luckybob wrote:

The object that has spent over a DECADE on my "must acquire" list has finally been paid for: […]
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The object that has spent over a DECADE on my "must acquire" list has finally been paid for:

The Asus p65up8!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSoNGaaETKQ

I paid more than I care to admit. But this will be the centerpiece of a NT4 gaming rig. As soon as it gets here from Russia. And I get some other parts...

I am intrigued, what is this board good for? Why the i960 on it?

luckybob wrote:

The object that has spent over a DECADE on my "must acquire" list has finally been paid for: […]
Show full quote

The object that has spent over a DECADE on my "must acquire" list has finally been paid for:

The Asus p65up8!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSoNGaaETKQ

I paid more than I care to admit. But this will be the centerpiece of a NT4 gaming rig. As soon as it gets here from Russia. And I get some other parts...

Dang! You've been on the lookout for this one for quite a while now. You gotta make a thread about it once you get it all up and running 😁.

brassicGamer wrote:

Some guy in the UK is selling a bunch of V5s one after the other on ebay at the moment. Both the previous ones went for £50 - am wondering how many he has left and how low the price will go after the people with money all have one.

Hope people with a thin wallet can get some V5 action in the future. This hobby should be for everyone as I see it.
Yes V5, GUS and other stuff like that is rare. Just that I hope more will have the experience with these gems in the future.
Well... Maby not... Stuff breaks and becomes even more rare. Ohhh... That old discussion on when it will get cheaper. 🤣

BloodyCactus wrote:

corrosion? doh. rottendog make spare boards. shame its not an 8ball deluxe! 8bd is fun. was never a fan of bally pacman or the babypac's. hows the playfield wear and tear?

I don't think Rottendog has a bally mpu 17, which is what this thing takes.

It posts to three flashes on the diagnostic LED. I bought a new set of ROMs and I'm planning on trying those out real soon now. If that doesn't work, I'll re-test all the output voltages and pick up an Alltek(?) universal MPU board.

The eightball playfield is in really superb condition, but the Pacman has a lot of wear. I'm not a fan of the Pacman machine at all, really. It's just sort of obnoxious.

Putas wrote:

luckybob wrote:

The object that has spent over a DECADE on my "must acquire" list has finally been paid for: […]
Show full quote

The object that has spent over a DECADE on my "must acquire" list has finally been paid for:

The Asus p65up8!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSoNGaaETKQ

I paid more than I care to admit. But this will be the centerpiece of a NT4 gaming rig. As soon as it gets here from Russia. And I get some other parts...

I am intrigued, what is this board good for? Why the i960 on it?

The i960 is basically a general purpose intelligent pci bridge. It was very common to use them on early multi-channel scsi raid cards. If you had a comparable hardware and OS, it would offload much of the work from the main cpu to the I960. This was glorious with scsi and network cards. In fact with the before mentioned scsi cards, you could do cross channel copy, and the data would never hit the main pci bus! it also reduced overall cpu load.

When I get the board I will make a thread about it and do some testing. ^.^

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

AnacreonZA wrote:

My GeForce 6800GS AGP arrived from NZ on the weekend. Luckily the PSU in my P4 had the necessary power connector and I spent a good few hours on the weekend completing Half Life 2 and starting Fallout 3. Never played F3 on PC before - seems like the game could use a lot more power as it doesn't look quite as good as on my X360 and the 6800 seems to be the lowest supported card for that game, but it's still quite playable.

Yea Fallout 3 needs way more grunt:

Building the Fallout 3 Retro Gaming PC

Got two 5970 that I need to get around to reflowing for that someday 😎
I still fight with myself about buying core 2 era boards remember how crappy many of these boards were 😵

tikoellner wrote:

Very nice find. My ideal would be 640x480 TFT, but still, very nice retro gaming machine.

Just tested that Toshiba 310CDT I picked up this weekend and 320x240 games run full-screen which is great. I was afraid that there would be a black border 😀

That is really great it scales 320x240 to full screen.

I decided to stick with 640x480 DSTN in my IBM 365ED, as the obvious flaws of this screen less annoy me than the black border on 800x600 TFT for this model that I purchased.

I didn't try to install it, though. Maybe it's worth checking if it can scale low-res graphics full-screen.

Got a couple of interesting-ish things on order that are vintage, but I'll share those when I get them. Only other thing of note is that I now have my first ever mechanical keyboard (Corsair K70 with blue backlighting and Cherry MX Red keyswitches), and I definitely see/hear what I've been missing out on!

As to screen scaling; some laptops have the option, but do a terrible job. I turn scaling off on a lot of them (e.g. my ThinkPad 600) as black borders look better than the poor attempts at scaling. Some of them scale very well though - my Compaq Presario 1694 does, for example. Using DSTNs with games like Age of Empires doesn't cause me any real issues, and I can just about play racing games on them for short periods of time; twitch shooters would be a nightmare though.

tikoellner wrote:

I didn't try to install it, though. Maybe it's worth checking if it can scale low-res graphics full-screen.

I have a 370C with the 640x480 TFT. It can stretch 320x200 DOS games full screen, but the scaling artifacts are noticeable.
Alternatively you can have a black bar on the top and bottom, which to my eyes is preferable.

You can always connect external monitor and have a great picture (CRT if possible). (Old) Laptop LCD's usually have very slow response time and aren't really suitable for gaming.

Of course, but I like playing on the balcony while smoking some good pipe. Would be quite uncomfortavble to do it with CRT on my knees 😉.

But seriously, I keep my retro laptop because it's a nice little piece of hardware, but also because for its mobility. For CRT or big TFT monitor I keep my desktop computer.

My DSTN is ugly, slow and bad in general, but it reinforces retro effect of the machine and is perfectly OK to play RPG or strategy games. It's impossible to play games fast like Castelvania (I noticed that even my modern Iiyama 1702s with quite fast refresh rate works too slow for that game), but otherwise its acceptable.

Bought this Protek board yesterday for $19US; untested. Looked like a worthwhile buy considering how surprisingly clean this board looks, especially the area around the battery. I am guessing this is an early-era 386DX board judging by the insane amount of logic and SIPP sockets. My only concern is the placement of that CPU, which I cannot tell from the picture for certain if the chip was installed incorrectly. Thankfully I have an extra 386 CPU and 4x256K SIPP modules to test it with.

the cpu looks right. The notch is at the intersection of row A and column 1.

seems like that 386 mobo is cacheless... that's a big no-no in my book

Make the RAM fast enough and you don't need a cache 😉
This 386 looks as if it might not be the fastest.

Is it just me, or is that a 287 socket near the two ROM chips? Definitely implies an earlier board if it is.

Seems a nice board.

Have a look at the bottom-most ISA slot. If pins A/B7 are bridged the board may be toast. If you are lucky only a 74*245 needs to be replaced.

tikoellner wrote:

Of course, but I like playing on the balcony while smoking some good pipe. Would be quite uncomfortavble to do it with CRT on my knees 😉.

But seriously, I keep my retro laptop because it's a nice little piece of hardware, but also because for its mobility. For CRT or big TFT monitor I keep my desktop computer.

My DSTN is ugly, slow and bad in general, but it reinforces retro effect of the machine and is perfectly OK to play RPG or strategy games. It's impossible to play games fast like Castelvania (I noticed that even my modern Iiyama 1702s with quite fast refresh rate works too slow for that game), but otherwise its acceptable.

Ghosting is no fun. I have a few old notebooks and while they are practical all-in-one solutions, LCDs are big no-no. I always end up connecting them to external monitor.

HighTreason wrote:

Is it just me, or is that a 287 socket near the two ROM chips? Definitely implies an earlier board if it is.

Seems a nice board.

The image has been slightly cut-off, but there is a 387 socket slightly to the right. I imagine the SIPP sockets should be a dead givaway that it's an early board as well. This is actually the first 386 board I've come across that uses SIPPs.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Have a look at the bottom-most ISA slot. If pins A/B7 are bridged the board may be toast. If you are lucky only a 74*245 needs to be replaced.

I just noticed that as well. I went back to the listing to have a closer look at one of the pictures. Unfortunately the quality makes it hard to tell exactly what is going on there, but it almost looks as if it is a piece of dust or debris that may have fallen into the socket, but here's to hoping that that is all there is to it. I'm not even sure why type of ISA slot that is? I've seen these extended-length slots before, and they may have had something to do with memory boards?