Broke out the Sierra Screamin' 3D to play one game: Descent II.

This game doesn't work with my Verite 2100, only the Verite 1000. I could use a Voodoo card and run from Windows, but there's something great about hardware acceleration in DOS.

Rendition Verite Descent II + Roland GM soundtrack = one of my favorite DOS game experiences.

Replaced the fan on a GF3 Ti500. Couldn't find an exact replacement, but one of the cheap fans I got from ebay a while ago fits quite well. The replacement fan has a sticker on the bottom; I superglued the fan through the sticker to the heatsink. If the new fan breaks down, it won't be too hard to replace. I tested the card briefly, works fine with the new fan. I'll load-test it in a few days. If it gets too hot under load I may 3d-print a shroud for the fan.

Frankly I like how it looks now better than the original.

Working on this machine again after a bit of a hiatus. Put all this together.

This is still a work in progress, but it's the following specs:

• Gigabyte GA-586S
  Cyrix PR233
  64MB EDO
  10GB Seagate HDD
  4x Panasonic CD-ROM
  1.44MB Floppy drive
  2x Voodoo2 cards
  Nvidia TNT2 card
  Realtek 8139 Network card
  878TV TV Capture card
  Creative Sound Blaster AWE32

I'm contemplating replacing the Cyrix with a Pentium 200MMX, but I thought I'd mess around with this first 😊

Just finished installing Windows 95C on it, so now I get to have fun installing drivers!

Been wrestling with my P2 rig today, it appears my motherboard (AOpen AX6BC) has trouble detecting RAM - some sticks report 128MB instead of 256, some aren't detected and some sticks make it refuse to boot at all.

Not too bothered, since 128MB is already overkill.

I tested my MPEG1 video decoding cards, the Leadtek MoviePlus 1100 ISA in a Celeron 400MHz "machine" (yeah it's just a GigaByte 440BX motherboard lying around!) as my Pentium 200MHz is on an Asus P55T2P4 board with a dead Dallas cmos battery so no way to change bios settings from the default...Anyway, that MPEG1 card works great!
The Kingmax Scenic Wonder PCMCIA card, tested in my Toshiba Tecra 500CDT running Win95, also works fine for MPEG1 files and VideoCD 😀
Now for the Margi DVD-To-Go, it gives me an error regarding OLEAUT32.DLL, I should try with the OSR2 release, perhaps later.

Purchased some MPC2 cables and headers. I plan to solder a header on the pad for Line Out on the YMF724 cats I have and use it to internally connect it to the Aux In header on the motherboard. I don't need to use cables externally then. I also want to add one to the SPDIF pad just to see if the signal does in fact get output there. I'm doing this on a Labway card, and these are common enough.

Got all the hardware squared away for an obscene Windows XP box. Just need to load XP, get the drivers downloaded, run some benchmarks and post some pictures!

Navigated the memory mapped hardware minefield this morning. There might be a few more kilobytes to squeeze out of the F000 region, but that's uncomfortable territory.

I am in the process of taking new pictures of my collection.
So far I have done the complete systems, now for the loose parts.

This is just one of my systems, and only some of the pictures of that machine.
AthlonXP, Voodoo3-3500 and a PCI-128 card.

(Sorry for them pictures being large, no time for resize)

brostenen wrote:

I am in the process of taking new pictures of my collection. So far I have done the complete systems, now for the loose parts. […]
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I am in the process of taking new pictures of my collection.
So far I have done the complete systems, now for the loose parts.

This is just one of my systems, and only some of the pictures of that machine.
AthlonXP, Voodoo3-3500 and a PCI-128 card.

Gorgeous system! Did you choose the PCI-128 for a specific purpose, or was it just an extra card you had available?

SaxxonPike wrote:

Gorgeous system! Did you choose the PCI-128 for a specific purpose, or was it just an extra card you had available?

Just what I had around. I have a spare YMF-724 wich is going into the machine later.
Or I might not swap it, as the machine is a Win98se only build.
I have other builds for DOS software in my collection.

Anyway...
That system has two 40 gig drives in RAID (mirror), just because I had the opertunity to do so.
Not that it gives any speed advantages, and I have no need for data sequrity on it.
I just had to build a mirror setup, because it was cool to do the process in itself.

I was having issues with my latest build. It has two voodoo2's (SLI'd), and I kept getting this:

I tried various drivers, even swapped out the CPU to a Pentium 200MMX thinking *maybe* it was an issue with the Cyrix PR150+ that was installed (that and the 200MMX was just nicer...)

Anyway, I pulled both cards and looked at them closely and saw this one one of them:

Aside from the cards being terribly dirty (which I cleaned up), one of the pins were bent and touching the adjacent pin. After carefully bending it back:

This just in!

It's Keropi's Music Quest MPU clone card!

Check out his project thread here: Music Quest MPU clone cards, anyone interested in them?

Only tested General MIDI today, but as expected, this thing just works 😁

Will put it through some MT-32 games tomorrow!

Finally added some heatsinks to my Voodoos. Plan on adding some on the memory, however the only correct size ones I can find seem too expensive...plus memory chips don't seem to be getting hot anyway so that can wait.

Munx wrote:

Finally added some heatsinks to my Voodoos. Plan on adding some on the memory, however the only correct size ones I can find seem too expensive...plus memory chips don't seem to be getting hot anyway so that can wait.

P_20160915_201231.jpg

Sweet..... Hopefully it will prolounge their life with a couple of years.

Been quiet of late thanks to new job keeping me busy and, most importantly, happy. Aside from getting components to repair a 286 laptop I've been trying (and failing) to restore, i picked up this bad boy for free today because it apparently doesn't work:

Dell Precision 690 from early 2007. 2x quad core Xeon (X5355, 8M Cache, 2.66 GHz). XP. Never had anything this powerful in my possession. I wouldn't call it retro but we often celebrate the joys of grabbing stuff that was high end for cheap or free. Only question now is what to do with it.

Trying to get an Diamond v770 Ultra to work on an Intel se440bx2 and P-III-500. Running Win98se.
I can only get it to work 100% with the official Diamond drivers, so I gave up and swapped for an Matrox g400-Max instead.
That Matrox might not be as fast as the Diamond, yet it is issueless in every way on this machine.
(only aprox 250/300 3D-Mark99 points slower)

Visited a second hand store nearby I didn't know existed. They had a website that showed some pretty interesting stuff, mentioned they were "probably the largest second hand store in that city" and that they checked whether electronics worked. How wrong I was. 😢 The pictures must have been taken a while ago, or the items were arranged to hide the godawful junk that most of the store contained. The state of many items was just a little above that of trash from a stinky trash heap, thrown on top of each other, mixed with broken planks and the like. The store certainly isn't the largest in town, and I sincerely doubt they test their electronics beyond switching them on and off - they had printers that looked like they came from a war zone, a yellowed, tar-covered G3 Mac (utterly disgusting), various switches thrown into a box of broken parts - let's say that last time I went to deposit a broken electronic appliance at the local rubbish dump the items in the container looked much better. 😵

Guess I should have been more alarmed by their web store selling the few decent (much better than what was in the physical store) items they had at outrageous prices.

Setup a Dell Inspiron 570 case with an matx am3 Asus board, 4gb of ram, and an Athlon iix2 260. Calling it retro necause it was originally in an old Compaq case. Looks really sweet and hoping to make a bit of $ on it.

I played Screamer on a DX4-100. Oh man, it did not like that at all. Looked like it was pushing around 5 or 6 fps.
It runs silky smooth in DOSBox. Makes you appreciate modern hardware that much more. 😀

"Fantastic! It must be real hard being this good!" 🤣