badmojo wrote:

Nice pick-ups Vetz! Love that mouse pad. […]
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Nice pick-ups Vetz! Love that mouse pad.

vetz wrote:

Sphere 3D joystick (NIB). This will be great to test out in Descent!

I bought one of those too, from the same seller I'm guessing. It worked really well but I must admit that it was too revolutionary for me, I'm too old for learning new tricks.

I suggest giving the driver CD a miss and using the ISO linked to in the last post of this thread:

Seeking Space Orb 360 drivers/software

It's a later version with better game support.

Really happy with that mousepad myself as well. Its objects like this that puts the cherry on top when you have most of the gear in place 😀

Yes, it was the same link/seller. I havent tested it yet in Descent, but it should in theory work quite well. Dunno if I'm too old to learn it though haha.
Thanks for the tip regarding the CD, will certainly be using it.

I have a SpaceOrb 360 as well, it's pretty awesome! I've tried it with tons of games, but only really found it to be fun with Descent 1&2 (Descent 3 didn't have official support for it so I never really tried it). It seems to have been made with that game in mind and it is perfect, it just needs a little getting used to (~1 hour).

FPS games like Quake were kinda cool with it, but it sure introduces a handicap. This is not the case with Descent, I think it may actually help you out in that game since you can outmaneuver enemies a lot easier with the SpaceOrb 360.

I also quite like Spaceorb, I tried playing racing games with it and while it could be good for simulation, it's just too hard for dynamic arcade races 😀 Awesome with Descent though!

Picked up a Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 yesterday for £20.

Intel 386/20mhz
4mb Ram
60mb Hard Drive
Floppy Disc Drive
PS2 Mouse and Keyboard
Running a clean install of DOS 6.21 / Windows 3.11 (Just installed)

It's in fantastic condition, works very well!
More photos My new - Compaq DeskPro 386s/20

foey wrote:

Picked up a Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 yesterday for £20.

Are those EISA slots I see?

QBiN wrote:

foey wrote:

Picked up a Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 yesterday for £20.

Are those EISA slots I see?

Yup, never used anything with EISA before!

Rendition Vérité V2100 - Diamond Stealth II S220 PCI 4MB (NOS) (1997)

3DFX Voodoo4 4500 (US) 32MB PCI (Boxed) (2000)

Go Artex! Never Ending Storage!

In other news...

I've had this for a while actually, I just haven't ever gotten around to testing it. I dug it out of a pile of scrap at the recycle center and have nearly tossed it a few times thinking it probably doesn't work, but I gave it a wash, jammed a Tseng ET3000 into it (8bit), and lo-and-behold it posted right off.

It's an XT clone board, sporting a 10Mhz Siemens 8088 CPU. I have a floppy controller and drive, I don't however have an XT keyboard so I couldn't take the testing very far.

Getting a working machine up and running would be a decent amount of work and as much as I like messing around with old hardware, I simply can't muster any enthusiasm for building an XT. I don't know much about them for a start - do they support IDE HDD? Would an ordinary 8 bit sound card work with it? Maybe I can find a good home for it elsewhere.

badmojo, I have that exact "10MHz Turbo Board" mobo.

It will boot from a DS/DD floppy without assistance, just like a "real" IBM XT board, but no in-BIOS support for HDDs that I'm aware of.

XT's definitely support option ROM BIOSes though, so an XT-IDE or other MFM/RLL/IDE controller with its own BIOS will work.

Any other 8-bit addon card will work just fine, as long as the software doesn't require any 286 instructions.

Agrees with SquallStrife.
The problem with XT's and IDE is that when you use a normal 8-bit IDE controller you'd also have to use a 8-bit IDE HDD which is not desirable. This is why the XT-IDE card was created, you can use more modern drivers with that one.

With an XT you'd probably want to have good CGA compatibility, better than most (all?) VGA cards can offer. Even Turbo XT's are too slow to use VGA in games, and you could just use a 286 without the game getting too fast. Even EGA is only fast enough in some games (we had a 8MHz 8086 at the time so probably faster than your XT board. OK in Sierra AGI games, borderline in early SCI games.)
So ideally you'd use a CGA card or an EGA card with good compatibility (eg. Paradise) with a CGA or EGA screen.

-

AFAIK some games in the CGA era take advantage of the crappy NTSC modulation of the vídeo card, using patterns to effectively create a wider gamut of colors. So if you go ahead and build a XT clone, I wouldn't bother with a CGA monitor, just connect it to a TV and play those games. If they do not take advantage of that, I'd just run them in a VGA-compatible vídeo card.

Bought a MT-32 and CA-30 and some cartridges. All complete for 40$, delivered.

devius wrote:

Intel must have sold a boatload of 486 DX2-66.

The 486 DX2-66 was the processor that was able to handle the more demanding games up to that point without so much as a stutter. It might have been too fast for a lot of early games, but for more recent titles, it ran them without a hitch. The DX2-66 was still a reasonable performer even after faster 486's and 5x86's were released and played games well right up until Pentium CPU's became a requirement. It also didn't hurt that Intel basically flooded the market with them, rendering all remaining 386's and earlier 486's obsolete overnight.

Synoptic wrote:

Bought a MT-32

Is it the lighting or is there really no wear around the volume knob? 😳

jwt27 wrote:

Synoptic wrote:

Bought a MT-32

Is it the lighting or is there really no wear around the volume knob? 😳

There is wear. The plastic is shinier around the knob, but the silk screen is undamaged.

Mine had none when I got it, but due to the MT-32's liking for randomly adjusting it's volume wear quickly developed.

Mine looks pretty crap by now to be honest.

HighTreason wrote:

Mine had none when I got it, but due to the MT-32's liking for randomly adjusting it's volume wear quickly developed.

It's not the MT-32 that likes to randomly adjust its volume, it adjusts accordingly to MIDI data received by the unit. Its a feature that makes perfect sense and it's not the MT-32 fault if someone programs random annoying volume changes to be sent to the unit.

Synoptic wrote:

Bought a MT-32 and CA-30 and some cartridges. All complete for 40$, delivered. http://i.imgur.com/dL6Vt1Wl.jpg […]
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Bought a MT-32 and CA-30 and some cartridges. All complete for 40$, delivered.

MT-32 "New" i see.

Abit AX8 + A64 3500+ (ClawHammer)

Never met another synth that allows adjusting master volume remotely, it damaged the input on one of my sound cards with that behavior. I think overall it was a short sighted design decision to implement that.