@veeb0rg

nice! can you give me more info on that cd-changer? I have one but no caddy. can i get a good pic so I can keep my eyes open for one on epay?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

What retro activity did you get up to today

I am doing a quick comparison between the Cyrix 486DLC and the 486SXL to determine how much benefit there is to having 8 KB of L1 cache vs. 1 KB of L1 cache. Anyone run this comparison before?

I just got the XG-DLS board to POST that I traded from kixs! Happy days!

You can use TightVNC to remote into your retroboxes running Windows 95 or newer.

http://i.imgur.com/VBYX3b1.png

Veeb0rg wrote:

Built a dos gaming machine. […]
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Built a dos gaming machine.

Pentium 120,32 meg EDO ram, Diamond Stealth64 Video.
Can only find one ps2 mouse and the ps2 to db9 converter I have is dead. Very frustrating.

Like this setup. Particularly the dual floppy and the CF adapter hanging out the floppy slot. 😀

Rhuwyn wrote:

Veeb0rg wrote:

Built a dos gaming machine. […]
Show full quote

Built a dos gaming machine.

Pentium 120,32 meg EDO ram, Diamond Stealth64 Video.
Can only find one ps2 mouse and the ps2 to db9 converter I have is dead. Very frustrating.

Like this setup. Particularly the dual floppy and the CF adapter hanging out the floppy slot. 😀

I can't help but notice the slot load optical drive and Trump like hue of the plastic. 😲

See, this is why I never post pictures of my machines. 😀

Truth be told, most of them are an electrocution waiting to happen.

stamasd wrote:

See, this is why I never post pictures of my machines. 😀

Truth be told, most of them are an electrocution waiting to happen.

I've actually shocked myself via my fingers from touching running computers under testing several times.. once was a broken sata cable end/connector. Didn't know it was broken went to pull it out to "hot swap" a hard drive.. and touched the contacts on the end of the cable on accident *ZAP*. Apparently they carry a decent bit of load on the sata circuit if you have other drives on other ports at the same time.. that one had my hair standing on end for half a day. Probably what saved me with that one is I had my wrist touching the metal part of the frame the drive was on when I touched the cable, just went right through my fingers to the ground of the tower, but still was a good jolt for a second, definitely had me 'bright eyed and bushy tailed' after that. And I look at sata cables differently now.

Some how I had something short in my 1000 watt power supply testing my 775-water system. Powered it on (thankfully I was no where near it, on the other side of the room* BZZZZRRTTTTT *pop pop* *darkness* something arc'd to ground inside of it and it popped the breaker. Still haven't replaced that in that machine yet.

Yeah, some of my computers and hardware are a death trap too, I've been there. 😁

luckybob wrote:

@veeb0rg

nice! can you give me more info on that cd-changer? I have one but no caddy. can i get a good pic so I can keep my eyes open for one on epay?

Its a Pioneer drm-624x. It uses a standard 6 disc pioneer caddy, nothings special about it besides its white.

gdjacobs wrote:

I can't help but notice the slot load optical drive and Trump like hue of the plastic. 😲

The faceplate and the NES I have will both be getting the retrobright dip eventually.

One AT psu down (dead), so I played dr. Frankenstein and crafted my second homemade ATX to AT converter cable.
Used the P8/P9 connectors and an 20 to 24 ATX extension cable as parts.
Right now, it is configured as a bench-setup/testing cable.
I can allways remove the push button, and solder the AT-Power switch connectors on, when I get another AT-case. 😀

Finally managed to install XP correctly on a Thinkpad R52 laptop. Got one of the (very few) HDDs that the BIOS supports. The first attempt to install was weird, the drives showed up in the wrong order (the HDD and the USB drive I installed from were reversed in explorer, with the USB drive being C: and the HDD being E:), and I had trouble upon reboot; it required several reboots at a time to come up cleanly, and eventually stopped completing a full boot altogether. I wiped the drive clean, and reinstalled; this time it went smoothly.

The only difference between the first and the second install was the power brick I used to power the laptop. The first time around it was a no-name one that I had laying around; the second time I used an IBM-branded one made for that generation of laptops. I don't know if that's what made the difference, but I'm posting it here in case someone else runs in trouble similarly.

Finally built my windows-retro gaming machine for 1995-2005 period 😁
First game for testing purpouse was Doom 3 (1920x1200, all settings on MAX). Played it first time in my life and... WHAT A GREAT EXPERIENCE! 😁

Machine specs:
Core 2 Duo E4700
Asrock Conroe865PE
3.5 GB RAM
GeForce 6800GT with NV5 Silencer (it's 65'C max! WOW!)
WD 1TB HDD
Audigy SB0090
Dual-boot Win98 & XP

Been busy resorting part of my collection from a mishmash of all kinds of boxes into standard kiwi boxes. The old boxes were all of different sizes and were generally too weak to stack lots of boxes on top of eachother (could crush its content if the boxes start sagging after a while, not very good). But I got new kiwi boxes lately, so thanks to the Dutch people for eating healthy food again I can now store part of my collection in a healthier fashion also 😀

And I've been playing some UT99. Turned out I had already installed the Anthology and UT99m was already patched. I got kicked in the nuts by Jade Falcon a lot ingame 🤣. Well done!

Doppler wrote:

Finally built my windows-retro gaming machine for 1995-2005 period 😁
First game for testing purpouse was Doom 3 (1920x1200, all settings on MAX). Played it first time in my life and... WHAT A GREAT EXPERIENCE! 😁

Very nice, a cool way to bridge XP and W98.

I started benching: CL-5446, S3-Trio64v+, S3-virge325 and TNT2-M64 on a P133.
Results will come in tomorrow. 😀

The reason for this, is to see how they will perform on a P133.
Kanecvr has done some testing with these cards, so I wanted to see if the difference are somewhat the same on lower spec's.

Nice. Are these all PCI or AGP?

They are all PCI. 😀
As far as I can see untill now, they are more or less head to head. Making 486dx2-66 to P133 a range of hardware, were it does not really matter what card. Only have to test the TNT2. I think I will try some games without tsr's and see how the user experience is, and hold it up against the benchmark.

been testing a few SATA to IDE converters to try and get my Gigabyte IRAM ramdisk working on my super socket 7 build...

no luck so far. Works fine on things like SATA DVD/CDrom etc but all of them refuse to see the iram sata connection 🙁 doh!

got one more from china coming and then I'll give up and pull the IRAM from the build.

Finished benchmarking: CL-5446, S3 Trio64v+, S3 Virge325, TNT1 and TNT2 in MS Dos 6.22, using Phils benchmarking suite....
All cards are PCI. I created a spreadsheet for the numbers after they came in. (anyone care to see?)

Next up... How do they feel in actual gaming, and what quirks do they offer.
I wish to do the game testing, using no Univbe, just to keep mem free and see how they perform "vanilla".

brostenen wrote:

Finished benchmarking: CL-5446, S3 Trio64v+, S3 Virge325, TNT1 and TNT2 in MS Dos 6.22, using Phils benchmarking suite....
All cards are PCI. I created a spreadsheet for the numbers after they came in. (anyone care to see?)

Of course! 😀