Mister Xiado wrote:

Got my first or maybe second ever STACK OVERFLOW error trying to play Sam & Max Hit the Road in Windows for Workgroups. Only took about TWO HOURS to transfer over the network. Ah well, it works perfectly in DOS, so I can't complain too much, it's just that the icon I made for it is useless. Unless I turn one of my Pentium systems into a Win95 box.

Haven't seen a stack oeuvreflow error in ages

BitWrangler wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My QX9650 also arrived. Good god this processor is insanely fast for its age. DOOM (2016) was smooth as silk backed by a 780 Ti XLR8.

Yes, I regard c2d at 3Ghz+ and c2Q at 2.5ghz plus as "modern" levels of performance still.... considering there's a lot of shatty low speed i3s and pentium dual cores being sold, and the atom based Nxxx are slugs. That's the mainstream, so if they wanna sell games, no sense making them need a top end i7

Yeah its something how far we come and yet the c2 can still pack a punch. But an i3 or Pent dual core will pull far less power.
Ether way a c2q like the q9650 at or past 3.6ghz is truly something. Unless if you have a top end board more then anything today c2 are held back by the motherboards.

I don't quite follow the logic here, the Core2Duo/Quad IPC is terrible compared to even most budget of dual cores, take the current G4560 for example, C2 has absolutely nothing that makes it look modern compared to that. Yet I'm hearing it's better than the lowly i3s of today's market? Hello, the Core2Quad Q6600 loses even to the Athlon II X4 640.

Yes the IPC is worse, thats why I'm talking high mhz ones against lower mhz sandy/ivy/whateverbridge cores. .. and you've got that backwards if you're going to go all IPC at me, X4 610 at 2.4ghz gets 2,806 passmark, whereas Q6600 at 2.4ghz gets 2,987, a Q6700 at 2.66 beats a 3ghz 640.

What I'm saying is, that forget the 20% high end systems, the average of the "current" installed base is around 2 - 2.5 Ghz i3 levels, and c2Qs can keep up handily. Look at the Q6650 3ghz at 4,202 passmarks and then look at all the middling last gen i5s below it and tell me people don't expect those to be "alright" at gaming still. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html

Cleaned and lubricrated my first 5.25" drive (not my first drive to own, but first to fix up). The whole mechanism was completely jammed up. Took the head assembly, rail, and stepper motor out, cleaned with rubbing alcohol. then reinstalled and lubed with synthetic grease. Also cleaned the heads with a cotton swab and alcohol.

At first I was worried, because the disk I was testing with was failing to format, but I tried another one and it worked perfectly (successfully formatted, copied files to and from). Must have just been a bad disk. I may even fix up the other bad 5.25" drive I have sitting around, if I don't get lazy tonight.

You can have the alignment off though and find that while it can read and write it's own disks, it can't read disks written by other drives, and they can't read any from it.

Back in the day for some reason, I discovered that DR-DOS 6 original disks seemed to be ideal for calibrating 3.5" drives, if I tweaked things until they read those, they read everything.... so-o-o I guess find known good original disks from somewhere and make sure it can read those. There used to be such things as calibration disks but sometime in the 90s floppy drives got too cheap, so they fell out of use.

I had a problem actually in the last days of "daily driver" floppy usage between machines in the house, one or maybe two of the drives were off, and the floppies that were in regular use got badly corrupted. One machine would scandisk and try to fix them whereupon they would be even worse on the other machine, etc, etc. I will have to be careful when I bring 3.5s back into service on older machines that I don't use one of the bad drives, and not do anything silly like let it try to fix a disk I haven't checked in another couple of drives.

appiah4 wrote:

I don't quite follow the logic here, the Core2Duo/Quad IPC is terrible compared to even most budget of dual cores, take the current G4560 for example, C2 has absolutely nothing that makes it look modern compared to that. Yet I'm hearing it's better than the lowly i3s of today's market? Hello, the Core2Quad Q6600 loses even to the Athlon II X4 640.

Thats a q6600 the latter last gen quads where far better and with overclocking they go hand and hand with alot of recent low end cpus.
Just take a look at hwbot.
https://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/pentium_g4560/
http://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/core_2_quad_q9650/

BitWrangler wrote:

You can have the alignment off though and find that while it can read and write it's own disks, it can't read disks written by other drives, and they can't read any from it.

Back in the day for some reason, I discovered that DR-DOS 6 original disks seemed to be ideal for calibrating 3.5" drives, if I tweaked things until they read those, they read everything.... so-o-o I guess find known good original disks from somewhere and make sure it can read those. There used to be such things as calibration disks but sometime in the 90s floppy drives got too cheap, so they fell out of use.

I had a problem actually in the last days of "daily driver" floppy usage between machines in the house, one or maybe two of the drives were off, and the floppies that were in regular use got badly corrupted. One machine would scandisk and try to fix them whereupon they would be even worse on the other machine, etc, etc. I will have to be careful when I bring 3.5s back into service on older machines that I don't use one of the bad drives, and not do anything silly like let it try to fix a disk I haven't checked in another couple of drives.

I tried some floppies that work in my 286, and they also work.
I think there are just some 'bad' disks in my collection, since I remember some of the unlabeled disks didn't work in the 286 either.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Thats a q6600 the latter last gen quads where far better and with overclocking they go hand and hand with alot of recent low end […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote:

I don't quite follow the logic here, the Core2Duo/Quad IPC is terrible compared to even most budget of dual cores, take the current G4560 for example, C2 has absolutely nothing that makes it look modern compared to that. Yet I'm hearing it's better than the lowly i3s of today's market? Hello, the Core2Quad Q6600 loses even to the Athlon II X4 640.

Thats a q6600 the latter last gen quads where far better and with overclocking they go hand and hand with alot of recent low end cpus.
Just take a look at hwbot.
https://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/pentium_g4560/
http://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/core_2_quad_q9650/

Yeah but to be fair the power draw might off set the savings after a year or two. My 500 Watt EVGA White PSU is at its limit. With a 780 Ti, 2 Fans, 5 drives, and a soundcard i have to unplug my USB hard drives and Wi-Fi USB while gaming otherwise my display driver crashes from the GPU not getting enough power. I'm fine with a Q8300 but my QX9650s 35w increase is too much. This is without overclocking.

That being said. For around 350 US I have a gaming machine that runs modern titles at high settings. I'm still hitting a bottleneck in fallout 4 though. In the city I still drop into the low 20s with less than 60 percent GPU usage. LGA775s useful gaming lifespan is nearly over even at the extreme top end and is over at the lower end.

Putting the finishing touches on my Pentium MMX system. Just need to find a Voodoo 1 4 MB for it and it'll be done. 😁

Specs:
Intel Pentium MMX 233 MHz ("PCB" type)
FIC PA-2007 motherboard (VIA Apollo VP2 chipset, 1024K L2 cache)
32 MB 72-pin EDO RAM
Diamond Stealth Video 2500 PCI (Alliance AT24 chipset, 2 MB memory)
Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 Value CT4330 ISA
Maxtor 10 GB HDD (master), Quantum Bigfoot 8 GB HDD (slave)
Lite-On 52x CD-ROM, Panasonic 1.44MB floppy
Realtek 10Mbps ISA NIC
Promise Ultra66 ATA-66 IDE controller
Generic 250Watt AT PSU
Windows 98 SE

Installing a program I've found that contains a lot of registry tweaks and all of the updates for 98 SE up until June 2007.

I love the board but it has some problems, the onboard I/O refused to work so I had to stick a generic multi-I/O card in for mouse capabilities. Also, the SDRAM controller was very unstable, a 128MB PC66 stick showed up as 32 MB and Windows 98 became unstable with sticks installed. Reverting to SIMMs fixed the problems.

^^^ I love that turbo display

I stuck an M571 in an ATX Case that I got for free a while back. With standoffs installed, and the motherboard nicely secure, I can't install any pci or isa cards (sound/video) without detaching their bracket covers. The 90° angle part of the bracket is snug to where you screw down the cards to the backplane, except the cards are barely in their slots. It's like my motherboard is sitting a 1/4 inch too low.

I'll see if I can get taller standoffs.

Did my first desoldering job on an nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 card (VGA port) after purchasing electrical flux and a desoldering iron with the pump at my local computer store, and was successful.

VGA

GPU (upside)

GPU (downside)

Ahh man. Looks like one pad came off. How are you liking your new stuff?

Are you replacing the connector with a fresh one, moving it somewhere else, or just practicing?

‎‎‎

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Yeah but to be fair the power draw might off set the savings after a year or two. My 500 Watt EVGA White PSU is at its limit. With a 780 Ti, 2 Fans, 5 drives, and a soundcard i have to unplug my USB hard drives and Wi-Fi USB while gaming otherwise my display driver crashes from the GPU not getting enough power. I'm fine with a Q8300 but my QX9650s 35w increase is too much. This is without overclocking.

That being said. For around 350 US I have a gaming machine that runs modern titles at high settings. I'm still hitting a bottleneck in fallout 4 though. In the city I still drop into the low 20s with less than 60 percent GPU usage. LGA775s useful gaming lifespan is nearly over even at the extreme top end and is over at the lower end.

Very true, the c2 pulls far more power then most new cpu's. even some top end ones can pull less. But for some its a far funner platform to mess with.

Also if you using the nfoce board your holding back your c2. get a x48 or p45 ddr3 board, bump of the FSB to 1600mhz with the cpu running at atleast 3.6ghz and it will be alot better.
I been messing around with a few games that require a new i5 and recommend a newer i7 on my qx9650 system. With all the right parts you can get alot out of the c2.

CkRtech wrote:

Ahh man. Looks like one pad came off. How are you liking your new stuff?

Are you replacing the connector with a fresh one, moving it somewhere else, or just practicing?

I'm planning on swapping the connector from a working GPU to the TNT2 card (the working card is going to be used in a desktop that'll serve as a firewall).

How I desoldered the connector was using the desoldering iron, solder braid dipped in no-clean electrical flux, soldering iron, and violà. Plus, I discovered one of the pins had rust on it (hence the horizontal grey lines in Windows), which is why I'm going to replace it. The new ones are overseas, and S&H is more than the connector itself.

Edit: Digi-key sells them, so I'm gonna get a bunch of them.

Today I made my DOS 7.10\98SE diagnostic setup just a little bit more awesome and it only took a couple minutes.

I have a high speed 8GB CF card that I installed Windows 98SE on. Using some tips from the forums here, I changed a few things so that it boots directly to FAT32-compatible DOS 7.10 (but loads Windows with no problems if I type WIN, as usual). I have a few DOS games installed on it as well as the DOS Benchmarking suite. I have dozens of old boards to test and experiment with, so making this as streamlined as possible is the key. I wanted a bit more "diagnostic" capability and a better selection of ready to use utilities though, so I simply performed a full-disk-copy of my bootable Ultimate-Boot-CD flash drive onto another CF card. I then installed it on another adapter as the "master" on my IDE cable, then put my DOS7.10 card on the same cable set as "slave".

Now, when i turn on a computer it is in the UBCD interface for diagnostics within a few seconds, providing CPU and memory stress tests, and dozens of other utilities. I can choose "boot next device" if I don't want to use the UBCD and DOS loads within one second. At which point I can do a BIOS flash (since it is a clean DOS install with nothing else running), test a game, run a benchmark or load Windows 98SE. I have almost 20 identical boards to test (along with a couple dozen others) so I can actually do this process over and over, even loading Windows and doing BIOS flashes, and all I have to do is swap the board out and transfer the heatsink, CPU, VGA card, one RAM stick, ATX power, keyboard\mouse, power switch and IDE cables. The rest is completely modular. 😀

Jade Falcon wrote:

Very true, the c2 pulls far more power then most new cpu's. even some top end ones can pull less. But for some its a far funner […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Yeah but to be fair the power draw might off set the savings after a year or two. My 500 Watt EVGA White PSU is at its limit. With a 780 Ti, 2 Fans, 5 drives, and a soundcard i have to unplug my USB hard drives and Wi-Fi USB while gaming otherwise my display driver crashes from the GPU not getting enough power. I'm fine with a Q8300 but my QX9650s 35w increase is too much. This is without overclocking.

That being said. For around 350 US I have a gaming machine that runs modern titles at high settings. I'm still hitting a bottleneck in fallout 4 though. In the city I still drop into the low 20s with less than 60 percent GPU usage. LGA775s useful gaming lifespan is nearly over even at the extreme top end and is over at the lower end.

Very true, the c2 pulls far more power then most new cpu's. even some top end ones can pull less. But for some its a far funner platform to mess with.

Also if you using the nfoce board your holding back your c2. get a x48 or p45 ddr3 board, bump of the FSB to 1600mhz with the cpu running at atleast 3.6ghz and it will be alot better.
I been messing around with a few games that require a new i5 and recommend a newer i7 on my qx9650 system. With all the right parts you can get alot out of the c2.

What's wrong with nForce? All the Intel boards I've ever had have been very picky about RAM and have been PCIe Gen1 where as nForce lets me use pretty much any combination and is Gen2 PCIe. Not to mention I could SLI in another 780Ti if I ever found the reasoning too.

My COM1 port died yesterday! 😢
It started all two days ago, when the mouse cursor begun to stutter and occasionally freeze, but then it worked again. Yesterday, the port stopped working for good: even though it's properly recognized by Windows, anything you connect (and I only have serial mice) won't be detected. The same issue happens in Linux so it's definitely an hardware issue, most likely a bad port. I have disabled it and I'm using the mouse on the COM2 port, after reprogramming it in BIOS to use the IRQ from the dead port.

Also, a little disaster: I have taken out the spare motherboard for my Pentium 3 in case the MSI dies, a QDI Advance 10T. Unfortunately, when I was moving the old case back to storage, I accidentally hit the motherboard and dropped on the floor face down, shattering the heatsink fan.

After an inspection, there's no visible damage on the motherboard, except for the heatsink fan that must be trashed. 😢

I hope the motherboard works, it's the only other Pentium 3 motherboard I have, and I don't want to upgrade to a Pentium 4 for my retro daily driver.

On a more light hearted tone, I'm trying the VIA 4-in-1 drivers v4.43. Compared to the newer versions I found on the MSI website, the system is way more fast and snappy with this version, plus I can use the same drivers on the Advance, since it uses the same chipset, except for the native Tualatin support. Nice.

Making more icons of variable quality, mirrored my Oldternet site to Geocities.ws, linked to a coworker's retro-website from mine, and I'm trying to think of more content to add to the site that would be period-appropriate (circa 1992-1994). I quit drawing 14 years ago, and I really don't want to start again. I forgot how to program anything even close to entertaining, and I cannot compose music, so that's out too.