Incidentally, this whole odyssey of pain started because I wanted to pull out the black rackmount PC to swap its video card, and decided that was too hard to do with the KVM & its cable snake just lying there on top. Guess which part of it I still haven't done?

Also 'Odyssey of Pain' is now going to be the name of my next album.

Built my dream WinXP box and prepared it for the Steampocalypse.

Core2Duo E8500
Radeon HD 5850 1G
X-Fi Titanium
4GB DDR2 800
Seagate Firecuda 1TB SSHD
Some Asus mATX mobo with a really cool northbridge heatsink.
WinXP SP3 slipstreamed using nLite.
Not the final monitor/kb/mouse (just a testbench).

Installing and test-firing the games I want to preserve, I came across one I hadn't played before....Prince of Persia Sands Of Time. Actually seems really good and has this classic early 2000s 3D look to it.

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Smoke tested my little piece of the great pentium pro haul pie, EliteGroup P6FX1-A with a PPRO 200mhz/512 with a sexy ALR heatsi […]
Show full quote

Smoke tested my little piece of the great pentium pro haul pie, EliteGroup P6FX1-A with a PPRO 200mhz/512 with a sexy ALR heatsink, and then played a little commander keen.. (only had a floppy drive going) and 16mb ram installed. Going to upgrade it to 256mb and put 9x on it. Haven't decided on a video card though, was going to use my old s3-virge 4mb but it's not working, I think the clock crystal took some damage in storage.

I recorded the whole event so I'll be attempting to make a YouTube video about it in the coming weeks, I have a bit of a learning curve on that yet.

Thanks to liqmat for hooking me up, and also thanks to luckybob for the YouTube video I used to figure out the CPU orientation and how to rewire the ALR heatsinks power extension 😊

IMG_20181223_145054.jpg

BTW the dallas battery held my bios settings thus far after unplugging and moving the board, and it's socketed too so no hassle to replace 😎 , also curious if this board is capable of running a 1mb cache model.

So I went ahead and tested the Elitegroup P6FX1-A motherboard with the Pentium Pro 200MHz/1MB CPU. It posts no problem with it installed and reoprts back at 200MHz, but the post screen says cache = none. So I went ahead and updated the BIOS from v1.3 to the last and latest revision which is v1.5. Still shows cache = none, but when I run diags and benchmarks in DOS it sees the 1MB cache. So in conclusion my best guess is even though the BIOS is reporting the cache as none, in reality the 1MB is working. So that should answer your question from earlier. Hope that helps.

Also you can find the latest P6FX1-A BIOS files over at the ECS archives here:

https://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Pro … -RR-/Socket%208

Got a fair haul today, the majority free. Posted a message about the motherboards and cards in the "bought these today" thread. The Sankyo DM600 floppy is the real surprise there. Did not expect that.

Hoping to test some of all of that tomorrow, but I also got a Dell Precision T3400 that I hope works (untested as well), the reason being it has two X16 PCIE slots and I need to run 6 monitors for something. It's older, so a Core2Duo, but I have a Q9300 and it may be compatible with an X3370 (lower power). Going to see how many weird combinations of video cards I can put in it (running an 750Ti and a Radeon 4850 simultaneously, anyone?).

Got a Dell XPS M2010, also, it a little rough shape and not sure if it runs, but the screen looks undamaged. Don't know if I'll get to that soon, but I'm curious. Will get pictures if it does.

Edit: Also have some logo-less old cases, so I went digging through old PC and Byte magazines gathering logos. If I get any cleaned up and ready to print I'll post them (I think we have a "big case sticker thread" somewhere).

Edit2: I had so much stuff I forgot the Magnavox Odyssey 2.

Recapped my Radeon 9600XT AGP card and I don't get the out of sync message on my monitor any longer (replaced the 5 10V 1000uF caps with newer ones that has a 10000 hr at 105C lifespan) and put on two new 16V 10uF caps on my VooDoo2 card (the ones I ordered were too small, but, they soldered on without a problem). Never recapped a video card before a day in my life and the video drivers are fussy on my Windows 98SE machine (Catalyst 6.2 installed, will install the 4.3 or 4.7 driver set).

Tested a bunch of older components and about 25Gb of DDR2 memory, put a Q9300 in my T3400 (stupid dell changing every little detail for mounting the heatsink my a mm or two).

Tested a "garbage" 4850 and X1900X that work fine.

Fixed a ABIT IP35 Pro by shorting the Drain and Gate on a certain mosfet. Before this it was giving error 8.4 which pointed to DDR voltage.

People might say this is bad, but keep in mind I replaced anything that had to do with that FET, including a Winbond W83220G chip near the RAM slots, as well as both torroids and the poly caps near the Winbond chip. I accidentally found out while toying around with the board that if I shorted Drain and Gate on the mosfet in the picture and then power it on, it would complete POST.

I am seriously not investigating this anymore. Now it works fine, 100% boot rate without problems (before replacing the W83220G it would lock up during POST a lot of times) save for the zone being hot (not warm, actually hot) but I found out that's normal, as evidenced by a older IP35-E I had (that failed from some other problem I didn't really care as it was a dumbed down version of this one) that was also the same level of hotness in the area.

Clearing out some old boxes of random junk and came across these two relics from 'Hardware Past'

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

Clearing out some old boxes of random junk and came across these two relics from 'Hardware Past'

relic0001.jpg

relic0002.jpg

Could you explain the bottom photo?

Probably not in my current hungover state 😕 😀 🤣

Suffice it to say, yes I did once own an Amstrad CPC464 / 6128

This probably makes it a bit clearer than I can currently

http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Graduate_Software

I found my old PC CHIPS M747 (the BXPro thing) and couldn't get it to post no matter configuration it was in. No beeps, but power was there so I figured a cap or something went on the board while it was in storage. No real loss since I have my 440BX board that ran circles around it, the last time the BXPro was going.

https://youtu.be/cw7_dWogBIU?t=452

LinusTechTips just announced he is going to do a DOS gaming PC.....

I don't even want to know what this is going to do to the prices of retro PC parts (I'm sure whatever he uses specifically will become unobtanium)

And welcome to Christmas Eve

Winter is coming (price hikes for hardware)

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

https://youtu.be/cw7_dWogBIU?t=452

LinusTechTips just announced he is going to do a DOS gaming PC.....

I don't even want to know what this is going to do to the prices of retro PC parts (I'm sure whatever he uses specifically will become unobtanium)

How noob he will be about it will probably make it worth it in the end; I love having a good laugh at how incompetend and out of the loop Linus is.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

https://youtu.be/cw7_dWogBIU?t=452

LinusTechTips just announced he is going to do a DOS gaming PC.....

I don't even want to know what this is going to do to the prices of retro PC parts (I'm sure whatever he uses specifically will become unobtanium)

Everyone who's got 300 motherboards on their workbench, get ready to sell!

Sadly not me.

Fixed my Dad's DosBox problems.

A few games were having issues and a lot of games were not loading full screen.

Issues were fixed by upgrading him to my compiled with VS 2017 0.74-2 from stock 0.74.

Full screen issues were fixed by changing the full screen setting in the .conf file.

Discovered that my Dad has been using my 1988 IBM model M keyboard for the past who knows how many years. I think I just didn't notice it before.... but I am planning on getting him a different keyboard and reclaiming my model M.

If I had known beforehand I would have brought a suitable replacement with me.

Spend a few days of finding drivers for my ISA card collection and testing them. However, I also have this interesting ISA sound card Viva Maestro 16VR from Computer Perherpials inc, and was unable to find drivers whatsoever. In fact, wery little information is obtainable on the internet about this card. If anyone can point me to the right direction about finding the drivers for this card, I would appreciate it...

Interesting card, some data here:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=6joEAAAAMBAJ … ro%2016&f=false

diamond computer systems sound card ISA

I managed to get my Asus P4S333 (right) working, which I'd previously written off as dead and was about to toss, by swapping & reseating the RAM a bunch of times and reseating the CPU. My 8IPE1000-G was in the same box, so while I had it out, I dismantled & cleaned the CPU coolers on both boards and replaced some DISGUSTING crusty thermal paste with fresh Arctic Silver.

The P4S333 is a really cool board with a 3.3V-compatible universal AGP slot and what looks like a PC-PCI (SB-Link) header?? :

It has a 1.7GHz Willamette on it right now. I think I'll use this as my Substitute Tualatin, as it should be roughly comparable and fully support Win98. I also have a 2GHz Northwood that could go on there if I need more speed.

Unfortunately I didn't have as good luck with this A8N-SLI Premium I got for free the other day:

About 50% of the caps on this thing look like the one on the right. She's dead, Jim. I did harvest the CPU and sweet Thermaltake heatsink, but the board itself will be making a trip to the recycling place.

Anyone know what kind of fan this thing needs?

I am trying to figure out if the orientation of the dip sockets on a motherboard with isa/pci slots can be so that 7 sockets + tag ram face one side, and one socket faces 180 degrees the other side, top of the row.. 😲
There is 0 documentation of the board except a mini manual with it and it doesn't depict or mention what the orientation should be.. 😠
Any clues here if that exist also on other boards.. 😮