I started to put together my new c2 setup. OK so a c2 system is not quite retro, but its far from new.
with any luck I'll have it done in time to use as a heater this winter. 1600w of fun 😎 Should heat the upstairs part of my home.

Managing to post this from a very broken looking VOGONS in Opera 3.62 on my "Mildly Overkill" Windows 3.1 machine I'm working on.

Selling my car and thinking on what kind of GPU to pair with dual 3.2ghz Netburst Xeon setup. Full pciex16 so the options are limitless but I only have a 535watt psu so I dont want to go to crazy.

Wow, I'm suddenly having flashbacks to this one quad-CD drive my father had years ago. I really liked having it, right up until I learned that it was basically a 4x drive in an era where 52x drives or so already existed, making installs slow.

Meanwhile, I decided to carefully disassemble that Iomega Z100Si drive to see if I could get it to read more reliably. Well, carefully cleaning the heads usually does wonders for the first time I insert a Zip disk, but subsequent times I insert a disk quickly result in clicky hell within minutes, in one case seemingly corrupting the data on a disk (that I had previously backed up in my good USB Zip 100 drive first, just in case) to the point that even my known good drive couldn't read it (but could properly reformat it without a hitch). If nothing else, the disks hold up far better than conventional floppy disks, even if the drives themselves don't.

Thankfully, the Click of Death with ripped heads and shredded disks hasn't happened yet, but this internal SCSI drive is still being a complete pain with how I seemingly have to very carefully swab out the heads after every disk insertion (with the tendency of the heads to stick together not helping one bit). I wonder if the cleaning pad the heads rest on could be part of the problem here.

Also, amidst the pile of bad and seemingly corrupt floppies, I managed to find at least one good HD and one good DD disk. Cue repeatedly rewriting the DD disk with System 6.0.8 install set images over on the 6500 as I set it all up to boot from the HD disk over on the IIcx side of things. It'll be a handy fallback if recapping that old SCSI HDD falls through, though I gotta say, even the simple act of running Stellar7 from a floppy requires too much damn disk swapping. It's practically tempting me to whip up some kind of adapter cable to connect the 6500's FDD to the external floppy drive port on the IIcx.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Wow, I'm suddenly having flashbacks to this one quad-CD drive my father had years ago. I really liked having it, right up until […]
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Wow, I'm suddenly having flashbacks to this one quad-CD drive my father had years ago. I really liked having it, right up until I learned that it was basically a 4x drive in an era where 52x drives or so already existed, making installs slow.

Meanwhile, I decided to carefully disassemble that Iomega Z100Si drive to see if I could get it to read more reliably. Well, carefully cleaning the heads usually does wonders for the first time I insert a Zip disk, but subsequent times I insert a disk quickly result in clicky hell within minutes, in one case seemingly corrupting the data on a disk (that I had previously backed up in my good USB Zip 100 drive first, just in case) to the point that even my known good drive couldn't read it (but could properly reformat it without a hitch). If nothing else, the disks hold up far better than conventional floppy disks, even if the drives themselves don't.

Thankfully, the Click of Death with ripped heads and shredded disks hasn't happened yet, but this internal SCSI drive is still being a complete pain with how I seemingly have to very carefully swab out the heads after every disk insertion (with the tendency of the heads to stick together not helping one bit). I wonder if the cleaning pad the heads rest on could be part of the problem here.

Also, amidst the pile of bad and seemingly corrupt floppies, I managed to find at least one good HD and one good DD disk. Cue repeatedly rewriting the DD disk with System 6.0.8 install set images over on the 6500 as I set it all up to boot from the HD disk over on the IIcx side of things. It'll be a handy fallback if recapping that old SCSI HDD falls through, though I gotta say, even the simple act of running Stellar7 from a floppy requires too much damn disk swapping. It's practically tempting me to whip up some kind of adapter cable to connect the 6500's FDD to the external floppy drive port on the IIcx.

It's funny you mention the ZIP drives. I have a usb zip100 drive from Goodwill that is beat to absolute heck that works fine, but the brand new boxed SCSI one I had wouldnt read any zip disks and made horrible noises. Also A ide750 out of a p4 box that works fine. And out of my zip disks the good ones are the ones with high usage and the dead ones are all boxed ones iv found and bought from goodwill/people.

Jade Falcon wrote:

I started to put together my new c2 setup. OK so a c2 system is not quite retro, but its far from new.
with any luck I'll have it done in time to use as a heater this winter. 1600w of fun 😎 Should heat the upstairs part of my home.

Dual 6990s right?

That will heat upstairs unless you own a mansion or something or are wanting it super warm.

My R9 290 used slightly less wattage than a 6990 and it could raise my bedrooms temps around 20f in 2 hours. And I only had one of them. It's the main reason I sold it actually.

Anyways onto my activities.

I've been playing some Descent FreeSpace on my XPS Gen1. Good experience overall. Im also breaking my cardinal rule of never playing a sequel in a series before playing the previous entries since FS and classic descent aren't really related. I've never beaten 1, 2 or 3.

Yep, dual 450w 6990s and a qx9650 with 6 raptor hdds and 4 2gb stick of ddr2. It will dump about 1600w of heat under full luad.

Came to this thread to describe my recent experience with some sounds fonts I've been messing with but @Jade Falcon, that quote you're quoting in your sig reminded me of why I post on this forum less and less these days.

Tasteless, immature, pointless.

badmojo wrote:

Came to this thread to describe my recent experience with some sounds fonts I've been messing with but @Jade Falcon, that quote you're quoting in your sig reminded me of why I post on this forum less and less these days.

Tasteless, immature, pointless.

I don't think it's nearly that bad, just low brow humor that makes me chuckle. 😜

Anyways, been messing with various DDOs to try to get a 6.4 gig Maxtor partitioned as 2 gigs into my 486. The 420 meg HDD wouldn't cut it anymore, especially with bloated Windows software titles.

What about using an XTIDE BIOS via a NIC card boot ROM socket?

badmojo wrote:

that quote you're quoting in your sig

... is the guy who was the forum admin for like half its existence...

Stiletto wrote:

badmojo wrote:

that quote you're quoting in your sig

... is the guy who was the forum admin for like half its existence...

Yes, he was the site admin. I like digging through old posts on this site, there is some real funny stuff here from the early days.

The quote can be found here.
Re: Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so

I also got a good chuckle out of these
A poll that means nothing.
Testing the retarded attach_mod
Harekiet's avatar is awful

I been trying to refind that one about Snover getting called out for making accounts to make the site look like it was full of users, but I think it was removed.
I think is was Snover, but it could have been another user.

The history is dark and full of terrors...

ODwilly wrote:

It's funny you mention the ZIP drives. I have a usb zip100 drive from Goodwill that is beat to absolute heck that works fine, but the brand new boxed SCSI one I had wouldnt read any zip disks and made horrible noises. Also A ide750 out of a p4 box that works fine. And out of my zip disks the good ones are the ones with high usage and the dead ones are all boxed ones iv found and bought from goodwill/people.

Wow, what are the chances... admittedly, the only reason I have any Zip drives whatsoever is because that's what the neighbors had.

So why would I bother with 'em? Well, the Power Mac 6500 came with an internal one as an option, and I'm thinking I can use that as a boot drive in case anything goes wrong with the HDD or I want to run, say, Mac OS 7.6.1 instead of 9.2.2 (at which point the USB drive wouldn't be of much use since that wasn't implemented until roughly 8.5 or so). The ol' Cmd-Opt-Shift-Del(-5 for the default Zip SCSI ID) trick still works.

However, that sort of practicality goes completely out the window if the internal drive isn't reliable to begin with. The USB Zip drive is more valuable as a data recovery tool than anything; it's not viable as a boot medium for vintage Macs (you need SCSI or FireWire for that), and any PC that can boot from USB has far more practical, spacious, faster and reliable solid-state alternatives to the ol' Zip drive.

I wouldn't mind having an external SCSI Zip drive with some semblance of reliability, though - not for the 6500, but for the IIcx. It would make file transfers that much less of a pain, but then again, I might be better off dropping a NuBus Ethernet card into it and getting a network file share setup going somehow. If not that, maybe a LocalTalk adapter between the 6500 and IIcx could work, but I don't have such a transceiver (I apparently can't just directly connect the serial ports on these things). I just don't want to keep yanking out the hard drive and constantly swapping the internal Zip drive with it, as that gets tedious quickly and wouldn't also work out for multiplayer purposes.

Finally got time to mess around with my Radeon 2900xt build again, this tine with Doom 3.
The timedemo produced 86fps, while my x800xt manages 100+.
Im starting to think that this card was really as broken as the reviews from the time state...

Figured out how to use Ontrack, replaced Conner 420 MB slave drive with a Maxtor 6,4 GB partitioned as 3 x 2 GB, 1 x ~300 MB. Look at the list of drives 🤣

I didn't do much with the IIcx tonight, but I started it up to see if the soft power and SCSI HDD were still gonna be flaky after not having warmed up for a long while. It still worked. No delay on soft power, HDD recognized immediately and booted right up; it's a weird machine for sure.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I decided to put that 16 MHz 68030 to the test while the HDD was being recognized. I wasn't exactly expecting the likes of Stellar7 and Wolfenstein 3D to struggle the way they did, and this is with Wolf3D running at quarter-res, roughly original PC resolution. The latter's just on the edge of playable.

Falcon MC runs a bit choppy if I crank up the details all the way, but if I scale back the terrain details just a bit, it runs about as smoothly as I'd expect of a flight simulator of that age. Ironically, I can't run it on the Power Mac 6500 because it requires 16-color mode, which the 6500 doesn't seem to support. (It's another one of those cases where I really should try an OS 7.6.1 install alongside OS 9.2.2 to see if that improves backwards compatibility at all.)

I have yet to try Hellcats Over The Pacific on the IIcx, but that one does run without any apparent issues on the 6500.

Nevertheless, it's quickly dawning on me just how slow a 16 MHz 68030 really is in practice, enough to make me wish that it was at least a Quadra as far as 68k machines go.

I guess I'm too used to growing up on 80486/Pentium-class hardware (and the rough 68040/PowerPC equivalent thereof) in my nostalgia-clouded memory of '90s computing, and it's not helping old Macs any that before the age of 3D accelerators, they were especially CPU-reliant in a way that Amigas and X68000s never were due to their custom chipsets. Makes you wonder how something like Geograph Seal would perform on that IIcx, were such a port to ever exist - if the faster 68030 (relative to a 16 MHz 68000) would be fast enough to soak up the additional overhead from lack of basic graphics acceleration and hardware sound synthesis that an X68000 would have.

Received the 1GB (512MB x 2) DDR-266 for my ThinkPad R40 in the mail today, installed the RAM, and Windows XP runs better than before.

Also went thrifting and I got a game (Delta Force Land Warrior) and a 19" or so Medion MD 1998 OF monitor. $21.31 well spent ($20.20 + tax)

1Delta Force: Land Warrior

1Medion MD 1998 OF (rear)

1Medion MD 1998 OF (front)

Sheesh the same giant pics in 2 threads?

badmojo wrote:

Sheesh the same giant pics in 2 threads?

Imgur is weird. Had to add the letter b after the last character of the URL (before the .jpg file extension)