That's a nice system. Really good choice of components. 😀
Are you going for platter or CF/SD card solution?
I like the design of the case, both on the outside as well as the inside.

brassicGamer wrote:

Nice build! Classic choice of components for the era. Yeah optical drive is a tricky one - I don't think my first DVD-ROM game was UT2004 and I think there were about 5 games were available on that format in 1997. In terms of video card, the Virge is pretty much spot on - all you can really do is add a Voodoo 😀

brostenen wrote:

That's a nice system. Really good choice of components. 😀
Are you going for platter or CF/SD card solution?
I like the design of the case, both on the outside as well as the inside.

Yeah, it's a nice case. I have 3 😀 I forgot how tight of a fit AT cases could be though!

I have a Canopus Pure3D I need to test, so that one might go in as well 😀 Or a Voodoo 3, but that is more 1999 already. Or Voodoo 2? So many options!

I put in a platter from the pile of untested drives I have, I also have a CF adapter but this feels more original for now 😀 I think I'm going to install Windows 95 OSR 2.5 on it just for fun, and I don't think that's a good idea on a CF card.

Brought up the Wireless on the TransNote. Bluetooth was first by means of a Zoom PCMCIA card.

Works well. Paired with a number of devices with no issue but couldn't seem to get tethering working with the iPhone. 😕

The other was WLAN. I have a cruddy 802.11b-only Linksys Compact Flash thing but there's also a Marvell Ambicom 802.11b/g card I really want to use instead. Under XP you plug the card in and "it just works". The driver is already there. Under 2000 it wants a driver. I hunted around in search of the XP driver and fed it that because there's so little between XP and 2K...nothing. 😢

I have to be doing something wrong. I'm pretty desperate to use a CF wireless card so I'm not wasting my only PCMCIA slot.

Well, the "joy" of owning and trying to maintain older computers with older parts and this hobby. Fortunately for me, I know an awful lot about computers and how to resolve all these issues.. some other folks may of just tossed out some machines if this happened to them and they were older, but not me.. I fix instead.

So I have multiple older computers. One of my favorites is my exotic top-of-the-line K7 system.

It's a nice system I'm rather proud of.. AthlonXP, 400-mhz Barton desktop chip that runs happily @ 2530 mhz, AGP 8x, 6800 ultra.. and 512 MB dual channel ddr-443 ram.

Well it -WAS- a nice system. I had not played with this thing for nearly 6 months. I pulled it out of "Storage" where it sat in the spare bedroom, turned it on and wanting to play some Diablo2 in voodoo2 glide mode.

This machine has two hard drives, one for XP and one for Win98se, and this is my fastest native Win98se machine so far.

Well the Win98se hard drive works fine. Booted, passed a surface scan on it everything was happy.

The problem is when I tried to boot to the WinXP drive. For one.. the first time, it took nearly 20 minutes to try to finish booting, spinning on the XP start up logo and then it mysteriously just *beep* warm rebooted back to POST. Very unusual, unexpected behavior. I tried booting it a few times.. repeat, repeat, same issue. So I tried safe mode.. it wouldn't get there. It just mysteriously locked up loading safe mode.

Also the optical drive (a old 2000 Iomega CD-RW Drive) had some pecuiliar behavior as well. It would not accept a disc. Every time I would press tray return it would go in, whirr for a few seconds then spit the tray out again, and it never would "stay in" and spin up. So that got replaced as well. Then after replacing the optical drive and trying to boot it again, that time it booted up with "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" blue screen for the XP hard drive. Well... then I stuck in an XP install disc, booted to it and ran recovery console. Did Chkdsk /R C: and it took 4.5 hours before finally completing and stating "There are uncorrectable errors on the volume that can not be repaired with chkdsk." Lovely...

Well I tried booting it again and it took 45 minutes at the XP logo but finally it did boot to the desktop. But I was getting all sorts of registry errors, I had a pretty good idea that drive was toast by then. I wanted to confirm it was actually a drive problem though and not just a corrupted file system.. so I managed to get HD Tune installed, and let it do a surface scan of the XP hard drive. Just 5 minutes into the scan and it found 28 bad sectors. Well.. I copied off my Diablo2 saves to my file server, shut it down, unplugged it and chunked the drive in the trash bin.

That was the end of Day 1. I was frustrated and tired and just passed out asleep.

Day 2 (yesterday) I set about digging through my older spare computer towers and found 3 spare IDE hard drives. 160 GB, 80GB, and 40GB. But given that they too were in storage (for much longer than this other computer) without coming on I decided to do fitness checks first. Spent several hours finding my IDE RAID card, shoved it in my old quad-cpu Pentium-III dell, because it's the only computer in the house with the 64-bit PCI slots the raid card needed. Got it in there, ran some IDE cables out the sides of it and sat the 3 drives on top, and connected em up bare laying there with a spare power supply, jumpered the ATX plug and powered the 3 drives, booted it.. then spent 3 more hours trying to find drivers online for the IDE thing.

Finally found drivers then got hdtune installed and did surface scan on all 3 drives at the same time. Took a while at 25 MB/s, but it completed.. then fortunately the 160 jumped up to 50 MB/s when the other two drives stopped using the controller and flew through. All 3 passed.. so now I have spare replacements.

Today's task will be putting the 160 in the AthlonXP and re-installing XP, all the drivers and software and get it back to how it was.

It's been a long task but I see a light at the end of the tunnel. And turns out anyway, the 160 GB drive is lots newer and faster than the 40GB I had in there for XP anyway, so this is going to turn out better in the end than when it started anyway.

Welp, I now know what the rest of my afternoon will be comprised of:

Found these while I was poking around the attic earlier. From left to right: Jan. '85 Popular Computing, Dec. 2, '87 PC Mag, and Jan. 26, '88 PC Mag with a really torn-up cover.

I finally went through my monstrous AT computer I bought last year. Inside was a very rare CompuAdd ESDI HARDCache controller!

https://books.google.com/books?id=dTAEAAAAMBA … troller&f=false

I even found the drivers/software for it on the attached ESDI hard drive, so I'm archiving that for anyone else to use.

dogchainx wrote:

I finally went through my monstrous AT computer I bought last year. Inside was a very rare CompuAdd ESDI HARDCache controller!

https://books.google.com/books?id=dTAEAAAAMBA … troller&f=false

I even found the drivers/software for it on the attached ESDI hard drive, so I'm archiving that for anyone else to use.

Wow! What a find! Upload em to vogons-drivers.

Im messing with my Roland SC-D70.

Edit

I thought the unit misinterpreted a GM reset (F0 7E 7F 09 01 F7 ) as a GS reset but now I'n not so sure. Everything sounds just fine both in games and when playing GM MIDI files so I guess the rest is trival and if not I could move the SC-55se from the pure DOS system when I need it to be perfect.

/Edit

I have never seen the GM led lit. I think the GS led always will be lit when connected through MIDI cables and not USB as the unit is booted in GS mode.

Put together future K5 build,im currently working on and run some game stability tests,still need to decide which case i put it in and about 2d providing videocard,temporary its Ati Mach64...

Made a somewhat working system out of my 486dx33 board. Got the SCSI going with an Adaptech ISA card and 50pin cable.
Installed SCSI EZ_Drivers for Dos in order to have a working HDD and CD-r setup. (had to edit "DOSINST.BAT" in the installer)
Installed an SB16 Vibra with OPL3 chip on it. Only missing to install a Serial card, to be able to use a mouse.
Everything is MS-Dos-6.22 and working great. 100% ISA system, 100% SCSI HDD+CD-rom. 😜

kithylin wrote:

dogchainx wrote:

I finally went through my monstrous AT computer I bought last year. Inside was a very rare CompuAdd ESDI HARDCache controller!

https://books.google.com/books?id=dTAEAAAAMBA … troller&f=false

I even found the drivers/software for it on the attached ESDI hard drive, so I'm archiving that for anyone else to use.

Wow! What a find! Upload em to vogons-drivers.

Yeah, I even messaged this guy who has the card, but no software. 😎

http://www.franken-online.de/ymmv/esdi/resour … es.html#Missing

I bought an old Olympus camera recently, so I spent a few hours trying to find a legitimate download of the Olympus software - none available. No drivers. I can put up with the barrel distortion, so can I just access it as a usb device? No - USB driver hack doesn't work on Vista or XP. I risked a dodgy download on my Windows 10 laptop and it installed a pile of shitware that ultimately led to me resetting the machine and reinstalling 8 then upgrading to 10. Just to be safe.

So back to the camera issue. I decide to get out my internal card reader and stick it in a machine - it includes a slot for Smart Media cards that this camera uses. But - no damn 3.5" external bay in my Windows 7/XP or Vista/XP machines. My other boxes run 98 and I don't really wanna disturb then: one of them isn't networked anyway due to where it is, the other is pretty much inaccessible under other machines.

So - take the clingfilm off my 775 box [water-cooled Prescott in an Asrock 4coredual-vsta], sort out cables, install a hard drive, Windows 2000, find the driver CD, and so forth - and FINALLY I can read the pictures off. Pretty good too for a 3 megapixel camera!

Some hours later my Windows 10 laptop is finally running again. This time I only got 10 Home not 10 Pro from Microsoft [some insider program oddity gave me Pro at one point]. No matter it's just a browsing machine and sometimes used on courses.

kithylin wrote:

It's been a long task but I see a light at the end of the tunnel. And turns out anyway, the 160 GB drive is lots newer and faster than the 40GB I had in there for XP anyway, so this is going to turn out better in the end than when it started anyway.

I feel your pain mate. I don't think experience is uncommon, I just don't think most people share their extended tales - well done for sticking with it. You should keep a blog on this kind of thing.

Today, I played Realms of the Haunting on my Pentium 66, followed by Grand Theft Auto. I've only ever completed RotH once before (On my old Pentium) so want to do it again, I am making good progress so far and am amazed how much of the game I remember, they must have done something right if I remember it.

Good old 90s adventure game logic; You must check everything and think of some very obscure and abstract solutions, but at the same time, everything wants to kill you.

In other news, I have to go and look at another house in a few weeks, so I might have to slow down on the internet around that time. On that note, the internet there is meant to be marginally faster than it is here, but being KCom that doesn't mean anything. I currently sync at ~9Mbit/s (I used to sync at 12, but you know, upgrades or something) which is the upper limit for here. Apparently the internet there averages at 10.5Mbit/s, but my current line gets capped at 2.5, which seems pretty common on this network, mostly due to congestion. I therefore doubt that I would see little if any difference if I got a faster or even slower sync speed wherever I end up moving to. The line here is slow enough that it usually takes between 14 and 20 hours when I upload a video to YouTube, partly because of frequent dropouts of the service which nothing can be done about.

rein_ein wrote:

Put together future K5 build,im currently working on and run some game stability tests,still need to decide which case i put it in and about 2d providing videocard,temporary its Ati Mach64...

ATI Mach 64 is dreadfully slow in DOS, nice Windows GDI accelerator though. I have a Ati Wincharger 2MB PCI, under Phils VGA benchmarks it was the slowest PCI card I tested with a K5 166 & IDT winchip, didn't beat a WD paradise ISA card by much!

Watched your socket4 youtube video this morning, great video chap. I really enjoyed it. Hope your moved and settled soon, I know how unpleasant it can be "hanging on the line" waiting for a resolution.
Best,
Chris

HighTreason wrote:

Today, I played Realms of the Haunting on my Pentium 66, followed by Grand Theft Auto. I've only ever completed RotH once before (On my old Pentium) so want to do it again, I am making good progress so far and am amazed how much of the game I remember, they must have done something right if I remember it.

Good old 90s adventure game logic; You must check everything and think of some very obscure and abstract solutions, but at the same time, everything wants to kill you.

In other news, I have to go and look at another house in a few weeks, so I might have to slow down on the internet around that time. On that note, the internet there is meant to be marginally faster than it is here, but being KCom that doesn't mean anything. I currently sync at ~9Mbit/s (I used to sync at 12, but you know, upgrades or something) which is the upper limit for here. Apparently the internet there averages at 10.5Mbit/s, but my current line gets capped at 2.5, which seems pretty common on this network, mostly due to congestion. I therefore doubt that I would see little if any difference if I got a faster or even slower sync speed wherever I end up moving to. The line here is slow enough that it usually takes between 14 and 20 hours when I upload a video to YouTube, partly because of frequent dropouts of the service which nothing can be done about.

Worked on lots of little projects, but mostly around a Slot 1 machine and Matrox G400 MAX. One of the Aureal Vortex 2 cards I have has an optical TOSLINK connector and I always wondered about that one. Turns out my sound card in my capture card actually has an optical input, one of the RCA ports doubles up as one, but I lost the adapter.

Turns out it's not something proprietary from Creative, just a standard adapter, so I got a 3 meter optical cable and it worked straight away. I can now do noiseless captures of Windows 98 game sounds which is awesome. Interesting that the signal can still clip, but just lower the recording level to 70% or so and it's perfect. No distortions even when running 100+ FPS Quake II time demo.

The G400 MAX has quite impressive capabilities. It can drive over 3 MP resolutions at like 100 Hz. Technology hasn't moved much considering that.

Current activity today is derping around Quadfather,temporary put together in crappy microlab case and installed W7,do some light stability tests and find out 1 memory stick is bad.Replacement on its way in few days

Almost completed spex btw:
Still not sure if i can trust core temp in that question,it shows 15-25 while bios on start says 40-45

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Technology hasn't moved much considering that.

Innovation is nearly all but a thing of the past. Not much new has come to the table the last 10+ years.

brostenen wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Technology hasn't moved much considering that.

Innovation is nearly all but a thing of the past. Not much new has come to the table the last 10+ years.

Yea frustrating. 2000 something: 1200p and 60+ frames. 2016: Industry telling you that 1080p and 30 fps is cinematic 🤣