Recently powered back on my pentium 4 build and I couldn't shutdown windows the correct way. I suspected the disk had issues but thought It had enough time left to last till I could get a SSD as an upgrade and clone an image out of it.

Went to turn it on again today and it was stuck the boot splash thinking it was just a fluke. hit the reset button again and "disk error". Just to be sure, I hooked it up to a sata/ide to usb adapter and tried multiple usb ports on my modern pc and the disk just doesn't read. it's not a surprise given it originally was from a late 2000s intel atom machine and has been in use off and on for many years in different systems.

Otherwise though, not much retro activity going on that build these days as the gpu in the build doesn't have a fan. Haven't gotten a replacement card as I wasn't sure if I still wanted to stick with a pentium 4 or invest in a platform one generation newer. I mean for games the pentium 4 it's fine in my experience, but trying to browse the internet to download games from GOG on the build itself was not going to happen (though a bad drive doesn't help). Sure I could copy a gog installer over via a flash drive, but what's the fun in that?

On my daily driver machine, I've been playing some bit of sven co-op which is pretty retro. might also do some team fortress classic later or half-life deathmatch as for as retro games go.

Testing and documenting 16bit color-limited Windows (and some DOS) games. Built a Windows 98SE P4 on an ECS CS P4S5A2 (SiS XP4) w/Willamette@2.0GHz\400MHz\256KB, 512MB DDR@266MHz and various graphics cards of the day including Matrox m3D (NEC PowerVR PCX2), ATI Rage LT Pro, Obsidian 100DB-4440 SLI, Matrox Mystique 220, Diamond Stealth 3D Pro 2000 (S3 Virge DX), and Powercolor EvilKing 4 (Voodoo 4500) on a 19" Gateway VX900 CRT. Sound courtesy of Sound Blaster Live 5.1 w/SB16 emulation configured.

I was originally going with a 440BX SE440BX-2 board with Pentium III@800MHz, but I again ran into SLI problems again - the Obsidian cards (like the other Voodoo2 cards I own) plain will not work in SLI with this board.

I updated my thread with the latest results. I'm in the process at the moment of gathering additional various game patches.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2022-03-28, 22:37:

Recently powered back on my pentium 4 build and I couldn't shutdown windows the correct way. I suspected the disk had issues but […]
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Recently powered back on my pentium 4 build and I couldn't shutdown windows the correct way. I suspected the disk had issues but thought It had enough time left to last till I could get a SSD as an upgrade and clone an image out of it.

Went to turn it on again today and it was stuck the boot splash thinking it was just a fluke. hit the reset button again and "disk error". Just to be sure, I hooked it up to a sata/ide to usb adapter and tried multiple usb ports on my modern pc and the disk just doesn't read. it's not a surprise given it originally was from a late 2000s intel atom machine and has been in use off and on for many years in different systems.

Otherwise though, not much retro activity going on that build these days as the gpu in the build doesn't have a fan. Haven't gotten a replacement card as I wasn't sure if I still wanted to stick with a pentium 4 or invest in a platform one generation newer. I mean for games the pentium 4 it's fine in my experience, but trying to browse the internet to download games from GOG on the build itself was not going to happen (though a bad drive doesn't help). Sure I could copy a gog installer over via a flash drive, but what's the fun in that?

On my daily driver machine, I've been playing some bit of sven co-op which is pretty retro. might also do some team fortress classic later or half-life deathmatch as for as retro games go.

I use a few apps (most free, one is paid for cos it's so useful) to clean all the garbage off my system every weekend, and do a fresh backup, so I never lose more than a week's work/play. When my main drive fails, I always have a spare waiting and a recent backup to restore onto it. Need to set up a raid array for most of my data and backups though, to stay safe, as the backups are on the same physical drive as mt data partitions (except for my drivers/manuals collection, which needs an upgrade from 3TB when I can afford it - I'm thinking of saving for 3 x 8TB in raid 5)

Today I wrote some floppies, and proved to myself that both the 3.5 and 5.25 Apple II drives are working. So, naturally, I played Oregon Trail.

I'm so familiar with things like the Apple ][ and the Atari 2600 that I have 0 nostalgia feels for them. I have far better feelings for things that weren't such a common part of my life when I was young. Enough hands on time to hold a reverence for them but not enough to have experienced all I would ever want to.

CGA video falls into that category too, but I love some EGA, the last standard that still felt like computer graphics. To me VGA and beyond (with the exception of the Amiga) feel too modern. Amiga ECS chipset still has a vintage feel despite the increased color palette.

Cleaned the thermal goo from the GF3, it was as usual cemented to the damn chip, the usual procedure turn the fan off, leave the card in the bios to cook itself for 20-30 min, so then to remove the damn cement nice and easy, without the chip coming off the PCB alongside with the cooler...

Gathered some of the parts for the new high end 939 system i will build. But it is still in the process of selecting what to use exactly.

for example Radeon x1950XTX CF edition or GEforce 7950 GX2
as memory 2GB Mushkin DDR500 Blackline vs 2GB Corsair XMS Pro DDR450 LED
what cooler to put Zalman CNPS 7000Cu or TT Sonic Tower (with a fan ofc)

The current parts that are for sure to be used

AMD Opteron 165 1800 MHz (waiting to get a damn FX or Opteron 185/ 190..)
MSI K9N Diamond nForce 590 SLI 939 (that damn thing needs VRM heatsink upgrade, and a fan to the chipset, as it gets hot to the point of melting...)
Silverstone TemJin TJ07B-W
HDD some crap 80GB Hitachi SATA II, dont have anything better for the moment
EnermaX Liberty Eco 500W semi-modular
LG DVD RW IDE

I love the GeForce 3. It's almost a fast as a GeForce 2 Ultra, has just enough pixel shader support to be useful, and works with very old drivers. In my testing, this is the newest graphics card by NVIDIA that would work properly in my Super Socket 7. Newer cards required newer drivers, and all of them have some kind of lag on this platform.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-03-29, 14:49:

I love the GeForce 3. It's almost a fast as a GeForce 2 Ultra, has just enough pixel shader support to be useful, and works with very old drivers. In my testing, this is the newest graphics card by NVIDIA that would work properly in my Super Socket 7. Newer cards required newer drivers, and all of them have some kind of lag on this platform.

Its also 100% compatible with Xbox era PC ports .. like Splinter Cell/Pandora Tomorrow where on anything other than a GF3 the shadows/lighting are broken, the GF3 has the special Hardware Shadow Buffer since its really just the Xbox GPU built for PC to show off what it was capable of and to buy nVidia time for GF4.

GPUs since the GF3 dont have the capability to use this method but people have fixed it for the Splinter cell games using other methods modern GPUs do support.

Here is a run down of the issue https://www.jiri-dvorak.cz/scellpt/

So really if you want to fully enjoy Xbox PC ports then using a GF3 is your best bet.

Haven't really been in a mood for tinkering with hardware for some time now, but finally got off my ass and threw in the SSD I've been meaning to install to my DOS/Win98SE PC for the past, dunno, 2-3 months? Also put in a 80mm case fan to push air out of the case and tried to MacGyver a 40mm fan to Voodoo 3 3ooo but turned out I don't really have a good way to do so. I could easily install it to Voodoo 3 2000 with right size screws but looks like getting a PCI fan bracket is the easier thing to do with V3 3000.

After getting everything installed I realized I had completely forgotten I was supposed to get a SPDIF cable to go between the CD drive and the Audigy 2 I've got in there, for some reason the CD audio line spews out constant garble when connected via a normal analog cable even when there's no CD in the drive. I had just muted it and forgot the whole thing as I haven't been playing anything with redbook audio.

While swapping WDM drivers to VXD with the tool that came with the creative drivers for Audigy 2 I noticed that it said to cancel out of the "found new hardware" promt after rebooting, no wonder it got messed up real good the last time I did that not noticing that bit. It's beneficial to read the text that explains what to do, the more you know!

Sombrero wrote on 2022-03-29, 16:21:

Also put in a 80mm case fan to push air out of the case and tried to MacGyver a 40mm fan to Voodoo 3 3ooo but turned out I don't really have a good way to do so. I could easily install it to Voodoo 3 2000 with right size screws but looks like getting a PCI fan bracket is the easier thing to do with V3 3000.

I find best way to put a fan on a V III card is with some cable ties as i call them, i use that all the time (you when you have new lets say power cable it is held together with small coil) to attach fans whatever i need them to..

Other more cool way is after market cooler such as this Zalamn VGA cooler...

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-03-29, 17:55:

Sombrero wrote on 2022-03-29, 16:21:

Also put in a 80mm case fan to push air out of the case and tried to MacGyver a 40mm fan to Voodoo 3 3ooo but turned out I don't really have a good way to do so. I could easily install it to Voodoo 3 2000 with right size screws but looks like getting a PCI fan bracket is the easier thing to do with V3 3000.

I find best way to put a fan on a V III card is with some cable ties as i call them, i use that all the time (you when you have new lets say power cable it is held together with small coil) to attach fans whatever i need them to..

Yeah it did cross my mind a thin insulated wire would do the trick, but I don't have any around. The heatsink has convenient holes but there's some component on the PCB right where one of the holes is and I don't have thin enough zip tie to fit though there.

No matter, I need a PCI slot fan bracket for another build anyway so I might as well get another for this.

(moved to right thread 😀 )

I was trying to install DOS, btw. not Windows, for testing some 486 boards and accessories. I spent another hour on the CFs today and threw them back in the bin (2 adapters and 2 CF cards, one 256M and one 8G). I could fdisk, format, copy files, but they wouldn't boot, and worse when they were in the system with *any* drive other than a floppy, for example the CF plus a HD, no matter what the master/slave relationship the system would try to boot the CF and fail. It seemed to steal the boot priority. One of the two adapters has a master/slave switch but it doesn't affect the problem.

I switched to a ISA/PCI 486 board and, after I got it set up, it wouldn't detect drives - well, by default the IDE is disabled, so that's fine. Detects, but detects a master drive as a slave and gets the name right and the parameters wrong. Even setting them manually doesn't get anything other than disk boot failure (2Gb Fujitsu with 500mb first partition I had just used on the previous DOS 486). The board support LBA, but won't detect CD-ROMs and thinks all HDs are on slave, whatever is set on the drive.

The good thing is the previous board was fine, memory and CPU fine despite momentary parity errors caused by... the ISA video card, a Sigma Designs 5GK-ACMVGA 256k with a mysterious jumper marked OWS/IRQ2/OWS-BIOS... it came set to OWS and worked fine in the P2, it would cause memory parity errors (and screen text corruption) on the 486 until I switched it to BIOS. Works fine. Little slow. Designed in Milpitas, CA, as an aside.

Luckily I have other ISA/PCI motherboards, and I already compared ISA and PCI boards on the P2, but I'd rather have this one working before I put it back on the shelf. I need to know when to postpone a project.

As far as the CF goes, none of my current systems have a CF reader, I need to set up a later system with that, like one of the 775s, and try using BootIt or whatever to deal with it rather than trying to format it from DOS/UBCD - which seems to sort of work but fails. It would save time and wear and tear to use it (they're the type that plugs directly into the board). I actually have two laptop IDE CF adapters, one of which supports 2 CF cards.

I also need to test the $1.49 Blu-Ray external mini USB drive. Needs a power adapter and not marked (well, it's center positive - my adjustable power supply doesn't go down to 5V, which is where I'd prefer to start).

I'm researching the Yamaha MU2000EX. I'm thinking about buying one and some PLG-150 boards to fill it up.

Sombrero wrote on 2022-03-29, 18:14:

No matter, I need a PCI slot fan bracket for another build anyway so I might as well get another for this.

Just thinking, do they even really need to be bought... I have enough random blanking plates, where I'd think of drilling a hole to bolt the top of one to the back of another, and then put 2 holes (76mmm apart?) for the fan in that one... then a little more fugly is attacking one with a hammer to flatten it out, screwing it to the case, and ziptieing the fan underneath it.

Continued to update my 8/16bit color only games list for Windows. All of the console ports I tested (Panzer Dragoon, etc.) and many of the DOS-to-Windows transition games (Need for Speed SE, etc.) only utilize DirectDraw, which I found interesting.

This is because the DOS versions which used software rendering could easily be converted by drawing to the screen (hence DirectDraw) as they did previously. This uses 2D acceleration and none of the 3D interfaces, despite the game being 3D itself.

I did the same thing when writing a 3D engine in software. All you need is a surface to draw to and a command to plot a point at an x/y location with a color. I used an SDL library, which would call either GDI or some DirectDraw interface in the same way.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-03-29, 20:55:

Sombrero wrote on 2022-03-29, 18:14:

No matter, I need a PCI slot fan bracket for another build anyway so I might as well get another for this.

Just thinking, do they even really need to be bought... I have enough random blanking plates, where I'd think of drilling a hole to bolt the top of one to the back of another, and then put 2 holes (76mmm apart?) for the fan in that one... then a little more fugly is attacking one with a hammer to flatten it out, screwing it to the case, and ziptieing the fan underneath it.

Yeah they do need to be bought when you got handyman skills like mine 😬

Shagittarius wrote on 2022-03-29, 04:29:

I'm so familiar with things like the Apple ][ and the Atari 2600 that I have 0 nostalgia feels for them. I have far better feelings for things that weren't such a common part of my life when I was young. Enough hands on time to hold a reverence for them but not enough to have experienced all I would ever want to.

CGA video falls into that category too, but I love some EGA, the last standard that still felt like computer graphics. To me VGA and beyond (with the exception of the Amiga) feel too modern. Amiga ECS chipset still has a vintage feel despite the increased color palette.

It's all new ground for me. The IIGS was just on my list of white whales due to the modern rarity of them.

Joakim wrote on 2022-03-27, 21:44:

Been playing around with Amiga emulators on a raspberry pi 400. Amiga for me was just games though so I feel lost in workbench..

Same deal with me, and I got the Amiga back then.

AmigaDOS ? Huh ?
AREXX ? What ?

Give me Syndicate or Dune, okthxbye Workbench.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2022-03-30, 11:31:

Same deal with me, and I got the Amiga back then. […]
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Joakim wrote on 2022-03-27, 21:44:

Been playing around with Amiga emulators on a raspberry pi 400. Amiga for me was just games though so I feel lost in workbench..

Same deal with me, and I got the Amiga back then.

AmigaDOS ? Huh ?
AREXX ? What ?

Give me Syndicate or Dune, okthxbye Workbench.

Don't get me wrong, I have always been interested in what those higher end Amigas could do but I only had my simple a500 with some extra memory I had to turn off with a switch to play winter games (if I remember correctly).