brostenen wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yesterday I plugged my modern Thrustmaster T.16000M into my current Windows 98 machine and was surprised that it went ahead and installed drivers. Tried some games, and the stick works perfectly. I had no idea!

Shame there is no way to use a modern USB stick for DOS games, that would be awesome.

I have seen USB drivers for MS-Dos somewhere in the wild.
I am just assuming that they don't work.

They do, but with some restrictions: Only for mounting flash drives formatted FAT, there's a time-bomb trial on them unless you pay for a license, and they use something around 300KB or 400 KB of conventional ram just to load it. And you can't format or re-partition connected flash drives via DOS, only read-write.

Found this Cordless Telephone from 1986 today at my local Goodwill. Paid 3 dollars for it and I totally intend to use it. 😁

Sutekh94 wrote:

40MB RAM

That 40 MB of RAM seems like it would make browsing pretty slow. At least W95 is lighter than 98.

I'm preparing to try fixing one 286 motherboard. It seems there is a problem with at least one shorted tantalum capacitor and the PSU won't even give power to the board. Hopefully I'll get to it this weekend.

This is the picture of the board:
http://i.imgur.com/pkPuIEk.jpg

I'm suspecting C62 to be bad or some other on this -12V line. I'd really like to rescue this board - it's the same I had back in 1991.

Setting up some scrap parts in a scrap case for a buddies kids to write up Word documents on and play around with. Terrible specs TBH

kithylin wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

Really liking the art work on that box. Today's boxes just don't look as cool 🤣

A little bit retro related. Sorted out my home networking / file server situation. Too many drives and USBs with stuff all over the place. Was looking for some redundancy, got a lot of drives, but really don't want to buy a NAS. Windows 8 has storage spaces built in, it's like a RAID manager for newbies. Created a Raid 1 array and will use that for my retro home network. The data on there is not super critical, but when you've organised it over some time, it's a major PITA if something dies.

Performance is pretty sweet. 140 MB/s local and 110 MB/s over the LAN. Just a shame Windows 98 networking is so slow 😵

It's how the RAID addiction starts. I used to be casual with storage. And now I have 4 computers in the house here with raid-5 storage of various sizes, and now with my dell servers I just got free, up to another 275GB raid-5 storage, and every computer is running on a full fledged hardware raid card on pci-express of some sort. And I have deep desires to move up to some very large enterprise raid setups of something around 8 x 2TB drives in the closet and move over to raid-6 and a newer hardware card.. (that would be 12.28 TB usable space, and protected against a two-drive failure) I'm hooked on it now, just the enjoyment of not losing anything because a drive decides to die is awesome.

RAID drove me nuts. At my pinnacle I was running 28 fiber channel disks and another 28 SCSI disks with a quad port SmartArray controller and it ate so much damn power. Once I had the parts and time I filled and attached an IBM 3583 ultrium tape library to my server and dumped the RAID's. Now there is a small 500gb RAID in the machine that holds frequently accessed files and everything else I've downloaded or created in the last 12 years is stored to tape using Windows Server's Remote Storage Manager and there's still some 21Tb of space left in the thing. Also works great for syncing folders for backup purposes and it's accessible through all the common network file formats.

Took my Satellite Pro 410CDT with me to hospital. Have used it a lot lately as I am writing a book and like the keyboard.

Have been unable to walk for a while, back at hospital Monday. Probably take the Toshiba again.

Of course, I keep the volume low when in hospital.

I brought my Toshiba Tecra 500CDT with me last time when was in the hospital.
It's nice to have retro-on-the-go 😀

I really like my Tecra now that I found a gameport PCMCIA card that works. A very decent gaming laptop for games that don't require an accelerator. Posted about it here:

Bought these (retro) hardware today

Have either of you found a way to disable the Trackpoint mouse in DOS? Nothing in the BIOS. I even physically disconnected the cable. It interferes with my Powerramp Mite gamepad (plugs into PS/2 port).

CelGen wrote:

RAID drove me nuts. At my pinnacle I was running 28 fiber channel disks and another 28 SCSI disks with a quad port SmartArray controller and it ate so much damn power. Once I had the parts and time I filled and attached an IBM 3583 ultrium tape library to my server and dumped the RAID's. Now there is a small 500gb RAID in the machine that holds frequently accessed files and everything else I've downloaded or created in the last 12 years is stored to tape using Windows Server's Remote Storage Manager and there's still some 21Tb of space left in the thing. Also works great for syncing folders for backup purposes and it's accessible through all the common network file formats.

Technology has changed an awful lot today. My file server / NAS in the closet has two 1366 xeons in a supermicro board (1.6 ghz quad cores without hyper-threading), and 8 x 7200 rpm fixed-rpm hard drives, and with a modern platinum efficiency power supply and a pci-e 7300 GS video card it's 3.4 TB of online storage with raid-5 and only uses 85 - 105 watts @ outlet power draw (At 120vAC USA, would be even less if we were on 220vAC).

And those are 3.5" drives, 500-GB each. I'm planning in future to convert to 2.5" laptop sized drives in hot-swap bays and move up to 2TB drives at the same time, it will drop the power usage by half for the hard drive section, and significantly increase the storage space at the same time. I might get it down to 50 watts or less. Today, if we do it right, we can have a lot of online raid storage and hardly any power usage.

Even with these low power chips, without hyper-threading, they're fast enough to also run my little web server on it and let a couple friends have vmware sessions to play around with small linux things and host a few smaller low-traffic websites as well, and still low power, low heat, and even has 24GB of ram in it, and It can still handle full 125 MB/second network transfer speed as a file server.

So I love my little NAS thing, and in the future I'll make it even more efficient.

"Here's looking at you"

For amusement, that's the MMX 200 P5TX-BPro with the original Corel on a 2GB Quantum Fireball. I apologize for the blurry snaps. Corel's Help describes how to use ScreenGrab in fine detail, but they neglected to bundle it...

That looks incredibly similar to Turbolinux (but i guess they all did back then).. What is the latest version of netscape you've got to work? I could only manage 5or 6 I believe. The kernel could technically run 9, but the dependancies are where I failed at... Trying to get old versions of pre-requisits are pretty impossible.. It's like a never ending tree of packages.

I haven't tried any other versions, only mucked with the default. I don't have the slightest nostalgia for revisiting Dependency Hell.

This Corel works nice out of the box FWIW. Other than Knoppix I usually expect some trouble with Pentiums, but this install and the hardware detect were butter-smooth.

Man... 'Turbolinux' is ringing a bell hard but I can't place it. Must have it on a buried CD somewhere.

configured amiga and atari-st emulators with win98se on a P-II-333 😀 they work really good, did not expecting that.

I managed to finally test my CT5320. Pretty low volume output. But I got it to work. Took me a while. 😈

I had my parents in town for a visit but now Im back to tinkering with the Gigabyte BX2000+, Im starting to really like this board.

Because the board has 4 multiplier dip switches it should support all multipliers but the manual only lists 3.5x to 8x with added information indicating that the 8x multiplier dosnt work, please dont buy...

Gigabyte has later released this table for Slot-1 and Socket-370 motherboards with dip switches and the 8x (and higher) multiplier does indeed work (most CPUs has their ratio locked though).

Gigabyte BX2000+

X3: O X O O
X3.5: X X O O
X4: O O X O
X4.5: X O X O
X5: O X X O
X5.5: X X X O
X6: O O O X
X6.5: X O O X
X7: O X O X
X7.5: X X O X
X8: O O X X
X8.5: O X O O
X9: X X O O
X9.5: X O O O
X10: X O X X
X10.5: O O X O
X11: O X X X
X11.5: X O X O
X12: O X X O
X13: X X X O
X14: O O O X
X15: X O O X
X16: O X O X

But wait a minut... dip switches... there should be a 2.5x setting... and a "Fail safe" 2x setting without L2 cache... and perhaps a 2x setting with L2 cache enabled.

Gigabyte dosnt list these settings anywhere but they should™ work with all Gigabyte Slot-1/S370 boards that use 4 jumpers/dip switches for multiplier selection

2X "Fail safe" No L2: X X X X. Tested and working.
2X "Fail safe" No L2: O O O O. Tested and working.
2X With L2 cache enabled: O X X X. Tested and working. edit: Klamath only, Deschutes L2 cache gets disabled.
2.5x: X O O O. Tested and working. edit: Klamath only, Deschutes L2 cache gets disabled.

I like the fact that I found another Slot-1 board that supports the 2x multiplier with cache enabled. Too bad it dosnt support any FSB lower than 66 MHz, at least the silk-screening, the manual and the Internet dosnt think it does. I will try out all combinations with the 4 FSB selection dip switches later to see what else I can find.

A few days ago I recapped a Shuttle AV18E2 VIA based Tualatin motherboard. This is the first chance I've had to try overclocking my Tualatin chips.
Yesterday I tried to clock a Tualeron 1100A. It wouldn't play that game. It won't POST at 133FSB even at the ridiculousness of 1.7v. 120FSB works, but this board won't let you fix the PCI divider so it's useless.

After the disappointing 1100A, I had no hope for the 1200 I tried today. Ironically, the 1200 is awesome. It's still on stock voltage and passed Memtest at 1660MHz/138. Easy chip, just turn up the clock and it works. I probably won't try to push it any farther because there's no point.

I've had these chips for years and always assumed the 1200 wouldn't be viable for overclocking. I was completely wrong. Strange that my 1100 was such a dud in comparison.

Got one of those pin modded Tualatin's from the Korean guy installed in an Abit VP6, which that motherboard just randomly came back to life after sitting in a box dead for a year. I think that motherboard is going to replace the stock Dimension 4100 board and be paired with a fx5950 ultra. Also I spent 2 HOURS scrubbing and cleaning the rubber coating off my laptop due to the fact that it would come off on your hands during use of the machine, which is annoying.

The benching of my unlocked Klamath Pentium II is progressing and the results are pretty much what could be expected.

I do however get low SuperPi 1M scores... or I dont really know if they are low, just a bit lower than expected when comparing to results on HWBOT and in the SuperPi thread. The scores on HWBOT seem to all be with Windows 2000/XP and perhaps its the same with the scores posted here on Vogons? I am running an untweaked Windows 98 install with some programs running in the background like PowerStrip and 3dfx Tools. Some scores here on Vogons are probably with Deschutes PII 266/300 and that could perhaps also affect the score a little bit?

As it is I get about the same score when running my Klamath PII 300 at 2x152Mhz as some others seem to get when running stock 4.5x66 Mhz. Its not the L2 cache, if I deactivate the L2 my scores drop 25-50% eventhough the memory is running at the same speed as the L2 cache as the latency is much higher.

If someone has a Klamath Pentium II running Windows 98 please post a SuperPi 1M score in the SuperPi thread. It dosnt really matter what speed the CPU is running at as I can match any speed.

pewpewpew wrote:

I haven't tried any other versions, only mucked with the default. I don't have the slightest nostalgia for revisiting Dependency Hell.

This Corel works nice out of the box FWIW. Other than Knoppix I usually expect some trouble with Pentiums, but this install and the hardware detect were butter-smooth.

Man... 'Turbolinux' is ringing a bell hard but I can't place it. Must have it on a buried CD somewhere.

Indeed. If you have era-specific hardware to accompany the installs of old linux distributions it makes life a hell of a lot easier!! For example with Turbolinux 6 (came out 99-2000) is I believe a Japanese tree so I doubt a lot of people even remember it. You had to pay for it. My dad purchased it and the original receipt is in the bag. He got it for less because it was in the 'lite' installation box. I'll take a picture of it. It's quite an interesting relic. 😈 😈

For me, it worked very well (although getting the LAN to work was a few hours work if not knowing what you're doing) out of the box with an ATI Mach 64vt, a 3c905 and a pentium 200. I didn't bother with sound from what I recall but I think it was installed. 😎

Old Linux/Unix is an incredibly clunky experience that most people don't want to experience again. For example having to write a small script to accompany an icon on the desktop just to automatically mount and access the floppy drive when you click on the icon. Modern distributions are simply amazing in my opinion with apt-get's and the autto installation of drivers. Even graphics drivers are a doddle to install now, they were HELL to get to work just less than 10 years ago. 🤣 🤣