oeuvre wrote:

this was the worst PC beep I've heard, from some old Gateway 2000 motherboard

Tell Gateway to stop hiring truck horn engineers to make their motherboards!

AC adapter for my Libretto 50CT finally arrived today. I LOVE THIS THING! Even the sounds it makes are just like that of a normal, big Pentium MMX machine, but I can comfortably curl up on my bed and enjoy all sorts of games with this!

Now have the 1st of my 9 Philips XT boards running!
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Before:

After:

After having Supersoft running without errors on CGA, it was quite difficult to make it boot with a normal BIOS. The CGA card didnt work at all, and the board was quite picky about the VGA. An ET4000 did it. In between C22 beneath the power supply exploded, but it also runs without it.
Regarding the BIOS I tried many. TURBO XT BIOS and mony others dont display anything on all cards. Award complains about parity and doesnt let me continue. Phoenix finally works! Dont have the sockets to install the parity, but it works without, too.
Think a main problem is, that the DIP settings dont change in Supersoft when switching. So the BIOS thinks all the time a MDA is installed. The DIP seems to be specific for this board.
On-board floppy also seems to run. The 8-bit IDE interface is not compatible, so I used XT-IDE with a 16-bit controller.

And still interested in the original BIOS 😉

I've been messing around with retrobright for the first time. Now it's time for bigger computer parts!

That's probably the clearest demonstration that retrobrighting can work I've seen.

I turned off my 486.

Then I got so enthusiastic I turned the 386 off as well.

Special back ground lighting supplied by a $2 shop translucent torch.

Late yesterday evening I concluded I own two shareware compilations I must absolutely upload somewhere, because they are mid-1990s dumps of large BBS'es and full of shareware programs, drivers, and documents that people here will love (for the sound freaks: two folders full of MOD utilities, FM OPL2 programming stuff, etc.)

yawetaG wrote:

Late yesterday evening I concluded I own two shareware compilations I must absolutely upload somewhere, because they are mid-1990s dumps of large BBS'es and full of shareware programs, drivers, and documents that people here will love (for the sound freaks: two folders full of MOD utilities, FM OPL2 programming stuff, etc.)

Sounds great.

Repaired battery damage on SOYO 025D2 486 VLB board. Keyboard wouldn't function because of one broken trace. All good now 😀

Link to the board settings as I'm messing around with it right now 😀
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/S/S … 6-486-VESA.html

Watched the new Carmen Sandiego netflix show, then fired up my dosbox to play the classic game.

“Ready for your next case, Bruninho?”

#nostalgiaAlert

And thinking about reorganizing my entire virtual machines archives.

Probably the following setup:

MacBook Pro
- DOSBox: Windows 3.1 without networking (replicating my 1st ever pc interaction)
- Virtualbox or VMWare Fusion (undecided yet): Windows 9x, or Windows 2000, or Windows Me? I want the classic 9x environment with the best possible internet experience available. I thought about using Windows 7 with a Classic Theme patch that is around. I have a Windows 10 VM that I will keep with me for a while before I make the jump to a Bootcamp based install, just for some heavy games but need to do a few more experiments and tweaks. The VM will be reset for use at work later - to do web development tests. I have product keys for all of the above.

iPad Pro
- DOSPad: Windows 3.1 without networking (same as above).

Preparing a 3.6volt TADIRAN external battery pack for reuse.

for the longest time, I have been deeply engulfed in GZDoom activities.. that is... downloading mods, modifying them and merging them... to create a very nice modernish and highly cuztomized doom experience...

for example.. I have a modified wadsmoosh that will allow me to play any combination of doom, doom2, heretic and hexen maps... working on adding strife to the mix as well

I strictly use 3D models for everything so currently I am limited to Doom and Heretic monsters and a few Hexen monsters, I have plenty other 3D models though.

I also added civilians from genetech, since some maps (for example city of the damned and ofc genetech) and/or games (strife) use civilians
I even created skins for some of the existing doom md2 models so they could represent the skulltag monsters defined on the ZDoom wiki 😁

I've purchased a lot of cheap PC games for 50p and a quid over the past few weeks. Stuff like Dungeon Siege, Splinter Cell, GTA 3, Rise of Nations, Return to Castle Wolfenstein...etc.

I decided now would be a good time to rip them all along with any other games that still need doing. At some point I need to put everything on a home server I can access from any PC in the house.

I've cleaned up Radeon 9000 PRO with distilled water and dish soap.

4dam wrote:

I've cleaned up Radeon 9000 PRO with distilled water and dish soap.

Looks as good as new! I was so envious of these cards when they came out.

Love that red cooler on the black PCB!

Is that 128MB?

Designed and 3d printed a custom sleeve to accommodate a larger and less noisy CPU fan in the SS7 build I'm working on:

Playing around with my Philips NMS9100 XT.

First I found out the ATI Graphics Solution-SR originally in the system wasnt really working in graphics mode a lot. Still not sure why, should be no problem. Will revisit later if I feel bored and the need to keep the original graphics card in the system. Swapped it for an ATI VIP and the Hercules stuff is up and running.

Then I decided I needed some storage, so on a whim I tried flashing the XT-IDE Universal BIOS on an EEPROM and putting it in a network card, a Realtek. Didn't work immediately, but found that I should enable the Boot ROM on the card. To my surprise, I found the utility for that on the Realtek website and was able to run that on the XT to setup the network card. Wow!

Now the XT-IDE ROM loads, but as soon as I put in a controller the PC won't boot from floppy anymore. I disabled everything on the controller except HDD but not working. Will try another one tomorrow, if can find one in the heap.

Snark Barker workes like a charm in this system. 😀

Got myself a monochrome monitor in today. Not sure if it works, but I'm going to clean it up before I even think about testing it!

Will be using it with my turbo XT soon if it works!

EDIT: Added picture