Upgraded my Dell Dimension XPS T500 from 500MHz 256MB RAM to 1.1GHz Coppermine Celeron and 512MB RAM. http://imgur.com/a/txglb

vetz wrote:

Munx wrote:

Made a quick and lazy comparison between a PII Klamath and Deschutes, both runnin @ 300MHz. […]
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Made a quick and lazy comparison between a PII Klamath and Deschutes, both runnin @ 300MHz.

3 runs of Quake 2 demo1, default settings with 8-but textures set to 'no', Voodoo 1, 640x480.

Deschutes: 17; 17.5; 17.5
Klamath: 17.1; 18.4; 18.2

Is there something in the older P2's that is different from the newer ones? (besides the new manufacture process)

Also I expected 20+fps from this sort of build...

You should have gotten 20+. Did you use the wrong drivers? You get better performance with the builtin MiniGL driver than OpenGL ICD. If you install the latest Voodoo drivers you use OpenGL ICD.

Just installed older drivers, still same results.

EDIT: installed v1tweak and set the card clock to default 50 and disabled vsync. This got me 24 fps.

I have selled my old unused and dust covered 286. Hopefully she is in a better home.

My K6-2 300 machine has a bit of issues hither and thither: trying to reinstall/"fix" Windows 98SE, and I hit a major snag when it was installing my drivers, and it gives me a Fatal 0E error has occurred at a VXD file VSB16(04) and it's been giving me these issues constantly, so I had to force to boot into safe mode, and fix the issues... AGAIN!

Edit: I backed up my user profiles files and folders into another folder, booted to command prompt only with the CD ROM drivers initiated, did a deltree WINDOWS command to uninstall Windows, went to the CD Drive that has the Windows 98SE CD in it, installed the OS successfully, and all of the drivers, including DirectX 7.0 were installed successfully, and I reinstalled some games since they require certain programs for them to run, such as QuickTime; I copied all of the files and folders for every profile: my username, my brother's username, and one for another profile called Admin successfully, and I also installed Internet Explorer 6 SP1 and Shockwave 10 so that I can play Fat Boy Raids the Cookie Factory on ezone.com (how many of you remember that?).

I've been working on my Dual Tualatin 1.4S build. So far these are the specs:

Tyan Tiger 230 motherboard (VIA Apollo Pro 133A)
2x Pentium III 1.4S
256MB SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9100 128MB (I had my 9700Pro in there but it kept crashing windows after installing the drivers. Might try again later).
Aureal Vortex 2
Lite-On optical drives: 16x? DVD & 24x10x40 CDRW
10GB Maxtor HDD
3Com 3C905TX Network

For the OS I chose Windows 2000, I'm not sure if XP would be better...? But I like Windows 2000 a lot, although a clean install feels very incomplete. So much needed is missing.

I'm trying to keep it very period-correct, but my memory is a bit hazy sometimes. Also, the 1.4S is the last desktop PIII to be released, so it is more in the P4 era... It's kind of hard to Google what DVD -ROM speeds are suitable for example. I need more magazines from the era to check oud the articles and advertisements.

(with the 9700PRO, now a Powercolor 9100)

Nice case! I had a P4 1.6 I bought in 2001 with that exact case (and Power Man PSU).

Messing with a couple of k2y-pro16 (Reveal 82C929 + Crystal CS4231A-XL) cards.

Restored a 486 system I picked up and elected to keep the sound card that came with it (Along with a 4X Reveal CD-ROM drive) just for fun. Using the drivers that the previous owner used. There are some odd issues of high frequency loss on some of the staple games. Same thing occurs if I swap it out for an identical card I also happened to have. Either the caps for both cards are whacked, or the DOS software (SNDINIT) that I am using is lacking.

Not sure if I want to bother with it or just throw a different card in.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I've been working on my Dual Tualatin 1.4S build. So far these are the specs: […]
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I've been working on my Dual Tualatin 1.4S build. So far these are the specs:

Tyan Tiger 230 motherboard (VIA Apollo Pro 133A)
2x Pentium III 1.4S
256MB SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9100 128MB (I had my 9700Pro in there but it kept crashing windows after installing the drivers. Might try again later).
Aureal Vortex 2
Lite-On optical drives: 16x? DVD & 24x10x40 CDRW
10GB Maxtor HDD
3Com 3C905TX Network

For the OS I chose Windows 2000, I'm not sure if XP would be better...? But I like Windows 2000 a lot, although a clean install feels very incomplete. So much needed is missing.

I'm trying to keep it very period-correct, but my memory is a bit hazy sometimes. Also, the 1.4S is the last desktop PIII to be released, so it is more in the P4 era... It's kind of hard to Google what DVD -ROM speeds are suitable for example. I need more magazines from the era to check oud the articles and advertisements.

(with the 9700PRO, now a Powercolor 9100)

I would suggest a Geforce 4 ti4200 for this setup. I know my own dual 1.0ghz Coppermine system was upgraded from a Geforce 2mx to one back in the day and was overall well balanced with that configuration. Since the ti4200 died b4 I ended up with it, it now runs a ti500.

I got a Radeon 9250 PCI, flashed it and did the resistor mod for Mac use, and now it's humming along strong in my Power Mac G4 MDD... albeit with some caveats.

-OS X Leopard does *not* like this card; I'm stuck with a "256 Colors" mode that looks more monochrome than anything. I suspect half the reason is because I had to flash a reduced ROM instead of a full one, the other reason being that every officially supported system should have an AGP slot.
-OS 9 works fine with the correct driver extensions, and it beats the hell out of the flashed Radeon 7000 that this system was downgraded with, but I have to actually remove said R7000 before OS 9 games prioritize the 9250. I suspect this won't be a problem if I had a non-ATI card in the AGP slot instead, but only time will tell. I need to get such a card first.
-256 MB cards do indeed work for flashing, but you only get 128 MB of usable VRAM after the fact. I can live with that, seeing as anything that really calls for the full 256 MB demands a more powerful GPU.

If my Core Image + OS 9 acceleration plans fail when using dual graphics cards, then I'll just give up Core Image on AGP and move the flashed 9250 to my Power Mac 6500, gross overkill as it may be for that system.

Messed around with the eMac some more. I'm beginning to understand why apple moved away from PowerPC processors. Around the late 90s these things were absolute power houses but by 2005 they were so slow compared to X86 hardware.

I tried out some games and the experience I must say was quite horrible. I couldn't get Halo running well without lowering settings to sub-Xbox levels. Zoo Tycoon was experiencing lag from the CPU not keeping up, etc horrible experience all around.

The iMac did a bit better in it's era (late 90s). I played some Quake, Tomb Raider, and Fate of Atlantis and all ran and sounded ok enough and my iMac is the model 1 Rev B with the 2nd slowest of the 5 or 6 possible iMac GPUs and the slowest possible CPU. 380MB of RAM though which is nearly 3x apples official max. Bought it like that too with it running an install of OS X 10.2.....

I fired up an old program I made in college years ago. It is a type of calculator that uses modified school-book methods.

The part I am running now runs division on numbers to try to find dividends/divisors that are increasingly accurate representations of PI.

Tweaking mixer settings on my Audician 32 Plus for World of Xeen. This game is incredibly audio-imbalanced. My default mixer settings (which work great for all of my other games) make the FM music way too quiet. I ended up setting the Audician to an FM volume of 7/7, and Wave to 1/7.

Was playing around with my Power Macintosh G3 Beige Desktop today. Specs: G3 300MHz (overclocked slightly to 333MHz), 128MB RAM, 6GB HDD & dual booting Mac OS 9.2.2 & Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Was working fine, in both Mac OS 9 & Mac OS X. I briefly played Tomb Raider 4, simply because I had the game to hand and I also browsed some web pages in Classilla on OS 9.

However, I noticed it's PRAM battery was on it's last legs. I had some spare RAM to try and upgrade this, but the dead/dying PRAM battery has scuppered any chance of success so far, by causing the system to fail to boot or crash soon after boot, even with the original RAM reinstalled. It will then only boot if left switched off for a while. 😠

Got a new battery ordered, so will have to wait a couple of days to play around with this again and see how far I can upgrade the RAM (should be able to do 448MB with the spare chips I have available).

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Messed around with the eMac some more. I'm beginning to understand why apple moved away from PowerPC processors. Around the late 90s these things were absolute power houses but by 2005 they were so slow compared to X86 hardware.

I tried out some games and the experience I must say was quite horrible. I couldn't get Halo running well without lowering settings to sub-Xbox levels. Zoo Tycoon was experiencing lag from the CPU not keeping up, etc horrible experience all around.

The iMac did a bit better in it's era (late 90s). I played some Quake, Tomb Raider, and Fate of Atlantis and all ran and sounded ok enough and my iMac is the model 1 Rev B with the 2nd slowest of the 5 or 6 possible iMac GPUs and the slowest possible CPU. 380MB of RAM though which is nearly 3x apples official max. Bought it like that too with it running an install of OS X 10.2.....

I'd say that part of the problem there was that Motorola/Freescale didn't deliver a suitable G5, and Apple went with IBM's PowerPC 970 as the G5 we know - effectively PowerPC's NetBurst moment with how thermally inefficient it was for the sake of boosting CPU clock speeds.

This held back the iBook and PowerBook lines to G4s this whole time when the G4 couldn't even properly utilize DDR memory bandwidth (hence MDDs showing little improvement over Quicksilvers and older G4 Power Macs with SDRAM in this regard), and the dual-core G5s ran so hot that Apple had to opt for closed-loop liquid cooling units with a notorious reputation for leaking all over and killing everything.

There's still the matter of optimization between architectures and OSes to take into account, but I'd say that by the mid-2000s, any games released then really start calling for a G5. Powerful AGP cards hacked to work in a G4 are too CPU-limited, going by various benchmarks I've found; we're talking sub-30 FPS across the board for something like Halo, though you can at least crank up the graphics detail and not lose overall framerate.

However, that's also the point where I start looking at my PC collection instead; starting around the late 1990s when the 3D accelerator revolution kicked off, Mac games were generally second-class ports, held back by other matters like not supporting 3D sound acceleration at all when PC gamers could relish in the joy that is Aureal A3D over headphones. That, I understand, is largely a fault of the software-driven Sound Manager, and use of SoundSprockets for a software-driven attempt at spatialized audio was short-lived at best. At least Heretic II, Q3A, UT and Deus Ex seem to run well enough on a MDD G4 when given an adequate graphics card, but without a decent AGP card for OS X at the moment, I can't test things like BF1942 or Star Wars Battlefront appropriately.

Finally gotten around to do some basic maintenance to my main rig (which is nearer to being retro itself these days). Basis dedust (them clouds 🤣!), replaced the case fan for a Nexus and finally replaced the 2x2GB and 2x4GB modules with 4 identical 4x4GB modules for the max this board will support 😀
These modules will be finding a home in different rigs sooner or later. It's always handy to be able to purchase one upgrade, and be able to upgrade not 1 but 3 rigs 😁

Also been messing around some more with inventorying and basic sorting and resorting, as this has really gotten to be needed to be done as I've kinda neglected this lately.

Also took apart around 4 old rigs I gotten around from here and there, sorted and ready to go through the next steps (cleaning + visual inspection, in due time perhaps some testing and final sorting).

NamelessPlayer wrote:

This held back the iBook and PowerBook lines to G4s this whole time...

I lost count of the number of times someone asked me when the G5 Powerbook was coming out. The Mac mini was also odd when Intel came on board in the sense that it ran a Core Solo. That didn't last long.

Upgrading my DOS test corner from a 386 to 486. Haven't used this board yet. It had no sign of life, so I went through all the jumpers for a 486 DX 33 and then it turned on 😀

Next step will be looking at flashing the BIOS. It always takes me a while to figure out stuff when working with the good old 486.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Upgrading my DOS test corner from a 386 to 486. Haven't used this board yet. It had no sign of life, so I went through all the j […]
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Upgrading my DOS test corner from a 386 to 486. Haven't used this board yet. It had no sign of life, so I went through all the jumpers for a 486 DX 33 and then it turned on 😀

Next step will be looking at flashing the BIOS. It always takes me a while to figure out stuff when working with the good old 486.

If the board supports the AMI BIOS, I recommend that one since it might not have the Y2K bug, unlike the AwardBIOS.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

It always takes me a while to figure out stuff when working with the good old 486.

A good 486 will always fight you every step of the way 😈

badmojo wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

It always takes me a while to figure out stuff when working with the good old 486.

A good 486 will always fight you every step of the way 😈

Pretty much 😀

I bought some flash and / or eeprom chips a while ago. Also a new, better programmer and a UV light eraser. So I've got all the tools, just need to sit down and do it. What's annoying is that a month ago or two, I had everything in my head. But you lose it when you work on other era projects.