Check if the tantalum caps aren't shorted

Played some GTA London 1969, and Redguard. Redguard is actually pretty decent isn't it? It starts poorly by immediately throwing you into a sword fight, and then showing some incredibly janky animation of taunting pirates, but quickly changes into an interesting world with a huge amount of lore. Only just started but still impressed.

My main retro box is nearing completion. I tried it with a second Voodoo2 for SLI, and with a DXR2 installed, but the DXR2 degrades the video signal too much, and getting the SLI recognised in DOS (one is a Creative Labs, the other an Orchid) was a pain. So it's going to stay with a single Voodoo2, and get a combo USB2/Firewire card installed for occasional use of memory sticks.

I tried DOS Glide Quake, but it tends to hang quite quickly, so probably going to install NT 4 on the box as well, and really should have something to play Unreal in Glide mode.

Are there many games that *only* run well on Windows 95/98? I'd much rather use NT 4 or stick Windows games on my XP/Windows 8.1 retro box.

Redguard does have the roughest first hour of any RPG I've ever played, I think.

Yeah, there are quite a few games that are not NT friendly at all.

I wonder how many windows 9x exclusive games (as advertised on the box) can work successfully on NT and how many of them can work with the unofficial DirectX 5 for NT

Converted the file system from FAT16 to FAT32 using Microsoft's file system conversion software using a 3.5" 1.44MB diskette and booting into DOS mode on my IBM ThinkPad 380D.

Secret source: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jeacocke/fat16to.htm (Method 3)

Had an AWE64 Value running in a XE466 and I have say... it sounded great!
Not a sound guy but I can see why some enthusiasts dish out big bucks(for way better equipment) for this delight.
A SoundBlaster Live! does sound great, to me at least, but an older card with ram is much more enjoyable as a whole package including handling, looks, software and funktionality.

More scrubbing and cleaning. Another desktop AT case, with a design much like the small tower we used to have at home with a 386SX 16MHz system in it.

Need to find a way to remove markings like this one without damaging the plastic. So far I have only used soap and water on a cloth. Next step is a melamine sponge I think, but need to get a new one and test on the inside of the case... I would rather have the marking than damage to the plastic.

This case might become the home of my 386 (DX 40MHz maybe?) Soundblaster/MT32/more sound cards system.

At last found some time to test a few sound cards. Apart from an ALS100 card (which I suspect of having PnP-issues so need to re-test in a more modern system than my 1991 486) everything works. A SB16MCD CT1750 does what it's supposed to with less noise than I'd expect for one of those early beasts, and souds amazing with the Korg MIDI daughterboard I also wanted to check. The AWE64 CT4520 is dusty but works as expected.

And then there's the Kentech Music16, with Crystal CS4239...

I never had a CS4239 before and wasn't able to find much info, only a Cirrus Logic desgin document which goes into huge technical detail but doesn't really say much apart from apparently even more stuff (including external MIDI synthesizer option) being chopped off for ultra-low-end price point. Expectations weren't high, but this thing sounded TERRIBLE. It's not noisy as such, but whatever sounds it generates sound downright mangled, far worse than on a CS4235, which is infamous enough. I could hardly identify the Civilization 1 intro tune (my go-to pure AdLib OPL2 test sound). Ugh.

I spend at least an hour looking for just a regular-ass, white (or beige) drive bay cover for my portable. Either I'm really dense, or they don't sell them anymore here in Germany. Didn't this use to be a really commonplace item to buy?

Anyway, I finally found some locally, but the guy's not going to get back to me until next week. If I find a cheap 5.25" floppy in the meantime I'm just going to put that in instead 😀

Was looking for a nice beige IDE DVD-RW optical drive and found one locally in a bin of other optical drives. Looked mint and it was cheap. Got home and tested it in a Windows 98SE build. The drive was set to master and I put it on the secondary IDE controller. Windows had the yellow bang symbol in device manager for the secondary controller every time I hooked up this drive. Could not figure out why this was happening, but then it dawned on me. BIOS. Nine times out of ten when weird crap like this happens a BIOS setting is making the universe unhappy. Checked all the settings in the mobo's BIOS and I suspected UDMA being enabled might be the culprit. Disabled UDMA for secondary master. Rebooted. Bam! Drive came alive and now am reading and writing until my heart's content.

As the infamous John "Hannibal" Smith wisely said...

I finally wrote a blog with some technical background on the Outline 2018 invitro that I released almost a year ago: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/keep … r-outline-2018/

Making a system with Cyrix 6x86 PR166 but stopped atm because I got tired of it :p
Just need to do OS and software but pfffffff.

Testing a box of unsorted old CPU's.
Lots of Pentiums and Pentium MMX'es (no 233's =/ ).
A bunch of 486's from DX33 and faster (got no way to test those tho).
And a few P2 and P3's, slotted and S370 versions.

Scali wrote:

I finally wrote a blog with some technical background on the Outline 2018 invitro that I released almost a year ago: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/keep … r-outline-2018/

Nice. I really like the desktop PC art with the space background near the beginning and of course great OPL3 music. Any chance of you uploading that art asset without the DSR logo so I can use for a desktop background? No big deal if you can't. It kind of reminds me of this early Amiga 1000 peripherals Deluxe Paint art asset Commodore used for promotional reasons back in 1985.

Edit: Actually my memory was fuzzy after 35 years. It was an Amiga Pro Paint promotional graphic.

liqmat wrote:

Any chance of you uploading that art asset without the DSR logo so I can use for a desktop background?

Well, not sure if I can do that, because I didn't make the images.
However, they were inspired on the promotional material of the Atari ABC 386:
http://www.atarimuseum.de/pics/scans/ABC386.pdf

That was a bit of a joke by the way. Outline was originally an Atari party, and the ABC 386 machine would be a possible target for this particular invitro.

Got a new Zalman cooler for my Abit NF7-S V2.0 Athlon XP build after I got ripped off on Ebay with a used one that didn't have the brackets (it was sold as "new"). So far I've got the motherboard, Athlon XP 3000+, Geforce 4 Ti 4600 (Ti 4800 AGP 8X), and a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. I have some Corsair XMS Pro that will be going in here, along with a Maxtor hard drive and new power supply. 😀 From the angles of the pictures, it looks like the power supply doesn't fit because the cooler sticks up toward the PSU bay too far, but there's about 1/4" of clearance.

I bet nobody has done this in a while.. Zalman Socket A bracket cut mod to fit because capacitors are in the way! haha. I put a nice brand new copper shim on top of the CPU as well.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

More scrubbing and cleaning. Another desktop AT case, with a design much like the small tower we used to have at home with a 386 […]
Show full quote

More scrubbing and cleaning. Another desktop AT case, with a design much like the small tower we used to have at home with a 386SX 16MHz system in it.

Need to find a way to remove markings like this one without damaging the plastic. So far I have only used soap and water on a cloth. Next step is a melamine sponge I think, but need to get a new one and test on the inside of the case... I would rather have the marking than damage to the plastic.

This case might become the home of my 386 (DX 40MHz maybe?) Soundblaster/MT32/more sound cards system.

For any scratches like that, I've had GREAT luck with magic erasers and a little water. (:

Played Half-Life and Unreal on my Quantum3D Mercury brick (8 Voodoo 2's in SLI, 2 Voodoo 2 chipsets in SLI on each 200SBi board)

TheeRaccoon wrote:

Played Half-Life and Unreal on my Quantum3D Mercury brick (8 Voodoo 2's in SLI, 2 Voodoo 2 chipsets in SLI on each 200SBi board)

Interesting. I thought that there were some issues with black 200SBi with 100MHz memories, that’s why green bricks with 125MHz memories were originally mounted in Mercury systems. You still use only one card (two voodoo 2) and test is meant gór antialiasing - right?

Finally managed to finish my blog on the fantastic DreamBlaster S2P: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2019/03/09/dreamblaster-s2p/