Last night was experiment time - messing with a $10 mSATA to 44pin IDE kit - trying out some old mSATA drives from old Dell laptops in this thing on my various 486 computers (basically the DX4-100 and the 2 Versas). Initially the plan is to try this out and see if I can get it working on the NECs, and if so, then get it working on both and get a second mSATA to 44pin adapter and build a second 128GB SSD for the other Versa. I did get it working on the DX4-100 desktop just fine - FreeDOS 2.1 installs in like....10 minutes with a full install, and boots almost instantaniously - the Versas....well....that's another story.

Somewhere along the way the DX4-100's 5.25" Mobile rack broke (Lian-Li RH27 unit), so I had to pull the IDE and power cables and run them direct to the drive (sigh). Looks like another repair on the horizon.

Same drive, same DDO (Seagate's, a version of OnTrack I believe), same O/S, neither Versa can find the boot sector or the drive. Planning to try out some Samsungs over the weekend and see how they work, if not, might just throw the SSD into the main box.

I built another VLB 486 for sale on eBay and repainted two cases for sale as well...

I resoldered the memory slots on my Thinkpad A31p and now I have a fully working machine again, maxed out to 2GB RAM.

Gonna play some Unreal Tournament 2004 on that baby now, hooray!

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-09-10, 18:35:

Super cool! 😁

Where did you find a high res version of that art? Or did you turn it into a vector with Adobe Illustrator or something?

I found a hi-res scan of the Dune 2 box art
here

HanJammer wrote on 2020-09-11, 16:18:

I built another VLB 486 for sale on eBay and repainted two cases for sale as well...

If I may ask, what is your process for repainting cases?

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-09-10, 19:04:

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-09-10, 18:35:

who at Creative thought displaying a slow, "EAX" splash screen with sound on each startup was a good idea? Or overriding the Windows startup sound with some thunder?

I hated that as well, messing with my custom made Unreal Tournament sound theme back in the day. 😁

Almost tops the Nvidia 40.xx drivers turning off the minimize/maximize window animations and claiming "improved desktop performance".

Thanks to your reply I noticed your Audigy 2 drivers for SB Live! guide. I wish I saw it before because it's excellent. I can now load the Arachno soundfont without getting the occassional blue screen, and it loads it much faster than the Live!'s Soundfont manager did. Plus VxD instead of WDM is a nice plus 😀

assasincz wrote on 2020-09-11, 18:44:

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-09-10, 18:35:

Super cool! 😁

Where did you find a high res version of that art? Or did you turn it into a vector with Adobe Illustrator or something?

I found a hi-res scan of the Dune 2 box art
here

Cool, thanks 😀

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-09-12, 11:52:

Thanks to your reply I noticed your Audigy 2 drivers for SB Live! guide. I wish I saw it before because it's excellent. I can now load the Arachno soundfont without getting the occassional blue screen, and it loads it much faster than the Live!'s Soundfont manager did. Plus VxD instead of WDM is a nice plus 😀

Always nice to hear that people are finding the guides useful!

And yeah, the Audigy2 ZS drivers referenced there tend to be more stable than Creative's older SBLive drivers, especially when working with soundfonts.

Today I reinstalled Mac OS X 10.5.8 on my dad's old MacBook from 2008 with a broken backlight. Fortunately these things behave like a desktop system the moment you hook up an external monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard, and close the laptop itself after powering on.

Gone is the extreme slowness it suffered from before (my dad had installed all kinds of crap on it). Next steps: Make my own Windows XP install DVD with integrated SP2 so I can install Windows via bootcamp, then find a firewire 400 enclosure + fast hard disk so I can install E-Mu Proteus X2* on it. Might still have to upgrade the RAM beyond the 2 GB the MacBook has right now...

* E-Mu Proteus X2 is a standalone soft synthesizer based on E-Mu's Proteus modules and libraries released back in 2006. The original Proteus X software is somewhat notorious for needing a very powerful system to run properly, more powerful than most common consumer systems from back then, and its successor isn't much better. I think the MacBook's Core 2 Duo probably can handle it...

HanJammer wrote on 2020-09-11, 16:18:

I built another VLB 486 for sale on eBay and repainted two cases for sale as well...

Building a 386 for the same purpose - having some intermittent memory issues I have to solve first though.

That and I played on my super-loud (15k RPM SCSI) 233 MMX today - a couple of Total Annihilation maps, then a slower-paced Simcity 3000 build. Now it's time to set up a makeshift " lab " in the basement for that 386 repair, as my home office is getting cluttered with x86 parts everywhere and my son ran off with an I/O card.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-09-11, 13:15:

Funny, generally speaking I had good luck with Maxtor and Quantum hard drives (they were very common around here). The few WD drives I used back in the day died soon, so I do not like them.

I love Quantum drives - except some of them will have the head stuck issue. That and Bigfoots are just unreliable.

Did a bit of re-wiring of my retro setup. Last week I replaced my 'little' Edirol UM-550 with a Roland A-880. Now I also dug out its power supply. Bigger change was replacing the miniscule 5-port Zyxel unmanaged network switch with a managed 16-port one (Netgear GS116E). That's partly so I can hook up all machines to my LAN and partly so I can work with VLANs to keep vulnerable 2k/XP systems off internet. Also screwed this switch into the bottom of the upper plank on my desk so it's out of the way and allows neat ordered cables - although that's not exactly the situation yet.

Didn't actually get around to playing with any of the systems, just confirmed that my modern Linux system (the 'sheepdog' for the rest) was still running and that I plugged the audio cable I accidentally pulled out of the late DOS K6-2 system into the correct port on my GUS. I did 😀

Been working on 1 of 2 of my planned year 2000 PIII 1.0GHz gaming systems. Decided on Windows 2000 Professional for the OS and have been installing games on it for most of the day. As I'm only installing games from 1998-2002/2003, I've only struggled with a couple of games that required patches to work properly on Win 2000, but mostly everything else worked great first time.

Ran a couple of benchmarks with both 3DMark 2000 & 2001SE too.

I was curious what Windows ME would perform like on this same PC, so I installed a temporary 2nd HDD and setup Windows ME. ME's performance was noticeably poorer than Windows 2000, I noticed that right away. After installing all the necessary drivers, including chipset & AGP drivers and making sure stuff like DMA was enabled etc, I decided to run 3DMark 2000. The benchmark results were worse than those in Windows 2000. I guess Windows ME and this PC simply don't get along too well, or maybe it doesn't like the Via Pro 133 chipset. I could probably fiddle around with ME and get it running better, but since 2000 just works perfectly there's no reason for me to bother and I'm not planning to run any DOS games on this PC either.

PTherapist wrote on 2020-09-12, 22:53:

Been working on 1 of 2 of my planned year 2000 PIII 1.0GHz gaming systems. Decided on Windows 2000 Professional for the OS and have been installing games on it for most of the day. As I'm only installing games from 1998-2002/2003, I've only struggled with a couple of games that required patches to work properly on Win 2000, but mostly everything else worked great first time.

Ran a couple of benchmarks with both 3DMark 2000 & 2001SE too.

I was curious what Windows ME would perform like on this same PC, so I installed a temporary 2nd HDD and setup Windows ME. ME's performance was noticeably poorer than Windows 2000, I noticed that right away. After installing all the necessary drivers, including chipset & AGP drivers and making sure stuff like DMA was enabled etc, I decided to run 3DMark 2000. The benchmark results were worse than those in Windows 2000. I guess Windows ME and this PC simply don't get along too well, or maybe it doesn't like the Via Pro 133 chipset. I could probably fiddle around with ME and get it running better, but since 2000 just works perfectly there's no reason for me to bother and I'm not planning to run any DOS games on this PC either.

Windows 2000 Pro = best OS ever. No internet browsing set up I guess?

Bruninho wrote on 2020-09-13, 00:10:

Windows 2000 Pro = best OS ever. No internet browsing set up I guess?

For fun I did install an older version of K-Meleon and used it to download a couple of game patches from sites that would still function. I'm just using SP4 at the moment, so struggled to find another browser to work with it.

Tweaked my 2000 build some more today. I cloned the HDD as a backup so that I could mess around and see if I could improve performance without worrying about having to reinstall Windows 2000 if it all went wrong. Luckily I managed to find the sweet spot for now and squeeze out some slight extra peformance - a combination of the Via 4-in-1 v456v chipset drivers & installing DirectX 9.0c (Feb 2010). Ran benchmarks in 3DMark 2000 & 2001SE and both showed improved scores, with 2001SE's score improving significantly.

I previously had DirectX 8.1 installed. Not sure if having 9.0c installed is going to lead to any issues with game compatibility further down the line, but everything I've tried seems fine so far.

I did have some bother today with the whole HDD cloning procedure however. Windows 2000 would fail to boot with an Inaccessible Boot Device BSOD. I tried several different methods & software for cloning and all had the same result, so I decided to try and boot the original HDD with the new HDD connected to slave and that wouldn't boot now either. I spent hours on that issue, using the recovery console etc, only to finally discover it was the IDE cable to blame all along and once that was replaced everything started working properly!

PTherapist wrote on 2020-09-13, 09:28:

Bruninho wrote on 2020-09-13, 00:10:

Windows 2000 Pro = best OS ever. No internet browsing set up I guess?

For fun I did install an older version of K-Meleon and used it to download a couple of game patches from sites that would still function. I'm just using SP4 at the moment, so struggled to find another browser to work with it.

When I attempted a VM with Windows 2000 Pro, I had BWC KernelEx just to run the last version of SeaMonkey for XP. According to my tests it was the most modern browser I could use on Win2KPro with BWC. Later I settled for XP with Inexperience Patcher themes and SeaMonkey themed as Netscape to give me classic Windows goosebumps. So far so good. The reason why I moved up was because VMware SVGA 3D only works for XP and later.

Spent a good bit of last night troubleshooting Links 2.21 under WiFi on FreeDOS 2.1. Had to delete and change a big chunk of my FDCONFIG.SYS to fix everything so that both modes worked properly....which I guess freed up some RAM and made things faster so that's a plus.

Setup Links to also use the graphical modes, seems to still run quite pleasantly on an 80486 DX4 in 640 and 800x600 modes.

That and troubleshooting the 486. I also have been shopping Versas again, I'm toying with downsizing - might or might not - and using mostly Versas for my retro stuff. It's just nice not to have to always be in the same room all the time to run my retro-systems without havging to drag a whole desktop into another room.....plus my Wife is getting into playing some DOS games now due to seeing me messing around on the Versas around the house.

Bah, I seem to be having some really bad luck lately.

I missed playing SC3000, so decided to install it on my Pentium 4 system. Put the CD in the drive, closed the door, and somehow the CD shifted in the tray and got stuck between the door and the drive. The disc was slightly scratched. The game then installed fine, but apparently the disc got damaged in such a way that it fails the copy protection check when running the game as the disc heats up. Aaargh!

That, or both drives in my P4 system have either really bad error correction or are failing at the same time. I'll check the cable connections to be sure and try with another game...

Maybe I should just buy the GOG version...no more disc, so should be better, right?

I mean, it's just a suggestion. you obviously have an original disk.

With GOG you get manuals and other goodies if you don't have the original box contents.