Re: Your favorite retro socket/platform

Posted on Today, 05:20

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Socket 3/VLB for several reasons: It works fine for most of the games I'm interested in (late 80's up to around 1995) I find tinkering with hardware from that era really fun For some reason I enjoy filling as many of the MB slots as possible with cards, and it's easier to do with these earlier …

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Re: 3.3V Supplemental PCI Power Connector on AT Motherboard

Posted on Yesterday, 05:32

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I suppose you could do that, there are some AT power supplies (usually from OEM systems) with the additional 3.3V power connector, and it is in fact 3 +3.3V and 3 GND. On the other hand, I never had a problem with PCI video cards when leaving that connector unplugged, are you sure that is the …

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Re: AT PSU Choices for 486, advice on the better gamble

Posted on 2020-07-11, 22:43

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

CWT used to make power supplies for Antec in the early 00's, they're usually well designed but had a long love affair with Fuhjyyu capacitors, so a recap will likely be necessary, even if it's new. If you go with the Delta, just clean it up and check the fan and caps. It probably uses 100% Japanese …

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Re: Is Cache Tag size to be seen as minimum or exact value

Posted on 2020-07-08, 17:50

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

At least one of my 486 boards does not work with a 32K x 8 tag when configured for 128KB, so you need to test.

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Re: Whi is my socket 3 soooo slow?

Posted on 2020-07-08, 16:15

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Personally I never managed to get a POD83 working with L1 in Write-Back mode on that board, even though DX4 and 5x86 work fine. But I have an older revision of the board so it may be something that got fixed later. So yes, I would suggest setting L1 to WT and also get the latest BIOS if possible …

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Re: VLSI 311 386SX Mainboard won’t boot no beep but...

Posted on 2020-07-06, 21:04

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just remove the capacitor, don't short the points afterwards or you'll have the same problem! The power supply refuses to turn on precisely because the cap is shorted, and you want to remove that short. If it works after removing the cap and you want to keep using the board, I recommend replacing …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2020-07-06, 20:57

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Still fighting with my VLB IO controller. I think I finally have the beast tamed to where it's not forgetting my HDD every game launch. Looks like it's jumpers where originally set for 50mhz bus speed. Changing that to 30mhz and one other jumper (1F0/170 to just 1F0 something like that? I forget …

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Re: CF Card Won't Save Partitions on 486

Posted on 2020-07-06, 20:48

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Do you have MS-DOS 6.22 installation floppies? If so, you can try this to let DOS do the partition creation: - Boot from disk 1, run the FDISK version there and make sure there are no partitions in the CF card. If there are, delete them - Reboot and let the installer run, once it detects that no …

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Re: CF Card Won't Save Partitions on 486

Posted on 2020-07-06, 20:32

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What size is the CF card? I assume you are trying to use DOS 6 with partitions < 2GB each, or are you using a version of DOS taken from Win 9x in order to support FAT32? Also, make sure you run 'fdisk /mbr' in order to write the Master Boot Record to the CF card, they usually need that in order to …

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2020-07-06, 20:17

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Those VXPro PCChips motherboards were legendary around 1996-1997 due to how incredibly cheap they were compared to the alternatives. Everyone I knew that wanted to upgrade their PC but didn't have a lot of money got one at the time. I had one myself of course, paired with a 6x86 PR150+ (which was …

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Re: 386SX board identification

Posted on 2020-07-04, 20:15

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Those shorter Baby AT boards suck, in particular when using long slots such as VLB. Usually they don't provide any support in the part closer to the front of the case and will bend horribly when installing VLB cards if one is not careful. In some cases if you're lucky there are one or two extra …

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Re: 386SX board identification

Posted on 2020-07-03, 19:11

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Also integrated HD and FDD controllers? I'd imagine an OEM too, good quality mainboard indeed even if I don't imagine to find a case for such dimensions.. :D It's just a standard Baby AT motherboard. It should fit on any AT mini-tower or desktop case from that era (maybe not on those that have …

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2020-07-03, 18:42

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Found this interesting board. On the back is name Elpina, which is also manufacturer of a COAST module. Size of RAM is unknown (no stickers) and I have never seen CPU like this. I have to take one of my two working AT PSUs and test everything. Elpina == PC Chips That seems to be one of their 486 …

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Re: Radeon 9800 Pro VRAM damage ?

Posted on 2020-07-01, 21:16

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Yeah, probably bad memory, I've seen it a lot, especially on early versions of that card. Regarding the shim issue, it's interesting to notice that later 9800 Pros do not seem to have that problem. I have a Dell-branded R9800 Pro that has a 2008 (!) date code and the shim on that one doesn't prevent …

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Re: Collecting rants

Posted on 2020-06-30, 19:58

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My guess is that adding people who are not even retro computer hobbyists to the pool of people who want to get these parts (and even more so to sell at a higher price later) are the worst reason why this is getting so expensive now. It's clear to see when looking at how much more for instance 3dfx …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-06-28, 05:12

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

That's a very nice looking case, kingcake! I wonder what was the link between Magitronic and Gigabyte... almost every Gigabyte board I've come across from the early-mid 90's had a Magitronic label.

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Re: Computer projects you would have liked to have been a part of ?

Posted on 2020-06-28, 04:59

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by TheMobRules

in Milliways

in Milliways

That what I use to think about Sun Microsystems too until I visited there main facility. It was not that great. However today with Oracle culture they should be more driven with a set goal. lol, the only goal Oracle has for the Sun/Java stuff is the same they have for everything they acquire: to …

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Re: Bought these games today

Posted on 2020-06-26, 20:15

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by TheMobRules

in Milliways

in Milliways

I hadn't heard of The Legacy until recently, when I got a copy that was in very poor condition, but I managed to archive the floppies. I only saw some seconds of gameplay in YouTube but didn't want to spoil myself since I am interested in playing it. Looks like a Survival Horror + RPG thing, not …

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Re: Computer projects you would have liked to have been a part of ?

Posted on 2020-06-26, 18:47

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by TheMobRules

in Milliways

in Milliways

Game programming in the 2D era when you directly programmed the hardware, not using 3rd party APIs in cumbersome modern OSes. I think the Atari 2600 was too limited for my taste, but anything from the A8/C64 up through the early 1990s would have been fun to be involved with. Mid-90s everything got …

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Re: Collecting rants

Posted on 2020-06-23, 17:35

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by TheMobRules

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

About raising prices, a few times I had a relatively uncommon item item for sale at a fair price, and there were like 10 watchers but no buyers for months. So I raised the price, and it eventually sold anyways. Why raise the price? Because the hardware is not getting more common by the day, and I'm …

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