JayCeeBee64 wrote:

I don't have any ongoing projects, I've finished all of them - the last two over a year ago. I'll post about them when the time is right.

I don't have anything planned for the future either, I already have everything I want. It's not money, it's lack of time and incentive to pursue any more projects. I'll continue to enjoy what I already have and concentrate on more important matters (like my physical and mental health).

Fair enough... and thanks for sharing. I understand how you mean by the incentive... in thought I have went there and questioned the purpose.

You are fortunate to have finished all your projects... and are able to say "no" to any more, that's a good position to be in.... especially putting more focus into your self.

vvbee wrote:

I just do what I enjoy doing without compartmentalizing it.

In some ways... that's the best way to be... though it sounds like you have a lot of freedom.... with both space and time.

This thread is just a Window of opportunity for you to share a momentary snapshot of something from your computer related creative side.

386_junkie wrote:

In some ways... that's the best way to be... though it sounds like you have a lot of freedom.... with both space and time.

Freedom of thought, sure. For some creativity is a hobby and for some it's more fundamental.

The S939 Opteron CPUs have 1MB L2 cache per core, while most of the regular Athlon 64 CPUs only have 512KB L2 cache per core.

The Opterons generally also overclock a lot better than the regular Athlon 64 CPUs.

De-lidding a S939 CPU can net you a reduction in load temperatures of about 20 Celsius.

I still have my Opteron 175 I bought new back in the day. I de-lidded it soon after I bought it. That is how I know what temperature drop to expect from it.
Depending on the cooler being used, you may have to modify the cooler and bend the hold down bracket to hold it tight enough after de-lidding though.

Anyway, de-lidding is not for everyone, but it works like a charm on S939 CPUs.

I'm currently gathering parts for a year 2000 build. The backbone is an ABIT VP6 dual socket 370 motherboard. I'm debating on what speed CPUs to run, and am waiting for a decent nVidia GeForce2 GTS Ultra (or Pro) to come up for sale. As for the CPUs, I'm thinking of settling for a pair of 850 or 900 Mhz PIIIs and trying to push them over 1GHz. I just picked up a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 for the system, and already have a couple HDDs right for the job; in fact they're actual drives I myself bought new 18 years ago.

I'm still on the lookout for an appropriate case. So far my plan is to upcycle a Dell Dimension D266 case I recently picked up, at least until something more exciting comes my way. That style of Dell case holds a special place in my heart and makes sense for a build like this, as if somebody who bought a D266 in 1997 might of upgraded their hardware in 2000 😀

An Opteron 185 is my daily computer.

I am curremtly messing around with early 3D games on a Cyrix 5x86-133 w/Voodoo2 to determine which titles from 1994-1998 are playable. What I am finding is that most games with 3dfx support or a patch play nice. It is quite labourous to find all the games and the patches and set it all up.

Currently deciding on motherboard for a non-VLB 486 build with a DX50. It'll be a highend early 90s build with a ATI Mach32, Gravis Ultrasound, Soundblaster Pro or 16, SCSI, 2x CD-ROM.

At the moment I'm playing around with the motherboards. I have a ASUS 486-ISA and a ASUS VL/EISA-486SV1. The latter I havent tested yet, but it supports EISA and also has a VLB slot. It is one of the earliest boards I've found with VLB.

feipoa wrote:

It is quite labourous to find all the games and the patches and set it all up.

^^This.. and it's exactly the reason I create backup images once everything is properly patched.

Artex wrote:

feipoa wrote:

It is quite labourous to find all the games and the patches and set it all up.

^^This.. and it's exactly the reason I create backup images once everything is properly patched.

This effort and stress is what makes me dive back into hardware again. The game effort seems to come back about once a year, usually when I need to catch up on sleep because I simply don't have patience for the software, so I turn it off and go to bed.

vetz wrote:

Currently deciding on motherboard for a non-VLB 486 build with a DX50. It'll be a highend early 90s build with a ATI Mach32, Gravis Ultrasound, Soundblaster Pro or 16, SCSI, 2x CD-ROM.

At the moment I'm playing around with the motherboards. I have a ASUS 486-ISA and a ASUS VL/EISA-486SV1. The latter I havent tested yet, but it supports EISA and also has a VLB slot. It is one of the earliest boards I've found with VLB.

Wicked - an Intel DX50 w/VLB and EISA. You'd be taking on quite a goal and I hope it works out!

Mostly finished rebuilding my Socket 7 P233MMX system. Just a couple tweaks remaining and then I'll make a post about it in the System Specs forum. Then I'll need a new flagship project. 😀

Before it was a slightly modified Dell XPS m200a system. However, after building my 486 system last year and ending up with an extra baby AT case, I decided I wanted to build a new Socket 7 system "for real" (using said baby AT case) and not cheap out by using an OEM machine. 😜 Of course, that's just a silly idea that got stuck in my head, and in reality absolutely nothing is wrong with using an OEM machine.

Recently I "rescued" my old 486 DX2/50. It's always been well stored and taken care of. But a couple of years back I suddenly remembered to take out the varta bomb. I was too late, it did minor damage to an IC socket, which I replaced. A couple of traces on the Multi I/O board got hit too, so I repaired that. I also got a spare replacement card to have on hand. Got around to spot-cleaning the area with Q-Tips and spiffing it to perfection.

It's rather modestly equipped with: 16MB RAM - 8 on the motherboard 8 on the M810 memory card
3x HDD 200MB, 504MB, 1.6GB, 2X speed CD-ROM 5.25, 3.5, PM14400FX modem, Epson MX-80
CT1740 SB16 + ASP + Waveblaster, 2 parallel ports, 256K L2 cache, Promise IDE secondary interface
3Com 3C515 10/100 NIC, 2 serial ports, Cirrus 5422 1MB graphics, ZipDisk 100, Snappy Digitizer
dual CMOS battery backup, 2 game ports, MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1, Phoenix BIOS
Western Digital Drive Overlay utility, DriveSpace, 613K or 630K conventional memory configs

I'm in the final stages of routing cables and just testing everything out. Polishing, cleaning, dusting, perhaps adjusting the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys, and conducting a modern-day backup through disk imaging.

On a different note, for the longest time I wanted to build up a PPro-200 on a VS440FX mainboard. There were some questions and ambiguities about the RAM configuration I never could get a straightforward answer on. Eventually I got as far as acquiring all the parts except for a case & powersupply and the upgrade ram.

I gave up out of frustration and the parts got returned to my parts box. The time and energy I would've eventually have spent on it will likely go toward a good fixing and cleaning/polishing my 1400MHz Tualatin rig.

Another reason I gave up was would it have been a worthwhile project? The would-be machine was from an era when not only processor speed was seeing huge gains, but so were instruction sets increasing in number and complexity.

And direct experience tells me that a processor destined for long-term use is more likely to be made outdated by new instructions it doesn't support rather than clock speed. It eventually becomes a matter of software not running at all as opposed to just running slowly. And the P-Pro didn't even have MMX.

The past weeks I’ve had someone recap all my Taiwanese motherboards from the bad cap area. Those should be all finished now (will receive the last two today I think). Now that’s finished, I can finally start assembling and configuring my dream retro pc setup, that will consist of various PIII systems (slot 1 and S370) and two slightly newer S478 based Celeron pc’s (already have a perfectly working 486). I have all the parts already (took me a year or so to buy everything, a lot of it is NOS) except for two new graphics card coolers (will order them soon). Most pc’s will get NVIDIA gpu based graphics cards, one ATI Rage Pro 128 and a Voodoo2 system. Hopefully I don’t have to recap my Asus P3B-F and another slot 1 Compaq workstation motherboard (caps still look ok). Needless to say this has cost a tremendous amount of money, but I don’t have kids or anything like that, so there I go 😊 One system is already built and running. My plan is to use the pc’s for old race games and perhaps some shooters and action games from around the year 2000.

Another project will be to refurbish my old Toshiba laptops (and one Siemens). Those systems need to be cleaned, need new rtc and backup batteries and may need more RAM and / or new hard disks. I won’t replace the main batteries, because I don’t use them.

So 2018 is full of projects!

My flagship project is the one that's getting me back into hardware after a long hiatus and what brought me to this circle: rebuilding my first PC! I actually kept the original motherboard, CPU, and some of the cards though I have no idea if any of it works. Why am I doing this? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm very much enjoying getting back into hardware after basically doing nothing but software for years.

I have spare parts on the way and I've already received some of them, but I'm still missing the power supply adapter I need to actually fire it up. I do plan to upgrade this build with period and modern parts. I already have an ATX power supply and 4GB DoM (the last hard drive I had in this machine was 3.2GB so that's about right). I'm thinking about putting a 233MMX in it (instead of the 133MHz Pentium) and I really want a Voodoo card because I never had one at the time, but they're pretty expensive where I am.
Of course it will all be documented in a video series, once I have time to make that.

Well, in life in general my flagship project is relocating all my hardware, and myself, and everything else to Nevada.

But on the hardware side, the 486 will always be my primary flagship project. That's my favorite era of hardware, and that's the hardware that I tend to get the most mileage out of stretching back and forward. I'm planning a lot of operating system experiments with the 486, which will get even more rampant once I finally move into a house of my own. Current plans for my 486 are...

Build out an 80GB HDD with Windows XP SP1, I will likely be doing this on my modern system, and doing the activation and everything else like that on the 486 post-install. Many have asked me if I've tried this, a few have done it, I felt it's time I try it myself, see how far I can push this generation, because it seems every time I think I've hit the ceiling on what the 80486 generation is capable of, I find out I'm wrong somehow. I thought you could not run a more recent Firefox on it....well, through Toastytech I can on 95, and Windows 2000 with some tweaks can run some pretty recent Firefox revisions, and while not the fastest thing in the world it was tolerable enough to me, about like surfing on 56K on 8MB of RAM.

Hardware-wise, aside from RH17 drive caddies and more hard disks, I'm pretty much done though, unless I find a Mach32/64VLB or something like that with 2+MB of VRAM capable of 3D or somesuch, or add USB support via an ISA card. About the only thing to work out is why I get parity errors running 128MB of Fast Page Parity RAM in a system that supports both that amount and parity - unless I should try Non-Parity, which I will be doing in the future. But even then, I kind of don't like the performance penalty of having so much RAM. The POST memory count takes for bleegin' ever with that much.

For the most part, my retro PC's are pretty much perfected. Another project is after we get the house,I plan to setup a set of retro-workspaces for each PC so that it can feel like the time period when you are there. I was thinking an early 90's computing space for the 486, late 80's for the 286, and early 80's for the Tandy. Hang up some Ultima maps and maybe some nice looking game posters from the 80's/90's and be done with it, maybe some plastic plants too.

But yeah, the 486, that's my main - when we were moving, I said if I had to sacrifice all but one vintage PC, teh 486 is the one that stays...

My current main computer-related flagship project is digital video and audio transfer.

For audio transfer: I've setup a hand-me-down Dell Dimension 4600 to use for this purpose, the biggest audio transfer project I've done on there so far is consolidate an album that I own on a cassette tape and a scratched CD into one fully functional audio CD with all of the defects removed on the tracks that I've recovered from the original CD, fragments from the cassette were used for repairing tracks that had noticeable damage. This isn't the end of the audio transfer project, I have one more CD+cassette combo album to consolidate.

For video transfer: I'm working on rebuilding a spare Dell Optiplex GX520 desktop to be usable for this task, since its original motherboard had no PCI-e slot and was limited to Netburst LGA775 processors, I replaced it with an Optiplex 745 motherboard to gain PCI-e and C2D compatibility. I now have a spare nVidia Geforce GT610 video card in there to help with video decoding and encoding, currently waiting for my Core 2 Duo to arrive, and I still need to source a good hard drive before I can start this project.

I have a copy of Corel Videostudio Essentials X4 to use for this purpose, I've used it before on my secondary PC until a Windows Update broke its functionality, therefore I'm using a separate computer for my video transfer projects, it's probably a good idea because that way I can easily bring my video transfer rig (the Frankenstein Optiplex) down to plug into our DVR rather than have to unplug my secondary rig and go through the trouble of setting it back up afterwards. The capture device I'll be using is a TOTMC USB Composite/S-Video capture dongle, I'll use a 2004 Sylvania VHS/DVD Combo Player (with hi-fi sound) for VHS transfers, a 2011 Sony DVD player for DVD transfers, and a Grex stabilizer for clips from store-bought VHS tapes. I have a collection of home-recorded DVDs and VHS tapes that I'd like to digitalize for safekeeping.

My actual flagship computer isn't going to change much at this point until NVIDIA starts putting out some Volta cards at saner-than-Titan V prices to succeed my GTX 980. Beyond that, it's waiting to see how i9 and Threadripper play out so I can migrate to a platform not constrained by limited PCIe lanes, including things like being able to use a fancier video capture framegrabber card that needs PCIe x4 and not compromising everything else in the system as a result.

As for my retro flagship? PC-wise, that's my mostly-complete 98SE/XP combo build. Just need to move the XP installation over from a PATA to a SATA drive so that I can see if dual SATA drives will cause Win98SE to actually boot all the way in a dual-boot-via-F12-menu setup. (I prefer dedicating each OS to its own drive, as it averts bootloader-related issues.)

However, that's not my main retro project right now. I have an Amiga 500 in need of restoration, particularly a damaged keyboard membrane that I can't seem to expose the traces on without accidentally scraping the trace material off along with the insulation, and for which I can't buy replacement keyboard membranes because nobody has any in stock! I'm thinking of just getting a USB keyboard adapter and a Gotek USB floppy drive emulator with an OLED screen while I'm at it, as I doubt I'll have a Vampire 500 V2+ board for this thing any time soon.

My current project is building a decent 486 system with an Asus PVI-486SP3 motherboard. I have two versions to test - 1.22 and 1.8. I'm waiting on cache chips to upgrade both to 512 KB, and next time I have enough cash I will max out the FPM memory. The rev 1.8 will be built first, as I will be testing a Cx5x86-133 for a friend. Once both boards are upgraded and tested, they will have AMD 5x86-133 chips when not testing other CPUs.

Next up will be a socket 423 system with RAMBUS memory, followed by a socket 478 system with a 64-bit CPU (there were a couple), which will dual-boot 32 bit and 64 bit versions of XP.

Then a 486 system slow enough to run 16 MHz processors, if I can't find setting for the Asus board.

386 systems will happen somewhere down the line, when I find the right boards and can afford a RapidCAD set.

So I have a few projects lined up for this year, and a ton (or at least a third of a ton) of hardware to play with and eventually test. Ultimately I want to be able to test every generation of x86 CPUs and graphics cards and have fully working systems for all of them, but that's a much longer term project.

Currently, I have no ongoing major projects...but I have been planning to put together an as-close-as-possible recreation of my first ever custom build from 2002. Unfortunately, I've had to shelve the plans for this rebuild indefinitely because real life intervened...and real life is friggin' expensive. 😵