Re: 486 system freezes
Posted on 2017-10-18, 19:56
Flip the board and look for dry solder joints on the back of the slots.
Re: PcChips sucks!
Posted on 2017-10-18, 18:00
I quite like PCChips, I'm at a success rate of about 8 for 9 whereas gigabyte, I'm 0 for 3. Anyway, could be a number of things... firstly, BIOS doesn't really, really detect RAM, it reads the presence detect bits on the last few pins of the SIMM which are encoded with zero ohm resistors or just …
Re: Abit LX6 (Intel 440LX chipset) Driver Installation and Sanity Check
Posted on 2017-10-18, 13:27
IIRC you just used to get a single download of "intel chipset drivers" and it would install for everything that needed one.
Re: U5SX 486-33F Build
Posted on 2017-10-18, 13:23
They were more common in early 486 era I think, Intel sx25s and sx33s, with about the only real use case for a 487 socket. I did see a "high end" EISA system with a dx40 on once, at time of production it would have been the fastest AutoCAD system you could get. Later in the game there might have …
Re: Taming the pile, specs to target?
Posted on 2017-10-17, 01:46
Canadians are a bunch of hosers anyway eh... I'm assuming we're just talking about machines for a little nostalgia and gaming, nothing super focused or special case. I don't have anything special case in mind, except maybe Need for Speed, it was tweaky about CPUs and CDROM speeds, but that might …
Re: Zida 4DPS (Tomatoboard) Socket 4 SiS PS/2 mouse not working
Posted on 2017-10-13, 03:48
It is unlikely that a Cyrix 5x86-120/4x will work stable at 133 MHz. Mine does not. My 5x86-120GP/2X works fine at 66x2, even with fast FP on @ 3.7 volts - BUT - the mainboard I used it in died. It was a Pine PT-430A from a PoS machine. I guess running it at 66MHz killed it - either that or …
Re: Taming the pile, specs to target?
Posted on 2017-10-13, 02:16
Hi Tetrium thanks for getting the ball rolling. Yah, mostly those organisation threads seem like what I've tried to do, get smaller boxes that stack nice together etc. I had a real good system with frozen burger boxes that fit exactly inside these veggie boxes I could get in a stack, but I only …
Re: 3Com Etherlink III 509B ISA - Driver Doesn't Find Card
Posted on 2017-10-12, 23:04
If it is blown though I might be afraid about why its blown... a short on the board I can't see? So if you fix the fuse and don't see anything else wrong, you can try powering it on in an ATX/ISA machine, soft power button, it shouldn't turn on if there's any shorts, or it will turn on and turn off …
Re: CL-GD5401-42QC-Bvs TVGA-9000B ISA
Posted on 2017-10-12, 22:54
Yah I wouldn't really recommend ISA for a DX4 build. However, I did have an ISA CL 5434 that was only about 15% slower than a PCI one... so that would be a hotrod for an ISA card. TVGA cards, damn I hate those things :-D I couldn't believe actually that they turned up in some Summit Direct built …
Re: Is there any point in building a DX2/4 instead of a P54C?
Posted on 2017-10-12, 18:18
For reference, the Pentium 100 came out right around the same time as DX4 (March 94) so it would have been very expensive. I don't recall seeing Pentium on home PC's commonly until 1996, unless you were buying at the high-end. Games were still targeted to 486 until at least the Quake release... I …
Re: SOYO 5XAE and AMD k6 II
Posted on 2017-10-12, 12:06
If you set it to 2x it will run 6x
Re: Socket 462 mATX build: modern, silent, and future proof
Posted on 2017-10-12, 11:58
Sorry, couldn't find any reliable references, think there used to be, but being "out of date" now seem to have dropped off the web... however embedded in this older online calculator are values for older stuff https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator Also yes most socket A were 5V thirsty... …
Re: IDE to Compact Flash as MS-DOS boot drive.
Posted on 2017-10-12, 01:30
Edit: I recommend to run Spur0Kill ("track zero kill") to get away with any spurious MBR and paritition data. And boot viruses, like LiLo . It was written by German(?) author Dirk Arnold in '93 and works very well under plain DOS. As far as I know, all access is done solely via the BIOS. This makes …
Re: Socket 462 mATX build: modern, silent, and future proof
Posted on 2017-10-12, 01:23
Photos? Seems nice. Mainly I wonder how much of a speed bottleneck conventional PCI places on your USB 3.0 card. Well it is and it isn't a bottleneck, PCI does just over a gigabit per sec while 3.0 is 5Gbit, however, a lot of the first crop of non-enthusiast stuff only does about a gigabit, like …
Re: Getting around that soundcard mess
Posted on 2017-10-11, 22:48
In the actual 90s, I only got the cheap cards, Aztech, Crystal, ESS etc, and had very few problems, one game had some weird probe routine where it pushed the PnP settings around, one game insisted on irq 5 for SBPro emulation... so as the years go by creative labs stuff turns up dirt cheap, SB16s, …
Re: Weird Win98 boot failure
Posted on 2017-10-11, 19:03
Should be completely unrelated... Though you're not quite clear how you rebooted that time. There's a mistake to make where you go from win98 to dos mode, but it's actually just a full screen command prompt with win98 still running, then if your dos stuff locks up, or you forget and ctrl-alt-del out …
Re: Socket 462 mATX build: modern, silent, and future proof
Posted on 2017-10-11, 18:53
I don't think you have to go to a much later GPU before they were munching off the 12V and you've got 100s of watts of that untouched.
Re: Zida 4DPS (Tomatoboard) Socket 4 SiS PS/2 mouse not working
Posted on 2017-10-11, 18:37
This could be some incompatibility triangle between the KBC, Mouse and Keyboard... and sometimes those go away if you turn off typematic in Advanced CMOS Setup.... sometimes you just have to give up on an older keyboard, or confine it to slower machines.
Re: Is there any point in building a DX2/4 instead of a P54C?
Posted on 2017-10-11, 17:25
Last time I ran a U5SX the doom performance was pretty dang good I assume that is a 33MHz CPU. On a 486 VLB with good memory and cache timings you would get around 19 FPS in Doom, on average, with one level of green border. It does not matter much whether the 33MHz CPU is from Intel, AMD, Cyrix or …
Re: Is there any point in building a DX2/4 instead of a P54C?
Posted on 2017-10-11, 17:05
Trying to make some similar decisions... My thoughts though, I don't know why but always thought of the dx2/66 as a sweet spot, some games targetted around it before pentium took over. Last time I ran a U5SX the doom performance was pretty dang good, it's the lack of the FPU that holds it back for …
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