Finally installed the Dell Dimension 3000 into my "lab" gaming area. So now I can kick back in the chair and play retro-games on the TV. Uses the VGA to composite converter I have to connect to the TV. Runs at 800x600 - not too bad really.

I spent the day trying to find a working ethernet driver for my Pro 1000GT that actually works in windows 95, all while trying to see if the ATi Rage II would be better than my Permedia 2. I am still yet to complete either task.

BetaC wrote on 2020-11-08, 07:41:

I spent the day trying to find a working ethernet driver for my Pro 1000GT that actually works in windows 95, all while trying to see if the ATi Rage II would be better than my Permedia 2. I am still yet to complete either task.

Is This any good for the network card?

debs3759 wrote on 2020-11-08, 08:13:

BetaC wrote on 2020-11-08, 07:41:

I spent the day trying to find a working ethernet driver for my Pro 1000GT that actually works in windows 95, all while trying to see if the ATi Rage II would be better than my Permedia 2. I am still yet to complete either task.

Is This any good for the network card?

No, it isn't. if this wasn't a pentium MMX, I would just go to 98 where I know a driver exists and works.

In that case, this Russian site says the drivers they have work in Win 95.

https://driver.ru/_1044089416372c9314fdd877e1 … %82%D0%BD%D0%BE

It doesn't mention system requirements though. Filename is sp23611.exe, which appears to be widely available and support a number of cards, although not all mention Win95

debs3759 wrote on 2020-11-08, 19:09:

In that case, this Russian site says the drivers they have work in Win 95.

https://driver.ru/_1044089416372c9314fdd877e1 … %82%D0%BD%D0%BE

It doesn't mention system requirements though. Filename is sp23611.exe, which appears to be widely available and support a number of cards, although not all mention Win95

I'll give them a shot the next time I load up Win95. Thanks.

BetaC wrote on 2020-11-08, 18:45:

No, it isn't. if this wasn't a pentium MMX, I would just go to 98 where I know a driver exists and works.

Why not do just that? You can run Win98 usably on a Pentium MMX, and you can get rid of the bloated IE4 shell using 98Lite. It's worked very well for me on my Socket 7 system.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-11-09, 01:23:

BetaC wrote on 2020-11-08, 18:45:

No, it isn't. if this wasn't a pentium MMX, I would just go to 98 where I know a driver exists and works.

Why not do just that? You can run Win98 usably on a Pentium MMX, and you can get rid of the bloated IE4 shell using 98Lite. It's worked very well for me on my Socket 7 system.

98SE runs great on my Pentium 90.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-11-09, 01:23:

Why not do just that? You can run Win98 usably on a Pentium MMX, and you can get rid of the bloated IE4 shell using 98Lite. It's worked very well for me on my Socket 7 system.

I've never actually used 98lite, and legitimately forgot it existed. I also kind of want windows 95 on this machine for aesthetic purposes, since it's almost all 1996/7 parts. Ironically, I have come to realize that the games I would play on this are better played on my P3 machine anyways, so I guess this is just me wanting something for the sake of it. Quite literally, the only game I have that would benefit from a slower machine is Shadows of the Empire, and if I really want to self-harm with that game again, I can use my N64 for full painful effect.

I also can get Outlaws running a bit better on this machine than with my Voodoo 3, for whatever reason.

Shagittarius wrote on 2020-11-09, 01:37:

98SE runs great on my Pentium 90.

Thanks for the heads up.

I spent a very frustrating weekend trying to get a handful of PCI video cards to work well with Windows Multimedia Edition (Version 3.0a). It was a nightmare. All of them could produce a VGA with 16-color image, but none remained completely stable at higher resolutions with a 256-color depth.

My Prolink card with a Cirrus Logic GD5446 chip performs the best (as long as you don’t use a .bmp as a desktop background) using Win 3.0 drivers for the GD5426/28. It provides good color reproduction with my test bitmaps, but the default palette looks very saturated compared to the palettes produced by the other cards.

lolo799 wrote on 2020-11-07, 19:57:

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-11-07, 14:53:

Spent a few hours last night working on my ThinkPads -

A) Tried to install BeOS R5 on the 560E - no dice, the machine does not seem to boot off PCMCIA ATAPI, and the boot floppy does not seem to support PCMCIA CDROMs - have to find an alternative way to get the machine to boot.

You can try with BeWrite from http://euc.jp/beos/beware.en.html, or using the Personal Edition would also make it easy to install BeOS.

Hm...not sure if its the ISO image from WinWorld, or something is up with BeWrite, but it seems to only work with BeOS 5 Personal (my guess is that it can't find the BFS filesystem on the CD or something). However, BeOS R5 Personal seems to lock up on load, so I am not sure what was going on.

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-11-09, 18:26:

lolo799 wrote on 2020-11-07, 19:57:

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-11-07, 14:53:

Spent a few hours last night working on my ThinkPads -

A) Tried to install BeOS R5 on the 560E - no dice, the machine does not seem to boot off PCMCIA ATAPI, and the boot floppy does not seem to support PCMCIA CDROMs - have to find an alternative way to get the machine to boot.

You can try with BeWrite from http://euc.jp/beos/beware.en.html, or using the Personal Edition would also make it easy to install BeOS.

Hm...not sure if its the ISO image from WinWorld, or something is up with BeWrite, but it seems to only work with BeOS 5 Personal (my guess is that it can't find the BFS filesystem on the CD or something). However, BeOS R5 Personal seems to lock up on load, so I am not sure what was going on.

How did you install the PE? Is it correctly located on your hdd, and how do you try to boot it?
If you press space (or shift) during the start of the loading process, you will get a boot menu with options such as a safe mode.
BeOS also outputs logging data from the serial port 1 if you press F1 during loading.

Spent a good chunk of yesterday messing around with the SHSUCD utilities in FreeDOS on my Versa M/75, apparently that DVD-ROM upgrade makes for a VERY fast rip to ISO. Did all of "Under a Killing Moon" and "Castles II" yesterday. Trying to find my ISO of Freddy Pharkas with Speech next.

Under a Killing Moon lead to a cool discovery about the WSS compatible CS4231 chipset, there apparently IS A way to get FM Audio and Digital sound out of that chip alone apparently because "Under a Killing Moon" Supports and makes use of both. I've been tinkering with WSS for quite awhile on this laptop and never thought that was even possible with it given all the problems I've had getting things like WSSXLAT just to get SB compatible audio out of it in FreeDOS (which I've still not pulled off yet). Also the last time I had it apart (about 2 weeks ago) I decided to pull the PCMCIA Drive cage to take a look at the sound circuit (only part of the motherboard I did not look at.....) well.....it indeed has a Crystal CS4231-KQ chipset in it, but I don't see any FM chips anywhere so it must be the 4231 doing the audio in software. Looking at the files on the disks it does have some form of OPL3 Emulation apparently because these disks are specifically for the Versa M/75 and there is an OPL3.DRV and OPL3.CFG file on those diskettes....problem is getting them working in DOS or working with WSSXLAT. Toying with maybe making another HDD with just a bare Windows 3.1 setup that I can slap the drivers onto directly and see if I can get OPL3 to work.through Windows 3.1 first so I can figure out what exactly is going on.

So making some headway making sense of this computer's weirdo audio setup. What's funny is there is no OPL3 emulation on the original HDD for it (Which I still have and is an annoying DRIVESPC compressed drive that's about 500 MB in size (250MB X2). What I'd love to do is maybe take a stab at figuring out how to get all this working switchable between SB and WSS Modes in DOS....maybe even attempt to make some things myself if-so inclined enough.

lolo799 wrote on 2020-11-09, 19:38:

How did you install the PE? Is it correctly located on your hdd, and how do you try to boot it? If you press space (or shift) du […]
Show full quote

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-11-09, 18:26:

lolo799 wrote on 2020-11-07, 19:57:

You can try with BeWrite from http://euc.jp/beos/beware.en.html, or using the Personal Edition would also make it easy to install BeOS.

Hm...not sure if its the ISO image from WinWorld, or something is up with BeWrite, but it seems to only work with BeOS 5 Personal (my guess is that it can't find the BFS filesystem on the CD or something). However, BeOS R5 Personal seems to lock up on load, so I am not sure what was going on.

How did you install the PE? Is it correctly located on your hdd, and how do you try to boot it?
If you press space (or shift) during the start of the loading process, you will get a boot menu with options such as a safe mode.
BeOS also outputs logging data from the serial port 1 if you press F1 during loading.

Rawrite did a CD content copy off R5 PE, and it was booted from Win98SE using loadbeos.

I'll probably need to spend some time looking at the boot args - the 560E that I have on-hand only has 40MB of RAM, which is probably not terrific. I have a pair of 64MB EDO SODIMMs heading my way...

Although I would prefer to get Openstep working on it first.

First time posting here. Figured you all would enjoy maybe some of the things I'm doing?
Sort of a tear-down/cleanup of an AST Advantage! 9313 I've had for a while that's been sitting.

It's a Pentium non-MMX 200 with a whopping 128MB of memory. Not bad for 1997.
First photo was showing that the case itself had easy access to installing additional storage and a place for it specifically. I'd never seen this before in an OEM case. Especially not one of this vintage.
The second photo is peak 2001, thought the 9/11 background and everything was a time capsule.
Third photo is sort of the bottom where I've already taken it apart to a point - expansion cards are upside down.
Last photo is the bare board, it's got a Triton II chipset, but I can't find much more about the board or computer itself as AST is long gone.

But, it has USB on-board. Which is actually pretty great.

The machine itself came with 24MB of memory, and a 3GB HDD. It was upgraded to 128MB and 10GB by the time I got to it.

The plan is to create maybe a vintage gaming machine, or something? I haven't necessarily decided yet. It's just fun to work with these things in my off-time.

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-11-10, 06:35:

Rawrite did a CD content copy off R5 PE, and it was booted from Win98SE using loadbeos.

I'll probably need to spend some time looking at the boot args - the 560E that I have on-hand only has 40MB of RAM, which is probably not terrific. I have a pair of 64MB EDO SODIMMs heading my way...

Although I would prefer to get Openstep working on it first.

Just run the installer in Win98, it should be enough.
The minimum required is 32MB for BeOS 5.

For OpenStep, I suppose you could make a complete dump of the 560E hdd, use it with 86box (or another PC emulator) to install OpenStep and put the dump back on your hdd afterward...

Yesterday I finally got around to test some stuff that I received over the past few weeks: A Siemens Nixdorf D1064 Slot 1 motherboard, two S3 PCI video cards and the miro HiScore 3D Voodoo card. All of them do work fine. Yay 😄

Along the way I decided to try Win 98 on a SATA disk using a Sil3114 based PCI SATA controller that I had flashed with the latest non-RAID BIOS some time ago. It did not go well. Not at all. BSODs, protection faults and random lockups all the way. Maybe it's just the combination of controller and motherboard, but from what I had read about the controller before, I had higher expectations. After attaching the SATA disk to the IDE port of the motherboard using one of those el-cheapo Chinese adapters, all the issues were immediately gone.

I tried to install TinyCore 11.1 (Linux kernel 5.4) on my old Socket 7 Pentium MMX PC. I mostly want to see how "modern" I can get it to behave with those specs, while actually using the hardware that's in it, like actual S3 drivers, not VESA, loading GM/GS soundfonts, OPL3 etc. I got it to play nicely with everything easily except sound on my AWE32 CT3910. Maybe I should go for another distro, maybe an older one as well... Any recommendations?

I repaired 2 more CDROMS, and built not one, not two, but THREE 486 DX2/66 machines. These were in various states of working order, the last one had some corrosion on the I/O controller - conversely that port was dead and the card was not revivable. Repalced all the batteries with Li-On 3.6vs and I also built an SX-40.

Lots of retrobriting, listed three machines on eBay (P-MMX, 386, 486) and already got an offer on the 386.

Two of the 486s will need parts (I have no more sound cards or VLB cards) so I will have to source some. They will also be listed for sale when done - Wife wants some money to offset the purchasing of my classic car last week 🤣.

Had time to get to work on my old stuff for the first time in a couple of weeks. Nothing big, lots of small stuff:

- installed the Chill MIDI interface (for Waveblaster-type cards) I assembled weeks ago in my big audio setup, so I can select it on my A-880 and feed output to my mixer for recording. Will use that sometime over the next few days to do some requested recordings of a Terratec Dream GSWave 😀
- troubleshooted why I couldn't play MIDI on my partner's Roland FP-7 digital piano. Very simple: turns out I somehow mixed up input and output. Switched cables round and works perfectly - although Doom2 sounds weird on piano 😜 Now I need to check if input is also working as my eldest son has taught himself to play Coffin Dance on the piano and I'm sure he'd love to hear it over some sound modules.
- tested some hardware I acquired over the past few weeks. VLB WD 90C33 VGA and UMC multi-I/O (with dual IDE) work perfectly - although turns out I already had exactly the same UMC card in my testbench. Still, decent workhorse, so worth having two.
- made a list of drivers I need to download to test more stuff.
- gotten so frustrated with my main 486 DOS system I've decided to temporarily decommission it until I figure out what is wrong. Strange stuff; some games hang at boot, in some games AdLib is totally garbled - but it's perfect in others... obvious troubleshooting step is to move hardware from this system (with U5S-33 CPU) to my testbench with Cx5x86. Motherboards are almost identical UMC-chipset VLB, so should be simple enough to narrow down where the problem is.