played around with AIM Phoenix and talked to someone on AIM for the first time in many years http://iwarg.ddns.net/aim/

chrismeyer6 wrote:

He's emulating a modem connection from his main pc to he retro pc instead of using a nic and setting up the packet drivers and related software.

Exactly right!

oeuvre wrote:

played around with AIM Phoenix and talked to someone on AIM for the first time in many years http://iwarg.ddns.net/aim/

Didn't know about the AIM one! 😲 There is also a version for MSN Messenger for those that don't know. Personally tried and tested on Win 95 & 98 using an older version of MSN.

https://escargot.log1p.xyz/

So, I got somethin' special in the mail a few days ago, and was able to test it out today.

Yes my friends. That's a 3dfx Voodoo4 4500. 😁

I tested it out on the most powerful Windows 98SE machine I have created yet (messy as it is; it's a test bench after all).

Funny thing is, I actually some difficulty getting the Voodoo drivers to work. Every time I would go to install them, they would I guess partially install or install incorrectly every time. I tried the latest beta driver, the last official version before that, and the one before that - all not working. I updated Windows 98SE with the the most up-to-date ASPI driver for Win98SE ('cause why not), IE6, and the latest version of Windows Media Player, as well as updated to DX7. Nothing. I'm like, "Why in the faq is this shiz not faqing working?". Then I'm like, "Okay, maybe it's because I'm just letting Windows 98SE see all 1GB of system RAM. Let me install HiMemX."

It was because of that.

I install HiMemX and BAM!, the drivers install properly and work. sigh

Tested out some NFS3 - Modern Patch, and the performance compared to my Voodoo3 3000 OCed to 180MHz is substantial. At 1280x1024 16bpp at the same quality settings, my V4 easily beats my V3 3000 hands down. I don't have FPS numbers, but I'm sure by say 25-50%.

Now all is there is to do is buy a replacement, higher-performing fan to replace the currently rattly-ass AAVID fan on there now and contribute some valuable temperature numbers to my thread here, and then throw it in my PIII-S system to replace the V3 3000 in there and profit. 🤣

the_ultra_code wrote:

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Congrats on the Voodoo 4! I have never seen one IRL... What test base are you using there?

Cyrix200+ wrote:

the_ultra_code wrote:

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Congrats on the Voodoo 4! I have never seen one IRL... What test base are you using there?

I have the Tech Tray Tech Station (ATX) from High Speed PC. It's a good product, but the two complaints I have against it are one, the rubber feet fall off kinda easily (thankfully, you can just reattach them and they just stick :\), and two, I have to pull up on the white expansion card mounting rail every time I try to add/remove a video card with a VGA or DVI port on the "top" of the card, because the standoffs snag on the rail. Other than those complaints, it's a solid product.

I'm actually looking to buy a two-level test bed, since that would make my work a lot cleaner and easier, and I might buy from them again. Might look elsewhere, though. Still need to do some research.

My test base is a computer case that had its guts taken out and lots of standoff mounts left from the other 2 cases. Heck, the one case that had the Intel D850GB board in is almost to the bottom end of my computer desk in my basement.

Speaking of retro activity, I had to reinstall Windows 98SE on my desktop (note to self: do a backup of the original configuration before removing the Windows folder to restore files easily and the registry) and use the backup I made from my 200GB (32GB limit set) HDD using Windows Backup to backup the Windows directory, sub-directories, and the registry to the installed 60GB HDD. My plan as well would be preparing the new 80GB HDD with a FAT32 partition and cloning the 60GB HDD to the 80GB HDD using Symantec/Norton Ghost 7.5, which successfully worked between the 200GB (32GB limit set) and the new 60GB Maxtor HDD. I wish I can use the 80GB as my backup drive, but the 330W PSU the board came with cannot handle 6 items plugged in at the same time (FDD, 2 ODD, 1 HDD, and the IR driver for my SB Live! 5.1 Platinum).

Thanks to good old eBay, there are adapters that has a 20-pin ATX to 20-pin ATX + the 6-pin AUX adapter, so I'll be able to upgrade the PSU to a bigger, beefier PSU.

I hate myself now. The AUX power connector is for AGP Pro 50 video cards and is considered optional. Welp, off to replace the PSU with a better one and put the 250W Bestech PSU in my Socket 7 machine.

the_ultra_code wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

the_ultra_code wrote:

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Congrats on the Voodoo 4! I have never seen one IRL... What test base are you using there?

I have the Tech Tray Tech Station (ATX) from High Speed PC. It's a good product, but the two complaints I have against it are one, the rubber feet fall off kinda easily (thankfully, you can just reattach them and they just stick :\), and two, I have to pull up on the white expansion card mounting rail every time I try to add/remove a video card with a VGA or DVI port on the "top" of the card, because the standoffs snag on the rail. Other than those complaints, it's a solid product.

I'm actually looking to buy a two-level test bed, since that would make my work a lot cleaner and easier, and I might buy from them again. Might look elsewhere, though. Still need to do some research.

I am also looking for a two-level test bed, but have not found anything I like yet. We had a thread on it a while ago: Cheap AT/ATX Test Bench? . Some of the option mentioned there are no longer available I think.

I think I am going to build something myself, I need to find a proper donor for the tray first though. For the base I am thinking triplex/multiplex, but I would like to keep it light and portable also. Maybe the Lian Li t60 or t70, but those are expensive and perhaps not AT-compatible.

Temporary swapped kickstart and harddrive storage in my Amiga600, to see how Kick 3.1 and Workbench 3.1 will work with the configuration tool for the IndevisionECS V2 scandoubler that I have bought. I need to check out screenmodes and how different screenmode drivers and profiles will work together. I will be happy, if I can get it to run at 1024x768. Then I need to test out my PCMCIA-CF adaptor under Workbench 3.1 and see how large CF cards I can use. If it will run better under Kick/WB 2.1 then I think that I will be buying a complete AmigaOS 3.1.4 package, as that is the newest release of them all.

Benchmarked an old Seagate Medalist ST31276A.

Here's the drive.

Other side

Blazing fast speeds in CrystalDiskMark

Just received my Schneider EuroPC replica's from JLPCB......... And it looks great 😀

Made a small mistake on U44, lacking the pin 29..... I think it is still usable. A prototype without a "bodge wire" is a prototype not worth having 😉

Played around in PCem for my perfect 386 DOS setup.
Got ~630KB conventional memory and ~95KB upper memory free after loading absolutely everything i could find. Both with EMM386 and also JemmEx, EMS enabled.

As it seems to be working great, i'll soon replicate it to my real hardware 386. 😀

Xicor wrote:

Just received my Schneider EuroPC replica's from JLPCB......... And it looks great 😀

Made a small mistake on U44, lacking the pin 29..... I think it is still usable. A prototype without a "bodge wire" is a prototype not worth having 😉

Haha that's a shame, but that is why it's a prototype - so is it replacement PCB for a euroPC, or a replica board to make new ones? I suppose either if it's the same dimensions.

Thermalwrong wrote:

Xicor wrote:

Just received my Schneider EuroPC replica's from JLPCB......... And it looks great 😀

Made a small mistake on U44, lacking the pin 29..... I think it is still usable. A prototype without a "bodge wire" is a prototype not worth having 😉

Haha that's a shame, but that is why it's a prototype - so is it replacement PCB for a euroPC, or a replica board to make new ones? I suppose either if it's the same dimensions.

It's mainly a replacement PCB, I tried to reproduce the original design as close as possible, (silk screen included) .
I think it's possible to use it as a replica because most of the components are readily available, still as a replica there is a challenge to solve, the U29 is a gate array from toshiba, and I suspect that it integrates a select decoder, and a joystick IO, probably it can be recreated on a modern CPLD. My initial intention is to repair my EuroPC that has a badly corroded PCB, don't know if the replica path is a viable or interesting one.

Ah, I'd seen you mention it before and wondered if it was for repair, I think that's a really cool way to get your one back to working status 😁

Pulled apart & fixed up my Focus FK-2001A mechanical keyboard. I had this for sale along with a 386 system over on VCF, but a member there tipped me off that it's a good one. It was in kind of bad shape (clamshell loose, dirty, etc.) so I cleaned it up and glued the mounting tabs back on best I could. I think it turned out pretty decent!

^^ absolutely no screws in this, it all comes apart via these plastic tabs. Unfortunately about half of them were broken off & long gone, but with this one fixed it mostly holds together.

I might hang onto it for a while instead now; it's my favorite layout for retro PCs - no Windows keys, L-shaped enter, full-length backspace & low backslash next to the right shift. I don't like it quite as much as my Kinesis Advantage, but it's pretty good & nice to have something decent with a more typical layout for gaming/tracking etc. It is a little loud, but the noise isn't grating like some other mechanical keyboards I've used.

I'm actually typing this post on it via a chain of adapters (AT -> PS/2 -> active USB.) 😜

heh I have the same PS/2 to USB adapter and it works well. Funny to see such an old keyboard on a modern Macbook

Solved the issue of getting full screen, border to border, on my IndivisionECS V2 scandoubler in my Amiga600. As it turns out, I had to install a lot of third part screenmode files, then make shure that they are all present in both "dh0:storage/monitors" and "dh0:devs/monitors" at the same time. Then reboot. Now my 600 is running at 800x600 and only 2 or 3 colours (limitations of the ECS chipset), yet I have border to border and in 800x600. Weeeee.... Uh... And because it is still running the old 7mhz 68000 CPU, then it is slow as f*ck. At least I have solved this issue.

Now I need to lower the resolution, until I have saved up for a CPU upgrade accelerator board. Anyway... I am happy to have found a workaround for this issue.

I've been putting more retro computers together lately and decided I needed a more era appropriate file server to load my drivers/software from. I have a modern Win Server 2016 machine with multiple guest VMs running so rather than building a dedicated retro server (which would have also been fun), I decided to see how hard it was to get Windows 2000/NT4 server running as 2016 Hyper-V guests...turns out it wasn't very difficult at all!

Installing these old server OSes brought back a lot of memories - mostly of me installing & reinstalling daily as a kid who was trial and erroring my way through understanding networking. I'm trying to think of more fun things that I could run practically on these VMs, but even if I just use them as file servers I'll be happy!

Starting plugging some retro build into a KVM to make life easier. All was working well until...sticky keys what evil is this? Why am I strafing into the wall all the time? Tried everything, bios settings, windows settings, some utilities to slow down the polling rate...and just as I was about to top myself I thought I would try a different, older PS2 keyboard and it worked! Just about to play some Quake2 on a Voodoo2 through it.