So pretty much, lower the dot pitch the better? Does this also apply to Nec, Sharp, etc monitors? (even though just a mention of Nec and Sharp yields quality)

Today I unearthed this beauty of a system amongst a pile of boring Pentium 4 boxes at my usual flea market:


Everex 386/25 from March 1992, made in the USA. Aside from a couple of scuff marks the only visible damage seems to be the female IEC conector on the PSU which I'll undoubtedly replace.

Dat sexy AT-style power switch <3

Taking a peek inside I see a Magic Combo video card (Hercules+CGA), Intel network card, WD Caviar 216MB hard drive (unplugged, along with the front panel display), and fortunately, an external battery.

Also found this weird ISA VGA+video capture(?) board:

133MHz wrote:

Today I unearthed this beauty of a system amongst a pile of boring Pentium 4 boxes at my usual flea market:

Man that Turbo switch. I love it!

Stojke wrote:

So pretty much, lower the dot pitch the better? Does this also apply to Nec, Sharp, etc monitors? (even though just a mention of Nec and Sharp yields quality)

Generally, for higher resolutions you'll want a lower dot pitch and larger screen size. For lower resolutions, higher dot pitch and smaller screen size (unless you like blocky pixels and fine scanlines).
I personally use a 21" with 0.21mm (and now 0.20mm) for 2048x1536, and a 14" with 0.39mm for 640x480 and below.

Oh I see, can you recommend some low res models as well?

I don't know what classifies as retro around here, but I got these yesterday free from craigslist. I just had to go to this guy's place and remove em from the racks and unhook their wires and haul em to my car. They're 2003-era Dell PowerEdge 1750's. They run on the Pentium4 Xeon platform, the early ones on socket 604 with 533 FSB. The whole thing is it's a finance company, and they were being retired from service and some company was going to charge them money (I don't know how much) to come to their site and take the old servers and recycle em. And they're too old for the company to bother trying to sell for cash. So instead they posted on craigslist and hoped someone would want em and come remove em from their site for free. Which I gladly did. I originally had 4 of these, and gifted one to a local friend to spread the wealth of my haul, the other 3 I have to play with.

Larger: http://www.outfoxed.net/dells/DSC05500.jpg

The server's general specs are:

(2) CPU Sockets capable of 2-way cpu's. Supports 533-FSB Pentium4 netburst xeons. Two possibilities: Prestonia core (no L3) up to 3067 Mhz, or Gallatin core up to 3.2 ghz and 2MB L3 cache.
8 ram slots, and while the official specs state 4GB ram max, which would be based off 1GB sticks, one of these servers I've opened has 2 x 2GB ram @ DDR-400, installed already, which tells me they can address 2GB sticks, so I'm hoping the other 3 have 2GB sticks too probably take 8GB max.
3 x SCA-80-pin hotswap scsi bays, and each server has a full-fledged hardware raid card installed via Dell PERC 4, and can run up to raid-5 with 3 bays. Dual onboard gigabit ports, and two PCI-X-133-Mhz expansion ports per server.

I'm planning to scoop up all the ram out of them and pool it all in to one server, as well they only have 1 CPU per server, so hoping I can find a matched set of -something- and get both together in a machine too. I have 3 x SCA drives in the other room but they're just 18.6 GB each. At least it's enough to get win7 installed in raid-5 and play with one and try out the raid card and some benchmarks and stuff. Get a set of 3 x 300GB for it later if it all checks out.

kithylin wrote:

I don't know what classifies as retro around here, but I got these yesterday free from craigslist. I just had to go to this guy's place and remove em from the racks and unhook their wires and haul em to my car. They're 2003-era Dell PowerEdge 1750's. They run on the Pentium4 Xeon platform, the early ones on socket 604 with 533 FSB.

Ah, I remember a while back, I picked up an old, Redline Networks (Pre-Juniper) load-sharing server with a Tyan S2720-533. I think it only had 2GB of RAM, but it had two CPU's, and I wondered which ones they were for the longest time because I didn't want to take the heatsinks off--thank goodness for CPU-Z! They ended up being the 1MB L3 Gallatins. IIRC, I put Win7 on this thing and it just wasn't snappy so I went back to XP. I'm really tempted to break it back out and see how it runs Win7, again. I think I was only using a 6-series Geforce card at the time, too. Maybe if I threw one of those newer 8400GS PCI cards in there, it would be happier.

Hmm, so tempting...

I bumped into another AOpen AX59Pro and got it. It came with a K6-2 500MHz and a bunch of memory (most of the SIMMs and DIMMs don't seem to work but they came for free).

Great board! Like AOpen boards, very solid. But worst spot to put the floppy header 🤣

jwt27 wrote:

0.21mm dot pitch, 0.20mm dot pitch

F931 factory brochure says it's a 0.25mm dot pitch. The F980 factory User's manual says 0.23mm dot pitch, which is the lowest dot pitch I have heard of.

Logistics wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

0.21mm dot pitch, 0.20mm dot pitch

F931 factory brochure says it's a 0.25mm dot pitch. The F980 factory User's manual says 0.23mm dot pitch, which is the lowest dot pitch I have heard of.

0.21/0.20mm is the horizontal dot pitch. I don't know why diagonal is the standard measurement for shadow masks, but aperture grilles are measured horizontally too so I think this is a fair comparison.
Perhaps triad pitch would be a better word. The actual dot pitch (in any direction) would be 0.1333mm.

And yep, I don't know of any other tubes with the same (or smaller) dot pitch. Which why I've been looking for one of these for quite a while now 😀

Two options for my ultimate 486VLB project:

Tekram DC-680C - VLB IDE cache controller.
.

Tekram DC-880 - VLB SCSI cache controller.
.

Any ideas, which board will be faster/stable/don't have bugs?

SCSI of course

Stojke wrote:

SCSI of course

Scsi2 is limited by 10mb/s bus, so you can get only about 8mb/s transfer.
And pio mode in ide (if supported by controller) is up to 16mb/s.

But scsi is more cool 🤣

A couple of items picked up for cheap last week.

Two Visiontek Geforce256 DDR cards.. I don't know why I like these so much, but I do. I know they run hot and get spanked by a Geforce2 GTS, but they were a lot faster than the SDR versions of the same card. Maybe it's because it's the first official "GPU." Maybe I'm just an nVidia fanboy... I dunno. 😎

And this one's kinda cool since you don't see it very often. A Media Vision Deluxe 16

Stojke wrote:

But scsi is more cool :lol:

Looks like you are right.
Now testing IDE controller under clean dos and I can achieve only 2mb/s direct from disk speed (while from cache - is more, than 10 mb/s).
Need to check from windows too, may be 32-bit drivers can change situation...

Artex wrote:

And this one's kinda cool since you don't see it very often. A Media Vision Deluxe 16

What interesting about this board? Just a jass16 version, no scsi, no wt.

easy_john wrote:

Artex wrote:

And this one's kinda cool since you don't see it very often. A Media Vision Deluxe 16

What interesting about this board? Just a jass16 version, no scsi, no wt.

As I said above, you don't see this variant too often. It's got multiple CD-ROM interfaces, YMF262 (OPL3) output and I believe that's a 26-pin wavetable DB header on the top right, but I can't recall if this particular chip (MVD121) had the same MIDI header flaw as the MVD101 chip.

This little gem arrived today. I've been trying to get a joystick working on my Toshiba Tecra 550CDT for the longest time. The Tecra has nice specs:

* 266MHz Pentium MMX
* 1024x768 native TFT display
* S3 Virge MX 3D graphics
* Yamaha OPL3-SA3 sound with SBPro & WSS support

I have a Basics Gameport by New Media, but I can't get it to work in DOS or Windows. I also have a Powerramp Mite gamepad that is essentially a mini keyboard that plugs into the PS/2 port, but it doesn't play nice with the always-on Toshiba trackpoint, which also uses the PS/2 port. (It works great on desktop computers if you use a serial mouse.)

So, I gambled when I saw this on eBay. I'd never heard of it. It is the GameCard II by JC Designs. It works great in DOS and Windows, but I really want it for DOS since I can use USB joysticks in Windows. At last, I can play great early 90s action games like Doom, Dark Forces, and Descent on a portable with genuine OPL3 FM.