Re: 2 options for Retro gaming PC

Posted on 2018-10-06, 10:20

by

by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If the plan is to run a retro OS as well as retro gaming, then the Athlon would be best. However, you're going to struggle/possibly fail to get that down to XT-486 performance levels and on the flip side it's a bit too slow to really utilise DOSBox properly. XP drivers should be fine for both boards …

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Re: Dual Pentium3 motherboard, Is it worth it?

Posted on 2018-10-06, 10:07

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I ran a dual Pentium III setup (Slot 1, though) back in the mid-2000s as a Web Server, running Windows Server 2003. I was basically being cheap and you could pick up Pentium III stuff back then for very reasonable prices. Funnily enough, that motherboard was literally the only PIII-era motherboard …

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

Posted on 2018-10-04, 21:20

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Tested out an Asus A7V600-X Socket A Motherboard, with Via Apollo KT600 Chipset. I've had it in storage and hadn't really bothered looking at it until today, taken from a working system that was given to me for free. Has 1.2GB RAM & had an Nvidia GeForce4 MX 4000 128MB AGP Graphics Card. It claimed …

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Re: Internal DVD drives period correct?

Posted on 2018-10-03, 19:13

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I got a new PC in December 1999, a Pentium III 650MHz which had a DVD drive in it. In fact that was 1 of the requirements I was looking for at the time, when purchasing a new PC. I'd only started collecting DVDs a few months prior to that, so I literally only owned 2 DVDs when I got my first PC DVD …

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

Posted on 2018-10-02, 20:40

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I got impatient waiting for a new cooler to arrive for my newest frankenstein Socket AM2 system, so I improvised with a quick & dirty job. I took a broken Zalman cooler, removed it's dead fan and then tied some generic piece of crap fan that I had in storage to the Zalman heatsink with twine & …

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

Posted on 2018-09-29, 20:56

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Weird failure - VID signal faulty? I wonder what voltage the CPU was running at before you set it manually. No idea, other than that it appears to be a known issue with many Athlon 64 X2 CPUs from that era. After a few years some of them seem to develop this weird fault where the auto setting ends …

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

Posted on 2018-09-29, 10:28

by

by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Working on 10+ year old hardware again, in particular dealing with a faulty 12-year old CPU. Had to replace an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ CPU for a client's office PC, which was overheating. Also ended up replacing motherboard & PSU for good measure, as they both had signs of failing. The old parts I …

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

Posted on 2018-09-24, 23:33

by

by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Not really retro activity, but working on old hardware - I had to borrow the PSU from a Socket 478 Pentium 4 3.0GHz system I have. Once I'd finished with the PSU and returned it, I decided to do some slight maintenance on the old Pentium 4 system. It has Windows 7 running from a 20GB IDE HDD, but …

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

Posted on 2018-09-06, 08:04

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Not been doing anything much retro recently as I've been too busy working on a 10-year-old Core 2 Duo PC, installing an Nvidia GeForce 10 series graphics card for 4K video playback & clean installing Windows 10 x64 onto an SSD. As an unintended consequence, this old PC can now play some modern games …

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Re: How many times in ebay you bump to a odd seller ?

Posted on 2018-09-03, 09:26

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Call me cynical, but if I had to guess I'd say it was probably along the lines of this - The PC was probably seriously defective and/or the seller was trying to rip people off. As you've asked specific questions, they've gotten nervous and blocked you as they don't want to be caught out and have to …

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Re: I have the chance to buy ..

Posted on 2018-08-27, 23:52

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used to own one of those monitors. Ran it on a pc and never had issues, used the graphics card software for calibration. Worked well for a few years until one day it switches on and died. Was a nice monitor.

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Re: WinNT351 build recommendations ?

Posted on 2018-08-24, 09:12

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

NT 3.51 is nice to play around with, but you'll probably get bored with it quite quickly due to lack of software & hardware support. I'd say 64MB RAM is more than enough to run that. You could probably get by with half of that RAM. Also the specs you've chosen would generally be wasted on NT 3.51. A …

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Re: Who on vogons has the largesst/most impressive collection?

Posted on 2018-08-09, 12:26

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

My collection isn't all that impressive. All in all I have about 30 fully built & working old/retro PCs that range from an 8088 XT up to the P4/Athlon XP/Mac G5 era. There are a further 10 active daily use PCs that I consider "modern" even though they're all about 8-10 years old. Then there's 3 …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-08-04, 11:45

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Chips 80286 2nd one That's cool, I have near enough the same motherboard with just a few differences such as the colour, jumper pins over by the battery & a row of resistors instead of those orange coloured chips for example. The CPU in mine is an Intel 286 10MHz overclocked to 12MHz and it has 1MB …

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Re: Need help with graphical artifacts

Posted on 2018-08-03, 15:15

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As far as cpu goes, I'm pretty sure it's an on board Intel 8088, but the ram is a mystery. I was hoping that bios could tell me how much it has installed, as there are no identifying marks at all on the Simms. There is no graphics card, only onboard vga. In your pictures there are chips marked …

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Re: Anyone still use ball mice?

Posted on 2018-07-23, 18:40

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I only use an old ball mouse on my 8088 & 286 builds, as those 2 are Serial only. The oldest Serial Mouse I own is a 2-button Mouse from the late 1980s and has the old 25-pin Serial connector. After some rigorous cleaning a few months back, it works like brand new. Everything else gets an Optical PS …

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Re: Old photos of old rigs thread

Posted on 2018-07-23, 09:26

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I've been looking for my old PC setup pictures for a while and this topic reminded me to have another look. I knew I had some somewhere, but couldn't find any on my HDD. Then I remembered, they were saved on my old Pentium III PC in the early 2000s. The old HDD is still going strong in 1 of my …

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

Posted on 2018-07-23, 08:37

by

by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Last night, I tried to get the HDD detected in my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus using the secondary channel and XT-IDE Universal BIOS showed the HDD as smiley face icons with the number 5 at the end and that didn't work out too well (went back to square one and hooked up the HDD to the primary …

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Re: How do you feel about gutting OEM PCs and using their cases/parts for builds?

Posted on 2018-07-20, 09:35

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've built systems in the past from gutted OEM parts (not done by myself, purchased that way) into generic PC cases. But as for the other way around, I personally wouldn't gut an OEM PC to fit a brand new build unless the original motherboard was dead. It's usually more hassle than it's worth, owing …

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Re: 8088 and ERROR on poweon

Posted on 2018-07-18, 20:29

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by PTherapist

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As you state that the keyboard is functional and you're able to boot the OS etc - is the keyboard perhaps an auto-sensing one, where it can automatically detect and work on both XT & AT class computers? If that's the case, then maybe it is defaulting to AT mode and not switching to XT mode in time …

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