ssokolow wrote:

I also got curious about the use of the terminology and popped over to the Wikipedia Combustability and flammability page. It turns out there's been an effort since the 1950s to retire "inflammable" in favour of "flammable" for exactly this reason (ie. it's a safety hazard) and "non-flammable" is the most direct antonym for "flammable". ("non-inflammable" is valid as the most direct opposite for "inflammable", but awkward-sounding.)

🤣 🤣 This does sound weird, "in" for us the innati... er non-native speakers is prefixed to form the antonym. Unless of course we end up with non-capable, non-accurate, non-complete, non-effective, non-visible 🤣

Errius wrote:

A problem with English is that unlike German, Spanish and other languages, there is no universal body with authority to set standards of spelling and word usage. Every major university and newspaper in the English-speaking world has its own style of English peculiar to itself.

There's no language authority for German either. Spelling is regulated (just like with every language), but words are not. We have the Duden which lists all words of the German language. However, the Duden is updated every few years to keep up with the spoken language, not the other way around.

Installed DOS 6.22 on the 166MMX I built yesterday. Installed the drivers for the PAS16 and software (Games & Benchmarking stuff).

The PAS sounds great but i'm having difficulty with the Mixer. I've followed the guide on Nerdy Pleasures but the Music is a lot lower in volume than the Sound FX. I can't seem to get my profile to load from the autoexec either. I need to have another play with it. I got to tied up playing Descent!

I also played around with Phils Dosbench (Great Suite of tools mate!) and Setmul.

Heres some speedsys results and it looks like i can get down just below a 386 DX33. Going to set the multi to 2x and get some more results.

I cleaned the rest of my Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro card last night and had to spray contact cleaner in the volume pot as it was sticking, however, the volume pot spins freely instead of fully stopping at the notch (because I sprayed too much on the volume pot itself). I'll check it later on tonight after I get my car checked for stalling issues.

liqmat wrote:

Went by an estate sale store in my local area. Picked up a stack of CDs. As usual, I am a sucker for old demo disks and weird shareware releases. Found an Amiga CD chock full of music mod files which I am very pleased with. Love mod files, brings a flood of memories of the Amiga amazing me in the mid 80s. Also found some motherboard driver CDs, some good classic games and I really like the PC Power DOS demo CDs. Never have seen those before or I just don't remember them from back in the day. The best part is the "Super Games" CD (second photo down). If you look at the bottom right corner of the CD cover it says "Dr. Ruth's Video Sex Tips". Nothing like a bunch of PC game demos and after you're done you can get some sex tips. What a really brillaint idea! Right? Errr... maybe not. 🤣

I'm also a sucker for those kind of discs. Every time I go to a flea market, I have to grab all that I can find (they are dirt cheap).

Errius wrote:

A problem with English is that unlike German, Spanish and other languages, there is no universal body with authority to set standards of spelling and word usage. Every major university and newspaper in the English-speaking world has its own style of English peculiar to itself.

Having read 1984 many, many times, I'm glad there's no regulatory authority for the English language.

ssokolow wrote:

I also got curious about the use of the terminology and popped over to the Wikipedia Combustability and flammability page. It turns out there's been an effort since the 1950s to retire "inflammable" in favour of "flammable" for exactly this reason (ie. it's a safety hazard) and "non-flammable" is the most direct antonym for "flammable". ("non-inflammable" is valid as the most direct opposite for "inflammable", but awkward-sounding.)

It sure confused Dr. Nick Riviera!

Having a bit of a spring clean as it were selling off some old games on eBay. It's always nice freeing up some space and getting a bit of money back.

Also working on my Win98 PC again, had a 3 1/2" to 5 1/4" mounting bracket arrive but it's cracked 🙁 I also realised the cheap mid sized atx case I bought only has two 5 1/4 drive bays and I need three if I'm going to have a DVD ROM drive, 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy drives in there together. My own fault really, I needed a cheap case, quick, and never stopped to consider 🤣

AlaricD wrote:

Having read 1984 many, many times, I'm glad there's no regulatory authority for the English language.

I quite like l'Académie's approach to French 😉

Setup my HP LaserJet 5MP with an HP JetDirect 170X so now I can print from anywhere in the house... even have Windows 10 drivers for it.

Today I finally got all 3 types of caps in to heal the capacitor plague on these two Abit VH6T motherboards:

I wonder if I can get away with just replacing the bigger capacitors, or if any of the smaller ones will also need swapping out? Right now I'm only replacing the large capacitor groups that I observed leakage on. The non-leaking caps all tested okay, but if I'm removing a couple, it's not much more work to replace all those Teapo caps. Sadly these replacement caps are quite a lot bigger than the originals, but bending the pins around a bit gets them to align well enough.
Getting the holes cleared out was really tough, I had to apply around 400C with a good 90w iron for the solder vacuum to be able to clear some of the holes attached to the ground plane / internal layers.

Now to test this one board then do the next 😀

Errius wrote:

A problem with English is that unlike German, Spanish and other languages, there is no universal body with authority to set standards of spelling and word usage. Every major university and newspaper in the English-speaking world has its own style of English peculiar to itself.

That is possibly the worst idea I have ever heard.

First place is reserved for future bad ideas that may be worse.

The local makerspace just had this Titanium PowerBook G4 lying around that I sure didn't see before. Bottom panel was loose and missing all of its screws, and I couldn't find an AC adapter. Figured I'd take it home to test it, knowing my iBook G4 charger would work.

Turns out it runs just fine. 667 MHz Onyx model with a Mobility Radeon, stock 30 GB HDD, DVD/CD-RW drive, AirPort card, and the most pleasant surprise of all - 1 GB of RAM, already maxed out for me! Oh, and the battery actually holds a decent charge, which is more than I can say for that iBook when I first got it.

It was running OS X 10.2 Jaguar with maybe one extra app installed, as if it didn't see much practical use for a while. Since a 1.42 GHz iBook G4 would curbstomp the old TiBook at running Tiger or Leopard (and I find it barely adequate for Leopard as is), I decided to go backwards, install OS 9.2.2, and then set up some games.

MechWarrior 2 runs just fine, Unreal Tournament has some moments of slowdown here and there, Driver is consistent but not perfectly smooth... it's not going to stand up to either of my MDDs in terms of performance, but for a laptop, it's respectable. Kinda makes me want to track down one of the later 1 GHz TiBooks, mainly out of hopes that the Mobility Radeon 9000 fares a lot better for gaming.

Also speaking of Classic Mac OS gaming, now's a good time to remind myself that Pangea Software basically made a bunch of their older releases legal freeware. http://pangeasoft.net/macGames.html

What retro activity did you get up to today?

today: Reading the messages in THIS forum with Lynx. 😉
It was possible becouse this forum design still is kept on this enough retro level.

yesterday: repairing the SB Awe64gold to add the SPDIF output, but then I found that it has only for the synth
that output, thus the Inertia Player does not make a sound with that.

I thought the whole point of the AWE64 gold (over the lesser AWE64 cards) is that it has the extra chip to convert analogue to SPDIF, so it gives both synth and regular audio through the SPDIF interface?

Thermalwrong wrote:

I thought the whole point of the AWE64 gold (over the lesser AWE64 cards) is that it has the extra chip to convert analogue to SPDIF, so it gives both synth and regular audio through the SPDIF interface?

But it does not have such capability. The awe64 SPDIF is only for the synth side, and not for "regular audio".
and also the newer SB models even if they have, (also that evilBS pci bus model card) they resample everything it to 48kHz.
Thats for I thought to start the new soundcard hardware project like it is in my signature. .... 😉

Also strange is with those awe cards that none of those trackers really can use their card, while there are several programs which can utilize the gravis ultrasound memory.

You may want to read this: SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold SPDIF Clarification?

derSammler wrote:

You may want to read this: SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold SPDIF Clarification?

yes...
well, doing a soundcard, plus with SRC chip then the sample rate compatibility is succeeded between 8kHz to 96kHz and for known samplerates it will not down or oversample. then my soundcard does neither have the sample rate limitations. 😉 so, some dma engineering needed for this new project.

Tested the Socket 370 motherboard I'm planning on selling and it wouldn't POST with a stick of RAM in the left slot for some reason. Removing it got the system to spring to life, and it detected the Celeron 1.4GHz CPU without issues (good thing I kept the CPU, and I wrapped the CPU that was in there, a VIA C3 700A with two foam pads, some tape, and an ESD anti-static bag wrapped around it). Also did some benchmarking and the HDD was slower than a 32GB HDD (setting isn't correct in the BIOS, or a limitation for it).

In touch with someone doing charity work fixing up old-ish but not yet retro PCs for disadvantaged senior citizens. Want to offload all my 'crap' that is too new for my interest and may actually still be useful for somebody as a daily drive to write emails, do online banking & e-government stuff, and look at pics of the grandchildren.

The tricky part with that sort of stuff is the customer support, actually giving the PC is just the start of it. Here she's taking care of that so I'm more than happy to donate the hardware.

Anyway, I'm doing basic builds with my P4 & newer stuff to give to her ready-to-go. While I'm at it I took the opportunity to swap out some bits of my son's retro system (K6-2 350 for DOS stuff), mainly building it into a case I'd rather not give away. Also upgraded the PSU from 235W FSP to 300W FSP. Or at least, that was the plan. The 300W was a NOS AOpen-branded FSP300-60BT(12V) I picked up recently. No real reason other than liking this big, heavy, solid PSU with enough headroom on 12V and 5V to do either late Athlon or early Athlon64/Core2Duo if ever so desired. So hooked it all up with my boy watching and let him flip the final switch.

Power started flowing, LED lit up, BIOS POSTed... and then suddenly there was this hissing sound from the PSU and what looked like smoke vented from all its openings. Of course it wasn't smoke but the guts of a Teapo cap that had spent the last two decades slowly decaying internally. So now my son has seen, heard and smelt why you can't trust a cap from 2001 as far as you can throw it. Just looking at a bulging old beast isn't half as educational 😉

Fortunately nothing else blew, so put back the old 235W PSU and confirmed everything was still alive, then unscrewed the new one to get a look at the perpetrator. Will be replacing that when I have time, if only to show how you can fix things you saw dying.

Today I came across a co-workers post on Facebook where he was giving away two sets of Logitech Z-5500 speakers.. he's going to give me a set tomorrow at work. Then I said "If you have any older computer equipment, I'm interested as well". Then he said that he has a ton of old computers, parts, and games he was just going to throw away since it is taking up way too much space in his closets and attic.. So, I have some mystery crates arriving soon. 😁