Re: Pentium PRO?

Posted on 2024-04-20, 01:24

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My only reason for building a PPro system was to see how it performed relative to other systems of the era (e.g. 1996-1997). It does occupy a bit of a retro-no-man's-land in my opinion. Not a daily-driver retro rig by any stretch. The local Tech College had a sea of micronics pro180 /256k single …

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Re: Pentium PRO?

Posted on 2024-04-18, 22:07

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

That model is less overclockable but runs a bit faster than a base 256k pro Single cpu ppro motherboards aren’t as difficult to find as multiprocessor machines, Long ago I had bought a pallet of them from a tech college. Sold them off cheap, wish I would have kept a few

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Re: Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games

Posted on 2024-04-16, 22:58

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I'm afraid DRAM would be too slow for palette. The color lookup table in RAMDAC chips is implemented as SRAM. The card itself would just mirror each rows pallet into the sram at the start of the probe when in blank it would be no different than the card having 641 (or 322) columns. Which is in spec …

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Re: Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games

Posted on 2024-04-16, 21:49

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Thanks, I admit I have a bit of a love/hate-relationship with CGA. One one hand, I love to tinker with it, while simultaneously wished there was "more". There were missed opportunities so to say. Like a 4 colour mode for 640x200 resolution or a 640x400 mono mode. Both would have helped at …

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Re: Pentium 60 vs DX4 100

Posted on 2024-04-12, 22:11

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Exactly how I remember it, p60 and dx4 were trading blows back and forth. It wasn’t until games like quake and certain audio/video codecs became commonplace that slow pentiums would consistently outperform faster 486 class.

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Re: How to limit DOS 6.22/Win 3.11 ram

Posted on 2024-04-10, 02:02

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If you use a vintage version of himem.sys you will get either 64mb or 16mb as that is all it supports. Your issue is actual cpu speed, disabling L1 & l2 should slow you down enough or there is this Throttle Blaster

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Re: AMD K6-2 533 upgrade problems

Posted on 2024-04-09, 20:16

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I checked the voltage on one of the molex connectors. 5.03 and 11.84V. Maybe that‘s the problem? I noticed the low 12V rail before when I tested the PSU but didn’t think much of it because there was only a test harddrive connected. The 12v rail didn’t matter as much back then, if your PSU allows …

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Re: Throttle Blaster

Posted on 2024-04-08, 20:49

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Re: No One's Gonna Talk About Throttle Blaster? Will have to get the Chinese to implement this technology in newly made motherboards from the factory. What’s unfortunate is all my k6-2 and older stuff works but p3 and higher is mostly DOA for me.

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Re: AMD K6-2 533 upgrade problems

Posted on 2024-04-07, 19:33

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Generally non-plus k6-2’s require 2.3 volts to run 550 stable In your case you may have more going on like bad caps or power regulation

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Re: Fastest emulators period

Posted on 2024-04-07, 17:22

by

by rmay635703

in Console & Arcade Emulation

in Console & Arcade Emulation

I've quickly searched those 5 pages and couldn't find, but i hope I havent missed the information I am looking for: I have a Commodore 386SX/25 equipped with 8MB RAM + 8GB CF-IDE "adaptered" HDD. Do you know of any emulator that will run on this? I also have mouse, joystick and a soundblaster 16 on …

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Re: Can a faster ISA Graphics card be built?

Posted on 2024-04-07, 17:17

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Cornerstones high resolution ISA cards outperformed pretty much everything in Windows, so 2d windows acceleration could get moderately advanced.

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Re: Socket 5 CPU limit?

Posted on 2024-04-07, 17:15

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

At this point some pentiums are expensive, if you luck out your p133 may have open multipliers and be overclockable. That is what I would do in your case.

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Re: Socket 5 CPU limit?

Posted on 2024-04-06, 23:34

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Seems like the old k6-233 was only 8-9 amps at 3.3 volts. Add extra cooling to the vrm and it might work. Cyrix pr166 might work as well if he can’t find pentium classics. I couldn’t tell but it looks like the board may have an undocumented FSB setting, if that setting is 75mhz he might have some …

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Re: internet in 286 windows 3.1 ?

Posted on 2024-04-04, 16:56

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Don't know if anyone still monitors this, been playing with my 286 recently using a dedicated DOS or Windows 3.1 CF Card depending what I want to play with. Recently been playing with Windows and yes I can get Google up and do a search using winsock and NCSA Mosaic (v2 alpha), pretty fast as well, …

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Re: Cyrix 6x86MX PR300 opinions?

Posted on 2024-04-03, 16:03

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by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm not really looking for more power as such. I'm just curious about how a Cyrix would perform compared to my non-MMX Pentium 200. I never used a Cyrix socket 7 CPU back in the day so curiosity is the main driving force here and the novelty of it. Having a new toy to play with :-) The Cyrix MX …

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Re: Cyrix 6x86MX PR300 opinions?

Posted on 2024-04-03, 15:51

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm not really looking for more power as such. I'm just curious about how a Cyrix would perform compared to my non-MMX Pentium 200. I never used a Cyrix socket 7 CPU back in the day so curiosity is the main driving force here and the novelty of it. Having a new toy to play with :-) The Cyrix MX …

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Re: 2024 - End of the era of Retro Computing Youtube channels?

Posted on 2024-04-02, 14:30

by

by rmay635703

in Milliways

in Milliways

Be careful as There are also YouTube alternatives recommended by folks like yewtu.be indivious and piped.video but all appear to be scam farms (and I’m too terrified to check them further). Would love to be proven wrong and there actually is a legit low resource solution to YouTube . I've used …

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Re: 2024 - End of the era of Retro Computing Youtube channels?

Posted on 2024-04-01, 14:15

by

by rmay635703

in Milliways

in Milliways

I assume you’ve already tried minitube (which probably doesn’t help much) I’ve seen mention of smtube but no idea if it’s safe. https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/watching-youtube-in-very-old-even-32bits-pcs-and-in-more-recent-ones-too/ Be careful as There are also YouTube alternatives …

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Re: 286 motherboard does not recognize any memory

Posted on 2024-04-01, 04:34

by

by rmay635703

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Could try a slow oscillator and underclock the board, if something is flakey that can get it stable enough to run a post card

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Re: 2024 - End of the era of Retro Computing Youtube channels?

Posted on 2024-03-23, 20:26

by

by rmay635703

in Milliways

in Milliways

(seriously, I've been called anti-science for trying to explain that leaving your refrigerator door open will not cool your house, even though I have a degree in physics). The trick is setting up a tent in the kitchen and cool that with the fridge, thus isolating the tent interior from the rest of …

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