Good to know thx!

Disassembled and checked freshly acquired Tandon CSP1622:

Turns out battery is failing, but still can hold BIOS info. Found out disk type (Conner CP3044), updated info in BIOS, and voila, it is working. Almost thirty years later, not a bad sector in sight. They don't make'em like that anymore.

Next thing: Prince of Persia on amber Hercules display... awww yisss.

My childhood, reactivation.

Finished sorting my old-ish CD/DVD optical drive collection.

Not retro, but, I installed the latest update on my Xbox 360 and I thought the downloaded songs for Guitar Hero: World Tour were long gone, and they reappeared. *whew*

Installed a SCSI card and CD drive in a 386 and then setup a DOS-based CD player and then tried Myst under Windows 3.1

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/IMG_0429.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/59DA1015.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/CGS_8009.jpg

Still image loading, audio and video playback is superb given that it's a 33mhz 386 however christ almighty I came across a fade to/from black in Myst while exiting and throughout all of the intro of The Journeyman Project and the machine went glacial. I will have to see if there is an updated driver for my VGA Wonder XL in the driver database and hope that's the issue. I shouldn't be waiting three or four minutes for a logo to fade in and out, followed by a fullscreen video that will play at 15fps fullscreen WITH audio.

Also at some point I lost a lump of conventional memory. Mem says there's 38k being used by fluff like drivers and DOS 6.22 is sitting in conventional while using 96kb even thought I have EMM386 active followed by DOS=UMB and DOS=HIGH. It bumps me below 528K and now Wolfenstein 3D no longer loads and with EMS turned off memmaker still can't allocate any more ram. 🙁

Turbo -> wrote:

Finished sorting my old-ish CD/DVD optical drive collection.

Cool, some classic fronts in that collection 😀

I have done no retro activity lately, the weather is too nice and the attic is way to warm now to work in 🙁

Finished rebuilding a high end Rev. A Bondi Blue iMac G3 out of the parts of two machines. It even has dual monitor capability (mirrored video only though).

Specs:
Motorola PowerPC G3 @ 233 MHz
288 MB RAM
ATi Rage Pro Turbo video w/ 6 MB VRAM
Quantum Fireball 4 GB HDD / 24x CD-ROM drive.
Griffin iPort Mezzanine card providing external video and serial.

It's an awesome OS 9.2.2 box. I still need to fix the overscan issue on the second monitor but it works!

In the evening after work had some time, so worked on my newly acquired Tandon Hercules AT and substituted Conner HDD with CF card. Used the image I had from Toshiba T3200SX (also based on Conner drive), as it turns out one of BIOS settings had this capacity and CHS geometry, so it was surprisingly easy to boot from it. Here is a pic of the computer running Golden Axe (hey, that one is for you, Batyra!) from CF card:

And here is Electro Body (Polish game from the nineties, marketed in US as Electro Man):

Next steps: build this with CF card sticking out back, so I don't have to dismantle computer in order to add something. Will need longer power cables and IDE ribbon.

Looked for Linksys LNE100TX v2.0 drivers forever on the internet.. couldn't find any proper working ones. Then I remembered I'm a digital hoarder and found them stashed on my file server in an obscure folder from 1999. 😎 NIC is working now in my PIII 98SE machine.

Finished setting up my 1997-2000 P3 system, now I can move it to storage and start working on something else..

The only issue is that the floppy drive does not work properly and always gives read errors.. the issue has persisted after changing the drive, ribbon cable and the PSU so I'm kind of stuck troubleshooting it.

not enough shortcuts

oeuvre wrote:

not enough shortcuts

Ran out of HDD space 🙁

After finally getting the core components I wanted I started assembling two systems last night. One is my 'ulitimate Packard Bell P3, with MS-6168 motherboard with onboard Voodoo 3 that I intend to run with a Tualatin 1400S. This beast is also going to get an Intel X25E SSD. Because I can 😉 Only screwed PSU and motherboard in there yet, still need to figure out SSD mounting.
Other system is my generic 1995-2000 test system, with Tyan Trinity 400 (Via Apollo Pro133a) slot+socket board. I decided to give that one a nice 40GB Samsung drive, mounted on 3.5"-5.25" silencing rubber grommets. I'd already tested the drive with scandisk or badblocks, but hadn't had time to check contents. Turns out to be a Win98 install with a huge haul of DOS games. That was too good to lose. So copied all 4GB of games dir onto another disk. Not had time to see what it all is yet (it was late and I had an early international train to catch), but I forsee fun times ahead 😀

dionb wrote:

After finally getting the core components I wanted I started assembling two systems last night. One is my 'ulitimate Packard Bell P3, with MS-6168 motherboard with onboard Voodoo 3 that I intend to run with a Tualatin 1400S. This beast is also going to get an Intel X25E SSD. Because I can 😉 Only screwed PSU and motherboard in there yet, still need to figure out SSD mounting.
Other system is my generic 1995-2000 test system, with Tyan Trinity 400 (Via Apollo Pro133a) slot+socket board. I decided to give that one a nice 40GB Samsung drive, mounted on 3.5"-5.25" silencing rubber grommets. I'd already tested the drive with scandisk or badblocks, but hadn't had time to check contents. Turns out to be a Win98 install with a huge haul of DOS games. That was too good to lose. So copied all 4GB of games dir onto another disk. Not had time to see what it all is yet (it was late and I had an early international train to catch), but I forsee fun times ahead 😀

Aaaaah the things to do when it is nice and warm outside 😀

Murugan wrote:

[...]

Aaaaah the things to do when it is nice and warm outside 😀

Yesterday it was warm. Right now I'm standing under cover at a Belgian railway station waiting for the torrential rain to lessen. I forgot a coat/umbrella, my colleague has those but his shoes aren't waterproof. Idiots both of us 😉

Replaced the S3 Savage4 Pro PCI with a RIVA128 PCI in my P1-MMX 200 Mhz. Now the hardware is all correct for a 1997 system. Also, speed of the card is amazing.

My Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro (S3 Virge DX 4MB) has been on the fritz for a year or two now. It started giving me artifacts in Windows 98 (strange lines around the cursor) so I switched to a different card in that build.

Today I wanted to try to fix it, so I installed it in my tester system, and sure enough it did it on that system too using the built in Virge DX drivers on 98SE. First I installed the Diamond driver package from Vogons Drivers. This changed how the corruption looked, but it was still there (now I would get distorted patches when moving windows). Then I ran a couple of DOS testers (including the one from the Diamond driver package) and it didn't show any problems, except for a strange stutter on the vertical panning test (seemingly unrelated).

Next, I pulled the four socketed EDO SOJ memory chips from the card and tested it with the 2MB of soldered memory... and the problems went away! Next I started digging through my heaps of old VGA cards looking for a donor. Basically, anything that would use these chips is probably less desirable than this card since its one of the best Virge DX cards and it has the latest BIOS (3.04). I found a Cirrus Logic GD5440 that had some similar Alliance 256k chips but they were 50ns, where as the 3D 2000 Pro had 35ns. Worst case scenario, I would have tried these. Then I found an S3 Trio 64 that I picked up in a scrap lot a few weeks ago. This card had two soldered 70ns chips and two sockets... for some reason one of the sockets was populated with a tm brand 256k 35ns chip! I have no idea why it had one chip and not two, or if it would have ever worked that way, but now at least I had a chip to use for testing. I quickly checked the datasheets and they seemed similar enough to not cause a fire (RAM chips aren't my area of expertise).

I tried this chip in each of the four sockets on the 3D 2000 Pro (swapping each one as I went around) and to my amazement the last one I tried fixed the problem! I'm so happy to have fixed this, and I did it without having to spend $10-$20 on a pile of chips from China. Its worth noting that the strange stutter in the vertical panning test in "xdiag" still exists, so I don't know what's causing that.

Here are some pictures of the card, the problem and the chip I used as a replacement. I don't know if there are any issues that come from using different brands of memory chips, but so far everything works fine.

I don't know how retro this is, but I'm repurposing a bunch of 'obsolete' hardware to do a job that most people would go buy something new for, so I'm counting it. I had a minor break-in to my car (no damage since it was unlocked, nothing of value stolen since it was unlocked 😜 ) so decided to set up a security camera. One Core Duo Mac Mini (2007?) from my always-handy stack of white Mac Minis, one Xbox 360 webcam from my junk bin, a USB keyboard and mouse I was about to donate, an old beige Viewsonic 1024x768 LCD I keep around because I always seem to find things to use it with, and an 80GB HDD out of a discarded laptop, now equals one video recorder & live monitor. The footage from the X360 camera isn't great, especially in the dark, but it'll let me see instantly if someone opens the door & turns on the dome light or tries to start it.

My bedroom window looks straight down at my parking spot so that's where this is, now I can lie in bed and watch the 'nighttime ambience.'

I'm using VLC at the moment but I can already tell it's not ideal - it uses WAY too much bandwidth while recording and doesn't let you change the framerate or bitrate, and the live view updates really slowly. Anyone care to suggest a better recorder software for a bodge like this? (OBS won't run on Snow Leopard - not even old versions - so it's out. Quicktime, which comes pre-installed, has the same problem as VLC of generating HUGE files. Like 100MB for 30 seconds of footage.)

I've been working on this really..REALLY rusty Mac Plus. Seriously, look at this. 🤣

The duct-taped board is a 3rd party add on for external video, which is my main reason for trying to resurrect this.

So far, the analog board has been reflowed and new caps are coming in the mail, and the board is almost clean. I've gotten it to bong, but the analog board gives some weird "whup whup" sound.

Not computer related, and not retro yet retro in the way that I do it every second weekend....
(Get ready for some rambling, I just have to get this off my chest)

Well... I went to pick up my children today. I have them every second weekend.
And during the trip back, some drunk ass bitch, had the audacity to play with my hair.
And then she said that she wish that she had the length that I have.

Well... Excuse me, drunk ass bitch. Though my hair is long and reaches my belly button.
MY HAIR IS NOT A THING YOU CAN PLAY WITH. Get the F out of here!!! 😵
What were she even thinking??? 😳

Anyway...
Pumped up the childrens pool, filled it with water and tomorrow my children have warm
water to play in, when the sun have heated it up.