Hi all,

I am looking more into retro computing lately. I allready own 6 NF7-s, 2 dfi norce 2, a few Asus and then some more...
After cleaning up the garage of my uncle I found all old cpu’s we had and a nice Macintosh FDHD and printer.
I thought I should go a little deeper into the retro pc world. Since I am an overclocker (always was) these systems will some day run at there maximum and beyond...

I found myself a defective Soltek SL-54U5 version d6. I fixed it today, all caps were replaced by solids and it is in a perfect working condition again.
This week I also tested an Asus P5A I bought (bought at a low selling price) and I received the photograph version of the PC CHIPS M577 manual (I could not find it anywhere on the internet). I allready have a board.

I bought some 486 boards as well and have some running now. Best cpu for now is an am5x86.

Just made a test bench for my Dual Tualatin-to be system (unfortunately i have problems with second slotket, so I installed Katmais now). I pushed heatset M3 threaded inserts into laser-cut 5mm thick acrylic base and installed standoffs. I wanted this setup to be as compact as possible, so I used SFX FORTRON 300-60GHS power supply. 22A on +5V, that should be enough. I wanted to 3d-print a mounting adapter for that PSU, but now I'm just using double-sided 3M tape to hold the PSU in place. It is so strong that I can pick up entire test bench by grabbing only the power supply 😀

Mobo is Tyan S1834D.

(red-ray if you are reading this - i will test your beta SIV version when I get Tualatins to work 😀)

the little crawl of the small fans

After cleaning the basement I was browsing through a couple of CDs and DVDs and among a lot of archived awkward party photos and MSN messages and stuff a teenage boy entertains himself with, I found a couple of fittingly low resolution images and an Everest report of the PC I was using in the mid-2000s.

I sold it around 2008 I think. I sometimes play with the thought of rebuilding it when I see one of those cases, but now I at the end I always put the idea off since I have better builds for that era.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-12-03, 12:42:

I'll be doing a bit of refurbishing on my P133 system, so I made myself some custom USB header and PS/2 mouse brackets for the QDI Explorer I motherboard in it. I will install them this weekend, that means installing Universal USB drivers for Windows 95 as well.

It also has a battery damaged speed indicator LED panel that was ruined by a leaky battery so it will no longer retain speed settings. The ruined traces run under the actual LED display so I may end up removing the circuit altogether to desolder the LED panel, and see if I can directly solder on an external battery holder for it..

Installing the custom USB and PS/2 brackets went perfectly and now I can enjoy a PS/2 mouse and USB mass storage on this Pentium 133 Windows 95 PC.

Now I'm mulling whether it's worth fucking with the front LED at all, as I am equally as likely to completely destroy it as I am likely to actually do a meaningful fix..

I will take some photos of this PC tomorrow and post it in the Retro Rig Photo thread. It is, to me, a beautiful thing, with an upside down AT case and stuff.

I've been playing with two x850 Pro Vivos.
Connect 3D with 1.6ns memory, and other with 2.0ns. Both unlockable to full 16 pipelines 😀.
Although GPU-Z says 12 shaders, 3DMark score shows ~22% improvement in multi-texturing (5419 MTexels/s -> 6636 MTexels/s), so I guess it works.

Procedure is fairly simple:
1. dump current BIOS with AtiTool or AtiTrayTools + make backup copy
2. edit BIOS with Hex editor (change one character at specific location: 1 -> 0)
3. load it with RaBiT BIOS editor and save it as new rom file (this fixes checksum)
4. flash new BIOS with atiflash
5. load new driver after reboot (no re-installation of drivers needed)

I've also tried with X850XT BIOSes, but run into stuttering issues in games and also fan curve issues.
It seems best scenario is to mod card's original BIOS.

I plan to pimp up first card with Zalman VF700 and memory heatsinks.

(I dunno if this is the right thread for this or not. If not, what thread would be better?)

Is there someone on these forums that is capable of fixing up an OG Xbox? (Namely, removing the clock cap, maybe installing a more reliable PSU)

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-12-05, 22:15:

(I dunno if this is the right thread for this or not. If not, what thread would be better?)

Is there someone on these forums that is capable of fixing up an OG Xbox? (Namely, removing the clock cap, maybe installing a more reliable PSU)

The PSU is usually not the issue but helps to get it recapped as well, it is 5 capacitors on the motherboard tend to bloat and latest revision of board does not require clock capacitor removed (actually requires it to work properly).

Other than that Xbox is rather reliable after cleaning out the dust build up, dust gets into everything including between case and the EMI shielding.

Cheers,

Don't some models have low-quality PSU's though?

The Thinkpad T21 came back to life miraculously over the weekend, and I ran some comparisons between it and its older, slower slimmer sister the Thinkpad 240.

Turns out that the 240 is more perfomant than originally assumed. A Celeron 300A isn’t a slouch, and all the noise about the Neomagic Magicgraph 128XD being slow and unable to run lower resolutions in DirectX software mode? Bupkis.

Here it is running UT99 at 400:300x16 software mode, high quality, spectator mode with 12 bots - compared to the Thinkpad T21 running 800x600x16 running at Metal mode, the rendering speed is nearly identical, that is, FPS in the mid-to-high 10s to low 20s for more complex levels. Note that both machines have sone serious bottlenecks:

The TP240 uses a 128XD, which is a 128 bit 2D Accelerator with only 2MB of embedded EDO DRAM and is connected to the PCI bus. It wasn’t super-fast even when new.

The TPT21 has the S3 SavageIX, which is a re/spun Savage3D with one texture rendered per clock cycle, runs at 95Mhz, has a 64 bit data-path to 8MB of embedded DRAM, and is designed to be merely feature complete and power sipping and not quite performant. It’s also driving a 1400x1050 TFT panel.
The performance in Metal isn’t great but it’s rendering quality is very decent. If UT99 ran in Direct3D the texture lighting is ignored and the game looks a bit odd.

A Rage128 Mobility with 16MB of VRAM (full 128 bit datapath) will run at almost 50% higher frame rate compared to the S3, but only at Direct3D.

Here’s DM-Crane:

And CTf-Face.

Here’s Quake2 running at 400x300x16 in software mode on the left compared to 800x600 in hardware accelerated mode on the right. Timedemo is around 26fps on the left, and almost 40 on the right. A 400MHz version of the Celeron will be roughly 2-4 FPS better.

Then there’s testing VESA rendering acceleration for 2 games that are notoriously picky about it - MS Flight Simulator 5 and Rowan Flight sims like AirPower.

Within MSFS5 the S3 SavageIX in the T21 does not seem to work well using S3c911 drivers, while the Neomagic works well with VESA one - in fact, the flight model for the T21 seems glitchy and the Cessna will lawndart onto the streets of NYC within 20 seconds, while the 240 is perfectly controllable. Within AirPower both are perfectly playable, but the Neomagic seems to be a little more responsive on the flight controls.

FS5 - Flight down Broadway scenario

AirPower - Scramble (Salvo)

These are activities of yesterday:

I was planning on making some comparison performance tests between my XP retro laptops and my P4 desktop.
The laptop is a Lenovo G565G (Athlon II X2 P340, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD4270). Didn't come with official XP support, but It can be make it work by hunting down the drivers from the chipset manufacturers.
It had decent XP performance up until about 2004-2005 games. I'd say the HD4270 should have about Radeon 9700 performance. But the laptop just died on me after the UT2004 benchmark. It already died once when it was a daily driver with Ubuntu. The laptop has a seriously dumb design flaw. The heatsink of the GPU is the metal bottom plate of the keyboard, but between the chip and the plate there is the keyboard's ribbon cable. It's a miracle it lasted for 9 years. It was temporarily fixed with a heat blower a couple of months ago. Maybe can be revived again with a proper reballing.

As for the P4 I also planned to test my AGP collection so I switched out the X800XT with a 9800Pro, but at 9 PM I was lazy to reinstall the driver so I just switched back and wanted to install some games. During the installion of Diablo II however the optical drive started acting up. It froze the PC for a couple of seconds then disappeared. I thought I just reinstall Windows, maybe something just got messed up, but the setup from the CD froze the same way. Then I remembered, that I put the X800 on e different molex connector. It was on the same cable as before and the drive was on a different one, it shouldn't have made any difference, but I put it back as it originally was then left it rest for the night. This morning I already installed Starcraft (didn't try Diablo yet) with no issues. Weird.

Diagnosed the floppy drive in my AMS NotePro Plus DSTN Color laptop and the issues are the following: only 1 head works, alignment issues left and right, and the belt I installed is slipping and rubbing against the diskettes, but not onto the data track, thankfully.

The laptop uses a proprietary Citizen FDD connector that only works with Citizen W1D or LR102061 drives and the floppy emu or other drives are not an option as it needs to be a Citizen drive exactly. Fortunately, I have a parts laptop arriving soon and will look at that floppy drive to see if that works or not along with a TFT display so I can say bye-bye to the dreaded ghost of display's past (DSTN). Wish I could find a modern IPS display, but getting the connections to work on a 26 year old 486 DX4-75 laptop for a modern display might not do any good as the connections for the displays have changed over the years.

I maneged to fill the P4 with happiness.

The only had 2 issues.
1. The 80GB hard drive is a little small. I'm left with 17GB free space and there are still a couple of games I'd like to add. Maybe I should buy a 160GB one.
2. I had a CRC error on SW:KOTOR disc1 which is weird because my Lenovo could install it with no issue and that one has one finicky drive. I guess I'll have to use the GoG version.

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-12-05, 22:15:

(I dunno if this is the right thread for this or not. If not, what thread would be better?)

Is there someone on these forums that is capable of fixing up an OG Xbox? (Namely, removing the clock cap, maybe installing a more reliable PSU)

The PSUs are totally fine, and usually don’t require any changing. Also, so long as you have the screwdrivers to get it all open, even getting rid of the clock capacitor doesn’t require much in the way of tools. Often, you can just snap it off after neutralizing the fluids. What’s more important for keeping your Xbox running well is replacing the thermal paste. It’s more of a gummy substance by now than any kind of paste.

Did did a few bit n pieces over the few days. More sorting and tossing out shit I'll never use which got ris of teo large cardboard boxes. Built up a new test bench system around aslot 1 Celeron 400. Have a PII and PIII cpu to test out. Have a pci USB 2 card, pci sata card and wifi card to put in it. IT has 1 isa card in it bit I don't know how useful it will be. But the mobp runs great.

Did some soldering to wires to an from a 386/486 era front control panel. I'm using a PSU the was designed fo AT and ATX mobo. I have a couple spares as well. An AGP video card is fitted. I can roll the test bench out from under thesmall table when I need to fit components t0 test. Everytihng, apart from the video card, is built in to the mob0 and has serial/lpt ports for chatting/connect it to older systems. I used Xandros 2 linux to test all the components because it is far easier then using a win9x/ME/NT/win2k hdd where you have to go and fectch divers. Everthing worked fine.

Matched up all the cpu heat sinks I have to suitable fans removing the old heat transfer grease in the process. On pentium had stuff as bakerlight I used a belt sander to get rid of it. Found spraying with CRC 5.56 made the job real easy on most of them.

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-06, 14:25:

The only had 2 issues.
1. The 80GB hard drive is a little small. I'm left with 17GB free space and there are still a couple of games I'd like to add. Maybe I should buy a 160GB one.
2. I had a CRC error on SW:KOTOR disc1 which is weird because my Lenovo could install it with no issue and that one has one finicky drive. I guess I'll have to use the GoG version.

Modern SATA SSDs are your friend. Get a 120GB-240GB drive for under $65.

the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-12-07, 11:09:

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-06, 14:25:

The only had 2 issues.
1. The 80GB hard drive is a little small. I'm left with 17GB free space and there are still a couple of games I'd like to add. Maybe I should buy a 160GB one.
2. I had a CRC error on SW:KOTOR disc1 which is weird because my Lenovo could install it with no issue and that one has one finicky drive. I guess I'll have to use the GoG version.

Modern SATA SSDs are your friend. Get a 120GB-240GB drive for under $65.

I prefer my drives to be easily swapped so for a SATA SSD I'd either have to buy a SATA IDE adapter to use it in my current HDD rack or buy a new SATA drive bay.
An IDE drive is just around 5$ or less and I'm also concerned about the wear on the SSD under Windows XP even if most people say it's not an issue with modern drives and limited use.

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-07, 13:00:

I prefer my drives to be easily swapped so for a SATA SSD I'd either have to buy a SATA IDE adapter to use it in my current HDD rack or buy a new SATA drive bay.
An IDE drive is just around 5$ or less and I'm also concerned about the wear on the SSD under Windows XP even if most people say it's not an issue with modern drives and limited use.

Honestly, as you can already tell, I think you should be more concerned about how much life those old IDE drives have left. I use SSDs under 9x and XP, no issues so far. Then again, after the initial install and setup, I'm not writing too much to the SSD when in use. And the speed they provide is no joke. Makes the OSes fly. As long as the SSD has a DRAM cache, you should be set. But, if you prefer that "it just 'works'" approach with all of the caveats it comes with, power to you. I've moved away from HDDs in general except for in my NAS setup. Speed, reliability, and size of modern 2.5" SSDs are just too good, M.2 SSDs even better.

If you want a pure IDE flash experience, a CF card is a good choice, although I think anything beyond 9x is going to be too harsh on such drives. I only use them for DOS/Win9X.

While I find it very cool and interesting that such options exist, I still use 15 years old HDDs. It just works.
I don't have the time or energy to tinker with my retro systems. Now, my goal is to I enjoy and preserve them.
I had my share of retro build that would not work anymore when one tinker with them too much.
25 year old motherboards can be grumpy. I don't want to have to reflow them or worse after too much stress.

the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-12-07, 13:30:

Honestly, as you can already tell, I think you should be more concerned about how much life those old IDE drives have left. I use SSDs under 9x and XP, no issues so far. Then again, after the initial install and setup, I'm not writing too much to the SSD when in use. And the speed they provide is no joke. Makes the OSes fly. As long as the SSD has a DRAM cache, you should be set. But, if you prefer that "it just 'works'" approach with all of the caveats it comes with, power to you. I've moved away from HDDs in general except for in my NAS setup. Speed, reliability, and size of modern 2.5" SSDs are just too good, M.2 SSDs even better.

If you want a pure IDE flash experience, a CF card is a good choice, although I think anything beyond 9x is going to be too harsh on such drives. I only use them for DOS/Win9X.

I'm moving over to CF for setups where less then 4GB capacity is enough. It's more about accessibility when it comes to working hard drive than the reliability of those working hard drive. And it's also makes it more convenient to move data over. But for Pentium 3 or newer builds, I'm firmly sticking to the old-school hard drives. 10GB and larger drives are cheap and abundant. Also, for the same reason I prefer my games on CDs and DVDs, the sound and sluggishness of the hard drives are I think part of the charm.