derSammler wrote:

PTherapist wrote:

Disabling Aero on Vista & 7 actually degrades performance as it switches the GUI rendering from the graphics card and onto your CPU instead and you'd notice things like bad tearing on 3D gaming & video playback.

I highly doubt that this is true. Yes, no Aero means that the CPU has to draw the screen, but you also lose all of the heavy GUI features like Aero Peak, transparency, etc. and it will still use the 2D acceleration of the graphics card (the blitter, that is). So the CPU won't have that much to do. On slower Intel chipsets with integrated graphics, Aero was often disabled by default, because the GPU was to slow for it. That of course means that the CPU renders non-Aero faster.

Try it and see. It's quite a well known issue and even if you don't spot the difference in performance, you will certainly experience terrible tearing in many games, emulators & all video playback with Aero switched off. Some programs/games prefer Aero off to function correctly, as such it's much better to leave it on and where necessary turn it off on a per-program basis via Compatibility options.

Just got this somewhat rare (i think) Voodoo 3 PCI in the mail from ebay.

IT DOESN'T WORK. I'm mad now -__-

Today I did some more retrobrighting with bleach gel.

My cheap Bose MediaMate speakers started off like this, with strange brown marks around the volume wheel:

Ended up like this, much nicer - the colour change ended up very consistent:

There's some broken plastic in the corner but it was like that before - I found that I really can not open up these without causing more serious damage to them. Fixing the paint on the speaker grilles will not be easy. I'll probably mask those off and just hope that the grilles catch the paint before it hits the speaker.

Learning from last week's brightening up on the tanned Roland SC-7, I did this to get them to this shade consistently:
1. Clean everything with soap and water carefully
2. Brush on 40% bleach gel over the whole thing except for the surfaces that don't get seen, like the underside and the back. I put a rubber cover onto the headphone port so it didn't get bleached.
3. Using the speaker grilles as a handle and gloves to avoid getting any bleach gel on my hands. I burnt myself much less this time 😀
4. Put cling film / saran wrap over everything, not airtight, not pressing it at all, it's only on there to stop the gel drying out in the sun
5. Place the speakers on the balcony in bright sunlight
6. After an hour, take them in, carefully put the cling film aside so it can be re-used. Wipe off the bleach gel. Brush on a fresh layer of bleach gel. Carefully replace the cling film.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 a few times (5 hours in my case)
8. When done, clean off the bleach gel with soap & water

edit: I've also been having a go with these older Bose speakers - they're quite nice.
The newer Bose Companion 2 MkII speakers that they're sitting next to seem to do some audio processing, which really amps up the bass to the point where a lot of games don't sound right at all, though they do make FM/Adlib music sound awesome. These MediaMate speakers seem to be a bit simpler and sound more normal in games.

rick6 wrote:

Just got this somewhat rare (i think) Voodoo 3 PCI in the mail from ebay. […]
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Just got this somewhat rare (i think) Voodoo 3 PCI in the mail from ebay.

IT DOESN'T WORK. I'm mad now -__-

What the hell? Is that even a legit 3DFX card? It doesn't look anything like either of my V3s. The "3DFX" mark seems to be in Comic Sans and I've never seen that Voodoo 3 logo before either. I thought most Voodoo3s were dual 3.3V/5V PCI cards.

Since it doesn't work anyway, pop that fan off & see what chip is actually underneath. I'm wondering if it's some unofficial product using salvaged chips or something, or even a fake.

xjas wrote:

rick6 wrote:

Just got this somewhat rare (i think) Voodoo 3 PCI in the mail from ebay. […]
Show full quote

Just got this somewhat rare (i think) Voodoo 3 PCI in the mail from ebay.

IT DOESN'T WORK. I'm mad now -__-

What the hell? Is that even a legit 3DFX card? It doesn't look anything like either of my V3s. The "3DFX" mark seems to be in Comic Sans and I've never seen that Voodoo 3 logo before either. I thought most Voodoo3s were dual 3.3V/5V PCI cards.

Since it doesn't work anyway, pop that fan off & see what chip is actually underneath. I'm wondering if it's some unofficial product using salvaged chips or something, or even a fake.

Looks like a Powercolor Evilking 3 - http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item/ … x-voodoo-3-3000

Dug out my old NIC to connect my 98SE PC to the net and browse Vogons while downloading old demos and listening to RPGN Radio via Winamp. I was reminded that John Romero created some new DOOM levels so I grabbed the wad from https://www.romerogames.ie/si6il while I was at it.

It's been a chill weekend 😀

Extracted several GOG.com versions of good old DOS games from their packages to get them to work in pure DOS environment.

I made a pretty cool discovery while tinkering with my pcchips M912 and a AM486 DX4 SV8B ...

One of them is a fake DX4 (but it's not bad at all 😁) Can you spot which one is the fake one ? 😜

Spoiler alert:
"One little piggy is unlike the other.....unlike the other...unlike the other..." (and better, for that matter) 😉

Updated my Windows 98/DOS computer:
- removed a PCI S3 Virge VGA card and installed a Voodoo 3 1000 Velocity AGP 2x 8Mb card (also placed a new 4cm Akasa fan on it's heatsink),
- removed some PCI Sound card (the chip says Creative ES1373), and installed an ISA CT4520 AWE64 sound card.

Install Debian 8 Jessie, which was released in 2015 and still current with LTS EOL mid next year, on my P166MMX test rig and installed a few bits n boobs. Who said you can't install a current OS on old kit and browse the web on a modern web browser?

Caluser2000 wrote:

Install Debian 8 Jessie, which was released in 2015 and still current with LTS EOL mid next year, on my P166MMX test rig and installed a few bits n boobs. Who said you can't install a current OS on old kit and browse the web on a modern web browser?

Wow, that is amazing! How fast is web browsing on that machine? What about scrolling speed?

Lets just say as fast as can be expected on something that old. Funny thing is all the applications, failing the likes of KDE and Gnome, I've tested are no slower than their equivalents were in 1999 on the same system.

Jessie uses a 3.16 kernel. I think the latest is 5 with a lot of legacy stuff being dropped. I was curious how far I could go on this P166MMX set up. Around 2010-11 support for the older SiS video chipsets were dropped so tossed in a S3Virge/DX video card and problem sorted. USB 2.0 works without any issue. New USB drives are instantly shown up on the desktop if it is supported. Modern encryption covered. HTTPS support. As you can guess I was presently surprised with the out come.

Funny thing was Firefox-ESR crashed right of the bat so knew to avoid anything based on that. Opted for Gnomes Epiphany browser in the mean time until I track down something a bit snappier. It was in the Jessie repos so no need to download from a 3rd party site.

The next stage of testing will be wifi and I'm betting it will work with no problems at all.

So my advice is if you want to give Linux on old kit, by that I mean pentium one era, a shot or maybe tinker a bit with a *nix workalike, shoot for the sky. The thinking that only old linux distros are capable of running on old kit is a load of horsesh*t.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Jessie uses a 3.6 kernal.

3.16 kernel actually. Jessie is also the last version of Debian that supports 586 (i.e. Pentium/K5/K6/6x86).

Thanks for the correction. But doesn't seem quite right wrt i386/i686. i386 arch seems to be supported up to Buster:

Looks like Devuan ASCII with the 4.9 kernel has ports for those archs https://devuan.org/os/

Stretch with 4.1 kernel supports them as well. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStretch

So does Buster https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBuster

Oh and look at all these kernals available for i686s.

Deksor wrote:

I made a pretty cool discovery while tinkering with my pcchips M912 and a AM486 DX4 SV8B ... http://i.imgur.com/qhu0CDLl.jpg One […]
Show full quote

I made a pretty cool discovery while tinkering with my pcchips M912 and a AM486 DX4 SV8B ...

One of them is a fake DX4 (but it's not bad at all 😁) Can you spot which one is the fake one ? 😜

I guess, it's the right one. I at least miss the space between 3 and VOLT.

Great, you've found it ! Actually this chip is a better chip disguised as a DX4 SV8B

I made a sticker for it :

Yeah it's a 5x86 actually ! I discovered it when I ran speedsys on that chip. During the memory test I noticed the L1 cache was 16kb instead of the advertised 8. So I was wondering if that chip wasn't hiding deeper secrets so I installed a jumper on the motherboard for 4x multiplier is and it posted as "Am5x86" 😁
It seems to work perfectly as a 5x86 at 133MHz so I'm quite happy with that 😀

I knew AMD was hiding better chips as slower ones because I have a DX2-80SV8B that's actually a DX4, but I didn't expect that still, I'm glad I tested it 😁

Who knows what my other AMD 486s might be hiding ? 😁

Caluser2000 wrote:

i386 seems supported up to Buster:

Debian uses i386 as shorthand for "32-bit x86" but which generation it supports depends on the release. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_ve ... _(Stretch) says 9/stretch dropped 586 support and earlier 6/squeeze dropped 486 support.

I'd rather try things out than rely on wikipedia. I mean they and MS said you can't have usb support on NT4 which was a down right lie.
i386 generally stands for i686 and lower processors from what I can understand. No such thing as a 7x86 processor.

Just did a search of the Stretch i386 repository and it does support i586(with the 3.16 kernel) and i686(with 4.9 kernel)

Did the same for Buster but 4.19 kernel at this point for i686

Takes a couple of minutes. Just a simple matter of swapping out jessie for stretch or buster in the sources.list file running "apt-get update" then "apt-cache search linux-image" I'm certainly no Linux guru but am getting an understanding on the basics while working on the P166MMX. It isn't that hard really.

So your assumption Stretch(and for that matter Buster) do not support 5x86 and 6x86 systems is totally incorrect. Well the official Debian wikis stated as much. So that is at least up until mid 2022 EOL LTS for Stretch which is pretty damn good with Buster about two years after that going by past history.

The other day I decided to bid on a "scrap lot" CPU auction on eBay, from the pictures I could see that there were various AMD K6/2, Slot 1, Socket A and Socket 370 CPUs in the lot (18€ shipped).
When it arrived I was pleased to see that most of the CPUs were in relatively good condition, some bent pins, missing heat sinks on the Slot 1 CPUs, but most of that can be fixed.

Today I found some time to test the Socket 7 CPUS: K6-266, K6-2-450 and K6-2-500. After straightening some pins, all of them turned out to be in perfect working order 😀
I will probably use the K6-2 450 in my Asus TXP4 Socket 7 System and put the others back on eBay.
My hopes for finding a K6-3 in the lot have not come true this time, however...