Murugan wrote:

I will post some pics this evening.
Is the board something special?

Well, it's one of just two boards with Voodoo 3 onboard, and the rev.2.0 is pretty much the ideal BX uATX board, apart from lack of AGP (because they connected the V3 to AGP, not PCI which would have been much better).

Yesterday I put in 256mb RAM instead of the original 64MB
I think it's still stock or close to stock.
The only thing I noticed,is the long POST/PB screen.

That could be a few error messages that get splashed-over. Check if HDD & FDD settings are correct, if not correcting them will speed things up. If you want more options you can get the regular retail MSI BIOS for it, but that's AMI, not Award (and some people have strong opinions on that matter). Mine will boot at 133MHz, but isn't completely stable unfortunately.

Murugan wrote:

@dionb: here you go....3-bay case.

Oh well, boring old Spheris II 😉

http://i.imgur.com/0mVSLNPl.jpg […]
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Beautiful MS-6168 rev 2.0 in all its glory.

Take a good look at the two caps next to the slot 1 obscured by the ATX power cable on this photo. They almost always fail on these boards (the rest of the big caps are just as bad, but apparently are less heavily loaded). Be prepared to replace or do so pre-emptively.

Bought this thing on eBay today:

as well as this (price was a bit steep but ok):

Fancy.

I have this wavetable ! Poorly documented on the internet sadly, there's almost no records of it 🙁

mcobit wrote:

Got this nice TA 80186 machine.

IMG-20181105-WA0095.jpeg

Ah, I see you are a man of culture as well.

Greetings from fellow Hercules fan. Love that amber!

Yesss!

I got Hexen in the mail, from a VCFED member. To save on shipping, it was packaged inside something else I bought.

This might stir up some controversy, 🤣. I honestly had decent luck with WinMe back in the day, though I found it all came down to what hardware you were running it on. Something <2 years old? Great. Anything else? Hold on tight.

Still, I'm pretty tickled to have this. 😁

Thallanor wrote:

Yesss! […]
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Yesss!

I got Hexen in the mail, from a VCFED member. To save on shipping, it was packaged inside something else I bought.

This might stir up some controversy, 🤣. I honestly had decent luck with WinMe back in the day, though I found it all came down to what hardware you were running it on. Something <2 years old? Great. Anything else? Hold on tight.

DSC_0366.JPG

Still, I'm pretty tickled to have this. 😁

Yes, I had the same experience with Vista. Why everyone else was having issues with it and hating on it I had zero problems and it was quite a nice OS for me.

Never had Win ME but recently I installed it on my K6-3 build and a Pentium 3 laptop 😀
Haven't tried it in depth so far. I just disabled system restore.

@dionb: sorry for disappointing you with the case 😵 . Gave it a good scrub yesterday. I need to find a way for cleaning the plastic top. I used a chemical on it and it interacted with the plastic 🙁 It was in dirty shape to begin with.
The caps look good but they look the same as on another MSI P3 board. There were 4 or 5 bloated.....Bad quality...

When it's assembled and cleaned again, I'll take care of the BIOS. It does give config errors.
The only thing so far I don't like about this board is the location of the V3 chip and fan. Installing another fan or heatsink interferes with the fan of the CPU.

Murugan wrote:

Never had Win ME but recently I installed it on my K6-3 build and a Pentium 3 laptop 😀
Haven't tried it in depth so far. I just disabled system restore.

Not sure why you would install Me if you would disable the only thing that makes it worth your while..

ME combined with wdm drivers is really nice. System restore on the other hand is a drag on cpu and performance, I also killed it back then.

I read about disabling the system Restore on Vogons so I did 😀
Haven't installed the unofficial SP yet.

Two tubes with some SAA1099P arrived. Were earlier than expected. China mail seems to step up its pace before christmas. 😉

Murugan wrote:

[...]

@dionb: sorry for disappointing you with the case 😵 . Gave it a good scrub yesterday. I need to find a way for cleaning the plastic top. I used a chemical on it and it interacted with the plastic 🙁 It was in dirty shape to begin with.

Been down the same path, this is what mine looked like before cleaning:

After also trying ever more potent chemicals and eventually starting to melt away the paint on one of the side panels, I gave up and threw it in the dishwasher. First run removed all the stains, the second got rid of all the smell. Can recommend - the plastic on your Spheris II should be the same as on my Squarius II.

The only thing so far I don't like about this board is the location of the V3 chip and fan. Installing another fan or heatsink interferes with the fan of the CPU.

What irritates me is the lack of mounting holes around the V3 - so you can only cool it with what will stick to it. Big passive heatsinks aren't an option.

Thallanor wrote:

Yesss!
I honestly had decent luck with WinMe back in the day, though I found it all came down to what hardware you were running it on. Something <2 years old?

I had nothing but trouble on all my personal hardware, back around 1999/2000 or when that was released.
Yet my parents had an Compaq with an 900 or mhz P3, and Gefore2-GTS. They had zero issues.
Everyone else I knew had all sorts of problems with ME as well.
Indeed you had to have the correct hardware, the correct drivers, and don't you dare change any of that.
If you upgraded the drivers or changed the hardware configuration, you would get into trouble.

liqmat wrote:

Thallanor wrote:

Yesss! […]
Show full quote

Yesss!

I got Hexen in the mail, from a VCFED member. To save on shipping, it was packaged inside something else I bought.

This might stir up some controversy, 🤣. I honestly had decent luck with WinMe back in the day, though I found it all came down to what hardware you were running it on. Something <2 years old? Great. Anything else? Hold on tight.

DSC_0366.JPG

Still, I'm pretty tickled to have this. 😁

Yes, I had the same experience with Vista. Why everyone else was having issues with it and hating on it I had zero problems and it was quite a nice OS for me.

Vista was absolutely horrible before SP1. After SP1 it was just fine.

The biggest problem I had before SP1 was the massive obvious bug with file transfers. Oh yeah, I want to let my computer take an infinite amount of time to move a folder with files from one drive to another.
Another problem was that the hardware mfgs didn't have any drivers and most of the ones that did had super buggy drivers.

The biggest problem with Vista overall was that the OEMs took Microsoft's minimum system requirements for it and then sold machines with Vista on them that had specs not even good enough to run XP well.

appiah4 wrote:

Murugan wrote:

Never had Win ME but recently I installed it on my K6-3 build and a Pentium 3 laptop 😀
Haven't tried it in depth so far. I just disabled system restore.

Not sure why you would install Me if you would disable the only thing that makes it worth your while..

"System Restore", even up to Windows 8.1 is nothing more than "maybe get your computer working well enough to recover files".

Past that it is a pile of steaming poo. Nothing ever works right again and it makes everything super flaky.

I also don't have it enabled with Windows 10. Just keep my files backed up. So much easier to just re-install Windows than to use System Restore.
If your computer gets to the point of needing a "System Restore" it is high time Windows is re-installed from scratch anyway.

Just got this AMD slot A motherboard/cpu combo, it's equipped with AMD Irongate chipset.

DFI-AK70:

Worst CPU VRM layout in terms of space-saving I've ever seen, bulgy caps also:

Murugan wrote:

I read about disabling the system Restore on Vogons so I did 😀
Haven't installed the unofficial SP yet.

I am undecided if I will install WinMe on any of my builds yet, not for dislike but because most are MS-DOS builds. But if I do, I too will be looking into the unofficial Service Packs. Heck, same thing if I go with Win95 or Win98SE. 😀

brostenen wrote:

Thallanor wrote:

I had nothing but trouble on all my personal hardware, back around 1999/2000 or when that was released.
Yet my parents had an Compaq with an 900 or mhz P3, and Gefore2-GTS. They had zero issues.

I suspect, fearing being swamped with support requests, most OEMs stuck very close to a very specific set of hardware with better driver support. That's all I've got. 😁

cyclone3d wrote:

Vista was absolutely horrible before SP1. After SP1 it was just fine.

Exactly. And I got into Vista so late in the game that it wasn't an issue for me. 😀

cyclone3d wrote:

The biggest problem with Vista overall was that the OEMs took Microsoft's minimum system requirements for it and then sold machines with Vista on them that had specs not even good enough to run XP well.

Good old "Vista Capable." I remember that. It wasn't new to Vista either, but it certainly had the biggest impact.