Re: The Old Hard Drive Thread

Posted on 2017-11-17, 03:52

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Are you putting them on a cable on their own? Some older drives may have trouble negotiating with much newer drives as slaves. Also I doubt a 120MB drive supports anything above PIO Mode 4, so DMA turned on may confuse it. Thirdly, where you have to use 2 drives together, sometimes the master needs …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2017-11-17, 01:25

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah what is it the kids say?... "Pokemon, you can't eat just one."

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2017-11-17, 00:43

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

*sigh* Talk like this is just encouraging me to keep a DX33 and a DX50 and a DX2-66, and a DX2-80 and a DX4-100 and a DX4-120 and a Cx5X86-100, and an AMD 5x86-133 ....

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Re: Best PC the year 2000 could provide.

Posted on 2017-11-16, 23:22

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well if you weren't running NT you didn't need it for sure. There was some CAD and engineering stuff on NT it was super good for. There was even, sometime around 95 or 96 a dual P-Pro laptop CAD station, for an as astronomical sum as you might imagine.

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Re: Best PC the year 2000 could provide.

Posted on 2017-11-16, 23:04

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

BeginnerGuy wrote: Fun fact: the first computer to reach the teraflop was called ASCI red, using nearly 10,000 pentium pro 200s if I remember right. It consumed nearly a megawatt of power. The newish i9 processor from intel matches about 3/4 of that machine 😀 I was running a teraflop for a kilowatt …

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Re: is a IBM PS2 MODEL 30 a good buy?

Posted on 2017-11-16, 18:53

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

BLockOUT wrote: regarding the floppy do you know if i can take a 1,44flopy and format it as 720k ? will it read? I believe it can read in a low density drive, but a low density drive still can't write to a 1.44 formatted to 720, it doesn't have strong enough coils in the head to flip the magnetic …

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Re: Some games don't detect SB II Compatible sound card

Posted on 2017-11-16, 14:05

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yah, I've come across that, game ignores T5 or T6 but will work with it set to T4 (BLASTER environment variable for ppl having trouble following.)

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Re: Need a tool to correct textmode-position on monitor.

Posted on 2017-11-16, 13:08

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I'm thinking SciTech Display Doctor maybe? Also have a brain itch that UniVESA or UniVBE had some capability to do it.

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Re: Maximum amount of memory on a 486

Posted on 2017-11-16, 12:50

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I thought 256k 512k or a meg didn't matter it was the tag RAM that defined cacheable area.

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2017-11-16, 12:42

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote: Your not Jason Scott are you? Not usually, I guess from a distance you could mistake me for him, but my cat hasn't got as much white on him.

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

Posted on 2017-11-16, 01:15

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

That case looks familiar, like one of the 2nd tier manufacturers used it, like Elonex or Viglen or someone.

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Re: is a IBM PS2 MODEL 30 a good buy?

Posted on 2017-11-16, 01:10

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Here's one of the older pages about that... https://web.archive.org/web/20040409100909/http://members.aol.com:80/mcapage0/memory01.htm For anything newer having a disagreement with Google's artificial stupidity at the moment, it's insisting I want to know how to modify a mini SIM to a micro SIM, not …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2017-11-15, 23:28

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ohhhhhh I always wondered what Llamatron was a take off of.

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Re: Help! New 486 build issues. I am decently confused

Posted on 2017-11-15, 18:36

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Best case scenario, you just had a capacitor go bad. However, sometimes it will be found that a particular AT supply, even when in new condition wouldn't fire up until it had a fairly decent load across it, sometimes just a board, CPU, RAM wasn't enough to get them going, needed a HDD plugged into …

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Re: Best PC the year 2000 could provide.

Posted on 2017-11-15, 17:21

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I am currently missing RebelsHaven quite a lot for all the AMD64 tuning stuffs.

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Re: Maximum amount of memory on a 486

Posted on 2017-11-15, 17:19

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What I seemed to experience with uncachable memory in the past was... by the time your application needs that amount of RAM, the time is long past where the system will ever be fast, and it's made even more dog slow by swap file thrashing, so cached or not, more memory makes it faster. You put 128MB …

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Re: Best PC the year 2000 could provide.

Posted on 2017-11-15, 16:44

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Edit: Another interesting link https://web.archive.org/web/20030306012002/http://www.sharkyextreme.com:80/hardware/articles/tyan_760_ddr/8.shtml[/color] Yah, there was a chaintech 760/761 board out for sure before end of 2000 also, can't be sure about the Epox board, that was known for hitting an …

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Re: Maximum amount of memory on a 486

Posted on 2017-11-15, 16:31

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My gut feel is that it may only support 4 banks, though if manual says it works with 2MB, 8MB, or 32MB in all 4 slots then it obviously has 8 so should take 4x128 modules.... however, there are sometimes other problems that stop it, like failure to map PCI expansion ROMS high enough etc.

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Re: Best PC the year 2000 could provide.

Posted on 2017-11-15, 03:12

by

by BitWrangler

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Though you can have arguments about whether the 450 and 800 were the fastest AVAILABLE Intel CPUs in their respective years, because of Intel announcing them to get jump on AMD and yields being apparently very poor, they were consequently stratospheric pricing, and regular system builders couldn't …

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Re: Improving my wife's computer

Posted on 2017-11-15, 02:38

by

by BitWrangler

in Milliways

in Milliways

So long as the 8GB it has is already dual channel (2x 4GB), I wouldn't bother going to 16GB - 8 is by far the price/performance sweet spot for most games, with a decent jump from going from 4 to 8 but nothing like as much going from 8 to 16 - unless you only have single channel at the moment, going …

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