Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-09-19, 15:59:

Half-Life 2 will depend on what you're willing to settle for. My 939 system has a 4400+ overclocked to 4800+ levels, and with my 6800 Ultra it still bogs down even at 1024x768 and the details turned down.

I guess I can settle for 800x600 with low to mid settings. Either version of HL2 (2004 or TOB) is fine, by the way, but I expect to run 2004 HL2 better.

EDIT: By the way, is there a site that documents GPU benchmarks and average FPS values for games and specific settings, for specific old GPUs?

ChrisNonyminus wrote on 2023-09-19, 16:01:

EDIT: By the way, is there a site that documents GPU benchmarks and average FPS values for games and specific settings, for specific old GPUs?

You can find old reviews of these old cards with google from still existing sites or using wayback machine from extinct ones. These cards were usually benchmarked against the most popular titles of the era, so they should give pretty good picture how they perform.

There are still good deals to be had, but patience is required. Scour your local Craigslist (or any similar online classifieds you may have where you are) daily. In the past couple of months I purchased two AGP video cards from a local computer store that sells used parts - a 7600 GS and a 9800SE, five dollars each. For your requirements I'd say the 7600GS would just barely make the cut.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-09-19, 15:59:

Half-Life 2 will depend on what you're willing to settle for. My 939 system has a 4400+ overclocked to 4800+ levels, and with my 6800 Ultra it still bogs down even at 1024x768 and the details turned down.

This doesn't sound right. You should get excellent performance with the 6800 Ultra in Half-Life 2. All of the reviews and benchmarks I find seem to confirm this as well.

Here is a link to the mobile 6800 Ultra, for example, which is probably slower than the desktop counterpart:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1624/5

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-09-19, 16:20:

This doesn't sound right. You should get excellent performance with the 6800 Ultra in Half-Life 2. All of the reviews and benchm […]
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Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-09-19, 15:59:

Half-Life 2 will depend on what you're willing to settle for. My 939 system has a 4400+ overclocked to 4800+ levels, and with my 6800 Ultra it still bogs down even at 1024x768 and the details turned down.

This doesn't sound right. You should get excellent performance with the 6800 Ultra in Half-Life 2. All of the reviews and benchmarks I find seem to confirm this as well.

Here is a link to the mobile 6800 Ultra, for example, which is probably slower than the desktop counterpart:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1624/5

In the same machine, my HD 3850 is only a tiny bit better, so it seems to be a CPU limitation. My Asus P4P 800 overclocked to 3.8 GHz, my Aopen i855 GMEM with a Pentium M 780 overclocked to 2.6 GHz - they all have to have the resolution and details turned down to give acceptable (to me at least) framerates. I suppose one thing that's essential to being happy with the performance of vintage hardware is picking the right games to play. When I had the 6800 combined with my KT600 8KRA2+ I found that Halo looked great, and I played through it several times on that machine.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-09-17, 15:10:

ldare1000 wrote on 2023-09-17, 14:38:

Hi, Thanks for replying. I've seen a screen shot of your post, do you have to know roughly what page its on there are now 1200+ […]
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Hi, Thanks for replying. I've seen a screen shot of your post, do you have to know roughly what page its on there are now 1200+ pages. I'd like to try your bootable disk as a starting point please.

Any idea how I can find out what PCMCIA Chipset I might have? Are there thousands or just a few that manufacturers shared?

Nice 3D work there!!

I've tried searching the words and phrases the screenshot I have of yourFB_IMG_1694710619928.jpg post but can't find it?

Click on the "Your Posts" button in the top right to see which threads you've posted in, should be this one: PCMCIA CF Cards on an old 486 Laptop
To find out which chipset you've got, you can look at the drivers it has or use a utility called "tellme.com" (attached) in a DOS prompt and it should say which one you have. There's only a few manufacturers.

Hi, I can't thank you enough for this help. It's worked first time. Sods law I've misplaced my 1GB CF Card, but am running a 256mb card fantastically.

What's the maximum it will support? Only asking as if I cant find my 1GB card, I'll order a new one that's not too big for any maximum limit.

Thanks so much
Louis

I was on holiday in Japan last week, Osaka, and I walked into one of those electronics stores and I noticed that they were selling a lot of optical media, not just DVD and BlueRay but a lot of CDs as well. So I google up a picture of a floppy disk and showed to one of the guys running the store, he beckons for me to follow him and he leads me to bottom shelf in the back of store and voila, there was a box with individually wrapped floppy disks. He says "very old" pointing at it.

They were 200 YEN each and I got 10. I am sure if I searched more stores I might have found fully boxed TDKs or something but unfortunately I didn't have the time... 🙁

To celebrate the freshly sunbrighted faceplate of this random AT tower i started cleaning the rest of it.
Here is the poor case in its "before" shape.

Pretty dirty, but not a lot of scratches.

Inside it was also pretty dirty and slightly rusted.

The power supply looks quite nice after a slight clean.

To celebrate the revival of the case i chose some special parts.

A 286 mainboard (1mb ram at the moment) from 1990.
The graphics card is a 8 Bit OAK model also from 1990.
The IO controller (2 serial, 1 parallel, 1 gameport, 1x fdd, 1x hdd) is a little bit newer from 1992. All my older ones are MFM but i have no MFM HDDs...
For the soundcard i will either use a AdLib clone, a Mediavision Thunderboard or a Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II ... The Adlib clone would probably be the best fit...

For the LED display in the front i configured it for a classic "HI/LO" text when operating the TURBO switch.
A HDD swap frame is a must have when you have 6x 5 1/4 bays...

I even found a floppy drive wich exactly matches the yellow of the case 😁
This is why its good to have like 50 drives in 50 shades of beige 😁

The HDD i will use (Kalok KL343) does not even fit in the swap frame because it is full hight... 😁

I will also have a look for a 1,2Mb 5 1/4 floppy drive in my pile of stuff... maybe there is one hiding.

A CD ROM is probably a little bit to new for the machine... but i will install one anyway 😁 .. Maybe a 4x Mitsumi IDE drive, or a Aztech 6x Drive wich needs a controller card.
More cards is better... 😀

Got the Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 out over the weekend. Going to do a few mods this year, not many, just adding a CD-ROM drive, and maybe exploring HDD Upgrade options (MAYBE). Mostly just focusing on enjoying the system as/is at this point. Did do a few focus/voltage tweaks to the NEC MultiSync II monitor while I Was at it (using it in VGA Mode now). Currently playing various games on it and removing the ones I'm not particularly fond of.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-08-28, 22:08:

debs3759 wrote on 2023-08-28, 21:17:

gmaverick2k wrote on 2023-08-28, 19:04:

Does anyone know where I can dump images of the reload cd and the recovery diskette?

http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/ works as well. It's worth uploading to both. I personally don't always find things easily on archive.org

I love Vogons, but it's always good to have a backup option. The Internet Archive is a mainstream project and should be able to secure funding for awhile. Then again, being more mainstream can have a downside and they could decide to change their policy on hosting certain types of software. Like all types of backups, it helps to have more than one.

Finally uploaded Time Computer backup/restore CD and Time Computers Recovery disk to Vogons Vintage Driver Library under uncategorised:
https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid … &menustate=60,0

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-20, 01:16:

...
For the soundcard i will either use a AdLib clone, a Mediavision Thunderboard or a Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II ... The Adlib clone would probably be the best fit...
... 😀

Cool system. I would definitely go with the Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II, seems like the best fit for a 286.

Today a recieved a 121mb Hard Drive. I wanted to test it in a 486 laptop which I think will only read drives less than 500mb. It wouldn't read this drive. But also I suspect the board is damaged so may bot be a reflection of the drive. However I can't get the drive to read on my IDE to USB which usually I can. If faulty I will return for a refund, but want to make sure first. On my USB adapter on another laptop it doesn't appear as a drive in Windows Explorer but does in Settings. Any ideas?

ldare1000 wrote on 2023-09-20, 12:52:

Today a recieved a 121mb Hard Drive. I wanted to test it in a 486 laptop which I think will only read drives less than 500mb. It wouldn't read this drive. But also I suspect the board is damaged so may bot be a reflection of the drive. However I can't get the drive to read on my IDE to USB which usually I can. If faulty I will return for a refund, but want to make sure first. On my USB adapter on another laptop it doesn't appear as a drive in Windows Explorer but does in Settings. Any ideas?

I have yet to find one USB-IDE adapter that can handle non-LBA disks. Don't count on it to test the drive

konc wrote on 2023-09-20, 13:08:

ldare1000 wrote on 2023-09-20, 12:52:

Today a recieved a 121mb Hard Drive. I wanted to test it in a 486 laptop which I think will only read drives less than 500mb. It wouldn't read this drive. But also I suspect the board is damaged so may bot be a reflection of the drive. However I can't get the drive to read on my IDE to USB which usually I can. If faulty I will return for a refund, but want to make sure first. On my USB adapter on another laptop it doesn't appear as a drive in Windows Explorer but does in Settings. Any ideas?

I have yet to find one USB-IDE adapter that can handle non-LBA disks. Don't count on it to test the drive

Ah so my 455mb drive that was in this laptop originally might still work!!

How well does the x1650 pro fare against games like HL2, The Sims 2, and Oblivion? What about even games like Crysis or The Sims 3?

ChrisNonyminus wrote on 2023-09-20, 14:29:

How well does the x1650 pro fare against games like HL2, The Sims 2, and Oblivion? What about even games like Crysis or The Sims 3?

This review should give you an idea, though I think your system is a little more powerful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCO3GOPdMas

Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-09-19, 00:33:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2023-09-02, 02:29:

Last fall I bought an assortment of old stuff that was quite a haul, and I've been working my way through it. It included two Socket 370 boards; one had a bad BIOS flash and the other needed new capacitors. After fixing both, I wanted to try to use one of the Tualatin CPUs that were included. I found a Lin Lin adapter on Ebay for a non ridiculous price, but it had a missing pin (even though it was NOS and had never been opened so it was a factory defect) so I sent it back for credit. I then decided to try one of those PCB Tualatin adapters, so I bought one and only today did I give it a shot. I have no idea if either of these CPUs are any good (they were going to be scrapped so they weren't stored carefully - most have been okay, but the Palomino Socket A was dead) since the boards don't natively support Tualatins, so I picked one, did my best to follow the instructions, and I gave it a try. The resulting CPU will not POST in either of the boards, and at this point it seems like a lost cause. I can't be sure if I did something wrong, or if the CPU was dead before I started, or if neither board can POST with a Tualatin without BIOS support. I think I'm going to buy one of his CPUs that has the modification already done and see how that turns out.

The modded Tualatin arrived today and I tried it in my Tyan S1854, it POSTed with no issue, and the board even recognized the correct speed, so that was nice.

I hit a speed bump; when I tried to boot into the existing Windows 98 installation it gave me a Windows Protection Error and rebooted. I then formatted and reinstalled and everything seemed fine, but then I installed the driver for the Creative 1373 (on board sound chip), and it would reboot when it got to the desktop until I removed the driver in Safe Mode. I tried a Creative Ensoniq PCI, and it had the exact same issue.

I decided to try the CPU in my Soyo 7VMA-B, and I was able to install the sound card. It did recognize the CPU's speed, but just in case, I used the BIOS Patcher and so far, so good.

pan069 wrote on 2023-09-20, 10:08:

I would definitely go with the Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II, seems like the best fit for a 286.

Good choice.

BX II plus a network card with rom socket for XTIDE went into the pc.

The HDD (Kalok KL-343) gave me a little headache. It was detected by the bios fine after i set it up and passed all bios tests ( seek...etc.)
But it didnt want to boot and fdisk didnt work. As a second drive D: it was detected fine and i could fdisk and format it... but not as C.

It turns out the jumpers in the datasheet you can find online are wrong. The manual says the center position is MASTER but it isnt!!
The jumpers closest to the outer edge are Master! It took me a hour to find this... But it works now 😀

Thats a healthy drive... 0 bad sectors.

I recorded a small video with sounds of this drive... Its super loud and awesome 😁
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9HLOmm0Xdkg

Man. I had a 33MB Kalok drive that only had 1 sector at the end that was bad, but booted up just fine.

Unlike the FMA7600 laptop that's bitching at me when I have a PCMCIA card inserted and the OS would lock up at the splash screen (Windows 95) until I power it off and back on again. The other one would eject/insert the cards for no reason as well. Either they need a recap or there's something I missed when I did the thorough inspection at first.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-20, 21:17:

It turns out the jumpers in the datasheet you can find online are wrong. The manual says the center position is MASTER but it isnt!!
The jumpers closest to the outer edge are Master! It took me a hour to find this... But it works now 😀

What do you mean you didn't follow the manual? Do you have any idea what you've done!? 😱 You've activated the retro singularity! The universe is folding back in upon itself!