clueless1 wrote on 2020-12-26, 22:16:

edit: adding to my post above only after I'm confident I didn't seriously hurt myself

24 hours ago I took a major fall down the stairs to the basement with my retro PC in my arms. Believe it or not, the first thought through my head as I was falling was "Don't let the PC get hurt!". I ended up apparently bruising a kidney and ribs, but no damage to my DOS PC. I cradled it like a baby while my butt and left side of my back took the full brunt of my weight plus the weight of the Packard Bell. I thought I might've cracked a rib, but 24 hours later, it feels like only a deep bruise to muscle tissue. Still hurts like hell, especially sneezes, hiccups, and bending forward or backward. But much better than last night. And the reason for the trip down the stairs was I got a new air compressor for Christmas, which I'd set up in the basement, and was taking my baby down to blow all the hard-to-reach dust out. Next time, I'll wear proper tennis shoes rather than slippers (pun intended).

Glad you are ok! Pretty daring to move heavy stuff down the stairs with slippers on.. those things should only ever be used in the bathroom.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-12-28, 08:01:

ElBrunzy wrote on 2020-12-28, 07:52:

I hate those socket board there they put 2 16 bit isa board that will get in the way of the cpu heat sink !

I doubt there will be an issue at all. My 60 or so 16-bit isa cards finish at the end of the slots.

SoundBlaster 16 cards are longer than ISA slots. AWE32 cards are way longer than that, so that may have issues.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-28, 15:37:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-12-28, 08:01:

ElBrunzy wrote on 2020-12-28, 07:52:

I hate those socket board there they put 2 16 bit isa board that will get in the way of the cpu heat sink !

I doubt there will be an issue at all. My 60 or so 16-bit isa cards finish at the end of the slots.

SoundBlaster 16 cards are longer than ISA slots. AWE32 cards are way longer than that, so that may have issues.

You are right. My point wae shere are a godzillion 16-bit isa cards that don't.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-12-28, 16:47:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-28, 15:37:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-12-28, 08:01:

I doubt there will be an issue at all. My 60 or so 16-bit isa cards finish at the end of the slots.

SoundBlaster 16 cards are longer than ISA slots. AWE32 cards are way longer than that, so that may have issues.

You are right. My point wae shere are a godzillion 16-bit isa cards that don't.

I don't think it's that much of a problem for this board. It has 4 PCI slots and on-board IDE controller, so using both vesa slots is probably avoidable.

Attempt to improve Commate S7AX 3V3 power supply be able to handle Voodoo 3 3000 AGP without excessive thermal load. This board uses circuit board as heat sink and it color has already shifted darker. I put up-side (or wrong-side) heat sink for 3V3 FET. The benefit was even less than I expected. Must look for a better heat sink for TO220 case and replace the FET as well (to 30N06L), this board has also TO220 mounting holes. Original FET is CEB603AL (TO263).

On a second thought the original linear reg should be replaced with more efficient switch mode power supply... or even a jumper cable from ATX-connectors 3.3V.

Today I disassembled & cleaned a Commodore VIC-20 keyboard. I've been meaning to do it for months, as some of the keys were not as responsive as they should be.

After cleaning the board & all key plungers with isopropyl alcohol and re-assembling + re-soldering Shift Lock key, the keyboard is now 100% perfect once again, with all keys fully responsive and working great.

This will come in extremely handy on NYE for a few rounds of BBC Mastermind with some "specialist subject" custom question packs. An unresponsive keyboard would have made the quiz hell, so I'm happy this was easily resolved.

Started pulling off components on a broken 386 board I have to see if there is hidden away damage. I was going to chuck it but on my last few attempts I did get the post card to show some numbers instead of ---- (0066 and 0099)
Going to take me a while to get the sockets off I think but I will keep nibbling away at it. It is a little confusing as I can now see all of where the battery leakage was and nothing appears to be broken. I have checked with multimeter all the traces I can follow.

Went digging again for that 8b SCSI adapter I had not quite given up on that someone wants an EPROM dump from. Didn't find it, did get around to testing a big pile of ATAPI and SCSI optical drives. A couple were clearly in need of some lubrication, but only two downright failed to work (one even shorted the bus out...). Particularly happy to find a working Toshiba low-profile SCSI CD-Rom drive for in my Sun SparcStation 20 - although that's one of the drives in need of cleaning. Big surprise: an ATAPI LS-120 drive missing front plate that had failed to work in a Win98 system happily did what it was supposed to in my Linux test system. Need to check if it also behaves as well with native media, but it's a fully working floppy drive at least 😀

Skyscraper wrote on 2020-12-24, 01:29:

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

XP1800+ 1800 2-2-2-5 1T ti500 260 580 3dmark2001 full spec.JPG

That is very cool.
Got an ultimate 2000 system put together!
Wanna compare benchmarks? =)
Mine is not overclocked tho.

I tried if my PCChips M919 can do what my M912 is surely capable of, but it just didn't want to run at 180MHz with two of the Am5x86-133s I've already tested at that speed. And now I realized that I forgot to jumper the multiplier back to 3x so who knows. I'll give it another try. Plus I made a few 256/512MB CF cards bootable with DOS 5 and 6.22. For those I used Socket7 to be able to run Partition Magic which I didn't even need then. Weh.
NP, I could watch more demos on a K5-166+@200+.

Does anyone know why I couldn't ever start pqmagic on older systems btw? And the same question goes for Adlib Tracker 2 and its player too...

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-30, 13:34:

Does anyone know why I couldn't ever start pqmagic on older systems btw? And the same question goes for Adlib Tracker 2 and its player too...

Which version? How old the system is? What error it sent?
For starters, PQMagic and some trackers will not run in anything older that 386, as them use DOS extenders to work.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2020-12-30, 15:43:

Which version? How old the system is? What error it sent?
For starters, PQMagic and some trackers will not run in anything older that 386, as them use DOS extenders to work.

At the moment I can only answer that it died without any error, just switched to graph mode, filled the background with teal pattern then got stuck there, forever. And it did so on any 386 or 486 I've ever tried on. But it readily starts on socket 7 or newer. Ummm, I have no idea about socket 4, for example.

Messed around with my Debian Linux VM to get my retro Pentium MMX with Windows 98 be able to bring up a dial-up connection to the internet. After a lot of head scratching and some helpful friends i can now dial in @33600baud and enjoy the interent at those speeds.

For hardware, i have usb-rs232 adapter with nullmodem adapter attached. Everything else is in software of VM. (tcpser, pppd, etc)

Next step would be to get something like this running in the vm: https://remino.net/retrosurfing/

I'm missing in my retro corner proper MT32 playback box. While I'm still looking for real hardware for affordable price 2 things pushed me to take intermediate step...
1. I got Raspberry Pi 4
2. My local telco set top pox became obsolete

So few electronic detail orders later this initial MT32-Pi test setup became reality:

That Motorola TV box has nice black translucent plastic faceplate. Idea is to put behind it bright 20x2 LCD screen.
I also need to add to my setup proper I2C audio DAC module since default Pi PWM audio is really low quality.

My ultimate goal is eventually have dual boot solution - fast booting MT32 emulation box by default and then general purpose Raspbian mini PC. I need to figure out first how to do that because baremetal framework used by MT32-Pi might not allow it on same SD card.

I've been playing Daikatana the last couple of days. It is fun, kind of. That is, until the first sidekick appears. Anyway, the game is not very good, but it's not that bad. I patched it to version 1.2 though, because having to find items that enable saving is a no-go in this age for me.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-30, 21:32:

I've been playing Daikatana the last couple of days. It is fun, kind of. That is, until the first sidekick appears. Anyway, the game is not very good, but it's not that bad. I patched it to version 1.2 though, because having to find items that enable saving is a no-go in this age for me.

I think their are some mods that fix most of the suckiness.

kolderman wrote on 2020-12-30, 22:19:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-30, 21:32:

I've been playing Daikatana the last couple of days. It is fun, kind of. That is, until the first sidekick appears. Anyway, the game is not very good, but it's not that bad. I patched it to version 1.2 though, because having to find items that enable saving is a no-go in this age for me.

I think their are some mods that fix most of the suckiness.

Correct, it exists version 1.3 patch, however that's community-made, and it seems to be in beta status (it brings interesting things though, like wide-screen and Linux/OSX support). Also, I prefer to play the game in all its original and official "glory". I do have the patch though, for applying it and trying it later.

Went for a 180km ride on my 1976 Honda CB550 Super Sport..

alvaro84 wrote on 2020-12-30, 16:40:

At the moment I can only answer that it died without any error, just switched to graph mode, filled the background with teal pattern then got stuck there, forever. And it did so on any 386 or 486 I've ever tried on. But it readily starts on socket 7 or newer. Ummm, I have no idea about socket 4, for example.

You may want to try older versions of PQmagic, like 5 or 4. This error feels like the application is querying the disk controller for something which isn't supported in older int13 bioses. PQMagic doesn't have direct access code or overlays like Ontrack or EZDisk, so it uses BIOS calls to access disks. Newer versions 7 and 8 eliminate workaround codepaths for some BIOS nuisances like old CHS partition quirks and/or the alternative "Large" mode access (EDD Phoenix/Compaq/IBM for 512MB+ disk drives). So if these quirks are present these newer versions may choke on them.

This problem doesn't exist in Socket7 mobos as these BIOSes have better worked and refined INT13H extensions, and generally them support LBA too. PQmagic 7 and 8 were written with LBA mind and support/workaround it by default.

The other day I finally got my 286 back. I decided to open her up to assess the damage.

First off, holy hell this thing is heavy. 35? 40 pounds?

I went in to assess barrel battery damage. What did I find?

An externally connected lithium battery. It was disconnected. Thanks, AST.