I loaded up Win95 and tested MP3 playback on the DX2-66 machine I recently rescued.

I took a FLAC encoded song and transcoded it to MP3 at different bit rates and sample rates. The highest quality that the DX2 could handle without skipping was a 11KHz/mono/48kbps file. Stereo playback topped out at just 32kb/s. The entire Windows UI slowed to a crawl during playback.

Is that performance normal for a DX-2? I'm almost certain that the DX4-100 I had a few years ago could handle 22KHz/stereo/64kbps MP3s.

It's really quite amazing how much faster the Pentium is at MP3 decoding. A P100 had no problem playing 44KHz/stereo/320kbps MP3s, making it several times faster per cycle than the 486.

Anyone know of a fast AAC decoder for Win95?

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

The Turbo does indeed work quite well. Engaging it and you get a similar performance to a 386DX 25 MHz I would say. Disabling the internal cache also works, and get roughly half of the performance of that. So yea, it gives you quite a few options.

Had to use Turbo to get Monkey Island to play the MT-32 music correctly 😀

Yeah it's about the last class of machine that the turbo button is of any use I think - some socket 7 boards have it but I can't imagine that it's of any use?

I'm messing around with my 16MHz 286 at the moment and adding a wait state via the BIOS and using the turbo slows it down to an ~8MHz 286, which is a good speed for a couple of CGA era games that would otherwise run way too fast. It was actually a handy feature for a while 😎

Did some very satisfying Task Scheduling on my XP machine. I've got two physical drives: a 500GB Velociraptor for C: and a 750GB Seagate for D:. I use Macrium Reflect to run weekly full images and daily differential backups of C: to D:. I wanted to set up scheduled backups, defrags and DiskFresh scans in such a way that none of the tasks overlaps and none of them occur when I am on the computer. So it took a bit of (very enjoyable) fiddling with the schedules to get it all sorted out.

So in the end, it looks something like this:
-Macrium Reflect full backup on Fridays at 4:00am; daily differentials at 4:00am on Sat-Thu
-MyDefrag "SystemDiskMonthly" script runs on the Velociraptor at 8:00am on Mon, Wed, and Fri.
-MyDefrag "DataDiskMonthly" script runs on the Seagate at 8:00am on Tue, Thu.
-DiskFresh scan of the Velociraptor every Saturday at 11:59pm
-DiskFresh scan of the Seagate every Sunday at 10:00pm.

The computer goes into Standby after 1 hr of inactivity and each task is set wake the PC when it runs.

All of this was reliant on getting my UPS hooked up (I live in an area that has frequent severe thunderstorms), which I did a couple of days ago. Prior, I just powered everything off when not in use or during storms.

Why is Task Scheduler so satisfying? 🤣.

badmojo wrote:

Yeah it's about the last class of machine that the turbo button is of any use I think - some socket 7 boards have it but I can't imagine that it's of any use?

I use it for flipping multipliers. Does that count? 😲

I just finished testing some floppies I got at Goodwill for $2 the other day. It was box of Maxel double density "Micro Floppies". Most were still in plastic wrappers, and I hardly ever see 720K disks, so I grabbed it.

Two were formatted by a Brother word processor so were inaccessible to Windows, but at the command prompt in Windows 7 I was able to format them using "format a: /u" with my Lacie USB floppy drive.

In the end I've got 8 like-new 720K Maxell disks, a repurposed 720K Brother disk (looked brand new; was only readable with a word processor, so I wiped it) and two decent looking 1.44MB disks. And the Maxell box of course.

Not bad for $2. 😀

I've had to cobble all of my 720K disks with tape up till now.

@HighTreason

May not be your way to do things, but you can ignore posts by people who rub you up the wrong way - see the "Friends and foes" tab of your user profile.

kithylin wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

I feel so cheated, I paid for 3dmark03, 3dmark05 and 3dmark06 early 2015, not fair 🤣

At least I'm the other way. I never paid for 3dmark 2005 and have been using the free version forever. We couldn't post valid results into their website via the report-online function unless we had a valid key. I got a free copy of 3dmark 2006 pro with my EVGA 8800 GTX way back when, and that's been my ticket to free version.. and I paid for `99 max, 2000, 2001se, 2003, and vantage though. Now I get to go back some time and re-test lots of my older machines and configurations with full 2005 suite and start filling out the 2005 section of my 3dmark profile with results.. 😀

I paid for

2003, 2005, 2006, Vantage, 11, and 3dMark

I bought the soundtrack to an old game from my childhood and gave it a listen today. It's from Masterworks' Flux, released in 1999. One of the first puzzle games to use Direct3D to my knowledge. I have the game and like it well enough but the soundtrack is what interested me more than the game. To get the soundtrack I bought Rudolf Clausius's Helix album on CDBaby, but I think this guy plagiarized the music from the game because the music is the same (although the titles are different, I recognize the music as being ripped from the game) but the artists (who are given proper credit in the game) are not given proper credit. Kind of a bad thing to support by buying it but I wanted that soundtrack since I played it in the early early 2000s as a young child, so...

It's late 90s techno music at its best IMO.

Website for the game is still up, at http://planetflux.com, but I'm not sure that you can download the game anymore... For some reason my version of the game refuses to run on Windows 98, but it will run on 2000-7 just fine. Doesn't work at all on 8/10.

I moved two entertainments centers, with a 37" CRT and 27" CRT and four consoles from the upstairs guest room to what we now dub "the gaming room". This room is where my XP, Win98 and DOS PCs are as well as my son's modern gaming PC. The 37" CRT and its entertainment center were especially challenging. The 37" CRT weighs almost as much as I do. Had a little help from my wife, but did the majority of it myself. I had to have a few beers after and played some NES to celebrate. In this photo my son is playing Wii Sports.

On the left is the 37" CRT with Wii, Dreamcast and DVD player. On the right is the 27" CRT with NES, Atari 2600 and VHS player.

Note the original NES and Wii boxes on the top of the left entertainment center.

Was working on trying to get a Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 to let me run a remote X session on an O2 in another room but when it got around 30c outside the computer started getting really spammy with the temperature alerts and I had to shut it down until the evening.

Being busy on my Fastest windows 98 machine.. Actually i call it a Year2K machine because iam trying to see if i can get windows ME installed on it.. And perhaps iam want to use also windows 2000 in dual boot..

Everything runs on an AMD Athlon XP system (my first intention was to go for a Pentium 4, but i changed my mind on that)

The build would be very easy to make, so i dont expect that i need much time to complete it.. want to run games from 1999 *that needs a faster processor then Pentium III 550Mhz till the year 2003-04 ish..

Installed Win98se to test out my Celeron 466 on the Shuttle 687z motherboard, 256mb of PC133 Ram and AGP Voodoo 3 3000. This board also has a Forte Media FM801 sound chip integrated. Not tested it in any games yet.

Stock speed it did a SuperPi 1M time of 6m19s. Ramped up the FSB to 83mhz for 582mhz and SuperPi 1M time of 4m59s. Will try and run some games in a couple of days and do some benchmarks.

Yesterday I got this 486 computer. A friend had found it on an electrical waste recycling center and had rescued it for me.

Not very retro but I'll list it anyway. Got a Lenovo IS6XM motherboard (socket 1155) a couple of weeks ago, but haven't had time to deal with it until now. It's originally from a Thinkcentre E30 workstation. Just installed in it my old i7-2600 and 16GB. It seems like the on-board video is dead, probably why I got it so cheap (though it wasn't listed as such). I had to waste one of the 2 PCI slots to install a video card (TNT2 🤣) because I don't have a low-end PCIe video card and a Radeon 5870 would be overkill for what I want to do with this board. I just ordered a Radeon 2400 from ebay for $7 for it for longer-term use because I want to free the PCI slot and I have no other use for the PCIex16 anyway.

Currently installing Funtoo Linux on it. Even with the i7 it will still take a couple of hours to compile everything. (Funtoo is a fork of Gentoo; all software is installed by compiling from source)

This board will become basically a learning computer for my 10-year-old; I want to teach her Linux/Unix, as well as managing services on it. I'm currently administering a few game servers for her, and I want to offload this responsibility. 😀

stamasd wrote:

Not very retro but I'll list it anyway. Got a Lenovo IS6XM motherboard (socket 1155) a couple of weeks ago, but haven't had time to deal with it until now. It's originally from a Thinkcentre E30 workstation. Just installed in it my old i7-2600 and 16GB. It seems like the on-board video is dead, probably why I got it so cheap (though it wasn't listed as such). I had to waste one of the 2 PCI slots to install a video card (TNT2 🤣) because I don't have a low-end PCIe video card and a Radeon 5870 would be overkill for what I want to do with this board. I just ordered a Radeon 2400 from ebay for $7 for it for longer-term use because I want to free the PCI slot and I have no other use for the PCIex16 anyway.

Currently installing Funtoo Linux on it. Even with the i7 it will still take a couple of hours to compile everything. (Funtoo is a fork of Gentoo; all software is installed by compiling from source)

This board will become basically a learning computer for my 10-year-old; I want to teach her Linux/Unix, as well as managing services on it. I'm currently administering a few game servers for her, and I want to offload this responsibility. 😀

Just so you know for the future, we have a "modern stuff" thread over here: Bought this (Modern) hardware today

I went looking for one of my two mice I should have around that has a USB to PS/2 adapter so I could finally get around to testing an HP desktop I bought at a thrift store so long ago. I couldn't find either of them but I did come across an AT to PS/2 adapter for a keyboard. I guess worst case I may pull out one of the machines I was thinking about doing Windows 98SE with and start tinkering with it. I've also been watching a few of Phil's videos on YouTube and have gotten a few good ideas on what I should really do now that I have a bit more time on my hands to get some retro stuff done.

I played about 30 minutes of Ultima Underworld early this morning. It's amazing how much more immersive the game is when played in darkness and silence.

kithylin wrote:

Just so you know for the future, we have a "modern stuff" thread over here: Bought this (Modern) hardware today

Yeah but this isn't about something I just bought, but something I just built from parts I already had. More of an "activity" than a "buying spree". 😀

got a usb floppy disk that can do DD+HD 3.5" disks so I can image my Magnetic Scrolls collection disks...

I took images, and I copied the files off.. now I get to see if I can install it into dosbox and test it out...

archiving disks ugh...

thegardentool wrote:

I went looking for one of my two mice I should have around that has a USB to PS/2 adapter so I could finally get around to testing an HP desktop I bought at a thrift store so long ago. I couldn't find either of them but I did come across an AT to PS/2 adapter for a keyboard. I guess worst case I may pull out one of the machines I was thinking about doing Windows 98SE with and start tinkering with it. I've also been watching a few of Phil's videos on YouTube and have gotten a few good ideas on what I should really do now that I have a bit more time on my hands to get some retro stuff done.

I found a USB to PS/2 adapter but not the IntelliMouse I think it goes to so no old mouse support still. I went ahead and pulled the desktop out for the first time since I bought it just to take a peek inside and power it up. I honestly had no idea what hardware was inside because when I bought it I went with what I could find off of a few eBay listings quickly. I thought it was a non-MMX Pentium based off of those, but it turns out it is a Socket 3 with an AMD 486 DX2-66. The model is HP Vectra VE4/66. It turns on and everything seems to work that I tested quickly. I'm going to try to give a good dusting out tomorrow as there were some probably 14 year old dust balls inside it.