Re: Using a retro ThinkPad for retro gaming

Posted on 2023-08-12, 02:16

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a T42 with the Radeon Mobility 9000. It's an awesome retro computer! I use it for DOS with it's beautiful screen. I pair it with the IBM Dock II and a discreet audio card (Aureal Vortex) to make a compact retro battle station. The CPU responds well to slowdown utilities.

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Re: How to learn about hardware

Posted on 2023-08-06, 22:01

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used to and still do read hardware manuals. The old computer and parts manuals explained how the hardware operated and how software interacts with it. Newer hardware manuals at a minimum explain how to install drivers for various operating systems, and how to troubleshoot problems.

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Re: Looking for help putting OS to hardware

Posted on 2023-08-06, 13:59

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Reminds me of some stories in the papers a few years ago about a guy who run his diesel engined car on used cooking oil. It worked but erm... Actually, it was pretty awesome! I wrote about it in the following post: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=93477&p=1172195#p1172195 I also agree …

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Re: Looking for help putting OS to hardware

Posted on 2023-08-06, 03:23

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think Ill be running Windows 98SE on a GX270. So you think those two PCs are to powerful for 3.1 and or 95c? I got Windows 95 running on a Core 2 Duo recently, so your computers aren't too fast. I've run Windows 3.1 on a Core i7, as well. The hardest trick to both is finding OS drivers for …

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Re: Looking for help putting OS to hardware

Posted on 2023-08-05, 15:04

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I concur with mulit-booting for more fun. I use a SATA to IDE adapter with my older computers. I connect that to an external SATA enclosure, and just swap SATA SSDs when I want to use a different OS.

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Re: Looking for help putting OS to hardware

Posted on 2023-08-05, 13:41

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used Windows XP with a Celeron 1.3 GHz back in the early 00's. I thought it was great. I'd pair it with a nice graphics card, though. Almost any GPU will improve the graphics performance over the integrated Intel graphics. I never had a 1 GHz Pentium III, but you probably won't go wrong with …

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Re: Graphics card - Compaq QVision 1280/E - What is that expansion connector for?

Posted on 2023-07-29, 19:33

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I just watched the YouTube video on the CRT Terminator. That's pretty neat. I like that the creator claims it would work for VLB-based graphics cards as well as ISA. I wish I had better soldering skills because 200€ before shipping is a bit steep. I can't blame the creator for wanting to make money …

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Re: Graphics card - Compaq QVision 1280/E - What is that expansion connector for?

Posted on 2023-07-29, 15:04

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's meant to connect other video devices to the graphics card for control/video pass-through. I used that connector with a dedicated TV card in the mid-90s. Dedicated MPEG decoders often used that connector as well.

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

Posted on 2023-07-27, 00:40

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What I would like to ask is. I know the last officially supported nvidia card for Win2k was the 8800 Ultra... However I do have a 9400GT running on another Win2k system I have and that has nvidia official drivers, so Im wondering if the 9800 GX2 will run under the WinXP drivers installed onto Win2k …

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Re: Win95 build

Posted on 2023-07-26, 02:11

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You'll have plenty of options when it comes to PCI graphics cards. I used a Cirrus Logic GD-5434 and an ATI Rage II for Windows 95 with my Pentiums back in the day. Matrox cards would also offer era appropriate options. I've got a Matrox G200 paired with a Pentium MMX for Windows 95 (and other OSs) …

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Re: Win98 Trying to install to 100GB SSD

Posted on 2023-07-18, 21:12

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used the Win98 Fdisk recently on a 120GB SSD. It worked for me when I used a percentage (50% in my case) to create a primary partition and an extended partition of equal size. Format.com correctly formatted both partitions with FAT32.

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Re: Help getting Media Vision External SCSI CD-ROM working

Posted on 2023-07-17, 19:12

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I had one of those drives back in the day. It was quite finicky. As I recall, I had to power up the drive just before starting the computer to catch the initialization routine just right.

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Re: Windows 3.11 Drivers (Voodoo3 & #9)

Posted on 2023-07-06, 21:43

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The driver files contain a very interesting looking .INI file to define monitor support (3FXMON.INI). It includes VESA 1280x1024 at 75 and 72 Hz. It also includes some odd resolutions like 864x1200 and 2000x1500. I wonder if you could modify that file to force Windows 3.11 into a widescreen mode …

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

Posted on 2023-06-19, 22:25

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I spent some time today benchmarking two Windows 95 Retro Rockets (one biased toward a very fast GPU and the other biased toward a very fast CPU). I posted the results in this thread: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=93477 Regardless of the results, I had a ton of fun buying the parts and …

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Re: Newest CPU and GPU for Windows 95?

Posted on 2023-06-19, 22:15

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Part 3 / 3 Findings: 1) The Radeon AGP card massively outperformed the GeForce PCI card by about 100% in all 3D benchmarks except Final Reality. I think the faster CPU aided the GeForce card in that benchmark. 2) The Core i5 outscored the Core 2 Extreme by as little as 5.3% and as much as 91.4% in …

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Re: Newest CPU and GPU for Windows 95?

Posted on 2023-06-19, 22:14

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Part 2 / 3 Note 1: I don’t have a PCI Readon 8500 or PCI Radeon 9000 (128-bit) for a proper comparison of fast PCI cards compatible with both Windows 95 Retail and Windows 95 OSR2. I used a PCI GeForce FX 5200 as a stand-in even though it is not compatible with Windows 95 Retail nor fully compatible …

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Re: Newest CPU and GPU for Windows 95?

Posted on 2023-06-19, 22:14

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Part 1 / 3 I thought I’d experiment a bit by testing two Windows 95 retro rockets: 1) biased toward a fast GPU and 2) biased toward a fast CPU. Here are the results: Overpowered GPU Configuration: - Processor: Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz, 2 Core, 2 Thread) - Motherboard: Asus P5PE-VM (Intel 865PE …

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Re: Windows NT4 and Realtek drivers

Posted on 2023-06-18, 22:16

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't think that any NT-based OS can use real-mode network drivers like those NDIS2 drivers. Win9x, on the other hand, can use them at the expense of RAM within the first 1MB.

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

Posted on 2023-06-14, 01:48

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by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A couple of months ago, I got the idea to try to install Windows 3.0 within the OS/2 1.3 DOS environment on my Pentium 4 Retro Rocket from watching a NCommander video on Youtube. Unfortunately, Windows 3.0's setup program gave me out of memory error messages. In fact, every DOS program I tried …

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

Posted on 2023-06-04, 01:12

by

by fosterwj03

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Wow that's an early OS for that video card, CPU and that screen resolution :) I'm surprised it all works with the exception of the tray programs. Do you need to plug in the power connector that the card has for it to work well? I've got a similar Medion Radeon 9800XL card and that's got the same …

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