Re: My old Socket A systems

Posted on 2019-06-19, 20:32

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I guess nforce2 chipset is slightly faster but the onboard video is not amazing. And I don't think nforce2 has any LAN driver for win98, if you are running 98. If you are running newer Windows though you might like to loot the slower systems for more DIMMs to build up 768MB or 1GB of RAM. Did you …

---

Re: Using a 2.1GB drive as 528MB

Posted on 2019-06-19, 20:13

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

With regard to this question, I think you would be fine as long as you can configure the drive identically on all the other systems in bios. Right, if you put in the same geometry again it will definitely work. Even that might not be necessary, but I won't say it's 100% certain because sometimes …

---

Re: XTIDE BIOS rom vs EzDrive DDO

Posted on 2019-06-19, 20:01

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

XT-IDE is also supposed to have a feature where it can boot using a serial cable, although I've never tried it because the server program requires WinXP and none of the machines in my retro room run XP, while none of my XP laptops have serial ports...

---

Re: Using a 2.1GB drive as 528MB

Posted on 2019-06-19, 05:38

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just put in 1023 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors, and then fdisk/format and it should be good.

---

Re: XTIDE BIOS rom vs EzDrive DDO

Posted on 2019-06-18, 19:51

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used XT-IDE to boot 386/486/sock7 systems from a 40GB HDD. I'm assuming that EzDrive is something that needs to be installed on the disk? So that would be an extra step compared to just plugging in an ISA card. However I noticed that XT-IDE would not detect a known-good WD-31600, so I guess it has …

---

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

Posted on 2019-06-14, 23:34

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Someone gave me a 45 record so I was motivated to troubleshoot the big ol' Magnavox (looks similar to below) which didn't track too well the last time I tried it. I discovered the needle is a removable piece and it has a rubber bushing in it that had gone soft so instead of resting on the tip the …

---

Re: Intel 486dx4-100 or AMD 5x86-133 ?

Posted on 2019-06-10, 23:27

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How are you going to get down to 33MHz? Those CPUs don't have a 1x multiplier (unlike Cyrix 5x86 for instance). Unless your bus speed goes lower than 25, then the best you could do would be 50 or 75MHz and then disable the L1 cache.

---

Re: Athlon Build, POST issues, common faults?

Posted on 2019-06-10, 23:23

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Capacitors might be correct, but to me it also sounds like possible thermal overload. Perhaps this board has one of those temp sensor "prongs" under the CPU and maybe the heatsink isn't quite flat against the CPU, allowing it to get hot...

---

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

Posted on 2019-06-10, 00:45

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Revisiting the Shuttle HOT-433 board with Cyrix 5x86-120... With a disassembly of a decompressed BIOS, I found out how to read and write UMC 888x chipset registers. mov cx,0x8050 ; register index goes here mov eax,0x80000000 mov ax,cx and al,0xfc mov dx,0xcf8 out dx,eax add dl,0x4 mov al,cl and al, …

---

Re: EDO VS FPM on a 486

Posted on 2019-06-07, 14:36

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Depends on chipset/BIOS. There was a thread recently with different BIOS images for the Shuttle Hot-433 which I tried on my board. One of them contains an option to enable faster timing for EDO and it allows 3-1-1-1 at 33MHz and 4-2-2-2 at 60MHz (Cyrix 5x86 at 60MHz times 2). At 40MHz there was no …

---

Re: Playing DVDs on a Pentium II/III - also is my L2 cache enabled?

Posted on 2019-06-04, 13:36

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I guess any computer that can do more than 500 MHz should play any DVD without acceleration I think that depends a lot on the target resolution. Scaling video is very expensive without acceleration. So playing a DVD at 1024x768 or higher resolution is going to be very CPU-intensive. Does anything …

---

Re: BIOS issue Shuttle HOT-433 Board

Posted on 2019-06-02, 23:00

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Whoa, the plan worked :) I used cbrom220 with the /isa switch to insert a copy of XT-IDE (just for testing purposes). Then I used a hex editor to copy the block from $1D000-$1DB20 from the original file into the modified file. Programmed that into the EEPROM and it powered up, and the embedded XT- …

---

Re: CGA game on option ROM

Posted on 2019-06-02, 08:14

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Is there by chance a PC emulator that allows configuring arbitrary ROMs that you are using to test these? I was thinking about trying some random things with option ROMs but the process of removing a chip, programming it, and reinstalling it would be too laborius.

---

Re: Need help identifying 8088 motherboard

Posted on 2019-06-01, 20:37

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It seems that Multitech was the predecessor of Acer, and their first few MPF models were Apple clones. MPF-V is briefly mentioned here: https://archive.org/stream/nzbitsandbytes-2-08/NZ-bits-and-bytes-issue-2-08_djvu.txt MPF-V is an IBM compatible. 16-bit 8088 machine with 128K bytes, expandable to …

---

Re: BIOS issue Shuttle HOT-433 Board

Posted on 2019-06-01, 20:16

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

When inserting an option ROM into that BIOS with cbrom 220 a 1KB chunk of code at $1D000 disappears in the modified ROM. Considering that it says Award Decompression Bios at the beginning, I'm guessing it's important. Maybe patching that back in will fix it? The older BIOS can be opened with modbin …

---

PC meta-hobby

Posted on 2019-06-01, 09:54

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's difficult to say whether this is considered on-topic or not... but has anyone seen the PC Building Simulator game? I LOLed when I saw this just now on GOG. I don't know how far back it goes it terms of hardware era. Maybe they'll release an expansion pack with 386s and Sound Blasters. And then …

---

Re: BIOS issue Shuttle HOT-433 Board

Posted on 2019-05-31, 13:47

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I couldn't extract your .rar for some reason, but I downloaded the 433WIE10 file from the other site and it works in my board even though it is a rev 4.0. I tried to monkey with it using different versions of cbrom but it seems to be misreading something. Saying that the first module is 16KB but has …

---

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

Posted on 2019-05-31, 04:17

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I went back to using my previous laptop, a 2003 NEC model with Pentium M. I've always been pretty fond of the design but started using a different one in 2013 because I needed battery life and there weren't any new replacements available (only rebuilt battery packs that weren't too impressive). …

---

Re: BIOS issue Shuttle HOT-433 Board

Posted on 2019-05-30, 15:38

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Your hot-433 BIOS is Award instead of AMI WinBIOS? And it's from 2001? Interesting... I don't know much about the BIOS modification utilities but maybe a checksum is not being recalculated correctly? Do one of those minor edits that shouldn't bother anything and then compare the resulting binary …

---

Re: Erasing a uv erasavle bios with uv nail dryer

Posted on 2019-05-27, 19:03

by

by bakemono

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used a nail dryer to erase EPROMs. It took a few days to work but that's better than nothing. And maybe because it is LED I'm hoping it will be less prone to failure whereas I had bought two erasers using fluorescent bulbs that both died.

---