So I finally had the time to dig out the old Fenner composite/DIN monitor I used on my Commodore 64 and hooked it to my Pentium 3 computer, and well...

Things went exactly as I expected: the picture quality is godawful, the desktop is barely readable but it's actually readable, if you turn the resolution down to 512x384 and increase the text size. The only issues are the jittering and the noise caused by the composite cable, and one major annoyance: the whine. The monitor whines a lot and stops only when I press the bezel. I suppose it's a shaky flyback transformer? If I take some courage I could try to crack it open and pour some hot glue on the flyback, hoping that could stop that annoying 15Khz noise.

If I manage to fix that, I could even reroute the audio to the monitor to use the internal speaker. I tested it with some games and boy, it looks glorious. But I can't stand the loud whine, so I put it into the box again with the hope I could do the hot glue trick... Someday.

Cleaned the case of the Pentium 4 PC I got yesterday. Will post pictures once it's dry. 😁

I upgraded the CPU on my dumpster-find HP laptop: The original CPU was a Core 2 Duo T5750, I remembered I had a T7300 laying around in my spare CPU box so I took a chance and replaced the T5750 with the T7300. Boy, is it a pain to take apart those consumer-grade HP DV-series laptops (having to remove two bolts in the memory compartment just to remove the palmrest stumped me the most) but it seems to be worth it for ending up with twice the L2 cache and the gain of virtualization, here's a link to a comparison page for anyone who's interested in seeing the difference.

I tested the drives I bought at RE-PC earlier this week: Both of the Dell modular bay drives (a C-series 24x CD-ROM and a D-series DVD-RW) work, the Powerbook G3's floppy drive works, but the external ZIP100 drive won't get power from the AC adapter that I bought with it, at one point I thought maybe the drive needed to be plugged into a computer to work but that made no difference because the system I plugged it into couldn't detect a ZIP drive, so I guess that needs some work done to it (either a new power jack or a new AC adapter is needed), the NEC DVD-RW drive was handy for the black bezel and tray due to the drive's eject button not working, but thankfully my Dell Optiplex GX520 has the same model drive but beige so a bezel replacement alone was enough to cover the reason why I bought it.

I did a bit of work on the Dell Optiplex GX150: I noticed that Monster Truck Madness 2 froze on the videos (logos at the beginning and the videos that play after a race) so I did some testing to see why it was doing that.

- Tried different video cards (An ATI Rage 128 Ultra, and a Geforce 4 MX440) - No effect.
- Using DirectX 6.1 instead of 8.1 (while I used the MX440) - No effect.
- Using the integrated SoundMax audio instead of the SB Live! - No effect.
- Disabling and enabling DMA - Still no effect.
- Different chipset drivers - Again, no effect.

Now I'm suspecting either the disc's scratches or having 512MB of RAM is the issue, I thought 512MB was more than enough RAM for Windows 98SE until I heard that some users here said that 512MB is where the issues start, so I'm going to downgrade the RAM to 384MB just for the sake of ruling out RAM issues. I can live without the videos in MTM2 so it's no big deal (they're disable-able, you know).

Fiddled with software on the 486DX4-100, installed IE5 as requested by SETI@Home, then installed my 'ancient' 2002 Icom PCR-1000 in Windows 95, seems to work fine, just need to spool out a long wire and watch NVIS HF activity on 160, 80, 60, and 40m, should be viable to run a Packet AX-25 Station 24/7 on it as well. Might try all this hardware on the 386DX-40 when its built, since I need PCI to run my Lightning Detector.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

... more than enough RAM for Windows 98SE until I heard that some users here said that 512MB is where the issues start, so I'm going to downgrade the RAM to 384MB just for the sake of ruling out RAM issues. I can live without the videos in MTM2 so it's no big deal (they're disable-able, you know).

I know removing ram isn't a major pain but if you add MaxPhysPage=18000 to the [386enh] section of your system.ini that will limit the available ram to 384mb. I am surprised your having possible trouble with 512MB I've only had issues with > 1GB

Stunning news! chkdsk out

I gathered some CPUs I will need for testing and benching a non Intel chipset s478 platform.

These are my supposedly tested and sorted Socket 478 Pentium 4 CPUs... It turns out they are not that well sorted so it took a while. Pictured are 127 CPUs, I probably have just as many untested and unsorted s478 CPUs littering about.

Today I recapped the GeForce FX5500 with leaking caps I found in the trash.

Previously it wouldn't POST, so I swapped out all of the 1000uf caps, but I didn't have low ESR ones here.

Turns out that was a mistake and I am not done yet. The card is POSTing again, but I have annoying flickering on the screen. Better luck next time. 😵

Better than nothing, though. Check for cold solder joints on the card and reflow if necessary.

I've been refactoring the DOSBox code so that the PIT code now has a reusable base class for generic 8253/8254 emulation, at any given base clock.
Why? Because the IBM Music Feature Card also uses an 8253 PIT, but running at 1 MHz instead of 1.19 MHz.
So far I've made DOSBox work with Timer, which is now a subclass of the new PIT_8254 baseclass.
I should be able to make another IMFC_Timer subclass, and use that for the IMFC emulation.

After sitting in storage for over half a decade I finally dragged out an HP Kayak XU series machine that I've been hesitant to work on because last I touched it while it had two pretty 450mhz PIII Xeon CPU's marked INTEL CONFIDENTIAL it had so many other problems.
I say hesitant because last I tried I rebuilt the PSU, repaired several damaged PCB traces that prevented the POWER_ON signal from reaching the PSU and after that I got a POST that would hang after the ram count.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/CGS_7801.jpg
After some experimenting I found that if you have more than 512mb of ram in it, the system loses its mind. I had two gigs installed.
After that I had repeated problems with Windows and the Windows 2000 installer doing much with the two 16gb SCSI disks besides saying "yep, there's disks installed". No partitioning or formatting was allowed. In the process I discovered my FastRAID card did not work, so no hardware RAID in this machine. 🙁
Eventually I replaced the drives with two newer 73gb Maxtor Atlas drives, one of which promptly failed halfway through the DBAN. Dammit. So now I had a good POST, I had good RAM, I had a good hard drive but the CD drive kept being dog slow. Eventually replaced the IDE ribbon cable with another with...a peculiar Date of Manufacture. 🤣

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/IMG_9307.jpg
NOW I could lay down an install of Windows 2000 Professional and start setting things up. To my suprise allt he drivers loaded first-time except for the three needed to make the Intergraph Wildcat 4000 work. After that was loaded I had my screen resolutions and OpenGL performance but...Device Manager would and still is complaining that for the L5 geometry accelerator it cannot find enough free resources to start the device. You cannot manually set the resources and it won't tell you what resources it wants. It just says "lmao you cannot run this", regardless of what cards you pull and devices you disable in the BIOS.
Well at the very least I know the card is performing well enough that Deus Ex runs pretty clean in OGL mode. Doesn't like losing window focus but frame dips only happen in outside spaces. which is fine.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/CGS_7806.jpg
Also got to play with that ADI Microscan. That's a goddamn 15 inch tube that will do 1024x768 at 75hz and 1280x1024 at 60hz 😲

Always thought those Kayak cases were sexy as hell. Love the look of them. Especially the model tower you have.

I have never been a fan of HP systems thanks to my poor friends that had issues with them in the late 90s. But that Kayak... looks pretty sweet.

Swapped out a 486DX2-66 motherboard for a 486DX2-50, just to see how well the board works. No idea what the make or model is...

Also, cleaned up my garage so now I have shelves with a heap of my computer gear on it, instead of carefully stacked up on top of things and each other 😉

Was trying to get my PC Chips M912 motherboard set up to do some testing.

After not being able to get it to go past "Please Wait" after the POST screen I ended up looking up the manual for it even though it has almost full jumper settings silkscreened on the board.

I found out that v1.4 doesn't support AMD DX2 over 66Mhz and also has no AMD DX4 support.

The only 486 chips I have are:
AMD 486 DX2-80
AMD 486 DX4-100

😢

Only other 486 board I have needs the corrosion from the removed as soon as I got it barrel battery before I even try testing it. That will have to wait for another day.

I am slowly but surely making database of stuff I have because I found out that I remember nothing and keep loosing track of items in the means of where they come from, what was I doing with it, what I plan to do with it etc.

Last month I was plowing through HDDs - I connect each one to some computer, HDAT2 it, CHECKIT it or NDD it, or worse HD Tune it and HDD Regenerator 2011 it , then I take a picture of it, make entry in Excel with all I know about that - where it come from, where it is stored, what it contains, which interface it has, model number, capacity, number of bad sectors - the normal stuff. Right now I am at disk number 110 and I have covered just what I have laying around, next step is going through the desktops and laptops which are intact - pulling them out and going through the same procedure. I think I may be obsessed with hard drives, but I just can't stop - I love them too much, they are too much fun to play with! 😁

But the most recent aquisition - those two buggers.

This SSD is now happily living in the Thintune PC I am making to be DOS gaming micromachine. But the second thing. That is giving me headaches.

How does it work? How do I get it to work? If I plug it into Windows 95 machine, the system notices it, installs drivers, but the storage never shows up to be interacted with. Do I need some sort of driver or what?

I have a similar PCMCIA card to that one complete in box. There are no driver disks with it and apart from a basic "stick the card in the slot and it shows up in file explorer" there are no instructions to speak of. However mine does require a couple of batteries to retain data when removed from the machine. Have you checked the batteries to make sure they are ok, perhaps a fail safe means that it wont work without the batteries being present (just hazarding a guess).

krivulak wrote:

How does it work? How do I get it to work? If I plug it into Windows 95 machine, the system notices it, installs drivers, but the storage never shows up to be interacted with. Do I need some sort of driver or what?

Common problem with Win95/98. Run into that as well. While Win95/98 has a PCMCIA stack, it's not enough to use the cards (a bit like USB back then). You need additional third-party software. There were a few, but all commercial and partly still sold today.

cyclone3d wrote:

Was trying to get my PC Chips M912 motherboard set up to do some testing. […]
Show full quote

Was trying to get my PC Chips M912 motherboard set up to do some testing.

After not being able to get it to go past "Please Wait" after the POST screen I ended up looking up the manual for it even though it has almost full jumper settings silkscreened on the board.

I found out that v1.4 doesn't support AMD DX2 over 66Mhz and also has no AMD DX4 support.

The only 486 chips I have are:
AMD 486 DX2-80
AMD 486 DX4-100

😢

Only other 486 board I have needs the corrosion from the removed as soon as I got it barrel battery before I even try testing it. That will have to wait for another day.

There's a board similar to yours on eBay, and there's a v1.7 board with the fake cache. My plan is to buy both boards, take the jumpers and sockets for the L2 cache, remove the fake cache and jumpers (or open the solder points) from the v1.7 board, and install the sockets and jumpers from the other board. I had the v1.7 board with real L2 cache until its BIOS chip stopped working. Going to have to find a VLB video card and I/O card as well.

Spend most of the day checking all the mainboards that I got yesterday, 27 in total. Half of them aren't special, but there were quite a few Super Socket 7, Socket 3, Slot A, and some with ESS Solo-1 on-board. Will post more infos later in a separate thread.

Now I'm putting together my Pentium 4 build, after having cleaned all parts.