alexanrs wrote:

I'd rather install the drivers myself. Call me weird, but hunting drivers, manually trying different versions and setting things up is kindda fun. I hate one-click solutions - its like playing Final Fantasy XIII.

For the most part I agree, but I don't always have the luxury of time. 😀

I still think it's a cool trick. 😉

- Stiletto

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

The more sites host drivers, the better.

I do like a different layout though, with the drivers on one side and the release notes and supported cards on the other side. So I can quickly scan, or search, the release notes for something. This might not be something many need, but I do.

Indeed, different usage cases. From my perspective accessibility was the main thing and I use it personally, all I need is a packet driver and MTCP installed and I can grab PKUNZIP and the drivers from the FTP and work from there. It does actually have a web interface, but it is not finished (a long way off too) and is not currently accessible without knowing the URL... Which would of course be pointless because there isn't much there. Glad this came up actually as I just realized that due to a configuration error, accessing the web for my archive would crash the server, something I cannot see when editing it locally.

For anybody curious, this is what it looks like. Images are temporary (though many will stay) and all will be in GIF format so they can be loaded in ancient browsers. That is, if I ever finish it, as I find the FTP adequate. Basically the pages are made of a few tables, some small images and a bunch of text. It is usable on a monochrome monitor and loads fine in Internet Explorer versions included with Windows 95. I can't speak for older browsers, but I think that a good number, if not all, support the primitive features the pages have.

SquallStrife wrote:

HighTreason wrote:

~95% of my traffic is attempted admin logins from China.

Same but from Russia.

I get the odd one from Russia too. Mostly China though. Either way, sucks to be them, because I disabled the Admin account before even putting it online and the server can only be managed locally. Management is also prohibited on the VLAN going out to the internet. It isn't hacker-proof, because nothing is hacker proof. I am sure somebody could get in if they really wanted to anyway, this is the risk when you put things on public internet, I can only hope that as everything there is to see is publicly accessible anyway there would be little incentive to mess about with it, the only things you can't see are occasional garbage like benchmark results I want to refer to later, music or sometimes images for forums and such which have been left behind after either moving them to PostImg or their thread was deleted.

Threw together an AM2 Athlon 64x2 4000+ machine for a friend. Reused his old ME based Compaq Presario Duron case, threw in a cheapo but stable 20pin 450watt psu, 160gb Samsung SATA2 drive, a 2gb kit of Kingston DDR2 667 and finished it off with a freshly baked/stress tested 512mb Geforce 8800GT. His last pc was a Dimension E310, talk about a heavy piece of Ecycle. The only part of it that was worth salvaging was the 80gb HDD, and even that was not in great shape.
OH! and the p4 521 made a great key chain after drilling a hole in it.

ODwilly wrote:

Threw together an AM2 Athlon 64x2 4000+ machine for a friend. Reused his old ME based Compaq Presario Duron case, threw in a cheapo but stable 20pin 450watt psu, 160gb Samsung SATA2 drive, a 2gb kit of Kingston DDR2 667 and finished it off with a freshly baked/stress tested 512mb Geforce 8800GT. His last pc was a Dimension E310, talk about a heavy piece of Ecycle. The only part of it that was worth salvaging was the 80gb HDD, and even that was not in great shape.
OH! and the p4 521 made a great key chain after drilling a hole in it.

I just had to make sure your P4 wasn't a Cedar Mill, but thank god it was only a Preshott 🤣

Tetrium wrote:

I just had to make sure your P4 wasn't a Cedar Mill, but thank god it was only a Preshott 🤣

My Cedar Mill chip is a 631 and a recycle save from another useless Dell 😊 THAT one is intact! Also I gave away an ES P4 3.06/1mb/800 chip with the unlocked multiplier. THAT was a fun cpu.

ODwilly wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I just had to make sure your P4 wasn't a Cedar Mill, but thank god it was only a Preshott 🤣

My Cedar Mill chip is a 631 and a recycle save from another useless Dell 😊 THAT one is intact! Also I gave away an ES P4 3.06/1mb/800 chip with the unlocked multiplier. THAT was a fun cpu.

I can imagine! 😁

Only s478 ES I got is some Celeron though 😁

My little adventure has been a success!

Recently I found this nifty project that implements a PS/2 keyboard on an AVR. I created an Arduino library based on this code (removing some hardcoded pins and timing logic, besides encapsulating everything in classes), build a little "shield" with some leftover perfboard and created a little device that gets receives key down/key up messages through USB and transmits them to the PC connected through the PS/2 port.

I tested this only on my Duron machine, as it was the retro pc already assembled. Worked fine both in Windows 2000, 98, DOS, the BIOS screen. Will try my other PCs when I have the time, but I can say for a fact that my AT2XT keyboard converter did not like it (my XT clone is always assembled, and I could not get it to work with it).

I already bought an USB host shield, and plan to change the skecth to read stuff from HID keyboards connected to the shield rather than serial communication. Then I'll evaluate if the ATMega can handle emulating a PS/2 mouse as well. Then I'll have my very own USB->PS/2 adapter and I'll be able to use my wireless keyboard with my old PCs!

cool project but you can already do this with (certain) logitech wireless keyboards and mice (which have ps/2 capability).. have one hooked to a ps/2 kvm and it's working well.

And they are reasonably nice keyboards/mice too.. but yes they are not so common anymore.

I have one of those Microsoft combo wireless mouse+keyboard with a single dongle for both devices, and I like it and want to use it with my older machines. That being said, I have fun doing this little projects, so even if I did have those I'd try to do this anyway xDD.

Another fun possibility is to keep using serial communication and so something like a "mouse without borders" for older machines, but I do not have the knowledge on how to block stuff like Ctrl+Alt+Del from executing on the host.

Yep definitely a worthwhile project - keep it up!

btw: something like a dongle box that plugs into the old IBM keyboards and makes them wireless would be well worth doing.

Listened to Nectarine radio whilst making dinner after 8088mph reminded me how much I used to love listening to demotunes!

brassicGamer wrote:

Listened to Nectarine radio whilst making dinner after 8088mph reminded me how much I used to love listening to demotunes!

Nice... Forgotten about nectarine. Demo tunes are totally 90's, better than most of what was on the tele.

Im still tinkering with my Digital Venturis Socket 3 system. I tried to install some L2 cache but the Pentium Overdrive did not like that and would not post at stock speed, the system would not even produce a beep.

By now Im pretty sure the POD is stable at 100 MHz as I have played all kind of games for hours in Windows 95, both DOS games and Windows games. The system is fast enough to play 192Kbit MP3s without issues and did so for 4+ hours this evening.

The performance in Speedsys looks OKish. Ignore the FAILED memory test, Speedsys just wont detect the 4MB +32MB +32MB correctly for some reason, the rest of the universe luckily do.

The memoryspeed in Cachechk is rather poor but the L1 cache performs better than in Speedsys.

The built in S3 Trio64 2MB is really slow in PCPbench in DOS, the gaming performance in Windows 95 seems better though.

Edit

I changed a badly documented jumper and somehow gained 2-3 MB/s memory speed in Speedsys and Cachechk, L1 speed stayed the same but memory read latency improved 10%. The PCPbench mode100 score gained 0.4 FPS to 8.8 FPS, Im too lazy to upload new screenshots.

Tetrium wrote:

Only s478 ES I got is some Celeron though 😁

This conversation is really making me want to put together my Cedar Mill rig man!

ODwilly wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Only s478 ES I got is some Celeron though 😁

This conversation is really making me want to put together my Cedar Mill rig man!

I think the Cedar Mills could actually become quite useful for some reason. It's basically old tech on boards that should usually support the much juicier Core chips, but perhaps having such a chip around may prove useful if you intended s775 rig might have problems when one of the Core chips is used instead of the Cedar Mill.

And I couldn't imagine these CPUs being very expensive these days (mind you, I didn't actually bother to check the major selling sites to see if this is actually true or not).

Main thing of interest is of course that it's made using a smaller manufacturing process so it doesn't run as 'hott' 😜

kreats wrote:

cool project but you can already do this with (certain) logitech wireless keyboards and mice (which have ps/2 capability).. have one hooked to a ps/2 kvm and it's working well.

And they are reasonably nice keyboards/mice too.. but yes they are not so common anymore.

You can also do it with a lot of KVMs. My Aten CS84U has PS/2 mouse and keyboard emulation, pumping out keystrokes to either of the USB or PS/2 cables no matter what keyboard is plugged into it. 😊

For the millionth time I am attempting to revive my Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra motherboard. Have it back to it's almost original setup, original cpu, original kit of ram and a TNT2 m64. So far so good but I am not holding my breath.

Playing around with my Asus A7V-266-E motherboard. Running an Athlon 1800+ and going to play with some GF4-ti4200 and raid-setup using IDE drives.
What operating system it is going to run, I really don't know at this point. It's like just too overkill for me, on the other hand, nice and fun to play with.

A couple of nights ago I took a soldering iron to the psu of my newly acquired Amstrad ALT-386SX Laptop (More like Brick!)

Sellers Pic - I haven't taken any myself yet!

Managed to fix a bad solder joint and get the psu up and running but found out the floppy was defunct as was the Connor 40mb drive. Setup a replacement 120mb Seagate with basic DOS on it and a few tools to test with.

This laptop is great in that it also has space for an ISA card and after testing many I was able to shoehorn an Aztech Waverider Pro 32 in it that also miraclously worked with the secondary IDE interface on the card allowing me to connect a cd drive and Zip drive - ok its not pretty as the cable runs where that left hand section is just below the screen but it beats taking the hard drive out everytime I wanted to add software! 😈

Tried my favourite benchmark - Doom which failed miserably as I hadn't realised it only had 1mb ram 😊

Thrift store finds! 😁

At first it seemed hopeless, but in the end I had a basket full of games (16, but this included some spares). Got some expansion of Black vs White (Creature Island..no idea I never played that game. I already have the basic game) and 3 copies of Imperialism II (great turn-based game! 😁 Very nice atmosphere! Only drawback is that a single game may take weeks 🤣!), another copy of Perimeter, one more copy of Frogger(!!) couple copies of Theme Park Inc, some Asterix game, Pinball 2 (dunno but the screenshots sure looked good 🤣!), House of the Dead (never heard of it) and some game called "Mythical Warriors".
Except for Perimeter, these games are all older ones and will make a nice addition to my already nice games collection 😀

All games were those standard DVD boxes though, except for Frogger which came in just the jewel case but Frogger is not bad at all!