looking4awayout wrote:

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.

Last time I had a com port problem it was some weird issue with BIOS corruption. The onboard hardware apparently barfed, so was disabled, whereupon an ISA i/o was used at standard addresses and the same problem persisted. Forgot how the BIOS chip got fingered, but I think it was a checksum error or something. Obtained right bios update for board, tried reflashing, but flashes gave errors. ... think I gave up on it, having other fish to fry, next move would have been fresh chip flashed in another machine. Cannot remember anything more specific or utils used, too long ago.

Still playing with my Turbo XT. Gave my Orchid TinyTurbo XTra accelerator card another try but it still doesn't work. But I could get its "new" SCSI HDD work in my main i3/win7 rig with an Adaptec PCI controller and copied games and music on it.

GLX plays mods @ 22kHz stereo on V20/10MHz + SBPro2.

Visited some photo supply stores in search of compact flash cards. Found none, gave up and ordered some online. Funny how none of them had any CF cards, yet at lease several types of fidget spinners 😕

Munx wrote:

Visited some photo supply stores in search of compact flash cards. Found none, gave up and ordered some online. Funny how none of them had any CF cards, yet at lease several types of fidget spinners 😕

Yes, it's getting quite cumbersome. Thankfully I mostly deal with early/mid nineties laptops, for which SD card adapters are much more handy. And ofc., you can get SD cards cheaply everywhere.

Checked out a few old shareware CD's I have, discovered one of them contains BeOS PE 5 😁

Managed to write a Mac boot floppy using Windows, so I could install the driver to my non-Apple SCSI hard disk, so it'd be recognised by Mac OS 7.5 on my finally-now-working PowerMac 6100/60 DOS Edition. After that was just a question of installing 7.5, updating it to 7.5.1, install the PC Setup software for the DOS Compatibility Card (Has a Chips & Tech VGA, 486 @ 66, a 32MB EDO Simm, SB16), install DOS 6.22 on it.

After all that was done, I spent an hour or so, trying to make the DOS bit of the Mac (sounds strange, right?) read a cd, but even after mscdex et all was loaded, no dice. Seems not only the non-Apple SCSI disks need a driver installed (which is only installed if you use a 3rd party tool or a patched version of Apple's own HD SC Setup or Drive Setup), but non Apple SCSI CD-Roms do too, so that HP 9200i needs to get one installed next weekend.

Put the PM6100 aside (I need to get some cheap 64MB FPM or EDO for it, all the ones I got show up as 8MB each), I felt like fiddling with the Intergraph TD-220.

Formatted the loud 10GB Maxtor, got it setup with 5 partitions, not quite sure of what I'll install in them all. All I know is that the first 2GB FAT has DOS 6.22 + WfWG 3.11 setup (minus drivers) and a shit-load of period-correct software already installed. On one of the others I'll prolly put Win95 OSR2.5 and for the last three it's going to be a subset of these (BeOS 5, QNX 4.25, OS/2 Warp or eComstation, RedHat Linux 5.x).

Now to find cheap and working edo rams 😜

IIRC max supported RAM density in those will be 16Megabit, and probably 4 banks, meaning two 32MB to max it out.

Third set done.

Decided to rebuild my K6-2/300 machine with almost every part I have last night.

1) Installed the new 60GB Maxtor HDD in the system with the drive bay adapter (3.5" to 5.25") and I'm going to put the cover back on it to protect the drive from water (and MacGyver 2-4 small fans to cool down the drive)

2) Installed my Sound Blaster 16 WaveEffects CT4170 card (didn't work in the Socket 370 system), D-link DFE-530TX+ Rev. D2 Ethernet card, STB Velocity 3D (S3 Virge/VX) card, and STB BlackMagic VooDoo2 card

3) Installed the 520W Corsair PSU, 128MB SD-RAM

The other peripherals I'm going to install today will be the CD Burner I purchased on Saturday and the Adaptec CardPark ISA-PCMCIA APA-4510 (new) for MS-DOS and going to purchase 2 CF to PCMCIA cards to use as a data backup, and the LS-120 drive's going to be used as a floppy drive.

BitWrangler wrote:

cut

My MSI 6309 v2.0 had a partially custom BIOS since it had a pin modded Pentium 3 Tualatin in it, and it was customized in order to add the microcodes support.

I "fixed" the issue by replacing the motherboard altogether. Now I have a QDI Advance 10T, native Tualatin motherboard, that runs way faster than the 6309, but it doesn't support hard drives larger than 137GB without a BIOS update. In order to support them, the last BIOS version available for this motherboard, v1.8, is a beta and so, despite it enables support for large hard drives (currently using it with a 500GB SATA drive with a SATA to IDE adapter), removes the Hardware Monitor feature, meaning I can no longer check temperatures nor voltages. I chose to do a compromise and so I updated the BIOS to that version.

So far, it's running way better than the old MSI, at least performance wise. The QDI also has better capacitors, made by Rubycon, while the MSI had unknown "Tayeh" ones.

I've been trying to troubleshoot the stability issues of my retro PC build. It seems the culprit is my SB Live! 5.1 SB0060 sound card or it's drivers as disabling it in the control panel makes all the stability issues in games go away. I'm using the WDM drivers.

Rest of the setup:
AMD K6-2/III+ (testing both CPU types)
256MB 100 MHz SDR
Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 4.1
3dfx Voodoo 3 3500
Seagate 80GB 7200.7
Corsair CX400W

I have Sound Blaster AWE 64, Sound Blaster 128 PCI, SB Live! CT4780 and CT4670 cards I could test with. Any suggestions for sound card + driver combo from that list of cards for Windows 98 SE?

aop wrote:

I have Sound Blaster AWE 64, Sound Blaster 128 PCI, SB Live! CT4780 and CT4670 cards I could test with. Any suggestions for sound card + driver combo from that list of cards for Windows 98 SE?

Do you plan on using that system for DOS gaming? If so then I'd go for the AWE64, otherwise use whatever PCI Sound Blaster works the best for your system.

For the AWE64: Windows 98SE should have the drivers built-in, and later DirectX versions will update the drivers to the ones included with the DirectX version you plan on using.

For the SB128 PCI & the CT4670: The support pages on Creative's website has some working drivers for those two cards (Use the Sound Blaster Live! Value drivers on the CT4670).

For the CT4780: I personally wouldn't bother with that one because that model because it was known for being crippled in ways that the official Creative 9x drivers refuse to work with it, but if you insist on testing it, read this topic for advice on getting it working properly.

Just for fun, I ran through several ISA sound cards from my box of treasures to see if I could find one that worked / sounded as nice as my Acer Magic S23, but failed to do so.

My Samsung SyncMaster 215BW decided to play tricks on me as DVI isn't working anymore for some reason when I was upgrading the GPU's drivers to the latest one. Help?

I guess this is sort of retro now that XP is no longer supported by MS.

Having to build an XP laptop at work because of some lame super expensive software that will not work on anything newer than XP 32-bit.

Having issues connecting to update.microsoft.com but may just be something with our connection not letting it go through. Either that or else MS has completely nixed it and updates through there are no longer possible.

And MS has also removed a bunch of stuff such as IE7 and IE8. The pages for the downloads directly from MS says that they will not work with XP so I had to download them elsewhere.

Even triep updating to SP3 and then tried getting to update.microsoft.com. Still no go.

Can somebody confirm that it actually still works?

I think you have to manually update windows updater to the final version.

Did a bit of tinkering on my macintosh Plus with a hyperdrive. (it adds an internal 20mb hard drive to a system with ZERO expandability. New aux power supply, new wiring harness. Still instantly bombs with an 0f002 error at boot. I wish I had a good copy of the firmware to compare mine to, to check for bit rot.

cyclone3d wrote:

I guess this is sort of retro now that XP is no longer supported by MS. […]
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I guess this is sort of retro now that XP is no longer supported by MS.

Having to build an XP laptop at work because of some lame super expensive software that will not work on anything newer than XP 32-bit.

Having issues connecting to update.microsoft.com but may just be something with our connection not letting it go through. Either that or else MS has completely nixed it and updates through there are no longer possible.

And MS has also removed a bunch of stuff such as IE7 and IE8. The pages for the downloads directly from MS says that they will not work with XP so I had to download them elsewhere.

Even triep updating to SP3 and then tried getting to update.microsoft.com. Still no go.

Can somebody confirm that it actually still works?

POS (point of sale) registry hack worked for me. I just skipped the specific point of sale updates since those didn't relate to my system. Only works with 32bit Windows XP SP3.

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/software/8089/ … a-registry-hack

I have 2 computers (3 after I re-install Windows XP on the Dimension 4550) that have XP installed on them right now with the POSReady 2009 Registry hack. I diagnosed my GT 730 that's not outputting the desktop when Windows 10 Pro loads after the splash screen, and it looks like a graphics card driver issue. HDMI works, but the TV it's hooked up to isn't displaying right (desktop chops off at the top, bottom, and the sides). However, when I turn the system on, it shows the BIOS info (lists of Hard Drives, Optical Drives, etc), and the splash screen.

bjwil1991 wrote:

I have 2 computers (3 after I re-install Windows XP on the Dimension 4550) that have XP installed on them right now with the POSReady 2009 Registry hack. I diagnosed my GT 730 that's not outputting the desktop when Windows 10 Pro loads after the splash screen, and it looks like a graphics card driver issue. HDMI works, but the TV it's hooked up to isn't displaying right (desktop chops off at the top, bottom, and the sides). However, when I turn the system on, it shows the BIOS info (lists of Hard Drives, Optical Drives, etc), and the splash screen.

HDMI Overscan. Google it. There should be adjustments on your TV unless its no name garbage and if not there are tools in the driver.