I got the QDI US491P3 VESA 486 motherboard to post again, the issue is that it only posts one time out of ~200 (not an exaggeration).

With the video card in any other slot than middle one out of 7 the board is totally dead, the diagnostic post card shows nothing except that there is power. The same thing happens if the diagnostic card is in any other slot than the last one. With the video card in the middle slot and the diagnostic card in the last slot the boards comes alive and starts producing post codes but the codes are somewhat strange. Two times in total the board has posted, one time right after I removed the battery a couple of days ago and again right now. Once the board posts it dosnt complain about anything except, CMOS checksum error which disappears after entering the BOIS, loading defaults and saving, just as one would expect with no battery connected. Soft resets works fine with the board posting every time.

I have tested the cache chips in another board, they work fine and the board finds 256KB cache so thats not the issue.
I have tested the keyboard controller in another board, it works fine.
I have cleaned the BIOS chip pins.
I have looked for shorts, there are none.
I have tried switching memory and VGA card.
I have tried two different known to be good AT PSUs.

Kafka called, he wants his motherboard back.

Well, this isn't hardware related but it is retro...although technically it was last night.

Went to see New Order in concert. The show was amazing.

After I left the motherboard on for an hour in the BIOS setup the board now posts every time, perhaps because the BIOS holds the settings for a while even without a battery. Im testing all slots with an I/O card at the moment to see which slots work, so far I have found that slot2 (the first VESA slot) is dead. I have not tried slot1 (8bit) and slot3 but slot4 (VGA), slot5, slot6 and slot7 do work, at least with the I/O card. I just booted DOS.

Chapter 8 in replaying old games maxed out on modern hardware: BioShock! Fun as hell, though I don't think I'm gaining anything by running it on newer hardware (other than the joy of revisiting the classics, of course 😜). I seem to recall that the Opteron+8800 SLI setup I used in 2008 had no problem sustaining 60 fps with the visuals cranked.

Mirror's Edge was a different story. Always liked that game, but the Physx effects brought my Opteron setup to its knees, even with one of the 8800s completely dedicated to Physx. I think part of the problem back then was the half baked PhysX API. IIRC even the best Core 2 Extreme/GTX 280 systems ran into frame rate issues with PhysX enabled.

Playing Mirror's Edge on a modern system was like a religious experience. Just silky smooth all the way through, even with a single (albeit heavily overclocked) GTX970 handling both graphics and Physx.

Eventually I'll try Mirror's Edge on the old Opteron system again, just to see if it plays any better with a newer release of PhysX.

Cool, I wanted to like Mirror's Edge but from memory it hitched for me so badly that it was unplayable. I'll have to try it again on more modern hardware.

The stupid QDI US491P3 486 motherboard now seems to work prefectly as long as I do not use expansion slot2.

I have no idea what was wrong, perhaps the blue tantalum fire crackers needed some reconditioning or perhaps the board will be as troublesome the next time I want to test/use it, time will tell.

Here is a Speedsys screenshot. The memory speed is rather slow but it would probably improve some with an Intel DX50 or a DX2-66 @80. The video card is a really slow Avance Logoc ISA 1MB.

A mix of retro and modern... got hardware OPL3 back up and running on my HP Workstation Z420 running Windows 10 64-bit (I already mentioned this before, but I didn't make the addition permanent because I had to remove my SoundBlaster Audigy 2, which I didn't want to do, but now, I don't really care anymore). Now I just hope I could do the same on my upcoming Skylake Core i7 build...

Set up
a Dell slimline system along with 19" crt then proceeded to have a muck around with DESQview/X on one of my 486s, Oh and of course then participated with the usual IRC banter over at slashnet.org

If anyone is familiar with Desqveiw/x i'd love to hear about your experiences with it.

Just testing my freshly build skt478-based Windows XP rig:

Indrid Cold wrote:

Just testing my freshly build skt478-based Windows XP rig: […]
Show full quote

Just testing my freshly build skt478-based Windows XP rig:

Nice!

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Indrid Cold wrote:

Just testing my freshly build skt478-based Windows XP rig: […]
Show full quote

Just testing my freshly build skt478-based Windows XP rig:

Nice!

Thanks Phil 😉

Trying to make some dodgy old-style graphics for something;

This was rendered mostly in the Build engine.

That is really cool. Totally neromancer 😀

I got my IBM model 95 fired up last night. I replaced the slow (4mb/s) spock scsi card with a corvette and dropped in a 15k U320 scsi drive. It now scores a respectable ~15mb/s!

I had to make a special cable adaptor to plug it in. IBM designed their scsi cards that required special cables. Lucky I cobbled one together from a dell and made do.

Pictures in link: http://imgur.com/a/znqov

luckybob wrote:

I got my IBM model 95 fired up last night. I replaced the slow (4mb/s) spock scsi card with a corvette

It may be slow, but it lives long and prospers.

I am currently cursing while trying to revive this configuration that a friend brought me as a present just yesterday (yes, this month has been RICH about 486-findings) - this is the first time I've got in my hands a PC with a Cyrix (here rebranded IBM processor) - unfortunately I can not get it started, and I really tried in every way, except changing AT power supply: I also noticed that jumpers were setup incorrectly, like incorrect FSB, for example. Once opened the case, I strangely found the only 32MB SIMM bank installed in the second slot, instead of the first one. Unfortunately, I always just get the black screen on startup, and no beeps or other signs... at least the S3 Virge DX PCI was missing in my collection (I possessed only AGP version), and another SoundBlaster 16 CT4180 always handy ...

Indrid Cold wrote:

I am currently cursing while trying to revive this configuration that a friend brought me as a present just yesterday (yes, this month has been RICH about 486-findings) - this is the first time I've got in my hands a PC with a Cyrix (here rebranded IBM processor) - unfortunately I can not get it started, and I really tried in every way, except changing AT power supply: I also noticed that jumpers were setup incorrectly, like incorrect FSB, for example. Once opened the case, I strangely found the only 32MB SIMM bank installed in the second slot, instead of the first one. Unfortunately, I always just get the black screen on startup, and no beeps or other signs... at least the S3 Virge DX PCI was missing in my collection (I possessed only AGP version), and another SoundBlaster 16 CT4180 always handy ...

The PC Chips M537DMA33 VXpro+, I have built and upgraded many computers with that model or to be exact motherboards just like yours but with a different name. I sold overclocked systems with Pentium 200 MMX CPUs clocked at 3x83 MHz, the VXpro+ had a bad reputation but the batches I bought worked flawlessly, the price was less than half compared to the cheapest Intel chipset board.

The chipset is a rebranded VIA VPX which is perfect for Cyrix CPUs and it can lock the PCI bus to 33 MHz which is good when using 83 MHz FSB.

Here are the jumper settings. I still have a manaul if there is some information you need missing in the link below.
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/thorfin/motherb … therboard_1.htm

The 83 MHz jumper setting isn't listed in the manual but if I had to guess I would think it's JP3. A: 1-2, B: 1-2 and C: 1-2, if it isn't then it's one of the other two unlisted combinations.

Here is a package with the same jumper guide as linked above and BIOS updates.

Here is the full manaul for the M537 v5.2, its the exactly same board only with VIA VP1 chipset. I have compared the jumper settings with my manual, they are the same. The only thing missing is the PS/2 mouse header pinout which exists in my manual.

Upgraded my G5 from 5.5GB to 9GB by replacing one pair of memory modules. I'll leave you guys to figure out what configuration of DIMMs I have in there that makes that jump possible. 😎

recently I've re-done a piece in my house, mostly adding sugar maple wood floor. I've bought some new speakers (and a 4k monitor) and today while I was doing some cleanup after the renovation I've started lmp (live module player) on a win98 with a soundblaster live and load a playlist of a high quality .module collections. lmp for dos rock ! but lmp plugin for winamp seem like a work in progress. At the end of the day the sound quality was so amazing that it mostly felt like there was a problem with the player 😁
(btw replace that small temporary lcd screen on the left and replace it with an asus 28" 4k)

1) I like your minty green walls and beautiful maple floor, but painting the baseboard trim bright white would add a bit of visual separation and really help both elements of the room 'pop'. I once did a room like that in a (somewhat darker) green with white baseboards & ceiling and it looked stunning.
2) Dogdogdogdogdogdogdog