TechNoirMK wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

orinoko wrote:

Very vague memory here of an old 486 Acer desktop system... But I think you just pull the front panel off the case..? Unless this is a different setup...

Thats how my Pentium Acer Power is. . .the case shroud is an all in one piece deal (sides and top as one piece) and you pull on the levers on each side of the front panel at the same time

I tried pulling the levers, but, as I've said, the front panel is held by screws I can't reach.

If it's anything like my HP Vectra, the two levers pull up, then you pull the entire front/top/sides out as a single unit. I couldn't figure this out until I saw a video of it. 🤣. Watch: I linked it to start at 3:45, right before he uses a screwdriver to help separate the outer case from the inner case:
https://youtu.be/NP4l7B76Y2k?t=224

If all goes well...I should be picking up a lot of older mac towers, several B&W G3s, a G4 of some kind, and a couple of G5s when I get out of work. Wish me luck!

senrew wrote:

If all goes well...I should be picking up a lot of older mac towers, several B&W G3s, a G4 of some kind, and a couple of G5s when I get out of work. Wish me luck!

Mission Accomplished.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bex94q9wlh7n6or/Fil … %20PM.jpeg?dl=0

Recorded the title music from Jill of the Jungle via YMF724, straight from the game.

https://soundcloud.com/saxxonpike/jill-of-the … -menu-on-ymf724

Downloadable as WAV if you want. I couldn't get a FLAC from this machine with the utilities I had, but maybe in the future! No postprocessing done.

The tonal metallic instrument in this song is often improperly emulated. Worse yet, these games embed their own SB playback driver and use the CMF files in slightly unusual ways. Getting proper VGZ dumps is a little more complex than just running the songs through PlayCMF for these reasons.

ElementalChaos wrote:

I pulled out my Pentium machine, upgraded the sound and video cards (SB16 to AWE64, S3 Virge to Verite V2200) then put in a PMMX 200 and overclocked it to 262.5 MHz. Oh, and replaced 4x8MB EDO sticks with one stick of 64MB SDRAM. It's blazing fast now.

Good to see all that stuff is working correctly. 😀

I wasn't sure if any of those SDRAM sticks would get addressed correctly. I know 430 chipsets sometimes have problems with memory density. Nice to see at least one worked.

Tried my new old Media Vision Jazz16 out. Oh man..... Was I in for a treat.
I tested the SB-Pro and the Adlib part of this card, and to my surprise, it sounded exactly like what I remember games should sound like around 1993. Perfect blend of treble, bass and middletone for my taste. And it was a warm sound. This card is now my favorite in my collection. I have heard about wavetableheader bug on this model of the card. This makes no difference to me, as this shall only deliver Adlib when it comes to music.

I played DynaBlaster, Lotus and Pinball Fantasis for about an hour. A couple of times I had the same feel as if my PC was an Amiga.

Running 3dmark99-2001 on my AGP video cards in Win98. Especially trying to separate the ones that seem to be similar performers according to reviews (like GF2MX, GF4MX4000, Rage128 Pro, Radeon 7200). Still have to test FX5200 64-bit and 128-bit, GF3Ti200, Radeon 9800 Pro.

clueless1 wrote:

Running 3dmark99-2001 on my AGP video cards in Win98. Especially trying to separate the ones that seem to be similar performers according to reviews (like GF2MX, GF4MX4000, Rage128 Pro, Radeon 7200). Still have to test FX5200 64-bit and 128-bit, GF3Ti200, Radeon 9800 Pro.

hey don't steal ideas from me. 😀

What retro activity did you get up to today?

Took a leap forward in time and played around with an AGP Sockt 939 board. Tried some of the faster chips, 4000+ and FX-57, very impressed. The FX is a real BEAST. The AGP is holding things back, I can't wait to move to PCIe, but there is still lots of work to be done before that happens.

Got some EEPROM chips, Cache chips that I'm hoping to put in action soon.

stamasd wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Running 3dmark99-2001 on my AGP video cards in Win98. Especially trying to separate the ones that seem to be similar performers according to reviews (like GF2MX, GF4MX4000, Rage128 Pro, Radeon 7200). Still have to test FX5200 64-bit and 128-bit, GF3Ti200, Radeon 9800 Pro.

hey don't steal ideas from me. 😀

What retro activity did you get up to today?

Ha! Given the nature of these forums and what we all tend to do here, I doubt your idea was original. 😉 How are your tests going? So far I've been able to determine that the Geforce4 MX4000 is about equal to the Geforce2 MX (slightly faster in 3DMark99, slightly slower in 2k and 2k1), and that the 64-bit FX5200 is between 50 and 100% faster than those two. The Rage 128 Pro is around 50% slower than the GF2MX and GF4MX4000. Lastly, the Radeon 7200 is equal to the GF2MX and GF4MX4000 in 16bit, but 60-80% faster than them in 32bit. Still have to test 128bit FX5200, GF3 Ti200 and Radeon 9800 Pro.

Walked one hour (forth and back) in order to drop off some hardware that I have sold.
Happy to have helped someone get into this hobby. He will have good use for that P-III bundle.
(Intel VC-820, 256mb PC-800, Rage128, P-III-450 and SB-Live-Value)

brostenen wrote:

Walked one hour (forth and back) in order to drop off some hardware that I have sold.
Happy to have helped someone get into this hobby. He will have good use for that P-III bundle.
(Intel VC-820, 256mb PC-800, Rage128, P-III-450 and SB-Live-Value)

instead of giving it to me?!?!?! im offended..

mrau wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Walked one hour (forth and back) in order to drop off some hardware that I have sold.
Happy to have helped someone get into this hobby. He will have good use for that P-III bundle.
(Intel VC-820, 256mb PC-800, Rage128, P-III-450 and SB-Live-Value)

instead of giving it to me?!?!?! im offended..

Well.... Offered him a fair price. And he really wanted it.
Anyhow. Was nice to walk. Not too often I do this.

Today I completely redid the cable management in my dual pentium 3 pc.
Part of it was switching from ATA66 to ATA100. Now I have to reconfigure Win2k to boot from the new port.

I also finished my Windows 98 gaming laptop. It is now loaded with games and still has plenty of GBs free of space.
P3 550, 192MB, Rage 128 Pro. I think I will test Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight next 😀

brostenen wrote:

Intel VC-820

Very nice board, shame I never got any more of them 😀.

Was originally gonna replace the FSB frequency and multiplier dipswitches with pinheaders on my Gigabyte GA-586HX board, to be able to connect external FSB/multiplier switches, but turned out there are revisions of the same board where you set those with jumpers. The jumper headers were there on my board revision (1.53) too, just not populated with pins. Great! Installed pin headers, and kept the dipswitch rack. If I ever want to go back to using the dipswitches, I just need to unplug the external switches. No replacement needed. The four dipswitches are set to OFF (open) when using the external switches, electrically it's the same thing as if they weren't there.

A few pics if anyone is interested:

Guess everyone here already seen the innards of a computer and jumper headers a million times, so didn't bother with that. Here's the raw material for the switch panel. A few SPDT switches, an IDE cable, and a 0.10" C/C connector I've salvaged somewhere.

Cut out smaller connectors from the salvaged one, fitting the new pin headers. Prepared leads from the IDE cable, and soldered everything together, some heat shrink tube to cover the solders as a finishing touch. Drilled out holes in a spare white front cover (kept the original one untouched), and tested that everything fitted together.

Printed out a table of all possible combinations and corresponding FSB/CPU speeds, and markings for the switches.

It works great! Even though it doesn't match the flexibility and convenience of a K6-II/III-system, it's not that far from it. Flicking a few switches and disabling caches in BIOS ain't all that painful either 😀

Also installed pins on the USB header. Wonder why it wasn't populated? Perhaps someone back then thought noone would care about USB? Or was USB 1.0 (which I assume it is on an old 430HX board) obsolete already when the board went into production?

Removed the jumper wire on the Cyrix/Intel selection header too while I was at it, and installed a pinheader with a regular jumper there instead. Could be fun experimenting with if I ever get hold of a Cyrix CPU.

Nice 😀 I didn't' see what cpu you are using, but that is such a cool setup. Makes it look like an industrial system.

clueless1 wrote:

Nice 😀 I didn't' see what cpu you are using, but that is such a cool setup. Makes it look like an industrial system.

It's a Pentium 200, so it's possible to use all settings without overclocking.

Thanks 😀

Almost done consolidating the working and non-working machines from that Mac haul. Think I'll have two working machines I can sell/trade once I'm done. The wife and I each kept a G5 and the MDD is my dream PPC Mac so that's staying 😀

Looked over at my boxes of old PC parts and am trying not to cry over how I don't have ATX cases to build up the systems I want to 🙁

Here are the results of my AGP benchmarks in Win98. I'm not too fancy with charts and such, so no dedicated thread. This was mostly to satisfy my curiosity on Geforce2 MX vs Geforce4 MX4000, FX5200 64-bit vs 128-bit, and FX5200 128-bit vs Geforce 3 Ti200. The others were thrown in because they were available.