Scrubbing... scrubbing... scrubbing...

The thermal paste on stock mid-period Coppermine coolers is downright evil 18 years later. Somehow it both managed to flow all over the place and turn hard as stone. Still, with enough solvent and elbow grease I won in the end.

Also played around with RAM on a SiS 530 Super So7 board. Interesting results. It has no trouble whatsoever with big 256Mb chips, but refuses to go over 516MB. Yes, 516MB. If I install 2x 512MB or 1x 512MB and 1x 256MB (or 128MB) it shows up as 516MB - i.e. 512MB + 4MB for the integrated VGA somehow addressed on the second DIMM. That's about the least efficient use of a 512MB DIMM I can imagine 😜

I changed out the DIN5s to mini DINs on my Pentiums and added mouse connector when there were spots on the board :

And I made an ATX to AT power adaptor :

Garage sales again today. Picked up stacks of loose discs. Old PC titles like Day of the Tentacle is in there and Dreamcast, Sega CD and Saturn titles as well. Got all of it for $5. Good deal.

PTherapist wrote:

It may be easier (and cheaper) to try and flash a regular PC version Voodoo card with a Mac ROM. I'm not sure how well the Vood […]
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NamelessPlayer wrote:

A Voodoo3 or even Voodoo5 PCI Mac Edition would be even more preferable, but I don't want to think about the price tag on those things right now. (That and my Voodoo5 5500s are AGP cards, not PCI ones.)

It may be easier (and cheaper) to try and flash a regular PC version Voodoo card with a Mac ROM. I'm not sure how well the Voodoo5 handles this nor where to find the rom images, but I did this a few years back with a Voodoo3 2000 16MB PCI card and ran it for a while in my Beige Power Macintosh G3 Desktop. Was great in Mac OS 9, much better than the onboard ATI 3D Rage Pro 2MB. I eventually replaced the card with a Rage 128 16MB PCI as I wanted to use the Voodoo3 in 1 of my other PCs instead and so I flashed it back to a PC ROM.

The Voodoo3 2000 was very easy to flash on a PC. Ideally you'd want to install it in a PC where it would be treated as a secondary card (doesn't have to be a functional display or need drivers, just needs to be detected), ie. a PC with a main AGP or PCIe graphics card (preferably not a Voodoo card, to avoid any confusion when flashing). Then just boot to DOS and backup the current Voodoo ROM and then replace it with the Mac ROM.

It's a bit tricky to find the Mac ROM, lots of broken links etc, but it is out there and I've got a copy of all the utilities & ROMs should you wish to try it.

It's apparently possible to flash the ROM from a Mac also, but I've never tried that. The flash utility and ROMs come from the Mac driver package.

Well, even the PC versions of the PCI V5 5500s get stupid expensive, and while I've heard that the AGP cards can be flashed with a Mac ROM that makes them act sorta like 66 MHz PCI cards in an AGP slot, the only AGP-equipped Macs I have are Mirrored Drive Doors G4 systems in which a Voodoo5 would be a waste of the AGP slot.

An earlier one like a Sawtooth or Mystic would be a different matter, but not a MDD, as those deserve something Core Image-capable in AGP for OS X's sake. (Then, when booting into OS 9, run a Radeon 9100/9200/9250 PCI in tandem for 3D acceleration there. Turns out that an AGP Radeon 9600 and PCI 9200 don't result in any nasty extension conflicts at all.)

I feel like my Power Mac 9600 with its G3 400 upgrade would be a better fit for the Voodoo5, and like all pre-Sawtooth G4 systems, it only has PCI slots. I think you can tell where I'm going with this.

Voodoo5 PCI aside, it would be tempting to go get another PCI Radeon 9200/9250 and flash/resistor mod it for the PM9600, but word is that an old Radeon DDR will still have support as far back as Mac OS 7.6.1, which may make that a better fit for the PM9600 that can also boot OSes that old for compatibility reasons I haven't foreseen yet (most Classic Mac OS software that doesn't require 16-color mode will run in 9.1-9.2.2 just fine). Besides, for anything that requires raw speed and doesn't require ADB joystick support or whatever, the MDD would be a better fit.

Tiido wrote:

I changed out the DIN5s to mini DINs on my Pentiums and added mouse connector when there were spots on the board :

Nicely done 😀

I tried that on my Lucky Star MVP3 motherboard - getting the ground parts hot enough to be able to remove the original solder took quite a whle but it appears to work 😀
Though in my case, the original AT keyboard connector got to stay because I have enough adapters for those.

I just successfully modified a Tualatin 1GHz celeron (which I got for free a few years ago) and an MS6905 slotket to work in my Aopen MX6B-EZ motherboard - probably the fastest 440ZX motherboard in the world right now 😀
These instructions (written by someone who is also on Vogons but I only found the pictures here) gave good results and weren't too hard to follow. https://msfn.org/board/topic/173706-processor-question/
I think if I modify another one, I'll leave the slotket alone and just desolder those pins from the CPU - it's not too hard to do if I carefully bend the pins out of the way first to make room for the iron. Then I can use the SlotKet for other things rather than it being perma-modded.

A Nice Cheap solution to finding a 1GHz P3 that runs at 100MHz FSB 😁

liqmat wrote:

Garage sales again today. Picked up stacks of loose discs. Old PC titles like Day of the Tentacle is in there and Dreamcast, Sega CD and Saturn titles as well. Got all of it for $5. Good deal.

gragesalecds.JPG

Soooo jealous! 😵

OldCat wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Garage sales again today. Picked up stacks of loose discs. Old PC titles like Day of the Tentacle is in there and Dreamcast, Sega CD and Saturn titles as well. Got all of it for $5. Good deal.

gragesalecds.JPG

Soooo jealous! 😵

Yeah, but you have to go to a lot of garage sales to find anything interesting. Lots of dirty kids toys and clothes, ugly and sometimes smelly furniture and of course the very used and not cleaned kitchen items. Once in awhile, though, you score something nice and cheap.

One of the funnier recent episodes I had was an old man had a sealed 10-pack of 3½" floppy disks on a table and when I went to pick them up to look at the price he grabbed them from me and told me someone had told him to sell them on Ebay because they were antiques and fetch good money. I had no words and walked away with a chuckle.

liqmat wrote:

OldCat wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Garage sales again today. Picked up stacks of loose discs. Old PC titles like Day of the Tentacle is in there and Dreamcast, Sega CD and Saturn titles as well. Got all of it for $5. Good deal.

gragesalecds.JPG

Soooo jealous! 😵

Yeah, but you have to go to a lot of garage sales to find anything interesting. Lots of dirty kids toys and clothes, ugly and sometimes smelly furniture and of course the very used and not cleaned kitchen items. Once in awhile, though, you score something nice and cheap.

I know, but come on, original Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and other classics! Worth shoveling a bit of smelly clothes and not cleaned furniture (or the other way round).

mmm DotT

liqmat wrote:

One of the funnier recent episodes I had was an old man had a sealed 10-pack of 3½" floppy disks on a table and when I went to pick them up to look at the price he grabbed them from me and told me someone had told him to sell them on Ebay because they were antiques and fetch good money. I had no words and walked away with a chuckle.

Speaking of which, look what I found at a garage sale:

I have so many HD disks I don't bother buying them anymore, but DD are much harder to find & I need them for my MSX. Score!

You better believe I busted that shrink-wrap WIDE open.

They look pristine inside, no signs of mold or moisture damage. I'm hoping they work, but if they don't they're still under warranty. 😜

Funny story with these - I casually asked the woman at the sale if she had any other really old computer parts kicking around, and she reminded me I'd bought an Apple II off her a few months ago. Totally forgot it was the same person.

Retrobrighted the blank panels

xjas wrote:

I have so many HD disks I don't bother buying them anymore, but DD are much harder to find & I need them for my MSX. Score!

That's awesome. As far as the DD disks go, I agree. I picked up a case of 10 10-pack 5¼" MD2D new old stock disks on Ebay months ago for about $37. I use those for my Kaypro 4/83 system and any XT/286 systems I might stumble upon.

By the way. Those weird Toucan birds in Tempra Pro have a whole backstory in the manual.

Tested some hard drives today with my ASUS X54C PC with an external HDD enclosure

1Quantum Fireball ST 3.5" Series
2Size: 3.2GB (supposed to be 6.4GB, according to the parameter chart)
3Tested: OK
4Dban: failed (HDD was beeping, but could be because of incorrect HDD space detected)

1Western Digital Caviar WD100 (cannot tell the exact model since the Compaq sticker is on it)
2Size: 10GB
3Tested: OK
4DBAN: Success (was blank anyway)
5Formatted: No

1Western Digital Caviar WD1600
2Size: 160GB
3Tested: OK
4DBAN: success (pulled from an HP Pavilion A706N, and I kept the rest of the internals)
5Formatted: Yes (NTFS)

Using the 160GB Western Digital drive as a permanent external drive, the 10GB Western Digital might go into my Socket 7 machine, and I still need to figure out the Quantum Fireball HDD since most of the machines I have are now in storage, and on top of that, my Windows 98 machine that's in my living room is used primarily by my brother daily until Friday evenings/Saturday mornings. I still have my new 60GB Maxtor (when they bought out Quantum in 2001) HDD that I'll be placing into the Windows 98SE machine due to the fact the HDD space is starting to run low (it's a 200GB HDD with a 32GB limit set due to certain PC BIOS limitations depending on the chipset).

Is perfect image geometry on a CRT a pipe dream? Even my relatively high end Samsung SyncMaster 790DF Flatscreen CRT has the issue of the shrinking effect in the top right corner of the screen regardless of how it's adjusted.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Is perfect image geometry on a CRT a pipe dream? Even my relatively high end Samsung SyncMaster 790DF Flatscreen CRT has the issue of the shrinking effect in the top right corner of the screen regardless of how it's adjusted.

The only CRT monitors with perfect geometry I've ever used were the Philips Brilliance line (107P and 109P models).

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Is perfect image geometry on a CRT a pipe dream? Even my relatively high end Samsung SyncMaster 790DF Flatscreen CRT has the issue of the shrinking effect in the top right corner of the screen regardless of how it's adjusted.

CRTs are really all about finding a balance that you can live with. It will never be "perfect", but you can often get it to be "very good". Even if you try the route of applying little magnetic strips to fix some geometry issues in one corner or whatever, you will likely mess up the dynamic convergence somewhat in that corner (at least slightly).

The monitor I'm currently using with my retro PCs is a SyncMaster 763MB that I bought from the original owner who said he used it for less then a year before deciding he wanted a bigger monitor. It's got very little use on it and it shows... it's definitely the brightest CRT I own. But it's still got some minor geometry issues I cannot fully correct. Same thing goes for my collection of Sony PVMs which each have their own little issues with geometry and/or convergence.

Though, flatscreens in particular tend to show worse geometry problems as they age.

Not surprising as flat CRTs have to stretch those field lines far more. Here my Iiyama Diamondtron flatscreen is pretty good when it comes to geometry, but doesn't keep different settings for different resolution/refresh combinations. Given I feed it all kinds of stuff and definitely can't be bothered to re-set all V&H position & size every time, I basically have it shrunk to fit most stuff, and even then some DOS text modes end up offscreen...

Maybe one day I'll combine this screen with a specific build (with something nice & predictable in terms of resolution) and use something else for testing & general messing around. Ideally a screen with knobs for image adjustment - although no nice fancy new high-res/refresh screen has those :'(

This evening I've been doing an inventory of stuff in my soldering 'to do' box. Caps, caps and more caps. One motherboard needs a single cap, one sound card too. A GPU wants three. And then there's my MS-6199VA that needs 18 (or maybe 21 - the 10V 1000uF caps look fine but I don't trust them any more than the rest) replaced. Time to order in bulk, as I don't have enough caps with the right capacitance now and most I do have are one size too large. I'm sure these aren't the last bad caps I'm going to encounter... 60 low ESR Chemi-con caps should arrive at my work address in a few days 😀

Proposed to my girlfriend that I had an idea for a new track in rally-sport as we were taking a walk. I pointed out that she'd get to play it and she wasn't ecstatic. I'm rewriting the code for the track editor anyway so she gets to wait. Probably will go for glide support for rendering and some proprietary stuff like s3's and ati's.

So yesterday I finally got the 512MB Empaq "VIA Chipsatz" stick. Despite my chronical pessimism, it actually works and it's error free (for now, at least). Another pleasant thing that positively surprised me is that it's even able to run at CAS2 Turbo speed, so now I'm running all the three sticks at Turbo, the system got a nice extra boost from it, as well as being helped by assigning 170MB of system RAM to cache in Eboostr.

According to Sisoft Sandra, now my RDD is just one megabyte slower than a P3 with BX chipset with CAS2 PC133 sticks, being at 465MB/s in ALU bandwidth and 474MB/s in FPU bandwidth. A BX, according to the program, has an ALU of 415MB/s and an FPU bandwidth of 475MB/s. Nice!

Received the CGA Graphics Card I ordered today.

Tested it out on my XT build and it appears to be working ok. The bottom RCA outputs colour, whilst the top 1 is monochrome only.

Now I just need to find a monitor or TV that plays nicely with it. Just about got an acceptable picture from an old Plasma TV, along with Composite Colour output.

The Plasma doesn't really like the output much and occasionally flickers & scrolls the image. An LCD TV I tested it on hated it moreso, as it didn't properly support the NTSC colour mode.

But it was fun to play around with. I tested Jumpman, as shown in the pic, as well as Microsoft Decathlon, Dig Dug & Tapper. Not sure what's up with Tapper on this card, the first couple of levels are Monochrome, followed by a heavily distorted colour level 3. I'll have to look into that.