Worked on a Pacific Computer Systems XT luggable. Has a DTK PIM-TB10 Turbo XT board and Amber mono monitor. Got it up and running but the HD is dead (story of my life 🤣). A few pics...

Nice luggable. How is the HDD dead? Not spinning?

liqmat wrote on 2020-03-29, 01:50:

Nice luggable. How is the HDD dead? Not spinning?

Yes is an old 20Mb MFM and it just blinks at me 🤣
added: wich I have the manual to this, looks like I have to totally tear down the case and internal side rails to get to the HD. Good thing is both floppies work 😀

That's too bad. I have had 20 and 40MB MFMs come across my desk in the last few years and spin up like new without one bad sector. Both were Seagate. Some last quite a long time.

liqmat wrote on 2020-03-29, 01:55:

That's too bad. I have had 20 and 40MB MFMs come across my desk in the last few years and spin up like new without one bad sector. Both were Seagates. Some last quite a long time.

That is great. Being a portable who knows how badly it was beat around before I got it. Most likely heads are stuck to platters or the bearings are froze. Maybe will have time to remove it and massage it into life 😀

Moved NOLF1 from a v5 to fx5950U. The v5 really doesn't do well with directx games from 2000 onwards.

Bought this motherboard as dead 6months ago, was cheap because of deadness. Tested it then and yeah, it was completely dead. So I just put in the pile of dead stuff.
And now I took it out again. It was still dead (surprise). Anyway, checked all jumpers according to silkscreen and all seemed right.
But alot of jumpers didn't have any info, and no info about FSB. Looking on th99 I found nothing. So just for fun I started looking for bios for it since the chip didn't look original.
Long story short. I found a bios and, on the same page, the manual for the board. Set all jumper by the manual and it booted right away.
A cheap SS7 board with at formfactor is always welcome here. 😁

Goody gum drops!

I received, among some other stuff, a Shuttle HOT-541 Ver. 2.2 today (Socket 7, Triton Chipset), complete with 32 MB RAM and a Pentium 100 MHz.
Had to straighten a few pins and stuff, and to remove some stains that looked suspicously like "spider poop", don't know how to describe it in other words 😉
Despite from the battery in the Dallas RTC being dead, it seems to work pretty well. So I guess I'll have to bring out the Dremel and the soldering iron tomorrow to modify the Dallas chip to accomodate a standard coin cell holder.

Together with the board I received some other stuff that I cleaned and tested, most notably a Swiftech MC370 heatsink with the original Papst fan. This thing was a legend back in the day and I am very happy that I was finally able to find one. It had a hefty price tag of ~67€ back then - 88€/97$ in todays money, so it was far beyond reach for the student-me in 2001.

Horun wrote on 2020-03-29, 00:30:

[...]
Nice ! Got to love EISA 😁

Love it - but only the way the mother of an absolutely demon spawn child loves it unconditionally... whoever thought this was easier than messing around with jumpers was either doing drugs or naive to the point of stupidity 😮

Getting the system up and running was easy, but then I wanted to add two non-EISA cards - an 8b ISA I/O card for serial and parallel ports and an SB16 as even though I have low opinion of the beasts, there aren't that many cards with EISA cfg, and I seem to have lost my PAS16 somehow ( 😦 - must be in the house somewhere, probably even in the same room. But not findable at present). Nothing too complicated, but some resources needed reserving. Then the fun started. The SCSI + FDD adapter defaulted to 330, and seeing as Ethernet was already occupying 300 (and could only do 330 otherwise). I needed to move it for MIDI. No problem. Four other options. None of which gave conflicts in the config tool. So reboot and - hangs on SCSI. Of course to change settings you need to boot the system to run cfg.exe. And that is on the SCSI HDD that can't boot. So removed SCSI, added an ISA multi I/O card, booted from floppy on that. Ran cfg.exe from floppy. Added SCSI again. Ran cfg.exe from HDD to ensure that the config would be in sync. Tried the next address. Hung again. Repeated everything again. Eventually found that 334 would work. In the end you need all the knowledge you would need for non-PnP ISA, just with an added layer of complexity and an added dependancy before you can fix things that go wrong. Lovely.

Of course, after that I got about half an hour of a correctly working system before SCSI started playing up. Determined that it wasn't the drive or adapter, nor the cable, and it would work with a plethora of adapters and a 68p cable with built-in active termination. That screams "termination issues", but of course my spare 50p terminator is also AWOL. Fortunately someone's selling them locally for a good price so ordered two.

Ugh ! Hate KB errors/issues. Maybe a partly dry cap and it could end up working OK after having power on for a while. Have seen some odd behavior on old boards stored for a while that smooths out after powered up for a hour or overnite. I have a KB error on soc5 that I can not figure out. No visible corrosion, all traces good, volts good, diodes good. Hoping it is not the via 82c416 chip........

Hope so too.

Figured mine out. Turns out there were two separate issues causing all three keyboards I tried to fail. Firstly the board delivers very little current over its DIN port. That's insufficient for a power-hungry Model M and throws off my KVM switch too. So I connected an other AT/DIN keyboard directly. No power issues there, but it had a stuck keyswitch. Fixed that and at least one worry less.

Also a more recent retro experience: picked up a set of Harman Kardon Soundstick II speakers. I was impressed by the sound my old IBM Aptiva speakers from 1996 produced, but these are in a whole different league. Have been listening to classical music and prog rock/metal continuously and it never sounded so good 😀

Today I played a bit with my DOS/Win311/Win98 PC. I configured the soundcard for Win311, installed a driver for the voodoo3 card (win311 @ 1280x1024 looks awesome) and tried to run Quake in pure DOS. I don't know if I am doing something wrong, or if it's simply the way it is, but despite this hardware being able to run Quake II, Half-Life and Unreal all in 640x480, the best I got with Quake was 320x240. Higher resolutions move too slow and it becomes unplayable. Of course, Quake runs under DOS 6.22, the other games run under Win98, so I guess that's the issue?

Thanks!

aha2940 wrote on 2020-03-31, 00:07:

Today I played a bit with my DOS/Win311/Win98 PC. I configured the soundcard for Win311, installed a driver for the voodoo3 card (win311 @ 1280x1024 looks awesome) and tried to run Quake in pure DOS. I don't know if I am doing something wrong, or if it's simply the way it is, but despite this hardware being able to run Quake II, Half-Life and Unreal all in 640x480, the best I got with Quake was 320x240. Higher resolutions move too slow and it becomes unplayable. Of course, Quake runs under DOS 6.22, the other games run under Win98, so I guess that's the issue?

Thanks!

You mean GLquake with a minigl driver installed? Or you want to run in software? If so, your CPU will be the bottleneck.

I tried to troubleshoot the dead PSU in the Compaq Presario 850 but didn't really get anywhere. I did see a component that looked like a fuse but was seemingly soldered to the PCB marked "250V" that looked like it might be burnt but my PSU knowledge is currently very low so I didn't want to try and proceed further without more research.

Fixing up my poor condition Nintendo 64 (game port had corrosion on the bottom pins, controller ports not working right, and basic cleaning). I need to source parts for it (screws for the chassis, top chassis as pieces of plastic broke off a long time ago, reset button, and power switch (plastic ones)).

kolderman wrote on 2020-03-31, 00:55:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-03-31, 00:07:

Today I played a bit with my DOS/Win311/Win98 PC. I configured the soundcard for Win311, installed a driver for the voodoo3 card (win311 @ 1280x1024 looks awesome) and tried to run Quake in pure DOS. I don't know if I am doing something wrong, or if it's simply the way it is, but despite this hardware being able to run Quake II, Half-Life and Unreal all in 640x480, the best I got with Quake was 320x240. Higher resolutions move too slow and it becomes unplayable. Of course, Quake runs under DOS 6.22, the other games run under Win98, so I guess that's the issue?

Thanks!

You mean GLquake with a minigl driver installed? Or you want to run in software? If so, your CPU will be the bottleneck.

Hi, thanks for replying. No, I do not mean GLquake. My idea is running "quake.exe" in DOS 6.22. I thought that being a game for DOS from 1996, a Pentium MMX 233 (which was among the fastest CPUs for the time) would be enough to run the game at 640x480, however I am not getting there with acceptable frame rates.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-03-31, 02:09:

kolderman wrote on 2020-03-31, 00:55:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-03-31, 00:07:

Today I played a bit with my DOS/Win311/Win98 PC. I configured the soundcard for Win311, installed a driver for the voodoo3 card (win311 @ 1280x1024 looks awesome) and tried to run Quake in pure DOS. I don't know if I am doing something wrong, or if it's simply the way it is, but despite this hardware being able to run Quake II, Half-Life and Unreal all in 640x480, the best I got with Quake was 320x240. Higher resolutions move too slow and it becomes unplayable. Of course, Quake runs under DOS 6.22, the other games run under Win98, so I guess that's the issue?

Thanks!

You mean GLquake with a minigl driver installed? Or you want to run in software? If so, your CPU will be the bottleneck.

Hi, thanks for replying. No, I do not mean GLquake. My idea is running "quake.exe" in DOS 6.22. I thought that being a game for DOS from 1996, a Pentium MMX 233 (which was among the fastest CPUs for the time) would be enough to run the game at 640x480, however I am not getting there with acceptable frame rates.

Quake was not merely "a game for DOS from 1996". It was the first truly 3D polygonal first-person shooter of any note, that rendered everything including monsters in 3D (no sprites). I.e. it was the cutting edge. John Carmack developed it on high-end WinNT workstations from Intergraph. I would not be surprised if it pushed a MMX233 to the limit.

kolderman wrote on 2020-03-31, 03:48:

[...]

Quake was not merely "a game for DOS from 1996". It was the first truly 3D polygonal first-person shooter of any note, that rendered everything including monsters in 3D (no sprites). I.e. it was the cutting edge. John Carmack developed it on high-end WinNT workstations from Intergraph. I would not be surprised if it pushed a MMX233 to the limit.

Indeed, there's a reason everyone started buying 3D accelerators soon afterwards. It was the Crysis of its day, a showcase of what could be possible on future hardware.

BTW this is what I was talking about: https://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-coded … n-1995-1422971/

Also, you have a Voodoo3 - I don't know if GLquake works on it (I play it on a V2 SLI) - but if it does, your framerate woes will begone. GLquake looks awesome!

Swapped my V2 passthrough cable with one a few millimeters thicker - hopefully it cures this random discoloration quality issue I was experiencing. Currently running quake2 demo mode...wait and see I guess.

kolderman wrote on 2020-03-31, 06:33:

BTW this is what I was talking about: https://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-coded … n-1995-1422971/

Also, you have a Voodoo3 - I don't know if GLquake works on it (I play it on a V2 SLI) - but if it does, your framerate woes will begone. GLquake looks awesome!

This doesn't negate your point, but that pic of Carmack is from a 1999 video about the development of Quake 3. IIRC Id had some kind of SGI near-supercomputer to crunch the map BSPs when they were making Quake 1, but I don't know what they were using for workstations.

DOS Quake 1.08 retail gets 17.1 FPS on my 233MMX at 640x480 (and 51.3 FPS at 320x200.) You need something like a P2/500 to hit a consistent 30FPS at 640x480. The game was a real brute in 1996.