justin1985 wrote on 2024-04-17, 22:04:

I do have a spare ASRock board with the same chipset so it is tempting to just swap that in instead, although a little bit sad to lose the NEC boot logo splash screen.

If you get yourself familiar with BIOS modding tools, you can maybe yoink it out of the NEC BIOS and yeet it into the ASRock one.

A few updates on this - thinking more about the motherboard, the ASRock spare I have has the ATX power header right in the middle of the board rather than at the front edge, which might make routing the power cable in across/around the DIMMs, but under the optical drive, quite tricky! Also the NEC board has a 4 pin 12v header, but the ASRock doesn't - seems like it might be a concern when it comes to the little 250w FSP power supply coping with Socket A?

Both of those things are making me lean towards biting the bullet and recapping the NEC\MSI board ...

The floppy drive didn't seem to work, always getting a "DISK I/O ERROR". I opened it up and frankly it looked like it had never ever been used - there was a thick lump of white grease on the motor lead screw. Cleaned this off and added a small amount of fresh white PTFE grease, and it now seems to work fine. I did also clean the heads with IPA, but I can't help think it always seems to be the lead screw that makes the difference on these ... Oh, and there was also a dead bee in there ...

The DVD drive also doesn't work and won't eject at all, even with the paper clip in the eject hole. Most likely a broken/deformed belt? I'll swap it for the beige DVD-ROM+CD-RW drive I have laying around for now, but try and restore it.

I realised I have a Radeon 9250 SE card sat around which is actually low profile, on a full height bracket. I dug around and found a low profile bracket that looks like it should fit - I don't mind losing the VGA. That seems like a nice upgrade over the onboard UniChrome graphics. This seems like it might actually be one of the best AGP cards available in low profile?

You likely have this board because at that time PB equals NEC. It’s currently missing photos and bios dumps which you could contribute.

Having P4 PSU connector on 462 is very nice however it’s too crammed inside so don’t go overboard with higher clocked Athlons.

Aside from LP versions of 9250, FX5200, mx440 and G550 there are also LP Rage128 cards as well as some LP versions of FX5700LE.

There are no Creative-made 98-compatible sound cards with LP bracket out of the box. There exist however smaller PCB sound cards that work in 98 provided those clear. Among others are some models of ALS, Solo-1, and 8738. It can be quite a hunt though.

Bruno128 wrote on 2024-04-20, 12:59:

You likely have this board because at that time PB equals NEC. It’s currently missing photos and bios dumps which you could cont […]
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You likely have this board because at that time PB equals NEC. It’s currently missing photos and bios dumps which you could contribute.

Having P4 PSU connector on 462 is very nice however it’s too crammed inside so don’t go overboard with higher clocked Athlons.

Aside from LP versions of 9250, FX5200, mx440 and G550 there are also LP Rage128 cards as well as some LP versions of FX5700LE.

There are no Creative-made 98-compatible sound cards with LP bracket out of the box. There exist however smaller PCB sound cards that work in 98 provided those clear. Among others are some models of ALS, Solo-1, and 8738. It can be quite a hunt though.

Many thanks for this! The factory cooler was a complete nightmare to remove and re-fit, so after taking it off to re-paste and refitting, I really don't fancy taking it off again ... this is the best I could do at a top-down photo:

I did go ahead and re-capped with a mix of Rubycon and Panasonic caps - it took more than one try to get the right combination of values and diameters! I also fitted the Radeon 9250 SE (128Mb) using a spare bracket from a half-height PCIe Radeon card but I don't have a VGA half-height bracket for the ribbon cable attachment so that is hanging loose for now. I also picked up a Dell OEM ES1373 Creative AudioPCI, which I butchered the bracket of to fit half-height using a razor saw and some files.

The ES1373 does at least give some DOS compatibility, although the FM synth really does sound BAD, but that said, I'm mainly interested in late DOS era games that are general MIDI anyway. The 4mb and 8mb wave sets don't sound bad at all in Windows, and general audio quality is great. Even better, it has the header for the internal speaker (although it sounds terrible!) which disables automatically when a speaker is connected, so there is at least some audio without speakers.

The Radeon 9250 128Mb, paired with the Athlon XP 2800+ and 512Mb DRR, gives pretty respectable frame rates in most of the demos in 3DMark2001 at 1024*768, 32-bit colour, and a score of 5228. Respectable, but not exactly impressive? Is this about the best I'm going to get on this platform with the low profile constraint?

Still, I like the compact format but still with all legacy stuff! But if I end up keeping it long term I'll have to find a beige DVD drive ...

justin1985 wrote on 2024-05-14, 21:19:

I also picked up a Dell OEM ES1373 Creative AudioPCI, which I butchered the bracket of to fit half-height using a razor saw and some files.

I have this exact Dell card, I didn’t mention 1373 because they are just small, not really LP. It’s notorious for FM emulation and it’s not the only problem. In Quake2 you would have choppy sound playback. C-media 8738 is better in this regard.

The VGA LP brackets are available at well known Chinese online marketplace.

Can you dump the bios with UniFlash / Awdflash or at least what is the POST string of that bios? Bottom of the POST screen during startup or in windows software like HWiNFO.