Same here, man. Reasons why I have an IDE CD-ROM drive connected to my 486 machines so that I can play some games at the speed of light. Greased and oiled the 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive and shrank the 40GB HDD to 7.8GB as the 4.3GB HDD wasn't sounding pleasant (clicked every 3 minutes), but works fine still. The 486 build is still running slow AF and I need to get a better VLB I/O card that has more drive speed options and secondary IDE.
It is an IDE CD drive... just was what came with the system and I hadn't bothered to look up the model number before then to see what speed it was. It is a Sony CDU55E.
If I need to copy anything else over with a CD, I'll probably swap in a faster drive even though it will be severely limited by the ISA bus, but at least it will be loads faster than the 2x.
I can confirm this, some of my boards will hapily boot from any USB drive. But some of them, like my DFI LanParty NF4-SLI, will not work well with USB drives. I tried to install Windows XP with Easy2Boot recently and it kept freezing at random points during boot. I tried another USB drive, didn't work. I tried another USB ISO burning software designed for XP, didn't work.
The only way I could get Windows XP on that machine was to burn a real CD and boot from it. Ugh..
This sounds like a different issue than the Gigabyte one. Sadly, I have no idea what could be causing these issues.
Well, I think I am done with this entire “convert an old router to be a DOS/classic gaming machine” angle. (See my previous entry on the IsIs Imagestream Transport/Portwell NAD2050-3 for more details on that one).
The basic concept was sound - the router is based on the Via ESP5000 (good downclocking support for retrogaming), Trident CyberBlade graphics (and a 10 pin VGA breakout), boots off/recognizes IDE40/44 drives (so IDE to SD conversion should be possible), USB breakouts for 2 ports and a PCI slot. So it should be possible to order a PC104 VGA breakout cable, repurpose an AOpen YMF744b Cobra sound card and we should be all set, right?
Well, not quite...
A) Got the PC104 board breakout to VGA cable today - the pitch between the female pin holes on the cable were too narrow for the male breakout pins on the board (looks to be 2.54mm on the board and 2.0mm on the cable)
B) Even after about an hour of using your typical DuPont breadboard jumper cables to extend it past the narrow pitch female connector, can’t seem to get it working at all.
Took apart the cable, desoldered the pins off the VGA connector and soldered male jumpers onto the connector following VGA connector standards on Wikipedia so I can experiment with it.
On the VGA female connector side, it’s supposed to be:
Which was easy-ish enough. Pure VGA only needed 5 pins - one for each color component (R/G/B), one for H and V-Sync, and there are optionally 2 grounds - one for each synch signal. ID1/ID3 is for DDC and not really needed.
I then followed the breakout cables back to the board via the pin outs on the manual...
Oh god, that fucking manual.
Looking at the board I only have a single triangle indicating pin 1, which is on the lower left. So where’s pin 2 and the rest? looking at the diagram, one would assume:
02 04 06 08 10
01 03 05 07 09
^
(Since it lists 2 columns, one being odd and one being even)
Grn V/S ID3 ID1 N/C
Red Blu H/S GND GND
And I spent close to 2 hours checking continuity on the cables, looking at the attachment points, trying to figure out why I am not getting any signal at all whatsoever. After about 2 hours I just pulled all the plastic jumper blocks off both ends of the jumper cables, connected one end of the jumper directly to the male pins on the VGA monitor cable, and the other end of it to the motherboard 10 pin make breakouts, and...no joy.
I actually spent time just checking continuity and making sure that the pins are soldered in correctly, tried several different orientations, assuming that it could be flipped 180 degrees, and trying to hunt down maybe a jumper re-enabling VGA output on the board.
Then I had an epiphany. Suppose if the Taiwanese manual writer is retarded and meant for the pin outs on the board to be read cross-wise, where it is like this:
06 07 08 09 10
01 02 03 04 05
^
ID1 GND ID3 GND N/C
RED GRN BLU H/S V/S
And to my facepalming surprise, once I change the pins to this order, it worked. Well, kinda. The VGA breakout is next to the power supply unit and since it’s all DuPont jumper wires, the signal is all weak and wavy.
Well, then I have another problem. See, the board came with 3 Realtek RTL8160 NICs (since it is a router board), and each are grabbing an IRQ, and there is no way for me to deactivate them in the BIOS. In addition to that, the board also presents a PS/2 port pair that was not populated on the board but are still grabbing resources. So once I boot into Win98, it turned into a resource grab deadlock. If there is anything Windows 98 is piss poor on, it’s dealing with plug-n-pray on tight allocations. I also installed nVidia drivers to get a Geforce 6200 to load prior to this - something tells me the driver might still be lurking around somehow and rustling my jimmies in the background.
Okay, let’s say that I booted into pure DOS mode in Win98 to avoid the resource slugmatch. Then can I get some peace now and load up some DOS Games?
D) Eh, I don’t see an option to have USB mouse pretend to be a PS/2 mouse in the BIOS (no PS/2 ports, remember?), so while the USB keyboard worked just fine, the USB mouse...not so much even with cute mouse loaded. Not sure what's going on there.
E) The there’s that freaking AOpen YMF744B. Doesn’t work without modifying the PCI extender to add capacitors on the t5720. And it doesn’t work on this router either. In fact, it’s slightly worse here, since the clearance is tighter, and there is no AC97 to fall back on. Since the YMF744b drivers seem to need some ini file to tell it to load in a certain specific way, well...the DSDMA DOS mode drivers didn’t work at all.
*ugh* - 4-5 hours of work just to realize that I could’ve just booted up my Thinkpad 560E for the late DOS games, and T21 for the Win98 games. Both have decent enough support for FM synthesis.
Oh well, at least I feel much less guilty backflipping this router into the recycling pile, and I learned to scratch build a VGA cable. The Scientist SS02 solder sucker arrived and worked well on the VGA cable building part of the project.
Well, I think I am done with this entire “convert an old router to be a DOS/classic gaming machine” angle. (See my previous entry on the IsIs Imagestream Transport/Portwell NAD2050-3 for more details on that one).
Did you just stick a sound card and a VGA cable in a internet ROUTER ?
Here is a massive dump of technical documents, white papers etc i collected back in 2013. I'm going through my data archives (which are straight up retarded in size btw) and I found that again. There is a lot of NVIDIA stuff in particular. A lot of interesting info about how their chips and the tech they developed for them handle different graphics techniques.
Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone:https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction
Well, I think I am done with this entire “convert an old router to be a DOS/classic gaming machine” angle. (See my previous entry on the IsIs Imagestream Transport/Portwell NAD2050-3 for more details on that one).
Did you just stick a sound card and a VGA cable in a internet ROUTER ?
Yeah, I did. It's an old router that has been in my discard pile for months.
I already explained the reasoning - it's free and its sitting around, it has a Via Epia ESP5000, the VGA breakout is on the board, there is PCI support for a sound card, and in theory it should work. I just didn't expect it to be this much work.
Been testing ISA sound cards today. Mostly working on my MediaMagic OPTi 930A + QDSP wavetable (for which I opened a separate topic), but also got around to testing an ALS007 card I had had for some time and an ALS100 card I received yesterday. Both happily working - with the same (ALS100) drivers in fact. Then I got looking at the cards themselves - and got a bit puzzled:
The big difference is that the ALS100 has an amplified speaker output, and the components to power that. No huge surprise there. But the left-hand side of the board is moder interesting. Both cards have two CD-audio in ports, both have an IDE interface. Both also have the same "LS262" OPL3 1:1 clone.However the ALS100 card also has some 74-series logic, 74LS245A and 74F244D, the latter hooked up to a tiny TI 74F125. Now, this 74-logic is a bunch of bus transcievers and buffers. Why would the ALS100 (a newer, assumedly more integrated design) need them where the ALS007 apparently does not?
For whatever reason, today I decided to test some broken hardware yet again and found that an Antec power supply I thought was good, is indeed bad and a couple floppy drives that threw errors everywhere, are indeed OK after testing them with another PS (they throw errors when used with the Antec PS). Also, found that an SB16 I thought had broken digital audio, was only missing a couple jumpers to disable the non-present CSP chip and now it works as it should.
After modding my biostar M5ATA last week to be able to supply 2.2v for my K6-3. I found a modded bios online which claimed to add actual support for the cpu.
I attach some pictures of before and after benchmarks and post screen. Very happy with the result!
It feels more "complete" as a build now the correct info is displayed on startup.
note: I added more ram before setting the machine up. The 16mb was just to check for POST.
The GPU is also a placeholder while I await a TNT2 PCI.
Managed to get my Amstrad PC1640 (PC-XT/Intel 8086) to boot from Compact Flash (XT-IDE 8-bit ISA card). It has a broken harddrive, so this is great. Now the machine can be resurrected.
It's currently at MS-DOS 3.2, but this image can be booted in qemu, so now I can make it all good and perfect for my sweet Amstrad 😀
For whatever reason, today I decided to test some broken hardware yet again and found that an Antec power supply I thought was good, is indeed bad and a couple floppy drives that threw errors everywhere, are indeed OK after testing them with another PS (they throw errors when used with the Antec PS).
I just received replacement caps for my 2004 Antec 480w, it has lower volts on the +5v (at ~4v) and +12v (~9v) rails than should be and two caps look a little bloated/leaky. Unfortunately the caps that arrived are 12.5mm and I thought ordered 10mm (originals are 10mm and very tight fit in the PSU) so not sure if I can recap with them without possibly piggy-backing two caps off the board near a coil and run wires instead of straight thru the mount holes. If you can hook an old broken HD to the Antec or use a PSU tester check the volts and I bet one or more are too low.
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
I may edit this post later to include photos of windows from within windows 98se with retrozilla web browser 😁
Thanks for reading 😀
Please don't edit, then I will never notice it .. 🤣
fair enough. I am frustrated my Radeon 9200 se and yamaha ymf724 don't have Microsoft quality signed drivers for windows 98se. I have taken a screenshot to show that Yes 2 gigabytes of ram can be installed for windows 98se with a patch from the now R.I.P. Rudolf Loew. His family created a memorial website.
RAID 0 isn't possible without NT windows. RAID 1 works for dos windows even with RAID 0 set in BIOS. To enable RAID 0 one must leave the set unpartitioned and create a signature set in windows NT for striping to occur. I have a SATA II card that boasts windows 9x driver support so that'll do for faster than RAID. as for the built in RAID iam designating it to 2 x 16gb CF card adapters that can't boot anyway which will serve as a RAID 1 set for system backups. I have a pentium 4 system i am building up for windows 98se that doesn't have RAID but built in Intel graphics their drivers have less obscure legacy. I will post again when I install windows 2000 maybe the GPU have labs signed drivers for my gpu there
Did lots and lots of testing today. I have several TVs and monitors for use with old games consoles & microcomputers, but there was a Mirai 32" HD Ready LCD TV from the mid-2000s that I hadn't fully tested everything out on yet, so I set about doing that to update my compatibility records.
Plus I also wanted to test a few things on the Amstrad CTM 644 Colour Monitor that came with my Amstrad CPC 464, using the RGB Scart adapter I have for it.
The Amstrad CTM 644 Monitor was the most interesting to test out and see what else I could connect up to it. I already know it works fine with my Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2A, as well as both Sega Master System & Mega Drive consoles. So today I tested the following on it (all PAL region hardware) -
Super Nintendo = Works absolutely fine. Sony PlayStation = Works absolutely fine with both PAL & NTSC games. Acorn Electron = Slight vertical screen shimmering/flickering, but otherwise perfectly usable. Sony PlayStation 2 = No go, green screen and missing colours. Commodore Amiga 1200 = As above, green screen and missing colours.
I won't bore with the details regarding the 32" TV, but suffice it to say it struggles with RGB Scart connections from a lot of old hardware. Though it worked great with the SNES via RGB Scart and was acceptable with the Sony PlayStation too. Everything else tested with RF, Composite, Component & HDMI connections all worked as expected. It even liked the S-Video output from my Commodore 64!
I unsuccessfully tried to set up a LAN bridge adapter for my retro rigs with an OpenWrt router using relayd. No matter what I tried I couldn't get an internet connection on the LAN ports.
Replaced a bad keyboard on an Apple PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" and upgraded the RAM to 256MB. Nice machine but mine takes ages to boot for some reason, even though I put an IDE to mSATA adapter and 32GB mSATA in it and it's running a stock installation of Mac OS 9.0.
Replaced a bad keyboard on an Apple PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" and upgraded the RAM to 256MB. Nice machine but mine takes ages to boot for some reason, even though I put an IDE to mSATA adapter and 32GB mSATA in it and it's running a stock installation of Mac OS 9.0.
Is that operating system still any useful in 2020? I was going to suggest using elementaryOS, since it's the closest thing to macOS in terms of appearance.
looking for direct x 9 sound and video for my pentium III today stuff thats had its drivers signed by microsoft its hard noone seems to advertise signed driver stuff
Replaced a bad keyboard on an Apple PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" and upgraded the RAM to 256MB. Nice machine but mine takes ages to boot for some reason, even though I put an IDE to mSATA adapter and 32GB mSATA in it and it's running a stock installation of Mac OS 9.0.
Is that operating system still any useful in 2020? I was going to suggest using elementaryOS, since it's the closest thing to macOS in terms of appearance.
Not in the least! OS 9 is an absolute dinosaur of an OS, built on code that dated back to at least 1991. I'd argue even Windows 9x would be better.
Replaced a bad keyboard on an Apple PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" and upgraded the RAM to 256MB. Nice machine but mine takes ages to boot for some reason, even though I put an IDE to mSATA adapter and 32GB mSATA in it and it's running a stock installation of Mac OS 9.0.
Is that operating system still any useful in 2020? I was going to suggest using elementaryOS, since it's the closest thing to macOS in terms of appearance.
Not in the least! OS 9 is an absolute dinosaur of an OS, built on code that dated back to at least 1991. I'd argue even Windows 9x would be better.
It's worse than that. MacOS9 is really MacOS 7 with some of the Copland eye candy put in. Tech wise it's closer to Windows 3.0 (cooperative multitasking, dependence on m68k code in some of the deeper routines, over-reliance on systems extensions that clash with each other in weird ways). It looks nice on the surface but it's like a Valrhona chocolate glazed radioactive dumpster fire.
