Tested several ISA sound cards including an SB 2.0 CT1350B, Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 Studio, Logitech Soundman (PAS16 Basic) and AWE64 Gold. They all work too. 😀

I got all of them in various lots online but the grand total I spent on them if I were to divide the cost of the lots would easily be under $20. The CT1350B has its original box and all the contents too. 😀

In the coming days I'll do a bunch more. I have a CT1600 waiting patiently, along with a few other slightly less interesting cards (Yamaha, ESS, AWE64 Basic).

Completed my downsizing my hardware for the time being - still feels like I have too many graphics cards but whatever. Next I'll probably be donating some computing books to charity.

Got a little further on Fry Cry--the 4th checkpoint on the Pier level. Then beat a few more missions on WC4. Now on Orestes 2 mission. Finally, I finished level 3 on Ultima Underworld. It's a little slow-going playing multiple games, but it does give a nice break from any monotony setting in.

Installed DRVSPACE on my ST1480N. Works great. A P200MMX has enough HPs to make it work. 😀

I just spend the first five hours of my day finding and adding microcode to a rather stubborn BIOS. I have just finished putting the ROM together and only now do I realize that I have misplaced the processors I was modifying it for. FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!

I'm sure they'll turn up, though I'll put money on the modification not actually working anyway.

HighTreason wrote:

I just spend the first five hours of my day finding and adding microcode to a rather stubborn BIOS. I have just finished putting the ROM together and only now do I realize that I have misplaced the processors I was modifying it for. FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!

I'm sure they'll turn up, though I'll put money on the modification not actually working anyway.

What board were you modding for what CPU?

SuperMicro P6DGU BIOS for P3-S 1.4GHz. Tried before and it did not work, this time didn't work either and despite some claiming it does and for one of the ROMs I made, even following their instructions 1:1, I am honestly starting to think the board simply cannot run with these processors installed (via Pl-iP3/SMP adapters).

One interesting point - the last ROM I tried does not contain any microcode for the Coppermine processors I usually run, but I forgot and put them back in without placing the original EEPROM back in the board. It starts up and does not complain about microcode or anything, which makes me wonder if somehow the BIOS has to be flashed in-board... I suppose I can only find out one way. The board is weird about the BIOS because it will start with an ASUS BIOS for a similar board, but still displays a SuperMicro logo at POST and a few other references to this particular board which makes me wonder just how it works. Hopefully I don't brick the board, that would suck as I really like the system and have had it a very long time, I guess I could make a ROM with an extra microcode for a P2 or something so I can boot it up again if the Tualatin's still won't work. The SL4BS chips didn't work on the original BIOS and that update was flashed in-board as I had no EEPROM programmer at the time.

Here's the ROM I was using;

Edit: Might not to take the risk. As I have little interest in the CPUs past this point and no board capable of running them I may instead try to trade them for faster Coppermine chips as those would work in these adapters.

in my experience, once pentium matured, so did the bios. Award won, and everyone used the same software, except for ibm, dell, etc. Even then it was most likely 95% the same. There is only so many ways to talk to a standard cpu and standard ram. So it does not surprise me that bioses are sometimes interchangeable. Hp for a long time just used ASUS boards in their machines. They alwasy claimed you had to get the bios from hp, but the standard asus one always worked for me.

Indeed. But in this case it is particularly weird as the board was not made by Asus, in fact, it has little to do with any company outside of SuperMicro, yet the logo will still appear implying it is stored in a different ROM to the actual BIOS. I've never seen this before. For example, if you replace the DFI LAN Party NFII Ultra BIOS with a WinFast K7NCR18D (Both horrible boards) you will get the Leadtek logo instead of the DFI one, replacing the SuperMicro P6DGU BIOS with an ASUS P2B-DS BIOS still yields the SuperMicro logo.

Who knows what SuperMicro did, some weird headers and stuff. Either way, I've decided to go for coppermine chips instead of these. I don't need the speed anyway and just wondered how fast the board could go, now I know it doesn't go that fast I shall just aim lower. 750MHz is plenty enough for now.

I have 3 SM boards running RIGHT NOW. I would say i'm familiar with the company. The point I was making was most manufacturers bought the bios code from award, slapped on their own logo, turned on or off a few features, and shipped the product. I would venture to say you could probably swap the bios for most boards as long as the chipset stays the same. that said, SM desires stability at all costs, so they would naturally make 100% sure all the ram timings were 100% jedec numbers. Where ASUS is famous for tweaking theirs.

Yeah, I seem to remember you having the P6DBU (Practically the same as mine).

AMI BIOS. I never stated otherwise and was merely pointing out the likelihood of multiple ROMs being on the board, though I am stumped as to where it is if this is the case.

dual bios boards are typically very rare. for a short time they seemed popular in the P4 era, but its a non issue anymore it seems.

your chip might not be erasing correctly. I had this issue with my programmer. solution was to supply the usb part with a 12v and it then had enough power to properly program some chips.

The chip was borrowed from a K7S5A, I prefer not to erase the original in case anything goes wrong with programming and I am unable to reverse it.

This interests me. I've never gotten into BIOS hacking or programming beyond using the manufacturer's tools to do bios upgrades. What does it take to get into it?

Depends on the BIOS. In this case, AMIBCP (An old version) and CTMC which are used to modify things like the default settings, "modules" (The CPU Microcode is stored in a module) and really tricky things I don't play with (PCI IRQ Routing? Err... OK, I'll leave that alone then.) but these are for AMI, Award BIOS has it's own set of utilities.

90% of it is probably luck. I don't usually go this far and I'm not very good at it, so instead I usually only modify the default settings so I don't have to do anything if the battery dies or else I just add stupid messages to the start. I modded the EPA logo once, but that was more trouble than it was worth. It wasn't hard and it did work, but it took a long time to do and there were a lot of very specific conditions that had to be met. Still, my K6 starts with a fission symbol in the upper right claiming "U92 pollution creator" as a stab at the boring EPA logo. It also displays a message in place of the BIOS Version string to the effect of "It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum!" for stupid reasons. The K5 is worse, because that one displays "Don't thank me, thank rape." which is a quote from a silly anime someone dubbed over and I suspect not everyone would find it funny, in fact a large part of my incentive to do it was to be offensive to people who witness the system starting up.

Here's a few tools and I'm sure tutorials are easy enough to Google. You can simply screw around with ROM images to start off with to get a feel for the software required. Some older BIOSes need older tools, so you can't just mod any BIOS from a particular vendor with just one version of their tool.

So while driving out of our little area near our house to get out to the main streets and go across town.. my mother spied a large bit of "crap" outside some house by the curb and an eviction notice on the door of the house and some of the windows boarded up where they were broken. So a vacant house.. and the county must of come in and threw everything in the house outside for the trash. So uhm.. well, momma came home and got me and we went through the piles of crap and looking for anything of any value.

We found a 6ft tall tree that had been dug up.. root cluster intact. And so I found a towel and wrapped up the mud/dirt section and put it in the trunk and carried it home.. wet down the towel to keep it moist and planning to re-plant it in our front yard tomorrow after it rains.

But that's not the point of this post.. The main point of this post.. They had tossed in three DirectTV DVR Boxes in the pile of crud. Because they had been underneath several blankets and lots of boxes on the bottom, they were protected from the rains. Most people out there think "DirectTV Boxes without service are useless trash." And tossed em right out. But not me! I know better!

These are the DVR boxes.. stacked up in my garage:

Well.. Not much anymore. They're empty shells now, still have the main PCB's in em. But I happen to know they're not trash. After harvesting the useful bits inside I was left with:

Full size (LARGE!): http://www.outfoxed.net/06-01-2016/drives-fans-full.jpg

Two are 100% matched full-height 3.5" desktop EIDE hard drives. And I know from experience these can be formatted and used in PC's. Both of the full height ones are 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 2MB buffer. The one on the left side is a half-height newer one.. 160 GB / 7200 too, but 8MB buffer. Newer. I also got three x 60mm ball-bearing fans with 3-pin header too. And a bunch of assorted screws.

Now I can get on to testing these IDE drives and run em all through a surface scan and SMART check. And if they come up clean.. I have a 4-drive RAID-0 set for my AthlonXP computer (It already has one of these in it.. should match exactly.. I harvested it from a trash-pulled DVR box too). So I'm a little excited/happy about this. Espically 100% free!!!!!!!! Best part! 🤣 😎 😊 😲

It all also works out, the two fans in my RCA stereo receiever in my room here for my big 3770k... it's two fans in it have been making "noisy grinding" nearly-fan-death noises the past few weeks and I needed to replace it's fans anyway. Now I Got free fans for that.. yay! 😀

I've had so many bad experiences with Seagates failing (mostly in the 500GB-1.5TB range), that I'd scan those suckers twice. Also run DiskFresh on them. It's free for non-commercial use, you can Google it.

clueless1 wrote:

I've had so many bad experiences with Seagates failing (mostly in the 500GB-1.5TB range), that I'd scan those suckers twice. Also run DiskFresh on them. It's free for non-commercial use, you can Google it.

I'll probably just check SMART status, and do a full surface scan with hdtune and if it passes with no bad spots, go use em. Still going to take about 2 hours to scan each one, maybe longer if I do em all at the same time.

Received 2 KT133A motherboards in the mail, both complete with CPUs and RAM. One is an Abit KT7A with 1GHz Athlon and 2x256MB, the other is a Chaintech 7AJA2E with Athlon Xp2400 (which it calls "unknown CPU at 1500MHz", but still works fine) and 1x512MB. Both tested good, now to put them to use. 😀

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

This is from 2014. It should be noted that Backblaze's 2016 tests show vast improvements in Seagate's failure rates, so Seagate seems to be responding to the pressure.