appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 06:02:

OS/2 forever..

I wish. Loved WARP 3 when it came out. Never used any version beyond that.

liqmat wrote on 2021-11-15, 16:31:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 06:02:

OS/2 forever..

I wish. Loved WARP 3 when it came out. Never used any version beyond that.

Warp 3 is my love affair as well. I only started using Warp 4 after I got into the retrocomputing hobby.. But Warp 3 carried be through 1995-1997. I ran my BBS on it. Played games on it. Connected to BBSs on it. Surfed the web on it. It was my life.

Bought the computer in second picture just for the case. Inside there is Gainward Geforce4 Ultra/750-8X (4800SE) which I know would be broken.
At first it was working fine. 3DMark99 OK. After some warm-up it shows a lot of artifacts and Windows hangs. On next boot Windows hangs or gives 16-colour artifacting screen. So something fails when heats up. Just a quick search on the net and equivalent Samsung DDR chips (faster) doesn't cost much/piece, but for 8 pcs it's something like 20€+. Think I'll first do some experiments with cold spray to locate failing chip. If not, to oven it goes.

Second case (inside picture) is another purchase I did just for the case (Aopen HQ45). Bought it for nostaltic reasons because that is the same model I bought (almost) 20 years ago for Athlon XP 1800+ Thoroughbred build.
I knew this would be original '00 build so I was a bit excited. I feel kind of lucky because there was Intel D815EEA2 board + Celeron 766 + Voodoo 3 2000. Board is old rev and doesn't support tualatins. This needed a modest upgrade: P-III 1000 + Voodoo 3 3000 and SB Live!.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 16:54:

liqmat wrote on 2021-11-15, 16:31:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 06:02:

OS/2 forever..

I wish. Loved WARP 3 when it came out. Never used any version beyond that.

Warp 3 is my love affair as well. I only started using Warp 4 after I got into the retrocomputing hobby.. But Warp 3 carried be through 1995-1997. I ran my BBS on it. Played games on it. Connected to BBSs on it. Surfed the web on it. It was my life.

No to mention it was stable as a rock.

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 arrived and I'm happy to report that it really does work nicely on a Win98 build, have to admid I was a bit sceptical but glad to be proven wrong. Sounds great and has very clean output which I do appreciate as a headphone user. Only CD audio has audible hiss, but I guess that's just how it is, haven't heard analog audio from an IDE CD-drive in 20+ years.

Though it seems there aren't any updated VxD drivers for it from Creative, only WDM, so hopefully the drivers in the installer CD really are solid, there's nothing to swap them to in case of trouble. Unless it accepts ZS drivers if you add the device ID to them, didn't like them at face value when I attempted to update to them through device manager.

Was trying out some different slot 1 CPUs on my MS6119.

I tried a p3 4.5x100 and sure it booted up. Got much better CPU marks in 3d mark 99 in comparison to my Pentium 2 @400 but the voodoo 2 is holding it back maybe 100 more 3d marks than my P2 @400 mhz. I didn't do anymore testing because I was eager to ramp things up.

The board does not officially support coppermine cpu, (should have a C-sticker on the windbond chip) but I figured what the hell. I went ahead and put in a 1 GHz p3 coppermine.

Boom the computer did not boot. Oh well it didn't work I guess. So I put back the stock P2. System didn't boot, but started beeping 1 long beep and 3 short. Did I damage a capacitor or something? According to some table this is a keyboard error, which just didn't make sense..

Mm well went to bed and continued today.. Pulled out the motherboard and disconnected everything. Now it would not even post. Hmmm this is not good. Tried a lot of things for 30 minutes or so.. and finally I flicked the multiplier dip switches around a bit and poof it worked. Ok... Maybe I changed the setting but it should not matter as the Pentium 2 I have is locked..

COPPERMINE TIME! I pushed this baby in and it actually boots! revenge!. However only as 7.5x100 as this board does not seem to like to run any faster. Got 100 more points in 3d mark 99 and the speed so well worth it I guess!?

According to sisoft Sandra the CPU is about 2x as fast as my P2 @400 mhz which I guess is reasonable.

At some point I will investigate if I can push the fsb a bit more maybe, but atm I'm happy with a working system and this case is not that good with regard to air flow anyway.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 16:54:

liqmat wrote on 2021-11-15, 16:31:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 06:02:

OS/2 forever..

I wish. Loved WARP 3 when it came out. Never used any version beyond that.

Warp 3 is my love affair as well. I only started using Warp 4 after I got into the retrocomputing hobby.. But Warp 3 carried be through 1995-1997. I ran my BBS on it. Played games on it. Connected to BBSs on it. Surfed the web on it. It was my life.

I like Warp 3 better because it has a unique GUI compared to the Win95/Mac clone IBM used in Warp 4 and beyond. Warp 4 does have a number of bug fixes and extra capability, though.

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-15, 18:14:

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 arrived and I'm happy to report that it really does work nicely on a Win98 build, have to admid I was a bit sceptical but glad to be proven wrong. Sounds great and has very clean output which I do appreciate as a headphone user. Only CD audio has audible hiss, but I guess that's just how it is, haven't heard analog audio from an IDE CD-drive in 20+ years.

Though it seems there aren't any updated VxD drivers for it from Creative, only WDM, so hopefully the drivers in the installer CD really are solid, there's nothing to swap them to in case of trouble. Unless it accepts ZS drivers if you add the device ID to them, didn't like them at face value when I attempted to update to them through device manager.

Don't want to rain on your parade but my Audigy 2 just crapped out after a month or so of heavy use. I'm sure a recap will bring it back to life but something you may want to plan for eventually.

HangarAte2nds! wrote on 2021-11-16, 06:34:

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-15, 18:14:

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 arrived and I'm happy to report that it really does work nicely on a Win98 build, have to admid I was a bit sceptical but glad to be proven wrong. Sounds great and has very clean output which I do appreciate as a headphone user. Only CD audio has audible hiss, but I guess that's just how it is, haven't heard analog audio from an IDE CD-drive in 20+ years.

Though it seems there aren't any updated VxD drivers for it from Creative, only WDM, so hopefully the drivers in the installer CD really are solid, there's nothing to swap them to in case of trouble. Unless it accepts ZS drivers if you add the device ID to them, didn't like them at face value when I attempted to update to them through device manager.

Don't want to rain on your parade but my Audigy 2 just crapped out after a month or so of heavy use. I'm sure a recap will bring it back to life but something you may want to plan for eventually.

I bought an Audigy 2zs some time back. I don't remember 100% but i thought i heard that many Audigy 2s will suffer some kind of capacitor issue overtime causing audio failure.

And not like an generic aging cap failure either. There's a very specific point of failure with Audigy 2 cards and their capacitors that happens to almost all cards.

Or maybe im thinking of something else.

Haha, great, there's a billion caps on that card.

Maybe I'll find that Vortex 2 for backup after all.

liqmat wrote on 2021-11-15, 18:01:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 16:54:

liqmat wrote on 2021-11-15, 16:31:

I wish. Loved WARP 3 when it came out. Never used any version beyond that.

Warp 3 is my love affair as well. I only started using Warp 4 after I got into the retrocomputing hobby.. But Warp 3 carried be through 1995-1997. I ran my BBS on it. Played games on it. Connected to BBSs on it. Surfed the web on it. It was my life.

No to mention it was stable as a rock.

Well, it was rock stable when it was stable, but breaking it was way easier than I was used to with things like DOS and Win 3.1. I remember having to reinstall it from 50-something floppies quite a few times before I knew my way around the OS - it was pretty easy to brick it while tinkering.

fool wrote on 2021-11-15, 17:50:

Bought the computer in second picture just for the case. Inside there is Gainward Geforce4 Ultra/750-8X (4800SE) which I know would be broken.
At first it was working fine. 3DMark99 OK. After some warm-up it shows a lot of artifacts and Windows hangs. On next boot Windows hangs or gives 16-colour artifacting screen. So something fails when heats up. Just a quick search on the net and equivalent Samsung DDR chips (faster) doesn't cost much/piece, but for 8 pcs it's something like 20€+. Think I'll first do some experiments with cold spray to locate failing chip.

Job done. Repair was straightforward and much easier than I expected. I freezed ram chips each one at a time. Artifacting disappeared when bottom left ram chip on bottom side got freezed. Verified result by masking the chip with kapton tape so that I will not freeze anything else. Resoldered the chip and looks great! Whole process took like 15 minutes. I know there are lots of cards with similar symptoms!

Turning on my pain in the NEC laptop isn't going as planned. Nothing happens when I slide the power switch. Not sure if the board is dead or if the power brick shat itself.

Tried fixing a couple Voodoo Rush cards. One that came in a scrap lot which seems like it is working, is detected in Windows but will not output anything.

Noticed a missing smd cap near the output. Replaced the missing one with a similar looking one I pulled off of something else that was being scrapped but it didn't help.

The other one I bought as-is because it had a couple legs on of the the 3dfx chips mangled. Fixed those but this card just gives the no-video beeps. Don't see anything physically wrong with it now but it just won't work.

Contemplating selling both of them as-is unless somebody knows of a common issue with the Rush cards.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-11-18, 06:27:

Tried fixing a couple Voodoo Rush cards. One that came in a scrap lot which seems like it is working, is detected in Windows but […]
Show full quote

Tried fixing a couple Voodoo Rush cards. One that came in a scrap lot which seems like it is working, is detected in Windows but will not output anything.

Noticed a missing smd cap near the output. Replaced the missing one with a similar looking one I pulled off of something else that was being scrapped but it didn't help.

The other one I bought as-is because it had a couple legs on of the the 3dfx chips mangled. Fixed those but this card just gives the no-video beeps. Don't see anything physically wrong with it now but it just won't work.

Contemplating selling both of them as-is unless somebody knows of a common issue with the Rush cards.

Start a "[repair] Voodoo Rush cards", if it works it's going to help others as Voodoo cards are a wanted item fro many 😀
(If you did and I didn't notice just discard my comment)

I finally set up my boot systems on the dual Deschutes build and the test bench P3B-F in my signature. Windows 98 SE + NT 4.0 + Windows 2000 SP4 on Deschutes and Windows 98 SE + Windows 2000 SP4 on the Tualaron.

Will spend tomorrow installing CPU-Z, Everest, 3DMark 99 Max and 3DMark2000 and the most basic of drivers and utilities before posting the results. I will probably downclock the Tualaron to 800Mhz and then 500Mhz and stick both Voodoo2s in there to see just how much of an effect those speed bumps from 333Mhz gives in 3D scores.

Once I’ve got a good bunch of scores, it’ll be time to start playing some good ol’ games again!

Nexxen wrote on 2021-11-18, 09:04:

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-11-18, 06:27:

Tried fixing a couple Voodoo Rush cards. One that came in a scrap lot which seems like it is working, is detected in Windows but […]
Show full quote

Tried fixing a couple Voodoo Rush cards. One that came in a scrap lot which seems like it is working, is detected in Windows but will not output anything.

Noticed a missing smd cap near the output. Replaced the missing one with a similar looking one I pulled off of something else that was being scrapped but it didn't help.

The other one I bought as-is because it had a couple legs on of the the 3dfx chips mangled. Fixed those but this card just gives the no-video beeps. Don't see anything physically wrong with it now but it just won't work.

Contemplating selling both of them as-is unless somebody knows of a common issue with the Rush cards.

Start a "[repair] Voodoo Rush cards", if it works it's going to help others as Voodoo cards are a wanted item fro many 😀
(If you did and I didn't notice just discard my comment)

Yeah, I will start a thread when I have a chance to actually spend some time on them. Thinking maybe the BIOS may be bad on the one and the other may have a bad crystal... Not even worried about getting 3d working on them yet. I just need output.

Played around with Matrox TurboGL in Quake 2 and got some surprisingly decent results.

My G400 was pretty much on pair with my Voodoo3, sometimes even faster. The Voodoo3 was using its own MiniGL here to provide a fair fight. I don't plan on doing a full comparison across all resolutions and such, but it was interesting to see just how competitive the G400 was at the time.

If you wanted to build the best possible PC of September 1999, it maybe had the G400 and a PII-667, but best PC of October 1999 would probably have the Geforce 256 and a PII-733, so King for about as long as Cyrix MX or AMD K6-3 kept the fastest CPU title.

Replaced a micro switch beneath the power "button" (just an extension rod) of that Acer Aspire X1800 retired by a friend of mine. Took only 5 minutes to solder the new switch, but putting back the entire front panel assembly took me a couple of hours and several attempts due to the following reasons:

1. While the new micro switch has the same maximum dimensions, the design is completely different from the old, broken one (yeah, I didn't search hard enough for the same model). Didn't want to use epoxy glue as it would be permanent; in the end I fastened the switch with some double sided tapes and electrical tapes.

   

2. Some of those plastic clips wouldn't close firmly; took several tries.
3. The DVD tray button extender rod on the front panel has an unique mechanism including a strangely-shaped piece of curved metal that became loose when I took the front panel apart. Took me a while to figure out the correct way to assemble it back.

Fortunately it's now fixed.