Blurredman wrote:

zstandig wrote:

I have no PS/2 Keyboard nor a Serial Mouse...

Get out of this forum!!! 😊 😊

Nice find though!! I recently found an AT keyboard, serial mouse and an old 12" CRT monitor but no PC... I just took the KB..

L O L ! Could you imagine a life without vintage computer components everywhere? I certainly could not. 🤣

brostenen wrote:

Long time since I have been doing any real retro activity. […]
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Long time since I have been doing any real retro activity.

Anyway.
I have been rebuilding my fic pa-2013 machine.
This time it is an k6-2 500, paired with 128 Mb of ram.
An TNT2 M64 agp and my AWE32 CT-3900 with 2mb RAM.

It is yet again running MS-Dos 6.22. No windows.

My problem is, or I am thinking about replacing the AWE32 with an AWE64 Gold.
The problem is or should I say. My reasons for not, is that I will loose the OPL chip.
On the other hand. This machine is for high end DOS games. (late 90's stuff)
And they almost all support AWE sound.

What to do?

Just curious as to why you are running the M64 version of the TNT2?

Started going through all my crap to move in a week, let's just say it has to do with the ongoing hell of mold in our apartment for the past few years getting worse and worse despite putting a gas truck of bleach on it over the years. No this is not a selling thread - I will be mentioning purge items just for the sake of telling the events of yesterdays insanity. I've also put the Game on hold for now.

I kicked it off by doing some sketches and Visio drawings of the new "Man Cave". The problem with my current one (where all my Retro PC and rock n' roll activity takes place), is it's too darned cluttered, I don't have enough desk space, and everything ends up out in the open anyway - I want to hide all the wires and crap and have it look nice. I plan to replace it with a school-type activity table.

I've been collecting/maintaining/tinkering with vintage video games since 95 (age 12), and vintage computers since 97 (age 14), I'm now 32, I've accumulated a lot of crap, so now I think it's time I make my stuff just a tad more cohesive. I look forward to having a new man cave that is in a building that won't leave me coughing up phlegm and in a bitter mood all the time - that's a part of what mold toxicity does to you.

The first lot was a ton of Halo toys and a pair of XT Motherboards. I don't play with toys, I tinkered with collecting for awhile (don't have that much), ended up throwing a set of Dodge Chargers my wife gave me from her job (never asked for em, I'm more of a Ford guy anyway). But amongst the items in the purge includes a pile of ISA cards, a anti-static bag of SIMMS, 2 PC-class motherboards from an IBM Industrial PC and an IBM Personal Computer Portable 5155, one of which has 256K, the other 640K that I upgraded myself. I just don't need em', my Tandy 1000a covers the gamut of 1980's vintage PC-DOS world goodness. Trying to decide weather or not to let go of some boxed software, some stuff like OS/2 2.1 with WIn OS/2 and OS/2 2.0, and stuff like FontMonger, and BASIC for the Macintosh I don't really want or need, but things like my original 1st Edition VGA copy of The Secret Of Monkey Island on 720K ain't goin nowhere (it's the VGA version with the text inventory menu)...then there's some in-betweens like Police Quest and a 3-pack of PQII, Hoyale Card Games, and Manhunter II (I believe). I also have about 70ish Atari 2600 games and 30-40ish NES games going to half-price books on the weekend so I can purge out all the games I don't play, I'm not a completest collector anymore.....then......

The wife goes in and "audits" everything on her own accord, and whilst you'd think she'd be mad because I was purging "not enough" stuff...nope, this is why I married her - she got mad because I was planning to send off NES games SHE wanted to play, and some Atari games that appealed to HER. She said "you're purging too much, remember, you'll probably never get them back, and I want to play some of this stuff too". So she pulled basically every movie title or edgy title she could find out of the stacks, still leaving around the same number area (though a good bit less in the NES case).

Tonight I need to post a ton of stuff on E-bay, and then start going through the game controllers I have, I have so much crap for the Atari 2600 it's insane, 2 TACs, 2 Pointmaster Discwashers, several CX-40 joysticks in varying condition including one original 1977 model that had the insert and leaf-switch action, a Gemini Gemstik, a Gemini flight stick I junked (because it was falling apart), some crazy neon blue and gray thing that looks like some kind of wacky kid's toy more than a serious game controller. I've decided to keep all the NES controllers (2NES Max gamepads, both versions of Zapper, the Advantage joystick, and the 4 gamepads I have).

as for making the PC collection cohesive, I've sorted out the PC's thus far accordingly, though more mrevision on this is going on tonight....I'm also looking at some keyboards to get rid of, amongst them are 2 XT keyboars - a IBM Model "F" which I wish I could adapt to my modern PC (that's my favorite buckling spring Keyboard of all time), and a generic Xt keyboard complete with a warning label on the bottom stating to NEVER use the keyboard with an AT computer.

Tandy 1000
- 1 white power cable
- Tandy 1000 Keyboard

GEM 286
- 1 Gray Power Cord
- Passthrough cord for Monitor
- I'm trying to decide between the 2 Microsoft Mice I have and a older 3-button Logitech Mouse I have, all serial
- Generic AT 101Key or Laser AT/XT Keyboard
- currently as-of-yet untested IBM 14" CRT

Home-Built 486 DX2
- POwer Cord
- Passthrough for Monitor
- PC-TRAC Trackball
- Chicony Keyboard
- Gameport/MIDI adapter
- omnihanded gamepad
- 1994 Color Monitor

Compaq Portable 486c
- beigy gray power cable
- Microsoft PS/2 Explorer Trackball

Apple Macintosh SE FDHD
- Mac SE Keyboard or Enhanced keyboard (not sure which yet)...
- Mac SE Mouse
- Pointing Devices Trackball (yes PD is the brand IIRCC)
- Beigy Power cord
- 800K External Floppy Drive

Either way, I have a lot of work cut out for me. I'm hoping $30 of the sales can go to getting a new screen for the Compaq Portable (p/n 128902-001) to replace the cracked one, that way then that project goes back on track. I'm even considering possibly making that the main DOS gaming PC after awhile once I figure out a few other things (turning a WAP into a WIFI device I can hide in the case, how to pass-through the audio from the intspkr output to the input on a SoundBlaster, then back out to the actual speaker inside the unit so all audio goes through the Compaq, and the voltage pinout for the hard disk so I can connect my 8GB drive for DOS/WFWG in there).

Artex wrote:

Just curious as to why you are running the M64 version of the TNT2?

Well... I am using my GF2-MX400 in this machine as of right now.
Gives the same sort of compatibility as the M64 in question, running on DOS-6.22.
I do own some higher class AGP card's (such as V3 and so forth), yet they are the ones that draw too much power and will toast the MOBO in question.

And for DOS games, and not Windows games, I really do not care that much about the GPU speed.
As long as I can run those games I like. Shure I could swap the GF2-MX for an TNT2-Ultra or TNT2-Pro, as I have those too.
As long as my cards are passive cooled, they win in my book.

What is more interesting in my case, is what soundcard I should use.
Should I go for my AWE64-Gold? My AWE32-CT3900? Some wierd mix of an SB16 and GUS-ACE? Or anything else?
I have an AWE64-Value installed right now, and testing out what will suit me the best by swapping soundcards and testing with games.
At some point I will eventually find the solution that suits me the best.

Tried to turn on my 939 machine yesterday. Thing's fans (mainly the gpu fan, the cpu fan is on a controller), the gpu fan just runs 100% and the thing never comes up to display video. I think I've killed yet another 939 cpu. 😵 😵 😵 😵 😵 😵 😵

If you were curious where that 'selfish' personal installer lead to...

I'm a little shocked a (emulated) 486 w/ 16mb could handle 900mb of LZMA2 extraction. This has me optimistic to do this on The Real Thing and compare real results vs this emulator

also this is just a small bit of it, I haven't gotten to any of the 3dfx games yet nor the loads of sierra games from earlier, and I left out the talkies 😀

I had to tear out my collection of desktop themes for even more DOS game icons to use

InnoSetup 5.4.3 was used and so were these compression parameters

1SolidCompression=no
2Compression=lzma2/fast
3LZMANumFastBytes=273
4DiskSpanning=yes
5SlicesPerDisk=1
6DiskSliceSize=650000000

Most of the time went into the program group shortcuts and finding their icons 😀

I'm a little shocked a (emulated) 486 w/ 16mb could handle 900mb of LZMA2 extraction. This has me optimistic to do this on The Real Thing and compare real results vs this emulator

I am not that surprised. The decompressors can be quite memory efficient. On the other hand, compressing it would take a whole lot more RAM (and CPU)

I still have no idea "why". It would seem like it would take a lot of disk space for a retro box
and it would seem like you would end up with a bunch of stuff you will never use -- not to mention making it harder to find anything.

Yeah opening it in the start menu itself leaves a 800x600 screen with nothing but a bunch of overwhelming choices 😀' I tried to have subgroups for bundles and games off shareware discs to tidy it up.

All of this installed takes around 3.2gb, true that it is a lot of disk space used. I just wanted to cut out the exhaustive 'insert disk/cds, run install and wait' parts 😀 unfortunately some of the windows games are fussy like Mordor, so I have to put shortcuts to their setup programs to fix them, kind of defeats the purpose a little.

Wasn't there a game icon database out there for good 32x32/48x48 .ICO icons like there is a booru for Steam grid images?

creepingnet: Just a heads up that bleach will actually make black molds grow faster after temporarily eliminating them. We learned that the hard way with our aluminum 70's mobile home windows.

ODwilly wrote:

creepingnet: Just a heads up that bleach will actually make black molds grow faster after temporarily eliminating them. We learned that the hard way with our aluminum 70's mobile home windows.

We have this (in danish) "Rodalon", wich are extremely efficient at killing stuff like that.
It can take away sweat (use it when doing the laundry), it can take away the smell of cat-piss (in the bed for example), and it kill's mold.
It can even take away stains from the walls, when mixed with water and used with a cloth or something alike.

The problem is, that it is being sold in Denmark, and I suspect that the name is only known inside of Denmark.

EDIT:
After some googling, I have found the chemical name of "Rodalon", it is: benzalkoniumchlorid

ODwilly wrote:

creepingnet: Just a heads up that bleach will actually make black molds grow faster after temporarily eliminating them. We learned that the hard way with our aluminum 70's mobile home windows.

Most likely that's because it was a non-porous surface. 😊

brostenen wrote:

We have this (in danish) "Rodalon", wich are extremely efficient at killing stuff like that. It can take away sweat (use it when […]
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We have this (in danish) "Rodalon", wich are extremely efficient at killing stuff like that.
It can take away sweat (use it when doing the laundry), it can take away the smell of cat-piss (in the bed for example), and it kill's mold.
It can even take away stains from the walls, when mixed with water and used with a cloth or something alike.

The problem is, that it is being sold in Denmark, and I suspect that the name is only known inside of Denmark.

EDIT:
After some googling, I have found the chemical name of "Rodalon", it is: benzalkoniumchlorid

For those in the rest of the world, this is quats (and for the Americans, Lysol). The "take away the smell of cat-piss" is what tipped me off, and looking it up online confirmed that. It is indeed very effective at killing algae/mold/etc (and it does sanitize in sufficient concentration - if memory serves its something like 250ppm in water, vs ~120ppm for bleach (if you need this "right" for food-contact surfaces look this up to confirm - I may have those backwards 😊)).

More OT:

I finished my dual Xeon's rebuild. It is now a quieter, more efficient machine. I swapped the FX 5800 Ultra for a Quadro FX 700 that I picked up new-in-box a few months back, and added Voodoo2 SLI (since my second card arrived), as well as upgrading it to a more modern SATA hard-drive (which is quieter). Power consumption and heat production have gone down, performance hasn't been significantly impacted, and it has gained some additional abilities (namely hardware Glide support and 16x AA on the Quadro).

After having done the AWE64 Gold review, I mucked around with the Yamaha Audician 32 Plus. Great little card. Also working on a MIDI related project to do with Munt and Soundfonts 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

After having done the AWE64 Gold review

One good video. Great job.

brostenen wrote:

One good video. Great job.

Thanks 😀

Kinda glad that the Audician 32 Plus is a much simpler card. Easier to cover 🤣

I am currently copying files from the Core 2 over gigabit Ethernet. They are being copied to the more powerful Pentium D system in preparation for me moving back to that machine so I can get things done faster whilst waiting for my Xeon to be built.

Also blasting 90's eurodance on my 1970's Sanyo GXT 7000, I had my SNES hooked up earlier too, haven't played it in ages... Damn, you forget what genuinely fun console games were like.

philscomputerlab wrote:

After having done the AWE64 Gold review, I mucked around with the Yamaha Audician 32 Plus. Great little card. Also working on a MIDI related project to do with Munt and Soundfonts 😀

I haven't watched one of your videos for a while - you're getting really good. It was very refined and easy to watch.

I dunno what you guys see in those OPLSAx cards 🤣 I tried my Audician 32 Plus again the other day - in DOS - and I just find them to be trashy. The OPL3 is nice as it should be, but the FX are dry as a bone and I'm dubious about how compatible they are. Mortal Kombat, for example, was dropping sound all over the place.

Are you using it in Windows? Maybe it's just the DOS drivers - they were probably aimed more at Windows 95 users.

badmojo wrote:

Are you using it in Windows? Maybe it's just the DOS drivers - they were probably aimed more at Windows 95 users.

I'm using DOS 6.22 and Windows 98 SE for testing. Each on a separate disk. Machine is a K6-III+ 400 MHz. Watch the space. I'll review this card next 😀

Thanks for the video feedback. I totally forgot a conclusion / summary for the AWE64. I'll do one for the Yamaha.

A similar video on the GUS could be useful 😀

vetz wrote:

A similar video on the GUS could be useful 😀

Oh dear. I have an odd relationship with my GUS PnP...

philscomputerlab wrote:

Oh dear. I have an odd relationship with my GUS PnP...

Gosh, an X rated movie then? 😈

Looking forward to your OPLSAx review, I need answers!