Today I finished with the TNT2 M64. I find it interesting how close it is in early games (GLQuake, Quake 2, Prince of Persia 3D, Need for Speed 4) to the full TNT2. It really isn't until very post-2000 games Like Medal of Honor Allied Assault and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 when the card really starts to suffer because of its memory bandwidth.

I've also tried to get something out of the Permedia 2 which came from a Sun server. I could make the test system boot if there is another graphics card with it (the M64), the system detects it, this driver installs, but I still can't get it to draw anything onto my screen.

Some time ago I've seen a topic on this forum where someone had the exact same card and managed to make it work, but I don't seem to have the same luck. What I get from there, with the drivers installed, it should post after Windows loaded, but mine doesn't. And the system won't boot if the Permedia is the only graphics card it has. Any tips?

andrea wrote on 2021-10-25, 17:30:

Of course I'm never going to open them up, I'm talking "software" fixing. But not nonsense like HDD Regenerator and the like, bu […]
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pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-25, 17:13:

I caution to anyone, replacing failed components on a hard drive is dandy but many has firmware kept in a large chipset. Ot […]
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I caution to anyone, replacing failed components on a hard drive is dandy but many has firmware kept in a large chipset. Other than that, cannot open the internal guts where platters are.
The data recovery vendors who do heads swap consider this data recovery only. Once done it is trashed.

The software that scan and marks them bad is not recommended either and wastes time.

If I find any issues and with good back up habits, you can just toss and get another.

Cheers,

Of course I'm never going to open them up, I'm talking "software" fixing.
But not nonsense like HDD Regenerator and the like, but at firmware level.

Most of my drives are WD, so I can do the following:

A few bad sectors? Self Scan it
More bad sectors? ARCO
Got a bad head? disable it.

To the best of my knowledge an ARCO test should be the same thing the factory does when they recertify RMA returns.

Now, the usefulness of a 4 head 500GB so degraded that after ARCO qualified as a 2 head 160GB disk is debatable, but the fact that I can is more important to me.

hdd regenerator saved my butt many, many times with customer HDD's. Its not a permanent solution if you have bad sectors at the start of the HDD, but it helps to read a damaged partition or patch an HDD with some bad sectors and still use it

been using the 1.71 version for almost 10 years, its a shame that it is DOS only and cannot boot from the rescue disk in moderm computers (memory problems with the emulation and boot)

Tonight I completely disassembled my HP m8000 media center PC so I can clean everything up real thoroughly and tidy things up before listing it for sale. This thing had so much dust on the inside when I got it I couldn't believe it. I've never seen such a grotesque accumulation of dust in my life. Wish I had taken a "before" picture but I was impatient. Such is me.

Introduced C# generics (which appeared in 2005) to a code base that predates them.

Today I replaced the optical drive in my 2013 vintage IVB i7 Vaio laptop. Somehow I managed to get a working BD-RE drive for $13 on Amazon. Used, of course, though it hardly looked used. I am going to try installing XP on it but I am skeptical whether that drive will work in XP. But the DGPU is a 7650M so that should work. I upgraded a HP Pavillion with an A6-5200 to 8GB RAM. It is definitely no good for XP since there are no graphics drivers. Instead, I will probably install Linux to use for retro emulation.

But the real fun was building my first ever PIII today:
PIII Coppermine 450/512/100 SL3CC
intel SE440BX2
Toshiba 2x64MB PC100 SDRAM
Asus GeForce 4 MX420 64MB V8170SE
Creative Labs SB16 CT4740 PCI
Western Digital Caviar 80GB ATA-100 7200RPM HDD WD800JB
HL 48x CD-ROM GCR-8481B
3.5" Floppy (I was lazy and didn't bother to look at it)
Antec 250W ATX PSU PP-253x
DOS 6.22/Windows 98SE
Dell 15" TFT XGA Monitor E151FPb
Gravis Blackhawk Flight Stick

This will be my go-to for playing many late '90s games, including flight sims such as Combat Flight Simulator, Crimson Skies, Air Warrior III, EF2000 and various Janes titles.
download/file.php?mode=view&id=122559
download/file.php?mode=view&id=122561
download/file.php?mode=view&id=122560

Your coppermine is a katmai.

Not very warm out here in October, around 10 degrees C, but still quite sunny, so I decided to try out retrobrighting for the first time. Got some 12% salon peroxide for my yellowest AT panel and left it out for 5 hours. Still needs more, especially for the sides, but Im quite pleased with the results.

Opened the "going nowhere" web browser on a P4 HT 3.0 and watched Boobtube videos about repairing Amiga computer systems.

Why you ask?

Because I can I answered.

Heads exploding.

Fuck Father Christmas!

Look what I found inside my COMDLG32.DLL file for Windows 2000 (see pic)

C7 45 F0 03 00 00 00

This instruction sets the default file listing type in the open/save dialog window. I changed the '3' to a '4' and now when I go to open a file it will always come up with the "Details" view without me having to select it from the dropdown everytime!!

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-10-29, 14:12:

Your coppermine is a katmai.

Yes it is. I also have a couple of Coppermine 750s and I got mixed up since it was late. I will be trying the 750 in this machine too at some point.

Soldered a 100-ohm resistor between the second and third pin of a power fan connector on a HP socket 370 motherboard, which was giving me FAN error on bootup. It worked. No fan errors anymore. I found the info for this online. The soldering job is only a quick fix, just to see if the problem is solved. I will have to desolder it again and put some heat shrinking tubes on the resistor leads.

Installed Win XP and Win 7 Sp1 on a 939 platform.
Friends need help and Doom over null modem to complete such tasks 😀

Turbo -> wrote on 2021-10-31, 08:37:

Soldered a 100-ohm resistor between the second and third pin of a power fan connector on a HP socket 370 motherboard, which was giving me FAN error on bootup. It worked. No fan errors anymore. I found the info for this online. The soldering job is only a quick fix, just to see if the problem is solved. I will have to desolder it again and put some heat shrinking tubes on the resistor leads.

Not only that, Early compaq computers with 3 or 4 wire fans (they were not PWM nor speed) including Dell with 3 wire fans, used pulled down to ground if good, will go floating high to indicate fan fault, and lot of HP used pulled down to ground feature on USB, front panel and any fans. If disconnected HP indicates feature unplugged error. For HP, easy to identify by a small loop of wire on the plugs.

Cheers,

I cut away Apple's equivalent of the CMOS battery from one of my Macintosh SEs today, because unfortunately in both my units they're soldered on instead of socketed. I was surprised to find that after 35 years it's still giving about 2.8V.

Next up is my other unit, which I will also try to give the maximum of 4MB of memory. The SIMMs I have should be okay latency-wise but let's see how picky these machines are.

Tested a 3650 AGP.
Good for old games. Drivers are death to find and install, SDI is there for a reason 😀

I finally got around to testing my newly built high end XP system with an age appropriate game. Went through my stack of games and settled on Need For Speed Pro Street. It's equally terrible and satisfying as I spent a whole lot of time in my 20s playing that game. It's good enough to make sure there are no issues with the graphics card. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get in a few good drag races though. 🤣

Also began the process of creating an nLite XP install so I can reinstall a slimmer version of the OS now. Forgot how much time it takes to go through all the options.

Work on my Win98/DOS PC continues on a familiar path:

First I realized the motherboard had 20pin power connector and the PSU had 24pin -> two weeks of waiting for an adapter
Once the adapter arrived and I could turn the PC on it turned out that the CD drive was busted -> two weeks of waiting for a replacement
Then after the CD drive arrived, a working one this time, I could install Win98SE and then it turned out the SBLive! was busted -> off to find another sound card 😖

At least the busted hardware have been all cheap easily replaced ones, everything important seems to work just fine, including both of my Voodoo 3 cards.

Started working on videos for #DOSCember....I guess.

Fixed the 286. Adaptec SCSI Controller was dead, so I slapped in the original MIO-400 Diamond Flower Multi I/O Card, and put on a 328MB 2.5" HDD from my old NEC Versas (which have 80GB Drives now) for the drive C:\. Fixed some hardware conflicts and did some tuning along the way.

Popped open the Versa Dock last night and found out that the reason it won't power on is two high voltage resistors in the power supply overheated and cooked themselves from the inside out. So that's some more footage I've taken.

Finally got some inspiration to mount this arduino controlled "character eating pac-man" display. It had no controller when I got this Silverstone case so something had to be done...luckily some code was easy to find. I connected it with USB cable so that it can be removed (or arduino reflashed) when I get bored.

Also tried out Celebris XL 590 (dual Pentium 133). It has Windows NT 4.0 installed, I haven't used that OS for about 20 years. At first it ran dead slow. BIOS serrings were on defaults, f.ex disabled external cache. After corrected it runs just fine. Tray load CD-ROM and hard drive are SCSI.

fool wrote on 2021-11-05, 18:34:

Also tried out Celebris XL 590 (dual Pentium 133). It has Windows NT 4.0 installed, I haven't used that OS for about 20 years. At first it ran dead slow. BIOS serrings were on defaults, f.ex disabled external cache. After corrected it runs just fine. Tray load CD-ROM and hard drive are SCSI.

I've never seen one of those before! Any pictures of the inside?

According to the service guide they can be upgraded to an Alpha. I imagine the Alpha CPU card is probably next to impossible to find today though.