Personal space! It's a thing!

Ugh, wrestling with an awful PCI SATA controller (SYBA SD-SATA3112-150R). I've never managed to get this to do what I want yet, and tonight was no exception - damned thing worked fine in my Via ApolloPro133A test system, but despite being recognized, assigned an IRQ and being able to access its BIOS, my BX system didn't manage to finish booting with this in the system. Almost suspect PCI version incompatibility, but if that were the case I'd be surprised that it would did work enough to enter its BIOS.

Anyway, I now have the most mismatched I/O I can recall running: an Intel X25E 64GB SLC SSD - connected to the BX's regular ATA-33 via a cheapo SATA-IDE (Marvell-based) converter. At least I know the disk won't be a bottleneck. For anything 😉

debs3759 wrote:

Personal space! It's a thing!

True that... I hate being viewed, as a display item or toy like that. (and this was second time this week)

Got an IBM Aptiva in the mail today. Pics here https://imgur.com/a/lBVYuDG

Bumped it up to 64MB RAM and put in a NIC. Replaced the MWave of course 😀

Listening to Ed Sheeran, Divide, on CD, using Cubic Player, on my 486 PC, that is built around the same motherboard as my first ever PC, but with significant upgrades.

s3freak wrote:

Listening to Ed Sheeran, Divide, on CD, using Cubic Player, on my 486 PC, that is built around the same motherboard as my first ever PC, but with significant upgrades.

The attachment Ed Sheeran copy.jpg is no longer available

Not sure what I am looking at (spectral analysis? or just random visualiser?), but it sure is pretty! 😎

As for me, I was playing with my recently acquired Tandon (AT plus Hercules): created new CF "disk" for it, set up the environment, added some games, experimented a bit with CGA emulation on Hercules, played a few games just for old times' sake. It was great!

Can you recognize all four?... You probably can, these are easy.

Damn... had built my MS-6168 board into its intended case, installed Win2k on the stupidly overkill SSD, gotten everything running smoothly but just as I wanted to get updates ready, the thing started rebooting madly. First suspicion was the PSU (235W CWT isn't exactly the best on earth), but behaviour unchanged on a known-good 250W FSP. Next I started suspecting both the caps I replaced and the others I didn't. But then I noticed that it actually told me it was shutting down before doing so. That sounded somewhat more controlled than expected with dead components. On a hunch I disconnected the power button: yep, problem solved. Looks like that button needs a little TLC 😮

After multiple delays due to various equipment failures I finally managed to upload my indepth overview and review of the HP Vectra VL400 Minitower I got while working for a local tax corp. If anyone wants some good morning light viewing the video is live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAT_PgiG3FE&t=47s

This video really served as a test for different camera angles and my new tripod. Learned alot, the next one should be better.

Yesterday, while getting ready to retire my HP DC7800 from daily usage, I've managed to transfer the Visual C++ 6.0 runtime installer to my Toshiba Tecra 720CDT laptop through the means of splitting the installer (which in whole is 1.72MB) to fit on two 1.44MB floppy disks by using HJSplit. A few months ago when I got every driver installed on that laptop, the Toshiba LED Indicator driver would trigger an "A required file, MFC42.DLL, was not found" error upon startup, online searching showed that in order to fix this error on Windows 95, the Visual C++ 6.0 runtime is needed. Once I got the runtime installed, the Toshiba LED Indicator tray icon would finally work.

For future reference, the Visual C++ 6.0 Runtime installer is "vc6redistsetup_enu.exe", a series of online searching has lead me to a working download link for this file.

Also, I got around to testing the Toshiba laptop's (Crystal CS4237) sound chipset for DOS gaming usage, after changing the IRQ from 9 to 5 (had to do this twice), I managed to get sound to work on a few of the DOS games I've thrown on it, although for some reason I get sound effects but not music in Doom, it's probably because the FM synthesizer is set to 318h for the I/O Address by default, maybe setting that to the usual 388h will fix it.

Not really done a lot of retro stuff over the past couple of weeks, as I've been busy fixing and upgrading stuff with my home network & audio system setups. Plus, still waiting on an RF modulator that I ordered to connect my XT to, for no other reason than it was cheap and why not try it.

I did receive 2 laptops for free today from a friend of the family. They're not retro though, simply "old" from towards the end of the Intel Core 2 era. I was given them for "parts" essentially and so I expected them both to be broken and figured I'd just strip out the HDD & RAM etc.

The laptops didn't come with power adapters so I scoured my collection of power adapters and luckily found matching power supplies for both laptops.

I decided to test them out and to my surprise both laptops are working fine, though both clearly need a clean reinstall of the OS (currently both running Windows 7, stuffed full of crap). 1 of them looks like it may have been dropped, with broken/missing plastic by screen and missing keys on the keyboard, whilst the other has the front plastic door of it's DVD drive missing. But other than those cosmetic issues, they're both working good and the batteries still have life in them.

Like I say, specs are not really retro:
Laptop 1 has Intel Celeron Dual-Core T3300 @ 2.0GHz, 2GB RAM
Laptop 2 has Intel Pentium Dual-Core T4400 @ 2.20GHz, 3GB RAM.

Both have crappy Intel Onboard Graphics, though I might be able to encourage at least 1 of them to suffice for some mid-late 2000s games (on low settings), as well as earlier games + DOSBOX for taking around to a friends house for some drunken LAN gaming. 🤣

A routine check on the caps in my oldest PSU; an original Macron MPT-400P from October 2001 - all good 😀

@PC Hoarder Patrol : no politics here 🤣

I finally got further with my Amiga ! The fdd is fixed, I added 1MB of chip RAM and it now have a 1GB hdd with workbench 2.1 on it.

Now I need new feets, new screws, a backspace and del key and then .. profit 😀

Well not quite yet actually : when booting, it sometimes throw a software error 8000 0003. I think it does this when the chip ram upgrade is installed. Maybe the connector needs a good cleanup ?

Also RGB output is oscillating between normal colors and blue tinted screen. But the composite is fine. Probably some left over damage after the caps leakage.
Oh and by the way, I still need to replace the audio caps, but I need more soldering tools

Finished upgrading my Pentium 4 Win98/XP Retro Gaming Machine to near perfection (maybe more RAM later on?, but the XP games I'm going to play on it, I doubt I need more than 1GB 😀 ). Check it out here: Pentium 4 Windows 98 SE/XP Retro Gaming Machine: My Second (and to Date Most Problematic) Retro Build

Thanks to @Deksor ( 😀 😀 ), made a placard 🤣

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

Thanks to @Deksor ( 😀 😀 ), made a placard 🤣

GamerGate-keep-politics-out-of-video-games-1b.jpg

https://media.giphy.com/media/1Z02vuppxP1Pa/giphy.gif

Tidied up my 15 kHz gaming cabinet. I didn't take a 'before' pic but it previously looked really ugly, with cables hanging out the front everywhere, a power bar on the floor, and stuff jammed into the cubbyholes at odd angles. I had to drill/cut a bunch of cable through-holes in the back panel but I think the result is quite neat:

The power bar is now behind the consoles on the lower shelf. All the controllers are in the cabinet, all the consoles are now on a video switch, and everything got a good dusting. It was only supposed to be an hour job but I kept finding more & more stuff to do and suddenly HOLY crap it's 7PM and I need to get some food in me. 😜

Some close-ups if you wanna peruse:

The PS2 and Xbox are in another room hooked up to an HDTV, and there should be a Megadrive there too when I get around to putting it back. Incidentally the PC is an old P4 with an AGP HD3850 hooked up via S-video, it has a bunch of emulators and some 98/XP games (Unreal, NFS, etc.) on it.

My question is why the two, 3DOs?

I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want two 3DOs!

(They are slightly different in a very important way ... look closer. 😉 )

Heh, I just know it's a console that didn't work out too well for EA, that's all, but, then again, that doesn't mean it didn't have great games for itself. I just don't know too many of them. 😀

As for the difference, I knew that 3DOs were made by several different manufacturers (Panasonic being one of them). My next question is, why do you have a "3DO Testing Station"?

the_ultra_code wrote:

Heh, I just know it's a console that didn't work out too well for EA, that's all, but, then again, that doesn't mean it didn't have great games for itself. I just don't know too many of them. 😀

As for the difference, I knew that 3DOs were made by several different manufacturers (Panasonic being one of them). My next question is, why do you have a "3DO Testing Station"?

The 3DO is kind-of my favorite console. It has just the right mix of quirkiness (in the games), obscurity, and not-quite-doing-it-right-but-we're-doing-it-anyway attitude for me. It doesn't have the biggest game library & a lot of the ones that came out for it were unplayable rubbish, but there are quite a few true gems in there.

The Testing Station is ... well, not really a 'dev kit', but it was a developer model that could play unencrypted games. Retail discs are encrypted & signed, but back in the day that was done in a secret room at the 3DO Company that like three people had the key for (seriously!) So if you were in the middle of making a game and just wanted to test your WIP build, you could just burn it to CD-R and toss it in one of these and it would play.