ubiq wrote on 2026-04-28, 16:51:

Been spending some time checking out early 00's demoscene output. Interesting time of rapidly changing hardware. Surprisingly a lot of early Win2k adoption. Early 3d accelerated experiments as well as software rendering holdouts. Not too much 3dfx/glide stuff, but a lot of OpenGL. Which reminded me of the existence of GLSetup. I remember that being a pretty sweet util/driver back in the day, but can't remember what exactly it did. Can anyone refresh my memory - when did it make sense to use GLSetup, and is there any reason to care about these days in retro systems?

It never made any sense to use it, it was used by those too lazy and/or ignorant to install graphics drivers themselves. I suppose there is probably some edge cases where a user has only modem access, isn't going to waste time downloading drivers or doesn't recognize that they need to and is amazed when they run glsetup on their game CD and their games magically work or are faster. Probably the same people that went searching for those Nvidia drivers that emulate glide.

Today my 2 motherboards I bought on eBay came in. Sold as a lot, a Socket 939 and a Socket AM2, both with Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU. Would of been awesome test rigs to see the difference between the two. Well, I am not very happy. Yes they were sold as-is/untested as is a lot of the older hardware, which I've never had any problems with.... Neither of the boards work. The AM2 system will turn on, but no beep codes. Tried no ram, different CPU, different video cards, nothing. Took the heatsink off the CPU and you could feel it slowly getting warm. The 939, no beep codes or anything. It would turn on just long enough for the fans to start spinning after you turned the power to the power supply on. Then after it turned off, you would have to kill power to the PSU for a minute or so before I could try to turn it on again. Took the batteries out of them just to make sure settings were cleared, and still nothing.

Very disappointing as I was looking forward to having a 939 system again.

Stick a FAT bootable USB in and turn them on, if they start flickering the light on it, then they're trying to do a BIOS recovery. Then have fun times with rufus making a 32mb partition DOS boot device on a stick to flash proper BIOS.

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her up ... with surprises!

• The CMOS battery has held its charge for ~25 years! And, the date time has drifted forwards by 2 hours?
• The BIOS shows one HDD set by User, but actually all HDDs were stripped out long ago and there is nothing on the IDE bus today.. thinking suspects/motives/opportunities.
• And having a zeroed HDD geometry doesn't ring any bells - maybe that was an LS120, but I can't think why I would have an LS120 on Primary Master unless this I had demoted her to testbed.
• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?
• The fan is noisy and needs some sewing machine oil. Does anyone know of a good UK supplier?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 21:34:

• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

Coincidentally I was just about to come post my retro activity from today about a very similiar issue. I finally revisited my Socket 7 / Pentium MMX build, the last issue several months ago I was dealing with was faint scrolling lines on the display. I replaced the PSU but that didn't do anything, not to mention I tried a variety of different motherboards, video cards, with / without vga switcher, plugging things directly into the wall, cooling, etc.

Today I finally decided to just run everything outside of the case and no scrolling lines or distortion, so now it's time to determine what about the case is causing a problem. It's a baby AT so it's pretty compact and while it has that iconic look and a mhz display I really don't like the way the motherboard sits in it. There must be some kind of improper grounding or something. Anyways, since you mentioned switching cases I thought this was relevant. Going to try some different standoffs or something and see how it goes.