Re: 3 (+3 more) retro battle stations

Posted on 2021-03-23, 08:01

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I just checked my Windows 95c installation and the CD-ROM properties page definitely has a DMA check box option, but as I don't have any installation which is using the onboard IDE for HDD access, so I cannot check in that regard.

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Re: 3 (+3 more) retro battle stations

Posted on 2021-03-23, 06:49

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Definitely don't trust my memory. It could have been that the DMA check box was only for CD-ROM drives. I do recall a thread (don't trust my memory) whereby somebody found the 486 ALi chipset drivers for Win9x and there was quite the improvement with DMA enabled.

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Re: Market value for popular or rare classic computer hardware

Posted on 2021-03-23, 06:45

by

by feipoa

in Milliways

in Milliways

Ebay offers free advertising (listing of goods), so naturally it becomes a place with a lot of such sellers. Pardon my being out of trend with eBay, but can you confirm that eBay no longer charges low-volume sellers to keep relisting their items even if they do not sell? If so, this would likely …

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Re: 3 (+3 more) retro battle stations

Posted on 2021-03-22, 20:17

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

It was actually 16.04 LTS, not 14.04. Not enough time left in extended security maintenance in 14.04 for me to have bothered. I think there is normally a DMA check box in Win95 on the device manager properties to determine if DMA is working in IDE. I recall those um8886 drivers breaking things when …

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Re: Market value for popular or rare classic computer hardware

Posted on 2021-03-22, 20:09

by

by feipoa

in Milliways

in Milliways

Back when I used to sell items on eBay (2003-2006), it was the cost of re-listing an item which made the seller motivated to sell quick. If I recall, you'd get your 1st relisting free or at a discount if you dropped the price, but after the 2nd listing, it was cost defeating to keep the item up for …

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Re: Market value for popular or rare classic computer hardware

Posted on 2021-03-22, 12:22

by

by feipoa

in Milliways

in Milliways

An untested NexGen Nx586 P110-E/D sold for $500 on eBay last week (13 March 2021). No motherboard, just the chip. A Cyrix 5x86-120 in OK condition sold for $150 USD on 24 Dec 2020. The amounts of both of these sales surprised me, perhaps more so the Cyrix. That Cyrix wasn't even S1R3.

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Re: 3 (+3 more) retro battle stations

Posted on 2021-03-21, 01:33

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

lol. Ubuntu is not fit for human consumption. Pretty much doubled the I/O metrics to ~7-9Mb/s from ~3-4Mb/s before. That same speed increase was also observed in Win95 osr2? Seems odd that Win95 OSR2 wouldn't have the DMA drivers included with the OS. I had the impression that those UMC 8886 drivers …

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Re: 3 (+3 more) retro battle stations

Posted on 2021-03-20, 22:44

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Does it properly use DMA? And which operating systems have you tested it with?

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Re: 3 (+3 more) retro battle stations

Posted on 2021-03-15, 03:09

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

A special guest on this weekend's matinee was MS-4144. Without further ado - i expected a lot from this motherboard based on its impressive specs (256Mb RAM, 1024Kb SRAM), but got disappointed. The system is unstable when timings are too tight. Increasing them to keep things stable leads to …

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Re: Register settings for various CPUs

Posted on 2021-03-14, 03:42

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

That is good to know that you've found a working autoexec.bat method for ctchip34. Maybe I don't need to use my messy means with 3 utilities to set the registers anymore. How much performance gain did branch prediction offer? Were you able to quantify this? I found clocking to 300 MHz a challenge, …

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Re: Anyone try USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 on conventional PCI slots?

Posted on 2021-03-13, 03:17

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Linux kernel 4.4.0-203 Yes, the Renesas chip works fine if using a PCI-E card, just not on the conventional PCI card. It is probably unable to find the bridge chip. You didn't say which motherboard... I ask because I recently found out, from experience and someone on the board telling me the Asus …

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Re: Anyone try USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 on conventional PCI slots?

Posted on 2021-03-12, 21:59

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Linux kernel 4.4.0-203 Yes, the Renesas chip works fine if using a PCI-E card, just not on the conventional PCI card. It is probably unable to find the bridge chip.

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Re: Anyone try USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 on conventional PCI slots?

Posted on 2021-03-12, 10:57

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was able to find one of these Startech USB 3.0 conventional PCI cards used for about 1/3 of their advertised price ($34) and thought I'd give it a go. Unfortunately, there aren't any Linux drivers. Normally Ubuntu can install PCIe drivers for USB 3.0 cards based on the same chipset, Renesas NEC …

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Re: M.2 NVMe working on old school regular pci

Posted on 2021-03-11, 09:23

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

4 lanes of PCI Express 1.0/1.1 is 4x250MB/s=1Gigabyte per second ! I dare hope that's fast enough for an Fx-60 . ;) I don't like waiting around to backup external HDDs. I don't even like leaving them out to transfer while I'm sleeping (kids, wife, burglars, fire, flood, earthquake, etc). The …

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Re: M.2 NVMe working on old school regular pci

Posted on 2021-03-11, 03:55

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was considering getting some sort of NVMe SSD solution for my ageing socket 939 system with an FX-60. I see that there are complete PCIe package from Intel DC P3608 and there are a large variety of PCIe-to-M.2 adapters which have various conditions on which M.2 devices will work on them. The PCIe- …

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Re: Anyone try USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 on conventional PCI slots?

Posted on 2021-03-10, 03:59

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Pardon me, yes, I meant the PCI bandwidth would be around 80%*133 MB/s = 106 MB/s, and inadvertently applied it to USB 2.0 bandwidth of 60 MB/s. The human brain is notoriously bad at multi-tasking! I have noted that USB 2.0 max is around 39 MB/s in practice. I tried to NAS on my Netgear R7000 with …

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Re: Anyone try USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 on conventional PCI slots?

Posted on 2021-03-10, 03:06

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Isn't there about a 20% overhead for coding on USB 2.0, meaning that theoretical bandwidth would be around 106 megabytes per second? It would be interesting to test this on a fast system with a SSD SATA 3 HDD internally and a SSD USB 3.0 externally. I understand that USB 3.1 may use a different …

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Anyone try USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 on conventional PCI slots?

Posted on 2021-03-09, 22:15

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Has anyone bothered to benchmark USB 3.0 vs. USB 2.0 cards on a conventional PCI bus to see if there is any tangible performance gain, preferably with an external SSD? I don't have an external SSD yet, but was noticing on PCI Express (1.0a) that from my USB 3.0 transfer speed seems to top out at …

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Re: Register settings for various CPUs

Posted on 2021-03-09, 06:51

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

After doing some testing with CTCHIP34 I am able to set via the command line on my Cyrix MediaGX. You have to specify a value in hex for it to work. Run CTCHIP34 with the specified register to see the current values. Figure out what bit values to change and then come up with the required hex value …

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Re: Evergreen 486 SuperChip - settings for DIP switch?

Posted on 2021-03-08, 00:51

by

by feipoa

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

lol, ok. I need some time to dig through the channel logs as most of the woes are now in the past.

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