Re: Reading unmapped I/O ports on old PC hardware

Posted on 2018-06-20, 21:12

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

On my 486 it seems that unused ports below $100 return 0, above that return 255. On my AT the most common result is 3. (I used a QBASIC program to read the IO ports and display the result. Maybe QBASIC was also doing some port I/O which resulted in 3 being on the bus)

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Re: Something is slowing my machine down

Posted on 2018-06-17, 23:25

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't see how a SCSI card would be causing a lower framerate in games. If 3D games with hardware acceleration are the only things running slowly then I would suspect a video card/driver issue. Did you benchmark any games with software rendering to see if they get a normal score for a Pentium 1? …

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Re: Is Win NT 3.51 any good for gaming?

Posted on 2018-06-08, 06:14

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

NT3.51 has no directx/directdraw which is unfortunate from a games perspective. It shipped with minimal OpenGL support (version 1.0, no texturing). I'm not sure how well it performs for doing 2D graphics. Doing screen updates from a memory buffer with GDI seems to be pretty slow, at least with the …

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Re: I'm Looking for a List of Software That Can Make a Full Disk Backup of Windows 98 SE and XP that Runs on Modern OSes

Posted on 2018-06-08, 05:54

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

WinXP: use Roadkil's sector editor to dump a disk image or the Raw Copy program to copy directly to another HDD http://www.roadkil.net/listing.php/C2/Disk%20Utilities (of course you can easily muck things up with a sector editor so be careful!) Linux: not sure but I think the DD command can dump an …

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Re: skt A hard lockup after upgrade to faster cpu

Posted on 2018-05-31, 04:32

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What about dropping the FSB from 200 to 166, or 166 to 133 to underclock and see if it becomes stable? And how about a memory test?

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Re: Can anyone identify this old Compaq desktop case?

Posted on 2018-05-31, 03:59

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a case that looks similar to that. It originally had a MicroATX PIII board in it, and a small power supply rated for only 130W or something (I believe it is FlexATX size).

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Re: 80386 BIOS image collection

Posted on 2018-05-26, 22:04

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

#17 ID: Dell 386SX-33 with 2x 72-pin SIMMs, ISA riser slot chipset: VLSI 82C311, Cirrus Logic GD5420 BIOS: 27C010 EPROM containing Quadtel VGA BIOS and Phoenix system BIOS 02/09/93 Copy code to clipboard 1 Jostens Learning Corporation 386/33SX 2 Copyright (C) 1990-1992 Dell Computer Corporation

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Re: Found a pretty motherboard, can we get it working?

Posted on 2018-05-26, 07:05

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I actually have the 180MHz version of this motherboard. So if you were referring to selling just the breakout board separately, I'm afraid that wouldn't make sense. BTW, it can boot with an ISA video card instead of the built-in video (but maybe not a PCI card?)

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Re: Found a pretty motherboard, can we get it working?

Posted on 2018-05-25, 02:45

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have the breakout board that connects to that motherboard. It says "MGX-1 MIDI BOARD" on it, although it has VGA, s-vid/composite, and analog audio (no midi). The cable has 20 conductors but only 19 pins (pin 20 is blocked off). I can tell the pin assignment for VGA signals …

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Re: Upgrade paths for the 386 - Yield?

Posted on 2018-05-17, 06:55

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I did that for my Win95 installs because of how many damn times I needed to reformat. It saved much time. For me it was Win98. I reinstalled so many times that I memorized the CD key. And it's been a few years but... I can recall the last 20 digits but I'm having trouble with the first 5, LOL …

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Re: Windows 3.11 + PCMCIA ethernet?

Posted on 2018-05-17, 06:32

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used an Eiger PC LAN card a.k.a. EPX10BT (has some Fujitsu chipset in it) under WfWG. It also has DOS, OS/2, Novell, Win95, WinNT drivers (IIRC it even worked under Win2K) Be sure to get the matching dongle.

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Re: Best Videoformat for 486 DOS-Machine?

Posted on 2018-05-06, 19:49

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Cinepak is probably a good one for older CPUs, or Microsoft Video-1 (faster but worse compression?). There are some shareware DOS programs that can play AVI like QuickView Pro and SEA. Encoding a video is easy on newer Windows by using VirtualDub or AVIdemux. On DOS I'm not sure, maybe a DOS port of …

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Re: Great PC! But can it run Crysis?

Posted on 2018-05-06, 08:19

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How about Windows 2000? My "low power" desktop with Athlon X2 4850e and Radeon 4550, then my main desktop with Athlon II 260 and Radeon 5670

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Re: PCI video cards not working on Intel 82430IB motherboard.

Posted on 2018-05-04, 05:32

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

sounds like the same issue covered in this recent thread: Trying to get newish PCI Graphics cards working on pre AGP motherboards

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Re: IBM 5170 and Lo-Tech XTIDE CF Adapter

Posted on 2018-05-01, 07:31

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

according to this there are problems with XT-IDE vs. the IBM BIOS http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/xtide/XT-IDE%20-%20Problems.htm It implies that it can still work with a 16-bit IDE controller. If the XT-IDE BIOS doesn't even show any messages when booting that could be a separate problem. Can you …

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Re: 486 turns on but I only get green smiley characters!

Posted on 2018-05-01, 04:40

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I couldn't get EDO RAM to work with a SIS 471 board. Try moving the memory and video card to different slots, but I suspect you'll need different RAM.

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

Posted on 2018-04-27, 07:43

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I saw an ISA riser that looked like it would fit in a Dell 386SX board I have which I didn't have the riser for, so I bought it. I put it in there with an old SMC network card that only has BNC and DB-15 ports on it (and jumpers to enable the boot ROM!) with a freshly-programmed XT-IDE EPROM to try …

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

Posted on 2018-04-22, 21:25

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I saw these Y2K-fix cards on auction site recently and was intrigued. The ROM could be desoldered and replaced with a socket for any arbitrary thing. XTIDE, Etherboot, ROM BASIC, who knows. It seems that the Y2K patch itself is only 8KB or less, but the card is wired for a 27256.

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Re: Trying to get newish PCI Graphics cards working on pre AGP motherboards

Posted on 2018-04-20, 05:16

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I have a GeForce 4 MX PCI card that works in an old socket 7 board (at least the one board that I tried it on). But a GeForce 8400GS PCI card didn't work in the same board. The GF4 has one notch opposite the face plate end. The 8400GS has two notches. According to wiki, cards with two notches are …

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Re: MTRRLFBE and AGP/PCIe cards in DOS

Posted on 2018-04-17, 08:23

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by bakemono

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I did some research in the AMD BIOS and Kernel Developer's Guide. There is a separate MSR $C0010113 which controls access to the $A0000 range (it can be remapped to DRAM in system management mode). But the register is locked, I can't modify it. So I guess that if I really wanted to enable VGA WC on …

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