Almoststew1990 wrote:

I've never played any of these, and picked them up cheaply :) […]
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I've never played any of these, and picked them up cheaply 😀

So I've been playing these over past few days on my PII whilst I decide what S370 board to purchase! UT is great fun.

I loved all of those games. I remember as a teenager downloading GTA illegally in 1.4MB chunks over dialup modem (because that is how people packaged warez back then so you could store them on floppy) because I was poor and my parents would never buy a game like GTA. (NOT ADVOCATING PIRACY JUST SPEAKING NOSTALGICALLY) Theif and Theif2 were two of my favorite games and really paved the way for all the Stealth based FPSes we have today.

I picked up a couple of games just yesterday that I didn't currently have in my collection but are also old favorites. I got them for 1 dollar each at a Goodwill thrift store i've never gone to in an area where I rarely go to but I saw it and decided to stop and take a quick look.

Hitman:Codename 47
Resident Evil 2 Platinum Edition
Battlefield 1942
Delta Force
Conquet of the New World.

I've upgraded my Pentium 3 (socket 370) machine to 1 GHz from 650 MHz.

A chip that according to CPU World cost $990 on release in the year 2000.

www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-III/Inte ... 0256).html

Last night I repaired a broken trace on my newly acquired Aztech Sound Galaxy NX PRO :
I38-MMSD802 - NX Pro AZTSSPT0592-U01 AZT-NXPMIX0592 YMF262-M Y N 40-pin Mitsumi & 40-pin Panasonic CD-ROM interface; 50-pin Exp. slot; volume wheel
(At least I think that is the card it is from the specs on the Aztech Sound Galaxy thread here and from the pics I could find on the web). There is no FCC ID (model number on it).

Somebody had tried to repair it before, but it was really ugly and I am not sure if it was even making a connection. Instead of just trying to use a big glob of solder, I ran a wire.

I'm wondering if the smd capacitor next to the trace is messed up as it looks like somebody at the very least soldered it back on. It shouldn't have affected anything but the virtual printer port as it was a trace going to one of the jumpers for it.

Then I tried to get it going in my KT7A build, but was having trouble getting it to detect. I have never set one of these up before, so I am pretty sure that that is probably part of the problem at least.

Will it even detect in a System that fast? It is one of the models that has the 14.318Mhz ocillators so I would think it wouldn't be affected by CPU speed.

It was really late so I didn't mess with it that much. My next step is to disable PnP in the BIOS.

What do I use to configure the IRQ, I/O, and DMA? Is it HWSET like the newer Aztech cards use?

Anybody have a copy of the original instruction manual or actually have one of these cards?

Trying to find actual real information as far as configuration goes is like trying to find a piece of hay in a needle stack.

Edit: found a post here on Vogons that said the installation has to be on real floppy disks or it wont install. Guess I am going to try that as well. Makes sense as it told me that it couldn't find a file that was in the same folder the installer was in. Maybe it is hard coded to look at drive A:

Edit 2: Well, installing via floppy worked... found out that at least 4 of the 3.5" floppy drives I have are bad. I think I am going to get rid of floppy drives and get a floppy emulator for each system. It is just not worth fighting with floppy drives and trying to figure out if it it the disk or the drive that is having problems.

I'll keep my nice USB 2x 3.5" floppy drive for reading disks since it works great. I've also got a stash of old Dell laptop 3.5" floppy drives that are able to be used via USB.

As far as the card goes, no matter what I did, it couldn't find a free DMA.

The FM worked, but the speed was waaaaaaaayyyyyy too fast. I guess this one is speed sensitive as well. A 2.4Ghz Barton must be just a wee bit too fast 🤣

Good news though is that both channels were working. The person I bought the card from said only one channel was working. Maybe my jumper wire fixed that even though it shouldn't have.

The other good news is that this card seems to be really quiet in regards to system noise. Supposedly the Sound Galaxy cards are supposed to pick up a lot of system noise. It is still to be seen if it will be the same on an older system.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I've never played any of these, and picked them up cheaply :) […]
Show full quote

I've never played any of these, and picked them up cheaply 😀

So I've been playing these over past few days on my PII whilst I decide what S370 board to purchase! UT is great fun.

Every single one of those games is a masterpiece.

andrewreader wrote:

I've upgraded my Pentium 3 (socket 370) machine to 1 GHz from 650 MHz.

A chip that according to CPU World cost $990 on release in the year 2000.

www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-III/Inte ... 0256).html

I'm currently wondering if it's actually worth upgrading my Celeron 1300 to this chip.. Probably not? The FSB and faster memory would probably help but how much?

I have a set of JBL platinum speakers that lost its headphone jack. I decided to heat up the solder to remove the jack and both the L and R channel pins were looser than my car's steering. I already ordered replacement jacks on eBay, and I just need solder wick since a bewildering iron is out of my price range.

In other news, I charged up 4 NiMH AA batteries (only needes 3 of them) for my IBM WheelWriter 10 series ii, and it's working out really well.

Rhuwyn wrote:

I loved all of those games. I remember as a teenager downloading GTA illegally in 1.4MB chunks over dialup modem (because that i […]
Show full quote

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I've never played any of these, and picked them up cheaply :) […]
Show full quote

I've never played any of these, and picked them up cheaply 😀

So I've been playing these over past few days on my PII whilst I decide what S370 board to purchase! UT is great fun.

I loved all of those games. I remember as a teenager downloading GTA illegally in 1.4MB chunks over dialup modem (because that is how people packaged warez back then so you could store them on floppy) because I was poor and my parents would never buy a game like GTA. (NOT ADVOCATING PIRACY JUST SPEAKING NOSTALGICALLY) Theif and Theif2 were two of my favorite games and really paved the way for all the Stealth based FPSes we have today.

I picked up a couple of games just yesterday that I didn't currently have in my collection but are also old favorites. I got them for 1 dollar each at a Goodwill thrift store i've never gone to in an area where I rarely go to but I saw it and decided to stop and take a quick look.

Hitman:Codename 47
Resident Evil 2 Platinum Edition
Battlefield 1942
Delta Force
Conquet of the New World.

Isn't RE2 Platinum like normally stupidly expensive for PC?

On a sidenote, Battlefield 1942 is an amazing game. I highly recommend you download the AI upgrade mod though as the default bots are dumber than a sack of rocks.

@TheAbandonwareGuy

I was wondering that myself actually when i first saw it but forgot to look it up until yuo mentioned it. Searched recent ebay auctions and it looks like it's gone anywhere from 20-80 usd shipped. So yeah looks like it's worth a bit. 😀

I also agree BF1942 is a great game.

appiah4 wrote:

I'm currently wondering if it's actually worth upgrading my Celeron 1300 to this chip.. Probably not? The FSB and faster memory would probably help but how much?

It depends on what you're doing. For £12.99, I thought it was a worthy upgrade. And seeing the Pentium 3 1000 MHz in the BIOS Post gave me a smile.

I can run some benchmarks if you did want to compare?

Andrew.

Finished my AMD 486dx4 120mhz system today. It was without CPU and GFX, as they were moved to my ABIT board.
This dx4-120 system is based on:

- FIC-486-VIP-IO Motherboard.
- AMD 486 dx4 120 mhz, 16kb Write Back L1 cache. (genuine, not overclocked)
- 256kb 15ns L2 cache.
- 32mb FPM Ram.
- Cirrus Logic CL-5446 2mb PCI.
- Creative SB16 CT-2910.

I looked around on Vogons for benchmark results, and it seems like I have some pretty good ones.
The GFX offers no real gain in performance, compared to other systems of this class.
It's just meh' and ok enough. Some 55.5 in 3D-Bench 1.0
Speedsys on the other hand... The L1-Cache results are pretty good I think.
Yet, as I have no real overview on what is good and what is not on 486 systems. I can not for real,
say that my results are good or just decent for a 486dx4-120.

brostenen wrote:

Finished my AMD 486dx4 120mhz system today. It was without CPU and GFX, as they were moved to my ABIT board. This dx4-120 system […]
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Finished my AMD 486dx4 120mhz system today. It was without CPU and GFX, as they were moved to my ABIT board.
This dx4-120 system is based on:

- FIC-486-VIP-IO Motherboard.
- AMD 486 dx4 120 mhz, 16kb Write Back L1 cache. (genuine, not overclocked)
- 256kb 15ns L2 cache.
- 32mb FPM Ram.
- Cirrus Logic CL-5446 2mb PCI.
- Creative SB16 CT-2910.

I looked around on Vogons for benchmark results, and it seems like I have some pretty good ones.
The GFX offers no real gain in performance, compared to other systems of this class.
It's just meh' and ok enough. Some 55.5 in 3D-Bench 1.0
Speedsys on the other hand... The L1-Cache results are pretty good I think.
Yet, as I have no real overview on what is good and what is not on 486 systems. I can not for real,
say that my results are good or just decent for a 486dx4-120.

AMD-DX4-120-01.jpg

AMD-DX4-120-02.jpg

AMD-DX4-120-03.jpg

AMD-DX4-120-04.jpg

Nice. My first computer had an AMD AM486DX4-120 in it, until the BIOS chip blew up, and I purchased a motherboard GPU bundle that had an AMD AM5x86-P75 (133MHz) on it. In my house, we have 5 desktops that have AMD processors: K6-2/300, Athlon 64 Socket 754, Athlon 64 X2 Socket AM2+, and 2 FX 6300 6-core Socket AM3+, 4 laptops and 2 desktops have Intel processors installed: Intel I486DX2-66 (my Packard Bell), Pentium 4-M 2GHz (ThinkPad R40), Pentium 4 (Dell Dimension 4550), Compaq Presario C700 (Pentium dual-core), Inspirion 1525 (upgraded from Sloweron to Core2Duo T8100), and ASUS X54C (Sloweron dual-core), one iMac G3/600 with a PowerPC 750cx, and the rest are ARM processors (Raspberry Pi, iPad, Android tablets, etc.)

An IRC buddy asked me to build him a Windows 98 machine so I got this IBM NetVista all up and running for him! http://imgur.com/a/hfNdu

My old workstation I dedicated to handling my chip burning and dumping finally died, so I picked up a slightly newer machine and made a fresh install. Fed it a retail XP pro key, then switched it with the OEM key on the side of the case because I was too lazy to burn the OEM disc and it was not accepting any of my spare keys.

Between the custom enclosure'd Willem PCB 5.0c unit and the Data I/O 29b I can read and write to just about any common IC and a few of the really older stuff like NMOS.
Also updated my Arduino and FTDI IDE's and added an RFID unit to handle ISO 14443A devices. Also have installed utilities for AMI, Phoenix and Award BIOS's, plus a disassembler and hex editor.

Now back to burning a new set of BIOS chips for an AT&T PC6300.

CelGen wrote:

My old workstation I dedicated to handling my chip burning and dumping finally died, so I picked up a slightly newer machine and […]
Show full quote

My old workstation I dedicated to handling my chip burning and dumping finally died, so I picked up a slightly newer machine and made a fresh install. Fed it a retail XP pro key, then switched it with the OEM key on the side of the case because I was too lazy to burn the OEM disc and it was not accepting any of my spare keys.

Between the custom enclosure'd Willem PCB 5.0c unit and the Data I/O 29b I can read and write to just about any common IC and a few of the really older stuff like NMOS.
Also updated my Arduino and FTDI IDE's and added an RFID unit to handle ISO 14443A devices. Also have installed utilities for AMI, Phoenix and Award BIOS's, plus a disassembler and hex editor.

Now back to burning a new set of BIOS chips for an AT&T PC6300.

Nice system. I have an IBM ThinkPad R40 that now has Windows XP Pro with SP3, but it needs more RAM since 256MB doesn't cut it. I love that keyboard that you have, and with a built-in TrackPoint and TtackPad? That's amazing. My ThinkPad R40 keyboard layout is almost identical, but its numeric keys are on some of the keys, and when I press Shift > Num Lock, the numbers activate on those keys, unlike today's computers that require pressing the Fn key to use the numeric keys on the keyboard. That and it also has a ThinkLight to light up the keyboard and TrackPad/TrackPoint when I'm on the laptop at night.

Today I finally found some time and a boatload of patience to take another look on my 486 DX2-66 computer I tried to finish about two years ago. Since then my storage basement got flooded. Two times. And both times the computer got dripping wet, there was about 5 centimetres of water. Because of that and a huge problem with IRQ/DMA I gave up on that because I didn't have enough patience. Today I finally tried to power it up. With no surprise whatsoever no POST, so I took it apart and tried to reseat everything.
It has this board:

(sorry for the crummy picture, it is from internet)

Anyway, I reseated every socketed chip I saw, assembled it back and yeah, it is up and running now. But what is WAY more surprising, now when I learned more about sound cards I tried to set up my Yamaha OPL3-SAx card for maybe 50th time now, and what blew my mind, it worked for the first try after the bath, got sound and music in Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 1 and Commander Keen!

(Well, it isn't as good as it could be, for example in Wolfenstein 3D digitized sounds are not playing fully, they get clipped, but hey, it works now! But if you know, what does that, I would be way more then happy 😊 )

What I have to deal with though is the CPU cooler. I am pretty sure you came around those brittle flimsy four-tab holders for heatsink sometime.

Those pegs tend to break off too easily, so I designed the little frame in CAD software and now I am trying to 3D print them. If you want the STL, it is attached to this post, help yourselves 😀

krivulak wrote:

What I have to deal with though is the CPU cooler. I am pretty sure you came around those brittle flimsy four-tab holders for he […]
Show full quote

What I have to deal with though is the CPU cooler. I am pretty sure you came around those brittle flimsy four-tab holders for heatsink sometime.

Those pegs tend to break off too easily, so I designed the little frame in CAD software and now I am trying to 3D print them. If you want the STL, it is attached to this post, help yourselves 😀

What material do you plan to print those on? I've found everything I tried to be either too brittle for such applications..

I used PLA and it looks just OK. Well, I didn't try to put it in place yet, but it's kind of a "set it and forget it" thing. I may try to use ABS, but I don't have good expirence with using ABS on 1,75 mm filament printer. Also, my printer is lent by my school with free filaments, so I will just print 10 of them and will be set for life. 😀

Today I got slightly impatient with my PII build, and in an attempt to keep me away from ebay and stop me buying new hardware, I thought I'd put together a P4 build around an ECS motherboard with a 2.4GHz CPU (not sure if Northwood or Prescott)

The 7cm fan spins at 4,500rpm and is biblically loud, so I've now bodged in a 12cm Noctura which spins much much slower and silently 😀 In the process I snapped the little fan 'frame' that sits on the heatsink (the thing shown the picture a couple of posts up, coincidentally) so that needed gluing back together 😒
I'm sticking with the TNT2 for now to see how much the 450MHz PII was holding it back but I'll eventually put my 9600XT (I think it is?) in the build.

I also sold a PIII slot 1 CPU for £6!

Is that the FDD connector all the way down there? That's a little inconvenient I think?

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Today I got slightly impatient with my PII build, and in an attempt to keep me away from ebay and stop me buying new hardware, I […]
Show full quote

Today I got slightly impatient with my PII build, and in an attempt to keep me away from ebay and stop me buying new hardware, I thought I'd put together a P4 build around an ECS motherboard with a 2.4GHz CPU (not sure if Northwood or Prescott)

The 7cm fan spins at 4,500rpm and is biblically loud, so I've now bodged in a 12cm Noctura which spins much much slower and silently 😀 In the process I snapped the little fan 'frame' that sits on the heatsink (the thing shown the picture a couple of posts up, coincidentally) so that needed gluing back together 😒
I'm sticking with the TNT2 for now to see how much the 450MHz PII was holding it back but I'll eventually put my 9600XT (I think it is?) in the build.

I also sold a PIII slot 1 CPU for £6!

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Is that the FDD connector all the way down there? That's a little inconvenient I think?

Yes, yes it is.