vetz wrote:

Been messing around with my new Socket 478 setup with: […]
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Been messing around with my new Socket 478 setup with:

Intel Pentium 4 HT 550 Socket 478 3.4Ghz (G1 stepping)
Thermaltake SI-120 heatsink w/Cooler Master 120mm fan
ASUS P8C800-E Deluxe motherboard
2x512MB OCZ EL PC-3200 Platinum Rev. 2 (2-2-2-5)
Club3D Radeon HD3850 512MB AGP

I learned the hard way to limit AGP aperture size to 8MB, or else there is no more than 4bit graphics in Windows... Have just overclocked to 3.8ghz so far, but should go higher. It runs Crysis! I benched it avg fps of 26 with 1280x1024 and everything set to high details. F.E.A.R. flies on this machine!

That's rather odd, I never had that issue with a P4P800dlx and HD3850, although I did have it paired up with a Pentium M at that point. The P4 is a huge bottleneck for that Video card, even the Pentium M
was a bottleneck. I might hook mine up soon.

The last time I tested and benched Slot-1 motherboards I got the good idea to put my unlocked PII CPUs in a box with one tested working CPU of each speedgrade of Klamath, Deschutes and Katmai. Now that box is nowhere to be seen, it's probably under a load of crap far in some wardrobe.

As I cant be bothered to search though every near to identical box in every wardrobe I have to use untested CPUs. It's not that I cant find the speedgrades I need, it's just a pain to use untested CPUs as you never now if a failed post is a dead CPU or if it's just not seated properly and I had to test many Deschutes before I found another unlocked one for testing low multipliers. I know I could have checked manufacturing dates but I didn't.

For some reason it seems I have loads of dead Slot-1 CPUs, I wonder what the previous owners did to those. I do not think I have a single dead Socket-7 CPU out of ~150 CPUs, most of them coming from gold scrap lots I have bought the last year, a few are missing a pin or two but I have been lucky and they have been NC or ground pins.

Currently benchmarking some socket 754 Athlon 64 chips. Interesting that only the later ones activate the command rate option (1T/2T) in the BIOS. Early chips / revisions have this option simply not show up, I guess at some stepping the Athlon 64 started to support command rate?

Took over the kichen table playing around with a dodgy Acorn RiscPC for the hell of it:

Nice thing about these is they can take a x86 co-processor card and you can run dos through to Windows 98 no problem.

Earlier on in the day it was a Archie A4000.

Yesterday I put my old OS/2 v4 hdd in a K6-2 350 system. A nice gain in performance over it's original P1-133 install.

Tomorrow I think I'll drag out the Mac :

Caluser2000 wrote:

Took over the kichen table playing around with a dodgy Acorn RiscPC for the hell of it:

IMAG0258.JPG

Nice thing about these is they can take a x86 co-processor card and you can run dos through to Windows 98 no problem.

Very nice machine, you seem to run an old version of the system though, from what I remember of the look of the icons, 3.xx, right?

lolo799 wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

Took over the kichen table playing around with a dodgy Acorn RiscPC for the hell of it:

IMAG0258.JPG

Nice thing about these is they can take a x86 co-processor card and you can run dos through to Windows 98 no problem.

Very nice machine, you seem to run an old version of the system though, from what I remember of the look of the icons, 3.xx, right?

3.60, it's booting off the roms due to an issue with the hdd. I could always slap New Look on this one if I felt like it. Version 3.x is all you really need 😉 and is still supported.

http://qubeserver.com/Qube/classicriscos.html

I've got another flacky system with 4.6 roms but they will go into system thats running correctly. I could always slap New Look on this one if need be.

Got a bizarre Vibra 16C with a built in modem for a pound here: http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/131751607156

I know Vibra's are a bit crap bit it was too unusual to pass up. Arrived today and is currently in my 386 Compaq Deskpro, just to make the 20Kg beast a little heavier. Oh and I got a Etherlink III from the same guy for the same price. Again, to go in my beast.

I will get a proper SB16 for it someday though...

Installed Lubuntu along with Windows XP on a Compaq Deskpro EN which has a Pentium 3 1Ghz and 512MB of ram. With some fine tuning and with the help of this really light distro, Lubuntu can make this computer quite useful again. I can watch youtube through VLC and even have steam and skype plugin for Pidgin, so this machine is capable once again with internet. It's my garage computer's so i'm fine with it!
Windows XP is for oldschool gaming and Lubuntu for secure internet.
Just wrote this quick reply with it!

Swapped my Pentium 4 machine into a different case with better airflow and set a basic web browser up for a friend. Just a little 2.0ghz Athlon64x2 with 4gb of DDR and an ATI X1050

Regarding wardrobes.... 🤣

Was doing some kind of inventory in mine, and stumbled across an old stash of Voodoo cards I almost regarded as lost...!
Been sitting there 8(!) years in an anonymous box, though I knew they were 'somewhere', I had never found them when looking on earlier occations...

They all worked fine when I tested them today, great vibrant colors and no artifacts, and all fans spinning/regular noise level. So there !
Now, what to do with them, I wonder. New project or just keep them as spares...? (more wardrobe time, heh... 😜 )

PS: as for HD3850/AGP aperture and Asus s478 , I have had the exact same experience as 'Imperious', i.e. no problems(& no special BIOS settings), other than some games seemingly gets a 'too fast' effect (running in SystemShock2 comes to mind).

Though currently using a '7900GT'(7800 Gainward special).
Not sure if system RAM size is relevant - have 2,5gb, and aperture size is at 64mb (just checked).

PPS: in that narnian wardrobe was also a weird sound card I didn't know I had, a Zefiro ZA2 (?). Any good for gaming I wonder ? Very little info online, so...

Some dumb terminal madness using banana.com on the Zenith Z-180 PC hooked up via null-modem cable to this linux box.

I found an old JVC S-VHS deck at the thrift store for $8 a few weeks ago. Yesterday I did a Blu-Ray to S-VHS conversion, to see the format at its absolute best.

I hooked up the S-VHS deck to the S-Video output of the 8800GTS in my Opteron SLI system. I then played the movie John Wick in MPC-HC (ripped from the BD without any re-encoding). I had MPC-HC downmix the TrueHD 7.1 stream to a Dolby Pro-Logic encoded stereo mix, which was then piped out of an X-Fi Titanium sound card and into the S-VHS deck's stereo audio input. I then walked away for a couple of hours to let the entire movie transfer.

When it finished, I brought the JVC upstairs and hooked it up to the home theater system. I was actually quite impressed with the results! The S-VHS recording was much sharper than even my best pre-recorded VHS tape (the AV receiver's video processing probably helped immensely here). It wasn't quite up to LaserDisc standards, but surprisingly close. The audio was also fairly impressive. The Pro Logic encoding obviously made the trip, as my receiver automatically switched into DPLII mode upon playback. I heard decent stereo separation and rear channel activity. The source file's discrete 7.1 TrueHD track was obviously much better, but two days ago I didn't even think that video tape could sound so good! Low frequency response seemed to be limited to around 45Hz or so. I was definitely hearing some low end, but it didn't even come close to the downright relentless TrueHD track in terms of gripping the room and shaking it like a set of maracas.

All in all, a very fun little experiment with a format that I pretty much ignored back in the day. 😊

The wife was catching up on work since we left early today (we work for the same employer), so I took it upon myself to finally go through the boxes holding the remains of my once massive parts collection. The quantity of items in the collection is much smaller these days but I hope, after the sometimes emotionally painful downsizing I did, that there is at least quality remaining.

I'm planning on rebuilding my long dormant Win 3.1/Win 95 and Win 98/Win XP machines, so I wanted to inventory what parts I had available. Hopefully I can find time over the weekend to at least piece something together.

Set up, connected, and tested every aspect of my two 486 machines.

One of which has been sort of "stored" at the foot of my bed as a stand overnight for my box fan for sleeping for 16 months.. came right on with no issues when I powered it up.

Took photographs of it's bios settings to store for the future in the one day I turn it on and cmos battery dies between when I last powered it on and then.. and so will have settings.

Set it up and did ms-dos scandisk surface scans of the entire 4 GB hard drive's space and verified still no bad sectors. Tested it's 5.25" floppy drive, still works. Tested 3.5" floppy drive, still works. Tested cd-rom, still works.. backup 486 is just fine..

Still going through testing of everything in my newer / faster 486. Tested sound card, cd-rom, 3.5" floppy, 5.25" floppy, network card, windows.. video card, did scandisk on half of it's 8GB hard drive, about to set it up at second table over there and let it scan another 2GB section.. depending on when it finishes I may have to wait til tomorrow to do the next 2GB section and the final 1.2 GB section or so tomorrow..

Need to photograph it's bios settings as well.

So far the only hardware failures in my retro machines from 2015 was a floppy drive in one of my Socket7 machines is not reading anymore and corrupted one of my floppies trying to read it.

Also tried out some sound card drives for Sound Blaster Pro that Artex sent me about 12 months ago... just now getting around to it. Verified they work fine in my CT1330A in my newest 486.

Spent almost an entire day so far working on these two machines just checking em out on and off.

EDIT: Thinking tomorrow I'm going to take both of these drives out of both 486's and slave em in to my AthlonXP machine and create Acronis Backup suite sector-by-sector images of them and stash em for the future in case the drives crap out on me some day.

Currently surface-testing 1.44mb floppies, MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 original sets:

bestemor wrote:

other than some games seemingly gets a 'too fast' effect (running in SystemShock2 comes to mind).

I believe with the Dark Engine games (Thief, System Shock 2), the game speed is tied to the frame rate. So you'll want to run the game at 60 FPS with VSYNC on to get proper speed. If you run at, say 120 FPS it will run at double speed 😀

Caluser2000 wrote:

3.60, it's booting off the roms due to an issue with the hdd. I could always slap New Look on this one if I felt like it. Version 3.x is all you really need 😉 and is still supported.

http://qubeserver.com/Qube/classicriscos.html

I've got another flacky system with 4.6 roms but they will go into system thats running correctly. I could always slap New Look on this one if need be.

I went from 3.60 to 4.02 and 4.39 roms then RiscOS6 softload on my RiscPC, when I still had it...
The 5.22 roms are available for sale from https://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/risc-os-5-22-roms if you fancy an upgrade!

I'm still amazed how little ram and cpu is used in this screenshot with all this activity going on:

So this is a Pentium 3 Coppermine at 1Ghz with 512mb of ram and a Geforce 6200.
Here in the screenshot i have steam and skype running (through pidgin), youtube video running through VLC player and the youtube site itself opened behind, and even a music player (paused). All this and only 289mb of ram used and 71% of cpu usage. Of course there are sites that take the cpu usage through the roof but still quite impressive.
Just to think that at my main desktop a single chome tab can take 500mb of ram sometimes..

Went through some of my boxes... and it seems I have quite a few cards stashed 😊

ISA VGA... ~70
ISA SOUND... ~60
VLB VGA... ~15
PCI VGA... ~60
AGP VGA... ~70

Still didn't find the time to catalogue anything... maybe in the summer 🤣

Im pretty drunk, the rest of my extended family are sleeping but Im up surfing the net using my parents 8+ year old netbook.

The wine Im drinking is old enough to be retro!