philscomputerlab wrote:

Artex wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

Very nice Artex 😀

Hah - just noticed you did a review of 98Lite. Good timing! I've been using that for some time now on all my 98SE builds. 😀

Cool! Which option did you go for? Did you run it after installing Windows 98, or a clean installation?

I usually do it after, and choose "Chubby" - just the right blend of speed and functionality for me.

Played some Ace of Base MIDs on my SC-55ST: groovy tunes! 😀

PeterLI wrote:

Played some Ace of Base MIDs on my SC-55ST: groovy tunes! 😀

Aww man, that brings me back. I used to love "Beautiful Life." Can't believe that was... 20 years ago? Omg.

I spent a few hours testing my stack of IDE HDDs, all harvested from the old machines I've come across over the last couple of years. It wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped - I didn't find anything exciting on any of them, and 7 turned out to be dead or dying 😒

Still taking apart machines at work. They have a ton of 80 GB SATA drives, perfect for Windows 98 SE machines 😀

Waving goodbye to one of my Compaq Portable 386's as part of a trade for another machine. Finished dropping a fresh DOS 6.22 install on the drive and now I'm pretty much dumping an image of my other machine onto this machine using Procomm, YMODEM and a null modem cable.

Have been working on the game a little more.

Mr. Flowers
- GUI artwork done and working - we now have LucasArts-ish style GUI (though I made some alterations to it - HEAVY ones).
- replaced all cursors with my own custom 256 color animated ones
- a great deal of the MIDI soundtrack is completed
- a lot of scripting/logic programming is completed for the GUI and basic functionality
- started work on the player and NPC sprites
- almost all but the daytime cutscene rooms are done
- currently making puzzle maps (interviews with Ron Gilbert have been quite handy here)
- currently brainstorming on the random puzzle logic

I do need to get the character movement and interactions working properly again though. Currently the EXE works all the way through the opening custscenes up until the first playable room and then the player is stuck mid screen and unable to move or interact with any hotspots. Chances are it's a mis-step in the scripting/coding of the game somewhere that I will need to fix - which I will figure out. Also need to start on the object animations.

I'm putting the other game onto the backseat until I get all the things working in this one so I can transfer some like-code over to it (particularly the GUI and the custscenes, though the other game does not have any huge elaborate cutscenes at the start like Mr. Flowers does).

Got a lot of retro-PC activities going on these days....
- I installed that SoundBlaster Pro II into the Compaq Portable 486c, have located a replacement screen, just waiting on budget to order it

And I just did a CRAPLOAD of stuff to the Tandy 1000A
- replaced the hard disk, the old 540 failed, so I put a 8GB in there, no DDO, I'm using the VCF XT-IDE controller
- reinstalled DOS, installed Windows 1.01, 2.03, and 3.0
- I've quit using Microsoft LAN Manager 3.0 in favor of using Mike Brutman's MTCP suite, Tandy has been a good little FTP Server thus far
- switched out the LAN card, the Intel EtherExpress 16 stopped finding it's RJ45 connector, thinking it's on BNC, put a RTL 8019AS in as a replacement
- installed a boatload of games (SimCity - which runs GREAT on an 8088 surprisingly, Ultima I-VI, every SCI/AGI Sierra title I have, Silpheed, Thexder (which is becoming a new favorite), and a boatload of old CGA and Tandy/PCjr titles).

So Tandy is back in commission, next focus is getting that Compaq all setup. I want to throw one of my 20-40GB HDD in there with a DDO and set it up as a portable DOS Gaming rig (well....luggable).

I also went thrifting this past weekend and found a thrift shop that had what I presume to be a 486 laptop with sound, I'm tempted to pick it up but passed it up because the wife would probably want to kill me, that and I already like the Compaq far more as the laptop could be B&W and I prefer color.

I made an ATX to AT converter from scratch. I used a 20 to 24 pin ATX adaptor and scavanged an old unstable halfway dead AT psu.

Got an old school Pentium laptop from 1995. Has built in floppy drive, audio, and came with the hard drive. Got it from my brother who got it checked it out of obsolete inventory at work. He powered it up for me and it boots onto the BIOS. Unfortunately, when he dropped off the laptop at my house, he didn't bring the power adapter! I think it's a 19v charger.

Made myself a rear bracket with RCA outputs for routing the analogue CD Audio to the back. Allows easy mixing with my external mixer 😀

That's a great idea, if you're already using an external mixer anyway!

Artex wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

Played some Ace of Base MIDs on my SC-55ST: groovy tunes! 😀

Aww man, that brings me back. I used to love "Beautiful Life." Can't believe that was... 20 years ago? Omg.

Never liked them a bit. I was more into Uriah heep and black Sabbath at that time.
Begun listening to the "big 4" from Seattle in the early 90's instead.

Played Homeworld for 3 hours on the Cyrix MII 333 & Rage Pro turbo. Runs just fine and looks good too, more importantly its a brilliant game 😀

I sorted some CPUs I have bought in bundles.

I have figured out some Ebay code.

Some CPUs have some bent pins = Someone has stepped on most CPUs.
All pins OK = All pins are still there.
No bent pins = I can not see any bent pins... without my glasses.

It is fortunate that my favorite spare time activity is to straighten out bent pins...

I have been researching math co-processors online for each of my Tandy 1000, 286, SX and older XT systems that can use one. I know that there are not many games that benefit from one (maybe only Falcon and a couple other games), but it is a very "nice to have" item on my want list (if I can get them at a reasonable price). I just looked on eBay and found some 8087 ones for about $15 bucks shipped to me. Not bad, but I may have to make a couple best offers to try and get them a little cheaper. So far, the only one I see for my 286 and 386 is each well over $30 shipped. I guess I have to just keep looking, that is getting a little on the high end for me.

amazing, today bought a silicon image sil3114 sataraid pci that incredibly work as native boot on a raid not-capable vp3 based mobo. Now installing win on k63 and real fast ssd 64gb.

386SX wrote:

amazing, today bought a silicon image sil3114 sataraid pci that incredibly work as native boot on a raid not-capable vp3 based mobo. Now installing win on k63 and real fast ssd 64gb.

These SIL adapters have been reported quite a few times to work well 😀

Let me know if you can enable DMA and maybe run a benchmark like http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P13/Disk%20Speed

sure, i have some problems at the first reboot after the first installation step on win98 files copying. press key to reboot, then start from hard disk first time and then hang at win screen. I think the size of disk is too much, i have to make a partition.

Testing some Socket 3 CPUs that I recently received in a lot. I bought one of these "Fancard" coolers largely because it was dirt cheap ($5 shipped). I was thinking I might use it to cool a Voodoo 3 in another build, but the card is just too long. It turns out that it is the perfect size to cool the CPU on my motherboard. Even better, it is supported by the VLB connector, which I don't need because this motherboard has built-in IDE and PCI.

Without the Fancard, the heatsink (needs to be cleaned!) on the DX2-66 was too hot to touch after about 10 minutes of the Tyrian demo. Now it is nice and cool. Fans aren't quiet, though. The card even has a jack & wired connector to power external speakers.

Salvaged parts from a Dell XPS 600 (I think) and another Dell box headed for the dumpster at work; Foxconn SLI motherboard, Pentium D 3.0/2mb/800fsb, decent 6-pipe cooler with a fat copper base, NVidia 7800 GTX/256mb, Audigy 2 zs (new to my collection), 4x 512mb PC4200, and an IDE CDR (handy since I have few problematic ones in service right now). The only thing I nabbed from the other box was 2x 1gb PC400 and a nice ATI 7900 Pro/128mb w/ video.

Unfortunately 2 caps on the Foxconn have small amounts of a dry dark purplish residue on them, and though not bulging, this does not auger well. On the plus side the machine appears to have been heavily used and I would have expected the caps to have gone bad by now - so if they haven't yet, maybe it's a case of "arrested development".. hopeful thinking of course.