I had quite a score this weekend. I got a Slot 1 based system (Pentium 2 400, 256MB RAM, PowerColor EvilKing 4 Voodoo4 4500) with 19” LCD and about 25 old games (including a boxed copy of Quake III Arena) for the equivalent of $40. Yes, the seller knew what he was selling.

Oj0 wrote on 2020-05-25, 05:25:

I had quite a score this weekend. I got a Slot 1 based system (Pentium 2 400, 256MB RAM, PowerColor EvilKing 4 Voodoo4 4500) with 19” LCD and about 25 old games (including a boxed copy of Quake III Arena) for the equivalent of $40. Yes, the seller knew what he was selling.

You could have just said you got a v4 for $40. Or just got a v4 at all 😁

kolderman wrote on 2020-05-25, 05:29:

Oj0 wrote on 2020-05-25, 05:25:

I had quite a score this weekend. I got a Slot 1 based system (Pentium 2 400, 256MB RAM, PowerColor EvilKing 4 Voodoo4 4500) with 19” LCD and about 25 old games (including a boxed copy of Quake III Arena) for the equivalent of $40. Yes, the seller knew what he was selling.

You could have just said you got a v4 for $40. Or just got a v4 at all 😁

I know, right? 😁 The card was a massive score. Even here in South Africa you can pick up the CPUs for $2-4, and probably a complete Slot 1 system for under $20. The card would fetch at least $300 here (and it seems eBay pricing has gone mad with an unboxed APG card selling for GBP499 at the moment), but I’m pretty thrilled with everything I got. Originally I was just getting Quake III Arena but it turned out to be my best deal to date.

At first I thought the CPU/graphics card combo was a bit lopsided, with the card better suited to an Athlon 800 or something. Thinking about it, the games I intend to play at all from 97-99 so will be fine on the Pentium 2, and it means the card will have a very easy life which is good news to me.

I plan to add a second (and maybe third) IDE drive, as well as to cut a window in the side panel which will receive a piece of non-tempered glass with a massive 3dfx logo frosted/engraved/whatever you want to call it lit up by some green CCFL lights.

I’m not too sure about the board it came with, an AOpen AX6BC EZ, although the manual does have a page dedicated to overclocking a Pentium 350 so maybe it isn’t terrible xD I’d like to get a 440BX board in there but it isn’t a priority.

jheronimus wrote on 2020-05-24, 17:27:

It's a Matrox Ultima Plus, a high-end VLB videocard from 1993. It's a beast of a card with 6MB of VRAM:

Nice! I also own exactly the same Matrox card. As far as I remember I did not get it running. The board was booting with the card installed without any error - but nothing was displayed on the screen. Maybe I should take a look at the Jumpers again, thanks for the link!

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2020-05-23, 08:25:

BetaC wrote on 2020-05-23, 01:29:

My collection of old Macs continues to grow, now that I have a PowerMac G4 MDD, seated next to my G3.

As you can see, it's a Dualie, specifically a Dual 1.42GHz model. While I don't have every slot filled for the RAM, it is already maxed out. The only downside is that I can't run OS9 on it, but I'd much rather use my ADB Equipped G3 for stuff that old anyways. Soon I'll run Halo on it for joke purposes, then figure out what I actually wanna do with it for now.

You totally can, though, with a patched OS 9.2.2 version. Runs fine on my FW800 MDD which was upgraded with a DP 1.42GHz CPU board. OS 9 is stupid fast on it.

How do you actually get that to boot, though? I haven't been able to convince the G4 to do anything beyond booting the copy of 10.4 it came with, and I don't have any dual layer discs for Leopard.

Epic post @jheronimus! Thanks for sharing that.

I came across a full length PCI VGA card once in my early retro hardware collecting days and thought to myself "wow, this is going to be awesome!" but it was the same deal - boring Windows accelerator and absolutely stank for DOS VGA games 😂

Not 100% computer related but at least it's old alright.
FInally managed to score a Roland PG-10 programmer for my D-10 for a very reasonable price. They seem to be very rare nowadays.

ATI Graphics Ultra Pro (Micro Channel, Mach 32)

This one officially needs (without hacks) a base video to be present. I am using XGA-2 which is overkill but that's what I've got in my Model 76 (486DX2-66).

Sound Blaster Pro 2 MCV (Micro Channel, CT5330)

Noticed this 8-bit ISA SCSI adapter - might come handy some day. Being sealed is an added bonus.

Wow! That's amazing. Especially the CT5330

canthearu wrote on 2020-05-22, 12:16:

I've gone crazy and paid too much for this (not the listing price they wanted on ebay, but still too much) […]
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I've gone crazy and paid too much for this (not the listing price they wanted on ebay, but still too much)

wd90c33-zz.jpg

No idea about how good performance will be, but it is a reasonably uncommon card, so that makes it intersting for me.

Need an ISA WD90c11 to sate my nostalgia though.

This is a very interesting card and should be plenty fast (in DOS and Windows 3.x at least). Although there are other WD90C33 VLB cards with faster RAM, I am not sure how much influence the RAM speed has on performance. I am curious how this card performs compared to the more popular Cirrus Logic, Tseng Labs and S3 VLB cards. I used to have a WD90C33 card in my AMD 486 DX/40 VLB system years ago and it was good!

CHiLL72 wrote on 2020-05-25, 19:59:

This is a very interesting card and should be plenty fast (in DOS and Windows 3.x at least). Although there are other WD90C33 VLB cards with faster RAM, I am not sure how much influence the RAM speed has on performance. I am curious how this card performs compared to the more popular Cirrus Logic, Tseng Labs and S3 VLB cards. I used to have a WD90C33 card in my AMD 486 DX/40 VLB system years ago and it was good!

In DOS it is very fast. Check my VLB VGA Group Test

mpe wrote on 2020-05-25, 20:04:

CHiLL72 wrote on 2020-05-25, 19:59:

This is a very interesting card and should be plenty fast (in DOS and Windows 3.x at least). Although there are other WD90C33 VLB cards with faster RAM, I am not sure how much influence the RAM speed has on performance. I am curious how this card performs compared to the more popular Cirrus Logic, Tseng Labs and S3 VLB cards. I used to have a WD90C33 card in my AMD 486 DX/40 VLB system years ago and it was good!

In DOS it is very fast. Check my VLB VGA Group Test

Very interesting test!

Tested one of that DataFab card reader for parallel port, works fine.

Added 2 files to config.sys and everything works.

On a PII laptop - reading from a CF card: 146 Kb / s, writing to a CF card: 263 Kb / s
On a 486SX laptop - reading from a CF card: 72 Kb / s, writing to a CF card: 75 Kb / s

Which about same as CD-Rom connected to the LPT port speed, and Aida by the way determines the LPT adapter like Host: Shuttle Epathd.

MAZter wrote on 2020-05-26, 03:11:

Tested one of that DataFab card reader for parallel port, works fine. […]
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Tested one of that DataFab card reader for parallel port, works fine.

Added 2 files to config.sys and everything works.

On a PII laptop - reading from a CF card: 146 Kb / s, writing to a CF card: 263 Kb / s
On a 486SX laptop - reading from a CF card: 72 Kb / s, writing to a CF card: 75 Kb / s

Those parallel adapters are great!
That laptop looks a lot like the AST 700N as it was known in Europe...
Does it start with a CF pcmcia adapter in?
And second question, how much ram does it have?

Got some bits and pieces over the week and I finally had some free time to get it installed.

- SB AWE64 PNP ISA
I got this to replace my AWE32 due to the hanging MIDI bug. It works great, but I still get really horrible hanging notes/channels in Sam & Max Hit the Road; I did some research and apparently it's more a software issue than hardware issue, and the only solution appears to be an MPU card or clone. While I wait for a clone to become available, I'll just set the Lucasarts games to MT-32 mode if the bug gets really bad (it is in Sam & Max, almost unplayable when certain tracks are playing!).

- New heat sink & fan, 3-pin to 4-pin MOLEX adapter
The heat sink & fan that came installed to the CPU/motherboard was making some horrible noises (and was overall pretty cheap), so I finally swapped it out. I had to get some 3-pin to 4-pin MOLEX adapters as my motherboard doesn't have any 3-pin fan connectors. I was also able to use the same adapter to hook up a case fan that had been dormant. Much quieter now!

CHiLL72 wrote on 2020-05-25, 19:59:

I am curious how this card performs compared to the more popular Cirrus Logic, Tseng Labs and S3 VLB cards. I used to have a WD90C33 card in my AMD 486 DX/40 VLB system years ago and it was good!

Yes I've found the WD90C33 chipset to perform about the same as the other chipsets you mentioned there in my 33MHz 486, and the image quality (of the card I have at least) and compatibility make this my fave VLB card.

Finally bought DreamBlaster S2 to use with my ESS 1869F.

I've read that some ESS cards have non-functional wavetable headers, I hope my sound card is not one of them.

lolo799 wrote on 2020-05-26, 09:16:

That laptop looks a lot like the AST 700N as it was known in Europe...
Does it start with a CF pcmcia adapter in?
And second question, how much ram does it have?

It is AST Advantage Explorer.

Unfortunately It does not start with anything inside self pcmcia slot (probably it supports very old pc card format), so that why I need to use LPT adapter instead of internal slot.

Total ram about 4mb (with 640Kb).

jheronimus wrote on 2020-04-20, 18:01:

Here it is. Is it good enough? PM me if you need more — I'll take more photos in the daylight, if needed. […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2020-04-19, 20:53:

I have the exact same board, mine had a barrel battery. Can you give me a good clean shot of the battery area so that I can cross check? From what I can tell only the diode on D14 and resistor on R12 are missing, I'd be delighted to learn I can just remove those and slap on a battery holder onto this!

Here it is. Is it good enough? PM me if you need more — I'll take more photos in the daylight, if needed.

I know this is a tad overdue but THANK YOU! My board finally has been modded with a CR2032!

Now, do I use this or a Biostar MB8433UUD-A for my 5x86 build 😀

Picked up this TOP853 on eBay, has only been used twice and is virtually new in box. Looking forward to repairing some of my motherboards and graphics cards, plus dumping some ROMs using this.

Not exactly vintage in itself, but will be used extensively for Vintage purposes. This is one of those gadgets, like a 'scope, where you reach a certain level and just need one. Actually been searching for a good priced one for a long time.