I finally managed to get this Intel i440LX board to boot DOS!!!

Getting the board to post was no issues but I have never ever in my life experienced such a picky motherboard.

The memory needs to be just right!
This is not the floppy drive you are seeking!
No not that that tested fully working HDD of a supported size!
Boot from CD might exist as a BIOS option but dont expect it to work!
I will work in slow motion until I finally lock up if you disable the parallel and serial ports!

And so on and on and on and...

Im very confident this board still has the BIOS it was sold with! 😜

edit fixed typos

Skyscraper wrote:

I finally managed to get this Intel i430LX board to boot DOS!!! […]
Show full quote

I finally managed to get this Intel i430LX board to boot DOS!!!

Getting the board to post was no issues but I have never ever in my life experienced such a picky motherboard.

The memory needs to be just right!
This is not the floppy drive you are seeking!
No that that tested fully working HDD of a supported size!
Boot from CD might exist as a BIOS option but dont expect it to work!
I will work in slow motion until I finally lock up if you disable the parallel and serial ports!

And so on and on and on and...

Im very confident this board still has the BIOS it was sold with! 😜

Sounds easy to me. You should work on an IBM, it will change your life if it doesn't kill you.

luckybob wrote:

Sounds easy to me. You should work on an IBM, it will change your life if it doesn't kill you.

Another nice feature is that there isnt any mutiplier selection on the board or in the BIOS and because my unlocked Klamath P2 300 is a late stepping the motherboard dosnt know its a P2 300 and runs it 266 MHz.

Got the Katmai running today. Nothing was wrong with the hard drive, it was that the CD drive wasn't getting enough power -- moving the fan over to the other rail has everything working fine again. Of course, it could also be that I reseated all the RAM, cards and CPU. It now runs a fresh copy of Windows 2000 SP4, I have no boot disks for installing 98/Me otherwise it'd be running one of those. Was just going to skip taking pictures -- it wouldn't be mine anymore after today, so why bother? Now I have no excuse, I'll get to it when I get to it.

The potential customer for the machine backed out of the deal at the last minute so now I have a copy of Windows that isn't registered to me installed. Thank you for wasting my entire afternoon! This was after I told them the price: $75 including a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. I thought I was doing them a favor considering I checked the prices on eBay for extremely similar models (as there were no examples of my exact machine to compare against) and for an original machine they want anywhere from 80 to 150 dollars just for the tower. The best part is that I was upfront about the price, I told them before I did anything to the thing!

Memtesting today (and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and so on) around sixty pc100/133 modules on my old Compaq Deskpro EN. I'm discarding faulty ones. Then when I finish this, I'll see if I have enough modules to sell and still keep a good quantity for me, or if I don't sell anything. In fact, I have to test every piece of hardware I have and do the same. But it's really a lot and I don't have enough time to do it quickly.

Played some Jack Nicklaus Golf.

Spend basically the entire evening up until now fiddling around in the files of Imperialism II with a couple hex editors and after a couple hours and trying to find anything related to Imp II (that mapeditor seems to not have any download links left and I'm not touching any websites with strange urls 🤣) I finally figured out how to view the europe map in the hexeditor and change stuff around...too bad for some reasons my changes weren't showing up (I messed with that for over an hour, but enough for today) but at least I managed to do a quick money cheat with one of the save files 😁

And yes I know theres trainers and whatsnot around for that, but wheres the fun with those? 😀

Worked on the MAME Relicensing project. Tracking down developers across the years.

Skyscraper wrote:

I finally managed to get this Intel i440LX board to boot DOS!!! […]
Show full quote

I finally managed to get this Intel i440LX board to boot DOS!!!

Getting the board to post was no issues but I have never ever in my life experienced such a picky motherboard.

The memory needs to be just right!
This is not the floppy drive you are seeking!
No not that that tested fully working HDD of a supported size!
Boot from CD might exist as a BIOS option but dont expect it to work!
I will work in slow motion until I finally lock up if you disable the parallel and serial ports!

And so on and on and on and...

Im very confident this board still has the BIOS it was sold with! 😜

edit fixed typos

This is actually a little bit odd to me. I don't doubt your skills btw, just comparing to my own LX build which went kinda seamless (though it was one of the later LX boards, it already featured s370). But then again, I have a couple "rules" I use to prevent unexpected mishaps like the one you described when you tried to disable your parallel and serial ports.
I'll usually not disable anything unless I have to (like disabling onboard sound when I intent to use a dedicated sound card) and I always try to cherrypick the RAM in a way that all chips on all modules are the same density (possibly even the same brand, if I have any spares), a bit overspecced if I have plenty spares (like running PC-100 cl2 at 66MHz) and as few chips on the RAM in total as possible. It may be unnecessary, but in the past many boards have given me trouble when I simply threw in some modules of whatever size.

I do hope your LX build works out for you, LX is a good contender for underclocking (better chance at 50MHz FSB than BX, just to name something)

If you want a picky motherboard which is not total crap, try a ASUS A7V133 (with rev without a dot) with a Palomino and 3 DIMMs 😁

Tetrium wrote:

This is actually a little bit odd to me. I don't doubt your skills btw, just comparing to my own LX build which went kinda seaml […]
Show full quote

Skyscraper wrote:

I finally managed to get this Intel i440LX board to boot DOS!!! […]
Show full quote

I finally managed to get this Intel i440LX board to boot DOS!!!

Getting the board to post was no issues but I have never ever in my life experienced such a picky motherboard.

The memory needs to be just right!
This is not the floppy drive you are seeking!
No not that that tested fully working HDD of a supported size!
Boot from CD might exist as a BIOS option but dont expect it to work!
I will work in slow motion until I finally lock up if you disable the parallel and serial ports!

And so on and on and on and...

Im very confident this board still has the BIOS it was sold with! 😜

edit fixed typos

This is actually a little bit odd to me. I don't doubt your skills btw, just comparing to my own LX build which went kinda seamless (though it was one of the later LX boards, it already featured s370). But then again, I have a couple "rules" I use to prevent unexpected mishaps like the one you described when you tried to disable your parallel and serial ports.
I'll usually not disable anything unless I have to (like disabling onboard sound when I intent to use a dedicated sound card) and I always try to cherrypick the RAM in a way that all chips on all modules are the same density (possibly even the same brand, if I have any spares), a bit overspecced if I have plenty spares (like running PC-100 cl2 at 66MHz) and as few chips on the RAM in total as possible. It may be unnecessary, but in the past many boards have given me trouble when I simply threw in some modules of whatever size.

I do hope your LX build works out for you, LX is a good contender for underclocking (better chance at 50MHz FSB than BX, just to name something)

If you want a picky motherboard which is not total crap, try a ASUS A7V133 (with rev without a dot) with a Palomino and 3 DIMMs 😁

Im only messing around with the Intel i440LX motherboard, I see no real reason to replace my M577 MVP3 SS7 system as my main DOS system. 😀

My Intel board still had a BIOS from the time around the i440LX platforms release which I think caused most of the issues.

When it comes to my own systems I always disable everything in the BIOS I know I am never going to use before I install anything to get the hardware config with all resources as I want it from the start, this normally works just fine!

Both the memory of choice and the HDD caused issues. I diddnt choose the memory to be as compatible as possible, I wanted to use the same module I used with the M729 and M577 and I wanted to use a Fujitsu 4.3 GB HDD. The motherboard would seem to detect the HDD correctly but only in the BIOS and it would not even post with the double sided 256MB module. Another much stanger issue was that I had to try 4 floppy drives before I found one that worked correctly, the others would seem to work and read from the floppys... forever and ever. I thought that perhaps the PSU was too weak as the system would not boot from either CD or floppy (it did try) but that was not the case.

As I said I have never tinkered with such a picky board before and I have probably built 1000+ systems. If it wasnt for the fact that its an Intel board I would have thought every single cap on the board were bad but now Im sticking with the old BIOS hypotesis.

I have updated the board with the latest BIOS so with luck it should be smooth sailing from here on but I wont know for sure for a couple of hours as I went to bed after flashing the new BIOS.

luckybob wrote:

Sounds easy to me. You should work on an IBM, it will change your life if it doesn't kill you.

The PS/2 is probably one of the most pickiest systems i've worked on... it definitely tests your patience!

Not really retro, but rather very geeky.
Last week I attended and directed a motion capture shoot in Los Angeles. It was such a great and intense experience... can't wait to do it again.

Farted around with a crappy P4 board and at last found 2 sets of identical ram to put in it so that it would run the memory at the proper speed and in dual channel. Settled on one set of Kingston DDR400 cl3 and a set of "Kingston" (looks to be Chinese knock off's) DDR400 cl3. All 512's for a total of 2gb. Now off to give it away for free!

I installed Windows 98 SE on my Intel AL440LX Slot-1 test system.

The latest BIOS seems to have fixed most of the issues I had with this board. The 256MB memory module now works fine. Disabling ports and stuff now disables ports and stuff but still lets the system boot. Booting from CD works. The system still dosnt like the Fujitsu HDD I wanted to use and this unlocked PII 300 still runs at 266 MHz but this is just minor issues as the board now can handle large (8.4GB+) HDDs and I have plenty of Slot-1 CPUs.

Designed and made a simple and small open-case with built-in floppy drive, cd-rom, 2,5 inch drive and 12 volt power supply, so mainboards can be switched quickly. Used 20x30 HIPS polistyrene sheet and glued some 3d printed parts to it. And M3 screws, so that's basically only 3 parts besides electronics :p I need to attach some rubber stands to it and make a panel with power switch and LEDs.

adalbert wrote:

Designed and made a simple and small open-case with built-in floppy drive, cd-rom, 2,5 inch drive and 12 volt power supply, so mainboards can be switched quickly. Used 20x30 HIPS polistyrene sheet and glued some 3d printed parts to it. And M3 screws, so that's basically only 3 parts besides electronics :p I need to attach some rubber stands to it and make a panel with power switch and LEDs.

Nice!! I like it. Looks tidy to perform hardware tests without all the material all around the table 🤣

Setting up and re-configuring the water cooling system in my 775 computer to do a "battle royale".

Windows XP SP-0 performance with AMD Vs Intel.

I may make a thread on it on here and post relevant information there.

AMD Side: AthlonXP 3200+ Barton @ 2.5 ghz, with dual channel ddr-475, geforce 6800 ultra AGP

Intel side: 775 2MB Pescott @ dunno mhz, haven't put it together and clocked it yet, I think this chip's done 3.7 ghz stable before under water.

Start out intel side at GT-240 and later step it up to water cooled (and seriously overclocked) GTX-470 for later. And getting a cedar mill chip for it later this week and aim for the 'above 4ghz' range on water.

And we'll see what high end cedar mill P4 can do with a fast video card and 4ghz.

kithylin wrote:

AMD Side: AthlonXP 3200+ Barton @ 2.5 ghz, with dual channel ddr-475, geforce 6800 ultra AGP
Intel side: 775 2MB Pescott @ dunno mhz, haven't put it together and clocked it yet, I think this chip's done 3.7 ghz stable before under water.

That doesn't at all look fair on the AMD side, for a more fair comparison you should probably use one of the S754 Athlon 64 single cores. Perhaps an Athlon FX?

3DMark '00 gives the Katmai some 1800 3DMarks, seems a bit low until I remember it's running a PCI Radeon 7000 and a 500MHz Katmai. This is using the default benchmarking settings, 1024x768x16-bit, don't remember the rest. Will post screenshots next time I go downstairs.

Sedrosken wrote:

kithylin wrote:

AMD Side: AthlonXP 3200+ Barton @ 2.5 ghz, with dual channel ddr-475, geforce 6800 ultra AGP
Intel side: 775 2MB Pescott @ dunno mhz, haven't put it together and clocked it yet, I think this chip's done 3.7 ghz stable before under water.

That doesn't at all look fair on the AMD side, for a more fair comparison you should probably use one of the S754 Athlon 64 single cores. Perhaps an Athlon FX?

3DMark '00 gives the Katmai some 1800 3DMarks, seems a bit low until I remember it's running a PCI Radeon 7000 and a 500MHz Katmai. This is using the default benchmarking settings, 1024x768x16-bit, don't remember the rest. Will post screenshots next time I go downstairs.

These are just all the chips I own at the moment, so trying to play around with em.

I solved the issue with all PII CPUs running at 266 MHz on my Intel AL440LX. The motherboard locks the multiplier and the only way to change it is by using the clear BIOS settings jumper. I tried to clear the BIOS multiplier setting by just moving the jumper with the system turned off and when this diddnt work I tried removing the battery and shorting the terminals. If I had RTFM I would have known that I needed to make the system POST and enter the BIOS setup with the BIOS jumper in clear position to allow for the muliplier to be changed.

When you do this you can set the muliplier to what ever speed you want as long as the CPU supports that multiplier as you would expect. The maximum multiplier is 7x so the maximum speed you can choose is 7x66 = 466 MHz but as the PPGA Celerons are fully multiplier locked the 500 and 533 MHz versions probably also work.