. Had to tinker with the DIP switches and after I found the correct settings (my wild guesses), I now have 2,688KB RAM (640KB onboard (conventional) + 2MB on the card (EMS)).

Gotta fix a few other items and it'll be complete. Recapping is one of the items on my list, the hard drive/CF booting sequence is the other item, and so on.

Today I found that my Atom Dual Core mini-itx board that usually while being a 64bit cpu is supposed to be locked to 4GB maximun ram depending on the oem bios, can instead see more than 4GB and tested up to 8GB DDR3-1066@7-7-7-6 1,5v (2x4GB 16 chips for each DIMM). But unfortunately the second hand rams I found today to test this seems to have both memtest86 errors so I'll have to change them. The board works only with similar rams so the newer 4GB Crucial ram I was using having 8 modules on it can only work as expected with another 8 modules ram. Now I'm trying this Atom with 5GB of DDR3 on a x64 linux light distribution and a Geforce 210 PCI. Tomorrow I hope to find some better rams. It's sad even DDR3 second hand rams begin to fail already.

I tend to be very optimistic when it comes to computer hardware, but I find that early Atom processors to be almost useless for almost any application.

I have two netbooks with an Intel Atom N270 and they can barely run DOSBox on Linux. Some older games will work (possibly with slowdowns) but many newer ones, like Privateer, are unplayable. Maybe it would run better on Windows XP. I only ever tried Linux.

Never had good experience with pre-Silvermont Intel Atoms running a desktop OS either. My family had one of these CPUs in a netbook form factor and the performance had a lot to be desired.

At least they're immune to Spectre and similar vulnerabilities. I think.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-04-12, 20:19:

I tend to be very optimistic when it comes to computer hardware, but I find that early Atom processors to be almost useless for almost any application.

I have two netbooks with an Intel Atom N270 and they can barely run DOSBox on Linux. Some older games will work (possibly with slowdowns) but many newer ones, like Privateer, are unplayable. Maybe it would run better on Windows XP. I only ever tried Linux.

I am a little surprised at that, I have 2 netbooks with DOSbox on and N270 and N470, the N270 with Ubuntu 18.xx LTS and the N470 with W10, both run up to ~P133 ish speed, maybe a P90 to P133 range depending on title, but Terminal Velocity and Frontier First Encounters are the two heaviest games I fire up on the regular and they run playable.

My reasoning process about early 2000s hardware is, though I have a bunch of it, XP runs well on much newer hardware (certainly more so than 98). So is it really necessary for me? Much of that will go into other hands.

I was staring at some of it yesterday and decided I will probably sell my socket 423 stuff. I like rare stuff, but what am I actually using it for? I did design a replacement heatsink bracket for one that broke and 3D printed it. I also have a pentium D system that is just huge and ungainly (Dell desktop server).

I accomplished little today, it was one of those "everything goes wrong" days. Okay, not everything, but most things.

Here's to a better tomorrow.

Some update on the dual core Atom build, I found today two other brand second hand 2x4GB DDR3 modules (again each with 16 chips 1333Mhz@1066 7-7-7-6) that memtest86 after 3 long hours of the first pass testing ended without errors and now it read 8GB of total ram, single channel that's a SoC/chipset limitation and without using the already much tested iGPU and instead an external bridged PCI Geforce 210 and a SATA3 SSD @ SATA2.

Of course there might not be any cases where that ram amount would be needed for such slow cpu but it's interesting to see this working when usually only Win7 32bit and 2GB of ram were supposed to run in its days cause the whole GPU story.
I still wonder why most config used a PCI bridged bus for the external vga when it should support up to PCI-EX x4 bus or multiple x1 ones and instead this very limiting PCI 133Mb/s (bios reading) solution force to use few cards or some adapter (adapter I've got and will test in future for some low profile more modern vga like a GT1030 or similar as long as it's below the 30 watts limit).

Some memtest86 numbers in x64@1,9Ghz (only 1 core was running here):
L1 cache: 7 Gb/s
L2 cache 512Kbyte (x2 theorically): 4,3 Gb/s
Mem 8GB (2x4GB 1066/7-7-7-6/64bit): 2,07 Gb/s

Hardinfo linux 5.x kernel LxQt gui benchmark (dual core @ 1,9Ghz):
CPU Blowfish test: 11,12 points
CPU CryptoHash test: 82,19 points
FPU FFT test: 16,01 points
FPU Raytracing test: 19,30 points
GPU Drawing (Geforce 210 @ 70% CPU usage I'd say): 3195 points

Total power demand using a basic 500W PSU is 24 watts in idle and 35/40 watts when stressed. Using a PicoPSU I'd say like 5 watts might be saved, lost into the atx PSU. I'll try again the Geforce GT610 PCI I suppose.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-04-12, 20:19:

I tend to be very optimistic when it comes to computer hardware, but I find that early Atom processors to be almost useless for almost any application.

I have two netbooks with an Intel Atom N270 and they can barely run DOSBox on Linux. Some older games will work (possibly with slowdowns) but many newer ones, like Privateer, are unplayable. Maybe it would run better on Windows XP. I only ever tried Linux.

they make good one-purpose computers

i have my EEEPC 701 (Celeron M ULV 353 @ 630Mhz, 1GB DDR2, 4GB SSD, XP SP3) connected to a dock with a single 2TB HDD WD Blue as an slow NAS for backups of my main PC

Switching back to Day shift from Night over the course of yesterday, so sleeping was weird and sporadic. Finally cleaned up the "Lab/Computer Den/Game Room/Guitar Shop/PC Shop/Whateveryouwantocallit" a good bit, and pulled out Creeping Net 486 and the Versa M/75 (my classic "duo" of vintage machines) and went to town....Compaq needs a break anyway....

- CN486 does not need anything, just fired right up into FreeDOS, though I might tune and tweak the memory settings a little. Mostly brought it out to rip CD's to the Versa's hard disk and repurpose the massive 250GB drive from the Ready 9522 when I sell it (the Versa P/75 is becoming the main Win95 Pentium machine now).

- M/75 got the P/75's drive (which was originally the M/75's when it had it's original casing), which is 100% FreeDOS - P/75 got the triple boot 95/WFW311/DOS setup.

- The M/75 reunited with this disk had all the missing games I like that use WSS reinstalled: FitUp, Get Lost, Flying Tigers I & II, 3D Body Adventure, and TekWar. The 7th Guest got the updates installed for audio and now it crashes like the other one did during install. Actually, that's something I'm starting to work on is figuring out what part of FreeDOS is causingg the auto-detection or testing a configuration of the Crystal CS4231KQ chipset causes some kind of memory crash - different depending on Himemx or JEMMX is loaded. With some tuning I got about 764K of the main DOS Ram Free with the max-memory free config (!!!) - ZSNES runs decently in 800x600 with that and UniVBE loaded. So Improvements are happening.

- Started dabbling with HX DOS Extender. Still failing to get anything Windows 3.1x to load using DPMILD16, but with DPMILD32 it seems for SCUMMVM, EXULT (I'm working out a way to get Ultima 7 working in FreeDOS, works great in MS-DOS 7.01), ZSSNESW.EXE, CIV2, Activision Action Pack, and Quake - they all want to run but are just missing a handful of Windows Dependenices (PE Stub reader files, some DirectX stuff,, etc), so I'll fire up either the P/75 or CN486 (probably CN486) with windows 95 and copy those dependencies over. CIV got to t he custom cursor and almost started to display the screen. Probably will FTP on Diablo, Postal, and possibly even Microsoft Golf 3.0. Might even get heady and try to run Five Nights at Freddy's on there in DOS 🤣.

Hopefully if the wife can stop spending for renovation, I can order a cheap, chinese, touch panel and finish up the M/75 while I wait for the "Newly Made PCMCIA Sound Card" or the "CardBarker" to come out while I make some minor plastic repairs as well.

Tested a PowerVR PCX1. I couldn't get Tomb Raider & Unfinished Business to run because the current machine I'm messing around with has a Sound Blaster Live! using SB16 emulation, and no ISA slots. The SB16 emulation requires EMM386, but the PCX1 version of Tomb Raider/UB refuses to run with EMM386 loaded (PCX2 version doesn't have this problem). So, Instead I tried Turok (it won't recognize the card; only PCX2), then I resorted to the PowerVR version of Biohazard (Resident Evil). This version does look the best, no doubt. It's choppy at 800x600, but 640x480 is great. The best part is the PowerVR version on the PCX1 runs at normal speed with even a 2Ghz P4. The Direct3D version flips out when even a 333MHz Pentium II is used.

Tomb Raider 1 won't run with EMM386? That doesn't seem right.

I can definitely get it to run from within Windows on my PCX2, and that should have the same limitation.