Produced a video about the TNT2 after having done all the benchmarks for my Windows 98 graphics benchmark project. TNT2, TNT2, Pro, Ultra and M64.

What most don't know, the Voodoo2 was my last card, before a 4 year total absence from computing. Picked it up with a P4 and Radeon 9800. So this is a real journey of discovery / blast from the past for me 😀

I really like the TNT2 and believe I would have chosen this card over the Voodoo3, back in the day. Not quite sure on the timeline of the cards, which one was out earlier, but the TNT2 had the 32 bit colour and sharper textures going for it.

Anyway, I'll be benchmarking and reviewing the V3 next, so that should be interesting 😀

Imperious wrote:

Unfortunately my multimeter will not read it in circuit and I'm not going to desolder it to find out. It looks exactly the same […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

You are correct, the board is an Epox EP58MVP3C-M. Any insight on what cap it is and whether its important or not would be great. 😀

Unfortunately my multimeter will not read it in circuit and I'm not going to desolder it to find out. It looks exactly the same as the other ones CB66 and CB65 nearby, probably 100nf but seriously I wouldn't worry about it.
Get the computer running and if all good and stable then forget about it.
You may have issues such as reboots with more powerful AGP cards in this mobo. I did with a TI4200 and mx440 and 5200. Tnt2 is ok but of course my motherboard could have some probs.

The computer runs just fine without the cap from what I can tell. If I do not run into any issues I will ignore the missing cap and pretend that spot is supposed to be unpopulated. The system is equipped with a Geforce 2 MX400 and I have not had any issues yet at least.

Thanks for the help.

Snagged this awesome 18" Liyama Pro 450 CRT monitor yesterday for free, it even has security system hookups in the back so I'm thinking it could probably be used with my 80's home computers and consoles that output composite video (with an adapter of course).

Here it is next to the old 1996 Sceptre Plug and Play monitor I was using for my retro gaming rig. I believe the Sceptre is only 14" so you can really see the size difference here.

Talked the boss into letting me rescue a Gateway 400mhz Pentium II / 128mb today from going to the recycling side of our company. (Yeah, it's pretty cool to work for a computer store that also does electronics recycling. 😀 )

Haven't decided what I'm going to do with it yet. I'm considering a DOS machine? Maybe I'll grab another AWE32 card since it has a single 16bit slot, and keep it's current TNT2 card. I'm open for ideas.. It has a noisy hard drive with XP on it now.

Man I've been getting lucky lately. 🤣 Just bought this desk from the local goodwill for 5$ (after using a coupon and in store credit I had from returning something).

Now I finally have some room while doing my retro computing. 😜

Oldbitcollector wrote:

Talked the boss into letting me rescue a Gateway 400mhz Pentium II / 128mb today from going to the recycling side of our company. (Yeah, it's pretty cool to work for a computer store that also does electronics recycling. 😀 )

Haven't decided what I'm going to do with it yet. I'm considering a DOS machine? Maybe I'll grab another AWE32 card since it has a single 16bit slot, and keep it's current TNT2 card. I'm open for ideas.. It has a noisy hard drive with XP on it now.

Change the harddrive and install Win98se on it. Other than that, use it for multiple OS's.
Win2000, Nt4, MS-Dos, Os/2 comes to mind.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Snagged this awesome 18" Liyama Pro 450 CRT monitor yesterday for free, it even has security system hookups in the back so I'm thinking it could probably be used with my 80's home computers and consoles that output composite video (with an adapter of course).

Very very nice! That Liyama is one of the "flattest" screen CRT's you can get. Good find!

I remember reading a review about it that said that it made a sony trinitron look like bubble when you put it next to it and almost looks concave because it gives such a flat picture. It of course uses a Mitsubishi diamondtron, so it's just an awesome CRT.

When you say it has security system hookups in the back, I am guessing you mean BNC connectors. I wonder if it does RGB (i.e. RGsB, RGB, etc) or if it is just RGBHV? I think I remember reading on that same review that it does sync on green, which would be amazing, because I believe that would mean that you can for example hook up a PS2 directly to it after setting it up for RGB output. Also, with Sync on Green, you can use a cheap Extron RGB adapter and hook up more game consoles and get true RGB. It's probably worth looking into...this is a great CRT....maybe one of the best around from what I have read about it.

If you can, post a picture of the connectors on the back with any of the labels on them.

Bought a Yamaha YST-MS35D 2.1 speaker set which turns out to be rather shi*e. The sound is right in the centre of your head i.e. with little to no separation and the quality of the high frequency speakers are terrible. Yamaha seems to be overhyped. It doesn't compare to the Altec Lansing ACS40 2.0 which when I first heard the sound was just fantastic.

[edit: photob*ck^t pic removed. post was useless without.]

xjas wrote:

Failed to get my Asus PC-DL Deluxe to boot. It used to work but after a couple months in an anti-static bag in my dry, clean closet it now claims the BIOS is corrupt and won't go.

There is an on-board recovery mode that runs a BIOS flash app (awdflash.exe) from floppy, but that freezes after reading the new BIOS image from the disk. I'm out of ideas.

It's a shame as this would be a pretty cool board if I could get it going. Dual P4/2.4 with AGP8x, onboard RAID, SATA & dual-channel RAM support.

Looks like the BIOS is socketed - just yank it out and program it. If you don't have a programmer you can risk hot-flashing it in another board, but you should seriously consider getting one.

After 20 years, my Gravis Ultrasound ACE now has 1MB of onboard memory. I was able to find an exact match for the 512KB DIP that was soldered to the card.

The installation was not without drama, however. Everything seemed to go smoothly as I tested the GUS with a couple of games. Upon the next reboot, however, ULTRINIT said that it could not find an Ultrasound card. The situation persisted until I put it in a different ISA slot.

Then, my AWE32 decided to not recognize any of its memory, either the bulit-in 512KB or the two 16MB SIMMs. Had to do a lot of fiddling around--replacing the SIMMs, leaving the sockets empty, changing jumper settings--until things went back to normal. Very scary, though.

I got smart and stuck a couple of these rubberized feet to the bottom of my case to support the other end of the AWE32.

Installed the Iomega ZIP Drive 750MB (recently found inside an IBM xSeries 206 in the dumpster) in my Windows 98 SE build - hey, it's getting crowded in the front panel!

Indrid Cold wrote:

Installed the Iomega ZIP Drive 750MB (recently found inside an IBM xSeries 206 in the dumpster) in my Windows 98 SE build - hey, it's getting crowded in the front panel!

All decked out 😀

A GOTEK would fit nicely?

philscomputerlab wrote:

Indrid Cold wrote:

Installed the Iomega ZIP Drive 750MB (recently found inside an IBM xSeries 206 in the dumpster) in my Windows 98 SE build - hey, it's getting crowded in the front panel!

All decked out 😀

A GOTEK would fit nicely?

Hello Phil, I'm attracted by floppy emulators, but more for my Amiga 600 than PC, I must confess 😀

No worries 😀

I finally got my Latitude C600 working after the PA-6 adapter I ordered came in the mail today. It runs Windows Me and has a couple lines of dead pixels in the display, but I have another parts machine for this laptop at the vocational school so it's no big thing, I'll just swap them out really quick on Monday. I was thinking I had wasted my money at first because in text mode everything was perfectly fine, but in graphical mode I ended up with a severely corrupted image. Don't know what I did but it fixed it and it stood up to 10 and a half hours of rigorous testing, well enough to put the temps into the "uncomfortable to have on the lap" range.

Was heartbroken to find my laptop PATA 80GB drive doesn't work, it hangs up the system during the detection phase of booting. There goes my multiboot plan, I'll have to keep this strictly 9x on the 40GB drive I have, and I'll barely have enough space on that after all is said and done. This is because I use one or two machines to play literally everything I own from that time period, so I need these massive amounts of storage on these old computers. Oh well. Not like any modern browsers will run without SSE2 anyway.

My Magnavox 486 SX appears to have died. I plugged a PCB in and it would not turn on. I took it out. It then posted yesterday. Today I switched some PCBs around. Now it does not POST but turns on.

Too bad but with this 20+ years old equipment you never know when retirement comes along.

Have you checked the slots for debris? Is there perhaps a certain slot that, when in use, causes this problem?

I've been sorting the non-3dfx graphics cards and I picked these cards for a benchmarking project:

STB Velocity 4400 16MB (TNT)
Diamond Viper V550 AGP 16MB (TNT)
Diamond Viper V770 ATX AGP 32MB (TNT 2)
ASUS V3800M - LP rev 1.00 AGP (TNT 2)
ASUS V3800M 32MB AGP (TNT 2)
ELSA Erazor X A32 32MB AGP (Geforce 256 SDR)
Daytona 64T Trident 3DImage9750
Jaton Video-107AGP 8MB Trident Blade3D
Matrox G4+MDH4A32G AGP 32MB
ATI Rage 128 Ultra 32MB AGP
ATI Rage Fury MAXX
Diamond Stealth II S220 (Rendition Verite V2100) PCI 4MB
Number Nine Revolution 3D 4MB SGRAM PCI
Jaton Geforce MX 4000 PCI 128MB

Testplatform: Pentium III-S 1400 / 512MB SD / Asus TUSL2-C / Win98SE

Maybe there are some differences between the cards with the same VPU.

I also removed the riser card: no POST.