Sorry I went silent here. Life has been very distracting.

That said, I thought you guys'd appreciate what I got up to today:

I nerd-sniped myself and implemented a one-click aspect ratio correction userscript for 320x200 screenshots on MobyGames based on this Gamasutra post.

It doesn't do 640x400 though. My enthusiasm was waning by the end.

Well, I found the problem with the fancy ass mid 2000s 500W PSU.

It was set to 230V. That's a problem, in Murica we use 115.

Unsurprisingly, flipping that switch solved the problem. Works fine now.

I've never seen a PSU set to 230 so I never thought to check it.

Still haven't managed to identify the problems with the Gigabyte AM2+ motherboard thats stuck at its splashscreen.
I feel like it has to be something simple.

First post on this thread. I tried MIDI for the first time!!!

Never tried it growing up. Decades later... I got a Yamaha YMF719 ISA card and put it in my Pentium 60 / W98se computer. Today morning I received the game port/midi cable... whereas as a kid I didn’t understand and couldn’t afford MIDI devices, now I realized my wife has Yamaha electric pianos with MIDI input. I brought one over connected it, set thr output to the MPU401 and tried the Canyon MIDI file in WMP... and the sound played on the keyboard 😁 super exciting. Curious to know now what further sound quality I can get with this setup... and need to find really good demo .mid files

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-04-16, 04:07:

Well, I found the problem with the fancy ass mid 2000s 500W PSU. […]
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Well, I found the problem with the fancy ass mid 2000s 500W PSU.

It was set to 230V. That's a problem, in Murica we use 115.

Unsurprisingly, flipping that switch solved the problem. Works fine now.

I've never seen a PSU set to 230 so I never thought to check it.

In Europe, a lot of PSU has blown up due to the opposite fact - being set for 115V, having 230V mains ..

jheronimus wrote on 2020-04-15, 13:46:

Can you play MP3 music without it being choppy?

Kind of a weird use case for me 😁 Then again, I once listened to a Pink Floyd album on CD using a 486 computer — for no apparent reason.

Well - back in the day, when I last time played with a 5x86, the MP3 playback in WinAmp was the indicator for me - at 133MHz choppy music, at 160 no hick-ups 🤣

Me, too. Especially in early games where the textures weren't hi-res. Filtering turns these into a blurry mess.

imi wrote on 2020-04-15, 21:16:

that sounds interesting, I really prefer the sharp pixelated rendering over early texture filtering in a lot of games.

I further enhanced the experience by altering the filtering and setting particles to square in the console, I will have screenshots soon..

appiah4 wrote on 2020-04-16, 07:15:

imi wrote on 2020-04-15, 21:16:

that sounds interesting, I really prefer the sharp pixelated rendering over early texture filtering in a lot of games.

I further enhanced the experience by altering the filtering and setting particles to square in the console, I will have screenshots soon..

Here they are, GLQuake on ATI 3DRage Pro (with some extra rendering tricks: gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR, r_particles 2)

Most visually appealing GLQuake experience I've had, personally..

Whoa, that really looks very much like software rendering.

looks great :3

some textures still seem to get filtered though apparently?
wall in the first screenshot and the floor texture.
at the door you can see the side walls being filtered while the front facing ones and the door aren't.

very weird, can't you just turn off filtering in glquake altogether for all cards via console commands?

Filtering can not be completely disabled, but gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR changes filtering mode to point sampled instead of bi/trilinear which makes it as software-like as possible.. By default 3D Rage Pro can only do bilinear filtering to non-alpha channel textures anyway, but this makes things even more software render like..

flupke11 wrote on 2020-04-12, 15:19:

I gave the P3TDE6 a new home in an Antec/Chieftec full tower from 2001. […]
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I gave the P3TDE6 a new home in an Antec/Chieftec full tower from 2001.

P3TDE.JPG

Specs:
Supermicro P3TDE6, dual Tualatin 1,4GHz, 2GB PC133-ECC
USB: VIA 2.0 on PCI
Sound: Hercules Fortissimi II on PCI
Disks: 9.1 Ultrastar 2*36 Seagate Ultra-SCSI, 2*150 WD Raptor in disk cage and 1*40GB Intel SSD on 3Ware 9550SX-8LP (PCI-X 66MHz 64-bit)
Optical: 2* Panasonic DVD-RAM on SCSI, 1 Plextor PX-116A on IDE
Legacy: 5'25" and 3'5" floppy's
Removable: 1 ZIP250
OS: WinXP

Purpose: SCSI test bed, Gotek base

edit: replaced SCSI disk

I'd love one of those full towers! Sadly I dont have the room 🙁

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-04-16, 11:29:

I'd love one of those full towers! Sadly I dont have the room 🙁

The idea is to have all my ATX Dual CPU systems in such Chieftec/Antec towers, which I got cheap throughout the years (and in various states of abuse). I'm a big fan of Chenbro cases, and a fellow Vogon'er has his favourite systems in such cases, but sadly they are hard to come by where I live (and frightfully expensive otherwise). So these are a cheap man's second best.

So at the moment the projects-in-waiting to fill these boxes are:

Dual Socket 8 PPro Overdrive
Dual Slot II Xeon
Dual Socket Celeron (BP6 😀)
Dual Socket 604

I'll keep the Dual Slot 1 Compaq AP550 intact, no need to change cases as that hull is already built to withstand a nuclear winter.

My Tulip AT Compact(s) (NEAT chipset 286) 3 is/are proving to be a nice project. I own two of these systems, both with their own problems. I decided to combine them into one.

One mainboard is 'dead', it does not POST. The other seemed to be okay, but some tantals exploded when powering it up (I posted before)... After replacing them all seemed okay.

I could not get a serial mouse working... I tried an external loopback plug, but tests failed. After some visual inspection and datasheet reading, I think the DS1488N chips are fried. They have some visible damage on top (a little bit visible in the picture), possibly/maybe as a result of the tantals blowing up? Or they were the cause... We'll find out when I replace them. Desoldered them today and put in sockets... Spares should be here on saturday, I found a cheap local seller.

Tested the motherboards and PSUs I picked up this week. I was hoping maybe one would work, but all four boards do, so do the CPUs on them and so do the power supplies - which is relevant as one board is a Dell-modified Intel SE440BX-3 with non-ATX pinout and one other is a Compaq board from 1999 with a 24p ATX-ish connector. Now the usual problem: what on earth to do with them. I might well use the SE440BX myself, but I'm overflowing with P4 and Athlon64 systems I have no use for and no one is interested in buying (hell, I can't even give the things away). Taking to the recycler would be the logical choice, but I can't bring myself to do that - yet.

Tested a 386 motherboard I bought ages ago as working but never actually confirmed for myself. Good news is that it does in fact work! Now if only I had something to put it in.

Finally got the new laser for my PlayStation SCPH-1002 calibrated correctly.

Hint: don't follow any of the guides trying to tell you about the correct voltages. And use an audio CD for calibration, not a game disc! Adjust BIAS to the lowest voltage at which a disc is still detected. Then start playing the audio CD. Now - while the audio CD is playing - adjust GAIN to find the left-most and right-most point at which the audio is no longer playing correctly. Then set it to the middle position between the two and you are done. Well, almost. The same can be done on the laser itself, but that should be correctly adjusted normally already. Though it wasn't on mine. It was set to 14mV, but I determined it should be 16mV.

Final test must always be done with the PlayStation completely assembled, as any sort of scattered light will negatively affect the laser's ability to read the disc.

More hardware accelerated 3D testing with the ATI 3D Rage Pro, this time Quake 2 OpenGL:

Again, even at default settings the general texture filtering smear my brain associates with the Quake 1/2 engines is not present here, probably because 3D Rage Pro can't filter alpha blended textures.. Regardless, without even setting the filtering to NEAREST_MIMPMAP_LINEAR (so at GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST by default) it looks a lot like software rendering. Blessing? Curse? You decide.

It's more because GLQuake/Q2's accelerated look in 97-98 was mostly associated with 3dfx in which they've got a smeary filter with default high gamma (so you can have less contrast for even more obvious smeary), whereas ATI here is one of the many that were considered "too unplayably dark !!!1" in which that it's technically correctly rendered.

Oiled the fan on my TI4400 AGP as the fan was stiff and barely moved. Now it runs faster so that it doesn't run hot all the time. Fan is still a bit noisy, but it runs.

Also did the bearing on my modern desktop since the fan's bearing went out and after oiling that, it works.