I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing X-Com in DOSBox on a 24" 1920x1200 monitor. It's definitely a little more comfortable on my laptop's 17" screen (also 1920x1200), but there's no such thing as too big 😀

It also helps that I use output=opengl (plus fullresolution=0x0 and aspect=true), which applies bilinear filtering to the image during stretching. This gives DOS games a soft look that is more evocative of the CRT displays they were designed for. For me, the extreme sharpness of LCDs is much more jarring in old games than the larger sizes - especially if I have to deal with non-integer scaling factors.

Just sniped this auction off ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/330740385163

Not one, not 2, but THREE 1GHz Orion core Athlon slot A processors! It even looks like they come with high-performance aftermarket heatsinks. HOT PISS! I'm sorry if someone here was bidding on it. I watched a last-second $20 bid come in and I'm glad I had bid more! I'm hoping at least ONE of the processors works. If more than one works, I'll give someone here first dibbs before it goes to ebay. I don't see how I need more than one. 😜

luckybob wrote:

Just sniped this auction off ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/330740385163

Not one, not 2, but THREE 1GHz Orion core Athlon slot A processors! It even looks like they come with high-performance aftermarket heatsinks. HOT PISS! I'm sorry if someone here was bidding on it. I watched a last-second $20 bid come in and I'm glad I had bid more! I'm hoping at least ONE of the processors works. If more than one works, I'll give someone here first dibbs before it goes to ebay. I don't see how I need more than one. 😜

But what about having spare parts? ;D

Sometimes (okay most of the time) patience pays off! I originally wanted my Pentium 200MMX rig to have a Rendition Verite and a 3DFX Voodoo1. I settled for my spare partly-working Voodoo2 at first, and scored a free Verite 2100 from someone on a forum. The cheapest (and one of the only) Voodoo1 I could find on eBay was a $50 Diamond Monster 3D, so I decided to wait awhile and see if it dropped in price. After a month it dropped to 40, but I still wasn't sure I wanted to pay that, so I kind of forgot about it.

Fast forward a few months, and today I noticed it was still on my watch list, and the guy must have been desperate to get rid of it. I finally bought that card... for $14 shipped! Score! Now my Pentium will finally be complete per my vision.

Looks like it's a 4MB model, since Wikipedia indicates that's the only memory size Diamond's Voodoo1 boards came in. Here's the ebay link: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?View … cvip=true&rt=nc

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I could get a 20" 1600 x 1200 screen but they are harder to find and cost quite a bit. With such a screen 320 x 200 games display perfect pixels with no scaling issues.

In theory, yes. In reality, not so much. Both my 1600x1200 TFTs still show uneven pixels in 320x200, and it's impossible to get rid of them with the monitor controls. 😒

5u3 wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I could get a 20" 1600 x 1200 screen but they are harder to find and cost quite a bit. With such a screen 320 x 200 games display perfect pixels with no scaling issues.

In theory, yes. In reality, not so much. Both my 1600x1200 TFTs still show uneven pixels in 320x200, and it's impossible to get rid of them with the monitor controls. 😒

Is it maybe trying to reserve pixels to show the overscan border?

HunterZ wrote:

5u3 wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I could get a 20" 1600 x 1200 screen but they are harder to find and cost quite a bit. With such a screen 320 x 200 games display perfect pixels with no scaling issues.

In theory, yes. In reality, not so much. Both my 1600x1200 TFTs still show uneven pixels in 320x200, and it's impossible to get rid of them with the monitor controls. 😒

Is it maybe trying to reserve pixels to show the overscan border?

Nope, the automatic scan tries to fit the picture without the overscan border.
The problem seems to come from the A/D conversion of the signal - the clock/phase and position controls on the monitor are much too coarse in order to align the pixels properly.
Besides, many of those 1600x1200 business LCDs are limited to 60Hz - say goodbye to smooth VGA scrolling.

Has anyone tried one of these "MediaMax" white-label hard drives?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-40GB-7200RPM-8MB- … R-/110681097628

At $16 shipped it's not much of a gamble, but I figured I'd ask if anyone has had any experience with them. They seem a little suspicious. 😉

Stay away from white label drives. The company you linked says they're OEM units, but that sounds very fishy to me... OEM units would still be marked with either the original manufacturer name (which, judging by the pictures, is WD), or with the name of some major company like Compaq or Dell or whatever... not some random company you've never heard of.

Usually such drives are third-party refurbs... meaning, they were dead drives bought up by some random company and repaired. They can't sell them as the original drive brand, so they stick their own label on them.

Pretty much all those companies are sorta fly-by-night operations, and there's no guarantee of the quality of work they do... I'd suspect most of 'em don't even have a clean room or anything. Often, they just throw together parts from several drives to make one unit that works long enough for them to sell for a quick buck.

You're better off just picking up used drives.

This is easily the biggest bargain I've gotten myself on eBay - a Music Quest MQX-32m MIDI interface for 1 cent (plus $7.50 postage):

It arrived last night so I popped it into an awaiting 386DX-40, paired it with a SB Pro 2.0, hooked it up to a MT-32 and... nothing. The jumper settings were incorrect it turned out, but a bit of googling found the settings for 2/9 330 (included below), and away it went. I've tested it with Pohl's Gateway to confirm that it can handle intelligent mode and yes it can, hooray!

Nice bargain 😀

If it runs Gateway = it runs everything 😀

CapnCrunch53 wrote:

Sometimes (okay most of the time) patience pays off! I originally wanted my Pentium 200MMX rig to have a Rendition Verite and a 3DFX Voodoo1. I settled for my spare partly-working Voodoo2 at first, and scored a free Verite 2100 from someone on a forum. The cheapest (and one of the only) Voodoo1 I could find on eBay was a $50 Diamond Monster 3D, so I decided to wait awhile and see if it dropped in price. After a month it dropped to 40, but I still wasn't sure I wanted to pay that, so I kind of forgot about it.

Fast forward a few months, and today I noticed it was still on my watch list, and the guy must have been desperate to get rid of it. I finally bought that card... for $14 shipped! Score! Now my Pentium will finally be complete per my vision.

Looks like it's a 4MB model, since Wikipedia indicates that's the only memory size Diamond's Voodoo1 boards came in. Here's the ebay link: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?View … cvip=true&rt=nc

Not bad, I scored a v1 my self a few weeks ago off amazon of all places. $14.48 after ship 😁

5u3 wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I could get a 20" 1600 x 1200 screen but they are harder to find and cost quite a bit. With such a screen 320 x 200 games display perfect pixels with no scaling issues.

In theory, yes. In reality, not so much. Both my 1600x1200 TFTs still show uneven pixels in 320x200, and it's impossible to get rid of them with the monitor controls. 😒

That is quite disappointing 😒

Is the behaviour different if you use DVI?

The 60Hz limit is also interesting. The Samsung I have does display on the info page that it runs at 70 (or was it 72) Hz and scrolling appears to be smooth. But I haven't really tested this yet.

What are some good games / demos to test this?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Is the behaviour different if you use DVI?

The 60Hz limit is also interesting. The Samsung I have does display on the info page that it runs at 70 (or was it 72) Hz and scrolling appears to be smooth. But I haven't really tested this yet.

What are some good games / demos to test this?

Haven't had much time to test this properly yet, but from a first glance, it's radically different via DVI.
It seems that the scaling is done by the video card and the refresh rate is forced to 60 Hz. I don't know if this is normal for DVI connections or just my card/monitor (Geforce TI4600/HP LP2065).

Good games to test for the VGA scrolling issue are pinball games like Pinball Dreams or Epic Pinball.

Suma Platinum Sif Type B Geforce 2 MX 400 (faster specs then the normal retail version of the card)
Voodoo 3 3000
Radeon 9000 (Powercolor I think?)
Aopen Geforce 2 TI
Geforce FX 5200 (evga,bad caps)

Amstrad PPC640. 12mhz NEC v30, dual 720kb floppies, 640kb memory and *gasp* a modem! Between the three floppies I keep with it, I have the original MS-DOS 3.3 system disk, a desk that once had a terminal emulator but now has Jeopardy and Tetris on it and another floppy with ZZT and the EDIT program from MS-DOS 6. Need to dig around for another floppy so I can have Wheel of Fortune too.

I like that unlike so many other portables from the late 1980s, the CGA screen on this is proper aspect ratio. Unfortunately, the contrast isn't very good. The form-factor of the machine itself is very odd and cumbersome and heavy (22lbs) but the keyboard's nice and it's pretty rugged. If nothing more, it's an easy conversation piece and takes up less space than a real PC XT while having a faster cpu and a carry handle.

Just bought a Nec PCX2 ,cant wait to test it against a voodoo1

FaSMaN wrote:

Just bought a Nec PCX2 ,cant wait to test it against a voodoo1

After you snatched that card right infront of me I have now learned by my mistake and bookmarked Amibay's hardware trade and sale page. Also checking it daily. Not gonna happen again that someone get a PCX2 before me 😉

Sorry about that, when I saw it I just had to get it, I remember reading about them in the PC Format but for some reason they never sold them here, only voodoo 1 cards.

If its any consolation the card has found itself a good home, and I will be building a P1 233MMX dedicated just for it 😀

No worries 😀 Put some pictures up in the system specs thread when you're done building it. You will probably be one of the few with a dedicated PowerVR machine.