Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?
Posted on 2018-08-18, 15:53
Added an MPEG-1/VCD decoder card to the Alcatel PC. Next up is installing the software.
Re: AWE64 Gold for Win98 alongside GUS+SBPro for DOS. Possible?
Posted on 2018-08-18, 12:04
Does the system have a Plug&Play capable BIOS? If not, it's easy. The AWE64 does nothing if not initialized by Plug&Play or CTCM. So in pure DOS with no Plug&Play, you can use the SBPro and the AWE64 is more or less invisible. In Win98, just use resources that are not taken by the SBPro or GUS and …
Re: Help Needed: Can I Save This M919?
Posted on 2018-08-18, 11:20
If +12V was supplied to the +5V line, you can bet that some component(s) burned to a short or caused too high current flow, which caused the PSU to shutdown. Check the two large transistors near the CPU socket first (those with the heatsinks touching the VLB slot). From my experience, these die …
Re: Pentium MMX Retro-PC
Posted on 2018-08-18, 09:08
The CPU has 32 KB (which still will work even with more than 64 MB btw), and the chipset has 512 KB. Combined, you can only cache 544 KB of that 64 MB. Dude, read some info on how L2 cache works, really! You are completely misinformed. The size of the code is irrelevant, as it's about RAM blocks …
Re: Pentium MMX Retro-PC
Posted on 2018-08-18, 08:53
No, that's not how cache works. Whenever data is loaded from RAM, it will end up in the cache. Next time that data is needed, the CPU can access it much faster. Or simply put: memory throughput is much higher with cache. The size of a program has nothing to do with that. The problem with more RAM …
Re: AMD 5x86 X5-133
Posted on 2018-08-18, 07:16
And the last free PCI slot goes to... this: 😁
Re: SD Card reader via USB2 idiotic policy from the manufacturer
Posted on 2018-08-16, 17:19
Which means, no matter what modern ultra-fast SD card I'll put in (even hundreds MB/sec cards), they will all be stuck at ~60MB/sec because of the USB2 bottleneck. SD cards are slow by design. I think you are confusing "bus speed" here, which is 624 mb/s with UHS-III cards at most. This is not the …
Re: S3 805 86C805-P speed?
Posted on 2018-08-16, 17:04
Some versions of the Trident TGUI9400 and 9440 are really fast cards, but the S3 805 is nowhere as slow as you depict it here. It was faster then alot of Cirrus Logic and nearly all older Trident cards. Mine was faster then my Tseng 4000AX card too. The card was tested by me and others and it …
Re: Help needed: Motherboard identification
Posted on 2018-08-15, 19:50
A constant beep on an IBM clone BIOS means that there's a short somewhere. It can also indicate that some of the voltages are missing.
Re: High DMA problem (GUS / SB16)
Posted on 2018-08-15, 19:30
Don't use/select SB16 in any game, as apart from some ALS and CMI chips, no third-party card is really SB16 compatible. It may work in some games, but you really need to select SB Pro (2.0). Your high DMA problem is gone that, too, as the SB Pro has no high DMA.
Re: S3 805 86C805-P speed?
Posted on 2018-08-15, 17:57
The 805 is a very slow card, probably one of S3's slowest. It was absolutely low-end and cut down to a 16-bit interface. Even the fastest 805, the 805i with interleaved memory at 2 MB, fails to beat a Trident TGUI9400. It's still faster than any ISA card, but not a very good VLB card.
Re: ESS AudioDrive Volume Settings Not Working
Posted on 2018-08-15, 17:51
Just an assumption, of course. Could also be that ESS chipsets do not allow reading the values. But I noticed that behaviour with cards based on ES1688, ES1868, and also ALS100+. Never checked what a real Sound Blaster does. While I have many Sound Blaster cards, I'm currently not using any of them. …
Re: ESS AudioDrive Volume Settings Not Working
Posted on 2018-08-15, 17:00
Actually, many games mess with the volume. I have the same problem with many DOS games on my 486. DOOM for example raises the volume to 14. It's probably bad coding that games that uses the hardware mixer of the sound card for volume do not reset the values on exit.
Re: How to get Realmagic EM8300 Mpeg decoder to work?
Posted on 2018-08-14, 18:16
Could anyone please upload the Win95/98 driver disks for the Hollywood Plus? Got one of these and want to use it with Windows 95. //edit: Nevermind. Found the last version 2.41 of the driver a few minutes after posting this.
Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?
Posted on 2018-08-12, 17:58
Faraday cages (including electronics enclosures) are typically grounded. That's all I meant. Faraday cages protect from high voltage, not from magnetic fields. (" Faraday cages cannot block stable or slowly varying magnetic fields, such as the Earth's magnetic field (a compass will still work …
Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?
Posted on 2018-08-12, 16:20
Not sure why you even say "grounded", as that has absolutely no effect on a magnetic field. Anyway, you need way over 5.000 gauss to harm a hard disk with a magnet, which must then even be in direct contact with it. No idea why people think a speaker is of any danger. Unless it's one of these very …
Re: IBM 5150 Mainboard repair
Posted on 2018-08-12, 14:36
No, it's a 5150. 5160 has 8 ISA slots with less distance between them and no cassette port. ps: topic title is "IBM 5150 Mainboard repair", btw. 😉
Re: MiroSound PCM Pro1 - General Midi in DOS = silent
Posted on 2018-08-12, 12:52
That's correct. No OPL4 wavetable works in DOS or inside a DOS box in Win9x (for games, that is).
Re: IBM 5150 Mainboard repair
Posted on 2018-08-12, 12:35
When the PC is running they should blink. The current behavior is i.e. caused by a missing/damaged CPU or BIOS. Be careful here. A normal POST card does not work on a 5150 mainboard since the BIOS simply does not send the POST code to port 80h. So all the card tells you is that the voltages are …
Re: IBM 5150 Mainboard repair
Posted on 2018-08-12, 10:12
What are the two non-lit LEDs on the POST card for?
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