China hates skeletons too 😜

ODwilly wrote:

As a Christian with some relatives that have fit the over zealous Christian stereotype I can honestly say that not EVERY Christian is like that, most good Christians tend to not be judgmental. The problem is that the minority that are tend to be the most vocal and ridicules. Like any group unfortunately 😒

Yes. But some atheists are equally bad and won't let religious people believe what they want in peace.

ODwilly wrote:

As a Christian with some relatives that have fit the over zealous Christian stereotype I can honestly say that not EVERY Christian is like that, most good Christians tend to not be judgmental. The problem is that the minority that are tend to be the most vocal and ridicules. Like any group unfortunately 😒

Ditto. One thing I've learned is that broad generalizations based off a limited data set is dangerous. If I did, I would think EVERYONE HERE ON THIS FORUM is fat, socially awkward, plays with star wars dolls, and has very very poor hygiene habits. But, that's only one guy that I met at his house picking up a 386 motherboard (Hey Frank, if you're reading this. TAKE A SHOWER!) 😎

Back on thread topic: This evening I'll be scanning disks and their labels into my database.

As an Atheist I personally don't care what you do either way so long as it isn't causing any harm to anyone. By extension, if you have a religion, that's not any problem to me either, go ahead, for all we know I might be wrong and you can come and jab me with pointy sticks in hell... If I'm right then... umm... crap... I don't believe in an afterlife so I can't really do anything to you can I?

Unfortunately, some of my kind like to ram it down the throats of Theists and they give use a bad name. Granted I constantly wind up a friend who is Catholic by attempting to disprove his faith and he responds by trying to ridicule people who don't believe, but that's just how we get along, we bash each others beliefs and don't mean anything by it.

Whilst not retro as such, I threw an offer at this and won... Never hurts to have a spare I suppose. Given that Intel sell a Celeron with similar performance today though, me and my friend are messing with the concept of who can come up with the cheaper system, him with the Celeron or me with this, though I suspect the <10 Watt Celeron will make up for it with what one would save in electricity bills, I expect someone would have to turn the gas valve at the power plant (practically on my back doorstep) up if I ran both of these at once.

Finished washing the VZ300. More cleaning required though.

Plugged in a spare 9V adapter and it started.

No response when I press keys yet, could be the keyboard or maybe it's just locking up, nfi.

At least the built up dirt is gone, Dick would be proud.

Spent last night trying some "Junk" DVD-RW and DVD-ROM Drives out on the 486, those were pretty much dead, one would not start, the other the door would not open - back to the pile with those parts along with the Video card from the same Sony Vaio that died.

Took the chipset heatsink from the Vaio's board and turned it into a thermal unit for my 486 DX2/66 chip. It has a tiny fan between the floor of the case and the center drive cage that pushes a lot of air very fast through that heatsink and also past the S3 805 Video card, seems it was overheating a little before because now my performance is nice and cushy now, made visible by my fancy schmancy AfterDark 4.0 mosaic screensaver.

Also took some pictures of the innards to my Tandy 1000a and the 486, hoping to post those eventually, I needed some new pics of those two as it's been awhile, if anyone knows of a good photo hosting site that does not run like a snail on valium (ie photobucket), let me know.

Try PostIMG.org; http://postimg.org/

It's not always the fastest out there, but it should be fast enough and makes up for it with the direct linking and such.

Funny you mentioned screen savers, I've been messing with those a lot lately... What's the point of building a kickass machine and then showing it off, only for it to look like every other when it's idle? That's boring, it needs plasma, vectors and other atrocious acidic colored things going on.

I try to hoard them when I see any surviving old site with them. It's not a well preserved software genre. Ditto for desktop themes, which I still use.

That reminds me, there was some piece of software in the old days that would add 'wallpaper' to the backgrounds of MS applications, like Word and Excel. Does anyone remember what it was called?

Was fiddling around with my 486DX2-66 build today. I recently got in a SB16 CT2230 with a ROLAND Sound Canvas SCB-55 daughterboard. I've been wanting this daughterboard for the longest time and finally found a reasonable one shipped from Serbia.

Well, I swapped out the CT2230 for my CT1770 (SB16 SCSI) card to test out if the CT1770 had hanging notes. I flipped on the power switch and POP POP POP and the smell of burnt electronics. My first reaction: OH SHI..........I just ruined my Roland Sound Canvas!!!

I yank out the SB16 SCSI w/Roland daughterboard and sure enough, it smells like burnt arse. I quickly pull my second 486 system in, plug in the Sound Canvas into a CT1740 card and turn in on and load TieFighter's setmuse.exe program. I go to TEST MUSIC card..............and IT STILL WORKS! WHEW! The SB16 SCSI card is toast though. I have NO idea what happened there. I'll see if some capacitor blew or something on my SB16 SCSI, but i don't see any marks on it yet,

But, my little Roland survived!

HighTreason wrote:

Try PostIMG.org; http://postimg.org/

It's not always the fastest out there, but it should be fast enough and makes up for it with the direct linking and such.

Funny you mentioned screen savers, I've been messing with those a lot lately... What's the point of building a kickass machine and then showing it off, only for it to look like every other when it's idle? That's boring, it needs plasma, vectors and other atrocious acidic colored things going on.

Screensavers were never much of a thing to me until I got an old Compaq Deskpro 386 2570 (one of the early ones) years ago when I was still living in Alabama, it had that Dazzle "Kalidescopic" screensaver on it, and a really cool old 320X200 MCGA "Deer Drinking from a Stream by a Waterfall" screensaver on it. Before then, I never knew DOS had any cool screensavers for it.

AfterDark is pretty much a permanent resident on my 486 DX2/66 machine ever since I found out about it on an old Macintosh that I got my hands on eons ago.

2fort5r wrote:

That reminds me, there was some piece of software in the old days that would add 'wallpaper' to the backgrounds of MS applications, like Word and Excel. Does anyone remember what it was called?

I wish I knew, I saw that on toastytech.org years ago on Nathan LIneback's "Computers I've Had" page or somesuch, he had a pretty killer Windows 3.11 setup with that program that would decorate the back of the Program Manager and Program Groups. That and 256 color Icons.

dogchainx wrote:

Was fiddling around with my 486DX2-66 build today. I recently got in a SB16 CT2230 with a ROLAND Sound Canvas SCB-55 daughterbo […]
Show full quote

Was fiddling around with my 486DX2-66 build today. I recently got in a SB16 CT2230 with a ROLAND Sound Canvas SCB-55 daughterboard. I've been wanting this daughterboard for the longest time and finally found a reasonable one shipped from Serbia.

Well, I swapped out the CT2230 for my CT1770 (SB16 SCSI) card to test out if the CT1770 had hanging notes. I flipped on the power switch and POP POP POP and the smell of burnt electronics. My first reaction: OH SHI..........I just ruined my Roland Sound Canvas!!!

I yank out the SB16 SCSI w/Roland daughterboard and sure enough, it smells like burnt arse. I quickly pull my second 486 system in, plug in the Sound Canvas into a CT1740 card and turn in on and load TieFighter's setmuse.exe program. I go to TEST MUSIC card..............and IT STILL WORKS! WHEW! The SB16 SCSI card is toast though. I have NO idea what happened there. I'll see if some capacitor blew or something on my SB16 SCSI, but i don't see any marks on it yet,

But, my little Roland survived!

Go test your other cards in the 486 in the system that it died in. I had a VLB card blow a capacitor in one of my 486's and it fried the two cards to either side of it in adjacent slots. Fortunately it was just a basic ISA IDE card that's had for cheap and a 3com etherlink III that's also cheap. But I now test new unknown ISA cards in other systems for power-on in-rush capacitor blowout before putting em in my 486's.

kithylin wrote:

dogchainx wrote:

Was fiddling around with my 486DX2-66 build today. I recently got in a SB16 CT2230 with a ROLAND Sound Canvas SCB-55 daughterbo […]
Show full quote

Was fiddling around with my 486DX2-66 build today. I recently got in a SB16 CT2230 with a ROLAND Sound Canvas SCB-55 daughterboard. I've been wanting this daughterboard for the longest time and finally found a reasonable one shipped from Serbia.

Well, I swapped out the CT2230 for my CT1770 (SB16 SCSI) card to test out if the CT1770 had hanging notes. I flipped on the power switch and POP POP POP and the smell of burnt electronics. My first reaction: OH SHI..........I just ruined my Roland Sound Canvas!!!

I yank out the SB16 SCSI w/Roland daughterboard and sure enough, it smells like burnt arse. I quickly pull my second 486 system in, plug in the Sound Canvas into a CT1740 card and turn in on and load TieFighter's setmuse.exe program. I go to TEST MUSIC card..............and IT STILL WORKS! WHEW! The SB16 SCSI card is toast though. I have NO idea what happened there. I'll see if some capacitor blew or something on my SB16 SCSI, but i don't see any marks on it yet,

But, my little Roland survived!

Go test your other cards in the 486 in the system that it died in. I had a VLB card blow a capacitor in one of my 486's and it fried the two cards to either side of it in adjacent slots. Fortunately it was just a basic ISA IDE card that's had for cheap and a 3com etherlink III that's also cheap. But I now test new unknown ISA cards in other systems for power-on in-rush capacitor blowout before putting em in my 486's.

Well that's the thing. I've had my SB16 SCSI for at least a year now and no issues. Its just when I put it back into the ISA slot along with the Sound Canvas did it blow. 😕

leileilol wrote:

I try to hoard them when I see any surviving old site with them. It's not a well preserved software genre. Ditto for desktop themes, which I still use.

Right. I've been meaning to start a thread for that for a while, so... "bring out your dead"

Great game-oriented screensavers?
Great game-oriented screensavers?

Re-capped my SiI0680 PCI RAID card and dug these out;

Never seen this name elsewhere, but I can't help wondering if these are DiamondMax's that didn't meet Maxtor's quality control - if that is the case, I don't expect they will last very long.

They are to be installed in my Pentium II 450

I did a little googling and found this bit of information: http://www.cdrlabs.com/forums/who-make-nikimi … ves-t10631.html

So basically Nikimi does -NOT- produce hard drives, they only buy refurbished products from major OEM's (Not even direct from the manufacturers..!) and then refurbishes them again, and slaps their label on it and sells em.

So.. good luck on those things lasting very long. 😢

EDIT: Another informing post: http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/top … drives/?p=38216

The company (and website) are long long deceased, and I've found these people on some forums quoting text that was on said website back when it was active. There's also the internet archive database (WayBack Machine) to go browsing www.nikimi.com if you want to try that route.

I finished up Wing Commander, now starting on The Secret Missions 1. I also made disk images of a bunch of game disks I found. Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Ghost Busters II, Motocross, The Music Studio 3.0, and MechWarrior (original). I also figured out why Doom wasn't playing well with my new 486 build. I accidentally mislabeled some EDO RAM, so an EDO stick in there wasn't playing nice. I took that out and Doom played just fine.

Oh...and I need to take my 19" CRT to get fixed. Its having a few issues with the screen quality. Its still insanely bright, but there's a few moire patterns that have popped up. I have NO idea how to adjust that and not willing to risk my life to figure it out....so I'll fork out money to someone who knows how to fix that stuff.

dogchainx wrote:

I finished up Wing Commander, now starting on The Secret Missions 1.

Cool!

I've gotten, maybe half-way, into SM1, boy is that game brutal. It's funny, although I have all the vintage hardware, I ended up playing it on my main desktop in DOSBox with Munt and a T.16000M Joystick.

The game is brutal. The amount of enemies is borderline ridiculous 😀

I used the pilot transfer system, but I'm not sure if I'll finis SM 1. Too hard 😵

philscomputerlab wrote:

Cool! […]
Show full quote

dogchainx wrote:

I finished up Wing Commander, now starting on The Secret Missions 1.

Cool!

I've gotten, maybe half-way, into SM1, boy is that game brutal. It's funny, although I have all the vintage hardware, I ended up playing it on my main desktop in DOSBox with Munt and a T.16000M Joystick.

The game is brutal. The amount of enemies is borderline ridiculous 😀

I used the pilot transfer system, but I'm not sure if I'll finis SM 1. Too hard 😵

The last time I played SM1 was a VERY long time ago, but I do remember it being very very difficult to finish. I look at it as a duty to my childhood to finish it, no matter the sleepless nights. 😎

Also, this morning I'm going to refurbish my Thrustmaster Topgun joystick. The trigger button has stopped giving a good sounding "click", and feels very very soft, so I need to replace the internal button mechanism. I have a badly cracked Thrustmaster TopGun that I'll be using as a source for parts. Going through Wing Commander I really let those furballs have it! Wait...can we still say furballs? Is that PC these days? 🤣

I watched Grease on Laserdisc last night.