Did some troubleshooting on an SiS530 SS7 HP-OEM board. It sucks. It has integrated SiS AGP, no AGP slot, and most PCI graphics cards get no video signal installed on the board. Sometimes I get a VGA beep code, other times I get no code, just a screen that doesn't power on. It doesn't make much sense to me. For example, the TNT2 M64 PCI works fine in every PCI slot, but no other PCI graphics cards work in any PCI slot, even though they work fine in other systems. I've tried enabling and disabling the VIRQ jumper, no difference, and I can't find any other jumpers or BIOS settings that might be related. What's even stranger, I tested a Voodoo2 with the integrated AGP, and I do get a video signal in plain DOS, but the moment I launch the 3dfx version of Screamer 2, the screen blanks out. So I know the passthrough cable works. The Voodoo2 works normally in another DOS system with Screamer 2.

As a consequence, I'm retiring this board and switching back to my Packard Bell with the POD200 for late-era DOS games.

Also, I'm going through and organizing my DOS game collection into "386-486" and "Pentium" categories, then burning them onto CDs for quick copying when I want to play one. Important especially on my 486 which has the 512MB HDD limit.

Recapped my Antec Truepower this week, also added a nice paint job to it.
before:

a few were bulging already, replaced the bulging ones and 6 others.

end result.

Gatewayuser200 wrote:

I got got some solid progress done on an upcoming build. I picked, installed, and wired up all the drives for the system. All 6 […]
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I got got some solid progress done on an upcoming build.

I picked, installed, and wired up all the drives for the system. All 6 HDDs, 4 optical drives, a card reader, and a floppy.

I kept the ribbon cable nightmare at bay for the HDDs by trimming the master connector off some cables to get shorter, single connector cables. Hopefully it won't cause any problems as all drives are set to master and the controller only supports one master drive per cable.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4D2J … bDQ?usp=sharing

The only thing to watch out for when you cut ribbon cables like that is to make sure it's a clean cut. You don't want any of the wires shorting

Had to swap the hard drive in my iMac G3/600 Graphite edition... again since the 40GB HDD was throwing errors when attempting to repair the partition with the Tiger installation disk on a flash drive (yes, you did read that right).

I also made a bootable Mac OS X Tiger Installation with the Disk Utility program onto a 32GB SanDisk Flash drive, formatted to the Apple Partition (PowerPC), with the Mac OS 9 Drivers to make it bootable, so if I need to check the hard drive for errors, I plug in a temporary keyboard and mouse since the cordless keyboard and mouse doesn't work with the installation disk, same with the commands to get to the boot menu. Can't complain as it does work without issues, but on USB 1.1, it's a pain, but better than replacing the CD-RW drive with a SuperDrive I cannot afford, and FireWire DVD burners only work on the G4/G5 and Intel Macs (excluding the 2012 and higher ones), and transfer rates with an external USB DVD burner won't cut it at all since USB 1.1 is rated for 12Mbps and FireWire is rated for 400Mbps.

Received two small Seiko-Epson 486(AMD DX4) computers which were built for industrial duties.
Size and build quality is very nice(super compact only featuring a 2.5" IDE harddisk) BUT the machines themselves hid a dirty secret - they're cache-less.

It's not a tragedy since their use is mainly limited to being a testbed for C/Asm code and some Doom. Also I haven't had time to run Windows98SE yet since I need more than 8MB of ram... do not know if the sound blaster works since the drivers state that Dos7.x needs some extra parameters when starting the drivers.

Let's see... what I can definitely say is that using this hardware to test things is so much more satisfying than DosBox!

amadeus777999 wrote:

Received two small Seiko-Epson 486(AMD DX4) computers which were built for industrial duties. Size and build quality is very ni […]
Show full quote

Received two small Seiko-Epson 486(AMD DX4) computers which were built for industrial duties.
Size and build quality is very nice(super compact only featuring a 2.5" IDE harddisk) BUT the machines themselves hid a dirty secret - they're cache-less.

It's not a tragedy since their use is mainly limited to being a testbed for C/Asm code and some Doom. Also I haven't had time to run Windows98SE yet since I need more than 8MB of ram... do not know if the sound blaster works since the drivers state that Dos7.x needs some extra parameters when starting the drivers.

Let's see... what I can definitely say is that using this hardware to test things is so much more satisfying than DosBox!

Do they at least have a place to install cache later?

i dont think your result in quake is bad for a 486 100; maybe the ram is fast?

mrau wrote:

i dont think your result in quake is bad for a 486 100; maybe the ram is fast?

My Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus won't get those results with a DX2-66 w/ 8KB L1 cache, but I'm going to upgrade to a DX4-100 w/ 16KB L1 cache, and get 512KB L2 cache. I get about 25FPS in Doom, which isn't bad, but not good either (somewhere in between).

Also, if the RAM has lower speed time in ns, the faster it is. In my Packard Bell, it has 70ns RAM since 60ns is unsupported.

In honor of installing a Voodoo2 SLI setup in my P2-400:

edit: not sure anyone got this. CPU is a P2-400 (Deschutes core). Beer is made by Deschutes Brewery. 😀

Purchased a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 external DVD burner for my iMac G3/600 Graphite to install Mac OS X Tiger on DVD, and make home movies on DVD with iMovie and iDVD to make the title, chapters, etc.

I also got a good used monitor that required cleaning the key PCB board since the monitor wouldn't turn off, and certain items didn't work out either for my FX-6300 rig. It also has two aspect ratios for the VGA port, and excluding the HDMI and DVI ports: 4:3 and full screen for games and computers that only support 4:3 ratio.

Re-built a dr-dos 6.0 install for a Siemens CNC machine with a failing hard drive. Going with compact flash, and it seems to be working fine so far. Apparently they'll send a guy from Germany to do this for $10,000!

I have $20 in it.

Tested a 20 year old audio mixer with my Sound Canvas, checked out the insides to see how easy modifying the power supply would be (it's 100V now, want 230V) and the thing is so modular that it looks like it's merely a case of swapping a transformer core.

clueless1 wrote:

Did some troubleshooting on an SiS530 SS7 HP-OEM board. It sucks. It has integrated SiS AGP, no AGP slot, and most PCI graphics cards get no video signal installed on the board. Sometimes I get a VGA beep code, other times I get no code, just a screen that doesn't power on. It doesn't make much sense to me. For example, the TNT2 M64 PCI works fine in every PCI slot, but no other PCI graphics cards work in any PCI slot, even though they work fine in other systems. I've tried enabling and disabling the VIRQ jumper, no difference, and I can't find any other jumpers or BIOS settings that might be related. What's even stranger, I tested a Voodoo2 with the integrated AGP, and I do get a video signal in plain DOS, but the moment I launch the 3dfx version of Screamer 2, the screen blanks out. So I know the passthrough cable works. The Voodoo2 works normally in another DOS system with Screamer 2.

As a consequence, I'm retiring this board and switching back to my Packard Bell with the POD200 for late-era DOS games.

Also, I'm going through and organizing my DOS game collection into "386-486" and "Pentium" categories, then burning them onto CDs for quick copying when I want to play one. Important especially on my 486 which has the 512MB HDD limit.

Someone needs to hurry up and make a CD ROM emulator akin to the Gotek Floppy Emulator.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Someone needs to hurry up and make a CD ROM emulator akin to the Gotek Floppy Emulator.

What would be the real advantage of a hardware CD-ROM emulator though? Maybe for DOS PCs? Even that is debatable..

I haven't messed with dos networking in years, but I don't really see the need of a CD-ROM emulator can't a CD-ROM drive easily be replaced by files on a network share.
'

appiah4 wrote:

What would be the real advantage of a hardware CD-ROM emulator though? Maybe for DOS PCs? Even that is debatable..

i486_inside wrote:

I haven't messed with dos networking in years, but I don't really see the need of a CD-ROM emulator can't a CD-ROM drive easily be replaced by files on a network share.
'

I believe it's all about being able to mount any cd image, as currently we're limited to ISOs.

i486_inside wrote:

I haven't messed with dos networking in years, but I don't really see the need of a CD-ROM emulator can't a CD-ROM drive easily be replaced by files on a network share.
'

It would playing games with CD audio a whole lot easier.

mrau wrote:

i dont think your result in quake is bad for a 486 100; maybe the ram is fast?

Be aware this is QTest1/test03 - not "start.bsp" of regular Quake which only gets 6.6+ fps.
I tested Doom Shareware 1.9 "doom -nosound -timedemo demo3" and got 31+ frames. The system bus is supposed to run at 50Mhz and it was described as a DX2 100. That's why I bought it... it seemed like such an oddity. The VGA part is a 1MB PCChips 65545 and is 16 bit which colors some results as pretty impressive.
Since I have two of these + network cards I will try to hook them up for a little Warcraft LAN.

@xplus93 - no, it's a fixed single board system. The pcb/component quality seems top notch though.

I´ve been testing a Voodoo 3-3000 AGP card that I´ve swapped recently with disappointing result: the computer boots up with no video signal. After that I played Doom for a while. A nice game for relaxing the mind, actually 😊

Speaking of testing, got a 2.1GB IBM hard drive in the mail today. It's for yet another socket 7 build.