VOGONS


Reply 12880 of 27170, by liqmat

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Replacing a GeForce2 HSF which had rock hard thermal adhesive. Used a razor blade and pliers method to remove it. Razor went flying when the heatsink came off and bounced on the tile floor. Tried to find said razor blade and when I did, it had impaled the bathroom cabinet in true ninja fashion.

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Replacement HSF looking good.

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Reply 12881 of 27170, by MrEWhite

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kolderman wrote:
A few firsts for me: […]
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A few firsts for me:

- first pentium mmx (want to see if it can "beat" my k6-3+ with setmul)
- first YMF724 with SBLINK (anyone have any hints on how to use it?)
- first install of Win98 on Compact Flash (industrial model, seems OK so far)

Mobo is a Epox MVP3G2 and the gpu is a mx440. I actually intend this to be my standard testbench board especially for testing combinations of ISA and PCI cards (e.g. digital sound out over the YMF spdif with opl/midi from an ISA card).

Your board needs an SBLink connector to use it, dunno if it does though.

Reply 12882 of 27170, by Vynix

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Prepping my Shuttle HOT-555A (a i430VX mobo that is rather... Tricky) for a P133 to P233 MMX upgrade (setting the cMul, bus speed, voltage and whatnot), except, I broke the fan 😵 oh well, I was meaning to replace it anyways, there was no way I'd use a P233 with the cooler I broke.

Not to mention that Shuttle put a shitload of jumpers to set, some of which are so weirdly placed that you even need as far as tweezers to grab them :p

Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]

Reply 12883 of 27170, by xjas

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verysaving wrote:

Try this :

files.hddguru.com/download/Software/zu.betta.050911.rar

DUDE! That did it in literally one second. I'm still going to dump the eeprom out of curiosity, but the drive is unlocked and installed in my PC. Now I just have to find something that can read an original Xbox drive (not a 360 one) and I can have a browse through to see if there was anything interesting on it...

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^^ after unlocking it with ZU I ran 'dispwd' in MHDD just in case, although I think ZU might have done that already. At least I'm sure the user password lock is no more.

Rant: those fucking hddguru forums are something else... I spent HOURS browsing hundred-page-long threads the other day and no mention of this tool was made. However, I did find tons of people saying "you need to read and understand EVERYTHING and search before you should even CONSIDER being allowed to ask a question!" or "this info should be kept secret, it's not right for everyone to have it" or even "thanks for losing me money from my data recovery business!" when a helpful answer actually WAS posted. That's not how you have a 'community', it's a clique. For all the faults we have here, I'm glad this place is so much friendlier and open to SHARING KNOWLEDGE.

derSammler wrote:

They did not lock it to prevent repairing or upgrading, but to prevent dumping its contents (which is legit imo).

Meh, it's only 'legitimate' as a barrel-scraping shonky business decision IMHO. And the whole system was cracked open pretty early so it accomplished nothing. It might have had some small benefit to Microsoft in the short term, but never had ANY benefit to the consumers who paid for their product, never stopped the hackers, and ended up consigning hundreds of thousands of tons of electronics to the e-waste pile early. The same argument can be made about any kind of hardware lockdown, really.

MMaximus wrote:

Good to see I'm not the only one using optical drives to prop up HDDs when plugging these outside the case 🤣

liqmat wrote:

Guilty as well. Some of the crazy towers of junk I've propped up hardware on over the decades is true stupid to downright dangerous at times.

Just for you guys, I expanded the tower of power a bit... although the project box on the bottom does buff up the height a little. I've done way jankier setups than this.

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The worst part is, this is my 3-way SLI rig, and the only thing I've been using it for lately is an FTP burro to the other Xbox and this. 😜

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 12885 of 27170, by Caluser2000

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Made a post on vogons.org this this ol gal download/file.php?id=68665&mode=view

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 12886 of 27170, by kolderman

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A couple of years ago I acquired a Yamaha SW20, but I could not get it to work. I was pretty bummed (not cheap) so I put it away and tried to forget it.

However recently I have been trying to test some of my old gear on a testbench I built, and I read here that the SW20 is very picky about motherboards and may not work with new ones.

Anyway my test bench is a Socket7 board with a MMX233 sitting in it (DOS6.22), and I thought I would give it a try using setmul to slow down if necessary. It turned out it was very necessary, but it worked! It was still a bit finicky, I had to reserve 2 legacy IRQs (one for OPL4, one for MAD16), but it was detected by the drivers and tests worked.

I then tried a few games. Doom with Midi music and then adlib music. Both sounded great, although for some reason the SoundBlaster sound stopped after starting it a second time (worked fine the first time and sounded fine). Then tried Monkey Island 1 Ultimate Talkie, and both adlib and speech sounded fantastic.

Not sure if I will be using this as a daily driver, but I am glad it worked in the end and it was worth listening to. I might play it a bit more while it is sitting there.

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Reply 12887 of 27170, by xjas

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Waiting on a couple zener diodes before I can build my Xbox EEPROM reader; that'll have to be on Monday. For today, I pulled the BASIC Stamp microcontroller board out of the Space Agency prototype thing I found and got it going.

First I soldered a USB cable onto the +5V/Ground leads for power... not the most elegant solution in the world, but it'll do for now. Plus, I can just plug it into one of the spare ports on the PC I'm using to program it and avoid the need for an extra PSU:

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Said PC is my CLI ST5500 thin client running Win2K Server, for no real reason other than it's on my desk & has a serial port. Plus, with the board plugged straight in like this, it makes for a pretty tidy dev setup. The last version of the IDE from Parallax says it requires XP or later, but seems to run fine on 2000. (There's a newer, multi-platform version of the software but it's a "Chrome browser application" so nope. I'll stick with a good old standalone desktop app, even if it's old & I have to run it from Windows.)

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Up and running! It recognised my board straight away & I was able to write a quick ancient-meme-tastic version of 'hello world.' This is a pretty slick little dev setup; I like how it has everything in one place.

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Unfortunately I wasn't able to retrieve the previous program OFF the board, although it wouldn't have done me much good anyway. The IDE compiles the program before sending it over, so the EEPROM only stores machine code, for hopefully obvious reasons.

Stamp BASIC isn't really a typical BASIC; it shares some syntax but is fairly low-level. Something like a hybrid between BASIC & assembly. The available commands are a bit limited and it lacks some functions you'd expect. That said, this thing has a 50MHz CPU, 32 bytes of general-purpose RAM (for variables, etc.), 64 bytes of scratchpad RAM, 16 I/O pins, and 16kB of EEPROM space for storing programs, so I should be able to make it do something cool (hmm, there's a game jam coming up...) I've actually never messed around with a microcontroller like this before, so it'll be a fun learning experience.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 12888 of 27170, by Vynix

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Finally removed the ol' P133 from my Pentium rig (soon to have its own page in "System Specs"), my new Socket 7 (got one from StarTech) cooler is coming up Monday but so far no trace of the P233 I ordered Wednesday 🙄)

I don't know how could I remove those metal "stains" on the ceramic, caused by the shitty cooler (the fan was already failing) that sat on this chip for decades, I'm afraid it'll have to stay like that 😒

(by the way, I've gone ahead and made this as my new profile picture, just for the heck of it)

By the way, I had already set the jumpers et al, but just left the P133 in as a placeholder, the PSU is currently being cleansed and stuff, and I've taped off the power button so I don't mistanakly turn it on and fry my Pentium 133...

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Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]

Reply 12889 of 27170, by pan069

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kolderman wrote:

Is SB-Link a pure DOS thing? Or does it have value in Win98 as well (for dos games)?

I believe it's purely a DOS thing including running DOS games under Win98. Win98 applications/games will use the Win98 driver layer and there be using PCI directly.

Reply 12890 of 27170, by Thermalwrong

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I got hold of a very tanned Roland SC-7 and thought this would be an ideal candidate for retrobrighting - I've never done it before but I bought the 40% peroxide cream a few months ago.

This is before I started, notice I pulled out the volume knob slightly to highlight the colour change:

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I put the cream on it and then put cling film on it - it was a sunny day and the balcony gets lots of light so it quickly changed colour. I found out afterwards though that you should rinse & repeat frequently to avoid spots ending up different colour - where the cream gets spread too thin to have an effect. Because of this, there was one spot that ended up looking like this:

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It's a little less bright white in real life, but it's less distractingly brown that it was - there are some fine cracks in the plastic though so clearly I should never try this again on this particular device - I think I'll just paint it next time if I can avoid damaging the front panel markings or reproduce them.

The result turned out very nicely overall, the front face looks good, I'm not looking at the blank top part so much:

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Reply 12891 of 27170, by bjwil1991

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I'd say that looks rather nice. I should retrobright my 486's front bezel, including the CD drive, keyboard, and mouse as they are slightly yellow.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 12892 of 27170, by Thermalwrong

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Thanks 😁

Yeah, getting all the shades of beige matched up would be nice. The monitor I bought from another vintage PC guy in London was also retrobrighted this way I think, because it has the same splotches.
My advice is:
1. Use less powerful peroxide cream than I did, or use a liquid & tub, which gives much more even application
2. Make sure to replace the cream frequently if you go the cream route, you only get one shot at it and it's effectively destructive to the plastic so it pays to be cautious

Reply 12896 of 27170, by pentiumspeed

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Yesterday, booted up a SE440BX-2 dell-based motherboard to check out PIII 800 fsb 100 CPU from ebay, works great was PIII 500MHz. Been looking for 800Mhz cpu for long time at reasonable price then realized tried to search via google with ebay included gave me better results.

Cheers, pentiumspeed.

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 12897 of 27170, by Bruninho

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Today I basically gave up to my plan of trying to make a version of my website to work with vintage browsers (IE5+). Nowadays, is much easier to build a site because HTML5 and CSS3 (and soon, CSS4) are so damn powerful. So why should I limit myself to very old techniques that always ended in pain/headaches back when I was just a rookie in my career? So I gave up...

There is a trend in the future were we will ditch jQuery too (after all we ditched Flash - FINALLY!) and go back to vanilla Javascript. I was never a fan of using heavy libraries, even for simple tasks. Christ, there are some techniques with CSS where we don’t even need JS or jQuery to make it work - these techniques are floating around the web since 2012/2015 and only in 2019 I am aware of them. Amazing. Actually, I think that the current trend will help to make the websites last longer for more browser versions.

But it’s not a complete disaster, I decided to give a treat to my old browsers with the WRP (Web Rendering Proxy) script. I believe the guy behind it is doing a great job on it. Meanwhile, I will just redo my website following the actual trends and lighter than actual version for modern browsers. My plan B was to serve the mobile version to older browsers (Actually it wasn’t a bad plan, just a tough work to make it happen because it needed ECMAScript 2 version of JS)....

Right now I am playing some SimTower classic fun to relax after a decent Monday of work.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 12898 of 27170, by xjas

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Did some updates on my *other* Xbox (see previous two pages), which is my original one from a few years ago. Updated the old SID install to Rocky5, backed up the Eeprom (which I never did the first time!), nulled the HDD key, and tweaked the UnleashX settings a bit. This one is going to become my debug kit eventually (once I get good enough at SMD soldering to upgrade the RAM), so I'm not too fussed about what's on there - just wanted to make it recoverable quickly.

Then I noticed Borg Nukem was available to install right off the Rocky5 extras disc. Nice. So I loaded it on and played that for a good hour or so. Honestly, I can't get enough of oldschool mods & total conversions like this; I have more fun playing them than the original games sometimes. It was pretty amusing to play as a Starfleet officer with phasers and exotic sci-fi gadgets, and yet still be able to kick Borg with Duke's boot.

Should we start an Original Xbox megathread? Seems like there's a few of us messing around with these right now.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 12899 of 27170, by Murugan

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This weekend I tried putting a case in the sun to de-yellow it 😀
Nothing changed after quite some hours baking outside.
Ah well I tried...

Currently making a system with Intel 440BX board, slot 1 P3-500, 384MB RAM TNT2 Ultra, SB Live! Value, WD Raptor 36GB + PCI SATA card and W2K. For "fun", I am going to try and install NT4 on a spare HD that I have here. There should be drivers for the SB and TNT2.

My retro collection: too much...