Been reading old issues of infoworld from around 1993/94, really fun reading.

https://www.google.dk/search?tbm=bks&hl=da&q= … bm=bks&start=20

Finally had time to play around with my GF4-ti4200.
Things are looking ok and work ok I guess.
I still like my Radeon 9600 better. Now the GF4 is
installed in my P3-933. Nvida drivers are still a hell.

Then I played a lot of games on my K6-III. Nice.

Speaking of old issues I read a CGW in 99 that had a very unfair 1-star review next to a very fair 1-star review.

Yesterday I played Pirates Gold! Great game. Turns out the sea is not heard with GM. With SB it is. I exited the game once I had too many mutinies: sailing all the way from Barbados to Mexico is a really bad idea. 😀

Today I replaced the 700MB HDD on my 486 with a 2GB CF card. So far so good. FDISK + SYS C: D: + XXCOPY16 and it is like nothing ever happened, except more free space 😀

Went through 40+ RAM 30pin 72pin SIMMs and tested them out, pairing them up, etc. Took about an hour, found two dead SIMMS.

Also rebuilt my 486 system with a VLB Caching IDE Buslogic card with 16MB of cache, 16MB that I tested previously with the above tests and pairing. I'll run benchmarks in a week or two comparing it to Smartdrv, etc.

Oh.......and I'm not sure about some of you, but my home office has looked like a DISASTER area for the past few months. Ripping apart old systems, getting in new stuff, old boxes, etc. I'm slowing cleaning it up and organizing, so I can start scanning big box DOS game boxes, manuals, disks, etc.

Oh...and I played Ur-Quan Masters HD.....the High-Def remake of Star Control II. Love that game....

Not super-retro, but put together a system with a Abit KR7A, Voodoo5 5500 AGP, Athlon 1333 and 2x256MB Kingston (BH-5) for some 3DMark01 benching. Later I'm going to test how a mobile 2800+ Barton works in the board.

dogchainx wrote:

Oh...and I played Ur-Quan Masters HD.....the High-Def remake of Star Control II. Love that game....

I had wondered about the quality of the remake. The project intrigued me, but I still have my copies of the original games, so I never took the plunge on it.

Did they really give it that dramatic of an overhaul?

This weekend I visited my parents and went back out to the shack where I found some of my old pre y2k hardware 2 years ago. I did not find more hardware except for an AT keyboard and a 512KB coast module I bought new back in 1997 but never used 😁.

My father told me he had driven huge amounts of stuff to the dump some 10 years ago and the stuff I found back in 2013 was stuff that diddnt fit on the trailer 😁. I remember having 10 or so identical brand new 14" CRT screens to name one example, when you build computers as a side job you tend to gather huge amounts of hardware. When I moved to another town late 1999 as I got a rather well paid job I just left everything and my parents moved the stuff to the shack were it stayed until my father did that trip to the dump when he borrowed a trailer for some other reason.

I wish my father would have been a bit more lazy and just left all my hardware in the shack as it isnt used for anything but its a bit late to worry about that. I did at least find something useful this weekend, lots of manuals 😀

Runicen wrote:

dogchainx wrote:

Oh...and I played Ur-Quan Masters HD.....the High-Def remake of Star Control II. Love that game....

I had wondered about the quality of the remake. The project intrigued me, but I still have my copies of the original games, so I never took the plunge on it.

Did they really give it that dramatic of an overhaul?

The 3DO version, which its based on, has a lot of improvements. You should check it out. I haven't played all the way through the HD remake, only just the 3DO conversion/remake "UR-Quan Masters". Doing the game with high-def graphics is an improvement.

@Skyscraper: The MOBO on the front of the right-most manual looks like the legendary VX Pro.

I think even I have one of those manuals somewhere even though I've never owned the board - probably says something, there are more VX Pro manuals now than there are boards, literally every stash of manuals I have ever rummaged in has had one.

HighTreason wrote:

@Skyscraper: The MOBO on the front of the right-most manual looks like the legendary VX Pro.

I think even I have one of those manuals somewhere even though I've never owned the board - probably says something, there are more VX Pro manuals now than there are boards, literally every stash of manuals I have ever rummaged in has had one.

It is indeed the infamous VX Pro! I did build lots of system using that crappy board, PC Chips über alles!

People wanted a Pentium MMX system for as little money as possible and that is exactly what they got 😀

I never had any issues with those boards and they were rock stable at 83MHz FSB, stable enough for me to sell pre overclocked systems with Pentium 200 MMX CPUs at 3x83 for 250 MHz. The boards were a bit slower than the Intel chipset boards at stock speeds though. I think perhaps some revisions of the VX Pro were bad and would not be stable at 75 and 83 MHz FSB but all boards that passed my hands seemed... "fine"...

One great thing with the VX Pro is that you can lock the PCI bus to 33 MHz. I have forgot what VIA chipset the VX Pro boards are using but its not all bad.

Today I updated my blog and added a lot of research I have been doing about Philips PCs. More specifically the P series.

Cleaned and lubricated the big Tandon drives from my IBM. Also fixed the door/latch thing on one drive which wouldn't stay locked anymore with grease, by moving the whole swingarm part more to the front so the latch now tilts a bit forward when closed.
Now previously, drive A would only read when cold... after cleaning, it only reads when warmed up. Guess I'll have some alignment to do.

Found that a GF4-ti4200, though faster than a Radeon9600, is shit compared to Radeon9600.
All sort of quirks regarding Win98 games from around 1999 to 2001.
Think the GF4-ti4200 is more suited for WinXP era stuff, than Win98 era stuff.

As an example. The GF4 would not display NFS-2K propperly unless Antialiasing was enabled.
And it gave some wierd off-color vertical line in UT99, farthest in the left of the screen.
When running RTCW, it ran really well without any issues at all.

Now... Despite the lack of speed (200 points 3dMark99 lower than GF4), the 9600 ran EVERYTHING
without any issues at all... Yeah. GF4 is XP era stuff. And yeah.... Said I would not build any P4 machine
in Phils thread. I will go for an AMD64 instead. Have all hardware except PSU, Case, and a AMD64 CPU.

The 9600 has one more advantage over the GF4. When being punished by high performing games.
I can not feel any heat on the cooler at all. 😳 I mean.... 😳 😳 WHY?
That is some serious well designed GPU, compared to the GF4 running that hot and only 200 points higher.
What gives??? The 9600 has one of those small flimsy coolers, so it can not be that. Or can it?

Other than that. Well... Played some Serious Sam Second Encounter Gold. (don't know what gold means)
And what a delitefull and fun game that is. Oh yeah. Allmost as fun as Duke3D.

Brostenen, with the P4 build, I was actually really impressed with ATI cards. Firstly they have working V-sync control, secondly I had less issues with Windows 98 games, especially using the latest driver. With NV I had to use an older driver, around version 45 or so.

Note that I didn't test that many games, so it's hard to really make a call, but I tend to agree with your findings. I particularly liked the 9200 SE, it has enough performance and is quite period correct as well, and has DVI.

Am I wrong when remembering people favoring Radeon over GeForce up till GF6600/6800
And favoring Amd64 over P4 untill Socket775 ?

Not wrong if you're beginning from R300's 2002 release. Before that it was all Geforce256-2-3-4 love.

brostenen wrote:

Am I wrong when remembering people favoring Radeon over GeForce up till GF6600/6800
And favoring Amd64 over P4 untill Socket775 ?

Nope. Back in the day, I did have a P4 and a Radeon 9800. Later switched over to an Athlon 64 with a 7800GT. Then Core 2 Duo came out and I switched back to Intel.

I just played Pirates Gold! again. Such a great game.

Also played MIDs on my SC-55ST: awesome quality.