ODwilly wrote:

I dumped a trunk full of SUN microsystsems stuff off at Goodwill and a 17 inch ViewSonic value series crt. Never going to get used and take up far to much space. Although the 10k scsi and dual CPU sparq station was pretty neat

I hope that goodwill has an IT department, otherwise it will probably all be recycled. Most goodwills cant sell old computers for legal reasons.

It was all rusted and moldy anyway and taking up all the space in my car. Only have 1/2 a bedroom for storage at. Also scrapped a P2 compaq and a dimension 4100

Yesterday my plan was to build my Year 2000 system with a Thunderbird 1200 and an AMD 760 chipset motherboard.

My plan was foiled by the system I found in the case I was going to use. It's a late 1998 system built by a local computer store. The system had an early revison (1.02) Asus P2B motherboard, a PII 450, 2x 128MB memory, a Sound Blaster 16 and a Matrox video card, all with matching numbered stickers. My plan was changed, over the next week I'm building the optimal 1998 system. The Socket A tinkering and the assembling of the Year 2000 system are on hold for a little while. 😁

My goal is to find a PII 400 that will run at 4x133 MHz as this was the fastest speed you could achieve during 1998 without using sub zero cooling to push a PII 450 or Celeron 300A to 600 MHz. The first revisions of the Asus P2B have a clock generator with only 8 settings that uses the correct PCI divider at 133 MHz. On later revisions you need to do a hardware mod to use the 1/4 PCI divider at 133 MHz as they use a different clock generator with 16 settings and the correct setting isn't accessable with the 3 FSB jumpers. On the last revisions of the P2B Asus added a forth jumper for setting the FSB and thus letting the user access the clock generators all settings making the mod unnecessary.

When finding the best CPU for the optimal year 1998 build you need some... well CPUs!

I did a quick search in some of my boxes and found 8 PII 400, I also found 4 PII 350, 3 PII 450, 3 PII 333, 3 Celeron 333 and a Celeron 300A. Also pictured is a Coppermine 700 which somehow infiltrated the picture with Slot 1 CPUs from 1998. If I can't get a PII 400 to be 100% stable at 533MHz I think a PII 350 at 466MHz will be the best bet with the PII 450 at 504MHz as the third best option. If you only play Quake II I think a Celeron 300A at 504MHz or Celeron 333 at 515MHz would be really competitive but overall I think a Pentium II will be faster.

Some Slot 1 CPUs released in 1998.

Edit

I just found two more Celeron 300A and yet another Celeron 333 😀

/Edit

Binge-watched all six hours of the "Triumph of the Nerds" and "Nerds 2.0.1" PBS documentaries from the mid-90s, then followed that up reading an old Q&A from the host of "Triumph of the Nerds" made just after that documentary first aired. It was interesting seeing the speculation of where computers are going and how it compared to what really happened. I had a chuckle with one Q&A answer where he said "Macs will never be PC compatible", and right away I looked across the room at my 2009 Mac Mini with an Intel processor running Windows 10. 🤣

Booted up a Powermac 4400 with System 7.5.3; it already has 8.1 on there, but for some reason the network card is not working. Going to try a new hard drive with other Mac OS versions, or BSD Unix to see if the hardware is working.

It's going to be used as an old Mac gaming box, dual booting to BeOS PPC(!).

In Mac circles it isn't highly thought of, as it's very PC like hardware, and is the only model with a floppy drive on the left hand side. However, it's reasonably fast (200MHz 604e), expandable to 160MB RAM, and crucially uses IDE disks instead of SCSI, so updating it isn't cripplingly expensive

I successfully replaced the HDD in my iMac G3 since the old 40GB had I/O errors with a 30GB Western Digital from a Dell Dimension 4550.

Going to install Mac OS 9.2, then 10.0.4, and 10.3 afterwards. Either that or Mint PPC.

Edit: Installed Mac OS 9.2.1 successfully, I might just zero the HDD and install either Mac OS X (10.0.4, then 10.3) or Mint PPC. for a $29.99 iMac G3 Graphite 600 edition, it's not bad at all, condition wise, it's seen better days, but it's 100% functional, minus the dead battery.

Went through a couple af PC World magazines from the years 1992/93. What a blast from the past. 😜

xplus93 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Uploaded some wallpapers from a Gateway 2000 system CD http://imgur.com/a/dW4Lf

Embrace the cringe.

I've been trying to find dell ones. Did they not make custom wallpapers before the XP era?

http://ex-vtc.gotdns.com/downloads/OEM_INFO/

Tons of good ones there

Spent 4 hours frying to troubleshoot a non posting tyan s1753. It would just boot and start blinking the power led.. I tried everything and after four hours it booted perfectly fine without the reset switch connected to its header. Case is an elan vital 10. No idea what the problem is but fuck this. I now remember why building PCs was a masochistic pleasure 20 years ago.

I was bored so I wanted to see if the Cyrix 5x86-100GP (from an unsealed but brand new Gainbery CPUMaximizer upgrade) I got from a recent haul worked, just to test it out. The thing was attached to a 5v socket adapter, with a rusted screw stuck in the heatsink that refused to budge, and an untouched warranty sticker on the side that would have to be ripped off. My 486's motherboard has native support for the 5x86 and I wanted to use it that way without the adapter. It took me a while to make up my mind, whether to keep a valuable item untouched, or free the CPU and use it like it was meant to be. In the end I decided towards the latter. I ripped off the sticker, pried out the screw leaving a scratch on the green heatsink in the process, and stuck it in my 486 machine.

I'm glad I did. It's a real monster; even at 75MHz it trades blows with a DX4-100. Plus, only just now did I learn you could adjust the multiplier with SetMul. So it's going to be staying there now, as it gives much more flexibility for a wider era of games, much more than the 486DX2-66. I'm glad to be able to take advantage of this rare and unique CPU.

Next step is to get it to 120MHz, of course. I tried with a bump to 3.6V, but DOS would crash right after starting up. I'll mess around more later.

appiah4 wrote:

Spent 4 hours frying to troubleshoot a non posting tyan s1753. It would just boot and start blinking the power led.. I tried everything and after four hours it booted perfectly fine without the reset switch connected to its header. Case is an elan vital 10. No idea what the problem is but fuck this. I now remember why building PCs was a masochistic pleasure 20 years ago.

Sounds like it's just a defective reset switch is all. I have a defective power switch in my Antec-Twelve-Hundred case since I got it used. I just connect up the reset switch as power instead. So that's probably all it is. Also a tip for troubleshooting.. always disconnect the front panel headers and operate the jumpers manually with a screwdriver, or at least it's what I do. I'm careful though. If you don't like that, stick a plug with two wires on it so you can tap em for power and another one to tap for reset, etc.

I put together a video about my iMac G3.

It's working out pretty well with the replacement drive I installed. Time to upgrade the RAM to 1GB, install an external DVD Writer (FireWire), and get a copy of Mac OS X Tiger for PPC, and maybe get an SSD for the system for faster boot up times (still launches up faster than my Windows PCs with the HDD).

Here are some pictures of it as well:

Did quite a bit today, catalogued some details about some motherboards that I had stored away in boxes and even managed to find a motherboard that I didn't even know I had.

Also tested out and set up a few systems from storage -

Tested out a Dell Optiplex GX1, Slot 1 Motherboard, Intel Pentium III 500MHz, 128MB RAM. At some point I'll get around to adding a Hard Drive, but it's tested out working fine and just needs a new CMOS battery.

Set up a PC with the following: Gigabyte GA-6BXE Slot 1 Motherboard, Intel Pentium III 650MHz, 320MB RAM, 40GB HDD. Added a PCI Sil 0680 RAID Card, PCI Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 & a PCI Intel Pro/100 Ethernet Card. Currently partitioned the HDD into 2 and installed Windows 98 SE, will install XP Pro at a later date - as it was running XP towards the end of it's original life.

As for the Motherboards in storage, I had no information about what they were so set about Googling and updating my catalogue. As such, I discovered they were these:

PC Chips M507, Socket 7 Motherboard, with AMD K6 III (was clocked at 333MHz, as it was most stable here), 128MB RAM & S3 Virge 2MB PCI Graphics Card (originally had a Voodoo 3 2000, which I've got stored in a box elsewhere). Wasn't able to test this out, as I didn't have an AT PSU to hand (would have meant dismantling another system), so will have to test this at a later date.

MSI MS-6330, Socket A Motherboard, with AMD Duron 800MHz. Tested with 128MB RAM and an AGP Voodoo 3 2000 and apart from a dead CMOS battery, all working ok.

FIC KB-6130-Z, Slot 1 Motherboard, with Intel Pentium III 450MHz. This was the motherboard I didn't even know I had and so I had no idea if it was working. But tested it out with 128MB RAM & same AGP Voodoo 3 2000 and like above, all fine except dead CMOS battery.

I finally made my way around to taking the back off of my KDS flatpanel 17" monitor and adjusting it. Turned out it's actually a rebranded Samsung tube with both focus and brightness adjustment knobs. Sadly I used a modern system for my adjustment pattern and forgot to reset the moire pattern in settings which resulted in less perfect results. Tomorrow I'm going to try again with it running a quake demo so hopefully I can nail down perfect focus and brightness.

Anybody out there have a BETTER method for adjusting monitors?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Anybody out there have a BETTER method for adjusting monitors?

Sure! Buy a new one that's already focused? *ducks*

Got 3 André LaMothe classic game programming books in the mail from a thrift seller and MS C/C++ 7.0 up and running. Started work brushing up on my DOS chops so I can hopefully get going on my own purist DOS game.

Which brings a question/request. Are you guys familiar with any good DOS based C (which would include interrupts) or MS C/C++ 7.0 books (maybe something I can find in PDF form, otherwise i'll check thrift sellers)? I need a refresher on certain topics like FAR heap pointers and a good reference for 286 era inline assembly and could really use documentation on using the CL compiler / MS segment executable linker.

Not sure if there are any other programmers around here?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I finally made my way around to taking the back off of my KDS flatpanel 17" monitor and adjusting it. Turned out it's actually a rebranded Samsung tube with both focus and brightness adjustment knobs. Sadly I used a modern system for my adjustment pattern and forgot to reset the moire pattern in settings which resulted in less perfect results. Tomorrow I'm going to try again with it running a quake demo so hopefully I can nail down perfect focus and brightness.

Anybody out there have a BETTER method for adjusting monitors?

Learn to use a test card.
Such as
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common … est_pattern.JPG
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/common … PAL_signals.png

Its the only right way to do it. I guess one could use a software tool such as power strip, but that will only get you so far.

A couple daya ago I worked on trying to get Audio working in Win98SE on my Toshiba P25-S509 laptop.

Stupid thing gives a unable to load driver error in Device Manager with both onboard and with an Audigy 2 ZS laptop pcmcia adapter.

Only thing I could find is maybe a corrupt Windows install or DirectX needed to be reinstalled.

Will work on it more when I get a chance. Probably try to install Win98SE from a usb stick since the DVD-RAM drive seems to be sort of wonky as it takes a decent amount of time to spin up and detect that there is a disc in the drive... Boots form it no problem though so not sure what is up with it.

cyclone3d wrote:

A couple daya ago I worked on trying to get Audio working in Win98SE on my Toshiba P25-S509 laptop. […]
Show full quote

A couple daya ago I worked on trying to get Audio working in Win98SE on my Toshiba P25-S509 laptop.

Stupid thing gives a unable to load driver error in Device Manager with both onboard and with an Audigy 2 ZS laptop pcmcia adapter.

Only thing I could find is maybe a corrupt Windows install or DirectX needed to be reinstalled.

Will work on it more when I get a chance. Probably try to install Win98SE from a usb stick since the DVD-RAM drive seems to be sort of wonky as it takes a decent amount of time to spin up and detect that there is a disc in the drive... Boots form it no problem though so not sure what is up with it.

Did you try installing DIrectX 9.0c on your laptop? My IBM ThinkPad R40 did the same thing with the MIDI driver (would freeze up when playing a MIDI file) and after I installed DirectX 9.0c on my laptop, it was working like there's no tomorrow. If all else fails, reinstall the drivers. I noticed the Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card is meant for Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP only, unless there are drivers available online for that, too. I need to install a better sound card than the one that's in my ThinkPad since the MIDI driver doesn't sound appealing to me at all.

Spent all my free time at work trying to figure out my build plans.. What's throwing a spanner in the plans is that I have no Voodoo 1.

What I currently have:

• P166MMX, 64MB, Matrox Mystique 220, Voodoo 2 (GPU too fast but can do Quake respectably, probably main PC for retrogaming)
• PIII-450, 256 MB, Voodoo 3 (CPU too slow)
• Celeron 1300, 512 MB, Radeon 8500 (GPU too fast)
• AthlonXP 1700, 1GB, Radeon 9800PRO (CPU too slow)

What I'm contemplating

• P166MMX, 64MB, Matrox Mystique (Pretty balanced, but no 3D accel makes it pretty boring overall)
• PIII-450, 256MB, i740, Voodoo 2 (Pretty balanced, main PC for retrogaming but V2 won't cut it for 1024x768..)
• Celeron 1300, 512MB, Voodoo 3 (Pretty well balanced or Voodoo 3 too slow?)
• AthlonXP 1700, 1GB, Radeon 8500 (I had this exact PC and loved it, though this PC would probably benefit a lot from a 9800PRO?)

Wouldn't mind your views on how to build these as my OCD mind is kind of going nuts with indecision 😀