Excellent work getting that poor voodoo 2 up and running again!

Nicely done on the voodoo2! I've been doing some similar surgery on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0, but I just can't seem to get it to run again. New battery, new EEPROM chip, checked the caps, switched CPUs, fiddled with a billion combinations of RAM..just a no go.

I have a real soft spot for Socket A and really want to get a machine up and running. This Asus board was what I had back in the day, however looking at tons of forum posts over the years, it seems like that model had a lot going against it in terms of long-term reliability, sadly. I may go with another nForce 2 board, preferably I suppose with an additional 12V connector.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-05-02, 22:31:

She works, so back to my friend she goes. In return for me troubles he will send me a dead Voodoo Rush PCI.. I can't wait to get it and see if I can fix that! It would be PERFECT for my 1997 Budget Build!

awesome :3

I saved a few motherboards from the vartas... the battery jar is getting fuller.

I'm a happy camper 😀

At last I have a working P3 Rambus bord. Sounds simple, but every single i820 board I have tried over the years, from Intel VC820 to Asus P3C-E - and a few P3C-Ds for good measure was utterly dead. With one exception: a Supermicro i820 board with MTH and SDRAM. Amazingly it not only worked but seemed stable. Still slow as hell, and not something I can use my nice 40ns PC800 512MB RIMMs with. So saw an affordable i840 board on eBay, a Compaq SW400 and took the dive. Glad I did. It needs a non-ATX-standard PSU, sourced one of those too. Added it all together today: a single P3-500, a Slot 1 terminator, two 512MB RIMMs, two C-RIMMs and an i740 VGA card. And... it's alive. Alive and complaining about everything from invalid config to FDC error (no FDD attached) to fan error (non-standard fan headers on the board). But I don't care, will fix those one by one, and then see if I can get a Tualatin running on this beast...

Purchased Compaq Deskpro M boards, 386/33M and 486/66M processor boards, I/O board and EISA board. Need to research into making a power supply.

From same seller, in same purchase LTE LITE 386/25E motherboard (complete), hopefully this fixes my LTE LITE 386/25e notebook.

This would help as my first computer was a rubbish 386DX 25 clone in 1990, based on C&T chipset that wouldn't run tight timing at all.

Cheers,

Messed around with my Pentium PCs and listened to some classic Adlib tunes on both. CT3910 has much clearer output than ALS100. Also, a K5 PR100 is unbearably slow for Win98SE. I also installed MR-BIOS on my Socket 5 PC. Not too much in general.

Cleaning the laptop Acer Aspire F5-573G and the cooling fan from dust

Finally found time to repair my Cheetah branded Kempston Joystick interface for my ZX Spectrum. Up & Fire wouldn't work unless you loosened the joystick plug.

I opened it up and right away spotted a cracked solder joint on 1 of the pins. Crappy design of this interface basically offered no reinforcement for the DB9 port, it was held in place by the solder joints only which meant all the force of inserting & removing joysticks is going straight onto the pins & the solder.

So I resoldered the affected pin and then I used hot glue to secure the DB9 port in place, so that it no longer flexes on the pins. Also had to use a little super glue on the edge connector plastic, which had slightly cracked and become loose.

All working great now and it feels a lot more solid. I can get back to gaming properly on the Spectrum.

I have ordered another, different branded, Kempston interface though as a backup in case this thing breaks again in the future. Can't hurt to have more than 1 of these things.

Well, it's that time of year again. The time I suddenly become obsessed with non x86 hardware for a month or so.

Grabbed my two PPC macs outta the closet and started benchmarking them. One, a maxed out dual processor G4 MDD with the following specs:

2x G4 CPUs overclocked to 1.5GHz, each w/ 2MB of L3.
2GB DDR333 memory
GeForce 7800GS AGP
320GB 10k RPM SCSI HDD
OS X 10.4.11

The other, an entry level G5 tower I got for $15 at a yard sale last year:
Single 1.6GHz G5, with 512K L2 (no L3).
2GB DDR400 memory
Radeon 9600 AGP
80GB 7200RPM HDD
OS X 10.5.8

As expected, the dual G4 rig absolutely dominated the multi-threaded CPU benchmarks that I ran. However, I was very surprised by the single-threaded results. I always thought that the G5 was faster than the G4, clock-for-clock. After all, it does have a much faster FSB (800MHz on the G5; 167MHz on the G4). However, that didn't prove to be the case at all!

In all of the single-threaded benchmarks, the G4 was within spitting distance of the G5. Perhaps most surprising was Altivec performance, where the G4 was ~2.5% faster than the G5! Now I'm not sure if the older version of OS X was giving the G4 a bit of an advantage. I'm thinking the next step will be to upgrade the G4 to Leopard and rerun some of these benchmarks.

Fascinatin' stuff! 😀

Wrote a new blog entry on my blog, about my family's first computer. An old 286 Unisys machine. I did write a tread here on Vogons, some 4 or 5 years ago, however dropbox would not let me share pictures anymore. So they are up on my blog now. Just be aware, if you want to see. It is a flood of images.

Put an Nvidia 6600GT in my Athlon 64, 98SE machine. Using the 71.84 drivers. It took a bit of tweaking but I'm mightily impressed and it gives my, usual, Radeon 9700 or 9800 Pro's a right kicking!

Nice card, which I would have only expected to work well in XP.

Sorta finished working on this: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Put in a working 250Gb IDE drive and installed WinXP and some apps and games. Another system nearly finished... now if only the replacement caps would come so can finish working on a older AT PSU that had issues.

brostenen wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:06:

Wrote a new blog entry on my blog, about my family's first computer. An old 286 Unisys machine. I did write a tread here on Vogons, some 4 or 5 years ago, however dropbox would not let me share pictures anymore. So they are up on my blog now. Just be aware, if you want to see. It is a flood of images.

Link? I'd be interested in reading it.

I finished up the last raw footage of the 286/8 machine I have been building over the last 2-3 weeks and packaged it up into boxes - already found a new owner. I will miss it, but I am happy to have some desk space back 😉 Now when I have time, recap the server (tomorrow hopefully) and start on the 286/10 machine I have that had the weird Keyboard Interface issue.

Jed118 wrote on 2020-05-04, 02:37:

Now when I have time, recap the server (tomorrow hopefully) and start on the 286/10 machine I have that had the weird Keyboard Interface issue.

When you do get it figured out please post ! I have a old board that looks like new but has a kb error at post and has no corrosion, no scratches, no bad traces, gets proper volts, etc. Am really puzzled and if you get yours working it might help me. Thanks !

Horun wrote on 2020-05-04, 02:45:

When you do get it figured out please post ! I have a old board that looks like new but has a kb error at post and has no corrosion, no scratches, no bad traces, gets proper volts, etc. Am really puzzled and if you get yours working it might help me. Thanks !

If this working from home bit keeps up for longer, I'll have more time to tinker with it. I'd like to get it going, stay original.

I modded one of my GOTEK units with the Flash-Floppy firmware, a 128x32 OLED screen and a piezo buzzer. This will be installed in my IBM PS/1 DX2-66 as part of its restoration..

Jed118 wrote on 2020-05-04, 02:37:

brostenen wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:06:

Wrote a new blog entry on my blog, about my family's first computer. An old 286 Unisys machine. I did write a tread here on Vogons, some 4 or 5 years ago, however dropbox would not let me share pictures anymore. So they are up on my blog now. Just be aware, if you want to see. It is a flood of images.

Link? I'd be interested in reading it.

I have the link to my blog, in my signature. 😀

Spent almost 2 days trying to make DOTT work with digital audio on my retro PC to no avail - it freezes shortly after starting the game. If I launch it without digital audio, it works perfectly fine.

dionb wrote on 2020-05-02, 23:47:

I'm a happy camper 😀

At last I have a working P3 Rambus bord. Sounds simple, but every single i820 board I have tried over the years, from Intel VC820 to Asus P3C-E - and a few P3C-Ds for good measure was utterly dead. With one exception: a Supermicro i820 board with MTH and SDRAM. Amazingly it not only worked but seemed stable. Still slow as hell, and not something I can use my nice 40ns PC800 512MB RIMMs with. So saw an affordable i840 board on eBay, a Compaq SW400 and took the dive. Glad I did. It needs a non-ATX-standard PSU, sourced one of those too. Added it all together today: a single P3-500, a Slot 1 terminator, two 512MB RIMMs, two C-RIMMs and an i740 VGA card. And... it's alive. Alive and complaining about everything from invalid config to FDC error (no FDD attached) to fan error (non-standard fan headers on the board). But I don't care, will fix those one by one, and then see if I can get a Tualatin running on this beast...

This is really interesting! I wonder how the performance will be with a 1400 vs other motherboards.

Skalabala wrote on 2020-05-04, 11:03:

dionb wrote on 2020-05-02, 23:47:

[...]

affordable i840 board on eBay, a Compaq SW400

This is really interesting! I wonder how the performance will be with a 1400 vs other motherboards.

Flupke11 is already on it, he has the same board and a lot more 😉
Tualatin chipset competition pt. II