canthearu wrote:

[...]

You can still get DS1387's on ebay. They are probably flat or close to it by now, but another chance to mod cleanly 😀

I checked there first. Most recent one I could find is dated 1997. No chance of live battery. If I'd butchered this one to the point of not working anymore, I'd buy it, but just for looks... nope.

But still, a working motherboard with a dodgy looking battery is better than a broken motherboard with a perfect looking battery 😀

Indeed. This one has taken quite a lot of work and I'm happy with progress so far.

dionb wrote:

Busy day is over, all repairs on my old Dallas DS1387 are completed and it holds a charge as well as 4k's worth of settings in S […]
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Busy day is over, all repairs on my old Dallas DS1387 are completed and it holds a charge as well as 4k's worth of settings in SRAM:

The dremel-work was messy at best, so much so that I despaired of getting a CR-2032 mount properly connected. So I cheated and went for 3x AAA. Won't win any prizes for elegance, but it's effective enough, Now time to get that EISA config sorted... enough to do - the SCSI card config is accepted, but only works on warm boots (hangs at detecting drive on a cold boot), and the Compaq CPQ3001 SVGA card .cfg has syntax errors according to my utility. But that's all for another day. For now at least the hardware is doing what I want.

That's about right on the mess actually. I've got this to contend with on my 486 EISA system. Luckily the coin cell replacement from glitch will replace the DS1287 and it turns out Digikey has a replacement for the DS1225Y luckily. Also, looks like they are cheap on Ebay as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8djB0fzoPb4

dionb wrote:

SpectriaForce wrote:

[...]

Please do the audience a favor and buy a new Dallas compatible battery for € 10 next time 😁

Note I said DS1387, not DS1287. You can easily buy DS1287-compatible modules, in fact I did. The difference is 4k SRAM on the DS1387. A board expecting a DS1387 won't run with a DS1287 or compatible. And as far as I can see, no one has made DS1387-compatible modules for the last two decades.

Didn't know that.

Cooking pork in the oven today. I have my own recepie that I made from scratch. It is made with what you would find on the market in London in the 1890's. Yeahhh.... Old old school. I call it "Jack the ripper's pork roast". It has to be good, because it needs to be good. Especially since it it my 43'th birthday today. Yup... Cleaning the house and making the food for guests on my birthday. Pork roast with baked root's (carrots, onions, selleri and so on, with thyme and garlic). And a loaf of warm bread on the side.

Happy (slightly belated now) birthday! I hope the pork lived up to expectations 😀

I shan't depress you with my culinary activity today ("whatever was left in fridge that my children might possibly eat and could be fixed up in about 15mins after getting home late"), instead I got up to some yummy software stuff. Installing Windows 3.11 on my U5S-Super33 build. Main reason was to double-check that my last huge Miro Crystal 24S S3 928 3MB VLB cards were working correctly so I could keep one and sell the other two. VESA support in their BIOS was patchy, so X-VESA didn't let me test the highest modes, although it did give the RAM a clean bill of health. Cards like this really shine i Win3.11, and Miro did their best with drivers and utilities - and some nice wallpaper too.

Here's 1024x768@24b true colour running at 77Hz vertical refresh (my monitor could do far more, but haven't figured out how to hack the drivers for it yet):

Oooh another U5S-Super33 build! What motherboard does the system run on? How much cache does it have? How fast does it run? Have you tried Ultima VII on it?

appiah4 wrote:

Oooh another U5S-Super33 build! What motherboard does the system run on? How much cache does it have? How fast does it run? Have you tried Ultima VII on it?

Have to look up exact specs this evening, iirc an MG TK somethingorother. UMC chipset of course, 3x VLB typical 1993-era board. Getting very, very irritated with BIOS though - anything storage-related is a pain in the arse (detects drives >540MB, but still only allows use up to 540MB, can't disable primary IDE, so can't boot from SCSI etc. etc.), so passively looking out for a different board if I come across it. Ideally I'd like an 85C418 or 85C419-based VLB VGA, or even better, an 85C418 + UMC I/O combo VLB board - but as I'm not willing to shell out astronomical sums to people in Canada or Bulgaria offering completely untested hardware, I'm currently stuck with an 85C408AF ISA card, which is er... authentically slow (AF 😵 ). Finally a UM9008 ISA NIC should provide connectivity. Oh, and 256kB cache - with UMC chips of course.

dionb wrote:

Happy (slightly belated now) birthday! I hope the pork lived up to expectations :) […]
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Happy (slightly belated now) birthday! I hope the pork lived up to expectations 😀

I shan't depress you with my culinary activity today ("whatever was left in fridge that my children might possibly eat and could be fixed up in about 15mins after getting home late"), instead I got up to some yummy software stuff. Installing Windows 3.11 on my U5S-Super33 build. Main reason was to double-check that my last huge Miro Crystal 24S S3 928 3MB VLB cards were working correctly so I could keep one and sell the other two. VESA support in their BIOS was patchy, so X-VESA didn't let me test the highest modes, although it did give the RAM a clean bill of health. Cards like this really shine i Win3.11, and Miro did their best with drivers and utilities - and some nice wallpaper too.

Here's 1024x768@24b true colour running at 77Hz vertical refresh (my monitor could do far more, but haven't figured out how to hack the drivers for it yet):

77hz? That is a kind of "different" refresh rate. 😁 Nice.
Well... The pork was extremely good. Tender and well done. They say you need to moisten/drip the meat every half hour. I just turned the two lumps of meat on their heads, every half hour. This is faster. Anyway.... It went extremely well. I did not take any pictures of it, yet I have two old ones from when I did it the first time.

If you want, then I can send you the recepie 😀
It is extremely easy to make, yet you need to have lots of hours set aside (4 to 6 hours).

Got the proper USB 2.0 connector for my NetVista... since the connector is too short, I extended it with single-pin male to female wires designed for use with Arduino. These wires are mighty handy.

Works like a charm.

Maxed out my Mac SE with 4MB of RAM. Thinking of also maxing out the OS on it by installing System 7.5, though the 8MHz CPU is definitely on the weak side. Would probably be like running Win98 on a 386.

Finally tested my new 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 that I got recently in my PIII-S 1.4GHz system, and it works! I finished cleaning the fans and heatsinks, and finalizing cable management (just had to add an additional Molex power cable to the PSU). It's an honor to have a piece of history such as this card, and I'm going to take good care of it. 😀

And, if there is ever a Glide game that won't run on this V5, I can always add my V2 into the system to see if that helps. 😀

Excellent find that card looks brand new

chrismeyer6 wrote:

Excellent find that card looks brand new

I know right? Near mint condition.

Now that I have this beast, the question becomes: Do I play Glide games natively on my V5 5500, or do I use nGlide on my P4 Prescott 3.4GHz HT + 6800GT machine? 😕

Both! nGlide will run well on that P4 system but there's nothing like the real hardware especially a VooDoo 5 5500.

chrismeyer6 wrote:

Both! nGlide will run well on that P4 system but there's nothing like the real hardware especially a VooDoo 5 5500.

Agreed. It'll just depend on what games I want where. I think I'll definitely keep early-to-mid Glide games on my PIII-S machine for max compatibility, but as for the rest of them, I might just play them on my P4 machine.

It's funny: the P4 machine does everything the PIII-S machine does, but better. The only thing that truly differentiates the two is compatibility with games. There will be a few games that, in their natural state, will only run on the PIII-S system (for example, Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed can't run on CPUs faster than 2.1GHz unless you patch the game with community-made patches, and those from my experience come with caveats; Tomb Raider 1 is another good example - the SB Live! in the system has good DOS support, whereas with the SB Audigy 2 ZS in the P4 system, I'm sure the same can't be said for it - haven't tested it, but I would assume that is the case).

A friend donated me his old HP Vectra VL Pentium 75. Still in very good condition since he barely used it - it was a very late DOS machine with only 8MB and as such was almost immediately obsolete since it was too slow for Windows 95 which never even got installed on it.

First impression: it's in very good & clean condition. The darker grey panels at the front have yellowed noticeably but nothing a little retrobriting won't fix. I opened up the case and inside are some quality components:

- full Soundblaster 16 (CT2230 I believe)
- Cirrus Logic VESA chip which I always loved for its high compatibility
- Seagate 3XXMb hard drive (360GB I believe)
- Quad speed CD drive (which I moved to my 486SX a few days back)

The case is not too bad to work in either and looks quite attractive from the outside as well - the power supply is not screwed down but fits inside using slots. It's a bit fiddly but it works and once you remove the supply (which runs from the front to the back so it's long and thin), you get easy access to the motherboard.

Initially I was going to use this for later DOS games but I think I'll just fix it up and sell it because:

- only ONE single IDE port. Even though the case has room for two hard drives, I can only hook up one hard drive and one CD drive. Since CF-to-IDE doesn't like another device as slave behind it, it means I can't replace the hard drive with a cheap and quiet Compact Flash either.

- The CPU is a very early Pentium so pretty slow. In fact, I recall that some benchmarks rank a 486DX2 66 higher than a Pentium 60 or 75. There's no Overdrive socket so no upgrading the CPU either. Turning it into Windows 95 machine is no go with a CPU that slow (the lack of memory is easy to fix).

- the BIOS is EXTREMELY limited. IBM's BIOS is pretty easy to use with many options to set. HP's BIOS is very short in comparison. About a third as big. For example, you can't set boot order - you can only chose whether to make the disk drive bootable or not (so hard drive is bootable by default).

- and now a small thing but it bugs me: the boot up screen is hideous. IBM and all other early PCs had a black boot screen with a logo and some text showing how much memory and so on. The HP has this big grey screen where, on EVERY SINGLE BOOT, it runs through all components and checks them one at a time. And there's NO option to disable this. It's slow, it's ugly and it always makes me nervous in case anything lights up red.

(this image I found online so the specs don't match)

Pentium 75 being too slow for Windows 95 is news to me in 2019.. I mean, I ran OS/2 Warp 3 on a DX4-100 super smooth, how much slower could Windows 95 be?

Regardless, you say it's a Pentium 75 PC with 8MB RAM, but the boot screen clearly says it's a DX2-66 processor and 16MB of RAM is onboard - one of you is wrong. 😕 You say the VGA is a VLB card, that makes me think the PC is the one in the right here 😎

Also, Pentium 75 is not slower than any 486 CPU, your memory is wrong. The DX4-100 may be a tad faster than Pentium 60 in integer tasks maybe, but that's about it.

For the past week or so I've helped a local bowling center with computers that control the lanes - it's from 1995 and computers are based on 486 VLB boards. They had some problems with the power surges and some components got broken. It's good I have a lot of old stuff 😉 I'll post some photos of custom built wooden cases later 😁

appiah4 wrote:

Pentium 75 being too slow for Windows 95 is news to me in 2019.. I mean, I ran OS/2 Warp 3 on a DX4-100 super smooth, how much slower could Windows 95 be?

Regardless, you say it's a Pentium 75 PC with 8MB RAM, but the boot screen clearly says it's a DX2-66 processor and 16MB of RAM is onboard - one of you is wrong. 😕 You say the VGA is a VLB card, that makes me think the PC is the one in the right here 😎

Also, Pentium 75 is not slower than any 486 CPU, your memory is wrong. The DX4-100 may be a tad faster than Pentium 60 in integer tasks maybe, but that's about it.

Read carefully :p

(this image I found online so the specs don't match)

The VGA is on-board (chip) so it's not VLB - disregard the screen above completely. I posted it to show you how the start up screen looked, nothing else.

And yes, technically Windows 95 runs fine on a Pentium 75 but I build these PCs to be typical high end machines of the period. I had a Pentium 166 for Windows 98 which I already found a tad too slow so I upgraded to a Pentium 233 MMX. A Pentium 75 running Windows 95 would only be able to run a very small amount of Windows 9X games at a good speed. It would be far more useful as a DOS machine. Thing is, my Pentium 233 MMX is ALSO great as a DOS machine and even better since there's quite a few late end DOS games that will run poorly on a Pentium 75 but run fine on a P233.