@cyclone3d: Is there a bios option to slow down the ISA bus? Sometimes it is a divider like 2/3, make it a higher number (slower)
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Try also CMS capabilities 😉
Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative
wrote:@cyclone3d: Is there a bios option to slow down the ISA bus? Sometimes it is a divider like 2/3, make it a higher number (slower)
Nope, no option to slow down the ISA bus. I did try changing the recovery wait for isa, but it didn’t seem to help.
wrote:wrote:Makin' movies 😀
...Done - here it is:
Who knew - mode 5 on composite CGA actually IS somewhat useful... if your CGA has the 'new-style' composite output, anyway. 😀
Wow, that is super-cool! How do you do it?
I remember seeing this clip of Donnie Darko playing on Toshiba T1200 and being mesmerised by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRETxn6hMQA
wrote:@bjwil1991
saw that vid pop up on my feed earlier. What were you munching on at the start? ^.^
I was eating Apple Crumble that my mom made last night (helped out) after I had my meatloaves that I made last night. The meatloaves were baked in a muffin tray with the wraps, and they came out amazing.
Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser
wrote:Wow, that is super-cool! How do you do it?
The real magic is in the encoder (which is really a compiler) and in the player: I used Trixter's ХDC, which was more famously used in the 8088 Domination demo. You can read more about it here: https://x86dc.wordpress.com/
What I did was modify the player to use BIOS video mode 5, which shows a B&W picture over composite. My CGA happens to be a 'new-style' card, with the more complex composite output stage which produces more shades of grey in that mode. So I converted the original video to that greyscale palette using dithering and a few filters.
You could do the same in mode 6, which is B&W as well and already an option in ХDC, but that only gives five shades of grey (including black and white) and looked worse when I tried it. 😁
I remember seeing this clip of Donnie Darko playing on Toshiba T1200 and being mesmerised by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRETxn6hMQA
Hah, nice -- I'm guessing that the total number of frames here is low enough that they all fit entirely in RAM...
When you feel down... remember
HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
I tried to install SoftMPU on my Athlon machine. It turns out SoftMPU doesn't like the version of EMM386 that comes with MS-DOS 6, so I made some 6.22 upgrade floppies. I did my upgrade and it basically broke everything. I used the uninstall disk to restore the old MS-DOS 6 system and it was working as close to fine as it ever did. I then decided to copy EMM386.EXE from MS-DOS 6.22 to MS-DOS 6 and the OS wouldn't boot. Fortunately I had a boot disk and backed up EMM386.EXE!
wrote:Well, I found out why my Dell Latitude CPi motherboard won't turn on.
]IMG_0260.JPG
That pesky little chip on the daughterboard is toast, maybe later I'll see if replacing that part will bring it back to life.
So, I replaced the board in question, now it's even worse, when I plugged it in to see if it would turn on now, the damn thing killed one of my PA-9s! tried again with a PA-6, still not working (but at least it didn't kill that one). Goddammit! The one time I bought a "for parts or repair" laptop on ePay only to find out that it doesn't work the way it's supposed to (the seller didn't mention anything about it not wanting to turn on), buy a part to fix it and it makes things worse! I hate older Dell laptops so much, I should've gotten Thinkpads.
On the bright side, I managed to snag another decent '90s laptop (a Toshiba Tecra of some sort) so hopefully that makes up for the pain and aggravation this stupid Dell has caused me.
wrote:wrote:What is quite interesting about this drive, is the jumpers. It seems as I can jump it for use in Amiga/Atari's.
Not sure about your exact model as Teac made billion different models, but switching the jumpers is just half the work. You might need to do some soldering as the signal wiring is a bit different:
http://elgensrepairs.blogspot.fi/2012/10/modd … u5-fdd-for.html
No soldering required with this drive. Though the drive is dead (can not read disk in eighter PC or Amiga mode).
Following this page, with the information in the bottom, you can set various old drives for different computers.
http://embeddedsw.net/EMUFDD_Floppy_Hardware_ … lator_Home.html
All I did, was to set the jumpers for D0, Ready on Pin34 and DC on Pin2.
Then it would work in an external disk drive for Amiga.
Soldering is when the drive have no jumpers for setting the drive to other systems than PC.
Anyway...
The drive is dead, as it can not read track 0. Though I cleaned the read and write heads, and lubricated
what needed to be lubricated. The drive remains dead.
Fun thing... I did find a lot of hair from my first cat inside the drive. The cat was put to sleep around 90/91.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen
001100 010010 011110 100001 101101 110011
Not today... but close enough 😉
- cleaned the remote control of my Philips CRT TV - now registers all the buttons
- repaired a broken trace on Hercules Dynamite Pro 2MB ISA - now works fine 😁
- repaired a broken trace on 486 VIP motherboard - still dead 🙁
Today...
- tested Roland MA-8 speakers... work fine, although not sure why, there seems to be some hum comming from the powered speaker when it's connected to the power outlet, even if speakers are turned off?? It gets a bit stronger when they are turned on. While listing at a normal low volume this doesn't bother, at least I don't hear it.
- tested Diamond Stealth64 Video 2MB VLB card I recently got... works fine 😁
Requests are also possible... /msg kixs
Today (and yesterday) I realized that I'm not good in soldering small components on 'newer' hardware. I tried to recap my GeForce4 Ti4800SE, but the solder joints stayed 'cold', despite using flux, cleaning the pcb and solder tips that I have. I've spent hours on getting it right, but without luck. Yesterday I even ruined a trace on a SB Vibra 16. Now looking for an expert in soldering nearby..
Furthermore I also destroyed a nice Asus V8170PRO (GeForce4 MX460) when I tried to disassemble to cooler. While I tried to remove the self retaining plastic screws of the cooler with a small tongs, I accidentally hit an extremely small (2mm) capacitor very nearby that fell off.. 😵
I finally cured my Athlon's sound woes with an AWE64. It worked flawlessly right out of the box without EMM386 (after downloading two drivers small enough to fit on floppy disks that install themselves automatically) and has no issues even at 1.1 GHz, except in TIE Fighter in MS-DOS, but I've never gotten TIE Fighter to work on any system, in hardware or DOSBox.
I can see why the Gold versions of this card are so desirable, if they're this compatible and have the higher audio quality and SPDIF on top of that.
Got busy with my AT some more. I decided to try changing jumpers around on my controller card and lucked out, after the second jumper that I pulled I could now access the 20MB MiniScribe drives. One of them had an intact DOS partition and I was able to recover a bunch of files from 1991 (looks like school work). I got a new (to me) EPROM eraser in the mail, zapped some 27256s and then programmed them with the AMI 286 BIOS from minuszerodegrees. I also popped in an 8-bit Video7 VEGA VGA card and ran the benchmark on it. It only got about 850KB/sec, similar to the 8-bit bus memory board. Here is a (short but big: 120MB) video of the computer booting: http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/turnon.avi
Since I have the newer BIOS, I can use a regular ISA IDE controller instead of ST-506, although there is a 1024 cylinder limit. I hooked up a WD Caviar 2635F which I was pleased to see is still working. This was the main HDD in my PC until like 2002, when I finally replaced a pair of old WDs with a pair of Quantum Fireballs.
I went hunting on my other PCs for some old software to run. I tried a couple of games: Megaman 3 and Overkill. They're a little slow on a 6MHz 286, probably need something more like 10-12MHz. I loaded a couple of photos with Compushow 2000! (takes quite some time) and discovered that the VEGA VGA card has an 800x600x4bpp 49Hz interlaced mode. The Paradise VGA card also supports this mode, as well as 640x400x8bpp which is a nice bonus on top of standard VGA modes. I found that Win3.1 could start in standard mode with only 64KB of free XMS.
A funny thing happened in not-so-retro land. I tried to run a graphical DOS FreeBASIC program inside an OS/2 DOS session that was running in Virtual PC 2004 on Windows 2000. And the computer spontaneously rebooted.
again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad
Tried to get this baby to work, but unluckily it doesn´t want to. An F3 error code is shown on my POST card (according to the manual its a Phoenix Bios and bioscentral shows "Initialize System Management Manager" for F3, no idea what this means).Board is a Tyan Tiger i7320 dual mPGA604 XEON. it was known working when put in storage 3 years back. Interesting detail are the intel fans. I didn´t know the Xeons sold in a boxed version including heatsinks and fans.
This frustrated i found an Asus NCT-D for the decent price of 25 € (incl. CPUs, coolers and memory) so i could´t resist.
wrote:Tried to get this baby to work, but unluckily it doesn´t want to. An F3 error code is shown on my POST card (according to the manual its a Phoenix Bios and bioscentral shows "Initialize System Management Manager" for F3, no idea what this means).Board is a Tyan Tiger i7320 dual mPGA604 XEON. it was known working when put in storage 3 years back. Interesting detail are the intel fans. I didn´t know the Xeons sold in a boxed version including heatsinks and fans.
This frustrated i found an Asus NCT-D for the decent price of 25 € (incl. CPUs, coolers and memory) so i could´t resist.
oh that's nice. If you need some pointers on dualies, let me know.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
wrote:Tried to get this baby to work, but unluckily it doesn´t want to. An F3 error code is shown on my POST card (according to the manual its a Phoenix Bios and bioscentral shows "Initialize System Management Manager" for F3, no idea what this means).Board is a Tyan Tiger i7320 dual mPGA604 XEON. it was known working when put in storage 3 years back. Interesting detail are the intel fans. I didn´t know the Xeons sold in a boxed version including heatsinks and fans.
This frustrated i found an Asus NCT-D for the decent price of 25 € (incl. CPUs, coolers and memory) so i could´t resist.
If you don't end up getting the board working be sure to keep those heatsinks. There are not many (any?) better heatsinks for Socket 604 (that you actually will find).
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.
Worst case scenario, you could put the heatsinks in a sack and kill people with it.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Tested out my ASUS P5A-B 1.04 motherboard.
It currently has the 1005 BIOS which doesn't properly detect/work with the K6-II+ and K6-III+ CPUs so it just detects it as a MMX-450 Mhz CPU and will not work with any multiplier over 4.5.
Have to flash to the newest beta BIOS and I should be in good shape.
I am amazed at how horribly the CPU socket is placed. I had to put electrical tape on the one edge of the CPU cooler to make sure it wouldn't short out something in the back of the video card. Granted the cooler I am using is a bit wider than the CPU socket.. but still... grrrr.
