mcobit wrote:

liqmat wrote:

I was just curious how your mono LCD screen displays graphic modes. Mine is EGA and the system represents colors with patterns.

Ok, It is a 640x480 screen and also displays patterns for colors I think. Looks like it if you look at it closely.

From the photos that LCD screen looks like greyscale to me and not monochrome. Maybe I am not seeing it right. It seems like a very crisp LCD screen image.

Not computer related, though aprox 200 year old cooking style.
Been cooking pork in 1800's style... Using porter and other beer, plus a crapload of dill, garlic and thyme. I must say the experiment went well. I have only been cooking with things that you could find, on an 1800's market in the center of London.

well, that excludes anything that has been refrigerated then 😉

looking forward to some eel pie.

brostenen wrote:

Not computer related, though aprox 200 year old cooking style.
Been cooking pork in 1800's style... Using porter and other beer, plus a crapload of dill, garlic and thyme. I must say the experiment went well. I have only been cooking with things that you could find, on an 1800's market in the center of London.

Today I set up a CF card for the first time in my first 386. Now it's ready for me to put DOS on it, for the first time on any PC - previously I've only messed with W98 and XP stuff. I haven't used DOS properly since I was about 5 and I doubt that would have been properly!

DaveJustDave wrote:

well, that excludes anything that has been refrigerated then 😉

looking forward to some eel pie.

Better hurry. In autumn, they disappear.

Found out my 256kb COAST module is toast. Received all the components to recap a different board. Since the COAST modules are rare, hopefully the recap will fix the other board.

dionb wrote:

OldCat wrote:

[...]

So I have three perfectly good HDDs, three good controllers, four good cables. And absolutely no clue why it wasn't working before 😮

Because SCSI. I just had a CD drive that was running all hot and cold. In that case I'm pretty sure it was mostly software, though at one point in diagnosis it seems to work horizontal but not even attempt to read vertical.

Merovign wrote:

dionb wrote:

OldCat wrote:

[...]

So I have three perfectly good HDDs, three good controllers, four good cables. And absolutely no clue why it wasn't working before 😮

Because SCSI. I just had a CD drive that was running all hot and cold. In that case I'm pretty sure it was mostly software, though at one point in diagnosis it seems to work horizontal but not even attempt to read vertical.

Experience says, 3 out of 4 times, when scsi doesn't work its termination and or cables. past that its having duplicate scsi ID's.

Murugan wrote:

I'll send you a message soon 😀
This one exploded as soon as I turned on the PSU. Only did a visual check of the board and PSU since I don't have the experience nor the equipment to do it.

Not sure if I'd want to risk destroying someone else's board, but I'll give advice if I can. 😀

Repaired a few car ECUs and other circuit boards, have a relatively new video card missing two SMD caps staring at me wondering if I'm brave enough to try soldering on that fine a scale. I did SMD once a long time ago and it was nerve wracking.

I would like to vent, bitch, whine, etc. just for a moment.

Remember that Pentium 100 case I restored/painted/cleaned/whatever...

I have been trying to clear coat the paint job for the last two weeks. Why is it not done you ask?

HAIR

Arm hair, cat hair, lip hair... every freakin time I clear coat the metal slide case I will then notice hair is stuck in the coat and when I go and try to remove it the texture gets all screwed up and I have to sand it, repaint and try and clear coat again. This hair problem has happened twice so far and now I have to sand it for the third time. This is not fair to be a constant victim of hair. I could paint it on a chair, I could paint it at the fair, but the hair comes from who knows where. You might say I don't prepare, but you just weren't there.

-=SIGH=-

Tomorrow I will declare a paint job without any hair and hope when I clear coat this metal square I will no longer be in despair.

Here's a Pentium for you all:

D: dat RTC

Met up with that one friend of mine again to take a look at another Amiga 4000:

This one had 16 MB of properly functioning Fast RAM SIMMs, a GVP Impact A2000-HC+8 up top with 2 MB worth of SIMMs for Zorro II space Fast RAM, and a Video Toaster 4000 underneath it. Also had a pesky leaking RTC battery, so I made sure to have it pulled before I left.

It also shows that desktop A4000s sometimes come with the slimmer Chinon FZ-357A, as opposed to the fatter FB-357A that you can't really fit a second FDD with unless you modify the faceplate or give up the 5.25" bay above. For those of you not aware, those are highly valued floppy drives because they're the only ones that will support high-density disks in an Amiga; modded PC HD drives only work as double-density.

The 72-pin SIMM slots on the board have some busted retainer tabs, though; contact is good enough that they'll work anyway, but I'd like to know a good source of replacement slots regardless.

I also found out that I may have misunderstood Protracker's behavior. On this other A4000, all four audio channels in Protracker seem to play out of both the left and right jacks, most peculiar. It's not missing half the audio at all, everything sounds like it should. I may have to look into the audio signal traces before they hit the amplifier circuitry.

Alas, there just wasn't enough time today to actually get around to fully recapping this A4000 and its A3640 board. That will have to wait until a later date. I'm just glad it works at all, really.

luckybob wrote:

Merovign wrote:

Because SCSI. I just had a CD drive that was running all hot and cold. In that case I'm pretty sure it was mostly software, though at one point in diagnosis it seems to work horizontal but not even attempt to read vertical.

Experience says, 3 out of 4 times, when scsi doesn't work its termination and or cables. past that its having duplicate scsi ID's.

Normally my experience agrees. I did a lot of SCSI around 2000-2003, when I was always short of storage and couldn't afford a nice big new IDE drive. Those were the days when Unix RISC workstations were literally being thrown away left, right and centre after upgrades to x86, so I could easily get hold of 4GB-9GB SCSI drives for (almost) free. My main system at one point had a 10k rpm OS drive (a Cheetah iirc), a 13GB IDE 'safe' storage and 5 more 4.3GB SCSI disks in jbod for extra stuff. It took ages to boot due to staggered spinup and sounded like a jet getting ready for takeoff.
(Although this was eclipsed when I obtained an SGI Origin 2000 with FC storage array for EUR 1 - I took that storage with me to LAN parties a few times. Until it got banned due to noise 😜 )

So yeah, familiar with cabling & termination woes with SCSI. But highly unlikely that was the case here - when I last tested nothing worked in any combination, this time everything works in all combinations (except when I use a 50p cable with no termination, then data starts gettibg corrupted - but that's no mystery.

Done a full badblocks scan of the drives and unfortunately had to bin one of the 36GB beasts. But that'spar for the course. The other two are fine.

Here I go again:

Have been trying to breathe some more life into my other rig - which I somewhat moved away from after building the compact P3 in my sig:

Pentium 120 (P54CQS) @133 Mhz;
32MB RAM;
ViRGE 325 4MB;
Voodoo Graphics 4MB;
ES1868F;
Windows 95/DOS 6.22.

This is a loose replica of the first PC my family owned that I really got into. It's a funny CPU in the sense that, despite having been made in 1995, it sometimes punches above its weight class all the way up to the end of the 90s: HOMM3, C&C: Tiberian Sun, Jagged Alliance 2, Midtown Madness, FIFA 2001 (we're talking software renderer!), and - with a decent graphics card - stuff like Soul Reaver, Earthworm Jim 3D, SW Episode I Racer, etc. There's even more playable titles from 1998. It even does ZSNES 😀 But, of course, you can forget about high resolutions and effects.

I've been wondering if Voodoo 1 is holding it back in some games 😀 NFS4, Unreal, Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Driver - all performed abnormally slow with it. So today I locally picked up a PCI Savage4 Pro 8MB for cheap, and gave it a quick spin:

Unreal and Omikron: The Nomad Soul have actually become playable with this processor! 😲 I even tried some intentionally heavy titles - like Deus Ex and Frank Herbert's Dune - and they work, too! With lots more RAM I could probably complete the training level in DX 😀 The latter game, however, was too much of a slideshow.

I've yet to try NFS4 and others, but seeing how Earthworm Jim 3D and Midtown Madness are doing better with Savage4 Pro on the same config - I'm pretty sure the rest will do, too (GLQuake, however, was noticeably slower than it was on the Voodoo, but it is likely a driver issue).

Merovign wrote:

Murugan wrote:

I'll send you a message soon 😀
This one exploded as soon as I turned on the PSU. Only did a visual check of the board and PSU since I don't have the experience nor the equipment to do it.

Not sure if I'd want to risk destroying someone else's board, but I'll give advice if I can. 😀

Repaired a few car ECUs and other circuit boards, have a relatively new video card missing two SMD caps staring at me wondering if I'm brave enough to try soldering on that fine a scale. I did SMD once a long time ago and it was nerve wracking.

Now a tantalum Cap blew on the 8088 too daaaaaamn. Now I really need to find someone.
Lately I've been looking a lot on the net how-to but I still need to buy some equipment and take the first little step. Changing caps is not what I call little 😀

Gah I'm just trying to install DOS but it seems all my floppies are dead! They'll write fine, copy its contents to the desktop fine, but when I put it in my 386 they will fail halfway through the install 🙁

Revolter wrote:

Unreal and Omikron: The Nomad Soul have actually become playable with this processor!

I have Nomad Soul for the Dreamcast. It looks very interesting (much more interesting than David Cage's later games) but the controls on the Dreamcast are terrible. How does it control with a keyboard?

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Revolter wrote:

Unreal and Omikron: The Nomad Soul have actually become playable with this processor!

I have Nomad Soul for the Dreamcast. It looks very interesting (much more interesting than David Cage's later games) but the controls on the Dreamcast are terrible. How does it control with a keyboard?

I bet you have it better on Dreamcast 😀 For example, if I remember correctly, remapping the "crouch" action to Ctrl key for Fighting and Shooting layouts gets you a blank key map that cannot be changed again - which can only be reversed by defaulting ALL your control settings %) (setting it to C key seems to work, but this is not what I'm used to)

But I still love it 😁