Installed a NOS PATA DVD-RW drive in my 98SE project. I think, after like 4-6 months, that this means this machine is actually ready to do some 98SE gaming...

ssokolow wrote on 2024-02-15, 23:23:

Just received the Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 disc I ordered. At the moment, I'm waiting for a USB stick to write so I can work around the senile DVD drive in my hand-me-down 2010 iMac and I'll see if it accepts the retail version of what it shipped with as a way to set up a 10.13/10.6.3 multi-boot or if the retail DVD's only good for setting up multi-boot on the 2009 Macbook that originally came with 10.6.1.

EDIT: Looks like it gets stuck at the apple logo screen for the iMac, whether I copy it to a USB stick or pull out my USB DVD-Rewriter too boot off of. I guess I need to track down the matching grey disc (or possibly a newer 10.6 retail disc if one exists) if I want a boot option old enough to run Rosetta as well as the usual stuff that requires an Intel mac but doesn't work on something as new as 10.13.

I think you need the grey disc with the custom build of 10.6.3 - 2Z691-6638-A. Oddly enough it doesn't seem widely available online...

VivienM wrote on 2024-02-16, 04:21:

I think you need the grey disc with the custom build of 10.6.3 - 2Z691-6638-A. Oddly enough it doesn't seem widely available online...

Huh. You're right. It doesn't seem to be on any of the sites I usually go to. Given how much it's going for on eBay, that's certainly a hold-up in my usual process. (Normally, I verify before spending money.) ...especially given that I'm a bit backlogged on my hobby budget while I prioritize buying a 16TB external drive for nightly backups of my "bulk stuff" ZFS pool to complete my new daily driver PC.

(Currently, I'm relying on a mixture of automatic snapshotting, having it be built from a WD+Seagate mirrored pair, and and not letting the contents change appreciably from the pair of 10TB drives in my old machine.)

Mitchellin wrote on 2024-02-15, 23:15:

Bought this badboy for £14 😁
I'm expecting under mx200 performance and severe texture issues... might make a video of the battle of the terrible pci cards: Radeon 7000 vs. SiS 315e.

It's a phantom 3d accelerator, you won't even notice it's there.. and wish you could.

Mitchellin wrote on 2024-02-15, 23:15:

Bought this badboy for £14 😁
I'm expecting under mx200 performance and severe texture issues... might make a video of the battle of the terrible pci cards: Radeon 7000 vs. SiS 315e.

Hope you do. If it is 64-bit DDR, it might not be too bad.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-02-16, 06:29:

Mitchellin wrote on 2024-02-15, 23:15:

Bought this badboy for £14 😁
I'm expecting under mx200 performance and severe texture issues... might make a video of the battle of the terrible pci cards: Radeon 7000 vs. SiS 315e.

It's a phantom 3d accelerator, you won't even notice it's there.. and wish you could.

nah, SiS315 a good win98se card for 800x600x16/32. Can't expect Geforce 2MX performance when it had $50 price at launch 😀 Still better than S3 I guess. I don't have a mx200 PCI to compare it to but I do have a 64bit fx5200 which is not far away from it. Curios about comparing it to Radeon 7000 with latest drivers, at launch it might have been different...

https://web.archive.org/web/20011211111333/ht … m/video/sis315/

This discussion is making me wonder (really more recalling a musing I've had once or twice before) whether the reason my childhood Voodoo 3 3000 PCI didn't work in my AST Adventure! 210 somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago was really an extension of the same motherboard quirks that cause the PC to lock up when MEMMAKER is run or if it was just the card needing its BIOS reflashed.

(First time I tried, I just assumed it was PCI 1.0 and buggy. It's certainly a lower-spec machine than the HP Pavilion 8160 that the Voodoo was originally bought for.)

Oh well. No biggie either way. I like having a 100Mbit NIC in it, I don't have the skill to make it a new riser with one of the ISA slots swapped out for a second PCI slot, and, these days, I've got an HP t5530 running Win98SE for non-DOS stuff and PassMark says its VIA onboard graphics are comparable to a GeForce 4. (It certainly plays Future Copy L.A.P.D. and Need for Speed 3 well enough.)

Remember that very brief moment when some developers decided it was worth it to bend over backwards and support every unique 3D accelerator/CPU combo they could?

Leading completely bonkers installation menus like this:

Look at that scroll bar!

(Had the newest Voodoo reference drivers installed; I downloaded a Diamond Monster 3D install cd image off archive.org and used the drivers off that - good to go!)

All that work and there were still plenty of games that would only work if the game disk was inserted into the primary disc drive in the system.

It was always a great feature when it was possible to load up multiple drives and have the game find the discs automatically instead of having to swap them around.

I always had a little pile of loose disks on top of my computer case for this reason.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-16, 19:11:

All that work and there were still plenty of games that would only work if the game disk was inserted into the primary disc drive in the system.

It was always a great feature when it was possible to load up multiple drives and have the game find the discs automatically instead of having to swap them around.

I always had a little pile of loose disks on top of my computer case for this reason.

Reminds me of how Age of Empires will only play its Red Book audio out of the first CD drive.

Aww, just fixed up another Toshiba T1900 laptop and pulled out my T1950CT to take a look at it - there's a bubble forming in the LCD! These '93 laptops, the polariser material is starting to break back down into its component elements. So now I've got to do polariser replacements on my Toshiba Portege 610CT and this T1950CT 😠
Thank goodness that they're TFT screens though, assuming the internal polariser doesn't go bad too, the polarisers are pretty standard and can be bought. (DSTN polarisers are impossible to replace as far as I can tell).
Check out how good this polariser replacement went! not mine but what a fantastic result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_YmBgE4wS0
I hope mine turn out that good.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-02-16, 23:07:

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-16, 19:11:

All that work and there were still plenty of games that would only work if the game disk was inserted into the primary disc drive in the system.

It was always a great feature when it was possible to load up multiple drives and have the game find the discs automatically instead of having to swap them around.

I always had a little pile of loose disks on top of my computer case for this reason.

Reminds me of how Age of Empires will only play its Red Book audio out of the first CD drive.

Is that weird though? I only remember using an audio passthrough cable on one of my CDROMs back in the day. The second drive was usually a burner and I didn't have an audio cable going from that to my sound card.

smtkr wrote on 2024-02-17, 04:19:

Is that weird though? I only remember using an audio passthrough cable on one of my CDROMs back in the day. The second drive was usually a burner and I didn't have an audio cable going from that to my sound card.

As in "I mount the game from DAEMON Tools and it plays perfectly except for having no music. I bash my head against Google for an hour and finally one obscure forum post makes me realize that the solution is to dig into the system configuration and swap the drive letters so the physical CD-ROM drive is E: and the DAEMON Tools virtual drive is D:".

It's not the only game either. For example, I believe it was The Incredible Toon Machine that will just issue MCI play commands to whatever the default CD Audio player is in Win98SE Multimedia settings instead of specifying the drive it detected the disc in.

Thankfully, I mostly play old Windows games on a repurposed thin client (with DAEMON Tools pointed at disc images on a Samba server) these days, so the simplest solution is to just leave my USB DVD-Rewriter disconnected so DAEMON Tools is the only optical drive.

smtkr wrote on 2024-02-17, 04:19:

ssokolow wrote on 2024-02-16, 23:07:

Reminds me of how Age of Empires will only play its Red Book audio out of the first CD drive.

Is that weird though? I only remember using an audio passthrough cable on one of my CDROMs back in the day. The second drive was usually a burner and I didn't have an audio cable going from that to my sound card.

Civilization II has this issue as well, and I'm sure lots of others as well.

How to fix missing music in Civilization 2, even when you have a disc in the drive

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-17, 07:01:

ssokolow wrote on 2024-02-17, 05:32:

Is that weird though? I only remember using an audio passthrough cable on one of my CDROMs back in the day. The second drive was usually a burner and I didn't have an audio cable going from that to my sound card.

I just noticed that I mangled the quote markup when cutting it down, so you have that attributed to the wrong person. I've corrected the original.

dominusprog wrote on 2024-02-13, 21:38:

Changed the fan for this power supply and I'm very happy with it, except the noise which is around 40dB. So I put a buck DC/DC converter between the fan and the power socket. Now it work at 7V.

IMG_20240213_201117.jpg

It's an overkill that actually works worse.
Fans (or any DC motor), just like LEDs, would prefer full 12V (LEDs with their appropriate full voltage) and the speed being controlled by turning it on and off very fast. So it's a PWM on powerline.
In practice, it means you can achieve way lower speeds while not stalling the fan. Also you have better starting probability. (With lower voltage, the fan might easily continue to run, but may not be able to start)

In aliexpress, you can find similar simple boards that would be more suitable for this scenario. ("12V PWM" would be a keyword. Without spending time on searching, already saw some for 1€ a piece, incl. shipping.)

Among the not-so-old cards, I have an ASUS Strix B360-G Gaming Rev. 1.01, LGA 1151 with DDR4 RAM, in short not as bad as MB, unfortunately it has several bent or crooked socket pins, I'm pretty sure that putting them back in place, the card can work, I also have a 16GB bench of the HyperX, which was given to me along with the MB, stating that it was broken, personally I'm not sure that it is so, because it is possible that it is the socket PINs crooked, to prevent the bank from being detected, if I'm not mistaken the RAM controller is integrated in the CPU, so if there is a broken connection, see crooked pins, RAM may not work at all.
Unfortunately, putting them back in place, it is not at all easy, you need more than a magnifier of tiny tweezers, then also a good dose of luck, maybe in a relatively short time, you can put them back in place.

PC@LIVE wrote on 2024-02-17, 16:07:

Unfortunately, putting them back in place, it is not at all easy, you need more than a magnifier of tiny tweezers, then also a good dose of luck, maybe in a relatively short time, you can put them back in place.

Sometimes you have better luck with wooden toothpicks, they have just that little bit of grab/friction to push and pull with where metal tools skate off.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2024-02-17, 10:27:

It's an overkill that actually works worse. Fans (or any DC motor), just like LEDs, would prefer full 12V (LEDs with their appro […]
Show full quote

dominusprog wrote on 2024-02-13, 21:38:

Changed the fan for this power supply and I'm very happy with it, except the noise which is around 40dB. So I put a buck DC/DC converter between the fan and the power socket. Now it work at 7V.

IMG_20240213_201117.jpg

It's an overkill that actually works worse.
Fans (or any DC motor), just like LEDs, would prefer full 12V (LEDs with their appropriate full voltage) and the speed being controlled by turning it on and off very fast. So it's a PWM on powerline.
In practice, it means you can achieve way lower speeds while not stalling the fan. Also you have better starting probability. (With lower voltage, the fan might easily continue to run, but may not be able to start)

In aliexpress, you can find similar simple boards that would be more suitable for this scenario. ("12V PWM" would be a keyword. Without spending time on searching, already saw some for 1€ a piece, incl. shipping.)

Before everyone got all anal about "12V means 12V so I MUST have a fan that uses exactly 12V" fans were quoted as having 7V to 15V supply range.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-17, 16:21:

PC@LIVE wrote on 2024-02-17, 16:07:

Unfortunately, putting them back in place, it is not at all easy, you need more than a magnifier of tiny tweezers, then also a good dose of luck, maybe in a relatively short time, you can put them back in place.

Sometimes you have better luck with wooden toothpicks, they have just that little bit of grab/friction to push and pull with where metal tools skate off.

Thank you so much my friend,
maybe I'll try with a pin on another motherboard that doesn't work, if I can straighten it using the technique you suggest, I could fix this ASUS ROG, I don't know if I have the CPU, but if all the pins go back to normal, I'll have to get an i5 or something similar.