I can relate to that. Now I've got a pretty organised system going. I don't think I have nearly as much stuff as you have, but organisation really helps with this hobby 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I can relate to that. Now I've got a pretty organised system going. I don't think I have nearly as much stuff as you have, but organisation really helps with this hobby 😀

I finally found it, it only took most of the afternoon!

I store most of my hardware in huge moving boxes. The issue is that I have not marked the boxes so boxes with AGP video cards, PCI-E video cards, motherboards, heat sinks et cetera all look the same and they are stacked on top of each other in my storages. It's pretty much the worst system ever but it's the only way to get everything to fit in the storage spaces, I should have marked the boxes though.

Im preparing a new combined work area and storage space in a ~14 m2 (~150ft2) room, I won't be able to fit everything in there but at least the more important stuff. I will probably not have any wired up computers in that room though, only a work area for soldering and such and some sort of shelf system for storing boxes with stuff.

Not being too happy with the options available for (Dos-compatible) Gameport gamepads, I decided to make my own adaptor for Sega Genesis gamepads. Since the Genesis pads have 3 action buttons + start, they are a perfect fit for the 4-button gameport limit.

Plus I already made myself a great 3-button arcade stick a while ago:

Here are the parts I'm using for this project:

A project box, one DA15 (Gameport) port, one DE9 (Genesis) port, an Arduino for the logic, proto board, and some resistors. The extra little board is the FTDI friend I need to program the Arduino; he won't be part of the final project. Since this Arduino doesn't have analog output, nor do I *reallly* want it, I'm going to use two discrete pins and a pair of 5.6 K resistors for a simple voltage divider. If I want 0, I set both discretes to Low. If I want 5 V, I set both to high, and if I want "the middle", I set one to high and one to low, for a result of 2.5 V on the PC side.

Today was the mechanical day. I drilled, sawed and ground out some holes in my project box to fit the ports. Here is the current result:

I'm not super-happy with how loose the DA15 port is (the port screws go too far through), so I may just glue it down as well 😐.

(Full album, which I will update as I do the wiring)
https://goo.gl/photos/VxJhKnAqShsXoYvs8

I ran Phil's Ultimate VGA bench on my desktop Pentium M 740 with Geforce 6800 (NV41) not as quick as I had expected considering it's windows performance.

At some point Nvidia put a cap on DOS performance.

Try a Radeon, I had to do this when I ran it on my i7 😀

zerker wrote:

Plus I already made myself a great 3-button arcade stick a while ago: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/zTuYhrH3KOr6bdgdZSqViPi5 […]
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Plus I already made myself a great 3-button arcade stick a while ago:

<pirate voice>Arrrr... she's a beauty!!</pirate voice>

I miss my Dreamcast arcade stick that I sold. 😢

First an update on my capture system.

This is how it ended up, the cables are still a mess.

Asus P5K, Q9550, 4GB, 120GB + 2TB, XiFi Xtreme Music and an Epiphan DVI2PCIe for capturing.

Today I'm testing the Abit Fatal1ty AA8XE bundle i posted in the bought this stuff thread.

The Abit Fatal1ty AA8XE i925XE motherboard.

The CPU turned out to be a furnace of a Prescott 560, the included Zalman cooler did not manage to cool it at all although it looked like it had made good contact with the CPU when I later removed it.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

I changed cooler to a Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme but the beeping would not stop and now the system shut down after 10s. The system did not even complete POST before shutting down but it turned out it was only the fan alarm as the 120mm fan I'm using does not have a RPM signal.

No more beeping.

I'm currently trying to find out what make my Athlon XP 1700+ build make some noises on power on.
Here is one video of the noises if anyone is curious about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbsNU6EllqY

.legaCy wrote:

I'm currently trying to find out what make my Athlon XP 1700+ build make some noises on power on.
Here is one video of the noises if anyone is curious about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbsNU6EllqY

Which noise are you referring to? I hear a clicking noise (which sounds like a stuck head on a hard drive) and a loud humming noise.

Skyscraper wrote:

The CPU turned out to be a furnace of a Prescott 560, the included Zalman cooler did not manage to cool it at all although it looked like it had made good contact with the CPU when I later removed it.

Do you really want to use this hot 'melting pot'??? These high clocked P4's are known for their high 'leakage'...

melbar wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

The CPU turned out to be a furnace of a Prescott 560, the included Zalman cooler did not manage to cool it at all although it looked like it had made good contact with the CPU when I later removed it.

Do you really want to use this hot 'melting pot'??? These high clocked P4's are known for their high 'leakage'...

It's totally under control now, it idles at 55C (BIOS) running at stock 3.6 GHz 1.4V with one of the best air coolers in existance combined with a 38mm thick 120mm fan! I just need to raise the speed to 4+ GHz and increase the v-core to 1.6V and everything will turn out great!

This CPU might have seen it's best days but no worries I have 100+ other s775 Prescott 5xx CPUs to torture if this one gives up, not that it will, they never do.

.legaCy wrote:

I'm currently trying to find out what make my Athlon XP 1700+ build make some noises on power on.
Here is one video of the noises if anyone is curious about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbsNU6EllqY

Sounds like that's a dead hard drive.

Lately I had been playing on nostalrius [retro in its way...] but now that's been quashed I've actually turned on my retro pcs for the first time in months.

RetroPC#1 is a voodoo5/aureal2 box mostly for diablo2 under glide, I really ought to check out other games though there's a Yamaha 724 and a PCX1 inside too. Thing is, that respec you can do after one of those later patches really ruins the game for me.

RetroPC#2 is Kyro2/V2SLI/AWE32 but there is some problem with the V2s: in Diablo2 [yes on this too - it's in another room...] some textures get patterns of dots over them after a while. GLQuake and AvP don't appear to be affected. Texture memory failing? Some overheating issue? Damn this hardware!

Uninstalled most of my gog games on my Windows 10 PC. Just left Torchlight [though it's a bit cartoony for me...] and Planescape Torment. And OMFG there is now screen artefacting on this game in 10. I don't know if this is a 10 problem or the gtx560ti drivers - the mouse pointer was replicating all over the game loading screen. Luckily I dual boot XP so simply rebooted to that and used the gog installer. Phew - plays fine.

Sunless Sea still doesn't work on this box either - by contrast it did work on a fresh-install 10 box with near-identical hardware. *sigh*. Atr least it plays on my crappy laptop.

clueless1 wrote:

.legaCy wrote:

I'm currently trying to find out what make my Athlon XP 1700+ build make some noises on power on.
Here is one video of the noises if anyone is curious about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbsNU6EllqY

Which noise are you referring to? I hear a clicking noise (which sounds like a stuck head on a hard drive) and a loud humming noise.

Yes its the clicking noise, its not the HDD because it will happen without any drive installed at all.
And the harddrive is working great.
And this happens only when i take out the power(remove the power cord from psu) at least for 15 minutes

.legaCy wrote:

Yes its the clicking noise, its not the HDD because it will happen without any drive installed at all. And the harddrive is work […]
Show full quote

clueless1 wrote:

.legaCy wrote:

I'm currently trying to find out what make my Athlon XP 1700+ build make some noises on power on.
Here is one video of the noises if anyone is curious about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbsNU6EllqY

Which noise are you referring to? I hear a clicking noise (which sounds like a stuck head on a hard drive) and a loud humming noise.

Yes its the clicking noise, its not the HDD because it will happen without any drive installed at all.
And the harddrive is working great.
And this happens only when i take out the power(remove the power cord from psu) at least for 15 minutes

I might suggest starting your own new thread about this. Most folks on here are helpful and would likely try to help you diagnose this.

I slept in and drank a large amount of alcohol. Also thought out the process of getting rid of some excess parts and can not wait to get working so that I can send out some spare parts and get going on some projects 😀 almost there! Just gotta keep scrounging by for a bit longer.

I catalogued my DOS games to spreadsheet. Relevant columns are year published, publisher/developer, whether it needs slowdown, and if so, what equivalent cpu speed it needs. Next, to reorganize them on the DOS partitions. The plan is to have a partition for older games that need slowdown, and a partition for newer, games that don't need slowdown. I may sub-organize them by publisher, but I don't know if I want to be navigating that deep in folder structures to get to my games. 😀

clueless1 wrote:

I catalogued my DOS games to spreadsheet. Relevant columns are year published, publisher/developer, whether it needs slowdown, and if so, what equivalent cpu speed it needs. Next, to reorganize them on the DOS partitions. The plan is to have a partition for older games that need slowdown, and a partition for newer, games that don't need slowdown. I may sub-organize them by publisher, but I don't know if I want to be navigating that deep in folder structures to get to my games. 😀

Personally I've found "slow down" in dos to not work very well at all with most systems (I've tried in the past) and myself went to the length to source and assemble actual slower older computers instead.

I have disk-images and ISO's of older dos games myself.. I think over 8500 of em coming to nearly 55 GB, but haven't admittedly gone through em all yet. Maybe some day.

kithylin wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

I catalogued my DOS games to spreadsheet. Relevant columns are year published, publisher/developer, whether it needs slowdown, and if so, what equivalent cpu speed it needs. Next, to reorganize them on the DOS partitions. The plan is to have a partition for older games that need slowdown, and a partition for newer, games that don't need slowdown. I may sub-organize them by publisher, but I don't know if I want to be navigating that deep in folder structures to get to my games. 😀

Personally I've found "slow down" in dos to not work very well at all with most systems (I've tried in the past) and myself went to the length to source and assemble actual slower older computers instead.

I have disk-images and ISO's of older dos games myself.. I think over 8500 of em coming to nearly 55 GB, but haven't admittedly gone through em all yet. Maybe some day.

Wow! I've only got about 60 DOS games installed, and not many more in archives.

After removing the capacitors from the power board of the T1600 laptop I'm restoring, I attempted to play Blackthorne - a favourite from back in the day that I had completely forgotten about until seeing one of those YouTube webshows of games from the 90s. The only complete system I have at the moment that is definitely working in DOS is my Acermate 386/20.

Obstacle one: machine's only removable storage is a floppy drive (need to get me a GoTek) and I haven't set up networking on this machine yet. Happily, Blackthorne compresses down to fit on one 1.44MB floppy. Happy days.

Obstacle two: I've got a Labway card installed for sound, with an OPL4 on it. This has been working brilliantly for Adlib and Soundblaster equivalency, but Blackthorne refused to run with SFX enabled. A change in IRQ made no difference.

Obstacle three: so I played it without SFX and realised it's too slow. I had a machine just like this in the early 90s but I guess I played this game on my 486 when I upgraded.

Obstacle four: I do not have a built 486 system at the moment but I have three socket 3 boards: the Pine VLB one will not POST, the Chaintech throws up a floppy error even if I use an ISA interface and disable the internal one (which I think was damaged by battery leakage - I have not fully assessed this board yet), and my original Abit board that I had back then will not POST.

Obstacle five: I have a couple of OEM PII systems (an IBM and a Dell) which I can't get to right now. The other is a custom build with a QDI Legend board in it and a PII 233MHz. General errors when reading from floppy. Tried two drives.

Couldn't be bothered to investigate further. Gave up. Over a period of 2 hours I play Blackthorne until I got to the first checkpoint. Someone recently mentioned planning builds 80% of the time and playing games some of the remainder - this is why. Without a fully configured and tested system, retro gaming is POINTLESS!!!!