Today I repaired Soyo SY-5EAS motherboard. Voltage level on Vcore was very low, 0.7-1.1V after MOSFET.
Found broken shorted MOSFET by measuring voltage drop of gate resistor. Because MOSFET gate impedance is very high, there should be very low voltage drop. This one had several volts due to gate(1) pin was shoted to drain(2).

After MOSFET replaced this motherboard posts fine. Wonderful feeling...

jheronimus wrote on 2021-01-04, 04:29:

I've been messing around with my newly restored Supermicro P54VL-PCI board: […]
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I've been messing around with my newly restored Supermicro P54VL-PCI board:

Currently it runs Quake at 20.7 FPS (timedemo demo1) and at 22.1 FPS with Voodoo (640x480). Weirdly enough it feels very playable, but it does stutter a bit whenever there are explosions on the screen or other effects that generate a lot of particles.

Upgraded BIOS to 3.2 and tweaked all the cache/memory timings I could. Only Ext. Cache Write Burst Mode had to stay at 4-2-2-2. 3-2-2-2 would prevent Windows from booting.

Quake demo1 now runs at 23.2 fps, demo3 runs at 24 fps. Not bad, considering that a 430VX board would give 26.7 fps.

Voodoo performance actually decreased with all these changes — 20.9 FPS. I can see why it would not increase (it is operating through a bridge chip, after all).

Doom timedemo is still kind of low — 1529 realtics, 48.8 FPS. For reference — a POD 83 would perform at 44.5 fps while POD100 should give 53.4 fps.

I also tried using Tseng ET6000 on PCI for comparison — 21.5 FPS,about 1.7 FPS lower. Curious, seeing how a lot of these board were shipped with PCI videocards.

All in all this does seem like a very decent DOS machine and a slight stepup from a 486. However, it does start to look like Windows 95 and Voodoo don't belong on this system at all.

Found recently that my motherboard's bios have an ISA bus speed setting (7+Mhz) and installed a sound blaster pro 1stgen, this card works alright now, no speed issues with my pentium build and while i was at it i made a cable to connect the motherboards pc speaker output to sb pro, nice to hear pc speaker sounds again thru better speakers!
Also tried some serial ata to IDE connectors i bought from china a while ago to replace my dual compact flash adapter cause CF speed is so slow with windows98 but didn't work out like i wanted at the end so stayed with compact flash.

Living wrote on 2021-01-05, 09:56:

i feel you man, i was doing some cleaning in my appartment and look what happend to my Thinkpad 760ED after 1 year in storage: […]
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i feel you man, i was doing some cleaning in my appartment and look what happend to my Thinkpad 760ED after 1 year in storage:

it smells like some type of glue and now its shorted (no power/no lights)

the other laptops are fine, i dont know what was the problem

I have a Compaq Presario 1200 with socket 370 that I keep around mostly because of the good-sounding JBL speakers and this is EXACTLY what happened to its LCD. Only differences are it was stored away in my room for about 3 months and the panel still displays correctly despite its texture looking like it got an acid bath. No idea what the hell that is or why it even happens.

Are there any AGP 4x/8x video cards that work in an AGP 2x slot? Or should I just get a better board for that?

There are a good number of ago 4x/8x cards that will work in a 2x slot. I've used a 6200 in one of my dual P3 440bx systems. I know alot of the GeForce fx line will work in 2x and 4x slots.

Todays activity is not completely retro but definitely old - working on an old Socket AM2 based PC running as a server. I didn't intend to work on this thing, but it decided today was the day to die after running 24/7 for the past 4 years.

I'd been having some issues with the system hard freezing when transferring files across to 1 of the HDDs. It happened again over night, so assuming it may be the PCI RAID card to blame, I opened it up and replaced the card with a spare, after which the board would no longer POST. I tried everything to get it to POST and then I finally spotted it - 4 bloated & leaking capacitors! 😠

Luckily I had a spare AM2 motherboard, similar chipset and with a CPU & cooler installed that I could just throw in and be back up and running right away. The one benefit of running Ubuntu, not having to deal with Windows having to redetect everything. Only had to reconfigure my Ethernet bridge and I was good to go.

While I was at it, I decided to install the latest Ubuntu software updates after not doing it for some time. After jumping through several hoops (broken package & deleted repository) I finally succeeded, only for it to fail to install the latest kernel properly and rebooting to a kernel panic. After fixing that, I also had to restore my Apache config as the update decided to overwrite it despite the default option being not to! And this is why I don't update.... 🤣

PTherapist wrote on 2021-01-07, 00:39:

I also had to restore my Apache config as the update decided to overwrite it despite the default option being not to! And this is why I don't update.... 🤣

Ouch, this is why I moved to a homebrew version, with Valet+, nginx and mysql all in one package. So far so good. macOS updates also used to f**k my apache settings so I decided to change. If you are interested in a linux version of Valet+ : https://valetlinux.plus/docs/1.0/index

The macOS version is fine, I needed that to work with Magento, but I will try out Docker for the next project since the majority of the devs at work like to use it.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-07, 00:37:

There are a good number of ago 4x/8x cards that will work in a 2x slot. I've used a 6200 in one of my dual P3 440bx systems. I know alot of the GeForce fx line will work in 2x and 4x slots.

Is FX5200 or FX5600 better?

https://www.gpuzoo.com/Compare/NVIDIA_GeForce … GeForce_FX_5600

Just from reading this I'd say the fx5600 but I kinda skipped over that era of graphics card when I was younger

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-07, 01:54:

https://www.gpuzoo.com/Compare/NVIDIA_GeForce … GeForce_FX_5600

Just from reading this I'd say the fx5600 but I kinda skipped over that era of graphics card when I was younger

Link doesn't work

Sorry about that I'll try again.

It works now somehow I messed up copying and pasting that link.

https://www.gpuzoo.com/Compare/NVIDIA_GeForce … eForce_FX_5600/

RetroLizard wrote on 2021-01-07, 01:39:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-07, 00:37:

There are a good number of ago 4x/8x cards that will work in a 2x slot. I've used a 6200 in one of my dual P3 440bx systems. I know alot of the GeForce fx line will work in 2x and 4x slots.

Is FX5200 or FX5600 better?

Depends on what you want. FX5200 is passively cooled and if you find a 128-bit model it will be more than good enough for any 2x AGP platform.

That said, FX5600 is the faster card, obviously. That performance difference will likely not be observable on an AGP 2x platform though, as mentioned above.

The words fx5200 and "better" are rarely seen together unless talking about what is better than the fx5200, which is almost everything 🤣

Swapped the floppy drive in my Austin laptop with a NOS drive and the heads aren't seeking. Gotta look at that and see what went wrong (possible the drive head motor had seized up, but I digress).

Living wrote on 2021-01-05, 09:56:

i feel you man, i was doing some cleaning in my appartment and look what happend to my Thinkpad 760ED after 1 year in storage: […]
Show full quote

i feel you man, i was doing some cleaning in my appartment and look what happend to my Thinkpad 760ED after 1 year in storage:

it smells like some type of glue and now its shorted (no power/no lights)

the other laptops are fine, i dont know what was the problem

Here is a good video explaining what causes this and also ways to fix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbrW7uUYpkw

I spent some time over the last few days re-installing Windows 95 Retail on my Core i5 overkill PC. I jacked up the previous install trying to get a Matrox G550 PCIe to play nicely with Win95 (in short, it didn’t).

This time, I edited the Windows registry to remove all of the calls for Nvidia’s helper apps and taskbar icons to stop the .DLL error messages every time the system boots. Windows loads the drivers for my GeForce 6800 GS (PCIe) quietly now.

If I had one complaint about Windows 95 Retail, it’s that 8 GB of hard drive space (partitioned into four 2 GB drives) just isn’t enough for a fair number of Windows 9x apps, games, and media files. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but FAT16 has definitely gotten long in the tooth. I have Windows 95 OSR2 on a 64 GB SSD using FAT32, and I don’t feel any storage constraints with it at all.

I also didn’t realize that Windows 95 shipped without any support for OpenGL in 1995. Not a problem since Microsoft released an OpenGL update for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 later; just odd, though.

All that said, I’ve got Windows 95 back the way I like it and mostly stable.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-01-07, 06:28:

RetroLizard wrote on 2021-01-07, 01:39:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-07, 00:37:

There are a good number of ago 4x/8x cards that will work in a 2x slot. I've used a 6200 in one of my dual P3 440bx systems. I know alot of the GeForce fx line will work in 2x and 4x slots.

Is FX5200 or FX5600 better?

Depends on what you want. FX5200 is passively cooled and if you find a 128-bit model it will be more than good enough for any 2x AGP platform.

That said, FX5600 is the faster card, obviously. That performance difference will likely not be observable on an AGP 2x platform though, as mentioned above.

So, I have this card lying around, which appears to be a ATi Radeon 9700?

According to this http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.h … versalagp30card, ATi Radeon 9700 is compatible with an AGP 2x slot in theory, but it doesn't seem to work in my i440BX board. Maybe it's dead?

RetroLizard wrote on 2021-01-08, 05:51:

So, I have this card lying around, which appears to be a ATi Radeon 9700? […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2021-01-07, 06:28:

RetroLizard wrote on 2021-01-07, 01:39:

Is FX5200 or FX5600 better?

Depends on what you want. FX5200 is passively cooled and if you find a 128-bit model it will be more than good enough for any 2x AGP platform.

That said, FX5600 is the faster card, obviously. That performance difference will likely not be observable on an AGP 2x platform though, as mentioned above.

So, I have this card lying around, which appears to be a ATi Radeon 9700?

According to this http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.h … versalagp30card, ATi Radeon 9700 is compatible with an AGP 2x slot in theory, but it doesn't seem to work in my i440BX board. Maybe it's dead?

Not to discourage your efforts but it wouldn't be uncommon for a Radeon 9X00 series to be DOA.

Shagittarius wrote on 2021-01-08, 05:53:

RetroLizard wrote on 2021-01-08, 05:51:

So, I have this card lying around, which appears to be a ATi Radeon 9700? […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2021-01-07, 06:28:

Depends on what you want. FX5200 is passively cooled and if you find a 128-bit model it will be more than good enough for any 2x AGP platform.

That said, FX5600 is the faster card, obviously. That performance difference will likely not be observable on an AGP 2x platform though, as mentioned above.

So, I have this card lying around, which appears to be a ATi Radeon 9700?

According to this http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.h … versalagp30card, ATi Radeon 9700 is compatible with an AGP 2x slot in theory, but it doesn't seem to work in my i440BX board. Maybe it's dead?

Not to discourage your efforts but it wouldn't be uncommon for a Radeon 9X00 series to be DOA.

Ah, a shame. Are there any visible signs that it's dead, other then plugging it in and checking?