Now that is a BEASTLY A500. And I thought mine was actually fast.. Wait, let me grab a screenshot as well..
ACA500Plus SYSINFO.jpg
It doesn't look even half as impressive next to yours, does it? I can't imagine how nice it must be to play Frontier or Grand Prix on that machine. Are you using WB 3.1 or 3.9?
Yup... It is a fast machine. Purchased it brand new as a kit for just over 156 euro, including shipping. The kit is the accelerator, CPU relocator, CF-Card adaptor and cable plus wires. I guess it is the best one can get for the price.
I will be gaming grand prix on it, though not elite. Never really liked that game, and as far as I can see, everyone is using it's intro to show off muscles of their Amiga. 😁 I did test Lotus-III on it, and it never felt more smooth than this on an Amiga500. I did run Indy500 as well. Though I did not seem to find any noticeable difference. Slightly faster, just not much.
Regarding Workbench. If I can get a hold on something that will relocate my kickstart socket away from the CPU-Relocator. Then I will be able to finish the machine. As the kickrom has both 3.1 and 1.3, then I will be running WB 3.1 on this machine. The TF-530 do not have autoboot, so the 1.3 rom is for old games. The 3.1 rom is for workbench. So far I have had it booting WB 2.1 from a CF card that I used in my a600, before I got SD card installed in it. This baby here, will be installed with some productivity software. People have talked about WHD loader and stuff, wich I am not going to use. I like the feel and sound of floppy disks, and will be continue to use them until the new drive is worn out.
Anyway... I have used all day, to hunt down some kind of kickstart socket relocator thingy. No luck so far. 🙁
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
OK! Successfully got the Dell online by sharing my laptop's wifi over ethernet. Using that to update drivers. Still got to get Windows to update properly before it'll like my wifi, but SP3 was being an ass about installing. Hoping with it online now Windows Update can help over manually installing stuff. 😀
OK! Successfully got the Dell online by sharing my laptop's wifi over ethernet. Using that to update drivers. Still got to get Windows to update properly before it'll like my wifi, but SP3 was being an ass about installing. Hoping with it online now Windows Update can help over manually installing stuff. 😀
As older versions of Windows Update are usually a real pain to deal with, I like to use WSUS Offline Update. This way you will be able to download all the updates on your main PC and install them on your Dell afterwards. For Windows XP you should use version 9.2.1 or older. 😀
Mimi: AMD K6-2/266, S3 Trio64, Diamond Monster 3D II, Sound Blaster CT2800, 32MB RAM Satellite 220CS: Pentium 133, SVGA DSTN, Sound Blaster Pro, 64MB RAM Contura 420CX: 486DX4 75, VGA TFT, Roland Serial MIDI, 16MB RAM
Someone bought a 160GB Hitachi PATA HDD from me and claimed it was dead - completely no spin up or anything. Odd, given I'd scanned everything I put up for sale thoroughly and this one had passed with flying colours. But OK, he was welcome to come around to get a different one. That one was dead too... hmm...
So he brought his setup along, an el-cheapo 40 & 44 pin PATA and SATA to USB adapter, and a separate 230V to Molex power supply. The adapter looked & felt dubious, but wasn't the problem. It was his PSU. Lovely bad caps inside, nothing even resembling 12V & 5V coming out. So he left happy, with the original (perfectly OK) drive and a little shopping list 😉
OK! Successfully got the Dell online by sharing my laptop's wifi over ethernet. Using that to update drivers. Still got to get Windows to update properly before it'll like my wifi, but SP3 was being an ass about installing. Hoping with it online now Windows Update can help over manually installing stuff. 😀
As older versions of Windows Update are usually a real pain to deal with, I like to use WSUS Offline Update. This way you will be able to download all the updates on your main PC and install them on your Dell afterwards. For Windows XP you should use version 9.2.1 or older. 😀
I did not know that was a thing. I'll give that a go, thanks! My issue so far seemed to be IE6 struggling with HTTPS and Microsoft's website denying IE7 and IE8 were XP compatible.
EDIT
And as I say this, my Dell's seem to have managed to get updates to work without IE on its own... We'll see how far that goes xD
Last edited by Amethyst on 2018-10-26, 11:23. Edited 1 time in total.
OK! Successfully got the Dell online by sharing my laptop's wifi over ethernet. Using that to update drivers. Still got to get Windows to update properly before it'll like my wifi, but SP3 was being an ass about installing. Hoping with it online now Windows Update can help over manually installing stuff. 😀
As older versions of Windows Update are usually a real pain to deal with, I like to use WSUS Offline Update. This way you will be able to download all the updates on your main PC and install them on your Dell afterwards. For Windows XP you should use version 9.2.1 or older. 😀
The latest extended support release (ESR 9.2.4) still supports WinXP and works just fine, no need to use old version of the main release.
Well, XP all updated and stuff. Got an old version of Firefox installed. Need for Speed Underground 2 looked like it worked pretty well, and that's started having issues on my main rig, something apparently to do with RX 4xx & 5xx drivers mess up older DirectX, and in the case of NFSU2 it causes the crowds to get broken, get a weird thermal vision like colour issue. 🙁
Cleaned the keyboard that is used daily for my Windows 98SE machine both the keys and the chassis itself (dust, crumbs, and who-knows what else), cleaned (mostly) the Compaq/Logitech ball mouse, and hooked up a Logitech Optical mouse to the machine with a temporary keyboard.
I've been experimenting with options for writing a DOS installer builder off and on over the last little while (to complete my list of open-source installer builders for every era and use case) and, today, I got carried away.
I'd started poking at Free Pascal but UPX doesn't like the FPC 3.x DPMI output, so I was at a little over 300KiB for the stub before I got any further than using the Crt and unzipper units to write a "draw tiled background" procedure that could print a parody of the Epic Pinball installer's background and then dump a proof-of-concept listing of the appended Zip file when I hit Enter.
Free Pascal's i8086 target doesn't have support for decompression in the standard library and it's still 39KiB after UPX if I rip out the dependencies on the unzipping library to get it building, so it's just printing the background ...so I started considering a second shot at making sense of how to incorporate Info-ZIP's self-extractor stub into a C-based solution. (Almost all my experience with C and C++ is theoretical, so I don't have much practice reading other people's code.)
Despite my dislike of using something with such primitive compile-time checks, my curiosity got the better of me, so I decided yesterday to see how Open Watcom C/C++ would do.
(If nothing else, maybe I could follow the lead of the Microsoft Setup Toolkit for Windows 3.1 and make version 1.0 useful as an installer wizard which is space-efficient and saves the developer from having to hack something together, but doesn't do single-file installers.)
The start was mixed, with graph.h adding something like 30KiB to the base executable size, but things have been getting very promising since then. I wandered my way through the manuals and -help output to see how many optimizations I could turn on (and switched to building .com rather than .exe binaries, to shave off the overhead of the MZ file format). (At the time, I didn't think Open Watcom supported dead code elimination though I'd later discover that it's something you have to pass through to the linker that's not mentioned in the documentation for the higher-level compile driver.)
I decided to try something I'd never done before and wrote some FFI shims for the BIOS's int 10h calls instead. That got me down to about 8KiB after UPX and, as a bonus, made it easier to do text-mode color fills.
Not long after, I remembered from /r/rust/ that things in print! such as float formatting tend to be inherently heavy, so I tried puts() instead of printf(). That dropped a it down to 3KiB, but it still felt too heavy for what was essentially a Hello World, centered on the screen, with a few bytes of assembly opcodes to set some non-standard colors.
...so I decided to try to write a wrapper for the int 10h/ah=13h (Draw text at cursor without moving it) call. Cobbling together enough understanding of x86 assembly to pass a string to it was... involved. (Thank goodness that, when I did encounter a bug in the example code I'd built on, which was triggered by building a .exe rather than a .com, I remembered enough of my near-uselessly random hobby reading on the topic from years ago to realize the problem was that the code assumed CS=SS.)
That said, it was worth it. At the moment, I'm sitting on a version of that "Hello World!" in the screenshot which takes up 1212 bytes (1364 bytes if I ask for a .exe instead, and UPX refuses to pack either because the stub is bigger than the savings from compression) and, according to my experiments, 996 bytes of that is the fixed overhead of the Open Watcom C runtime library bootstrap (ie. the stuff which eventually calls main()). (I'm thinking that, at some point, I'll go poking around further in the Open Watcom docs to check whether there are any other options I could use to request a build of the standard library optimized for size.)
In the mean time, I also used Doxygen for the first time. (I can get pretty obsessive about polishing up my API docs.)
The typedefs are both to make the function signatures in the documentation nicer and so that splint -strict can complain if I pass a row where a column is expected or get my integer arguments mixed up in some other way..
Now, I've put in a long obsessive-compulsive Saturday, so I think I'm going to go to sleep.
(I have also been brainstorming on the best way to implement a project definition/control scripting for such an installer, and I've made quite a bit of progress on the idea, but, unless someone is curious, I'll wait until I have an implementation to show off.)
Last edited by ssokolow on 2018-10-28, 08:30. Edited 3 times in total.
The left one is a AMD 5x86 133 with 16mb ram, sporting a Matrox millenium 4mb and SB16, just because. 😎
The right one however got it's heart ripped out and replaced. Out went the p166mmx with it's sdram filth 🤣 and in went an 386dx40, 8mb ram, and for gfx an S3 P86c924 1mb. Still trying to decide on the sound for this machine 😕
I've been working hard on modern stuff for a few days, but I'm staring now at this disassembled Powermac 8500 that needs to go back together. I guess I'd better do it before I forget where all the parts go. 😀
It's funny how idiosyncratic Mac motherboards can be as to, for example, placement. PC motherboards tend to have things more standardized and lined up evenly, Macs often place things where they fit.
Unfortunately I have big projects that don't really need that many hours but are sucking my brain up right now.
I have another lead on a possible small haul of hardware Monday.
I've been trying to resurrect the PSU (200w AT) that goes with my first computer. I fried it one day when I was running it off an car inverter and started the engine.
For some reason it kind of works when I Have the voltage switch set at 230v, but it can't handle a load without the voltage dropping a lot. And the power good signal doesn't reach 5v if there is much of a load (say 20 watts.) At 115v it makes a buzzing sound and the fan tries to spin and then spins for a second.
After testing without the power on, I think everything is OK on the primary side but I could be wrong. Do any of you PSU/electronics experts know what's wrong?
Ouch. Right-click on My Computer, click on Properties, Device Manager tab, expand the Display adapters section, right-click on the driver that says Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA), click on Properties, click on the Drivers tab, click on Update driver, click next, click on Display a list of all drivers in a specific location, so you can select a driver you want, click next, click on Have Disk, click Browse (why it goes to the floppy drive is beyond me), click on the list of drives and select Drive C or another drive that has the drivers, expand nVidia, Win9x or Win9xME, open the appropriate driver revision (81.98 causes windows protection errors and won't shut down), such as 77.72, make sure the inf file is selected, click OK, click OK, select the video card (6800 GS if listed), click next, click Yes (it always asks me to click yes when I re-install my GeForce 6200 video drivers), click next (the drivers will copy over to the appropriate destinations), click Finish, and click Yes to restart Windows.
Last night, I figured out my video card resolution issues by switching the VooDoo2 card and GeForce 6200 PCI card around, installed driver set 77.72, and I now get 1280x1024 resolution on my 18.1" NEC MultiSync 1850e monitor.
Okay, so today I went ahead and followed this plan of attack. However, I was superficially bothered by the fact that "6800 GS" wasn't an option through the "have disk" method, so what I did was go into XP, install the driver for that OS, copied all of the lines in the .inf file that mentions "6800 GS', went back into Win98, edited that OS's .inf file with those same lines reworded to match the same style of that .inf, and boom!, Win98 automatically said that the "6800 GS" was the best option to select. Now that's thinking. 😀
However, sadly, all good things must eventually come to an end. After installing the driver under Win98, I noticed while playing some games that some random-colored pixels would show up from time to time, and once there was a weird sound glitch in Hot Wheels: World Race (although this problem only persisted for one boot). After play-testing Win98, I went under XP, and tried testing out Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Driver (please don't criticize my game choices; these were my childhood games, and good ones 😀 ). I noticed that the game was really sluggish, and there were framerate problems. At this point, things went down-hill fast. Win98 became very sluggish, and XP somewhat unstable (it probably didn't help that after I installed the Nvidia driver for this card, the OS suddenly became "deactivated", and I am currently unable to reactivate the damn OS, because the online connection method didn't work, and nor did the phone method - after typing in the long reactivation code, the website was then redirected to basically a blank page :\ - hopefully it's just a Sunday thing, not a Microsoft-finally-giving-up-on-XP thing).
So, I decided to uninstall the drivers for both OSes and pull the card. I think there is something that is wrong with the card that the seller didn't catch. Unless someone can tell me otherwise, I think I'm going to refund this card. Twice I have been disappointed by the 6800s I have bought off of ebay. I'm now looking at a 6600GT to replace this disappointment of a 6800GS, since they are easier to find and/or are cheaper on average than any 6800, and they have actual "official" driver support for Win98, unlike the flaky support for the 6800GS.
Also, question: Does any one know of any good display driver removers for Windows 98 and XP? I have now put three GPUs through this P4 system of mine - 2 Nvidia GPUs and one ATI - so I feel that such a cleaning is necessary at this point.
