I was able to successfully load the video drivers for my on board S3 Trio64 tonight. It took me a couple hours to get it right but I'm now able to enjoy WFW 3.11 in 800x600 resolution. Before I was using the standard vga driver that shipped with 3.11 and let me tell ya guys. There is a HUGE difference.

Oldbitcollector wrote:

Built myself a Dual-Core Windows XP box. (Is that retro?)

I'd been collecting a few games which needed something stronger than my '98 box could be provide.

If you can't buy the hardware / software new then it's retro as far as I'm concerned. Is that a Prescott you're using then?

brassicGamer wrote:

Oldbitcollector wrote:

Built myself a Dual-Core Windows XP box. (Is that retro?)

I'd been collecting a few games which needed something stronger than my '98 box could be provide.

If you can't buy the hardware / software new then it's retro as far as I'm concerned. Is that a Prescott you're using then?

Prescott's are single core, some with hyper-threading.

brassicGamer wrote:

Oldbitcollector wrote:

Built myself a Dual-Core Windows XP box. (Is that retro?)

I'd been collecting a few games which needed something stronger than my '98 box could be provide.

If you can't buy the hardware / software new then it's retro as far as I'm concerned. Is that a Prescott you're using then?

It was a an AMD X2-4000 that was cast off from a customer upgrade. Found a couple Seagate 20gbs and dropped in an ATI 1300XGE and that Yamaha wavetable card that I picked up a few days ago from Fleabay.

I've got a GeForce 7600GS sitting on my desk I'm thinking about trying with it, not sure which one is the stronger video card.

kithylin wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

Oldbitcollector wrote:

Built myself a Dual-Core Windows XP box. (Is that retro?)

I'd been collecting a few games which needed something stronger than my '98 box could be provide.

If you can't buy the hardware / software new then it's retro as far as I'm concerned. Is that a Prescott you're using then?

Prescott's are single core, some with hyper-threading.

Crap, I meant Pentium D 😀 never owned either!

Strangely, as probably the only Pentium D fan in the world, even I call the Presler by the name Prescott more often than I should. I think it was basically just Prescott with SMP support (On the Die only) anyway.

My workstation is still a Presler and has developed a rather disturbing smell of hot fiberglass, I can't find the source of it so I just have to hope whatever it is can last until the replacement is put together, probably next year.

Speaking of P4s, I have a post for this thread, but I've been waiting to get my camera back so I can make it properly. So I will be back here late.

no.......your not alone, I love the Pentium D, can be had for a song, still more than useful today and keeps you warm in the winter. we use 2 at work still, both built by me & run in filthy garage conditions 24/7 a smithfield 2.8 and presler 3.0, nothing wrong with the good old "D" 😀

BSA Starfire wrote:

and keeps you warm in the winter

Funny that, my radiator recently broke (Blows the breaker whenever it is switched on) so I've been leaving HD movies playing on a loop with acceleration disabled to keep the room warm. The 950 kicks out just enough heat that it isn't unbearably cold in here and the movies keep the hard drives spun up which also generates a decent amount of heat. The GPU is forced to run full clock anyway, so nothing really affects that very much and it constantly gives off a lot of warmth.

Otherwise, it's always been a reliable machine and it outran the 64 X2 it replaced in rendering at least and that was with the 920 - some people claim the Athlon 64 was faster and the benchmarks usually reflect that, but it wasn't in my own usage case. Perhaps if I ran different software the outcome would not be the same. Either way, it has served me well for the last decade.

Night storage heating here chap, so i hear you, bloody useless when you are at work all day,cold by the time you get home! open the fridge to keep warm in January! 🤣. Most winters I run 2 prescott systems with Geforce passive 210's on SETI 24/7! Works a treat!

Condemned gas installation here, thanks to Hull City Council's famous contractor workmanship, so all I had was that one portable heater. Had no central heating (Not that I want that crap) or hot water for years now, I told them not to rip out my immersion heater and my fireplace, but they did not listen and carried out the work without my permission anyway.

When the Pentium D isn't enough heat a fast Athlon XP and the LaserJet 4 help to take the edge off. The Dual P3 surprisingly doesn't put out much heat at all.

hehe, lived with a Laser writer II for decades, they were a little warm! Bit dissapointed with the Cyrix reputation as heaters tho, well over rated, no prescott is the thing 😀

I acquired a new machine;

A HP Pavillion T472,UK. Has a P4 Northwood 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR RAM and other generic stuff for a machine that age (HDD is 160GB which isn't bad for the time, too bad it's Maxtor) - not a bad machine and I will probably find something for it to do, likely as a backup for the server that can take over when the server needs maintenance. Also has a novel way of storing CD-ROMs;

Whilst I won't rummage around the drive because I sort of know the people it came from, I did look in the music folder... BONUS! It was full of power ballads!

I also tried to run these 486 boards. The smaller one I started for novelty reasons as it didn't work properly and I took it out of service years ago but I wanted to sell the larger one.

Annoyingly the smaller one (MSI) gave me a black screen and then made burning smells despite producing no visible damage. The larger board just does nothing. Tested the PSU under load and the voltages are about as close as possible (As in, they are well within the margins for error on my shit meter, never mind the PSU, so the PSU is good) so I have no idea why the small board went pop. No idea why the larger (FIC) one doesn't work but I wanted to sell it so I'm kinda mad about that. Both boards yield cold CPUs so it seems the processor is not getting power for some reason - the FIC one does get mildly warm, but I am sure it should be warmer.

Nice space heater 😁

It's Socket-A testing time here at my place. I tested an ECS K7SEM and did some testing on my Asus A7V266.
Both were given new BIOS batteries, and the ECS went well through mem-test. (1x512mb Kingston PC-133)
The Asus went through the memtest without any trouble as well.
Now I need to let them rest, in order to see if they still hold the BIOS setting after 12 hour's.

Then I will start to test wich OS's they can handle, and if they by some chance have any defect.
Basically in the middle of a test, right now. Will start them up again tomorrow.

Yeah... This reminds me... I need to recap an Asrock K7s41 (Socket-A too) because it has one
bulging 3300-cap right at the top, behind the Ps/2-Ports.

If they all are in perfect working state, then I have to decide wich one's to set for sale.
Socket A is not really my thing. I like the platform, just that older stuff gives more pleasure.
Jumper's please... Jumper's all over the place. And dip switches... That's what I like the best. 🤣

I've been making my way through a pile of low-end S370 boards in the hopes of finding a home for my PIIIEB-800 and Celeron 1000. None of these boards have AGP but that's not the biggest issue, the issue is that not a single one of them post. The one I could get the closest to POSTing was, oddly enough, an old eMachines board with an i810 chipset with the Celeron 1000, it liked the PIIIEB-800 even less. Even that hangs at the eMachines splash screen. Not even getting so much as a POST beep code for the other ones.

I'm pining after an old Socket 7 board with a P133, 256K pipeline burst COAST module and 64MB in SIMMs that my teacher at the vocational school has to show kids what computers were like back in the day. She let me fiddle with it a bit, she didn't think it would work but it got into the bios just fine, didn't have a floppy handy to boot it from. It seems to be one of those rare Socket 7 ATX boards, came out of a Gateway 2000 of some description. I tested it with an S3 Virge for video. Right now it is sitting on an open table outfitted with the same S3 Virge, Paradise Ultra-ATA 66 controller (for working with drives bigger than 8GB), an ISA 3Com Etherlink 3 (3C-509B), and an honest to goodness genuine Sound Blaster 16. I have never seen one of these in the flesh before that, plenty of ESS chipset audio boards though.

My Katmai seems a bit slow to boot, but I do have it connected to the network under 98SE and the integrated ATA-33 controller I'm still using probably isn't doing it any favors. Reminds me, I still need to get pics up of that. Will do that sometime soon now that I have a working camera courtesy of my new phone.

Sedrosken wrote:

My Katmai seems a bit slow to boot, but I do have it connected to the network under 98SE and the integrated ATA-33 controller I'm still using probably isn't doing it any favors. Reminds me, I still need to get pics up of that. Will do that sometime soon now that I have a working camera courtesy of my new phone.

Try using a fixed IP address and running SmartDrv in AUTOEXEC.BAT. That might speed up the booting process a little.

Btw, today I initiated myself to the world of running multiple sound cards on a single system. Which would not be bad if they had jumpers... But mixing a PnP AWE with an Aztech Sound Galaxy Pro II (settings in EEPROM) has proven to be a weird challenge.
The way I managed to run them in Windows as not only setting the IRQ and DMA addresses used by the SGProII, but also the ones used by the PnP AWE (a bit counter intuitive) and setting its address manually in the device manager. I'm yet to install the DOS software package for the AWE. That was the only way I managed to keep the "ACPI IRQ holder for PCI IRQ steering" (and the video card with it) from grabbing IRQ5. I also had to set "PnP-aware OS" to yes to keep the BIOS from starting up stuff - as with that setting off the Aztech card would not work (but it did before putting the AWE in). Will mess with it more later.

Setup my MD Data drive to verify it worked. I didn't have Sony's specific PCMCIA Fast SCSI adapter but an Adaptec card worked fine. I didn't have the ASPI driver loaded but after shuffling the drivers so that mdmgr and mdfsex ran after the SCSI card was loaded everything worked flawlessly under MS-DOS. Need to image the floppy disks for this thing though. Never seen them online anywhere. Might try getting the 3270 keyboard working with the XT before the end of the day.

My ABIT PS5 is here. Also included were a PCI SCSI card, an ISA I/O card and an ATI Mach64 which I wasn't expecting, so thanks for that AmoRetro. 😉

All the stuff in the box works brilliantly, I am really pleased with it. It is slightly (As in, very slightly) slower than my Batman up to now (Which may actually just be the Mach64, which I will move to another machine. I have a nice S3 for this one) but I mean very, very slightly to the point where I can't notice. Most importantly, it works consistently instead of me having to cross my fingers every boot, which is nice. I have a feeling I shall be keeping this board. That probably means I will be sending the Batman away to another enthusiast at some point or selling it off depending on how things work out. It is nice to have another SiS 5501/5502/5503 board as I really liked the Socket 5 one I had many years ago.

Unfortunately, my old PCI IDE board doesn't work so well... Guess I will have to fix that. Still, it ran enough for me to test the board out and as I said, the board is good and the parts which came with it are all good too. I will just use ISA IDE for now because DOS won't know the difference when I repair my PCI board and shove it back in there. It is only dry capacitors, I have had the card sat in a box for over 6 years and it was flaky when I got it all that time ago.

If AmoRetro should read this (I think he intermittently appears on Vogons) then thank you, I will do a bit more testing, but I am pretty certain you will be getting very positive feedback on this one. 😁

Meanwhile, I have signed tenancy for another house. I don't really like it and it is going to cost thousands (which I don't have) to make it live-able. I have spent around five hours there today and my chest is killing me already. As predicted, idiots have filled the cavity with formaldehyde or some such and it is soaking wet, so not only am I reacting to the substance but to the patches of mold I discovered. Still, could be worse, at least I have a house I suppose, it's just ironic that I have to move because where I am now is supposedly rubbish and needs demolishing, versus where I am moving to being "better" despite being smaller and less of a solid structure. The front porch is supported by PVC tubes... In fact, there is a lot of PVC in the house. Can't stand the sight of it, so I shall be boarding over the windows as I cannot afford for someone to come an re-install wooden ones. The plumbing is fucked and at least some of the electrical outlets use undersized wire (8-10A max) which is inadequate, personally I wouldn't even use that shit to run a single 60W bulb (I like to over engineer things) - lucky I know how to fix most stuff myself I guess, but I'm not well and can't really be doing with this shit.

HighTreason wrote:

All the stuff in the box works brilliantly, I am really pleased with it. It is slightly (As in, very slightly) slower than my Batman up to now (Which may actually just be the Mach64, which I will move to another machine. I have a nice S3 for this one) but I mean very, very slightly to the point where I can't notice. Most importantly, it works consistently instead of me having to cross my fingers every boot, which is nice. I have a feeling I shall be keeping this board. That probably means I will be sending the Batman away to another enthusiast at some point or selling it off depending on how things work out. It is nice to have another SiS 5501/5502/5503 board as I really liked the Socket 5 one I had many years ago.

I recently got 66,-€ for a Batman with CPU, they sell quite well.

It worked perfectly aside from the dead RTC, I just found it very bland and boring.

HighTreason wrote:

Meanwhile, I have signed tenancy for another house. I don't really like it and it is going to cost thousands (which I don't have) to make it live-able. I have spent around five hours there today and my chest is killing me already. As predicted, idiots have filled the cavity with formaldehyde or some such and it is soaking wet, so not only am I reacting to the substance but to the patches of mold I discovered. Still, could be worse, at least I have a house I suppose, it's just ironic that I have to move because where I am now is supposedly rubbish and needs demolishing, versus where I am moving to being "better" despite being smaller and less of a solid structure. The front porch is supported by PVC tubes... In fact, there is a lot of PVC in the house. Can't stand the sight of it, so I shall be boarding over the windows as I cannot afford for someone to come an re-install wooden ones. The plumbing is fucked and at least some of the electrical outlets use undersized wire (8-10A max) which is inadequate, personally I wouldn't even use that shit to run a single 60W bulb (I like to over engineer things) - lucky I know how to fix most stuff myself I guess, but I'm not well and can't really be doing with this shit.

That would never ever be alowed in Denmark. Formaldehyde can if the dose are too high, potentially result in cancer. Mice and rats that have inhaled a high dosage, in form of formaldehyde gas. Did all devellop cancer. By danish law, a home are only allowed to be rented out if it is in live-able condition.
There are only two sollutions to this. Eighter the owner of the house have to find something that are equally as expensive. Or the owner relocates the ones who rented it untill it s all fixed to live-able standards. All expenses for the moving, are placed onto the owner who rents out the apartment or home.