brostenen wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I got this package today. The best ESD protection ever.

Ouch!!!!

😀

Now Im installing Windows XP to test the Radeon X850 XT PE I bought for 6 euro. I had a XP install I used for testing a X1950XTX two weeks ago but I forgot to mark the drive so it got lost in a sea of drives.

At least she looks good and displays 2D ok but she came without ESD protection wrapped in bubblewrap in a box not larger than herself.

Setup my 586 and played a game of Blockout. Fun game! 😀 Then played Civilization but the Barbarians destroyed Samarkand around 3900BC. 🙁

PeterLI wrote:

Setup my 586 and played a game of Blockout. Fun game! 😀 Then played Civilization but the Barbarians destroyed Samarkand around 3900BC. 🙁

Blockout? That 3D-Tetris kind of game? It even runs on a 8mhz 286 with EGA and 640kb of Ram.

brostenen wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

Setup my 586 and played a game of Blockout. Fun game! 😀 Then played Civilization but the Barbarians destroyed Samarkand around 3900BC. 🙁

Blockout? That 3D-Tetris kind of game? It even runs on a 8mhz 286 with EGA and 640kb of Ram.

Maybe it's more of a challange if it moves the same speed as "The Flash"

Today I wanted to test my newly arrived Nx motherboard but I cannot find my Host Adapter anywhere. It was a faulty card anyway so I would have had to buy one if the board worked (I'm pretty confident it does) so I'll just nab one when I can afford it... Or in a few minutes, payday can't be that far off now. I also don't have a PSU for it, but I'll just butcher an ATX one for now. I am sure I have one AT supply left.

I tested SCSI in my Pentium 60 (Ready for the 66MHz upgrade I have planned) but the drive I was testing, an old DEC branded Seagate ST3610N makes horrible clattering noises the whole time and doesn't appear to be working. I lack the cards and cables to use my newer Western Digital drive and it's too large anyway at 18.3GB - this the one remaining drive from my dual P3's original configuration, that one has used Quantum Atlas drives for a few years now. The computer did try to boot the Seagate drive though but failed for obvious reasons and so I deemed that I shall move it to SCSI as I pondered this when it was built. It seems more fitting, especially as the board has no built-in I/O at all.

I watched a few episodes of Scrapheap Challenge from 2001. Again reminded of the old playground arguments over Cathy VS Phillipa.

Dug out my Cardcaptor Sakura DVDs, might have to watch those soon.

Fed the spiderlings, they are growing quite fast and I'll probably have to let them go free soon. I think I will keep one. I also misted big spider's tank as it has been warm and I don't really want her to dehydrate.

I went back to the P60 and reasoned the fact the CD bay gets in the way of the CPU does piss me off more than I originally thought. I am now giving serious consideration to making a cover for the one remaining AT case I have. Said case got pulled out of the electronics graveyard a few years ago (I have a video of the place but that case isn't in it) and it was the source of some of the parts in my K5. The case was nice but it had no cover and no matter where i looked I could not find it. As it is one of those made of a single sheet folded over the top I figure it can't be that hard to make one at all and as I know someone who does that kind of thing for a living I can possibly get help. Thus, the Pentium 60 might be moved to that case and this would also leave that case free for the Nx because there is nothing but a keyboard controller and some simple logic up there i don't have to touch.

I also can't find a heatsink for the Nx. I wanted to test one of those three hole Socket A ones as suggested and know I have an Akasa one, but it is not where i remember leaving it. I do have a K7 that I never use and might be giving the board to a friend, so I shall see what heatsink in there. Quite a busy day to say I'm still getting over a stomach bug, but hell if I'm going to sit here and do nothing if I can be working on stuff I like doing.

Edit: Nah, such heatsinks do not fit properly, though they come close. A clip-on Pentium heatsink might work or one of those weird 90 degree wire ones I haven't seen in years, though I think I have one. I will probably end up using glue though. I guess I will just use a small bit of glue and a blob of thermal paste to hold one on, it would then be easier to take back off if I ever had to do that but I'd put a rubber band through the heatsink to discourage it falling off if the glue came loose.

brassicGamer wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I am doing inventory so I finally have a list of all my stuff (except for memory/cables etc). Today was CPU day 😀

Nice collection - IIT, Cyrix MII, PPro, Pentium Gold Tops, and a DEC Alpha next to the K6s?

Thanks. The MII is unstable though, it only posts intermittently on various boards. I need to check it one last time, and otherwise it's a write-off 🙁 Which is sad, because those are my favourites.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Thanks. The MII is unstable though, it only posts intermittently on various boards. I need to check it one last time, and otherwise it's a write-off 🙁 Which is sad, because those are my favourites.

If it isn't stable at its rated speed it will probably work just fine at a slightly lower setting, I have seen other members reporting this.

I just ran a bunch of benchmarks with the 6 euro Radeon X850 XT PE that came in the anorectic box wrapped in in some bubble wrap, it works flawlessly! Now my boxed Radeon X850 XT can retire back in its box for the foreseeable future.

Skyscraper wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Thanks. The MII is unstable though, it only posts intermittently on various boards. I need to check it one last time, and otherwise it's a write-off 🙁 Which is sad, because those are my favourites.

If it isn't stable at its rated speed it will probably work just fine at a slightly lower setting, I have seen other members reporting this.

...

That will be the next test. I'll try it in my AOpen AX59Pro again, re-flash the BIOS first and go from there. This is the exact variation I have: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/MII/Cyrix-MII-3 … %202.9V%29.html

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Thanks. The MII is unstable though, it only posts intermittently on various boards. I need to check it one last time, and otherwise it's a write-off 🙁 Which is sad, because those are my favourites.

If it isn't stable at its rated speed it will probably work just fine at a slightly lower setting, I have seen other members reporting this.

...

That will be the next test. I'll try it in my AOpen AX59Pro again, re-flash the BIOS first and go from there. This is the exact variation I have: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/MII/Cyrix-MII-3 … %202.9V%29.html

If you can get it running at 2.5 x 83 MHz for 208 MHz you wont loose much performance at all. 2x100 will be even faster but if 3.5 x 66 is unstable I kind of doubt 2x100 will work. If the CPU isn't extremly degraded I can almost gurantee that at least 3x66 MHz will work.

I have not seen any pattern with low FSB Cyrix MII models not working as good using 75/83/100MHz FSB as the ones rated for 75/83/100MHz FSB. They all seem the same when it comes to handling FSB but none of my MII CPUs will overclock more than a single speed grade at best and the max clock with higher FSB is lower than with lower FSB. The exception beeing my 2.2v MII 366 GP that will overclock to 433 GP spec and the max stable clock is 300 MHz regardless if using 75 MHz or 100 MHz FSB.

In my experience the MII prefers clock speed over FSB speed, so I prefer 3.5 x 75Mhz for 262 MHz than 3.0 x 83 MHz for 249 Mhz.

My Sharp X68000 never came with a power supply, hard disk or any of the brackets. I finally had the time today to fabricate new brackets for the drive and a smallish ATX power supply which will be modified to work.

There's an extra bracket I still need to make. It supports the AC plug, power switch, fan and ground lug.

Testing and benchmarking an Asus P5Q3 mobo I recently acquired. Yeah, I consider Core 2 stuff kinda old.

So far I'm very happy with it. It overclocks and performs much better than my old P5N-E SLI (nforce 650) board. Intel chipsets truly are the bee's knees. In fact, this board takes Core 2 IPC right up to Phenom II levels. Previously I thought that Phenom II was faster than the 65nm Core 2 processors clock-for-clock, but this doesn't appear to be the case.

So far the P5Q3 has been running my Q6700 at 4GHz/1600FSB paired with 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory. The performance is liek, amazeballs. 😁

Not strictly retro as it involves modern components but I spent a few hours today piecing together some VHDL code to recreate in a cheap FPGA board a retro machine. So far I have a Z80 CPU, 4kB of RAM and a serial port. The goal is to make a CP/M machine 😀 But for that I have to add some external RAM.

stamasd wrote:

Not strictly retro as it involves modern components but I spent a few hours today piecing together some VHDL code to recreate in a cheap FPGA board a retro machine. So far I have a Z80 CPU, 4kB of RAM and a serial port. The goal is to make a CP/M machine 😀 But for that I have to add some external RAM.

Nice! I'm working on building a z80 cpm machine, got some sram, going to use a PIC to act as an MMU so I can bank switch 2kb or 4kb page size pages in and out..

Well I was hoping to dispense with discrete components by going to FPGA but I ran out of resources and have to add some external RAM. To keep things simple I'll use two 32kx8 chips (I have a stack to be used as cache for 486s). I would need though a perfboard with 20x20 holes to fit on my FPGA board and I only have 18x24 ones. Grr.

This is my FPGA:

Either I order a bigger protoboard and wait 2 weeks for delivery... Or I can't use a whole row of pins. 🙁

(edit) I went for option B... I hope I'll have enough GPIO pins.

Blockout works fine on a 586. 😀

kithylin wrote:

Probably do what I did, connect a digital volt meter to the terminals when it's on and see if it's outputting any voltage. If it does then it charges, if it doesn't then use whatever battery you have and just know you'll have to replace it some day.

Even though my 486's are on packs of nimh cells, they were specifically drained down to 3.3v (Before connecting to the machine) 5 years ago and one is down to 1.65v now the other down to 1.77v when I checked last week.

So they don't charge and they're just drain-only. I have their bios settings saved in pictures on my other machine so some day when they get low enough to lose settings I'll recharge em. So far it's going on 5 years now since this feb 2016 and haven't had to yet.

I found this well written article about them CMOS batteries...
http://pc-restorer.com/replacing-cmos-batteries-in-old-pcs/

I gave the Antec SX series server tower that has been in my family since 2001 to a good home. 6 5.25 inch bays and 8 3.5 inch bays with 6 80mm fan mounts! 1.2mm thick steel, no way I was going to let Goodwill scrap it and make $20 😀

Today Im going to test the Supermicro Super S2DG2 dual Slot-2 motherboard I bought half a year ago. I have not had any Slot-2 CPUs to test it with until now. I'm not sure it will post with a Xeon 900 2M if the BIOS is really old but I'm hoping for the best. I would like to make sure these Xeons work before I leave positive feedback to the seller but if the board won't post I can't really be sure if it's the CPUs or the motherboard or just a too old BIOS version so I guess the seller will get his positive feedback what ever happens.

The testbench as it looked yesterday when I tested the Supermicro P6DGU.

The Supermicro Super S2DG2. This board is littered with shady "NRSY green" caps, it looks like the previous owner replaced some of them with random caps he took from other boards.

The two Xeon 900 2M.

Close up.

Ran some tests on AMD K5 PR166 for clueless1 with various cache levels disabled for his project and was reminded what a great machine my K5 is 😀