VOGONS


Reply 17600 of 27057, by SodaSuccubus

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Did some Voodoo benchmarking today to see what i'd get on my upcoming 166mhz Voodoo build. Granted I only have a P120 OC'd to 133 on hands but, close enough I guess.

P133 with Voodoo. GLQuake 640x480:
27FPS

P133 with Voodoo 2. GLQuake 640x480:
40FPS.

Well shit, guess this is why people don't build much with Voodoo 1s anymore. Wonder if a 6mb Voodoo would be faster?

Reply 17602 of 27057, by LewisRaz

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Spent the last few days really thinking if it really makes sense to have 2 PCs set up. My main one (mostly a 166mmx) is used a lot but there some important games for me that need significantly more power to run.
After a lot of thought I decided I would go for 1 rig using my Pentium3 system as a base. It only had 1 ISA slot however and my SW60XG just has to be included. So I had to search for a PCI soundcard that could provide sound for the few dos games I would play (All launched from within windows!) and fortunately I had a SB Live CT4830 in my collection that seems to work very well emulating a DOS card!

Its all running great now although I did lose 3 hours to trying the first PCI card I found (CMI8738) and what I didnt know at the time... A dying CF card.

Time will tell if I do actually settle for this configuration..
JETWAY 994AN-L
Pentium 3 866mhz (SLOT1)
512mb ram
Geforce 3ti 200
SBLive CT4830
SW60XG
2gb CF + 3gb real HDD.
Windows 98se.

My retro pc youtube channel
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Reply 17603 of 27057, by creepingnet

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kolderman wrote on 2020-12-22, 20:27:

> I found a vintage 8086 laptop

Unlikey. A luggable at best.

Well close - it's this......just Bondwell branded.....could be a 286 with some more digging. Still practically a luggable but IIRC (I downloaded all of NEC's FTP) it does have battery power (likely NiCad, and VERY heavy).

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~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 17604 of 27057, by debs3759

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creepingnet wrote on 2020-12-23, 01:20:

Still practically a luggable but IIRC (I downloaded all of NEC's FTP)

What is their ftp address? I tried ftp.nec.com but couldn't connect, so unsure whether that was right

nm, found it on archive.org software archive.

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 17605 of 27057, by Shagittarius

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SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-12-23, 00:48:
Did some Voodoo benchmarking today to see what i'd get on my upcoming 166mhz Voodoo build. Granted I only have a P120 OC'd to 13 […]
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Did some Voodoo benchmarking today to see what i'd get on my upcoming 166mhz Voodoo build. Granted I only have a P120 OC'd to 133 on hands but, close enough I guess.

P133 with Voodoo. GLQuake 640x480:
27FPS

P133 with Voodoo 2. GLQuake 640x480:
40FPS.

Well shit, guess this is why people don't build much with Voodoo 1s anymore. Wonder if a 6mb Voodoo would be faster?

Here are the results with a 16MB Voodoo Banshee which may be of interest to you:
GL Quake @ 133Mhz w/64MB EDO:
DEMO1 = 52.3 FPS
DEMO2 = 53.4 FPS
DEMO3 = 48.7 FPS

And the results with a Xeon3230 @ 2.66Ghz 512MB RAM with a Voodoo 2:
DEMO1 = 73.4 FPS
DEMO2 = 71.2 FPS
DEMO3 = 70.7 FPS

Reply 17606 of 27057, by SodaSuccubus

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Shagittarius wrote on 2020-12-23, 02:38:
Here are the results with a 16MB Voodoo Banshee which may be of interest to you: GL Quake @ 133Mhz w/64MB EDO: DEMO1 = 52.3 FPS […]
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SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-12-23, 00:48:
Did some Voodoo benchmarking today to see what i'd get on my upcoming 166mhz Voodoo build. Granted I only have a P120 OC'd to 13 […]
Show full quote

Did some Voodoo benchmarking today to see what i'd get on my upcoming 166mhz Voodoo build. Granted I only have a P120 OC'd to 133 on hands but, close enough I guess.

P133 with Voodoo. GLQuake 640x480:
27FPS

P133 with Voodoo 2. GLQuake 640x480:
40FPS.

Well shit, guess this is why people don't build much with Voodoo 1s anymore. Wonder if a 6mb Voodoo would be faster?

Here are the results with a 16MB Voodoo Banshee which may be of interest to you:
GL Quake @ 133Mhz w/64MB EDO:
DEMO1 = 52.3 FPS
DEMO2 = 53.4 FPS
DEMO3 = 48.7 FPS

And the results with a Xeon3230 @ 2.66Ghz 512MB RAM with a Voodoo 2:
DEMO1 = 73.4 FPS
DEMO2 = 71.2 FPS
DEMO3 = 70.7 FPS

I did my tests on Demo2. Thanks for your results 😁 Glad to see the banshee doing some work there!

I can't decide weather to break my 1996-1997 accuracy and just use a Voodoo 2 for the better frames and video quality. Or to grab a 6MB Voodoo 1 for the uniqueness and period correctness.

Reply 17607 of 27057, by creepingnet

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debs3759 wrote on 2020-12-23, 01:37:
creepingnet wrote on 2020-12-23, 01:20:

Still practically a luggable but IIRC (I downloaded all of NEC's FTP)

What is their ftp address? I tried ftp.nec.com but couldn't connect, so unsure whether that was right

nm, found it on archive.org software archive.

That's where I found it at. I'm slowly uploading the files organized by model for my site so its a lot easier to get them.

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 17608 of 27057, by PD2JK

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Nice job Xicor. Thumbs up.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 17609 of 27057, by bjwil1991

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Did more work on the P54VL-PCI board: bath time with vinegar and 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol and a bit of change, but needs rust removal on the bottom. I plugged it in to see what would happen and it shows -- -- on the PC POST card with all voltage present. So my guess is the QFP chips and the bottom of the board need a reflow.

Getting somewhere.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 17610 of 27057, by sf78

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bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-12-23, 09:29:

I plugged it in to see what would happen and it shows -- -- on the PC POST card with all voltage present. So my guess is the QFP chips and the bottom of the board need a reflow.

Maybe not, POST cards indicate -- -- or 00 00 if the memory configuration is wrong or lacking.

Reply 17611 of 27057, by LewisRaz

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sf78 wrote on 2020-12-23, 12:38:
bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-12-23, 09:29:

I plugged it in to see what would happen and it shows -- -- on the PC POST card with all voltage present. So my guess is the QFP chips and the bottom of the board need a reflow.

Maybe not, POST cards indicate -- -- or 00 00 if the memory configuration is wrong or lacking.

I thought -- -- or 0000 meant something more serious

I have been trying to repair a 386 board that gives ---- or sometimes 00-- and the IRDY light doesnt light up. Had given up hope on it.

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Reply 17612 of 27057, by creepingnet

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Fixed the charge/power board on the 40EC so it charges batteries again, next up is to get it a new battery. Turns out some wire going from the second "-" terminal on the primary battery side was burned up and broken off (probably from overcharging the battery and the battery trying to shove 10+ Volts of power through what should only be putting out 7.2vdc). That said, the battery my Versa M/75 and P/75 have been using works well and I think I found the place that still makes and sells them for around $55 apiece - so worth it - so before too long, this Versa too will be truly portable.

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Also have been doing some diagnostics and repair to the original motherboard and charging board and might be onto something - first I noticed that a cap on the working charge board is replaced with a generic non-smd style can electrolytic (the others are a lot like the ones I see Adrian frequently replacing on his Digital Basement channel on old macs). I also found one of the tiny SMD caps might be bad too....so might be some time in the future I"m going to spend troubleshooting and diagnosing those. Somewhere between here and there I might want to get another CPU board (V/50, V/75, 40 or 50E boards work I think that at the original Ultralite boards) and start really digging deep. I have a feeling in 20201 I'll be finding myself an Oscilloscope.

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Last edited by Stiletto on 2020-12-23, 19:40. Edited 1 time in total.

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 17613 of 27057, by sf78

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LewisRaz wrote on 2020-12-23, 13:32:

I thought -- -- or 0000 meant something more serious

I have been trying to repair a 386 board that gives ---- or sometimes 00-- and the IRDY light doesnt light up. Had given up hope on it.

It could, there are many reasons for it, power failure on the board is one of them. I had a working P54C board that gave -- -- only because I accidentally put the RAM chips in the wrong row. Diagnostic cards are a bit vague and don't usually give the exact right code, but rather a crude estimation at what point the booting operation fails. You could be stuck with figuring out if the power failure is a capacitor problem, fuse, broken trace etc. The only way to narrow it down is to use a multimeter.

Reply 17614 of 27057, by bakemono

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Tried to use CPU northbridge throttling on an Athlon II X2.

On dual power plane boards the NB voltage can remain fixed (ie. 1.175V) while the CPU voltage can potentially go much lower than that when throttling. On single plane boards they are tied together, and if you lower the voltage too much (for that sweet electricity savings) the NB is likely to start screwing up first, leading to video driver crashes or something. The BKDG describes an option to throttle the NB to half speed which seems like it should work on this CPU. I thought that would let me lower the voltage even more. But it doesn't work! K10stat is supposed to support this, but the program doesn't work at all on this computer. Trying to set bit 22 in a p-state control register using CrystalCPUID MSR editor had no effect, I'm guessing because it has to be set on both cores. So then I hacked phenommsrtweaker so it would set bit 22 in the lower p-states. That got bit 22 to read back as 1 in $C0010070 (control register), but never in $C0010071 (status register). I tried making the CPU speed less than double the NB, and even setting the HT speed to 800MHz. Also checked the disable bit $C001001F and it was clear. No dice.

again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad

Reply 17615 of 27057, by Skyscraper

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I built a fast year 2001 system that I will use in a future project.

Ths system consists of

Asus A7V266-E motherboard (KT266A September 2001)
Palomino Athlon 1800+ @1800 MHz (October 2001)
Geforce 3 Ti 500 (October 2001)
Era correct memory, storage and case.
A somewhat newer Seasonic PSU from 2005 (because it diddn't need a recap...)

I was first using a Palomino 1900+ (November 2001) overclocked to 1800 MHz but it's 12x multiplier and the resulting 150MHz FSB was not optimal. The 1800+ with it's 11.5x multiplier is at least a little bit better but I might replace it with a 1700+ running at 11*164 MHz if I find a suitable one (Or perhaps I will unlock the 1800+).

The Palomino Athlons are hot bastards, especially the ones from the first batch (AGKGA) manufactured during the summer 2001 and these will often not overclock beyond 1700 MHz without watercooling. The second batch (AGNGA) that hit the market with the 1900+ could usually do 1800 MHz with air cooling and 1.85V - 1.9V. Later batches made in Q1 2002 like the AGOIA first used for the Palomino 2100+ could often do 1800 MHz at stock voltage and diddn't run as hot.

My 1800+ is a hot running one and it needs 1.85V for full stability at 1800 MHz. The cooler I'm using is a Zalman CNPS7500 AlCu, it's not nearly good enough and the CPU hoovers around 60C but it will have to do for now.

PC Magazine tested some "Ultimate PCs" with Radeon 8500 or GF3 ti500 and P4 2.0 or Athlon XP 1800+/1900+ in the issue released the 6th December 2001. The best performing computer scored 7716 points in 3dmark 2001.

My ultimate year 2001-system scores somehat better than the ones in PC Magazine, perhaps not very surprising as my system is overclocked.

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New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 17616 of 27057, by radiounix

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I spent much of my evening fighting with a Kodak Diconix 180si travel inkjet hooked up to my Tandy 8088 laptop. Cute little printer, but it only really works right with bitmap output in Windows 3.1 unless you're okay with output that doesn't fill the page. And that's not okay for a Christmas Banner and Christmas cards! So now I'm in the market for a new old printer. Something with 9 pins, definitely Epson, something that will just work with basically every DOS computer program and can talk Epson MX and caveman hieroglyphics as needed.

Re the comment that 8088 laptops did not exist, only luggables, not so. My machine is a horrifying 14 LBs and has a carrying handle so you can tote it like a briefcase. That's Tandy, cheap and simple was the game . It still basically is a laptop -- I can confirm it can be used on battery power sitting on a lap -- just not for too long, the heft starts to cut off leg circulation!

Around the same time NEC had a diskless 4LB UltraLite and Zenith had a 6LB Minisport that used 2 inch diskettes. By 1990 you could buy a truly practical Compaq LTE 8086 or Toshiba 1000LE with a backlit display and built in hard disk in a slick 6 LB modern clamshell form factor. Modernity! If you wanted a totable monster, you could still have it -- just had to step up to VGA and a 386.

Reply 17617 of 27057, by Robin4

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Today i have set up my soldering table / space.

Desoldered the old barrel batterys from my motherboards
Repaired a 286 board with a new keyboard connector. also with a deoxit d5 threatment.

Yesterday i installed a new workbench light.

Now iam trying to trouble shoot my motherboards. Find bios solutions, trying to install VRMs on 486 motherboard that have space for it and hope to get them working so 3.3 volt would be available as well.

~ At least it can do black and white~

Reply 17618 of 27057, by ODwilly

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Buildin a free kid's pc. 8gb dr2 800mh with a phenom ii 965 with a 750ti.

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 17619 of 27057, by ragefury32

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Did honorable screwdriver combat against this TECO TR3230F/Relisys RWT205CE, which is a “legacy-free” thin client based on the 200MHz SiS550 SoC (which itself is derived from the Rise mP6) - tried to get a Yamaha YMF724 or a Crystal 4630 to work with it.
Ultimately fruitless.

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What’s good about it?

a) The SiS550 is kinda rare and performs somewhat well against a 200MHz Pentium MMX.
b) Uses PC100/133 SDRAM
c) Low power usage (about 4w on tap, which compares well to the 6w used by my Wyse 5070 thin client)
d) Fairly competent 2D core (SiS301, or the 2D base of the SiS315 Mirage series) - the SiS UniVGA drivers for Win98 can be modified to work with it.

And bad?

a) AC97 only with an ADI AD1881 codec
b) No support for DMA or bus mastering in LPC or ISA
(no old school Soundblaster support for you)
c) Seemingly no support for the same in PCI (so the YMF 7 series and Solo-1 cards won’t work)
d) No publicly available datasheet with register file info for it, so it’s not like you can bitbang it to work like with a Trident 4Dwave legacy core.

Who would find something that performs like a Pentium 233MMX with no legacy support to be useful? At least the Via C3s with the 686C/8231 southbridge or a K6 embedded with a SiS Chipset would happily work with the YMFs or the Solo-1s, and the slower NatSemi Geodes will have SB emulation baked into its BIOS via some SMI (system management interface) state machine. What is this good for, really?

Eh, if you find one, strip it if its useful components and put it back into the recycling bin. It's not really worth your while.

Last edited by ragefury32 on 2020-12-26, 23:11. Edited 2 times in total.