I completed Realms of the Haunting on my Pentium 66... Just as the rickety IDE drive decided it had enough, luckily this was all I wanted from it. I have now started moving the system over to SCSI thanks to a recent trade, DOS boots reliably and I am about to install WFW 3.11 on the system again. It's bloody fast on this SCSI drive.

Also listened to some Vinyl records on my old Sanyo; namely Mozart - Sinfonia Concertante and Symphony No.29... In short, real music. Not sure the neighbors approve of hearing this at such a late hour, I did try to keep the volume down but it's hard not to ramp up classical music. Probably think they live next door to a serial killer now.

I shall also look into an audio problem which has developed. At the end of RotH the audio became distorted and quiet and it didn't go away when I quit the game. I am not sure if it was a one-off bug or if the sound card has broken - either the PAS or the Audigy 2. I'd rather the Audigy 2 had died as it was busted anyway and should be retiring before the year is out. Nothing seemed hot or appeared visually damaged on the PAS anyway, so here's hoping. I'll stick my headphones into the jack after I've finished moving over to SCSI and see if that sounds OK, if it does the I'm just going to write it off as another dead input on the Audigy.

Getting some quality time on System Shock level 8. I can feel the end is near! Had to mount the headphones to be able to hear myself play, as I share a gaming room with my son who is loudly skyping with buddies while playing first person shooters. 😲

At least, that's how I used to do it.

My floppy drive just died, had a feeling it was going out. Luckily, I pillaged a spare from a neighbors trash when they moved out, so it's no big deal.

HighTreason wrote:

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At least, that's how I used to do it.

My floppy drive just died, had a feeling it was going out. Luckily, I pillaged a spare from a neighbors trash when they moved out, so it's no big deal.

Yep! That's pretty much it! 🤣.

That's the crappy part of retro computing...old stuff tends to die in waves, but if you're resourceful (as you've shown you are), just plug in a spare and move along. Well done, Mr. Treason.

The best part is he's wearing his headphones, so I just hear his end of the conversation, and the headphones are up so loud he sounds like he's having a conversation at a rock concert.

Woohoo! Just beat System Shock. 😀

I really need to play that again.

Finally finished installing WFW, took longer than expected because my CD burner wouldn't play ball. Then the system locked up, seems my LAN card is playing up now... FFFFFUUUUUU!!! This is a Socket 4 machine, you'd expect the motherboard and CPU to be the first thing to play up, but it's everything else. As luck would have it, I have another ISA adapter as well as having a PCI slot left (I have an abundance of PCI cards) so I can put it right if the card is actually dead. However, I changed the PCI IRQ table and I think I've been ignorant and assigned the unused slot the same IRQ as the network card, which would explain why the lockup is random, no idea and I'm tired so I'll fix it tomorrow. The system wants to work anyway and that's what matters, plus I'm starting to like the system even more than I did already, seems the ones that are just a little annoying to set up end up being the ones I like best. I like this one second best after my U5S machine.

Ugh, the joys of computing with old hardware, there's always a lot of pressing buttons in the dark involved.

Edit: Couldn't help myself. Yeah, I had assigned the empty slot IRQ11 without thinking, which was the IRQ used by the Ethernet card. Probably did this when I stripped out the NCR BIOS. Not sure how well it works yet but it didn't lock on starting windows, so good omens so far.

Still going. Forgot to copy the TCP stack over, but I'll just grab it with a DOS FTP client. Damn this thing is fast.

Made more progress on my Genesis to Gameport adaptor project. Got everything soldered onto the protoboard. Loaded a bunch of throwaway test programs onto the Arduino and confirmed connectivity by verifying it was creating square waves on the proper pins and NOT any other pins 😀.

Tomorrow I will solder it up to the ports and start functional testing. I'll probably need to shorten some of those wires too 😐

Started work on testing the Amiga 500 core for the Mist FPGA computer. It works really well, but the icing on the cake is if you hook it up to a CRT monitor. OMG the Mist really needs to be used with a CRT monitor. I had an Amiga 500 back in the day and this IS like the real thing, but with a lot of convenient extras!

Filming a CRT screen is a pain, but direct captures don't really show what's going on.

HighTreason wrote:

I It's bloody fast on this SCSI drive.

Shame it's not a 10,000rpm drive. Those things scream along.

I did look up the speed and noted it was 7200RPM. To be honest, I doubt much of anything noticeable would happen on a faster drive here, the computer isn't that fast anyway. Almost everything is instantaneous already.

At least, until Windows 7's crappy netcode gets involved;

I can't wait until I get that damn Athlon set up after I move and I can go back to 98 for this kind of thing, this Windows 7 is bloody useless at nearly everything, it can't even grasp how to write to a FAT16 file system properly, it pisses and moans about things like that constantly. But the DOS/Win31/9X machines? They just sit there and do as they're told most of the time, even when I'm trying to make them do stuff they're not meant to do - they'll even read NTFS drives with minimal issues. It isn't like most of this stuff hasn't been standardized for years now, so fuck knows why they suddenly can't get it right any more as of 2009.

I should benchmark the drive in the machine to see how fast it actually goes, I expect it to push well into double figures anyway.

I was out in the yard today! Growing my own carrots, peas, beets, green onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and rhubarb this year.

Not exactly a retro activity on its own, but listening to a wonderful playlist comprised of the Moody Blues/CSNY/Grateful Dead/Renaissance/T. Rex/ELO makes it so! 😀

Organizing my DOS games today. I originally had one partition (C:) for games published from 1990 to 1993, and another partition (E:) for games published from 1994-1997, but the latter was out of space, so I moved the 1994 games to C:. That gives me roughly 500MB free space on each partition. The D: partition has a special job--it houses Wing Commander III (1.8GB) so it can play entirely from the HDD. Worst comes to worst, I can pop out one more partition and move my CD-ROM from F: to G:.

sent my MT32 dac trimmer pcb to oshpark fab. will see in a month how much noise it reduces it by or if its worthless 😀

This has been going on for a while now... slowly packing things into larger boxes, labelling and moving everything for temporary storage to my parents house.

I know I have loads of everything but this is getting ridiculous 🤣 I'm beginning to wonder if I'll have enough space in my new place 😲 😊

kixs wrote:

This has been going on for a while now... slowly packing things into larger boxes, labelling and moving everything for temporary storage to my parents house.

I know I have loads of everything but this is getting ridiculous 🤣 I'm beginning to wonder if I'll have enough space in my new place 😲 😊

Packing stuff into large boxes is super nice! 15 years from now you will find so much useful stuff you had forgot you ever owned! 🤣

Skyscraper wrote:

kixs wrote:

This has been going on for a while now... slowly packing things into larger boxes, labelling and moving everything for temporary storage to my parents house.

I know I have loads of everything but this is getting ridiculous 🤣 I'm beginning to wonder if I'll have enough space in my new place 😲 😊

Packing stuff into large boxes is super nice! 15 years from now you will find so much useful stuff you had forgot you ever owned! 🤣

🤣

I'm pretty confident that I know what I have... at least the important stuff. But when I look at the boxes and a pile of AT/ATX cases... then I'm not so sure any more 😊

If all goes to plan I'll move into "new" man cave sometime this summer and then arrange everything so nothing gets left behind 😁 This time I'll have a full room for myself... which is much much more then now - a corner in the living room - I might take a picture of it as it's getting more empty and "normal" again 🤣

I have spent alot of time trying to get my Juko Nest Turbo XT board working, not having much luck.

As I wanted to see if the 41256 parity chips and 8 of the many 44256 chips I have used when testing the XT clone still worked I put them in a Chips chipset 286 motherboard with an Intel 286 12 MHz. I also wanted to test a multi I/O card that came with the latest scrap lot I bought a few weeks ago. This is not the 286 motherboard I borrowed the parity chips from but another that complained over having no parity chips when I tried to test it to see if it worked right after I got it.

This motherboard came in a scrap lot I bought 4-5 months ago and there is no obvious way to disable parity although the board has an advanced BIOS for a 12 MHz 286. I perhaps found the parity setting just now (tinkering with it as I write), "AUX parity ---> enabled/disabled" set by changing bit 6 at adress 46H from 0 to 1. I love this BIOS, SCAT is a name it dosn't deserve!

The motherboard is marked "FM-2 R0" (or perhaps RO) but I cant find it in TH99 or anywhere else. The BIOS chip is marked 1986 but looking at the size of board I would say it's a much later model, perhaps from 1990-1991, the 12 MHz Intel 286 CPU seems to be from week 33 1990.

This is how the motherboard looks on the "test bench", also known as "on top of the working XT clone system"

This motherboard seems to work perfectly and look at that video performance in Landmark, not bad for a 12 MHz 286!

Edit

With the "AUX parity bit" set to disabled the video performance improved from an already high level...

Does anyone have a 12 MHz 286 with better video performance in Landmark ? 😀

/Edit

Today i was being busy on testing some purchased ISA 8-bit cards in my laser XT 8086 /3.. And dumped 3 roms as backup.

Lately iam not so active anymore.. Because i have lot to do, and dont know where to start.

Upgraded the hard drive in my WinXP Gog box to a 500GB VelociRaptor. This drive was the boot drive in my son's (modern) gaming PC, but he got it so loaded up with Steam games that he had less than 70GB free. So I bought him a 1TB Seagate SSHD, migrated his install to it, then reaped the spoils of leftovers for myself. 😉 I had a 250GB Seagate 7200.10 as my original boot drive, so we both got doubled capacity for $65.