Last night I burned a Strike Commander install CD from my GOG.com install, then installed and tested it on my DOS PC. Worked perfectly.

clueless1 wrote:

Last night I burned a Strike Commander install CD from my GOG.com install, then installed and tested it on my DOS PC. Worked perfectly.

Nice 😀

Quite a few GOG DOS games actually provide the full installation CD. Not all unfortunately, but quite a few 😀

Some should start a database 😊

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Nice :) […]
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clueless1 wrote:

Last night I burned a Strike Commander install CD from my GOG.com install, then installed and tested it on my DOS PC. Worked perfectly.

Nice 😀

Quite a few GOG DOS games actually provide the full installation CD. Not all unfortunately, but quite a few 😀

Some should start a database 😊

Yeah, that would be cool. I don't own nearly enough GOG games to do it myself, but maybe one day...😉

One thing that I didn't like about Strike Commander in DOS was the General MIDI was so quiet compared to the digitized voice acting. I turned it up to hear the DreamBlaster S1's interpretation of General MIDI and practically popped an ear drum when the digitized voice came in. I didn't see an in-game way to adjust music/digital volumes.

It didn't seem nearly as bad on my XP system under DOSBox. And I'm REALLY enjoying the MIDI emulation of the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz! It is much better IMO than the SBLive!

386_junkie wrote:

kixs wrote:

Tested this card today. Not sure what it's all about? :confused: […]
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Tested this card today. Not sure what it's all about? 😕

Does anyone have more info?

Cute card... I like it. Could it have been used in a system with limited expansion?

Got them in a lot with other parts. These two look kinda unused. Really clean connectors and the cards itself too. Although this picture is from the net, my cards look identical.

@CelGen:
Thanks for the info. I've never seen this connector before. Will have to decide what to do with them. It would be interesting knowing what is the output resolution.

clueless1 wrote:

One thing that I didn't like about Strike Commander in DOS was the General MIDI was so quiet compared to the digitized voice acting. I turned it up to hear the DreamBlaster S1's interpretation of General MIDI and practically popped an ear drum when the digitized voice came in. I didn't see an in-game way to adjust music/digital volumes.

I think many of those older games assume you have some external volume control, whether it be on the module itself (MT-32 in the case of Strike Commander) or an external mixer.

Received my new (old) IBM PS/2 Model 30 8530 8086 today. Took quite the gamble but both the FDD and HDD still work. 😀

Formatted the proprietary IBM HDD: 20MB with some bad sectors. 😀

FX works great as well.

The last couple of days I have been testing a REALmagic Xcard which have been collecting dust since I bought it bare and untested a year ago. I have been using an Intel AL440LX motherboard with a Celeron 533 running Windows 98B and the Xcard turned out to work just fine. I do not have a VGA passthrough cable but Im using a second screen connected to the decoder cards VGA out port.

The cards documentation states that a 200 MHz system is needed to decode DVDs but today I manged to convince the Intel LX board to run a Klamath PII at 133 Mhz without L2 cache and the system can still decode my 9.8 Mbps 720*576 25 FPS PAL MPEG2 test clips flawlessly. I wonder if a 486 class CPU would be enough to play DVDs with a decoder card... I tried installing this card in a system with an Intel DX4 CPU and Windows 95B a month ago but I only got blue screens as soon as I tried to install the driver.

PeterLI wrote:

Received my new (old) IBM PS/2 Model 30 8530 8086 today. Took quite the gamble but both the FDD and HDD still work. 😀

Formatted the 20MB proprietary IBM HDD: 20MB with some bad sectors. 😀

FX works great as well.

Totes jel. Would love to add an IBM system to my collection. One that isn't an Aptiva.

PeterLI wrote:

Received my new (old) IBM PS/2 Model 30 8530 8086 today. Took quite the gamble but both the FDD and HDD still work. 😀

Formatted the 20MB proprietary IBM HDD: 20MB with some bad sectors. 😀

Ohh! I scrapped one of this in the early 2000s, still have the cpu somewhere around. Today it would have been a crime 🤣 (it was in much worse condition than yours, anyway).

I like those old IBM systems. There was a guy on Craigslist a few months ago selling 286 and 386 IBM systems in near mint shape, both with model M keyboards, for $50/machine. Kinda wish I had picked one or both up.

Replaced a bad Jamicon capacitor in a 300watt Bestec powersupply, opened up another exactly identical supply to see how the caps were in it and found everything good. Seeing as how the bad supply was packed full of dust I am amazed it only had one bulged out cap. On another note I pimped out a Celeron 478 Emachines w/o AGP for a friend and it plays HD youtube videos now. Thanks to scrap parts on hand the total cost was $0

Finally beat Rostov mission 1 on Wing Commander after about a dozen efforts, but my wingman Iceman ended up dying. I went on to the next mission and realized I will not be reassigned a new wingman! So the next mission was even harder flying solo. 🤣. Now I am considering:
a) going back to the previous mission that was so difficult and trying yet again to beat it without losing Iceman.
b) going back several saves and see if I have one at the beginning of Kurasawa that will get me back on the winning path that bypasses Rostov and goes straight to the Venice series (the final series on the winning path).

I know it's not retro but on the other hand it's not bleeding edge either the CPU came out in 2012, I finally decided to buy a new motherboard combo as the caps on my ASUS P5B 775 are looking none too good. I got this from ebay:http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/120842463987?_trksi … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT. Hopefully this will be a good replacement for my P5B, E6600 setup. Anyone know if the onboard GPU is any good? Or will I be using my old nVidia 9800 GTX+ still?

BSA Starfire wrote:

I know it's not retro but on the other hand it's not bleeding edge either the CPU came out in 2012, I finally decided to buy a new motherboard combo as the caps on my ASUS P5B 775 are looking none too good. I got this from ebay:http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/120842463987?_trksi … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT. Hopefully this will be a good replacement for my P5B, E6600 setup. Anyone know if the onboard GPU is any good? Or will I be using my old nVidia 9800 GTX+ still?

I did some looking and the onboard video is generally only "HD 3000" graphics, but it doesn't tell us specifically which model it is, so there's no way to know in general. If I would have to guess I would say that it's probably the HD3410. I had an AMD laptop with build in video a while back and it was the lowest possible tier for it's respective line. Also there's two models of that motherboard, two revisions. One has more power phases than the other. It determines which cpu's can go into it. And due to the lower power phases in general (The best one is only 4+1), some people in overclock.net forums have reported frying the entire board trying to overclock 6 core chips in it.

You're going to want a dedicated video card of some sort in this one. I would think even a 9800 GTX would be better than what comes onboard.

One of the issues with that board and the power phases is the vrm section isn't cooled and causes the AMD APM to throttle the cpu speeds back if you get near the limits.

For more information, read over here: http://www.overclock.net/t/1202751/amd-fx-cpu … 0#post_21427918

Earlier today I rescued a motherboard that was taken out by lightning in '02 or '03 together with with it's PSU. Somehow it survived beeing trashed by hiding in the loft. Used its sucsessor, an Asus A7S333, to hotflash a "new" BIOS chip.

Im testing a Gigabyte GA-5SMM SiS SS7 board from a Compaq Presario 5420.

I have not done much testing yet but so far Im positively surprised! Isnt this boards onboard SiS 6306 video solution supposed to be slow?

I would have thought that especially the Compaq version of the motherboard would struggle when using the onboard video as it lacks the optional 8MB video memory and instead uses the system ram. I have only done a few tests with the K6-400 that came with the board but so far the SiS 6306 using 4MB of CL3 PC100 SDRAM seems much faster in DOS than I would have thought and this is with the safest/slowest BIOS settings.

The Gigabyte GA-5SMM

Backed up data for an ex work mate on his Win98 box hdd using Nero Express on this P4 setup, which normally runs Linux, in VGA mode. Had to find the cd burning software buried amongst my stash. Forgot how annoying old virus checkers are. The archiving was quite straight forward. Verified the data on my P1mmx 200 box while IRCing on a 486DX2/66 system.

Bought a lot of damaged 3DFX cards last week, managed to redneck repair the Voodoo Rush and the Banshee into working order but got more cards to repair. Basically the person I had bought them from bought them from someone in Europe that decided it was ok to ship a bunch of cards without anything at all to protect them so every single card had something scraped off.

brassicGamer wrote:

Totes jel. Would love to add an IBM system to my collection. One that isn't an Aptiva.

Aptivas can be ok. IBM shipped some models with snonky ram that woudn't run their own operating system.

I forgot to mention the system the hdd I grabbed the files off was out of was NEC PowerMate VT.

Skyscraper wrote:

Im testing a Gigabyte GA-5SMM SiS SS7 board from a Compaq Presario 5420.

I have not done much testing yet but so far Im positively surprised! Isnt this boards onboard SiS 6306 video solution supposed to be slow?

I would have thought that especially the Compaq version of the motherboard would struggle when using the onboard video as it lacks the optional 8MB video memory and instead uses the system ram. I have only done a few tests with the K6-400 that came with the board but so far the SiS 6306 using 4MB of CL3 PC100 SDRAM seems much faster in DOS than I would have thought and this is with the safest/slowest BIOS settings.

I suppose those shared memory solutions are slower for 3D acceleration than the same chip with dedicated memory, but for DOS usage I can imagine that it's fast enough.