Figured out why the Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 runs like a 386SX - because it has been running as one, even when thinking that Upgrade CPU was doing something....did some digging and found out I have the Evergreen 486 BLX3 upgrade in it.....got the drivers now for it and holy crap this thing flies now. And now I have basically 2 retro-computers in one computer - a 386SX and a 486SX4. I can switch modes by leaving the driver out of certain entries in my multiboot config. This is pretty cool.

So now Ultima VI runs at that slight overspeed I like, Wolfenstein 3D is smooth as glass, and I can downclock/downgrade to play TD3 or DeathTrack at a (fairly) sane speed. Arachne screams on 486 mode, better than some of my other boxes surprisingly. I guess now I get why they call that chip "Blue Lightning". Might toss in a 387 though still so I can gain some speed for certain stuff that supports it (Sim City). The speed difference was far more noticeable than I was expecting.

Spruced up my PVM-9L1 RGB mod by making a new board with the RCA jacks, resistors, capacitors, and the blanking switch with less wiring and a lot less mess to work with.

Installed the board on top (at a slight angle since my drill decided to make the holes 1/4" higher than the others) and all that needs is the foam tape and the mod will be complete.

Had issues with the green and blue colors being incorrect and found out I didn't solder the wires in the correct spots and the speaker wasn't working and that was because dummy me didn't plug in the cable back where it belongs.

After sorting those issues, the mod is functioning well and no issues whatsoever. And boy, does my Genesis Model 1 look amazing in RGB over composite.

Finally decided to take stock of my SCSi drive collection and well I have

8 x 15k 78.2gb Ultra Wide 320 drives
2 x 15k 18.2gb Ultra 3 drives
6 x 10k 9.1gb Ultra 3 drives
1 x 10k 9.1gb Ultra 2 drive
4 x 7200 9.1gb Ultra 2 drives

So a lot more drives than I thought I will likely pitch the 9.1gb drives as they are not that useful to me, but the 320 drives might make for a fun raid experiment if I can find the right controller for them.

I think my "best" SCSI drive is about 4GB, but then I lost track after SCSI 2... does this triple decker sandwich looking D thingy take Ultra Wide 360 with HOV lane or is it Fibrechannel over USB redundant multipath with infiniband sidechannel addressing over IPv6 ? Have I got enough room behind the desk or can you only bend the thumb thick cable around the radius of a tractor tire? Do I need oven mitts to switch the hot spare?

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-30, 05:31:

I think my "best" SCSI drive is about 4GB, but then I lost track after SCSI 2... does this triple decker sandwich looking D thingy take Ultra Wide 360 with HOV lane or is it Fibrechannel over USB redundant multipath with infiniband sidechannel addressing over IPv6 ? Have I got enough room behind the desk or can you only bend the thumb thick cable around the radius of a tractor tire? Do I need oven mitts to switch the hot spare?

NANI ???

Im willing to admit I know sweet fuck all about SCSI ..I just happen to have stripped a Compaq Proliant server at one point and still have the drives, not sure if I still have the carcass around .. might still have the SCSI raid card in it.

BRB

Edit - ok its got the SCSI controller still in it, a bit dusty but its a Smart Array 3200 ..now the question is will it work in a non dell machine and if it does .. how in hell do I configure it.

ugh... what a nightmare day (again).

First, I tried one more time to validate whether my Canopus Pure3D is dead. To make sure it wasn't s CPU speed issue, I ran a PII@233MHz. I then downclocked the card to 40MHz to verify it wasn't overheating. Chips were barely warm to the touch. This time I also had the manufacturer drivers for Windows 98. Passthrough works fine and the card is detected, but when 3D (Turok tested) is engaged the process lockups up. I can kill the process, but if 3D is attempted again, it fails completely without even flipping the screen. I might send this off for repairs.

2nd, tested a C-Media ISA AV310, CMI8330A based on some positive feedback. The card works, but it sounds like junk to my ears. I have the perfect system to put this card in and it is a system only from Vogons could love.

3rd, spent hours... HOURS with 2 InnoVision 12MB Voodoo2 card. They work individually, but in SLI, the connection is detected by the additional RAM, FBI, and TMUs are not detected. I just see 4MB and 8MB. I tried an exhaustive list of combinations involving multiple SLI cables, slot moves, different CPUs, different DirectX versions, different driver versions. reversing directions for all possible directions, and blah, blah blah. Obviously, this is not normal.

I needed to check the content of a 3.5" floppy that I found while sorting my hoard mess collection, so I decided to connect my FDUSB-M (rebranded Y-E Data) USB floppy drive to my Dell M4800 notebook running Windows 10 .

The result : "classic" error code 10 on all USB ports (all USB 3.0)
I even tried passing it through to an XP VM under Virtualbox to no avail .

The fix/solution : connecting the drive through a USB 2.0 hub (bus powered, no AC adapter connected).
WTH is up with that ?

Adventures in wrappery on hardware not meant for it. I wonder if this is even recognizable...

*squint* it's tuxracer? .... second guess Mechwarrior II .... 3rd guess Rebel Assault, Hoth levels.

At a guess, Need for speed 1 or possibly 2 could be one with the 3DFX patch, the box in the top right corner is a car mirror and the thing in the bottom left corner is some kind of speedo.

Installed a Gotek drive in my Amiga500 Rev 8a.1 that I have upgraded to 500-Plus spec's. Now it has kickstart switcher (1.3 and 3.1), Boot selector, RGBtoHDMI and now Gotek. I used to have a TF-530 in the machine, but I sold the accelerator and will buy an 8mb/IDE upgrade instead, now that I have a 1200 with 68030 and a 600 with 68020. Still keeping my other 8a.1 factory stock.

Tried to fix a laptop but i'm stuck finding datasheets to check some chips.

Tested the K6-3 400 into my Socket 7 430VX board and it works @ '66Mhz x 6' and the only lowest vcore 2,4v beside the bios see it as a 80486DX 66Mhz.
More than three times faster in CPU marks (3dnow!) in 3DMark99 compared to the P-MMX 233 and still the Rage Pro PCI get mostly the same final score.. I was expecting this to be closer to the AGP version speed but seems slower.

386SX wrote on 2022-01-30, 17:22:

Tested the K6-3 400 into my Socket 7 430VX board and it works @ '66Mhz x 6' and the only lowest vcore 2,4v beside the bios see it as a 80486DX 66Mhz.
More than three times faster in CPU marks (3dnow!) in 3DMark99 compared to the P-MMX 233 and still the Rage Pro PCI get mostly the same final score.. I was expecting this to be closer to the AGP version speed but seems slower.

If you really want to extract as much performance as possible from the AGP Rage Pro (XL in my case), test it in a 440BX board overclocked to 133mhz. This AGP card has no problems running out-of-spec at 89MHz.

Meatball wrote on 2022-01-30, 17:36:

386SX wrote on 2022-01-30, 17:22:

Tested the K6-3 400 into my Socket 7 430VX board and it works @ '66Mhz x 6' and the only lowest vcore 2,4v beside the bios see it as a 80486DX 66Mhz.
More than three times faster in CPU marks (3dnow!) in 3DMark99 compared to the P-MMX 233 and still the Rage Pro PCI get mostly the same final score.. I was expecting this to be closer to the AGP version speed but seems slower.

If you really want to extract as much performance as possible from the AGP Rage Pro (XL in my case), test it in a 440BX board overclocked to 133mhz. This AGP card has no problems running out-of-spec at 89MHz.

Thanks. I also had the PCI version I was thinking was faster and mostly cpu limited but instead I suppose the difference with the AGP ("Turbo") 8MB it's quite big. It'd be interesting to find the old SGRAM upgrade modules but there're some doubts about the compatibility of those module code numbers with it.

I spent some quality time with my socket 3 system and gave it some well needed upgrades.

Upgraded the L2 cache to 1024k. That gave a pretty nice performance boost in Quake from 16.1 to 19.3 fps.

And it finally got the case fully asembled for the first time this year 😀

OSkar000 wrote on 2022-01-30, 19:12:

I spent some quality time with my socket 3 system and gave it some well needed upgrades. […]
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I spent some quality time with my socket 3 system and gave it some well needed upgrades.

IMG_20220129_110250.jpg
Upgraded the L2 cache to 1024k. That gave a pretty nice performance boost in Quake from 16.1 to 19.3 fps.

IMG_20220130_150210__01.jpg
And it finally got the case fully asembled for the first time this year 😀

The first things I thought of when I saw this fully constructed machine was the robot from the Munsters... but the Lost in Space robot is an acceptable alternative... haha...

Very nice!

Today I cleaned the ZX Spectrum+ which has just arrived. Rather quickly than perfect - it was so dirty that I decided to do it immediately. Also I've fixed the plastic legs on this machine.

Ran some ISA video card benchmarks on a DLC 40 - A couple of 8900s, a Tseng 4000, and a Mach64.

The results were, well, reproduced earlier by others, but still interesting to see, especially that the 8900D actually won, by a fair bit.

https://youtu.be/0O-tsRjLZLs

Released a new YouTube video of the Compaq showing off the multi-clock 386/486 setup I have the Blue Lightning doing (3 PC's in one >D) and describing my work on it while showing off games running on the computer at various speed setups (386 SX/20, 486 BLX2, 486 BLX4).