Took apart and cleaned a super nintendo and gave it a retrobright treatment. The bottom is still a bit yellow after two treatments. I will have to give it one more and I think it will be good.

I also took apart and cleaned the controllers. One of them needed one of the L and R buttons superglued back together. All fixed now.

I tested my "switchable TTL Oscillator mod" idea on retro mainboard FIC-486-VC-HD ISA board

i486DX2/66 and Amd 5x86/133 CPUs
ICS2494N clock generator is from dead ISA G.K. 🤣

Lovin' the idea! 😁

Testing a GF2-GTS by punishing it with some high resolution gaming, using detonator3 driver.
So far so good. Been playing UT99 on this card for two hours straight and no issue's.

Somehow, I feel that it is a bit better balanced than a G400 on P3-500 and 440BX.
The bad part is that I loose that great image quality for some better performance.
It's like plaque or cholera. Can't have it all I guess.

Finally received my 486 board, RAM and CPU kit from Ukraine. Sadly it hangs after POSTing at "Updating ESCD". I managed to find an old Vogons thread that suggested that it might be the cache chips and the system works normally now that I removed them. It's using an AM5x86-133-P75 CPU so hopefully the performance loss won't be too bad.

133MHz wrote:

Lovin' the idea! 😁

Yeah, that's a great idea!

Anyway, still working on this system:
10 Reasons for a Pentium 4 Windows 98 DOS Retro Gaming PC :)

Main thing to do is to make it quieter. Bought four brand new Arctic Super Silent 4 Ultra TC coolers for it - I only wanted one, but I won the auction for all four with a bid of 1€ 🤣

In the meantime, I've replaced the stock cooler on the FX5700:

No idea where this one is from, but it fits perfectly. Plus, I've been able to connect it to the mainboards fan headers, resulting in the fan being controlled by the mainboard. It completely stops when the system is idle. System is rock solid and a good deal quieter that way.

I have added the following tunes to the Creative Wave Blaster 1 playlist:

- The Incredible Machine - Play A Set
- Gabriel Knight - St. George's Book Shop
- Madonna - Holiday
- Dance (Creative AWE32/64 demo midi)
- 5 Days a Stranger Theme
- 7 Days a Skeptic Theme
- Super Mario 64 - Inside the Castle Walls
- Super Mario 64 - Dire Dire Docks
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows Theme
- Tyrian Theme
- Cold Dreams - Introduction
- Cold Dreams - Main Theme
- Cold Dreams - Training
- Cold Dreams - World 1
- Cold Dreams - World 2
- Cold Dreams - World 3
- Canyon.mid

Link to playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxDnrsc … LiQxkg1wERt3wrq

Playing around with both of my Adaptech-1542-C controllers. Both are ISA, have 50pin SCSI and Floppy.
One is tested ok, with a floppy-drive and a 4.5 gb IBM HDD.

Played with my 8088 some more.... until it decided to kind of die =(
Well, I am using it through a capture card, and I just minimized the window on my main PC to check on a few things... got carried away and took a while. When I got back to my 8088 the screen was just black. Now it doesn't POST. Removing the CGA card doesn't make it beep, removing the multi-IO as well makes no difference. I believe it the RAM chips were the issue the board would at least beep... If it is the BIOS chip that died I have a backup of the ROM (first thing I did as soon as I bought a programmer).

Hmn... it is reviving little by little....
I left it off for a while, then turned it back on. Then it hung on the memory test. Then I left it off some more... and now it displays garbage on the screen right after the memory test. I suspect the memory chips =/

EDIT: Now it POSTs, but complains about a memory error. Yup, damned memory chips.

I have uploaded some tunes for the 'Recorded with Creative Wave Blaster 1' playlist again:

This time, five demos that came with the Wave Blaster driver disk:

- Concerto
- Chipblue
- Pwrply
- Trout2
- Wingwk

Link to the playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxDnrsc … LiQxkg1wERt3wrq

Recieved a AMD K5 PR166 cpu form ebay. Worst packaging I have seen for ages, CPU was wrapped in tissue paper then put in a tiny padded envelope, of course on arrival all the pins were bent every witch way!! Spent 2 hours straightening out the pins, but eventually got there! Thankfully it works fine, so ran some bechmarks in my AT DFi system and added them to Phil's spreadsheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9n … wpNU/edit#gid=0
It's actually not a bad chip, stand up pretty well to the Cyrix 6x86l 200+ I ran yesterday in the same system. Not bad considering 66 vs 75 bus, 116 mhz vs 150 mhz, it really is pretty close.
No excuse for ebay sellers to post things like this though! Got to laugh at the "FRAGILE" on top of envelope! 🤣

ROFL @ the tissue paper 'packaging' :')

I have added some more tunes from Bible Black (Nightmare, Bible Black, Catacombe),
from Duke Nukem 3D (Missing? Impossible!, Gotham, Aliens, Say Your Prayers!)

But since there is such a hype for Back to the Future these days (I have always loved the Theme Song):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ0xmJpih_o&li … Rt3wrq&index=49

Now wondering which midi-tune i'm going to record as the 50th video on my channel 😁

Quick test of FIC SD11 and Athlon 550. Bought as "pile of junk - for spare parts or gold extraction". POST successfully at the first attempt, not bad. 😎
Maybe I will put V2 SLI in and create nice win98 PC.

Been batteling with my Adaptec 1542-C ISA controller today. Been a learningfull experience I might say.

What I tested and played with, was an Asus P5A, 16mb ram, random TNT2 agp-card, the controller and some SCSI devices.
The devices are an IBM 9.4GB HDD, Plextor CD-Burner and a ZIP-100. All SCSI. I have no ZIP media, so it is used as an terminator.
(build in terminator)

No problem formatting the HDD and installing MS-Dos-6.22. The problem arose when I wanted to install the drivers for CD-Rom.
It would just keep hanging during CONFIG.SYS. No matter what I did. Then it struck me, that the card has MEM-Base dip-switches.
And the BIOS has settings for ISA MEM-BASE. So I tested with the MEM-Base selected for the one set on the SCSI controller.
And hurray... Shit works now. 😀 Boy do I feel stupid... I should have thought about this. Well... One can allways learn new I guess.

🤣 🤣 🤣

Now... I thought to my self... Why not test that disabling of cache (L1 + L2) and just run some Norton Sysinfo really quick.
The CPU on this setup, is just a K6-II-300 and I really did not expect much. So getting as close as possible to a 486, I got
what appears to be close to a 386DX-40. Yeah.... Really need a more powerfull CPU to hit that 486-Class.
With both cache's turned off, it would go as slow as an 286-class. Not really what I wanted. (Good to know anyway)
The diskspeed could not be 100% completed duo to the "intelligent controller" (figures), yet the speed measured, are great
for a 386-Class machine. Never had that much speed back in 95, when I had my 486dx2. 🤣
Never mind. I'll just post some pic's that I took of it.

Finally (for retro activity) I just cooked some homemade marcipan. Not really hard at all.
Just boiled the almonds, took of the peel, and grinded them into a mash/pure'.
Then cooked some sugar-sirup, using nothing but sugar and a little bit of water and mixed it with the almonds.
Then I just kneaded it, like it was a bread untill it became marcipan. 30/35% sugar, 70/65% almonds.

Recorded some more tunes on my Creative Wave Blaster 1:

- Tyrian - Tyrian the Level
- Wolfenstein 3D - Menu Theme
- Wolfenstein 3D - E1M1
- Mariah Carey - All i want for Christmas is You
- Space Quest V - Starcon Academy
- Leisure Suit Larry 6 Theme
- Privateer - Intro Theme
- Privateer - Agricultural Base
- Tie fighter - Intro Theme

Link to playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxDnrsc … LiQxkg1wERt3wrq

Credits to Phils Computer Lab as his Dreamblaster reviews inspired me to record some of the games above.

Decided to install Windows 98SE on my Compaq Presario 5005SR (a.k.a. this thing). Had a bit of a laugh when I saw this while installing the driver for the ESS Allegro sound card (still available on HP's website, BTW):

🤣 @ the above 😀 Is the Allegro soundcard a standard part of the Compaq computer (Since the drivers say 'Compaq' too) ?

Been putting together a retro-dos machine "package" for sale.

- K6-II-300
- Asus P5A
- TNT2 M64
- 32mb Ram
- 1024mb HDD (Quantum Fireball)
- CD-Rom (Samsung)
- SB16 ISA
- Keyboard and mouse.

It is fully installed with MS-Dos-6.22 and a load of games.
Only need to take some pictures of the machine.
My issue now, is to figure out what I want for it. Wich I really have no clue on.

Any suggestions?

deemster wrote:

🤣 @ the above 😀 Is the Allegro soundcard a standard part of the Compaq computer (Since the drivers say 'Compaq' too) ?

Yeah. It's actually integrated onto the motherboard.