Re: Bought this AWE64 Gold thing...

Posted on 2018-09-04, 11:53

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The 4MB onboard RAM enables loading some very useful soundfonts, there are some very decent <4MB soundfonts that rather accurately mimic SCC-1 and Yamaha XG soundsets, the ESS 3MB and Creative 4MB soundfonts are also fairly decent, so if you want to use your card for General MIDI and don't have a …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-09-04, 11:02

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Found an SC-55MkII locally for 65 USD.. I already have an SD-35 that has me covered for GM (equivalent to SC-50 and therefore SC-55 for GM..) but it's still tempting. How good is SC-55MkII's MT-32 mode? Is the module worth it for that?

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-09-04, 06:47

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If it's not too much trouble, would you mind checking the Matrox driver disk that came with that Mystique for this video? This is apparently an interlaced video that runs at 60 fields per second and I've been looking for it for a while now, because it's a nice showcase for video playback on early …

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Re: Compaq Deskpro!

Posted on 2018-09-03, 23:07

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Fantastic, thank you.. One last question; the cpu cooler on this thing is driving me nuts. I can not, for the life of me, find a way to remove it. What is the sorcery that actually unlatches it from the pegs? The green thing is supposed to be pressed down I believe, but the hook does not budge at …

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

Posted on 2018-09-03, 20:23

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

McBierle wrote: While i'm waiting for a Slot-A heatsink for this newly bought board+cpu: Where did you get one? I have an Athlon 700 that needs a Slot-A heatsink..

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

Posted on 2018-09-03, 14:23

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I wouldn't know if that is certainly true but I couldn't get it recognized with my PC; it may have to do with USB drivers etc. as well..

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Roland RA-95

Posted on 2018-09-03, 14:22

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Is this unit useful for retrogaming?

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

Posted on 2018-09-03, 13:44

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Flashed a second GOTEK to the FlashFloppy firmware. Now I have 1 HxC and 2 Flashfloppy GOTEKS. The HxC is serving as a df1: external floppy drive for my A500/ACA500+, the FF ones are in my Roland SD-35 and 486 PC. Life is gud. :cool: Just curious, which method did you use for the flashing? I …

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

Posted on 2018-09-03, 12:37

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Flashed a second GOTEK to the FlashFloppy firmware. Now I have 1 HxC and 2 Flashfloppy GOTEKS. The HxC is serving as a df1: external floppy drive for my A500/ACA500+, the FF ones are in my Roland SD-35 and 486 PC. Life is gud. 😎

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Re: '98

Posted on 2018-09-03, 11:56

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Fantastic. What a year 1998 was for video hardware. If you have the cards, a similar effort for a 1999 benchmark would be fantastic, pitting the Voodoo 3 3500, TNT2 Ultra, GF256 DDR, Radeon DDR, G400 MAX and Savage4 against each other.

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Re: ATI cards for retro builds... any benefits?

Posted on 2018-09-03, 07:54

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I replaced a VireDX with a Rage Pro PCI yesterday, and I can tell you that the VASTLY superior 2D image quality is a huge benefit compared to the S3 cards. Yes, it has trouble with high res vesa modes (Duke3D does not work in 800x600, but works in 640x480 for example) but screw it, the blurry …

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Re: Compaq Deskpro!

Posted on 2018-09-03, 07:52

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Apologies for resurrecting this old-ish thread but it made more sense to do so then to start a new thread on such a related matter. I have obtained one of these charming SFF Deskpro EN models, although mine has a terribly yellowed bezel and a 24x Creative CD-ROM replacement that need a good deal of …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-08-31, 12:25

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Bought a Compaq Deskpro EN P3-1GHz 256MB SFF PC; turned out to have a i815 B0 chipset so I can use my P3-1266 in it. But it requires a BIOS update and I would rather swap out the HDD and Im already lost in trying to figure out how Compaq’s rom/firmware/bios thing works..

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Re: Bought this AWE64 Gold thing...

Posted on 2018-08-30, 05:07

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

AWE64 doesn't have a CD-ROM header. The headers on the board are for a RAM upgrade and are not supposed to have a plastic shroud on them. I say keep it for the DOS games that support AWE32/64 directly and for General MIDI in Windows. You will also have better DOS compatibility than most PCI cards. …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-08-29, 22:32

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

oeuvre wrote: How'd you get this all for free? Other people seem to have this thing called 'friends'. Don't know what it is but it seems to be convenient.

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

Posted on 2018-08-29, 21:08

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Replaced the grey GOTEK in my SD-35 with a black one and I think it looks super awesome now. Works flawlessly too.

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Re: Best Socket A (462) Motherboard?

Posted on 2018-08-29, 20:53

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sorry for the necropost. I want to get 2 socket a systems, so I decided to go with: 1) KT3 Ultra2, because it's the last system compatible with 3dfx cards, it uses kt333 chipset, unlucky no 4pin connector. My first AMD system was an AthlonXP 1800+ with an MSI KT3 Ultra (1) and I loved that board. I …

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What are these yellow connectors for?

Posted on 2018-08-29, 13:46

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

On some of my cards (curiously cards from the DX8 era, ie. Ti200, GF9100 etc.) there are small yellow connectors on the end that look like power connectors on Radeon 9700 cards and the like, but are obviously something else. Does anyone know what they are for, and what the pinout is? https://s5. …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-08-29, 13:07

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hey, that was my idea :P I'm planning to open a System Specs topic about it. As for performance of the UMC VGA: a weird mixed bag. 3Dbench (VGA graphics) is similar to Trident TVGA8900B, so low but not disastrous. But text mode scores are atrocious: you can see things like BIOS screens build up. …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-08-29, 11:51

by

by appiah4

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I got some goodies today, I'll post the pictures later when I receive them. First is a 486 Socket 2 VLB motherboard marked as 486UL-P101. I can't find the manufacturer, some sites claim ECS made them but there are several variants of 486 boards marked as 486UL; mine is a UMC chipset VLB board with …

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