Found my copy of The Goonies...on Laserdisc! Perfect way to wind down the weekend.

Received my GQ4x with adapter and eraser in the post on Saturday and immediately got to work making a repro of Wolfenstein 3D for Sega Megadrive on a 27C160. I used my dead copy of Sub-terrania as a donor as it's about the same size and Wolf3D worked perfectly. It's quite amazing playing such a good port of this old DOS VGA game on a real Mega Drive. I played the first few levels before having to do something else and they seemed perfect. No save option obviously as Sub-Terrania does not save.

When poking the BIOS around for my Pentium, I noticed that it refers to a 486DX3 processor...

I wonder if it was ever referred to that by Intel, or if the people writing the BIOS just anticipated it, or perhaps they simply made a typo.

Strangely, continuing through this stuff, there is also a reference to the Cyrix M1. The BIOS also, and this is what I was looking for, contains the string Pentium P54C.

The 486 DX3 was a 486 CPU with 2.5x multiplier, it was never released but replaced with the DX4 with 3x multiplier, totally logical! 😀

It's a bit strange with references to a 486 DX3 in a Pentium BIOS though if its not a very early Opti or SiS Pentium chipset or the like.

It's a Socket 4 board with a SiS 5501/2/3. I've seen references to Socket 3 chips in boards as late as 1997, but never a reference to DX3. One board I can think of is the ECS TR5510 from around 1995-1996, that one will even show it at POST sometimes if you set the jumpers wrong.

If it was a 2.5 multiplier it implies that once, Intel may have intended to release one for 40MHz boards, due to the 100MHz model it seems to list.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Found my copy of The Goonies...on Laserdisc! Perfect way to wind down the weekend.

That's retro^2 (or retro**2 if you do Python). You can still find new software on a CD or even a floppy, but the contents of a Laserdisc will always bring retro joy.

Started the LaserDisc hobby last week. I now have 3 players and 600+ LDs. 😀

Lots of fun!

Started 3D modelling my IBM PS/1 2121:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/88pxgwtahtppvn4/201 … 041901.png?dl=0

And here is my (not quite finished...) collection of 3D models so far:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yfmzhu8dmzcckdr/201 … 041901.png?dl=0

Burned up an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU when the replacement heat sink wasn't aligned properly. 🤣

Doing some tests with 40-series of drivers on a GF4-ti4200, using UT99. Unpatched vanilla are done testing, next up, UT99 with the latest updates.
Expect the same result as every other time, that it will render wrong on the unpatched edition. And right on the patched with AAx2 enabled.
The difference now, is that I have taken pictures of it. Yay! Don't even want to start testing on FX-5000 series. They are even worse.

I am going to make a thread about this issue, as it clearly is not present on V2/3, GF2, TNT2 and Radeon9600/9800 cards.
And that is BOTH the patched edition and the unpatched vanilla edition.
Below a sneak preview, as I have tested 5 different drivers and taken 4 pictures of each driver rendering wrong in two levels.
There are more levels that are rendered wrong, I just went for the easy solution and tested two levels only.

Just cleaned my ASUS SP97-XV, and tested to see if i damaged anything during cleaning process.
Pics of before and after https://m.imgur.com/a/rMw0r

.legaCy wrote:

Just cleaned my ASUS SP97-XV, and tested to see if i damaged anything during cleaning process.
Pics of before and after https://m.imgur.com/a/rMw0r

You cleaned it up so well, the CPU disappeared!

orinoko wrote:

.legaCy wrote:

Just cleaned my ASUS SP97-XV, and tested to see if i damaged anything during cleaning process.
Pics of before and after https://m.imgur.com/a/rMw0r

You cleaned it up so well, the CPU disappeared!

Since i will not use the cpu that came with the motherboard i took it away before cleaning 🤣
This board was covered in a greasy black substance but i managed to remove it all, and the board is working, im just waiting some parts to arrive to complete this project

.legaCy wrote:

Just cleaned my ASUS SP97-XV, and tested to see if i damaged anything during cleaning process.
Pics of before and after https://m.imgur.com/a/rMw0r

I guess I'm crazy but I don't see anything even remotely dirty/bad/wrong with the before shot.. why are you cleaning it again? It looked perfect before.

PeterLI wrote:

Started the LaserDisc hobby last week. I now have 3 players and 600+ LDs. 😀

Lots of fun!

Nice! I started my Laserdisc hobby back in 1994 and I only have one player (the Panasonic LX900 I bought way back then) and around 85 movies. I sold way too many of my old LDs back in 1999 after I bought my first DVD player. Man do I regret that! 😢 I'm sure I let go of quite a few DTS LDs, which would be really fun to play with now that I have a proper home theater setup.

So which players do you have? Are you wired up for Dolby Digital playback?

Made some serious progress on System Shock. Just destroyed the Reactor and made my way back to Level 5. I think I'm another hour or two away from finishing the game. Will have to wait another day, bedtime now. Hope you all had a great day!

CLD-1010
CLD-2070
CLD-3070

No DTS. I have to keep sound low past 7PM because my kids go to sleep so I just watch on TV only.

Might pick up another CLD-3070 this Thursday. Also bidding on a CLD-99 and CLD-1030.

I picked up a Compaq Presario 4832 for free. 4 72pin SIMM slots, a dying onboard Virge, P2 266mhz, 32mb of ram all packed into a huge LPX form factor tower that weighs a ton. Oh and it has a slot load 24x Matshuta CD drive and a 6gb Quantum Bigfoot with the factory install of Windows 95. Booted up no problem besides the red toned display and the CMOS battery is only 2 days off the current date. Considering that the last time it was used according to the files on the hard drive was 2003. . . .I am fairly impressed.

I actually built a system this weekend! No software on it yet though...

Pentium 166
Asus P/I-P55TP4XE (430FX)
64 MB of EDO RAM
S3 Virge/DX 4MB
Sound Blaster AWE64
HDD & CDROM/DVD (CDROM/DVD is a bit to young, will have to change out for something more suitable)

I want to build a period-correct system for ... 1995/6 maybe? Still have to check what graphics card would be suitable...

Nice build! Classic choice of components for the era. Yeah optical drive is a tricky one - I don't think my first DVD-ROM game was UT2004 and I think there were about 5 games were available on that format in 1997. In terms of video card, the Virge is pretty much spot on - all you can really do is add a Voodoo 😀