LHN91 wrote on 2020-02-10, 13:59:

Well - over the weekend, not today, but....

Dug out and cleaned up my Compaq Deskpro EN450, gave it a scrubdown with a magic eraser to clean some marks up and powered it on, booted right up to what I was doing with it previously. Thinking of doing a fresh install, and not entirely sure which way to go with it yet.

It's a P3-450, 384MB of RAM, 10GB HDD (that I think is dying, I do have spares though), ESS 1869F onboard audio and an ATI Rage 128. This one uses the oddball short-segment AGP bracket that only fits certain cards, the one I got with it was dead and the Rage was the only thing AGP I had that fit. Makes a decent DOS machine with the ESSFM sounding pretty good as long as you aren't encountering speed or ATI related issues.

Cool system. I used to have a similar one myself, exact same case design but originally came with a Pentium II CPU (either 350MHz or 450MHz, I forget). I upgraded it to a Pentium III 600MHz shortly after getting it and managed to fit in a Voodoo 3 16MB AGP Graphics card. That thing became my secondary machine running Windows XP for years.

Wish I still had it, but unfortunately it's long gone. If I ever see one going cheap anywhere one day I'm definitely going to replace it.

I repaired a Roland SC55 yesterday. Some of the buttons were messed up, so I repaired those. The tact switches behind them were still pretty unreliable so I saturated them with Deoxit and pressed them about 400 times with the handle of a screwdriver. Amazingly, it works great now! I got it for a good price as-is so I'm happy that I was able to get it fixed.

After that I did what any self respecting person would do... I played old PC game music and changed the instruments until it sounded ridiculous.

I was playing with my new TheC64-FullSize machine.

Not that remarkable, but I want to say these cheap wire shelf units are really good for quickly reconfigured test setups. Somehow I have missed this for years. Fast, no tools, light-weight, sturdy, *and* the activity is quiet & without sawdust.

Is it strong enough?

Yup. The individual pieces are plenty strong, and the way these go together, things get tightened by the weight on the shelves. It needs no extra bracing.

It suddenly occurred to me that I had not really spent any time at all fiddling with Mod players/trackers on either of the two retro PCs I have built that both has GUS cards in them. What a travesty.

This was not something I had delved into at all back in the day, so I was kinda approaching it fresh today/yesterday. I was looking specifically for DOS players, so I checked out FastTracker II, Scream Tracker 3, Impulse Tracker, Open Cubic Player, Xtc-Play and probably a couple others now that I've forgotten about. In the end, I decided I liked Xtc-Play the best, by a long shot. The others, like FastTracker and Scream Tracker, are quite cool but seem to be intended for composers I guess? They can obviously still play files, but there's a whole ton of editing and tweaking tools in these that are just not something I'm interested in using. Xtc-Play also has playlist support which is what I really wanted in a player. Open Cubic Player also has an interesting feature list, but it did not perform well on my 486 DX2 at all, so it immediately was dropped from consideration.

So, now as I'm looking for collections of modules to play, I'm quite overwhelmed! There's tons and tons out there! I just started going through the start of the top voted/downloaded lists on The Mod Archive for now.

Next will be to find a decent DOS MIDI player. Would be cool to also be able to put my Sound Canvas to use with more than just games. 😀

Try DOSMID 😀

I played a bit of MSV1 codec video on my 286 using Video For Windows 1.0. I'll make a full post detailing the process and what we had to do to get this video running once I perfect the method for making source material. In the clip below, the video is being played on a 10 MHz 286 with 4 MB of RAM and a 6x read CD-ROM drive, running Win 3.1 + DOS 6.22.

Here's a sneak peek:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/dqMDLM9sfo4zseuQA

(The video material was not made by me, it was made by @ryaxnb of the Retro Computer Discord. Thanks to @ryaxnb and @Dissapearing.Inc on the Retro Computer Discord for their help with this little experiment. If I knew their usernames on here, i'd include them in this post, but unfortunately I don't.)

Discord link for those who are curious:
https://discord.gg/nRUu4V2

Curious, what size is the file, length and what is the video frame size.

I remember old video codecs being horribly inefficient.

The file is about 4 MB I think, and the frame size is 156x120. It's locked at 9.9 FPS and the video is about 15 seconds long. The audio track is removed to save some space, as I only have an Adlib in that machine, so no 8 bit PCM audio.

canthearu wrote on 2020-02-11, 05:45:

Curious, what size is the file, length and what is the video frame size.

I remember old video codecs being horribly inefficient.

Not wanting to hijack the subject, but could you suggest me some video codecs for w98?

Not exactly sure what runs in 98 and what dosen't as I haven't gone into depth with video on that platform, but I know MP4 files run well on Pentium 2/3 systems running XP in my personal experience. MPEG-1 would be something to try, as it was the standard of around the time. You could also use the older formats of Intel Indeo, MSV1, or Cinepak if that's your thing.

I was playing around with one of my 486 motherboards today. It was in a case and I was running some dos benchmarks. There was bit of a strange situation. I didn't use the power switch that is part of the case, but I had AT power switch that was just dangling from the 4 wires that come from power supply that I used to turn the it on. I didn't see it as dangerous because there wasn't really any exposed wires. Suddenly for some reason part of the switch touches the metal case of the pc and there is a short circuit. Loud noise, sparks and bit of smoke too. There is also a burn mark and dent on the case where the switch touched it like I had just done some electrical welding on it.

First thought was of course that I must have fried something, but it just continued running benchmark like nothing had happened while this happened.
I was also lucky that I was not touching the case when this happened. 230V isn't fun probably.
I'll try not to be so lazy in the future and use the actual power switch of the case instead just attaching the wires to a switch that has been separated from another case. The reason why I was lazy because the power switch of the case is in a hard to reach place behind the hard drive cage that needs to be removed first.

Edit: I assume one of the metal edges of the case went in the small cap that is between the connectors at the end of the wires and the switch. That is the only way I think this could have happened.

Finally finished my PC parts collection gallery except for my PC build photos which I really need to get around to some day. That sure took a long time.

Baoran wrote on 2020-02-11, 13:07:

I was playing around with one of my 486 motherboards today. It was in a case and I was running some dos benchmarks. There was bi […]
Show full quote

I was playing around with one of my 486 motherboards today. It was in a case and I was running some dos benchmarks. There was bit of a strange situation. I didn't use the power switch that is part of the case, but I had AT power switch that was just dangling from the 4 wires that come from power supply that I used to turn the it on. I didn't see it as dangerous because there wasn't really any exposed wires. Suddenly for some reason part of the switch touches the metal case of the pc and there is a short circuit. Loud noise, sparks and bit of smoke too. There is also a burn mark and dent on the case where the switch touched it like I had just done some electrical welding on it.

First thought was of course that I must have fried something, but it just continued running benchmark like nothing had happened while this happened.
I was also lucky that I was not touching the case when this happened. 230V isn't fun probably.
I'll try not to be so lazy in the future and use the actual power switch of the case instead just attaching the wires to a switch that has been separated from another case. The reason why I was lazy because the power switch of the case is in a hard to reach place behind the hard drive cage that needs to be removed first.

not like this.jpg

Edit: I assume one of the metal edges of the case went in the small cap that is between the connectors at the end of the wires and the switch. That is the only way I think this could have happened.

people seriously need to stop doing this ^^

don't let your live wires dangle around in the case, attach that switch to where it belongs.

see also: Electric Shock by AT Power Switch - Bad Power Supply or Bad Wiring?

appiah4 wrote on 2020-02-11, 13:25:

Finally finished my PC parts collection gallery except for my PC build photos which I really need to get around to some day. That sure took a long time.

nice :3
I still need to do this... I'm barely through my sound cards and I haven't even taken pictures yet.

imi wrote on 2020-02-11, 13:36:

people seriously need to stop doing this ^^

don't let your live wires dangle around in the case, attach that switch to where it belongs.

see also: Electric Shock by AT Power Switch - Bad Power Supply or Bad Wiring?

The case that the switch is from is long gone. It was too far rusted to be used. I just thought I could use the switch to test if any power supplies I come across still work. I know it shouldn't be used like this.
I think I learned my lesson knowing what could have happened if I had been touching the case when I let go of the switch and this happened.
No idea how the motherboard, psu and the other parts survived it though.

Baoran wrote on 2020-02-11, 13:47:

The case that the switch is from is long gone. It was too far rusted to be used. I just thought I could use the switch to test i […]
Show full quote

imi wrote on 2020-02-11, 13:36:

people seriously need to stop doing this ^^

don't let your live wires dangle around in the case, attach that switch to where it belongs.

see also: Electric Shock by AT Power Switch - Bad Power Supply or Bad Wiring?

The case that the switch is from is long gone. It was too far rusted to be used. I just thought I could use the switch to test if any power supplies I come across still work. I know it shouldn't be used like this.
I think I learned my lesson knowing what could have happened if I had been touching the case when I let go of the switch and this happened.
No idea how the motherboard, psu and the other parts survived it though.

the case was probably at least properly grounded, so the current took the shortest path to ground, which was through the case, and not any components.

I bought the HP Thin 5720 PC and runned Chex Quest/Dooms(Also Quake 2, Half Life, Unreal 1-beta version too)!!
+ Duke Nukem 3D as my first fan art ever!!!!

https://youtu.be/IP2vWZNqW68

https://www.facebook.com/groups/retrogamerisr … 66554300111314/

Today I am realizing I need a serial mouse for my DOS computer and then also realizing how annoying it would be to have multiple peripheral sets for multiple computers. Time for KVM research!