I hate bent pins. This DX4ODP100 was utterly mashed up. Managed to get almost everything reasonably straight when this corner pin S17, ADS, broke 🙁

Might be able to sort of fix it, but at best this will now be a fragile CPU to gingerly lower into a socket once and keep it there :'(

The picture is a little blurry, but it looks like there's still quite a bit of metal there to solder in a new pin. Luckily, corner pins like that are the easiest to solder since you can hold your iron off to the sides without touching other pins.

Dual processor board for Proliant 1500,
Investigated the dipswitch and BF0 and BF1 and, sw 1 for BF0 and sw 2 for BF1, which can run either 100, 133, 166 and 200 using unlocked Pentium 200 processor.

Setting SW 1 or SW 2 "on" pulls low.

Cheers,

Gave my newly build Commodore64 SixtyClone-250466 "Black Bessy" a test for a couple of hours. Tested settings in the ARMSID, and chose filthers 3 notch down. After that I played some Batman the movie, Giana Sisters, Golden AXE, Super Cycle and Winther Games.

I also had to get rid of the RF Modulator replacement, and used an original NOS one that I initially bought for the project. I am blown away by how good the image quality is. This is like 1986 all over again, because the build is a clone of the 1986 model that Commodore produced. Next step is to solder in the cartridge port shield, install some casemod that I have in mind (internally non destructive to the case) and add a silent fan to give the VIC-II and the 5volt regulator some better cooling. I also have to source more aftermarket replacement parts, like S-Ram upgrade and some ESR protection to the CIA chips. I also had to use a CIA from an Amiga500, because one of the C64 version was completely dead, to the point were DeadTest gave no error, yet brought the entire system down in a seriously big way. Strange....

Oh well... My homebuild and completely new Commodore64 is a reality now. I am extremely pleased with it. And proud that I was able to actually build a functioning computer from scratch. All solderwork was done well and in one go. I think that it was done well, because I took my time to do it right. I did not make any solder bridges and electrical contact is perfect on all soldering.

Reconfigured the compaq deskpro 4/33i for 386DX 33 mode via dip switches and replaced 486 with 386DX and is running doom for testing. In 386 mode does use 395DX cache controller as zero wait state 16K.

Also moved a jumper to turn off the onboard audio chip.

Have to decide which sound card for it. DOS only, ESS1xxx or Aztech sound card which is good?

Cheers,

wiretap wrote on 2021-03-18, 14:51:

The picture is a little blurry, but it looks like there's still quite a bit of metal there to solder in a new pin. Luckily, corner pins like that are the easiest to solder since you can hold your iron off to the sides without touching other pins.

Yes, that's why I'm optimistic I can fix it. Ideally I'd use an interposer so I can keep the dodgy connection in the same socket all the time. Does however somewhat defeat the purpose of the ODP to use an interposer after all 😉

My floppy drive arrived, so it has been maintainance day for my 2005 time machine project, the floppy drive is installed and i finally managed to find a pinout for the USB ports of the case so i could finally hook them up to the motherboard. For those curious the USB 2.0 port header on your motherboard will have a gap in the left bottom, from that angle the top row is the 5V, the row above the gap is the ground. That should help you hook it up properly if you do not have it as a single connector in your case.

I have also been playing with TCP Optimizer a bit in XP, and now i can finally get maximum speeds on the rig! To do this i put it on 100mbps mode, and then clicked custom. There is a value that you see increase as you slide it, should be at the left top. I changed that to 7777777 (7 7's) and rebooted. Now i can finally enjoy my full 30mb/s (250mbit) downloads on the retro machine, and i am no longer capped to the default 3mb/s or as i previously had it tweaked 9mb/s.

x0zm_ wrote on 2021-03-18, 08:28:

I went ahead and set up XP Pro SP2 without issues, installed all the drivers and went back to the good ol' days of community modded ForceWare drivers. I figured it's right in the perfect hardware time period to play with them once again. After tossing up between DriverHeaven Zer0point, Omega and NGO, I settled on the DH drivers for now.

I have been playing a lot with the modded drivers for XP that i could find as well, so i will share a few of my experiences on my 6800GT
- Latest Omega, Seems nice at first but avoid it. The moment you plug a VGA cable into it instead of a DVI cable it implodes.
- Latest NGO, seemed fine but i didn't notice anything to special.
- Zeropoint, Haven't tried it yet but its quite a bit older than the others so i also did not see much reason to try it.
- DNA-Force latest, seemed promising contains a fun tweak utility to. But turned out to have serious texture problems in some games like Wolvenstein.
- DNA-Force 3.8.163, this one gives me really good gaming performance especially since they let you pick what kind of performance mode you like. So definately a great gaming driver, its stable to, but i did notice that firefox doesn't use GPU acceleration on this one, making my browsing experience very choppy and slow. Not sure if thats a tweaked driver bug or the fact the driver is just to old for firefox to really use it. This also is debloated, so no NView or Background services.
- XTreme-G 191.07, this one is pretty basic to similar to NGO's driver. Just a period correct driver with some tweaked settings. Firefox is smooth here, games run great although not as great as the performance mode on the DNA-Force driver, great stability so far, and new enough to ship with cuda and physx in case you ever want to use it on a card that supports it. Because its based on 191.07 this driver is substantially newer than the other modded drivers i have found so far and i think this alone fixed my Firefox issue. Picky games like Wolvenstein with the texture bug, or Half-Life 2's Retail version which also had texture bugs on the latest nvidia driver run fine here. Newer games like Unreal Tournament 3 run great to! So all in all its a great mix of performance, stability and compatibility.

So my current winner is XTreme-G 191.07, but if anyone knows other tweaked drivers that are even better than the ones i listed i'd be happy to try them. I absolutely loved modded drivers especially since it was such a hot thing in this period. And my XP install mostly runs off modified drivers. I modified the VIA Chipset driver for compatibility with my T5710 in 98 despite being newer than the driver it supports and also to include the audio driver rather than having to download it seperately (Only if detected). Got the PAX-NewYear driver for the Audigy which gives you the Audigy 2 ZS / Audigy 4 software suite (Also works on the Soundblaster Live for those interested) and then the mentioned GPU driver.

Saw a cheap Promise SuperTrak SX6000 and got an idea.

2x WD SiliconDrive II 1GB RAID0 + 2x Kingston 16GB RAID0. Windows 2000 boots pretty fast, but not as fast like some post-modern SSD.
Maybe I'll get two 16GB CF cards more, and configure RAID5 so the i960 and RAM will get some work to do. 😉

PD2JK wrote on 2021-03-19, 05:46:

Saw a cheap Promsie SuperTrak SX6000 and got an idea.

2x WD SiliconDrive II 1GB RAID0 + 2x Kingston 16GB RAID0. Windows 2000 boots pretty fast, but not as fast like some post-modern SSD.
Maybe I'll get two 16GB CF cards more, and configure RAID5 so the i960 and RAM will get some work to do. 😉

a post modern SSD wouldn't be fast, it would spend all its time arguing in an unprovable and ever shifting way about relative power imbalances and relationships between parts of the stored data therefore accessing data, or 'socially conditioned data discourse' as it would have it, must not happen at any speed which disadvantages other data, or something like that!

sorry...! 😀

and back to reality - I like what you've done, this is a very neat approach, I'd expect your windows 2000 session to be pretty fast in practical day to day use

Oops, I meant pre-modern / pre-contemporary, something like that. 😜 Yeah access times are great, below 1ms anyway. 😀

gerry wrote on 2021-03-19, 08:33:

a post modern SSD wouldn't be fast, it would spend all its time arguing in an unprovable and ever shifting way about relative po […]
Show full quote

PD2JK wrote on 2021-03-19, 05:46:

Saw a cheap Promsie SuperTrak SX6000 and got an idea.

2x WD SiliconDrive II 1GB RAID0 + 2x Kingston 16GB RAID0. Windows 2000 boots pretty fast, but not as fast like some post-modern SSD.
Maybe I'll get two 16GB CF cards more, and configure RAID5 so the i960 and RAM will get some work to do. 😉

a post modern SSD wouldn't be fast, it would spend all its time arguing in an unprovable and ever shifting way about relative power imbalances and relationships between parts of the stored data therefore accessing data, or 'socially conditioned data discourse' as it would have it, must not happen at any speed which disadvantages other data, or something like that!

sorry...! 😀

and back to reality - I like what you've done, this is a very neat approach, I'd expect your windows 2000 session to be pretty fast in practical day to day use

In other words.... Never faster than the rest of the system can keep up? 😀

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-19, 09:35:

gerry wrote on 2021-03-19, 08:33:

a post modern SSD wouldn't be fast, it would spend all its time arguing in an unprovable and ever shifting way about relative po […]
Show full quote

PD2JK wrote on 2021-03-19, 05:46:

Saw a cheap Promsie SuperTrak SX6000 and got an idea.

2x WD SiliconDrive II 1GB RAID0 + 2x Kingston 16GB RAID0. Windows 2000 boots pretty fast, but not as fast like some post-modern SSD.
Maybe I'll get two 16GB CF cards more, and configure RAID5 so the i960 and RAM will get some work to do. 😉

a post modern SSD wouldn't be fast, it would spend all its time arguing in an unprovable and ever shifting way about relative power imbalances and relationships between parts of the stored data therefore accessing data, or 'socially conditioned data discourse' as it would have it, must not happen at any speed which disadvantages other data, or something like that!

sorry...! 😀

and back to reality - I like what you've done, this is a very neat approach, I'd expect your windows 2000 session to be pretty fast in practical day to day use

In other words.... Never faster than the rest of the system can keep up? 😀

Or never faster than the slowest part of its system. Classic bottleneck scenario.

I bought a spares and repair Dell XPS 1530 laptop without a HDD. It has a t8100 2.1GHz CPU, 3GB of RAM and an 8600GT video card. I was hoping the Spares and Repairs just related to it not coming with a HDD but it didn't power up at all when I got it.

I took it to bits right down to the chassis and couldn't see anything funky so put a new CMOS battery in (you need to remove EVERYTHING to get to it, unhelpfully) and still no joy. I treated it to new thermal paste whilst I was in there, and dug out a 120GB SSD for it.

I bought a new charger for it and now it boots up, yay!

I'm going to use it for a bit as an XP laptop and play some games and then drop Windows 7 on it to see if it is bearable as a "modern" laptop.

Shagittarius wrote on 2021-03-19, 16:15:

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-19, 09:35:

gerry wrote on 2021-03-19, 08:33:

a post modern SSD wouldn't be fast, it would spend all its time arguing in an unprovable and ever shifting way about relative power imbalances and relationships between parts of the stored data therefore accessing data, or 'socially conditioned data discourse' as it would have it, must not happen at any speed which disadvantages other data, or something like that!

sorry...! 😀

and back to reality - I like what you've done, this is a very neat approach, I'd expect your windows 2000 session to be pretty fast in practical day to day use

In other words.... Never faster than the rest of the system can keep up? 😀

Or never faster than the slowest part of its system. Classic bottleneck scenario.

True indeed.... 😀

Soldered in the cartridge connector bracket on Black Bessy, and signed my work. Love the result.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-03-18, 02:29:

Man, I was hoping for an ES688F and a YMF-262M. On the plus side, I have an EXP CD-ROM + SoundNote that I can install on the system.

The P/75 has that exact setup I believe. It has OPL3 support that much I do know. Surprisingly loud for a single speaker output laptop from 1995.

Whoah, how well does that card work? Does that have OPL? I'm looking to slap some OPL compliant cards in my V/50 and 40EC, maybe even the M/75 if it has Adlib support. I've been hanging out in the PCMCIA Sound Card Megathread a lot since I got the 40EC in 2019. Theres a part of me though that's tempted to make my own PCMCIA SB16 compatible card though since I have skills to do that sort of stuff.

The EXP CD-ROM multimedia kit (plus SoundNote) has an ESS AudioDrive ES688P integrated and only works when the CD drive is connected to the card and possibly requires an external speaker on the card as well.

Haven't tested the sound portion since my Austin and AMS laptops both have an ES688F + YMF-262M either integrated or as an option card, but I'll test it on my ThinkPad 380D and see how it performs with it.

I want to start doing some socket 7 CPU testing. Tried starting but didn't get very far 🙁

Made a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNC_-ckQREw

Today I received a small lot of goodies, containing - along other thing s- a Voodoo1 card 4MB.(Innovision 3DX5000). Curiously ,I could not get it to work properly with S3 Virge/DX, it was a headscratcher but replacing the S3 with ATI Mach64 card did the trick....I wonder why the Voodoo didnt like the S3 Virge/DX...