philscomputerlab wrote:

Mucking around with a P4 3.2 GHz machine. […]
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Mucking around with a P4 3.2 GHz machine.

I have an original Audigy (SB0090) in my P4 (2.8GHz Prescott, going up to a 3.2GHz Northwood here soon for working hyperthreading and better RAM I/O) and I can't seem to find the front panel breakout box for it anywhere. Found a few for the Audigy 2 ZS, but I don't *want* a 2 ZS, I want to use my existing Audigy. Honestly not sure why I want the breakout box, I never use front panel audio anyway.

But this P4 is still holding up for an interim main machine. Kind of surprising actually. I want to swap the 9600XT for a cheap used HD3650 AGP so I can use this thing for a couple modern games that I've seen run on this hardware, like Skyrim. It runs moderately well. I want to do it. And that card will give this machine the boost it needs to run Test Drive Unlimited adequately. I'd go for broke and grab an HD4670 instead but I'm gonna be honest, I don't see much of a point to it besides having the most powerful AGP card ever created, and breaking my bank trying to do it.

Anyway, enough random rambling, to get back to what the topic's about, today I played through Commander Keen 4 in DOSBox on this P4. Fun times. It actually played at full speed while this thing was running a defrag. On both drives at the same time. Even Doom stutters and stops in such conditions.

Tetrium + HighTreason

Yeah... Know that shit too well. Had a customer that insisted that I had installed Gay-porn on his daughters new computer, delivered with a blank harddrive. Because he had a legal copy of XP. So... Well... We apologized to him, and brought out a factory sealed harddrive. (we tested every OS-Free build with a temporary XP installation and then blanked the drive). The next day, he was there again and demanding that we erased it from the Ram or the BIOS or wherever we had installed it. And we gave up and asked to test it. We found that he had installed a pirated XP without even SP1. (this was in early 2006)
Then he would just connect it to the internet, beginning to surf and find other pirated software.... 🤣

Now he demanded to have his money back, when he came to the counter the day after, and when we refused. He picked up the computer and threw it 10 meters into the shop. If my boss had not been quick to get away, he would have had it landing in his face.... Well.... Would have been nice if it did, as he never payd bill's for Asus and Asrock parts, and cheating me for my last paycheck. He would rather spend money on a golf tournament in sweden and hardcore shopping in London, than pay and make shure the company would not go down. Well... He blew it, and told the press that it was all due to bad workers and customers not buying enough. What a F**k-head

Did some Watcom C coding a week ago, so...I coded a small VGA\VESA video "benchmark" 😀
It can test standard EGA\VGA modes, Mode-X and VESA banked and linear modes, perfom 8\16\32 bit memory write\read\move from main to video memory and display results in MB\s, MiB\s and frames per second.
Sory for readme in Russian, type "vidbench -?" to get a command line keys list. Sources are included (as always 😀)

P.S. if there is enough interest from the community I will release a new version (planned to add VGA latches test and fix some VESA procedures)

brostenen wrote:

Tetrium + HighTreason […]
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Tetrium + HighTreason

Yeah... Know that shit too well. Had a customer that insisted that I had installed Gay-porn on his daughters new computer, delivered with a blank harddrive. Because he had a legal copy of XP. So... Well... We apologized to him, and brought out a factory sealed harddrive. (we tested every OS-Free build with a temporary XP installation and then blanked the drive). The next day, he was there again and demanding that we erased it from the Ram or the BIOS or wherever we had installed it. And we gave up and asked to test it. We found that he had installed a pirated XP without even SP1. (this was in early 2006)
Then he would just connect it to the internet, beginning to surf and find other pirated software.... 🤣

Now he demanded to have his money back, when he came to the counter the day after, and when we refused. He picked up the computer and threw it 10 meters into the shop. If my boss had not been quick to get away, he would have had it landing in his face.... Well.... Would have been nice if it did, as he never payd bill's for Asus and Asrock parts, and cheating me for my last paycheck. He would rather spend money on a golf tournament in sweden and hardcore shopping in London, than pay and make shure the company would not go down. Well... He blew it, and told the press that it was all due to bad workers and customers not buying enough. What a F**k-head

Wow....

Some people are just sad beyond belief.

Anyway, not really today, but I started going through my boxes of graphics cards to write down what I actually have, started with my box of ISA cards. Lots of the stuff I had totally forgotten 🤣

Guys, I don't know, how much can you all help me, but I have an unsolvable problem for me right now. I got Commodore C64 with 1541 Disk Drive for free. That sounds nice, BUT i can't load anything. I got some floppy disks from previous owner, but it could be easily bad. It does very much something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebtYDP8hfC0

I spend whole day fiddling with this, I cleaned heads, but no such luck. I thing alignment could be wrong, but I don't really know how to fix that without callibration software. I don't either have Datasette, so I can't play with tapes. So now I am stuck and can do nothing about that.

krivulak wrote:

Guys, I don't know, how much can you all help me, but I have an unsolvable problem for me right now. I got Commodore C64 with 1541 Disk Drive for free. That sounds nice, BUT i can't load anything. I got some floppy disks from previous owner, but it could be easily bad. It does very much something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebtYDP8hfC0

I spend whole day fiddling with this, I cleaned heads, but no such luck. I thing alignment could be wrong, but I don't really know how to fix that without callibration software. I don't either have Datasette, so I can't play with tapes. So now I am stuck and can do nothing about that.

Create a new thread perhaps? That way you'll get more viewers with the correct knowledge 😀

OK, I thought that it is nothing too much interesting, so it doesn't deserve new thread 😁

krivulak wrote:

Guys, I don't know, how much can you all help me, but I have an unsolvable problem for me right now. I got Commodore C64 with 1541 Disk Drive for free. That sounds nice, BUT i can't load anything. I got some floppy disks from previous owner, but it could be easily bad. It does very much something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebtYDP8hfC0

I spend whole day fiddling with this, I cleaned heads, but no such luck. I thing alignment could be wrong, but I don't really know how to fix that without callibration software. I don't either have Datasette, so I can't play with tapes. So now I am stuck and can do nothing about that.

Try formatting a spare disk and see if it recognizes that.

Test the resistance of the R/W head coils, on some particular drive mechs used in the C= 1541 the head tends to go open circuit internally - if that's the case there's no other solution than replacing the R/W head assembly (or the complete drive mech) with a working spare, since the head itself is sealed.

Fired up the Cyrix Windows 95 box last night (Cyrix 6x86 166+, 32mb Ram, 4mb Virge DX, 4Gb HD, AWE64)

Played some International Rally Championship by Europress. I had the older version, Network Q RAC Rally Champ and my a year later a friend had this version, At the time it played like a dog on my Pentium 75 machine. It runs on the Cyrix non-accelerated - but keep having to resist the urge to drop in the Pentium 200 MMX processor which is sat next to the machine! 😀

Anyone know how to reduce the speed a CD-ROM drive in Windows 95? I use QCD in DOS which works well @ 4x.

I used "CD-Bremse" to slow down the CD-ROM drive. Still available for download on several sites. I don't know if the latest version will run on '95, but I'd try that one first.

Glued together a Pentium III 800EB with four video cards... Perhaps you will find out why some day. All but one card are S3 Trio 64s. I have a small problem because there is no room for a capture card and I wanted to install one. I may be able to do it, but it will be sharing an interrupt with something else, perhaps I may replace the Trio cards with something else eventually to free up a slot.

The system runs Windows 2K Pro. It uses an Intel D815EEA motherboard. It has 256MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive - this was my testing drive, but I will no longer need it for testing and this system won't be doing anything important enough to make me mad if it fails in there.

These were all parts I had on the shelf below my black desk.

I cataloged my box of PCI Ati and Matrox cards. Didn't find anything special this time, except that one of the cards apparently was never cleaned of it's dust when I got it and the dust is kinda cooked onto the PCB though no signs of corrosion are apparent.

I am disappointed!

And there was me thinking I had problems in old browsers (I will convert the images some day to fix this) but this place is far worse... You know I'm only messing right?

Anyway, I have decided these Trio cards are a pain in the ass and as it is going to cost money to add more RAM, I may as well spend the extra few pounds and get a quad monitor matrox. This will also make it easier to add other peripherals, such as the capture card I want. It would also leave me able to add a SCSI or SATA card if I need to at a later date, though as the onboard IDE appears to be UDMA100 that probably won't be necessary as I won't be stressing it that much, in fact, the CPU is probably the weak spot.

From pressing Shut Down the system takes about three seconds to power off... Quite possibly the fastest power down I have ever seen for Win2K.

@HighTreason
Netscape Navigator is fun 😀

I think VOGONS is useable (though not perfect) with IE 5.5... IE 5 is far worse.
Well, a Quad Matrox will not only free up slots, but will also have better image quality, so I guess that is the better route allright.

Today I fired my Slot A system to benchmark an Athlon 500, 650, 800 and 1000. It's good to see AMD's first 1GHz chip running. I like the race and advertising towards the 1000MHz mark. You won't see animated GIF's on AMD's website like they we're back then!

Somewhere next on the list is a SECC2 Slot1 Pentium III 1000. It's time to let the old devils face each other once again! 😈

I prefer the TV commercial; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK0hU0OYvCI

Though the GIFs are also cool

I have recieved four of my five 9" POS monitors. They are awesome and they seem to work fine for what I wanted them for. The Pentium III on the other hand had its windows install screwed over by ATI's driver (requires a version of .NET not compatible with 2KSP4) and isn't powerful enough for what I wanted to do with it. I might have to break my rules and use an old Phenom II board I have (Not likely as it is totally shit) or the smaller Core 2 board I have (also shit) with the Quad core CPU installed. Way overkill, but it only needs to run a single app and my PSU can stomach the horrible inefficiencies of the Core 2 / Phenom well enough because I won't be using an overblown GPU and it will only have a single hard drive.

Went through another box of graphics cards today. This time with some of the more high-end AGP cards. Only like 5 cards in the entire box but 2 took up a lot of space due to their coolers. These were also the ones I had trouble to identify.
Both are GF FX cards and both have the AGP 4x slot. One is slightly longer with a green PCB and the only thing I could make out was P172 and the other one has a blue PCB with P177. Both have molex's and both have a 2-slot bracket, so I suppose both are Ultras?
And I took a long time as I was simply unable to conclusively identify any of these 2 cards.

Tetrium wrote:

And I took a long time as I was simply unable to conclusively identify any of these 2 cards.

You can use Ultimate Boot CD, it has some tools that can tell you what card you have. I think it reads the card's BIOS information.