oeuvre wrote:

Played with this in 86Box […]
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Played with this in 86Box

Oh wow.. the memories.. Stop me before I put together an MMX system to install Warp 3 or 4 on..

DO IT!

oeuvre wrote:

DO IT!

Tempt me not! Too many systems already 🙁 I could try dualbooting MS-DOS and OS/2 Warp 3 (maybe even 4?) on my UMC 486SX33 I suppose, the million dollar question is of course would it run satisfactorily well?

Well, I think I've found my new favourite DOS chip (maybe until I try an Ezra).
Let's benchmark our systems with caches disabled

Spent the whole evening completely emptying and cleaning a Pentium III era beige ATX case, and installed my PIII-450 slot system into it. Everything was going fine until the last details; I was plugging in the PATA cables, and found out the only PATA ribbon I had was 79-pin, but the motherboard IDE pinout is 80-pin. *le sigh*

appiah4 wrote:

Spent the whole evening completely emptying and cleaning a Pentium III era beige ATX case, and installed my PIII-450 slot system into it. Everything was going fine until the last details; I was plugging in the PATA cables, and found out the only PATA ribbon I had was 79-pin, but the motherboard IDE pinout is 80-pin. *le sigh*

Of course I'm not aware of the details. But if I understand it correctly and your female cable is missing a hole then most probably it's a dummy seal, one that can easily break with something like a needle. If not sorry for this unnecessary post 😉

Background: I got three boxes slap full of untested, pulled HDDS from a local computer shop that was closing down.

Welp, after only successfully testing 8 good SATA laptop drives an evil drive killed the SMART capabilities of my 3ware Escalade 8506-12 12 port SATA raid card. Because of this I've began testing IDE HDDS with my Escalade 7506-8.

I imagine part of the reason SMART died on the SATA RAID card is because the newer SATA drives I was testing were mostly pulled for being bad in the first place while all the IDE drives and old SATA drives were mostly pulled from working old computers that were just being recycled.

OH well, guess I'll snag another from fleabay.

Some PIX

http://i.imgur.com/b6NWsvF.jpg
A bunch of drives in my favorite partitioning program. My testing consists of...
1. Plug in 8 drives
2. Check SMART health then shutdown. I then divide all drives into three groups. good drives with no bad sectors, good-ish drives with 0-20 bad sectors, and bad drives that have more than 20 bad sectors. For all drives I've tested so far they typically either have a few, or a few hundred bad sectors.
3. Once I get 8 good drives I wipe out all partitions and do a one pass secure erase then a full format under windows.
4. Check SMART data again under same rules in #2, but this time good drives get bagged and stored.

http://i.imgur.com/DQiJBdT.jpg
8 Drives all on carpet 😲 No worries though, I keep a desk fan pointed at them during testing and monitor emps to keep them from bursting into flames.
Maybe ESD killed my 8506-12? Don't care too much if a drive dies though (even though I don't think one has died due to static yet) as I got them all for free.

http://i.imgur.com/YXSLB5h.jpg
Big stack 'o untested Maxtors center front with other brands to the sides. Rear right are tested bad drives and drives that were marked bad from the shop. I do plan to test the drives that were marked bad from the shop though as the shops testing was very strict. For example they marked a 500GB WD Green as bad even though is only had ONE bad sector. Rear left on the antistatic foam are good good drives that await further testing.

http://i.imgur.com/C6i2oRV.jpg
Good IDE drives so far. Not too many as I only started a couple hours ago.

The test system is a Dual Athlon MP build based on the Tyan S2466. It's rock solid stable and has the high bandwidth 64bit 66MHz PCI slots necessary for the RAID cards to work at full speed.

Diagnosing an issue where USB keyboard input causes lag everywhere. I suspect it's got something to do with the BIOS. Going to play Kiloblaster and pressing anything during gameplay instantly makes it go at roughly half speed, and messes with all the PCM playback. Even FM music playback slows down. After 15 seconds of repeated input, the keyboard will simply fail, and it gets stuck in the slow mode.

I don't own a PS/2 keyboard or mouse, but I'm thinking I'm going to need to get one, since the BIOS provisions won't be enough.

Strangely, not all games suffer from this, but Kiloblaster and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold are from different companies entirely, and they both suffer from the issue.

When I switched to playing the game with the Gravis Gamepad, however... mission accomplished.

Went to RE-PC, bought some keyboards. One was a rather nice clicky NEC keyboard that I'm using on my 486 right now.

My K6-2 300 system had issues freezing up when playing 3D games, like Tomb Raider 2, for example. It had a 200W Bestec ATX PSU installed, then I placed a DiabloTek 400W ATX PSU, and it still locked up (with both PSUs, the Ctrl-Alt-Del command never worked, and the only option was to push the power button to shut off the system); I swapped the PSU that was in my Athlon 64 system, a 520W Corsair PSU, then it froze again, but responded to the Ctrl-Alt-Del command to reset the system properly.

I then upgraded my nVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 PCI Video card and VooDoo2 accelerator card drivers, and it hasn't frozen up ever since. I also took out the 0.5W 8 ohm speaker out of my K6-2 300 computer and placed it inside my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus for the Lo-Tech Tandy Compatible Sound Card for less wire clutter and to have an open port for my MT-32 and in the future, for a GM synthesizer. Next up, making a PC speaker redirect cable to hook up to the Lo-Tech Tandy Compatible Sound Card in place of the PC "Squeaker" with a resistor and capacitor for better sound and to prevent a short in the circuitry.

I also upgraded Ubuntu from 16.10 to 17.04 on my Presario C700, and my mom's Dell "Red Plague" Inspiron 1525 is getting the OS upgrade from 16.10 to 17.04. My Pavilion N3350 is running Windows 98SE with all of the drivers, and I have a Wireless G CardBus 32-bit installed, and I'm planning on upgrading the memory in the laptop from 64MB to 256MB since the amount of resources is too low, and programs are closing left and right due to low memory.

I'm going to replace the flooring in my room with tile flooring in place of the carpet, so I'm going to move all of my things out of there (dressers, TV sets, computers, etc.), tear the carpet and padding out, including the infamous carpet tacks, lay out the anti-slip cover to place on the wood flooring, place the tiles on the floor (while measuring and cutting the exact amount), finish the paint job on the molding, walls, and baseboards, build a desk for my closet to place my computer collection in there (sorted by needs new caps, fully functional, and repair bench to re-solder bad parts), set up my gaming area (3 TV sets, 5 consoles, 1 DVD recorder, stereo receiver), and have another desk for my Packard Bell and iMac G3/600 for audio and video editing, digitizing cassettes, and capturing footage from the Packard Bell itself for YouTube videos by my bed.

konc wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Spent the whole evening completely emptying and cleaning a Pentium III era beige ATX case, and installed my PIII-450 slot system into it. Everything was going fine until the last details; I was plugging in the PATA cables, and found out the only PATA ribbon I had was 79-pin, but the motherboard IDE pinout is 80-pin. *le sigh*

Of course I'm not aware of the details. But if I understand it correctly and your female cable is missing a hole then most probably it's a dummy seal, one that can easily break with something like a needle. If not sorry for this unnecessary post 😉

Well.. Possibly, but the real issue is that I'm awfully confused with regards to the whole cable and pinout thing. My understanding has always been that standard IDE is an 80-pin 40 conductor cable with a matching 80-pin motherboard header, and UltraATA is a 79-pin 80 conductor cable with a matching 79 pin otherboard header. The motherbard in question, a Lucky Star 6P2BX supposedly supports Ultra-ATA Mode 5 which but the pinout is 80 pin.. So am I supposed to use a 40 conductor wire here or an 80 conductor one, and do 80 pin 80 conductor cables exist?

appiah4 wrote:

konc wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Spent the whole evening completely emptying and cleaning a Pentium III era beige ATX case, and installed my PIII-450 slot system into it. Everything was going fine until the last details; I was plugging in the PATA cables, and found out the only PATA ribbon I had was 79-pin, but the motherboard IDE pinout is 80-pin. *le sigh*

Of course I'm not aware of the details. But if I understand it correctly and your female cable is missing a hole then most probably it's a dummy seal, one that can easily break with something like a needle. If not sorry for this unnecessary post 😉

Well.. Possibly, but the real issue is that I'm awfully confused with regards to the whole cable and pinout thing. My understanding has always been that standard IDE is an 80-pin 40 conductor cable with a matching 80-pin motherboard header, and UltraATA is a 79-pin 80 conductor cable with a matching 79 pin motherboard header. The motherboard in question, a Lucky Star 6P2BX supposedly supports Ultra-ATA Mode 5 which but the pinout is 80 pin.. So am I supposed to use a 40 conductor wire here or an 80 conductor one, and do 80 pin 80 conductor cables exist?

There is one IDE pinout and two types, 40 conductor and 80 conductor.

I've come across this problem myself, and in a pinch I just use a tiny drill bit to remove the key/blocked pin. Your 440BX board has ATA33 only meaning you don't need an 80 conductor cable. 80 conductor cables are just newer and were made more friendly so they have a key, index pin, and color coding. Since the QDI board doesn't have ATA66 (minimum speed that requires 80 conductor) the connectors on board weren't made with the ATA66+ 80 conductor cable standards in mind.

I gathered together a bunch of spare parts that I had in storage and built a Socket 7 system. I was playing around with a PC Chips M537 motherboard at first, with VXPro (Via?) chipset, Pentium MMX 233MHz & 128MB RAM. This was ok, but I thought I'd try out my spare AMD K6-2 CPU and the board didn't like it, so for now I decided to use a different board instead.

Spec I ended up with:

PC Chips M507 Motherboard
Intel i430FX Chipset
AMD K6-2 500 (runs fine in this board, but underclocked to 300MHz)
128MB EDO RAM
4.3GB IDE HDD
Voodoo3 2000 16MB PCI Graphics
Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA Sound Card
RealTek RTL8139 10/100Mbps PCI Ethernet Card

This motherboard doesn't fully support running with an AMD K6-2 CPU, but I've had 1 installed in it for years and it works with comprimises. I played around with the jumper settings and whilst it would run at a maximum of 397MHz, it wasn't stable there, so my only stable options were 232MHz @ 66 FSB, or 300MHz @ 50 FSB. According to my records I apparently used to have it running at 333MHz, but I don't recall how I managed that.

Installed Windows 98 SE on it and it generally performs as expected for a poor motherboard with fake cache.

Today I had my recently completed PII/Win98 build hooked up to the AV system for some DVD action.

Equipment list:
Asus P3B-F motherboard
PII-400 overclocked to 533MHz
512MB CL2 PC133
V2 SLI + GF4 Ti-4400
SB Audigy2

Samsung F8500 64" plasma
Denon AVR-X7200WA receiver
7x Philharmonic Audio Affordable Accuracy monitors
2x SVS PC12-Plus subwoofers

I played around 30 minutes of the LOTR: The Return of the King DVD through this setup. The rig was configured to pipe the DTS ES Discrete 6.1 track directly to the receiver. While DVD certainly doesn't look so hot on a large screen, there's something immensely satisfying about seeing "DTS ES+Neural X" show up on the receiver's front panel when it's being driven by an 18 year old computer!

Replaced the speakers in my Dell E1505 that a family member managed to blow both the speakers out.

I'm doing a quick power on to BIOS test with an Abit TH7-RAID i850 Socket 423 motherboard I bought.

The motherboard isn't in very good condition, warped and with a broken USB port but it was still priced at £50 + £20 shipping with a P4 1.6 GHz CPU. I thought it was too expensive but kept it in my watch and when the price was lowered to £36.50 I could not resist.

It turns out that the CPU fan header is dead which isn't a big deal but as it shows that the seller diddn't do any thorough testing so I will need to test the motherboard with an OS this weekend to see what else is broken. Not that I will return it as long as the issues don't hinder the board from running but if the list with issues gets much longer I will probably at least moan about it.

I found a bonus though, the CPU accepts multipliers from 8x to 16x so I guess it's a Willamette P4 ES! I have not removed the included Zalman CNPS6500B-ALCU cooler yet to read the markings on the CPU.

Another good sign is that this TH7-RAID has no issues with POSTing at 156 MHz FSB which is the maximum setting on most motherboards with the i850 chipset. The Asus P4T will only post at FSB settings below 150 MHz and not run with stability at FSB higher than 144 MHz. The "low" max FSB is a known limitation caused by the cheap Cypress "Direct Rambus Clock Generators" maxing out with the 3x memory multiplier. The Abit board uses the exact same Cypress "DRCG" model but somehow it seems to clock better! If it can run at 150+ FSB with stability remains to be seen though.

Edit

The CPU turned out to be an "QAQ1" Pentium 4 1500 ES made week 39 year 2000. Why they locked multipliers higher than 16x is a bit of a mystery. The CPU has no issue with posting at 13*133 = 1733 MHz so it isn't the CPU reaching it's frequency ceiling.

/Edit

Installed WinMe on my PII(I)450 build against my better judgement, just trying to keep a more open mind about it following Phil's video.. but I have a feeling I'll hate myself as soon as Voodoo 3 and Live! Value drivers are installed...

Changing broken usb ports on GIGABYTE ga-bx2000. And a pair of bulged caps.

SaxxonPike wrote:

Strangely, not all games suffer from this, but Kiloblaster and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold are from different companies entirely, and they both suffer from the issue.

Love me a bit of Blake Stone.

I have spent the evening imaging my game CDs. Again. I ripped them into ISO format years ago but then realised this doesn't work for CDs with audio tracks. So I've redone them all in BIN/CUE format. I have in the region of 50 games on original CDs... 😒

EDIT: oh, and of course I have a bunch of Safedisc to deal with.

Well.... I oficially killed my Unisys 486 today. It was in need of a new dallas battery, and after replacing the battery it is dead as a cold fish. Going to salvage cache memmory and other parts.