shamino wrote:

Found mention of a Tomb Raider 3Dfx demo for MSDOS that apparently programs the Voodoo card directly without needing any drivers or other nonsense. Should serve as the simplest possible test that my ignorance can't possibly screw up. If that doesn't work I'll probably make a thread.

That's not exactly right. ... It's known as a "statically linked" Glide game. The Glide library it uses has been linked internally to the executable, not left as a dynamically linked library (DLL). Tomb Raider has two 3dfx executables. One (1114 kB) is statically linked, the other (874 kB) uses glide2x.ovl.

I just tested today a AMD K6-III+ 400MHz in my Asus TXP4-X mobo with patched bios, thanks to Jan Steunebrik. And it worked just great:

...but not at the 7.14MHz FSB, witch suxx bad 🙁

Just ordered 2 Dallas DS12887 Real Time chips for a board I think goes to an Acer V50S, but can't find any info on it.

Been quiet as of late because of the impending move. Still, I found time to fix a Sanyo DCX W18 I nabbed quite a while back. It has been sat in a garage for over a decade and did not work well at all. Nobody wanted it and the owner died so it went out to the trash, I grabbed it when his house was being cleared - before you get any ideas, no, they knew about it and were fine with it, they actually offered me it along with some other stuff as they just wanted it all out of the way so they could get shot of the house.

I tested and discovered no suspect electronics which lead me to think the problems were mechanical. Indeed, a few blasts of WD-40 and abuse of all moving parts for a few minutes has left me with a completely operational stereo - completely free! So that's good.

Needs a stylus though, it did not come with one. I need some new ones for my GXT 7000 anyway so I may as well grab one for this when I order those. I don't know if the turntable works, the lid is missing and as I said, there is no stylus to test. Don't plan on really using it much anyway because it is nasty plastic, but it would be nice if I could get it to work.

Edit: Well, to be honest, one tape deck doesn't work. The capstan turns but the spindle for the reel does not, the door is also damaged on the inside so it doesn't eject/close. I see no reason to fix this particular problem however, though I probably could with a screw and a new belt. No real use for two decks on this.

I went back to Windows 7.

Yesterdag evening i was busy with a new build.. I fiddled out that it was the best to go for a next dual boot system as well. It will be a Vista-32bit / Windows xP 32-bit system. So it would compatible with the whole windows xp scene, and also can run directx 10.(1) compatible games on vista as well.. I have chosen to go with my older system motherboard i had before with this Core i5 2500K system. Why i made this choice is because microsoft is screwing windows 7 as well with there (i want your information much as possible patches) So i really want to have that build free of that crap.. On the other side combining an faster windows 98se machine with an windows xp machine isnt very easy because you need really go low on memory so windows 98se can run normally and the downside will be that a windows xp system should at least need 2GB of ram so it would not slow down or getting problems to run software properly without needed to insert more memory modules again.. I think on system specifications, the gap is just to big from a faster win98 se system and a more advanced windows xp one.

Maybe i decide to made an extra build specially for the faster windows 98 se machine.. I know that having to much computer cases isnt fun staying around.. But their isnt much i cant do about it. So that you really have to take what is the best shot.

Also i powered up the system with the older data on it. I need to have to buy a bigger harddisk and backup the data that is most important for me. Then i need to reinstall the Osses again.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I went back to Windows 7.

This made me laugh.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I went back to Windows 7.

From what?

Added a 128mb pye disk-on-memory to my new 386 dx 40. Next swap the 3.5" diskdrive. It works, but it won't eject the disks.
Also need to add a cd-rom drive. But i first have to find a way to hookup,the dom module, since it is now directly attached to the controller.

Robin4 wrote:

Yesterdag evening i was busy with a new build.. I fiddled out that it was the best to go for a next dual boot system as well. It will be a Vista-32bit / Windows xP 32-bit system. So it would compatible with the whole windows xp scene, and also can run directx 10.(1) compatible games on vista as well.. I have chosen to go with my older system motherboard i had before with this Core i5 2500K system.

Interesting, a XP/Vista hybrid DX9/DX10 machine. I think that's a great idea! Because there are a lot of overlaps around 2006-2008. Many games were DX9 by nature, but a DX10 patch would get released or something like that.

Maybe start a new thread and keep us updated? Keen to hear how you go. What will you use to dual boot?

King_Corduroy wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I went back to Windows 7.

From what?

Windows 10. Should've waited for Win 10.1. 🙄

Standard Def Steve wrote:

King_Corduroy wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I went back to Windows 7.

From what?

Windows 10. Should've waited for Win 10.1. 🙄

I always used to say "never buy a 1st gen Apple product" but I'm inclined to include any major software release now as they all seem to ship in beta.

Consumers = Free Beta Testers

Yesterday, I made a speaker switch - connects internally to the speaker header to a rocker switch in the back, where you can switch between the internal speaker (for that authentic PC speaker feeling 😀 ) and the speaker header on the sound card. Middle position is silent.

Today, I worked on my new "fast" baby AT socket 7 build. Finished installing components, flashed the BIOS for the K6-2/400 and 128GB HDD support, and frankensteined several socket A cooler parts onto the poor socket 7. I plan on overclocking this once it's finished, it had to be done 🤣

Finished up my highend Win98se build, tested it with 3D-Mark99 for authentisity.
(testing like it was 1999/2000 again)
Gave me over 17000 3Dmarks, and I was like WTF! Did not see that comming.
Pretty happy with that build so far. 😜

I had an epically retro day. Took delivery this morning of a batch of 7 motherboards I won for a fiver on eBay. Not so happy about having to then pay £15 to the same seller a week later for a bunch of ISA boards that I needed in order to test the motherboards. Three of the seven were ropey-looking socket 5 server boards. Not much use to anyone really so I harvested the useful parts (caps, crystals, DRAM) and binned them. The others, however, were all very interesting for different reasons. All aside from 1 had a barrel battery, so I had no idea if any of them would work.

Board 1: 386

Although I've got a 386 already, it's a proprietary model and has very little expansion potential. This one is obviously a proper AT model but totally anonymous. Can't find any details on the VOL chipset. It's only a 16Mhz CPU, but I'm hoping I can change up to a 50Mhz crystal and squeeze 25Mhz out of the bugger. I had no 30 pin SIMMS at first but the board has 1MB built in it seems. It booted up first time and the board layout allowed me to switch out the barrel battery (which had hardly leaked at all) for a 3V cell:

I really like the simplicity of 386 and older boards. Because it's only one layer, you can hold it up to the light and see right through it.

Board 2: Elitegroup Triton II

This one caught my eye mostly because of the all-white slots - even the keyboard socket is white! I remember seeing one similar to this on the 'stuff I have bought' thread a month or so ago. Until last week I didn't have a socket 7 board, only SS7, so now I have two. The other one is only an FX board, so I'm glad to have a VX because of the SDRAM and support for PCI 2.1. Surprisingly, the Dallas RTC on this one was still good so it booted first time!

Board 3: Chaintech 486SPM

I literally only just found out this board is in The Red Hill Guide so that's fairly awesome. I removed the battery and it too booted up fine. The board doesn't have space for a 3V cell so I'll have to improvise. This is now my second socket 3 PCI board so I'm looking forward to doing some benchmarking.

Board 4: OPTi 495SLC

This is the one I was most excited about, as I've never had a VLB board and I find them dead quirky. This chipset in particular is quite wacky because it supports any CPU from a 386DX right up to a 486DX4. It was clear from the pictures even before it arrived, however, that it was in a worse state than the others and physical inspection seems to have confirmed my fears. Even one of the ISA slots is affected:

You can see at least one of the tracks is totally hosed. I would love to get this thing working if anyone has any tips - has anyone has any success with this kind of damage? I'd really like not to bin it. I was wondering if I could use wiring to reroute the current but I'm guessing that the resistance of any wire I use would be higher than the tracks on the board and so would mess things up in some way. The silver lining is that, hiding under the menacing heatsink there was an Am486DX2-50 - I only had one 486 up until now. I could also use the cache chips elsewhere, and the board was populated with 30 pin SIMMS too, so bonus. Would still rather have a working VLB board.

Other retro activity included replacing the digitser on an iPad 2 (retro because you can't install the latest iOS on it, so it's obsolete) and also had to diagnose an issue with an iMac (late 2009). Wouldn't power up. Service manual helped me work out it was simply the power switch. I say simply, I had to strip the whole machine down to get at it, and it's an integral part of the case, so it would cost £145 to replace it with a new part and £70 for a second hand part. I decided to save the customer some money by dismantling the broken power switch and making a new one with the parts and some electrical tape:

I think I should probably go to bed now...

p.s. this is the 2nd time I've typed this - the connection reset the first time because it took so long to type grrrr

Stealth time machine

I ran that benchmark you asked about, Phil! Still looking for Unreal though.

Lamented over the sudden death of the Seagate ST-250R from my AT&T PC 6300. One of the heads snapped off. 😵

Got the snazzy cooler master elite 361 case for my P166 PC. 😎

Found a PSU that I thought long lost and finally got the machine running 😀