Nowadays I'm into maintaining my Amiga gear. Found six of my old joysticks, three arcade sticks and three flight-yoke type ones! The two were already fully working, I restored and cleaned the other three, will change a damaged 9pin female connector on the fourth later today. Got an external Amiga floppy adapter and used a PC drive to write new floppies, in order to test the stock Amiga drives which I (apparently correctly) suspected to have gone bad. Turns out that both the Epson SMD-400 and the Chinon A500 internal drives I had are inconsistent, even after trying to service them. Strange, given that the Chinon used to work last time I used it before packing the A500 away (several, possibly too many years ago!), yet a cleanup-recap-lubrication didn't revive it 🙁 Still haven't tested my A1200's TEAC drive, but from what I recall it was dying as well, or just misaligned - will have to repair or replace. The Epson did get a bit better after a thorough cleaning and a recap, as it wouldn't read anything initially, still it gets read errors where it shouldn't. Modified a PC Alps DF354H911C for internal Amiga use (DC, RY, DS0, HD switch signals) and it seems to perform pretty decently and silently, even with ready signal-sensitive demos such as Arte [SNT]. Now to see how it will fit inside the A500rev5, will have to do something about the eject button; .stl files are available on the Internet for eject buttons which fit this particular drive but I don't have a 3D printer! Apparently they also sell such buttons at amigastore etc, but I guess I'm really impatient 😜 Finally, while searching for kit in the storage, I found another Gotek (the original in the classic black 3.5" plastic case) which I got a couple of years ago for PC use, but never bothered to unpack and test it. Soldered a pin header and serial-flashed it with FlashFloppy, to use as DF1: with the external adapter, as an easy way to get ADFs on real disks with X-Copy.

I'll be doing a bit of refurbishing on my P133 system, so I made myself some custom USB header and PS/2 mouse brackets for the QDI Explorer I motherboard in it. I will install them this weekend, that means installing Universal USB drivers for Windows 95 as well.

It also has a battery damaged speed indicator LED panel that was ruined by a leaky battery so it will no longer retain speed settings. The ruined traces run under the actual LED display so I may end up removing the circuit altogether to desolder the LED panel, and see if I can directly solder on an external battery holder for it..

pan069 wrote on 2020-12-03, 06:00:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-03, 02:54:

Went through another Dark Forces mission. I'm currently at mission 9: Nar Shaddaa. This game has been so far really funny, however I had to patch it to support mouselook, since I can't play with keyboard only anymore.

I started playing a few months ago and got frustrated with the (seemingly) unnecessarily dark corners that are part of some levels. Even the first level has this dark cave part where you have jump across, I find that very frustrating. The levels don't seem to flow like they do e.g. in Doom.

Other than that, there is a lot to like about this game.

Yes, the darkness in some areas of the game is a bit too much, but it is not too frequent (there are 3 or 4 dark sections that I can remember, none is too large) and it can be fixed with brightness controls. Also using the mini map, which is very useful in this game. The fact that the levels do not flow like in Doom is cool for me, since each level is supposed to be a separate mission, taking place in different worlds each one, that not only keep the aesthetics of Star Wars, but also look like the buildings you are supposed to be in (jails, processing plants, storage warehouses, etc.). I really like that. I also like that there are specific objectives in each mission, not just find keys and run to the exit.

Made a 3.5" 1.44meg floppy drive holder out of parts laying about for my Redstone XT Turbo system. Painted the fascia matte black to match the floppy drives and 5.35" 1.2meg floppy drive fascia.

I decided to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on my Core i5 experimental system. I had to rearrange my PCI cards due to a weird IRQ conflict between my network card and the motherboard's SATA controller. I eventually got it to work with my SATA SSD (32 GB), SATA DVD drives, Reatlek network card, AudioPCI sound card, and a Matrox G200 video card.

I also ran a short benchmark. I love comparing the performance of a modern system to those available when an old OS originally got released.

I only wish I knew how to force Windows 3.1x to use widescreen resolutions. WINOS2 drivers can manage it, but the Matrox drivers for Windows 3.1x just don't seem to offer anything other than a 4:3 aspect ratio.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-03, 15:12:

pan069 wrote on 2020-12-03, 06:00:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-03, 02:54:

Went through another Dark Forces mission. I'm currently at mission 9: Nar Shaddaa. This game has been so far really funny, however I had to patch it to support mouselook, since I can't play with keyboard only anymore.

I started playing a few months ago and got frustrated with the (seemingly) unnecessarily dark corners that are part of some levels. Even the first level has this dark cave part where you have jump across, I find that very frustrating. The levels don't seem to flow like they do e.g. in Doom.

Other than that, there is a lot to like about this game.

Yes, the darkness in some areas of the game is a bit too much, but it is not too frequent (there are 3 or 4 dark sections that I can remember, none is too large) and it can be fixed with brightness controls. Also using the mini map, which is very useful in this game. The fact that the levels do not flow like in Doom is cool for me, since each level is supposed to be a separate mission, taking place in different worlds each one, that not only keep the aesthetics of Star Wars, but also look like the buildings you are supposed to be in (jails, processing plants, storage warehouses, etc.). I really like that. I also like that there are specific objectives in each mission, not just find keys and run to the exit.

The sewers really caused me a lot of pain, and the blood moon. I had no idea where I was going, but it is a very fun game to play.

Finally moved, all my computer stuff is in disarray. Most of it is going to stay hopelessly lost in boxes and stuffed into PC cases until I have a plan for storage.

I did get my file server and now 2 out of my 3 daily-use desktops up and running though. Typing this from my WinXP machine, which being a Phenom2/GTX285 sits somewhere between "overpowered XP" and "outdated modern PC".

Currently engaged in the slow process of adding a new hard drive to the file server. I hesitated to spend the money, but it's a good time to buy cheap dodgy hard drives on Amazon since returns are extended through January.
I'm trying to rearrange the collection of drives and what data is on each of them without losing recoverability if one of the drives blows up on me in the middle of the process. I'm also verifying that the copied data has no errors, so as I chart out the whole operation it feels like it's going to take longer than going to the moon.

I've been spending a while now trying to figure out how to get my Dell Audigy 2 ZS working in tandem with my Vortex 2 card so that I can properly use daemon tools for CD audio. My DVD Drive is picky as all hell about burned disks.

In the mail i received a cannister of Deoxit D5 which i purchase one day ago.

Now iam trying out an 486 motherboard with Intel DX2 66 5volt with 2 VLB card..
The harddisk iam using isnt setup right. Previous owner formatted the drive with 1025 cilinder. So other controller cards wont recognize it.
But only controller will and having a Super bios rom on the card.. So you have to setup diskdrives and harddrive manually in to this bios chip
Trying to backup the drive, some of the software can be very handy for future reference. That re-partition the drive and reformat is, how it should. Then using the drive for one of my machines later. And will using it for test purposes for now.

psychz wrote on 2020-12-03, 12:39:

Nowadays I'm into maintaining my Amiga gear. Found six of my old joysticks, three arcade sticks and three flight-yoke type ones! The two were already fully working, I restored and cleaned the other three, will change a damaged 9pin female connector on the fourth later today. Got an external Amiga floppy adapter and used a PC drive to write new floppies, in order to test the stock Amiga drives which I (apparently correctly) suspected to have gone bad. Turns out that both the Epson SMD-400 and the Chinon A500 internal drives I had are inconsistent, even after trying to service them. Strange, given that the Chinon used to work last time I used it before packing the A500 away (several, possibly too many years ago!), yet a cleanup-recap-lubrication didn't revive it 🙁 Still haven't tested my A1200's TEAC drive, but from what I recall it was dying as well, or just misaligned - will have to repair or replace. The Epson did get a bit better after a thorough cleaning and a recap, as it wouldn't read anything initially, still it gets read errors where it shouldn't. Modified a PC Alps DF354H911C for internal Amiga use (DC, RY, DS0, HD switch signals) and it seems to perform pretty decently and silently, even with ready signal-sensitive demos such as Arte [SNT]. Now to see how it will fit inside the A500rev5, will have to do something about the eject button; .stl files are available on the Internet for eject buttons which fit this particular drive but I don't have a 3D printer! Apparently they also sell such buttons at amigastore etc, but I guess I'm really impatient 😜 Finally, while searching for kit in the storage, I found another Gotek (the original in the classic black 3.5" plastic case) which I got a couple of years ago for PC use, but never bothered to unpack and test it. Soldered a pin header and serial-flashed it with FlashFloppy, to use as DF1: with the external adapter, as an easy way to get ADFs on real disks with X-Copy.

I bought two converter cables a couple of years ago. They were cheap, and will let you use stock PC drives on Amiga. That said, there are still the issue of modding the top side of the drives shield and find a different eject button. However, it works for 99 peecent of all floppy disks.

So I tried using 'parted' to resize a partition. What a huge mistake that was. Don't ever use 'parted' unless you enjoy being tortured for your unfamiliarity.
- It doesn't clarify ambiguities in units of measurement.
- It completely ignores your response to "Yes/No?" questions and executes the command anyway, leaving a result that's orders of magnitude different than you intended
- Changes are immediate - it doesn't buffer the changes and give you the opportunity to quit without applying them

So basically if you make a mistake, it will let you know just to tease you and then apply the changes anyway.
I accidentally shrunk the thing twice, both times saying "n" and "No" to the ensuing prompt, before getting it correct. Whatever it did, after making a seemingly correct and working resized partition in gdisk, apparently there was some damage hidden underneath. It wasn't obvious until I rebooted.

Upon rebooting the server couldn't mount that partition anymore. e2fsck now says an ext4 "superblock" got corrupted and I have no clue about that kind of thing.
I'm now cloning the whole fubared drive to an image file in the blank space on a new hard drive, which fortunately is just barely big enough to hold it. That will take 12 hours.
After that I'll reformat the fubared drive, cross my fingers and hope that SnapRAID can recover it's contents. I expect that to take just as long.
If that fails, I'll be trying to figure out how to mount the corrupted image file and get my files back out of it.

I should have taken the time to hook up a CDROM drive and used gParted. That frontend is what makes the whole thing usable. I thought 'parted' would be the same thing in text, equal in user friendliness to 'fdisk' and 'gdisk', but hoo boy was I wrong.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2020-12-03, 21:08:

I decided to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on my Core i5 experimental system. I had to rearrange my PCI cards due to a weird IRQ conflict between my network card and the motherboard's SATA controller. I eventually got it to work with my SATA SSD (32 GB), SATA DVD drives, Reatlek network card, AudioPCI sound card, and a Matrox G200 video card.

That is awesome. I'd like to set up a DOS/Win3.x machine someday, but I wasn't planning to do it with modern hardware. It's cool that you got it working so well, unfortunate that modern monitor support is problematic.

Won a bid on a Satellite Pro T2155CDS.

shamino wrote on 2020-12-04, 13:46:

fosterwj03 wrote on 2020-12-03, 21:08:

I decided to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on my Core i5 experimental system. I had to rearrange my PCI cards due to a weird IRQ conflict between my network card and the motherboard's SATA controller. I eventually got it to work with my SATA SSD (32 GB), SATA DVD drives, Reatlek network card, AudioPCI sound card, and a Matrox G200 video card.

That is awesome. I'd like to set up a DOS/Win3.x machine someday, but I wasn't planning to do it with modern hardware. It's cool that you got it working so well, unfortunate that modern monitor support is problematic.

Yes, DOS/Windows 3.x work pretty well on modern systems as long as the motherboard's UEFI has the Compatibility Support Module (CSM) that allows booting into legacy OS's. My Haswell system, for example, also works with my PCI devices in DOS and Windows. The Haswell motherboard has 3 PCI slots, so I can use audio, video, and network cards supported by Windows 3.x. I just lose assured access to the optical drives (AHCI DOS drivers aren't that good). I usually have to resort to loading ISOs instead.

I don't mind using 4:3 aspect ratios with these old OS's too much. My monitor usually conforms (letter boxes on the sides), and it has a pretty good scaler for non-native resolutions. I just like to use all of the screen at the correct ratio as often as possible.

Like I wrote above, OS/2's copy of Windows 3.x (WINOS2) is capable of widescreen modes if OS/2 uses a widescreen resolution (I'll have to take and post a screenshot the next time I boot into OS/2), so Windows 3.x can obviously handle it. It comes down to the drivers. In this case, Matrox didn't write their Win 3.x driver to use what was then an obscure aspect ratio as far as I can tell.

Regardless, I do like using Windows 3.x for pure nostalgia. It can do less and less productive stuff as the days go on (Internet access even with a proxy server still isn't great), but it can still do a lot. I had Windows 3.1 on my first PC, so it has a special place in my heart.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2020-12-04, 17:18:

Like I wrote above, OS/2's copy of Windows 3.x (WINOS2) is capable of widescreen modes if OS/2 uses a widescreen resolution (I'll have to take and post a screenshot the next time I boot into OS/2), so Windows 3.x can obviously handle it. It comes down to the drivers.

It should be noted that Windows 3.0 was shipped with a CGA 640x200 driver, ie. 3.2:1 - much wider than modern 21:9 (2.333:1) "Ultra Wide" stuff.

Grzyb wrote on 2020-12-04, 17:51:

It should be noted that Windows 3.0 was shipped with a CGA 640x200 driver, ie. 3.2:1 - much wider than modern 21:9 (2.333:1) "Ultra Wide" stuff.

What kind of monitor do you suppose would have displayed that resolution natively? Did anyone make picture tubes that wide back in the CGA era?

Correction: I guess early portables used some really wide LCD screens, so that resolution would probably have worked with them.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2020-12-04, 18:12:

What kind of monitor do you suppose would have displayed that resolution natively? Did anyone make picture tubes that wide back in the CGA era?
Correction: I guess early portables used some really wide LCD screens, so that resolution would probably have worked with them.

Monitors were normally 4:3, but the point is: Windows, from the very beginning, was designed to handle graphics modes with horizontal/vertical pixel count other than 4:3.
And yes, displays other than 4:3 also did exist, I think mostly in palmtops - see eg. Atari Portfolio.

Grzyb wrote on 2020-12-04, 18:26:

fosterwj03 wrote on 2020-12-04, 18:12:

What kind of monitor do you suppose would have displayed that resolution natively? Did anyone make picture tubes that wide back in the CGA era?
Correction: I guess early portables used some really wide LCD screens, so that resolution would probably have worked with them.

Monitors were normally 4:3, but the point is: Windows, from the very beginning, was designed to handle graphics modes with horizontal/vertical pixel count other than 4:3.
And yes, displays other than 4:3 also did exist, I think mostly in palmtops - see eg. Atari Portfolio.

I believe someone on the forums posted an example of that not too long ago; a Matrox G200 under Windows 3.1.

Many Matrox cards have a software programable RAMDAC that allow the user to specify custom resolutions by adjusting the signal properties in the MGA.MON file that comes with the drivers. That's how I managed to set 1080p resolutions in Windows NT 3.51 and OS/2 Warp. In those OS's, simply selecting a monitor profile that links to a custom resolution brings up new options in the display settings dialog boxes.

Unfortunately, the Windows 3.1 Matrox drivers seem hard-coded for a small variety of 4:3 resolutions. Changing the MGA.MON file and selecting a custom defined monitor profile does not change the resolution options in Windows 3.1.

Grzyb wrote on 2020-12-04, 17:51:

fosterwj03 wrote on 2020-12-04, 17:18:

Like I wrote above, OS/2's copy of Windows 3.x (WINOS2) is capable of widescreen modes if OS/2 uses a widescreen resolution (I'll have to take and post a screenshot the next time I boot into OS/2), so Windows 3.x can obviously handle it. It comes down to the drivers.

It should be noted that Windows 3.0 was shipped with a CGA 640x200 driver, ie. 3.2:1 - much wider than modern 21:9 (2.333:1) "Ultra Wide" stuff.

WIth square pixels yes, but this driver was for rectangular pixels, so 4:3 after all.

Can't comment on when first non-4:3 support on PC appeared (Win2k with 16:9 was my first deviation from it), but this certainly wasn't it.

My activity for this evening: playing around with my RaSCSI, a Pi hat that should turn the Pi into a simulated SCSI device. It was originally developed for Japanese X68000 systems, but later translated to English for use with early Mac systems. My idea with it is slightly different: it also supports CDRom images. So this could be my holy grail of a Gotek-like device that can emulate a CD, so no more burning CDs for installation of OSs that insist on being installed from CD.

Took a lot of messing around with my pile of Pi stuff. My oldest Pi (a Pi 1 rev B) turns out to have bad RAM, then after that the 16GB microSD card I was using turned out to also be dying. But after finding a working Pi 3 and a good 8GB microSD card everything was simple enough. Unfortunately first attempts at recognizing it on a PC weren't successful - if it was connected, the system hung on SCSI device detection. Tomorrow I'm trying a diffferent system as this one had all kinds of other issues too.