PcBytes wrote on 2022-06-16, 18:57:

You wouldn't lose only the USB at how crap their ESD protection was. You'd straight up see it burn.

'Floating' ports can sink the ship - USB shield grounding

I had an issue with a refurbished Athlon 64 system I bought some years ago. It was very unstable and after I saw sparks around the USB port on an insertion it removal (I can't remember which), I returned it immediately.

PcBytes wrote on 2022-06-16, 18:57:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-06-16, 14:29:

PcBytes wrote on 2022-06-16, 14:05:

I'd avoid P4P800 and P4C800 like the plague. ASUS and especially Intel were to greedy and removed the ESD protection from their 82801ER southbridges.
I'd in fact avoid anything that uses that craptacularly engineered southbridge. Either 82801EB or skip altogether.

Wasn't this issue related to the USB ports?
I wonder if disconnecting the USB ports (yes I know loosing USB is something of an issue in this case) and using addon USB PCI cards could prevent the southbridges from dying from this issue.

You wouldn't lose only the USB at how crap their ESD protection was. You'd straight up see it burn.

'Floating' ports can sink the ship - USB shield grounding

So it's the front USB headers that are affected and not the back ones. So not connecting the front ones should help avoid this issue.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-06-16, 19:51:

PcBytes wrote on 2022-06-16, 18:57:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-06-16, 14:29:

Wasn't this issue related to the USB ports?
I wonder if disconnecting the USB ports (yes I know loosing USB is something of an issue in this case) and using addon USB PCI cards could prevent the southbridges from dying from this issue.

You wouldn't lose only the USB at how crap their ESD protection was. You'd straight up see it burn.

'Floating' ports can sink the ship - USB shield grounding

So it's the front USB headers that are affected and not the back ones. So not connecting the front ones should help avoid this issue.

Considering the back ones are connected through the SB very likely, I wouldn't be so sure.

PcBytes wrote on 2022-06-16, 20:05:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-06-16, 19:51:

PcBytes wrote on 2022-06-16, 18:57:

You wouldn't lose only the USB at how crap their ESD protection was. You'd straight up see it burn.

'Floating' ports can sink the ship - USB shield grounding

So it's the front USB headers that are affected and not the back ones. So not connecting the front ones should help avoid this issue.

Considering the back ones are connected through the SB very likely, I wouldn't be so sure.

They also are, but they have at least better ground protection compared to the front ones. Still a huge mishap from Asus and any other affected manufacturer. Cheers for that link btw, I had forgotten about it and provided me with the info google wouldn't show me 😋

The other day, I connected my Sony PVM-9L1 and the PVM-1341 together (RGB out + sync and audio from the 1341 to the 9L1, composite out and audio from the 1341 to the 9L1, and S-video out and audio from the 9L1 to the 1341) so I can watch TV on both screens, including some video streaming and playing games from the good old Nintendo 64.

If I have the 9L1 on only, it'll show the video and produce sound without having the 1341 turned on, which is nice.

I went about installing my Simmconn Revival to my Awe64 Gold.
I'm using 8mb at the moment because that's what I have on hand , although I have a 32mb stick on the way.
It was a bit of a tight squeeze and I had to move some cards around to get it to fit between the shared pci slot and the next pci slot but there was just about enough room thankfully.

Finally got my IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486 fully working!

Prepping the NEC Ready 9522 to Sell, broke out the Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 and tried out an SVGA Card (TSENG ET4000) and huge (80GB) HDD with it, did not work out so well. Would kinda sort awork but whatever BIOS routines Compaq is using does not want to play ball with ontrack 9. The TSENG is going back into the 286 since I prefer the speed coverage of the Compaq better. But I might have the Compaq and Moondog competing because it is cool to play LAN games between two similar 486s. So I dunno. Trying to whittle it down finally.

Setup Filezilla on the iMac to push some games to it, been playing all of them, keeping the Compaq an "of-the-period" setup.

Tried this:

Well I guess I need a Voodoo3 again...

Also installed the latest and greatest on an old Dell, is this considered retro?

It's that Unreal Tournament running on BeOS? That's so cool.

Run it as "UnrealTournament -safe". Does it work with the software renderer?

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-06-19, 14:19:

It's that Unreal Tournament running on BeOS? That's so cool.

Run it as "UnrealTournament -safe". Does it work with the software renderer?

Yes it is, somehow the file surfaced again after years.
I can't try it again today, but I think it really requires a Voodoo 2 or 3, whatever supports hardware OpenGL in the beta drivers.
I managed to run Quake 2 and 3 with a Matrox Mystique in OpenGL mode with older drivers,
both very slow, Q3 menu was unbearable I didn't bother loading a level.
UT just crashed like in the screenshots.

There are alternative OpenGL drivers for Unreal and Unreal Tournament. You could try one of those.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-06-19, 15:15:

There are alternative OpenGL drivers for Unreal and Unreal Tournament. You could try one of those.

The BeOS support for OpenGL is what it is, great with a Voodoo3 or 4, possibly good with a Voodoo2, the rest not so much.

Old benchmarks:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000711032159/ht … ory/3270.1.html

Did look in whole shoes box full of heatsinks from dead motoherboards, chipsets, after market ones like Zalman, ThermalTake, Titan and others. And was shocked to find only an Titan GPU cooler and some another crappy one did fit onto Voodoo V 5500 what a pile of horse shit really... At least these ones are copper, good for me outside of that box i did have on a motherboard installed second copper Titan cooler, the only downside is the second one does not have its original mounthing screws some pesant did remove them it seems... So guess these x2 Titans will be the temporal new coolers for the Voodoo V, as they are like 4 times better heatsinks compared to the stock ones that are a joke...

Still i have Zalman VF900-Cu will measure if i can fit one of them on the Voodoo 5, and then to look and buy second one. If the 900 does not fit then Zalman VF700-Cu should 100% fit in there...

I'd avoid the fans on those Titan coolers like the plague.
Their blades are so brittle that as much as trying to gently clean them with a piece of old clothing broke three blades off one of my Titan coolers (and as a result I had to throw it away completely) and also broke the fins on another cooler done in the same way as the Titans, which was factory installed on my Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro.
If possible, I'd replace the fans on those with something similar to the LED fan found on Hercules 3D Prophet 9800 Pro. It's similar in design, but the plastics are much much better than those crappy "fake copper" styled fans. Alternatively, glueing a smaller fan (like those on generic FX5500 cards like the ones from MSI could also work, as long as the fins don't hit the heatsink's walls.

Or, considering the Voodoo 5 doesn't have an exposed die unlike the Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800 series of cards, you could go with a Deepcool V50 if available in your country, as long as you don't use their white goop thermal paste (which is literally useless for anything else than maybe MOSFETs at best.). I know the V50 is aluminium (it's kinda similar to Medion's cooler from the 9600TX (and no, the TX wasn't a typo) design-wise) but if it cools down a Radeon 9700 Pro without an issue, I'm fairly sure it can cool down a Voodoo 5.

Well will see these are clean so, they will work for the moment... I really want to put some Zalmans on the Voodoo as they are so much overkill.. But will see i am still cosidering what exactly to use on the Voodoo V. These Titans yes the fans are fake gold/ copper ones, but the heatsink is for sure heavy copper, so if the fans plastic is total garbage, well then replacing them will fix the cooler...

Put my NEC Ready 9522 on E-bay with the VooDoo Card. STarted writing more entry level vintage Tech stuff for my site. Been a real pain since I've been sick off/on this week.

I am creating a Boot disk for my D800.
Not sure if I want to automate everything.
Bare minimum:
Log on to my network.

Today I spent many frustrating hours working on setting up a new 16GB CF card for my Amiga 1200.

Got everything setup in WinUAE on my PC, partitioned the CF card into 2 PFS3 partitions (500MB + rest) and then copied the Workbench contents onto partition 1, followed by all the WHDLoad & AGS2 etc stuff onto partition 2. After all that was finished I booted from the CF card in WinUAE and - no 2nd partition found.

Now if I wasn't such a novice with Workbench & Amiga OS in general, I could have probably solved that in less than 5 minutes. Instead I tried all kinds of different things, at 1 point making the problem even worse and having to wipe the CF card and re-partition again. If I'd simply realised sooner that all I needed to do was copy a newer version of scsi.device in to DEVS on the Workbench drive, I could have saved myself many hours of troubleshooting.

At least the card now boots on both WinUAE and my Amiga 1200, now I just have to copy all the WHDLoad stuff etc back over to it. Hey on the bright side I guess, I'm learning a lot more about how this OS works.

Today I made a wooden USB floppy drive 😀