Well, in honor of the 1,000,000 views, I present:

Network cards, SB Live, G200, G400, ATi... blah blah... wuh? AWE64 Gold and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP?

... $20?!?

*buy now*

...

*giggle*

...

*cry*

...

I think I have a problem...

😵

Lol - that was JUST posted in the other thread! You're quick!

Haha... which thread? I just found it on eBay. 😮

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Haha... which thread? I just found it on eBay. 😮

Topic 34088

😉

I decided to visit my local charity shop this weekend just on the off chance of finding something. I hardly ever find anything there but I did once find a working Commodore monitor so I go back occasionally just to check. There in amongst the boardgames was a box labelled motherboard. The branding on it identified it as a Gigabyte Athlon board, but inside was the board that the Gigabyte probably replaced - an i440ZX Celeron socket 370 board from EPOX with CPU and cooler. There was also an ESS sound card in the box as well as some new IDE cables and the manual etc for the Gigabyte. Total cost less than 1 dollar.

I spent quite a fun morning getting the thing to work. It was a bit dusty but otherwise perfectly functional. It's quite a tidy little ATX board with some ISA slots, AGP and no integrated graphics or sound. I chucked two PC133 DIMMs in to bring it up to the max of 512MB RAM and used a spare 4GB IDE drive with Win98 on it. It makes quite a good little DOS machine - it might even replace my K6 Socket 7 DOS PC.

The ESS card didn't impress me though as I couldn't get any Yamaha OPL sound to work, but if I do use it as my primary DOS machine I'll just use my SB16/DB50XG combo instead.

I used my old GeForce 440MX AGP card for video, but that's not ideal as the cooler fan has seized - hopefully once the 6600 GS I've ordered arrives for my P4 machine I can retire the 5200 that's in there now to the Celeron. Bit of an overkill since the board only supports AGP2X AFAIK, but it should be safer than using the 440MX. Otherwise I can just move over the Voodoo from my Socket 7 PC.

Irene charity shop?

Yip. Don't tell me you gave it to them? 😀

AnacreonZA wrote:

Yip. Don't tell me you gave it to them? 😀

Not really , but there should be a lot more PC games there now that I moved 😉

HPZeta :3

Is DX10 retro yet? Either way, I have taken a break from my socket 3 frustrations with this one. Yes I know that Crossfire was badly implemented and that the drivers were crap but I simply could not resist getting another one of these to complement the one I already own, especially as it was a tenner and complete in box. Now all I need is a motherboard that supports Crossfire!

Normally I'm not into buying old pc hardware....but I couldn't resist this one!

A Sharp PC-7000 8086 computer
Gonna pick it up tomorrow!!

I'm sure my buddy on this website Chris is gonna like this

@19rsn007
welcome to vogons!

also i got one if those machines, really neat! I play Zork on it. ^.^

19rsn007 wrote:

Normally I'm not into buying old pc hardware....but I couldn't resist this one! […]
Show full quote

Normally I'm not into buying old pc hardware....but I couldn't resist this one!

A Sharp PC-7000 8086 computer
Gonna pick it up tomorrow!!

I'm sure my buddy on this website Chris is gonna like this

Hiya Buddy!!!

Yes that is totally awesome!!!!!!!!
Best,
Chris

I got a small package today.

Inside the package i found an OCTEK OAK OTIVGA UMC UM587F 8bit EGA/VGA videocard from ~1988.

From what I can tell there is zero information about or pictures picturing this card online except for the sellers bad picture showing this exact card. There are pictures showing 16bit ISA VGA cards with the same early UMC VGA chipset though but they are not as interesting.

The card was only £15 which I find a bargain but the shipping from the UK was £9 which I find alot for an item this small not even shipped in a box. I'm still very happy about this purchase though and the only visible shipping damage the card had was a slightly bent bracket so I expect it to work just fine.

This is my today's purchase - Trident TVGA8900C (~10$ shipped):

It's a bit of a sad story - I've bought this card just to salvage those Fujitsu 4x256kb CMOS chips for my Gravis Ultrasound which for now isn't even capable running Second Reality...

So tomorrow my new Trident is going to loose not less than 750kb of memory.

tikoellner wrote:

This is my today's purchase - Trident TVGA8900C (~10$ shipped):

It's a bit of a sad story - I've bought this card just to salvage those Fujitsu 4x256kb CMOS chips for my Gravis Ultrasound which for now isn't even capable running Second Reality...

So tomorrow my new Trident is going to loose not less than 750kb of memory.

Borrowing memory chips from video cards or motherboards is not sad. Sooner or later you will run into something non woriking with DIP 10 memory chips and then you can resurrect the video card.

Yeah, you're right... it will sit in a dry, warm drawer. Could be much worse for this kind of a rather mediocre graphics adapter :--) And then maybe I'll get to some 386 build this card would fit like a glove. Maybe with this California Access case that currently houses my 486 (http://olx.pl/oferta/california-access-stara- … 99-ID79C9P.html)

I said I would not buy more stuff the next couple of months if it wasnt for a specific project, like the 8bit ISA VGA card a couple of post above, it's going into my XT clone system.

Another thing I wanted for my XT clone system was a NEC V20 CPU. There were no V20s to be found on Ebay UK the last week but I did find this "untested" XT clone motherboard with... a NEC V20! 😀

The price was 15 euro or best offer, I paid the 15 euro... many nice sockets and chips I can salvage if I can't get the board going.

(the sellers picture)

This was an impulse buy for sure. I based my decision solely on my memories of running the sound setup programs for old DOS games, and I always remember seeing Pro Audio Spectrum listed...

Got it "as is" for $19.95 shipped... seemed okay for a less common card such as this, but I normally try to get things cheaper than this if I don't know much about them.

Is it worth using?

The PAS16 can be a great card and is quite well supported in DOS games, as your memories of seeing it listed suggests.

There are a couple of things to take note of:

- it's important to get the right version of the drivers, because there are multiple out there and the wrong version will give you wonky results (or not work at all).
- in DOS, use the mixer (PAS.EXE *) (yes the * is important!) and turn inputs off where possible, and set the rest to 'play only'. The card will hiss otherwise.

It's a kickass card, the onboard amp is a killer, you can control the mixer from the command line, the FM is thick and bassy and they are all-round good cards. The SB compatibility is pretty good too. You can also control the volume in Windows with key combinations without opening a mixer.

Be warned - the CD Audio header has a funky pinout, something like G R G L G I believe.

Something else awesome; Near the SCSI interface, you can see a little 4-pin header. If you plug a speaker into that header and have nothing in the Line Out jack, sound will play through that speaker inside the case. Don't go nuts though, the amp is pretty strong and I've damaged a 2 Watt speaker with mine before (On purpose, given it was wrecked already) so if you start making it distort you should really back off if you don't want the speaker to break. The rear jack also passes this amp, so you can use those crappy passive speakers and still get nice loud sound.