I definitely scan drives on a newer computer with an adapter, dock, etc. Or just the fastest machine with an IDE port somewhere.

I also use various utilities from Hiren's, like Victoria, or the manufacturer's software if I have it.

I just did a stack of drives I'd got mixed up and had four dead ones - not entirely sure if any of them died in storage, but I know two of them had gone bad in use.

Fried my mini-IDE adapter on the last drive because it was designed by a monkey, and not a clever one. Need to fix it and then improve the design so it can't short out again, then I'll post something if the fix works out, because it seems to be the default cheap ebay design, and it's flawed.

I thought I'd make a PC for Morrowind. It's got a Pentium 4 1.8GHz Northwood, 512MB DDR RAM, MX440 running Windows 98. I might upgrade it to a 4200ti which is reasonably priced on eBay.

Except I accidentally put a 2.4GHz Northwood in their instead and only found out when I ran CPU-Z. Eugh... Not sure I can be bothered to change it.

edit - this is going well 🙁

AESTHETIC

appiah4 wrote:

That looks like an issue with your 2D card not your Voodoo.

Yeah, it is. But that wasn't my question. My question is: What caused it to be like that, because beforehand it was working perfectly? Or are you saying that it was neither the passthrough nor the Voodoo1, but the 2D card in how it handled the V1?

What it could be is the pass through cable wasn't standard or meant for the VooDoo1 to get hooked up to the 2D card you have.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I thought I'd make a PC for Morrowind. It's got a Pentium 4 1.8GHz Northwood, 512MB DDR RAM, MX440 running Windows 98. I might u […]
Show full quote

I thought I'd make a PC for Morrowind. It's got a Pentium 4 1.8GHz Northwood, 512MB DDR RAM, MX440 running Windows 98. I might upgrade it to a 4200ti which is reasonably priced on eBay.

Except I accidentally put a 2.4GHz Northwood in their instead and only found out when I ran CPU-Z. Eugh... Not sure I can be bothered to change it.

edit - this is going well 🙁

Ahhhh!!! Of course. That brings back memories. The dungeon with the really bad wallpaper.

luckybob wrote:

USB 3.0 ide converters are your friend here. I will just blow the drive away with a wipe program, while I do other things on my main system.

That said, it doesn't usually like the pre-ata33 ide drives. But that's a rare issue for me.

Yep, I'm aware of them - I just can't be bothered to source one, as I never had so many PATA HDDs and the ones I was really interested in were small (& therefore quick to scan) anyway. But somehow almost every bigger box of old PC junk I picked up the last few months had big PATA drives in it. Still not interested in them, but if I'm going to do anything with them other than throwing away, I want to know they're working OK. Maybe will dig a few up after all...

Still no luck with CF cards reader under Windows 10, but works fine under Windows 8 and CF card is not damaged, I checked. Really hate MS at times like this.

Tested a couple DOS games on Hercules hardware. One photo here, more in this thread: Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games

I’d recognise Double Dragon anywhere, even tiny and monochrome 😀

Very cool and nostalgic.

Finally got all the bits & pieces together for a couple high-end (for their time) AMD boards I've been wanting to use:

I've had both of these for a while, just didn't have any spare compatible CPUs and coolers to try them out. Now I do. 😎

On the left is a very nice Socket A Aopen AK77-600n. I actually think this is a really sharp looking board, with its bright yellow PCI slots and distinctive blue & white AGP. It has a nice layout with a ton of features.

Thanks to the OEM-style HSF I found, it also now sports this sweet hologram badge. Can't argue with that.

I wish they'd centered it better on the fan though. 😜

I tried my Geode NX1750+ on it. It seems to work, but without any BIOS support it doesn't set the voltage, clocks, or see the CPUID correctly.

Fortunately there are a ton of options in the BIOS for setting clocks & voltages manually:

^^ it also has a credits section in the BIOS. Never seen that before, and it's a really nice touch! Lends this board some personality. From my brief testing here, I'd say the folks above knocked this one out of the park.

The board on the right is of course an Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe. I had this earmarked for my FreeNAS build, since it supports ECC RAM and has a ton of SATA ports. That seems like a waste of such a nice board though. I'm also considering throwing 16GB of DDR2, a hexacore processor, and of course two GPUs in SLI at it and using it as a workstation. A setup like that probably won't match my Xeon E5440 or Q9300 in raw CPU speed, but it sure would be fun to build. I've never messed with post-Voodoo SLI before.

Anyway with my uninspiring 64x2 4200+ and a stick of low-end RAM installed, it seems to work fine. Good to know.

I worked some more, on my Amiga500 refurbishment project. This time I finished the Floppy disk drive part of the machine. I had to do a couple of tricks, and now it has a working drive. Finished it off, by updating my blog about this project. One thing that strikes me, is how long it takes to do this kind of work, when it is on the absolute lowest budget possible.

xjas wrote:

4.jpg
^^ it also has a credits section in the BIOS. Never seen that before, and it's a really nice touch! Lends this board some personality. From my brief testing here, I'd say the folks above knocked this one out of the park.

I wish every BIOS had a credits section, sure would be nice for knowing exactly who made it. 🤣

Did a rebuild of the clips, that keeps the keyboard in place, on my Amiga500 refurbish project. Cutting up a plastic lid, glueing them in place with super glue, and using "cement" made from ABS plastic dissolved in acetone to strengthen the new keyboard clips/holder's. Then updating my blog about the progress.

Fixed every single issue my Socket 754 Athlon64 system had by replacing the 300W PSU with a 500W PSU. No idea what made me think a 300W PSU could power a Radeon X1950PRO AGP. Alas, everything works flawlessly now. Busy running 3Dmark2001 and 3DMark03 on hardware that I never got to own (went straight from Socket A/R300 to Socket AM2/HD3850..)

xjas wrote:

Finally got all the bits & pieces together for a couple high-end (for their time) AMD boards I've been wanting to use: […]
Show full quote

Finally got all the bits & pieces together for a couple high-end (for their time) AMD boards I've been wanting to use:

1.jpg

I've had both of these for a while, just didn't have any spare compatible CPUs and coolers to try them out. Now I do. 😎

On the left is a very nice Socket A Aopen AK77-600n. I actually think this is a really sharp looking board, with its bright yellow PCI slots and distinctive blue & white AGP. It has a nice layout with a ton of features.

Thanks to the OEM-style HSF I found, it also now sports this sweet hologram badge. Can't argue with that.

2.jpg

I wish they'd centered it better on the fan though. 😜

I tried my Geode NX1750+ on it. It seems to work, but without any BIOS support it doesn't set the voltage, clocks, or see the CPUID correctly.

3.jpg

Fortunately there are a ton of options in the BIOS for setting clocks & voltages manually:

4.jpg

^^ it also has a credits section in the BIOS. Never seen that before, and it's a really nice touch! Lends this board some personality. From my brief testing here, I'd say the folks above knocked this one out of the park.

The board on the right is of course an Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe. I had this earmarked for my FreeNAS build, since it supports ECC RAM and has a ton of SATA ports. That seems like a waste of such a nice board though. I'm also considering throwing 16GB of DDR2, a hexacore processor, and of course two GPUs in SLI at it and using it as a workstation. A setup like that probably won't match my Xeon E5440 or Q9300 in raw CPU speed, but it sure would be fun to build. I've never messed with post-Voodoo SLI before.

5.jpg

Anyway with my uninspiring 64x2 4200+ and a stick of low-end RAM installed, it seems to work fine. Good to know.

The M2N32-SLI-Deluxe doesn't support 6 core Phenoms.

Not "officially", no. 😜 Internet scuttlebutt says otherwise.

I got a bunch of old motherboards recently, which is where I got this thing from. I got an Abit KV7 in one of the lots, which sadly arrived with its CPU socket removed. I tried fitting a Socket A socket I got from a lot of CPUs a few years ago, but it didn't post - which I'm not too surprised at. So I decided it's going to go in the electronics recycling, but before it goes, I'll take what I can from it.

Of course, every cap on the board is a Rubycon and none of them are leaking, so now I can recap a couple of my Socket 7 boards with bad caps without having to spend much 😁

I found that the easiest way to get the caps off was to keep the board upside down, put the TS-100 iron to essentially its max temp, blob some solder up between the two capacitor legs poking out the back, let it heat for a bit, then wiggle the iron tip, which (around 70% of the time) made the capacitor drop down to the desk.

This IBM Blue Lightning board is super weird - it can run Windows 95 just fine, but Windows 3.11 hard locks just after loading up, getting past the splash screen, displaying the desktop, then just stops. Which is a real shame, because I thought its hardware (a 386 on steroids) would be well suited to running Windows 3.11. It's certainly pretty slow in Windows 95.

The worst part is, like the other person that has this board discovered - sound is just pretty broken, I can get midi, I can get too-fast digital audio in Windows, AD-PCM works, but I can't get digital sound to work in Doom or Descent so far, with either an SB-16 CT2230 or an Opti 924.

Spent some quality time inserting DIP memory chips one by one in a memory card. All 90 of them. Left the 108 that need to go in another card for another day.

xjas wrote:

Not "officially", no. 😜 Internet scuttlebutt says otherwise.

Well if you somehow get it to work, please let me know how because I've tried a 1045T on mine and it detects it initially as a dual core and then refuses to post on the subsequent reboot.

I finally found something nifty that I knew I had kicking around some old boxes somewhere:

A set of Windows 95 floppy labels (sadly, some stained) that came with a Windows 95 laptop which was an early example of the modern practice of expecting the end user to write their own reinstallation media.

Even back then, when I must have been somewhere between 10 and 13 years old, I was the type to refuse to apply them because it was irreversible.