TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Explored a new (to me) electronics recycling center that was extremely reasonable. Sold to me by the pound. Got some incredible […]
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Explored a new (to me) electronics recycling center that was extremely reasonable. Sold to me by the pound. Got some incredible deals. I only had sadness knowing I couldn't save them all. haha The last two photos was a bizarre little system. Almost looks like a multi-line BBS machine, but probably not. Maybe you guys can identify. Glad I recently got my tetanus shot booster because man I had a lot of cuts sifting through the piles. Gloves next time.

Looking up Inter-tel, it looks like that computer was just for a business phone system. Nothing too exciting.

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If I found a place like that near me I would be eating ramen in the dark from blowing my paycheck trying to save everything.

Seconded. I would also have to live out of one room of the house, since the others would be full of "rescues".

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

If I found a place like that near me I would be eating ramen in the dark from blowing my paycheck trying to save everything.

That's very funny. Although, this place is so freakin cheap you could throw some shrimp on that ramen and live in style!

Worked on my Pentium 233MMX build.

Already had a clean install of 98SE on the SATA SSD. Yes, I use SSDs in my builds where possible. Should even be able to do that in a 486 build with a SATA to IDE adapter.

Finally found the MS only updates (Feb 2004 CD image), and installed those. Fixed the startup and shutdown issues it was having. Not keen on using any of the unofficial update packs as every time I have tried any of the newer ones, things get all wonky. An no need for the extra junk that is included in them anyway.

Also found the driver for the PCI Promise SATA controller I am using. Promise 376. So now that is another SATA controller that I know has Windows 98SE drivers.

Still have to install the drivers for video and sound, but it is getting there.

Only bad thing I found is that I think the PS/2 mouse port is dead on this board 🙁 That and one of the fan headers seems to not work. I didn't really troubleshoot either. May have a look at that tomorrow.

Took the Commodore64 for a 3 hour game session with my son. We played Supercycle, 1942, Great Giana Sisters, Winther games, Bubble bobble and the Atari version of PacMan. We had the most fun with PacMan, and gamed it for one and a half hour straight. I actually had not gamed like this since the 80's. You know... Handing over the joystick on each death, and actually having an conversation about the gameplay as we played. Basically a trip back in time with my son, showing him what it was like to play on a computer, for over 30 years ago. Another thing that struck me, was that I have not seen him enjoy any other game on any other platform this much. Shure he loves to play on an iPad and iPhone. Yet on a C64, he came out of that isolation shell, most youngsters and kids have these days, whenever they sit with touchscreens and play. This was so awesomme.

brostenen wrote:

Took the Commodore64 for a 3 hour game session with my son. We played Supercycle, 1942, Great Giana Sisters, Winther games, Bubble bobble and the Atari version of PacMan. We had the most fun with PacMan, and gamed it for one and a half hour straight. I actually had not gamed like this since the 80's. You know... Handing over the joystick on each death, and actually having an conversation about the gameplay as we played. Basically a trip back in time with my son, showing him what it was like to play on a computer, for over 30 years ago. Another thing that struck me, was that I have not seen him enjoy any other game on any other platform this much. Shure he loves to play on an iPad and iPhone. Yet on a C64, he came out of that isolation shell, most youngsters and kids have these days, whenever they sit with touchscreens and play. This was so awesomme.

Teen here. Please forgive the ignorance of the rest of my generation. My multiple attempts at indoctrination have all failed miserably.

There loss, more Baldurs Gate and Quake III for me.

‎‎‎

Got the Compaq STB Interwave card working on my P233MMX build. So much misinformation about how to get stuff working, even here on Vogons.

Finally found the Compaq drivers, installed them, and it just works. With the suggested drivers, they would not even detect the card in Windows. Not to mention that some of the drivers that are labeled for Win9x are nothing but the DOS drivers/software.

People also mentioned that they loaded the new firmware on the card, but no specific instructions. When the firmware loader is run, is it loaded each time the computer is booted? Or do you just run it once and it updates?

Which one do I use? Couldn't tell from the thread about it if the one mentioned was for the card without the SIMM slot or the one with the SIMM slot (mine has the SIMM slot).

There are also different versions of the firmware... maybe for different cards. Don't want to load the wrong one and brick my card.

One thing I will have to figure out is the crashing if I try to run DXDIAG. Seems DirectSound crashes. Is there a way to fix that? Does the GUS PnP support DirectSound? If so, what driver version?

Yesterday I gave up trying to find a PCI SATA card that has working 32bit drivers for Windows 95. Via, Promise, and Silicon Image drivers would install, but not load or detect connected drives.

So then I dug out my trusty old Buslogic BT-958 UW SCSI card and popped it into my Pentium 90/430NX PC. It worked perfectly in DOS and Windows 95. But Linux had to work too. That was a HUGE problem. Older kernels, such as, 2.4 and below worked fine, but kernels past 2.6.something did not. Certain SCSI commands cause the driver to reset the bus and stall the system for ten seconds or more.

Then I whipped out an old Tekram LSI LVD 160 SCSI controller and it worked nicely, but not with older kernels because there was no support for the card back then. Also, in DOS, it would use some of the upper memory that EMM386 needs for the page frame. I worked around that by including that 64k block and it works.

Back to the BT-958 today because that EMM386 thing was bugging me. I got a working, yet new enough kernel compiled, and I installed Slackware 3.3 on an 36GB 10000RPM IBM drive I had on an server 13 years ago. It's working great. But I had to try out my new Acard 7730A SCSI to SATA bridge with an SSD..... It craps out writing to the drive after a while. I thought it was a termination problem, but I ruled that out. I think it has something to do with bad CHS translation. So I finally gave up on the BT-958. The author of the Linux driver died in a plane crash in 2000 or 2001 and the driver hasn't been fixed.

So it's back to the LSI LVD 160. I would not have gone through all of this trouble. but the computer will not boot if there is a drive larger than 2GBs connected to the IDE bus. But the end result is a fast 32GB SSD and CD BOOT (I also have an Acard 7722 connected to a DVD writer.) Tomorrow's frustration will be installing and testing Linux on the SSD. I'll also try to get a working S3 driver for Xorg and compile and set up Afterstep.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Teen here. Please forgive the ignorance of the rest of my generation. My multiple attempts at indoctrination have all failed miserably.

There loss, more Baldurs Gate and Quake III for me.

I feel the same here, I might be considered the only person in my age group to not have a proper "smart" phone mainly because I don't have a use for one. I'm about the same age as you (as much as I hate to admit it) and I actually have an interest in retro-computing so I guess you're not the only one anymore. 😀

-

Today, I got around to flashing the BIOS on my AMD64 rig, the painful part was finding the latest BIOS image available and the proper DOS utility to flash it with because ASUS seems to have gotten rid of everything relating to their older hardware (jerks, they're no better than HP) so I ended up taking a long and through course of Google searching until I found the A8V 0229 BIOS update and a flash utility that actually worked, after trying out a few different tools I managed to get it done and over with.

And it turns out my BFG nVidia Geforce 7800GS OC AGP video card has died. During the past few months this computer was having trouble turning on because I had to try turning it on at least a few times to get a picture to show up and now it won't budge, when I attached a PC Speaker beeper onto the motherboard I got 1 short beep which (according to the official AMI BIOS POST code document) corresponds to memory failure so I tried reseating the RAM sticks into different slots as well as turning it on with just one stick, nothing changed.

I decided to go the extra mile by digging through my parts bin and trying a couple different AGP video cards (which included an nVidia Geforce 4MX 440 and an ATI Rage 128 Ultra), that actually worked, I tried to boot it up again with the BFG 7800GS card, it didn't work, and booting it up w/o a video card resulted in the same beep code pattern. So I guess either this video card is dead or it just doesn't like the DDR-400 Crucial RAM that I have.

I placed an order on an ATI Radeon x800 video card to replace it so hopefully I can bring it back to life without having to stick with a wimpy video card (Yes, I know the x800 is technically a downgrade, but because this is a 2004/05 era PC it feels more period-correct and I didn't feel like spending $50+ on a better card).

I'm only two years older than you guys so you're definitely not alone

I do own a smartphone, but I never play games on it. I mostly use it to take (bad) photos, surf the web outside of my house and chat with my friends but that's it. I don't even have a facebook account. Some people I know will tell you how fun those "strategy" games on their smartphone are good and that you play with your friends but in the reality they just sit there, their mouth shut, playing the game. If that's "playing with your friends" I prefer to play my games on my old PC, the AI in age of empires II has as much conversation than the people playing on their smartphones. And I'm planning on making a retro lan sooner or later with all my retro PCs. You can't do this with your smartphone

bjwil1991 wrote:

sketchus wrote:

Awesome, a C64 is on my list for me to pick up still.

I modded my Mega Drive today, installing a 50/60hz switch. It's the first proper console mod I've done with soldering. It was exciting, and more importantly, it seems to work!

Nice. Sounds like you can play NTS and PAL games on the fly. The mod I'm going to do next would be to install a SID2SID into the system for stereo output. I plugged it in to see if it'll turn on, and it does. Just waiting on the RCA to Coax cable adapters that I purchased on Amazon, and it'll go nicely with my Sony PVM-9L1 with the DVD Recorder as the main box with the A/B switch box to change the source from antenna to the C64, or my TV/VCR Combo. And everyone's suggesting for me to get the Ultra 1541-II instead of the 1541 drive itself for games and stuff.

Jealous of the PVM, that's great. I use a CM8833-II monitor which I adore, but can't accept NTSC over composite. I think the PVM takes absolutely anything, right?

badmojo wrote:

That's a worthwhile mod for sure - I did mine recently too but my telly only has composite input, so I needed to do this extra m […]
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sketchus wrote:

I modded my Mega Drive today, installing a 50/60hz switch. It's the first proper console mod I've done with soldering. It was exciting, and more importantly, it seems to work!

That's a worthwhile mod for sure - I did mine recently too but my telly only has composite input, so I needed to do this extra mod to get colour @ 60Hz:

http://www.mmmonkey.co.uk/mega-drive-1-pal-60hz-colour-mod/

This extra step was somewhat daunting for a hack like me but it all went smoothly enough - worked first time actually, no twiddling of the variable capacitor required. The colours are perfect and the image quality wasn't impacted. End result:

I play mostly SMS games on my MD actually - the image is noticeably sharper than the trusty old SMS.

I luckily, and able to output RGB to my amiga monitor, which gives me fantastic image quality. I don't think have could have done the colour mod! The Mega Drive is my least played console from the ones I own, through no fault of it's own. I intend to one day finish the Lion King, but it's very, very hard.

Finally got a chance to test my Asus P4P800 (no suffix).

Powered on. Can POST. Entered the BIOS. After about 2 min of mucking around in the BOIS. Poof. Power off (nothing was smoking or popped). Tried to turn it back on, but nothing. But when you turn on power switch, the green LED is still there.

What gives 😕

@dexvx

caps. like 90% of the time it's bad caps. they don't need to be leaking balloons to be bad.

Testing stuff...

agent_x007 wrote:

Testing stuff...

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P3 overclock??? 😳

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Teen here. Please forgive the ignorance of the rest of my generation. My multiple attempts at indoctrination have all failed miserably.

There loss, more Baldurs Gate and Quake III for me.

I feel the same here, I might be considered the only person in my age group to not have a proper "smart" phone mainly because I don't have a use for one. I'm about the same age as you (as much as I hate to admit it) and I actually have an interest in retro-computing so I guess you're not the only one anymore. 😀

Yeah... I do own an Android phone as well.... Not using it for any games as well.
It's for phone calls, text messaging, reading news, watching retro/vintage computers on youtube, vogons and so on.
Mostly only for information and communication. Facebook??? Nope. I deleted my FB-Account in 2013.
I don't even have twitter, snapchat or any other crappy "so-called"? social networks/media-whatever.

brostenen wrote:

P3 overclock??? 😳

Close...
Core i7 980X (with 5 cores and HT disabled) 😁

Sidenote :
Speedsys lists CPU Clock/Bus speed, Motherboard's name and BIOS date, correctly.
Interesting...

PS. I did use test on CF card DOS is on (1GB).

My buddy's mom turned up a Gateway Solo 5300 laptop, looks like a Pentium 3 600 model, Windows 98 SE cert on the bottom. No power supply though but he's going to send it to me. I'm going to order some kind of universal power supply (not sure what I should get yet) and hope it works. Strange that is has no floppy drive.

I wonder if these have half decent sound blaster emulation. I'd love to have a nice 9x laptop! Never have been much of a laptop guy in the past though.

I'm sure it's nothing special but it's free 😊 . Nice of somebody to think of me when they turn up the old computers.

Was testing a cheapo PSU when a capacitor exploded. Ears are ringing and it smells like burnt popcorn in my room, but so worth it. 😁

The only thing that would have made that PSU better/worse would be if they had written “lol” across the pcb where all the components should have been.