liqmat wrote on 2020-10-04, 13:21:

BetaC wrote on 2020-10-04, 06:23:

As for what I am up to, I decided that I am going to be putting together a Socket 7 system soonish, and realized that, assuming I can find a good ATX board, I can totally build it using parts that I already have sitting around. I really just need a board, and maybe a secondary PS/2 connector so that I can avoid needing to find something AT.
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1997 is the cutoff point, for the sake of fun, so the Permedia 2 Graphics Blaster I have is gonna be doing the 3D when I bother with Windows 95 era stuff. I'll also be moving my AWE in at some point, just for the sake of it.

Matrox must have hit the extra mass produce button on those IS-STORM / MGA-2064W cards. I have a stack of them and run into them all the time in hardware lots. Probably a popular business graphics card back in the day.

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Well they were designed more around professional level stuff than games, so it makes sense. Also, good lord why are Socket 7 boards so expensive?

Speaking of professional level stuff I used to render 3D logos a bit in the mid 1990s with a 3D text rendering package from Pixar called Typestry. It ran under Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (there was also a Mac version) and it was quite powerful for its time. Fired it up in Windows 7 64 and amazingly it just worked. Spent about an hour relearning some of the tools and voila, some fun results. Not bad after not using it for almost 25 years.

Was going to install a 20GB HDD into a spare Socket 370-based ePOS machine, only to switch it on and find it no longer POSTs! I tried reseating the RAM, reseating the riser, as well as removing the CPU and testing a spare CPU - still nothing. I'll have to look at it further when I have some more time, no idea why it's suddenly decided to die after being in storage for so long. I have 2 of these exact same DigiPOS branded machines and I powered up the other one to do some testing, which is still working absolutely fine.

Aside from that, I spent a couple of hours installing a few more games on my recent 2000 gaming setup. I have about 100 games on there now, with all discs as ISO images on a network share. There's not much else I really want on there by this point so I'll probably finalize the setup soon & clone it to a 2nd system, then I'll move on and setup a couple of 2003 gaming PCs (possibly Athlon XP 3200+ based).

980ti and Windows XP on a 27" 2560x1440 @ 85hz or LG 38" 3840x1600 @30hz monitor with scaling.
Took quite a bit of troubleshooting but finally identified the last good driver with scaling on XP w/ DVI or displayport.

Re: Adventures in Windows XP Ultrawide

kolderman wrote on 2020-09-27, 04:22:

LHN91 wrote on 2020-09-27, 03:55:

Picking away at what I call the Retro Console/Audio corner of the rec room (what my wife calls "the room full of your s**t"). Again, not 100% retro, but the retro consoles, turntable, component stereo are all here, and most of it has been either thrift/yard sale finds, family/friends, or mine from childhood.

IMG_20200926_233240.jpg

Badly missing a retro PC 😜

So what if I said, instead of 1 retro PC in the room..... I'm working on an 8 retro PC LAN! (And had to rearrange the room a bit because of the size of the desks)

We're moving what used to be at my in-laws house to here. These are all frankenstein'd P4/P3/Athlon64 machines running Windows ME for playing retro LAN games on Windows.... mostly Lucasart's Outlaws, Warcraft 2, Dune 2000, etc.

Terribly unreliable, a bit of a mess, all cobbled together from dumpster finds..... but it's a lot easier to manage them when they're here for me to work on, and not at my in-laws.

Did some more testing with the COBRA YMF PCI sound card by Aopen, purely because I was bored

Running in a Pentium 200MMX on a Socket 7 board

Build Engine Games: Fine
Doom Engine Games: Fine
Jill/Alien Carnage/SideScrollers: Fine
Descent/Descent 2: Fine
Obscure Japanese PC98 Ports (Rusty/PowerDolls):Fine

...Transport Tycoon Deluxe: Not fine. Crashes before boot
Red Alert: Not fine. Crashes before boot

What the heck? I remember TTD running fine last time I tried this card. Albiet in a late slot 1 board. Same with Red Alert.

Something tells me this card doesn't like the motherboard though. If the setup program glitching out after card initialization is anything to go by.

Oh well, we all kinda knew ISA cards are the way to go for Pentium classic based Windows 95 machines.

Soldered up a Super Denise chip adapter for my Amiga 500. I did this because the PLCC version of the chip is far less expensive than the DIP version for some reason.. haha. Sold 2 PCB's to local friends already, so I already made my money back on the JLBPCB order.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-10-04, 09:19:

Horun wrote on 2020-10-04, 01:11:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-10-03, 20:51:

Trying to get a board to POST. I turned it over and realized it had some partial (and sloppy) recapping done in the past. And then there is this strange decoloration next to an apparently replaces capacitor’s legs. What am I looking at here?

Looks like cold solder joints to me ! Wow what happened to the board mask ? Maybe someone used a heat gun a little to close to the board ?

The joints are fine as far as I can tell but the solder mask is weird. It's either the work of a very high wttage (possibly industrial as someone above mentioned) soldering iron's work or someone tried to use a heatgun to melt the old solder. Either way it's at least cosmetically damaged but the (visible) traces seem fine. The board won't POST but I'm not sure if it is due to the sloppy recap job or due to the BIOS not recognizing a C3 CPU. I will try a Celeron 1300 and a Pentium III 866 tomorrow.

On that note, is it worth trying to OC a Celeron 1000A to 133MHz FSB, or should I just use a Celeron 1300? Is there much practical speed difference?

What you're looking at, I would say, is delamination of the PCB. Typically that's the result of too much heat, as you suggest. It's the resin between the individual layers of the PCB being damaged. In some cases it can lead to broken traces, and probably also short circuits ..

DosFreak wrote on 2020-10-04, 22:36:

980ti and Windows XP on a 27" 2560x1440 @ 85hz or LG 38" 3840x1600 @30hz monitor with scaling.
Took quite a bit of troubleshooting but finally identified the last good driver with scaling on XP w/ DVI or displayport.

Re: Adventures in Windows XP Ultrawide

FYI, 352.86, or just any drivers before 353.X+, are the last drivers that properly show what monitor you are using and thus allow you to use the "Adjust Desktop Size and Position" for that given type of monitor. Sadly, these drivers came out before the 980 ti AFAIK, so while adding a 980 ti's ID to the .inf file will allow you to install the driver, and from what I can tell it works perfectly find, in the Nvidia Control Panel and anything that looks at the NCP for specs and not directly querying the card for that information (like GPU-Z does), it will just say "Graphics Device" instead of "980 ti." Hopefully it's only a cosmetic issue.

You mention scaling, but I'm guessing you aren't referring to what I'm talking about, no?

appiah4 wrote on 2020-10-04, 09:19:

Horun wrote on 2020-10-04, 01:11:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-10-03, 20:51:

Trying to get a board to POST. I turned it over and realized it had some partial (and sloppy) recapping done in the past. And then there is this strange decoloration next to an apparently replaces capacitor’s legs. What am I looking at here?

Looks like cold solder joints to me ! Wow what happened to the board mask ? Maybe someone used a heat gun a little to close to the board ?

The joints are fine as far as I can tell but the solder mask is weird. It's either the work of a very high wttage (possibly industrial as someone above mentioned) soldering iron's work or someone tried to use a heatgun to melt the old solder. Either way it's at least cosmetically damaged but the (visible) traces seem fine. The board won't POST but I'm not sure if it is due to the sloppy recap job or due to the BIOS not recognizing a C3 CPU. I will try a Celeron 1300 and a Pentium III 866 tomorrow.

On that note, is it worth trying to OC a Celeron 1000A to 133MHz FSB, or should I just use a Celeron 1300? Is there much practical speed difference?

It POSTed fine with a Celeron 1000A at 133MHz so the C3 issue was almost certainly a BIOS limitation. I can not seem to find an updated BIOS for this board (PC Partner PM601TMS3-T898C - I'll be damned if there's anything about this board online..) so I'll just stick with the Uber Celeron DOS/Win98SE/Linux triple boot theme.

Continuation of yesterday.. installed my Super Denise chip, and also enabled 1MB of chip RAM in my A500. It worked, and Superhighres mode also works. 😁 (floppy drive shows unreadable because I have the floppy selector set to external but didn't have the Gotek connected)

Got my Socket 7 board running with a modified BIOS and it seems to be seeing all 512kB of cache! Board is a Soltek 5HXA. I was informed that it is a clone of the Soyo SY-5TF. Flashed it with the modded BIOS for the 5TF from Wim's. That disabled some BIOS options, but gave me others, and now it seems to be seeing the 256kB onboard PLUS the 256kB in the COASt socket!

I'll have to check what RAM I have when I get home. All I have with me here at work in 72-pin is 4 8MB sticks of 60ns EDO and 2 8MB sticks of 60ns FPM, so I can't get above 32MB to see how much gets cached above that. I should be caching 64MB at 512kB cache, right? The Soltek BIOS had a field for 'cacheable RAM area' that was selectable for 64 or 512MB; this BIOS it's hard-locked at 64MB.

Picture is test with 16MB on left, 32MB on the right.

Browsing for ISA graphic display adapter cards, and I'm wondering which one would be good for a basic Slot 1 Windows 98 build? (Or PCI, if ISA doesn't work).

Basically, a basic display adapter that has no 3D support.

the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-10-05, 04:52:

FYI, 352.86, or just any drivers before 353.X+, are the last drivers that properly show what monitor you are using and thus allo […]
Show full quote

DosFreak wrote on 2020-10-04, 22:36:

980ti and Windows XP on a 27" 2560x1440 @ 85hz or LG 38" 3840x1600 @30hz monitor with scaling.
Took quite a bit of troubleshooting but finally identified the last good driver with scaling on XP w/ DVI or displayport.

Re: Adventures in Windows XP Ultrawide

FYI, 352.86, or just any drivers before 353.X+, are the last drivers that properly show what monitor you are using and thus allow you to use the "Adjust Desktop Size and Position" for that given type of monitor. Sadly, these drivers came out before the 980 ti AFAIK, so while adding a 980 ti's ID to the .inf file will allow you to install the driver, and from what I can tell it works perfectly find, in the Nvidia Control Panel and anything that looks at the NCP for specs and not directly querying the card for that information (like GPU-Z does), it will just say "Graphics Device" instead of "980 ti." Hopefully it's only a cosmetic issue.

You mention scaling, but I'm guessing you aren't referring to what I'm talking about, no?

355.98 work for me on XP 32bit (with inf modified). Earliest I could find after that is 358.50 which has the monitor detected as a TV issue. With the 355.98 drivers using DVI or displayport then the nvidia scaling, monitor scaling or no scaling options are available and work, any version past that has the issue. Next goal is to talk to the dev who made nvidia pixel clock patcher about what needs to be modified in these drivers to allow refresh rates past 85hz at 2560x1440 or 30hz at 3840x1660. On Windows 10 on the same box refresh rates go much higher.

For drivers past that I haven't had any luck with using overridedEDID, monitor drivers, mix and matching drivers.
http://www.codeground.net/howto/override-moni … using-registry/

Mabye if the driver can be modified to ignore CEA or the EDID changed on the monitor then mabye newer drivers can be used, I say that but when I connected a very old monitor from 2012 I still had the same issue so it likely can only be fixed in the driver, we just need someone who can debug these drivers.

Testing an app called Rewound, which simulates the classic iPod interface on my iPhone. Works great. (I still have the 1st gen iPod nano working great, although it has some scratches).

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-10-05, 18:31:

Browsing for ISA graphic display adapter cards, and I'm wondering which one would be good for a basic Slot 1 Windows 98 build? (Or PCI, if ISA doesn't work).

Basically, a basic display adapter that has no 3D support.

For slot 1 you probably want to go the PCI route. Maybe an S3 Trio or an S3 Virge or something like that. They are mostly 2D accelerators but by that time (mid late 90's) most video cards have some sort of 3D acceleration onboard.

Resurrected a DigiPOS branded Socket 370 based ePOS computer (with Tualatin Celeron 1.2GHz) that was refusing to POST yesterday. I inserted my POST analysis card and it wasn't displaying anything.

So I examined the motherboard and the various connectors and suspecting a potential short somewhere, I decided to unplug the Serial port power cables and switch it on again, whereupon it sprang to life. So I power cycled several times, reconnecting each of the 4 Serial port power cables one at a time and it's happily all working fine now.

I can only guess that at some point during being moved about in storage, one or more of the Serial power connectors had worked it's way loose and shorted, even though the connectors are pretty tight.

This isn't the first time that one of these DigiPOS machines has acted dead, only for me to manage to resurrect it. They certainly are very temperamental!

DosFreak wrote on 2020-10-05, 18:38:

355.98 work for me on XP 32bit (with inf modified). Earliest I could find after that is 358.50 which has the monitor detected as […]
Show full quote

the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-10-05, 04:52:

FYI, 352.86, or just any drivers before 353.X+, are the last drivers that properly show what monitor you are using and thus allo […]
Show full quote

DosFreak wrote on 2020-10-04, 22:36:

980ti and Windows XP on a 27" 2560x1440 @ 85hz or LG 38" 3840x1600 @30hz monitor with scaling.
Took quite a bit of troubleshooting but finally identified the last good driver with scaling on XP w/ DVI or displayport.

Re: Adventures in Windows XP Ultrawide

FYI, 352.86, or just any drivers before 353.X+, are the last drivers that properly show what monitor you are using and thus allow you to use the "Adjust Desktop Size and Position" for that given type of monitor. Sadly, these drivers came out before the 980 ti AFAIK, so while adding a 980 ti's ID to the .inf file will allow you to install the driver, and from what I can tell it works perfectly find, in the Nvidia Control Panel and anything that looks at the NCP for specs and not directly querying the card for that information (like GPU-Z does), it will just say "Graphics Device" instead of "980 ti." Hopefully it's only a cosmetic issue.

You mention scaling, but I'm guessing you aren't referring to what I'm talking about, no?

355.98 work for me on XP 32bit (with inf modified). Earliest I could find after that is 358.50 which has the monitor detected as a TV issue. With the 355.98 drivers using DVI or displayport then the nvidia scaling, monitor scaling or no scaling options are available and work, any version past that has the issue. Next goal is to talk to the dev who made nvidia pixel clock patcher about what needs to be modified in these drivers to allow refresh rates past 85hz at 2560x1440 or 30hz at 3840x1660. On Windows 10 on the same box refresh rates go much higher.

For drivers past that I haven't had any luck with using overridedEDID, monitor drivers, mix and matching drivers.
http://www.codeground.net/howto/override-moni … using-registry/

Mabye if the driver can be modified to ignore CEA or the EDID changed on the monitor then mabye newer drivers can be used, I say that but when I connected a very old monitor from 2012 I still had the same issue so it likely can only be fixed in the driver, we just need someone who can debug these drivers.

I'll check this out later. It'd be nice if 355.98 work.

learning MASM, code with VS2019 and build/debug in DOSBOX 😀
I'm considering trying to use Open Watcom.
VC 1.52 works, but the syntax is difficult compared to Borland compilers and the build result is not very good.

quovadis11 wrote on 2020-10-06, 00:42:

learning MASM, code with VS2019 and build/debug in DOSBOX 😀
I'm considering trying to use Open Watcom.
VC 1.52 works, but the syntax is difficult compared to Borland compilers and the build result is not very good.

I use Open Watcom on my Linux desktop. I use wmake to build (although gnu make is nicer/better/easier/current etc). I build binaries into a shared DOSBox drive so it makes development cycle super easy. I.e. I can just use VSCode or Sublime to edit, a normal native terminal to compile and then run from DOSBox. Open Watcom WASM supports MASM syntax (I think).