Finished the two week long refit project on my Compaq Deskpro 6266 machine. Keep in mind this is a Desktop form factor machine.

The specs are:

Windows 98 First Edition
Intel Pentium II 266MHz on an Intel 440BX chipset
384MB PC100 SDRAM
STB Velocity128 4MB AGP (2D/DX6/OGL)
STB BlackMagic 3D II 12MB (GLIDE)
Creative Soundblaster AWE64 Value (DOS Audio)
Creative Soundblaster LIVE 5.1 (Windows Audio)
20GB Maxtor Diamondplus Hard Drive
24x Lite-ON CD-ROM

It has onboard USB and the on board audio (an ESS AudioDrive) is actually DOS compatible. It will usually be picked up by auto detects as an SB Pro 2 clone. I usually have to direct program over to the AWE64. The Black Magic 3D sadly has a bad TMU so I have to keep the second TMU disabled via an environment variable. This essentially makes it a double clocked 8MB Voodoo Graphics as I understand. This is fine for the target era of games anyways.

This PC has basically every thing you could want for a DOS/Early Windows 9x/Early 3D PC. All in one convenient and stylish package.

creepingnet wrote:

Did a whole myriad of psycho things with the 486 yesterday - Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Thunderbird (Nathan Lineback's modded versions).

I guess one can indeed surf the modern internet in Windows 95 on a 486 in 2018. COnjures up memories of surfing in AOL 3.0 on 8MB of RAM on a 486 DX-33 though in Windows 3.1 in 2001.

Are you a masochist?

oeuvre wrote:

creepingnet wrote:

Did a whole myriad of psycho things with the 486 yesterday - Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Thunderbird (Nathan Lineback's modded versions).

I guess one can indeed surf the modern internet in Windows 95 on a 486 in 2018. COnjures up memories of surfing in AOL 3.0 on 8MB of RAM on a 486 DX-33 though in Windows 3.1 in 2001.

Are you a masochist?

Nah, a guitar in my lap helps. 😉

Backing up some games & documents from an old MFM hard drive onto 5 1/4" floppy disks, using an 8088 CPU at 4.77MHz and 256KB RAM.

Thankfully there isn't that much useful stuff needing backing up, as my 5 1/4" floppies have seen better days. I'm having to back the most important stuff up to multiple disks as I don't trust these old things not to spontaneously eat my data. Though I might just be being a tad paranoid 🤣

I'd use 3 1/2" floppies, but the motherboard/BIOS only sees them as 360KB. I may try creating a boot disk with mTCP and also the Doublespace driver, but floppies are sufficient for now.

Finally got the HOT433 to run as I intended - talk about a lot of trial and error.

Lesson to take home
-equip the board with srams even if your disable the secondary cache
-try a LOT of ram sticks until you find one that really works with it

On a more positive note, it is a pretty fast board.

Received my coloured slot 1 bracket

Put on an Asus P3V4X mobo for a PIII 933 build. Not totally decided about the other parts, but will be probably 256mb ram, a sound blaster live and a radeon 9500. (which seems to be detected as a 9700 - that was the name it displayed on screen when I forgot to plug the additional power connector )

OCD dictates you get blue heatsinks for the ram/northbridge/everything

bjwil1991 wrote:

@bregolin: How cool is that? I'm planning on scanning the box art from games that my dad got brand new in the 1990's, make them as posters, frame them, and hang them up in my back room after clearing it out some more above my computer collection.

It is awesome, I guarantee you'll enjoy have them up on your wall too 😀
Make sure to share pictures of yours when you do it!

Printing out these as posters is the closest I can get to the actual game boxes; unfortunately vintage boxed games are hard to find here in Brazil, and thus when you do find them, they're super expensive.

luckybob wrote:

OCD dictates you get blue heatsinks for the ram/northbridge/everything

Will be hard, the cards I chose makes more of a rainbow 🤣 🤣

The sound blaster will be moved down to leave more space for the GPU fan

Continued testing for a second week a big amount of 386, 486 and socket 5-7 motherboards/cpu's/RAM/Graphic cards.
I am inserting all info about the tested hardware in an excel sheet so I can keep track of their specs and more important their storage location. 😀
So far I have:
CPU:
-62 working cpu's tested, most 386, 486 and P1 area
-4 dead/not working cpu's - will retest some of them in other boards

Motherboards:
-16 working
-5 with pending repairs or removal of acid
-1 with a strange issue that it sometimes boots, sometimes not

Graphic cards:
-26 working cards - most isa and pci
-4 pending repairs (3x exploded tantalum 😐 , 1x missing ram chips)

And more then 100 sticks of 30/72pin FPM and 72pin EDO sticks tested..

Still a few more weeks worth of hardware in the queue for testing.

Played around with my XT 5160 motherboard build. 8088 CPU @ 4.77MHz, 256KB RAM (will be building into a case soon, hopefully)

Low level formatted an old 20MB MFM Hard Drive. Then ran FDISK and formatted & setup IBM PC DOS 3.30.

The damn thing wouldn't boot from the Hard Drive at first, just freezing with a blinking cursor. So I had to write an MS-DOS 5.0 boot floppy and include FDISK so that I could run FDISK /MBR - which cured the problem nicely, now booting into PC DOS 3.30 from the HDD.

Ran Sysinfo 4.5 and it's little benchmark and it gave the hard drive a 1.2 compared with the 1.0 XT standard, whatever the hell that means.

Started transferring games, using a 3.5" floppy formatted to 360KB. Not ideal, but saved time. Ended up playing games on it all day:

• Chopper Commando
• Pole Position
• Pole Position II
• Win, Lose or Draw
• Wheel of Fortune
• Block Buster
• Impossible Mission 2
• Night Mission Pinball
• World Games

So much for productivity 🤣

I have a bunch of old BASIC .bas games that I intend to transfer over too at some point. Also have a Gotek Floppy Emulator on the way, which should make my life a bit easier and save on HDD space.

Decided to change the fan on my now dissembled 815 Tualatin system, somehow, both of the 128mb PC-133 dimms that were in there died but the single 256 works in all three slots, anyways decided to dissembled the system and put the board + cpu, Voodoo5 and the rest of the parts into storage, I might give it a go in the future but ATM, I'm puzzled at how that happened.

Tried overclocking my 6MHz AT to 10MHz. Much to my surprise, it actually booted up and worked for a few minutes before crashing. Hah. Then I dropped down to 8.1MHz and it passes a memory test, runs fine. I also found some more 41256s to boost the RAM card to 1MB (plus 512KB on the motherboard).

Made a slew of IBM wallpapers.

https://imgur.com/a/rMSMD

and https://imgur.com/a/iBG3K

In the process of creating a new room. Out with the old furniture, and in with some new ones. The thing is, that I am sharing my retro room with my son. My children stay at me and my girlfriends house every second weekend, and the space somehow have gotten too small (however that happened 🤣 ) Yeah... Too much stuff.

Anyway.
We bought a tall bed, wich google translates to "highsleeper" (it is one of those tall beds, with space underneath), in order to get some more floor space. Then I will be replacing my desk, currently measuring 110x90 centimeter, with a new desk measuring 151x60. Going to get some shelf's to go with it as well, that will be wall mounted, using a couple of mounting brackets.

Finally I will be finishing everything off on saturday and sunday, by setting up and re-arranging all my computing stuff. Then sorting through my sons toys, getting rid of the broken pieces and finally setting up a tv/blueray playback setup.

Pictures will follow on monday with everything in place. So yeah... Computer "related" yet nothing to do with computers it self.

I've had an on and off interest in doing some benchmark tests and comparisons on a socket-7 system. I've been keeping the results in a spreadsheet.
It seems so simple, but when you find a problem it can be infuriating. Feels like time was wasted.

I just discovered that the Unreal timedemo is being inconsistent. The same configuration and same exact settings will give me a tightly grouped set of results averaging to ~18.5fps, then on a later run I get a tightly grouped set at ~19.0fps. This is with me running 10+ laps of the timedemo, I'm not just looking at 1 lap.
Need to reboot more? Maybe, but after abusing this as an experiment I couldn't convince myself that failure to reboot had anything to do with it.
It seems that configuring the game's screen resolution through the GUI menu gave me slightly different results than using a dedicated .INI file that was preconfigured for that same resolution. I compared the Unreal.ini and the customized .ini afterward and they were *identical*.

I've decided I need to always do a fresh reboot before every stupid little test, just in case. I'm also now going to exclusively use the dedicated .INI files (separate .ini for each resolution). Hopefully there will be a return to order and sanity.

Tackled this Vobis Highscreen last few days.
The case was pretty dirty outside and inside. Lots of dust and yuck. Gave it a clean but the front is yellowed and the chassis shows corrosion. Not sure what that ECO button does 😀
It came originally with an MMX 166 on a FIC VA-502 motherboard,16mb or so RAM, Sound Boostar 16/32 sound card, CL-GD5446-HC-A GPU, Creative 24X CD-ROM and an 8GB HD.

In the end I went for this: AMD-K5 PR100 (got this CPU for free once and never had the chance to test it and I have enough MMX systems in the lot I bought), 128MB FP RAM, S3 Virge DX, CT4170, 16GB HD, Lite-On CD-ROM (couldn't get the Creative to work with my Win95 bootfloppy) and Win 95 OSR 2.
I changed the GPU,sound card and CD-drive because I couldn't make them work for some reason. I probably screwed up again with wrong drivers or so 😀
Does anyone have and use this soundcard?
Still doubting if this will be the final configuration. I have to go through a pile of PCI cards but I believe I saw a Matrox and an AWE32 with added RAM (don't know the exact type ATM) and I have some USB expansion slot laying around here that will fit on the mobo. This means an install of a later W95 version so not sure if I will do the switches.
Hell, maybe I'll retry it with the original CL and Sound Boostar!!

Murugan wrote:

Tackled this Vobis Highscreen last few days.
The case was pretty dirty outside and inside. Lots of dust and yuck. Gave it a clean but the front is yellowed and the chassis shows corrosion. Not sure what that ECO button does 😀
It came originally with an MMX 166 on a FIC VA-502 motherboard,16mb or so RAM, Sound Boostar 16/32 sound card, CL-GD5446-HC-A GPU, Creative 24X CD-ROM and an 8GB HD.

Ha! Love that case. The Pentium I 166 MMX configuration was my family's second computer, bought straight from the VOBIS store at the mall. Good times.

I always assumed the ECO key was a "rebranded" turbo button for the ecosensitive German consumer 😀

ECO button is for sleep / stand-by mode (if supported by the mainboard).

My head was about to explode due to my indecision on what video card to upgrade my Dell Optiplex GX110 with. I had a bunch of VGA cards from the period I want to capture with it (Win2K machine from 2000) but I was having a lot of trouble trying to gauge the speed of various cards I had against each other without going into the trouble of benchmarking them all.

My OCD nature took over, so I pored over the net and compiled a bunch of benchmarks comparing various cards I had at hand alongside their contemporaries, put them on a spreadsheed and normalized the results. Then using the GF2 MX as a benchmark, gauged the relative performance of them averaged across 800x600/1024x768 16-bit/32-bit Quake 3 scores. You can find the spreadsheet here.

It is not rocket science, but at last I have a visual representation of where each of these cards fall against each other.

I decided to go with the Radeon 7000. GeForce 2 MX was also a decent choice but lost out due to being actively cooled and not having DVI Output. The fact that the case came with a Graphics by Sapphire badge and that I had a Sapphire Radeon 7000 PCI helped the decision, admittedly. I was originally going to go with a Matrox G450 but boy, it really quite a bit slower than I thought it would be at 32-bit.