ynari wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

..
I've also been faffing about in X-Wing and TIE Fighter a little. I'd play them more if I just had an ADB joystick right now, since the mouse controls leave a lot to be desired, but I'll have to wait a few more days for that. They look way better on Mac than on DOS, and you still get to keep iMUSE, albeit without any apparent external MIDI options for the MT-32 owners out there.

I didn't even realise that existed! Wikipedia says it's bundled with the collectors edition CDROM (which I have) but I didn't think it was, it should therefore be a bit better than the release, but equal to the SVGA graphics of the updated DOS version.

I'll check at some point as I have an OS 9 capable Powermac..

It's good that you have actual Mac hardware, as they don't run in SheepShaver or OS X Classic Mode well. Too slow. Apparently, it has something to do with how it uses QuickDraw for rendering that only native hardware handles properly. Much like Win9x gaming, emulators just don't cut it for '90s Mac games.

However, you'd better have a joystick handy, and one that uses mouse coordinates to boot since both games predate InputSprocket.

I just had a rude awakening in that the original driver software for the Mac ADB version of the SideWinder 3D Pro is nigh impossible to find on the Internet right now (either PC/Windows driver results or dead links), and the mouse mode is a relative implementation that doesn't work properly because XW/TF expects absolute mouse coordinates in joystick mode, akin to how a graphics tablet works.

Arctic wrote:

It's 1.04.
I have a jumper setting for 133/33

I am still unsure. Maybe I should just use the P3 1100MHz 😒

My first FSB133 test has failed. I managed to halfway boot with the Tualatin 1.4/512/133.
Now I have it running at 1052MHz.
Apparently there is more to be done to enable FSB133 support. It probably needs more current on the chipset.

Edit:
After a few minutes of 3DMark99 the screen went black.
I changed to onboard graphics, switched the CPU with the Celeron 1.3 but nothing changed.

I get the system POST beep alright, but that's it.

I wonder what failed: the psu, cpu, slot-t, motherboard or the voodoo 4 4500 PCI?

Edit2:
After diagnosing several of the different components for possible failure, I found out it was as I had been suspecting. The component which failed was the monitor. *headdesk*

Today was Rack Day

Need to buy plywood for the sides and ducting and finish a bit more electrical work but it's almost ready to take all the hardware I can mount in it. Might also add a smoke detector in the exhaust ducting and wire the pull station to an EPO circuit.

Playing on my 486DX2-66. Man, this thing struggles with Descent 1. Feels like anywhere between 10-15 fps. Definitely playable, but when you've played this game on a Pentium then go back to a 486, it really becomes noticeable. It does get better with a smaller window, but not much. Doom 1 is a bit better, but still noticeably sluggish in spots. I'm guessing these two games would come alive with a DX4-100. But both games really need a Pentium for silky smooth gameplay.
specs:
Intel DX2-66
VLB CL-GD5428 2MB
27 fps in Doom 1 timedemo from Phil's VGA Benchmark.<-above average result compared to other DX2-66's in Phil's VGA database.

I found the same 😀 Descent especially was not playable to me. Doom was fun, but like you I prefer playing it on a faster Pentium 😀

It really solidifies my stance that if you have a good Pentium for DOS games, the 486 makes a great complimentary system for graphic adventures and RPGs to be played at native speeds. Also, when you do disable cache and turbo, it can dip down to 286 performance levels which is much slower than a Pentium can be dropped to. This lets me play games like Lode Runner and the older Ultimas and Might and Magics. 😀

Played the X-Wing Collectors CD the steam version on my modern Windows 10 machine. I used Phil's guide on youtube for using Sound Canvas VA to provide MiDI sound support and it sounded amazing.

Just finished up some early morning workshop fun 😀 Remachined an old, beaten up heatsink from a dead socket 478 P4 Compaq desktop, into a socket 370 one for my 440BX system. It's customized for use with a 370 slotket, hence the asymmetry.

* Removed the "tabs" for the socket 478 retention mechanism.
* Removed two fins, to accomodate for the socket 370 retention clip.
* Made recesses for the retention clip, the heatsink is somewhat wider than socket 370.
* Machined the bottom to give play for jumpers, caps, etc around the socket, leaving a pad protruding 2.5 mm from the heatsink, large enough for full contact with the IHS on PIII's equipped with one of those.

Not too shabby to be milled with an old Polish drill press, if I might say so myself 😁 The milling marks are far more accentuated on the photos than in the reality. The surfaces are silky smooth to the touch, even if it doesn't look that way on the photos.

You have a few scratch marks on the thermal contact surface, needs more polishing. Other than that looks great.

Attempted to rebuild my two Toshiba Libretto 100CTs into one good one. Ended up breaking more of the plastics anwyay. Damned old toshiba plastic is like chalk! No matter how careful you are, you always end up cracking it 🙁

Anyway they are both back together now. I wonder if it is at all possible to design and CNC out a new shell... hmm...

stamasd wrote:

You have a few scratch marks on the thermal contact surface, needs more polishing. Other than that looks great.

It's the camera, those scratches are barely visible in the reality, and you can't even feel them with your nail. Might lap it just for the hell of it if I got too little to do some day though 😀

I refreshed the desktop and theme on my Dimension 4100.

Visited my parents yesterday and picked up that old monochrome hercules monitor. Hope it still works - going to find out tomorrow 😀 These things are nearly impossible to find. Might have to start checking CRT monitors at the dump.

Also, installed Windows 2000 and Office 2000 on one of the future exhibits (Celeron 333, BI440ZX motherboard, 256MB RAM); prepared another computer for testing 5.25" drives... got a bunch to test tomorrow!

My P200 MMX system inexplicably stopped working a couple months ago, and it was my go-to DOS\9x gaming machine. I've been thinking about having a more flexible system that was a little faster for later DOS games and was maybe a little bit more power efficient, so I decided to rebuild my K6-2 500Mhz FIC PA-2013 2.0 system in a spiffy old ATX case I picked up used for free. The system currently has the K6-2, 2x128MB PC-100 SDRAM, a Hercules Geforce 2 MX AGP and an AWE64 Gold. There's a good chance I'll end up putting together a system for much older games with more specific (older) hardware requirements, so I think this will work well for most games and will allow some clock speed and cache flexibility for some of the more sensitive games.

My retro activity today was to pull the 2nd hard drive out of my Win98 machine, install the Floppy drive again, then delete the C: partition, reformat the 40GB drive as a 32GB C: + 8GB D:, then format and install Windows 98 again. Installed the wrong Diamond Viper V770 drivers and it broke my Display Control Panel app. So I had to re-format and reinstall. This time I ran the unofficial SP update and THEN installed the right drivers for the card.
I had also removed the 8MB Diamond Monster 3D II card and replaced it (before Windows was re-installed) with the 2x STB Voodoo2 12MB cards in SLI.
I may pick up that 600 MHz Pentium III, or I may not, but it would super-charge those Voodoo2 cards.
And this week, I'll have to go about re-installing the games, starting with Final Fantasy VII.
Why the 8GB D: drive? Because that's where I stick my Windows 98 install CD-ROM files so it never asks me for a disk when I make a change. I also keep my FF7 movie files there so I never have to wait for a disk to spin up while playing the game. I also keep all my drivers and software installers archived there.

Toying around with the XG-DLS rig, running into issue with a fairly consistent BSOD after booting into Windows. Currently running XP. Seems to be some kind of hardware conflict as the bluescreen is referencing IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error.

Only thing I can think of that may be causing the issue is I currently don't have any PS2 keyboard or mice so the machine may be wigging out due to USB keyboard and mouse combo. I did a quick test this morning for about 10 minutes of runtime in windows with just the keyboard plugged in and did not seem to get the bluescreen, which usually happens pretty quick after booting into windows.

Anyone else encounter this on old boards like this?

Does not appear to be hardware failure of any other kind as all other hardware in this setup worked on my other XG-DLS board. I ran through Windows XP install again but the process gets stuck when starting windows after setup file transfer is done. Also ran a few memtest86 passes and got a hardware related interrupt failure on CPU0 eventually, no actual memory error. I know these procs will do 112Mhz FSB so I'm assuming it's the USB devices as most likely there were very few USB keyboards/mice around back in the late 90s early 2000s.

More Power Mac 6500-related news:

-Micro Center was selling $10 PCI Gigabit Ethernet cards. I took a closer look at the chipset: Realtek 8169. The one with OS 9 drivers. At that price, I had to give it a shot.

Guess what? IT ACTUALLY WORKS! Browsing the Internet is a real exercise in patience and stability with it, but now I don't have to burn a CD-R if it won't fit on a floppy. Just gotta figure out how to make it see my router's SMB file share, or failing that, set up an FTP server on the router.

Also, because of this, I could actually go through with OS 9 Helper and the 9.2.1/9.2.2 updates, which aren't officially supported on pre-G3 machines like that one.

-After much detective work over on the Wayback Machine, peering through Microsoft's Download Center pages for any hint of an official file name, I finally managed to hunt down the Mac ADB drivers for the SideWinder 3D Pro, complete with the needed profiler software to make it work with older games. X-Wing and TIE Fighter, here I come!

I'd still prefer having the ADB versions of the Thrustmaster FCS and WCS, but those aren't exactly easy to come by.

Over the weekend I bought a bunch of stuff at some thrift stores including some recapping projects which are a couple PSUs and an HP 2035 monitor.
One of the PSUs is a Thermaltake PurePower 500 NP. The "model" number is ISO-P500L, implying it's a rebranded TAO ISO-P500L, which is actually a 420W PSU. The Thermaltake "part" number though is WO100RU, which was also used by a completely different PSU that got a critical review on one of the hardware sites. Mine looks very different and more heavily populated than that one. Apparently Thermaltake used the same part number for different PSUs. Also saw some confusion in Newegg/Amazon reviews about the specs, probably for the same reason.

Funny thing about the label - although the number "500" is used in the name of the PSU, it's not given as a wattage measurement. The label gives max amps per rail and a max wattage for 3.3v+5v, but no overall max for the entire PSU. If the label specs are taken as complete then the max wattage would be 582W, but I don't really believe that.

Anyway, yesterday I recapped the Thermaltake PSU, and had a weird experience with it afterward. Some of the caps I used were old, oldest being 13 years, so maybe that had something to do with how it acted.
First I hooked up a worthless Dell P3 board with no components. It powered up as expected. I checked voltages and found that 3.3v was sitting at 2.94v. Okay, maybe it needs a load, maybe this board doesn't use 3.3v? Nope, I probed around and found the 3.3v rail going to a MOSFET. Not promising.
I had invested too much time to give up there. Maybe it needed more load. I didn't feel like dragging out parts to build up the P3, so I just hooked it up to an assembled P4 system that I have intended to use it with. It's still nothing valuable and since none of the voltages were high I felt okay trying it.
Powers up but no POST. Must be the 3.3v rail, I thought. Checked voltages again - all the voltages are good now. 3.3v was at 3.4v, other rails also good. So why no POST? After fiddling with it for a few minutes I swapped back to the previous, working PSU. Board POSTed with the old PSU, so the difference is the PSU. Stubbornly I swapped back to the Thermaltake PSU again. But this time it POSTed! What changed? I have no idea. Let it sit in the BIOS for about 45 minutes, then booted Windows, idled there for a long time, still good. Finally ran a 3D game for about 15 minutes and it worked perfectly. So after "breaking in", the Thermaltake PSU is working great now.

m1919 wrote:

Toying around with the XG-DLS rig, running into issue with a fairly consistent BSOD after booting into Windows. Currently runnin […]
Show full quote

Toying around with the XG-DLS rig, running into issue with a fairly consistent BSOD after booting into Windows. Currently running XP. Seems to be some kind of hardware conflict as the bluescreen is referencing IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error.

Only thing I can think of that may be causing the issue is I currently don't have any PS2 keyboard or mice so the machine may be wigging out due to USB keyboard and mouse combo. I did a quick test this morning for about 10 minutes of runtime in windows with just the keyboard plugged in and did not seem to get the bluescreen, which usually happens pretty quick after booting into windows.

Anyone else encounter this on old boards like this?

Does not appear to be hardware failure of any other kind as all other hardware in this setup worked on my other XG-DLS board. I ran through Windows XP install again but the process gets stuck when starting windows after setup file transfer is done. Also ran a few memtest86 passes and got a hardware related interrupt failure on CPU0 eventually, no actual memory error. I know these procs will do 112Mhz FSB so I'm assuming it's the USB devices as most likely there were very few USB keyboards/mice around back in the late 90s early 2000s.

Well, tested the XG-DLS with just my cheapo Microsoft USB laser mouse plugged in. Did not get a bluescreen with the machine just sitting idle for 3-4 hours, but when attempting to install 3dmark01, the machine just rebooted spontaneously, no bluescreen. Then during POST it got stuck in loop testing memory.

Looks like either I have some bad sticks which I can swap for another set or I can try cleaning the contacts and re-seating them... This machine is getting frustrating to deal with.

Are you running it at a 100MHz FSB? Or on 112MHz?

m1919 wrote:

m1919 wrote:

Toying around with the XG-DLS rig, running into issue with a fairly consistent BSOD after booting into Windows. Currently runnin […]
Show full quote

Toying around with the XG-DLS rig, running into issue with a fairly consistent BSOD after booting into Windows. Currently running XP. Seems to be some kind of hardware conflict as the bluescreen is referencing IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error.

Only thing I can think of that may be causing the issue is I currently don't have any PS2 keyboard or mice so the machine may be wigging out due to USB keyboard and mouse combo. I did a quick test this morning for about 10 minutes of runtime in windows with just the keyboard plugged in and did not seem to get the bluescreen, which usually happens pretty quick after booting into windows.

Anyone else encounter this on old boards like this?

Does not appear to be hardware failure of any other kind as all other hardware in this setup worked on my other XG-DLS board. I ran through Windows XP install again but the process gets stuck when starting windows after setup file transfer is done. Also ran a few memtest86 passes and got a hardware related interrupt failure on CPU0 eventually, no actual memory error. I know these procs will do 112Mhz FSB so I'm assuming it's the USB devices as most likely there were very few USB keyboards/mice around back in the late 90s early 2000s.

Well, tested the XG-DLS with just my cheapo Microsoft USB laser mouse plugged in. Did not get a bluescreen with the machine just sitting idle for 3-4 hours, but when attempting to install 3dmark01, the machine just rebooted spontaneously, no bluescreen. Then during POST it got stuck in loop testing memory.

Looks like either I have some bad sticks which I can swap for another set or I can try cleaning the contacts and re-seating them... This machine is getting frustrating to deal with.