Have been reading about retro hardware using google search. Damn so many old computer's have nice design's.
Like these machines here http://www.oocities.org/surfboardart/Mainfram … m360_photos.htm
Love those colours they choose back then.

Then I have bargained for some old hardware. And perhaps made a nice deal (more on that later this week, or next).
All I can say. It is very special for the price, and I really had to hunt it down.

Reassembled my Wyse 286 and began installing DOS 6.22 on it. I didn't know until now that the 3.5in floppy drive on it could read high-density disks! 😊

BTW, the screwdriver is wedged into the power button on the monitor because it won't stay pushed in on its own anymore, and I don't know how to fix it. 😢

It is running on the Win7 box here so I can access VirtualCZ to quickly test and program the synthesizer... Either way, it is still Cakewalk 9, it is controlling a 30 year old synthesizer (as well as a 29 year old drum machine) and the song, in its original guise, is 102 years old.

Short version; I have learned an old Peruvian song, El Condor Pasa, and have attempted to make it resemble 80's pop.

Long version; I have deep issues with guitarists, people who play guitar are scum of the earth, they to be rounded up and hung from the ceiling by their nipples when they aren't making awesome music. I sort of know a guitar guy, total bum ass bastard he is - not because he plays guitar, but because he really is a bum ass bastard - and he said he was learning it. I was already contemplating it, but now I had to learn it because I will not be outdone by a guitarist. The only thing worse is losing to a pianist. He'll likely never hear it as I don't have much to do with him, but its a pride thing.

Might try and do a second one that's like a power ballad, but I like the pop one for now. I will add it to SoundCloud when I am done.

Hate this Dell keyboard.

It seems like I just completed Snake II on 3310 😀

torindkflt wrote:

BTW, the screwdriver is wedged into the power button on the monitor because it won't stay pushed in on its own anymore, and I don't know how to fix it. 😢

The little metal fixator inside the button is probably broken. It should not be hard to replace a button, you'll probably find the same one still for sale. The other way of doing it is to bypass the button.

Completed Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow on my turbocharged PIII rig and just started two other favorites: Painkiller and Thief: Deadly Shadows.

I just can't help but be impressed by how well this old rig--on which I spent way too much money--runs these games.

Installed an Athlon XP 2400+ in my socket a rig (KT7A-RAID) and got the correct multiplier and bus speed to work using kynar wire to mod the socket. 15x133, 2GHz. 😀

Also ordered a Voodoo 3 for my Super Socket 7. First-time Voodoo user here, kind of anxious.

Im messing around with my Gigabyte GA-5AX and a K6-3+ 400. Its like entering the world of Kafka 😀.

The performance again seem to depend on what exact memory module Im using, two 256MB modules with the exact same layout can perform 5% different in SuperPi with the same BIOS settings. So far I have not been able to even get close to my best SuperPi scores from the last time I tinkered with the same board and CPU even when using what I think is the exact same memory module.

Socket 7 systems can be somewhat temperamental, Im sure I soon will find out what BIOS settings the board dislikes. Or perhaps using a PCI Voodoo III makes the memory subsystem 10% slower than using a Geforce 2 MX AGP card 😜 .

I remember another forum member telling me that this board, or chipset, runs fastest with a single memory stick, rather than two. There is also the issue of cachable memory size.

I've got some results for you to compare in this video: AMD K6-2 vs K6-2+ vs K6-III+ Comparison

And there are some more, including SuperPi, in my review of that board: Gigabyte GA-5AX REV 5.2 motherboard review

I believe that the cachable size is 128 MB, so a single 128 MB stick should work very well. Use a PC133 stick, and set the lowest CL2 timings in BIOS.

philscomputerlab wrote:

I remember another forum member telling me that this board, or chipset, runs fastest with a single memory stick, rather than two […]
Show full quote

I remember another forum member telling me that this board, or chipset, runs fastest with a single memory stick, rather than two. There is also the issue of cachable memory size.

I've got some results for you to compare in this video: AMD K6-2 vs K6-2+ vs K6-III+ Comparison

And there are some more, including SuperPi, in my review of that board: Gigabyte GA-5AX REV 5.2 motherboard review

I believe that the cachable size is 128 MB, so a single 128 MB stick should work very well. Use a PC133 stick, and set the lowest CL2 timings in BIOS.

Im pretty sure that other forum member was me 😀

The onboard cache is disabled as Im running 125 MHz FSB at the moment so that is not the issue. Im running the memory at 125 MHz CL2 and right now Im testing every single BIOS setting just as the last time I messed with this board. I could have saved alot of time if I had written some notes on what settings worked best 😁.

Oh that was you 😊

philscomputerlab wrote:

Oh that was you 😊

I found at least one setting I needed to change to bring me closer to the SuperPi times I got a year ago.

"CPU Write Allocate" needs to be disabled. This improved the SuperPi 1M time 4-5%.

Perhaps CPU Write Allocate works better with the onboard cache enabled, I will need to test that later.

RetroBoogie wrote:

Installed an Athlon XP 2400+ in my socket a rig (KT7A-RAID) and got the correct multiplier and bus speed to work using kynar wire to mod the socket. 15x133, 2GHz. 😀

Which revision board is that? Mines only a 1.0 I don't like my chances of running any XP CPUS.

I thought you didn't have to do pin mods for CPUS that had a locked multiplier?

Now Im remembering why I prefer Slot-1 over Socket 7 😀

While "CPU Write Allocate" needs to be disabled to get decent SuperPi times with the K6-3+ it needs to be enabled to get good 3d performance, at least with my PCI Voodoo III. You need to play whack a mole with the BIOS settings to get good performance or use "CTU" to change these settings on the fly.

Perhaps these issues are limited to the Gigabyte GA-5AX but I doubt it. The Ga-5AX seems to be one of the slowest SS7 boards in old reviews but I guess that is offset by its overclocking abilities.

I still cant reach the 4m 44s seconds I got using 5*120 MHz last year. Now the best result I got so far is 4m 52s at 5*125 MHz.

It seems it wasnt enough to test every BIOS setting, I need to test every combination of settings...

The GA-5AX has very fast IDE performance, ATA-66.

With a Socket 7 CPU, the board is quite strong with anything to do with DOS and Windows CPU performance, but falls behind in Windows 3D gaming performance (that was with a S3 Trio 64 V+ and V2).

With a SS7 CPU and V3, it's the slowest board I have when it comes to Windows 3D performance. But the fastest under DOS.

Quite the odd board 🤣

It seems the Voodoo II and the Banshee drivers have decent 3dnow! support but not the Voodoo III driver. I guess 3dfx was too busy with going bust to develop good drivers at the time. This somewhat explains why I cant seem to get much better 3D performance out of the K6-3+ with a PCI Voodoo III on the GA-5AX than I get with my PC Chips M577 system with a Banshee and a K6-2 @500.

When I tinkered with the K6-3+ last year I used a Geforce 2 MX 400 and the difference is just amazing, the PCI Voodoo III "3500" is very slow compared to the GF2 MX.

Im testing 5x120 with the onboard cache enabled right now, with luck this will improve the performance a bit. I know I had it disabled last year at FSB settings over 110 but now it seems to work... magic

Edit

Running with the onboard cache enabled diddnt improve the performance much, probably because the board only caches the first 128MB eventough it has the H revision of the Aladdin 5 chipset. I need to install some cache check utility on the system. Edit I checked the oboard cache cachable range and its 128MB just as I thought, the onboard cache still improves the performance some even with 256MB memory installed

The good thing about my Gigabyte GA-5AX is that its rock stable, I cant seem to get it to crash what ever I do. Even when Im running 140 MHz FSB the only thing that happens is that Power Strip wont start (Protection error 43) and that SuperPi sometimes gets errors. The errors in SuperPi isnt strange as running PC133 CL3 memory at 140 MHz CL2 is asking a bit too much.

The system never freezes and the only blue screen I have seen is when I tried running AIDA 32 or newer versions of CPU-Z as both these programs are incompatible with the Aladdin 5 chipset but the system wont lock up even then. A motherboard able to run the PCI bus at 47 MHz without (noticeable) HDD corruption cant be all bad.

I can also enable write combining without any instability, reading about other peoples experiences when it comes to write combining gives you the impression that it often causes issues.

I've been testing my own K6-3+ system this past week, and I've found that the Voodoo 3 3500 is a great match for the FIC VA-503+ (rev. 1.2a).

I tested it in Quake 2 against a Quadro2 Pro (12.41 drivers), whose specs are just a little shy of those of a GF2 Ultra. I used the 3DNow! patch and the 1.49 MiniGL.

(Remember that you have to rename 3dfxgl.dll to opengl32.dll and then select "3DNow! OpenGL" and not "3DNow! 3DfxGL.")

At 1024x768 with the K6-3+ OC'ed to 550MHz, here are the results:

1                 FPS (DEMO1)
2VOODOO3 3500     86.9
3QUADRO 2 PRO     75.5

Even when the K6-3+ was not OC'ed (450MHz), it still scored 81.9.

With Unreal Gold, the V3 3500 was about 10FPS faster. I'd like to find a DX7 game for benchmarking that has a real D3D implementation, however, and not one based on Glide.

boxpressed wrote:

I've been testing my own K6-3+ system this past week, and I've found that the Voodoo 3 3500 is a great match for the FIC VA-503+ […]
Show full quote

I've been testing my own K6-3+ system this past week, and I've found that the Voodoo 3 3500 is a great match for the FIC VA-503+ (rev. 1.2a).

I tested it in Quake 2 against a Quadro2 Pro (12.41 drivers), whose specs are just a little shy of those of a GF2 Ultra. I used the 3DNow! patch and the 1.49 MiniGL.

(Remember that you have to rename 3dfxgl.dll to opengl32.dll and then select "3DNow! OpenGL" and not "3DNow! 3DfxGL.")

At 1024x768 with the K6-3+ OC'ed to 550MHz, here are the results:

Copy code to clipboard

1                 FPS (DEMO1)
2VOODOO3 3500     86.9
3QUADRO 2 PRO     75.5

Even when the K6-3+ was not OC'ed (450MHz), it still scored 81.9.

With Unreal Gold, the V3 3500 was about 10FPS faster. I'd like to find a DX7 game for benchmarking that has a real D3D implementation, however, and not one based on Glide.

I have not tried the 3dnow! patch for QII yet but I have downloaded it, the issue is that not many other games have 3dnow! support on the level of QII which got special attention from AMD. It seems Nvidias drivers have better 3dnow! support in games that dosnt have special 3dnow! patches or native 3dnow! support.

I get 49.3 FPS @ 600 MHz in QII running Demo1 640*480 using the default OpenGL driver. I do not like the look of the normal 3dFX driver, the game looks too bright and the performance seems to be almost the same anyhow as the CPU sets the limit. I will report back later when I have tried the 3dnow! driver

Edit.

As my Quake II installation on my Windows 98 bench USB stick seems to be the wrong version I could not run the 3Dnow! 3DfxGL driver but strangely enough I could run the 3Dnow! OpenGL driver and it improved my FPS to 56 FPS at 640*480, not too impressive. Perhaps the fact that Im running a PCI Voodoo III card is holding me back or perhaps my GA-5AX simply hates any Voodoo III.

Edit2

The installation instructions isnt the same with the patch I downloaded so I guess there are more than one. The patch I downloaded had 3 different 3dnow! drivers (ref_glam.dll, ref_swam.dll and 3dfxglam.dll) , some other files and a special Quake2.exe. But I will try your instructions to see if I can get it going.

Edit3

I get a grey screen 😀. Without renaming the 3dfxgl.dll I can at least use the 3dnow OpenGL "optimized for adapters with OpenGL ICD drivers" but not the 3DfxGL which I can choose but then I get a grey screen using this method aswell and the game defaults back to the software driver. Renaming the 3dfxgl.dll makes the working 3dnow! OpenGL driver unavalible, I guess it gets replaced by the non working driver although the filenames are not the same.

Im sure I could get it going with a fresh Quake II install but I just cant be bothered with it now as I want to use the same Voodoo III drivers and game versions as I used with my PII/PIII system for comparison. But the Quake2.exe patched with 3dnow" support stays.

The exact error message I get is "_GlidelnitEnvironment: glide2x.dll expected Voodoo, non detected" Strange as the non 3dnow! 3DfxGL driver detects my Voodoo III just fine 😀 I think my QII installation has been patched too many times... Or perhaps the Voodoo III drivers I use suck. Im using AmigaMerlins driverpack with Glide 2.x driver 2.6 and Glide 3.x driver 3.1, this driverpack has worked well with Intel systems.

I just read the driverpacks readme 😀 The driverpack I am using seems to be for Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 only, I have no idea how it got into the Voodoo III map on my driver CD and as it works perfectly with the Voodoo III I never noticed. I have used this driver pack with the Vooodoo III installed in Intel systems for years and I have never suffered from any performance issues but I can understand that AMDs 3dnow! optimized 3DfxGL Quake II driver gets confused. The strange thing is that everything else works 😁.

Note to self, read the readme.txt file before installing stuff.

Edit 4

When looking for a better driver I again got directed to the driverpack Im already using so its supposed to work just fine with the Voodoo III which it indeed does. I will try a Voodoo III reference driver later as my results even with the Intel system seems to be at least 10% lower in most games compared to Phils results in his Voodoo shootout project with a similar CPU. It could be some PCI vs AGP thing or simply because the Gigabyte BX2000+ has really bad memory performance compared to the AOpen AX6BC which is one of the faster BX boards.

I finally solved the mystery with the Gigabyte GA-5AX inconsistent performance using different memory modules with the same size and layout and with the same BIOS settings.

It seems if I activate "Auto Configuration " under "Chipset Features Setup" after I have changed memory module the performance stays consistent. After booting Windows once Auto Configuration can be disabled again. I have no idea why but it seems the BIOS needs the auto configuration to get everything right with a new module. If I do not do this its hit and miss how the performance will be after switching modules.

Another thing I have noticed is that the board can suffer from performance degradation after changing the chipset and memory settings back and forth too much and then the only way to get the performance back seems to be loading the BIOS defaults and start all over.

I still cant replicate my 4m 44s SuperPi 1M time with the K6-3+ at 5x120 MHz from last year but now I can at least get 4m 54s consistently at that speed.

I like Super Socket 7 but the Gigabyte GA-5AX is a really strange motherboard.

EDIT

Finally I manged to find the combination of settings that is optimal for SuperPi !!!
I did not only manage to replicate the 4m 44s time from last year, I managed to beat it 😁

4m 38s with the K6-3+ at at 5x120 MHz.
Its a new personal best with this CPU and a rather good Socket-7 SuperPi 1M score, at least for Windows 9x as SuperPi runs faster in both Windows NT4 and 5.x!

I followed these directions for the Quake 2 3DNow! patch with Voodoo 3 and Banshee. Totally unintuitive, but it works.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/277/6

boxpressed wrote:

I followed these directions for the Quake 2 3DNow! patch with Voodoo 3 and Banshee. Totally unintuitive, but it works.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/277/6

"
Unfortunately, there is much confusion as to how to properly take advantage of AMDs 3DNow! Quake 2 patch with the 3dfx Banshee and Voodoo3 which require the use of 3dfxs MiniGL driver rather than AMDs 3dfxglam.dll driver under Quake 2 (and all other games based on the Q2 engine). The process is quite simple actually, however it isnt documented anywhere on 3dfxs site:

"

This explains the trouble I was having with 3dfxglam.dll 😀

I already had the normal 3dfxs MiniGL driver working and while the performance did increase some with the 3dnow! optimized Quake2.exe I did not reach the performance you got.

edit

I noticed that my version of the 3dfxs MiniGL driver is 1.3, I will try to update it to the version you used, perhaps thats the issue.

edit 2

I did a Quick Google and to get good performance with 3dnow! you need to use 3dfxs MiniGL v1.47 or v1.49 so that is the reason for my bad performance!

edit 3

The 3dfxs MiniGL v1.47 did improve the performance some more but my system is still alot slower than yours in Quake II. I blame the combination of the Gigabyte GA-5AX and the Voodoo III PCI. I will try the K6-3+ and Voodoo III PCI with one of my PC Chips M577 with VIA MVP3 chipset later to see if that combination performs better.

Thanks for the help!