Re: What Piece of PC Hardware Have You Owned Longest

Posted on 2016-10-23, 01:14

by

by FFXIhealer

in Milliways

in Milliways

I did not buy my first two PCs. The first computer thing I bought with my own money was my Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 in 2005. I still have it and it still works. Running Windows XP. Specs below CPU: Intel Pentium M Speed: 2.1 GHz RAM: 2GB DDR2-533 VIDEO: nVidia GeForce 7800GTX 256MB PCI-Express HDD: …

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Re: Question on Voodoo2 SLI known chipset issues?

Posted on 2016-10-23, 01:09

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't know what causes the problem, but I have a Pentium II based system on a 440BX chipset motherboard with that same pair of STB 12MB Voodoo2 PCI cards in SLI. The system acts JUST like you describe for me on the FIRST BOOT, but if I tell Windows to RESTART and let it come up, it works just fine …

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

Posted on 2016-10-22, 03:37

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Today, I pulled my old PS2 slim and my old DDR MAX game out of my gaming box and I hooked up my brand-new dance pad and tried to dance. Apparently, being 60 lbs heavier and 15 years older makes playing these games a WHOLE LOT HARDER. I used to routinely play this game on HEAVY. Now I'm playing on …

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Re: Retro LAN gaming over the internet, how do I do it?

Posted on 2016-10-20, 22:54

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by FFXIhealer

in Milliways

in Milliways

Except that he WOULDN'T have access from a computer inside the DMZ. That's the whole point of the router with a built-in firewall.

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Re: Retro LAN gaming over the internet, how do I do it?

Posted on 2016-10-20, 15:49

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by FFXIhealer

in Milliways

in Milliways

Especially when you consider that back in DOS/9x days most people used dial-up, which gave your PC a direct internet connection with no firewall. It WAS in a "DMZ" so to speak. Now, everyone has broadband and a base router (with NAT, port screening/firewalls, etc.). Besides, my 98 system is only on …

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Re: Old Pentium 4 laptop and Windows 98

Posted on 2016-10-19, 21:18

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah, sometimes you just gotta strip the PC down to the essentials: Hard drive, processor, 128MB memory, and a video card, then when Windows is up and running, start adding stuff back in ONE DEVICE AT A TIME. Install it, boot to Windows, install drivers, reboot and see if Windows is stable and the …

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Re: Voodoo 1 & 2 DVI-I Passthrough Cable

Posted on 2016-10-19, 21:16

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Test it yourself by plugging a monitor directly into the end of the VGA side of that cable. If you get a picture on the screen, it'll work perfectly fine through the Voodoo cards.

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Re: Heatsink stuck to CPU

Posted on 2016-10-15, 20:51

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by FFXIhealer

in Milliways

in Milliways

Well I fixed it in the end. After spending some time closely inspecting the pins I discovered one pin was bent and touching another pin. So I carefully straighten it and now the computer works again. Yay! I've received motherboards from manufacturers (for Intel LGA) where I had to inspect the array …

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Re: Newly minted retro PC: is there a market?

Posted on 2016-10-13, 18:31

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah. Really the nostalgia age for me was the early 3D game days like Quake, Tomb Raider, Turok, Final Fantasy 7 and up, etc. The time when 3dfx was king. That's why I resurrected my PS2 computer with a Voodoo2 SLI setup (for Glide and OpenGL and a TNT2 card for DirectX).

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Re: Retro Gaming PC (1998)

Posted on 2016-10-10, 15:12

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There are a few fully 3D mini games, but on the Voodoo2 card, they were VERY smooth. I remember having a little bit of issues with my old Intel i740 card (Diamond Stealth II G460), but either the TNT2 or the Voodoo2 cards I have are both so powerful that those games are like butter.

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Re: Retro Gaming PC (1998)

Posted on 2016-10-10, 01:50

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What's the maker of this white ATX case, I had one and is very decent quality. I threw that ATX case along with recapped dimension 8300, big mistake. :( Cheers, pentiumplay I honestly don't know. That case is now back where it belongs, with my original Windows XP computer with the AMD Athlon XP …

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Re: Retro Gaming PC (1998)

Posted on 2016-10-09, 22:15

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ok, new issue. Hooked up my Gravis Gamepad Pro to the sound card port and I see NOTHING. Windows 98 doesn't see shit and the Gravis installer hangs indefinitely during the "updating your devices" stage. Although, I'm happier about the Voodoo2 SLI working than I am about my gamepad working. I guess I …

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Re: Retro Gaming PC (1998)

Posted on 2016-10-09, 19:18

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well I managed to stabilize the Dual Voodoo2 SLI by moving the 2nd Voodoo2 card to the 3rd PCI slot and moving the NIC card down to the 4th PCI slot, leaving the 2nd slot bare. Now I can re-install all my games. It's pretty stable and 3DMark99 gave it a 3006 score on 800x600.

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Re: Final Fantasy VII in Windows 95

Posted on 2016-10-07, 01:17

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My first reaction would be to examine the CD-ROM and see if there are any scratches, blurs, or otherwise obscured areas of the disk. This could happen if the PC can't read the next file to copy. I had to DOWNLOAD an ISO of Disk 1 just to get two movie files off of it that were corrupt/unreadable on …

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Re: Build your XP Time Machines Now

Posted on 2016-10-05, 18:32

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by FFXIhealer

in Milliways

in Milliways

I think we all ran XP on a single core during the early to mid life of XP. The multi-core phenomenon really changed desktop computing though and in most cases I think if your building an machine to cover the entire XP era you pretty much going to get a Dual core machine at the least. I never used a …

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Re: Build your XP Time Machines Now

Posted on 2016-10-05, 16:09

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by FFXIhealer

in Milliways

in Milliways

Am I the only person who ran Windows XP for years on a single-core? It's got an Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz), 512MB of RAM (DDR1) and old PATA drives like a DVD-RW and an 80GB Western Digital drive? I mean, the motherboard didn't even have USB 2.0 built-in! It had two USB 1.1 ports on it! Ran it with …

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Re: My original Windows95 CD boot disk doesn't boot CDs?

Posted on 2016-09-30, 18:44

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by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I always used my own Windows 98 boot disk created from within Windows 98. It always boots with ATAPI CD-ROM support.

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Re: Retro Gaming PC (1998)

Posted on 2016-09-30, 03:05

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

No, it's not the truth. A good half of that read is snake oil. He's not talking about emulation. He's talking about SIMULATION, otherwise known as HARDWARE MODELLING. We do this shit in guitar amps. The good ones, yes, are Fractal's AxeFX, a $1,500 rack-mounted amp modeller unit. But I don't need to …

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Re: Retro Gaming PC (1998)

Posted on 2016-09-30, 01:33

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Again, I NEVER noticed stuttering or a slowdown on my 350MHz Pentium II system. SNES emulation was perfectly smooth and responsive. I have no idea why you think I need a 3 GHz Pentium4 to emulate a system that had a 3.58 MHz processor inside it. My experience has shown that none of that is necessary …

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Re: Retro Gaming PC (1998)

Posted on 2016-09-29, 17:15

by

by FFXIhealer

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well granted I'll never run Morrowind on this PC anyway because the CPU requirements are higher than my 350MHz Pentium II. I think the minimum was 500 Mhz Pentium III.

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