I replaced the motherboard of my Athlon64 system yet again and reverted to the K8V Deluxe (K8T800) yet again. Now I am having a dilemma; do I stick to keeping it as a Windows XP box or do I make it a dual boot Windows 98/XP box, and add in a second PCI card for SB Emulation (Likely a Terratec 128i ESS Solo-1).. I can't decide and it's driving me nuts. Alternatively I could just set up DosBox on the PC and use that for DOS games but I have no idea how well it would run an a Socket 754 Athlon 3700+..

One PC for DOS, one for Win98, one for XP. Trying to wrangle one PC into 2 or more roles is a futile exercise in frustration.

kolderman wrote:

One PC for DOS, one for Win98, one for XP. Trying to wrangle one PC into 2 or more roles is a futile exercise in frustration.

I already have two for DOS (386SX-25 DOS 5.0 and 486SX40 DOS 6.22), three for Windows 9x (P133 Win95, K6-2/500 Win98 and PIII-1200 WinMe) so this was meant to be the XP PC originally.. Maybe I should stick to that plan. I may still install a modernish Linux distro on it though..)

appiah4 wrote:

kolderman wrote:

One PC for DOS, one for Win98, one for XP. Trying to wrangle one PC into 2 or more roles is a futile exercise in frustration.

I already have two for DOS (386SX-25 DOS 5.0 and 486SX40 DOS 6.22), three for Windows 9x (P133 Win95, K6-2/500 Win98 and PIII-1200 WinMe) [...]

Looks like you are still missing one nice higher-end 486dx for messing around with Win 3.11. 😀

Opened up a Sony CDU33A. The power/activity LEDs came loose somehow. Possibly other problems...

large pics of the PCB:
http://www.hyakushiki.net/misc/cdu33a-t.jpg
http://www.hyakushiki.net/misc/cdu33a-b.jpg

GigAHerZ wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

kolderman wrote:

One PC for DOS, one for Win98, one for XP. Trying to wrangle one PC into 2 or more roles is a futile exercise in frustration.

I already have two for DOS (386SX-25 DOS 5.0 and 486SX40 DOS 6.22), three for Windows 9x (P133 Win95, K6-2/500 Win98 and PIII-1200 WinMe) [...]

Looks like you are still missing one nice higher-end 486dx for messing around with Win 3.11. 😀

To be fair that era is perfectly covered by the P133 Windows 95 PC AFAIC. Still, I am going to build a PC for my daily retrogaming and as a source for DOS video capture, but I can't decide between a 486DX4-100 PCI and a Cyrix mII-266GP - so I may actually have one of those soon as well..

Had to repair my 486 as the dual floppy drive was not being detected. Disconnected one end of the floppy cable and sprayed DeoxIt D5 in the pins and did the other side of the cable. Finally gets detected. Also installed Terra Nova Strike Force Centauri on the system. It runs smooth in some cases, other times it stutters. Probably because I'm running the game on an AMD Am5x86-P75 (Evergreen 586) CPU and the game requires a Pentium 60 or higher to get it to run better (if I find a Pentium OverDrive 83 cheap, it'll be installed). Got the game to work on my IBM ThinkPad 380D TFT by remaking the univbe.drv file (video.bat file) and runs smooth as butter.

appiah4 wrote:

I can't decide between a 486DX4-100 PCI and a Cyrix mII-266GP - so I may actually have one of those soon as well..

Cyrix all the way baby! It will do so much more.

appiah4 wrote:

486SX40 DOS 6.22

Nice ! I have a 486SX40 board that has been sitting for a long time, how does it run compared to DX40's ?

page 686, YEAH

i686?

Coincidentally, this is the last CPU I just finished benchmarking in my Super 7 project:

xjas wrote:

Coincidentally, this is the last CPU I just finished benchmarking in my Super 7 project:

20191218_210655.jpg

That reminds me, are there any functional differences between 6x86mx and mII architecture wise? Would be nice if you could look at that in your testing..

I think they're two names for the same thing. The BIOS on my P5A-B reports this as a "Cyrix/IBM MII." Unfortunately the only other chip I have in the series is a non-MX 6x86 PR150+ & isn't compatible with this board.

Went to turn on my 286 and was greeted with silence. Looks like a PSU replacement in the future 🤦

Also tried to harvest IDE connectors from a scrap motherboard using a hot air blower from a plastic welding kit. Result is a bit messy but probably salvagable.

appiah4 wrote:

xjas wrote:

Coincidentally, this is the last CPU I just finished benchmarking in my Super 7 project:

20191218_210655.jpg

That reminds me, are there any functional differences between 6x86mx and mII architecture wise? Would be nice if you could look at that in your testing..

The 6x86MX was renamed by Cyrix to MII. I can't remember why. The MII will basically be later revisions (steppings) or the MX

Tested a Matrox G200, and ran into a problem people complained about back in the day - the default bus mastering option in the driver causes a hard lockup or BSOD in any 3D game I tried under Win98. Disabling bus mastering fixes the problem under D3D, but makes OpenGL acceleration unavailable. 🤣 And we're back to missing OpenGL, just like 1998 all over again.

I eventually managed to get OpenGL working only after resorting to a OGL->D3D wrapper. The one for Chromatic Mpact works surprisingly well in Quake and Quake2.

Finished upgrading my Win 98SE rig to a ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA with a Xeon 3230 and a Radeon 9800 Pro/Voodoo 2. I also decided to use an AIO, the Cooler Master ML240P Mirage, which didn't fit in the case I had without taking a hammer to the drive cage up front and only installing one of the fans on the 240mm radiator. However after testing it seems sufficient for the CPU, Idle at 30c, games at 40c, torture test in prime 95 at 52c max. This motherboard seems pretty great and solid so far and I'm enjoying my new semi reverse sleeper 98SE build.

I dual boot with XP and in 3dMark 2001SE I get 22k, which is a big improvement from my old P4 rig.

EDIT: Ordered a slim case fan it's only 10mm thinner but that should be enough to fit. Idle temps currently at 27-33c, will report back temps after installing the second fan on the radiator.

My 386 has the 504mb disk limit, and I noticed that fdisk would still let me add an extended partition. "That can't work", I thought, but I did it anyway. Well I did get another partition, so that was very successful. The contents of my original partition have turned into scrambled eggs, though.

Discovered the ide controller is kaput on the IBM Aptiva I picked up, given the CD drive was blown too I expect something has happened here...

Well at least I have a nice mATX case for a future project. 😐

Currently spinning up a custom WinXP installer to get XP on my HP 4320s Probook daily driver alongside Linux. Always find it useful to have a working machine with XP on it.