Re: Trying desperately to buy a NEC usb-card, but failing miserably
Posted on 2018-11-06, 20:35
Patience is the key 😀, I'm seeing plenty at the flea market. Also try getting better cards. Ports should each have a buffer cap.
Re: IDE HDD or optical drives BIOS / firmware
Posted on 2018-11-06, 20:32
Disk firmware releases are pretty rare in the consumer space. Optical drives did get firmware updates, some of them quite some. Usually burners, to support new discs.
Re: Psu help
Posted on 2018-11-06, 17:47
Sincerely, that PSU seems to be utter crap. Why do you need a powerful 5V rail at all? Any current PSU will be fine with a P4.
Re: Motherboard capacitors.
Posted on 2018-11-06, 17:43
My answer would be ...no I dont agree. Smoothing or decoupling capacitors aren't so critical ..and a higher voltage rating just means they are stressed less. There _are_ situtaions where the UF capacitance value is critical ..but not for decoupling .. Up voltage and up capacitance is preferable .. …
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2018-11-03, 19:29
Dang, that sucks. I have a Dell Dimension 4550 that has 4 bloated caps next to the CPU socket and it still works. I should probably really get some kind of desoldering gun, Last time when I tried desoldering caps from a scrap motherboard with just soldering iron and braid, it didn't go too well. :P …
Re: The Strange (And Long) Case of The Very Unreliable Compaq Deskpro EN-SFF
Posted on 2018-11-01, 19:49
LHN91 wrote: Add another one suspecting the PSU. You might be able to repair it if you open it up and see if any capacitors are failing. I'd do the same. They are built like a tank though...
Re: Sound Blaster Pro power consumption
Posted on 2018-10-25, 21:02
bernat wrote: Just a side project. It's not unlike the OPL2LPT or the OPL2 audio board, but I would like to use the real hardware. Driving such an ISA card seems simple enough for an Arduino. Far from it. OPL2/3 does not have to deal with data transfer, latency, etc.
Re: 1ghz. CPU build questions ?
Posted on 2018-10-25, 20:44
... And make it an ALL AMD build. Will there be any problem with this ? Of course there's a problem; ATI weren't part of AMD that far back. They weren't even making core logic chipsets yet. They were not making chipsets in the socket 7 era. Slot A was released with an AMD chipset. I'm sure there …
Re: What's your home/everyday PC?
Posted on 2018-10-18, 19:10
FX8350, 16GB of RAM and an RX470.
Re: Dual Pentium3 motherboard, Is it worth it?
Posted on 2018-10-05, 20:27
I ever thought that even on a single thread games you could benefit from smp by making it run on one cpu, and other tasks share the other(s) while on a single cpu system the cpu time is always shared between everything running. The trouble is that in a retro gaming scenario you will not run an OS …
Re: -5V on old power supply; where is it used for?
Posted on 2018-10-05, 20:22
Someone in another retro group was complaining of a PII era mainboard complaining because of the lacking -5V.
Re: Asrock p4v88+ with bad caps
Posted on 2018-10-02, 18:57
Nemo1985 wrote: Ill go for Kemet, better safe than sorry, I noticed that the shipping price is higher than the product, do you have a cheaper site to advise me? Thank you. Shipping from Farnell to EU is around 5 euros by next Day air mail. Can't beat that.
Re: Matrox Mystique: opinions?
Posted on 2018-09-20, 20:50
I paid a lot just for the CDs 😀. Not sure if I have all though.
Re: What game are you playing now?
Posted on 2018-09-17, 19:02
Heroes III and I suck at it even on the second difficulty level. I think I'll leave it be and get into Witcher 1.
Re: Micro-ATX motherboard with AGP and ISA slot for Windows 98 SE & DOS?
Posted on 2018-09-16, 19:40
Armand Karlsen wrote: Any specific suggestions of make and/or model for the motherboard? At this point I just grab anything cheap and ISA.
Re: Selecting a PSU
Posted on 2018-09-16, 19:33
Gazirra wrote: So, can I just look on Newegg for these OEM parts? You want to look for them at companies selling 'refurbished' components. If you simply want to grab a PSU asap then look for a midrange Seasoning (should be about 50 bucks). As a comparison I can get old OEM PSUs for 5 euros here in …
Re: Power supply and cpu upgrade
Posted on 2018-09-16, 17:41
elderago wrote: Been working on my dell dimension, Im currently looking for a power supply with two molex cables (modern ones only have one) as I dont think just one molex cable will work There are adapters from SATA to Molex and if you can't find one then building it is pretty easy: no tools crimp …
Re: Micro-ATX motherboard with AGP and ISA slot for Windows 98 SE & DOS?
Posted on 2018-09-16, 17:34
Socket A might be easier to find but the combination of ISA and MicroATX will be rare. I'd skip Tualatin, it's a pita to find a board. You could go with Coppermine as well. It's available and plenty fast for DOS and Win98.
Re: Dual channel U320 SCSI, any benefit?
Posted on 2018-09-16, 08:08
Oh, is it better to use this SCSI card in non-RAID mode then? Or even in non-RAID mode, its still sucking up CPU? Can't be worse than IDE, can it? It will be better than IDE for sure, SCSI drives have very fast seeks (and the exquisite noise that come with it). It's a bit more problematic to find …
Re: Dual channel U320 SCSI, any benefit?
Posted on 2018-09-16, 03:56
SCSI RAID was all drives on a single cable. With 2 drives from that era you can not saturate the bus. With better cards you have a nice large cache on a DIMM right on the controller so it's even less of an issue. The specific card you are talking about offers fake (CPU assisted) RAID. Kind of beats …
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