It's summer, and since summer always puts me in a PowerPC lovin' kinda mood, I brought out Super G5: my quad-core, liquid-cooled, air-conditioner breaking, crème de la crème of PPC rigs.

And since tomorrow is movie night, I've decided to put those AltiVec-infused wonder cores to work by creating a D-VHS Edition of the 17th best movie ever: Zoolander!

That's right: if I can somehow get all of this to work, I'll probably be the only dude in the world with Zoolander on glorious 1080i D-Theater tape.

Super G5's already crunching the numbers. She's taking my Zoolander MKV file (ripped directly from blu-ray), and transcoding the original 1080p H.264 video to a more DVHS-friendly 1080i MPEG-2 stream, at a constant bit-rate of 28mb/s. The machine's been working at it for a little over an hour now, and estimated time remaining looks to be roughly 5 hours. That's actually not bad at all! I forgot how much faster MPEG-2 encoding was/is on these old 2005 machines. It's H264 encoding that really brings pre-Core2 machines to their knees.

Of course, the next challenge will be getting the computer to talk to the D-VHS deck. However, it's all done through FireWire, and since these old PowerMacs were pretty much designed to be the video editor's BFF, I'm hoping that it'll Just Work. Hopefully in time for TGIF movie night!

I built a little gaming machine for my retro desk as I have zero retro gaming urge at the moment. I bought a H85 motherboard for £35 and a Haswell Xeon 1220V3 (which is a 3.1GHz i5 with 8mb of cache) for £21. I had enough DDR3 RAM lying around and I'm reusing my 1070ti because gone are the days where I'd be able to pick up something like a GTX 570 for £20. I've got a 850GB SSD. It's all set up and I've got some games downloading but it's all entirely pointless as it can't do anything that my main PC can't do but I guess I have a block that prevents me from not having anything set up on my retro desk!

Currently building my mom a computer out of the M5A97 R2.0 board, FX-6300 CPU, 8GB RAM that came with the M5A99FX Pro R2.0 bundle I won off of eBay, and a GT610 PCIe video card.

Going to order a sound card, wireless card, keyboard, mouse, optical drive, bay covers, multi-memory card reader, 2.5"-3.5" hot swap SATA adapter, a PSU, heatsink compound, an SSD, spare case fans, and a good monitor from either Amazon or Microcenter.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-07-16, 03:38:

It's summer, and since summer always puts me in a PowerPC lovin' kinda mood, I brought out Super G5: my quad-core, liquid-cooled […]
Show full quote

It's summer, and since summer always puts me in a PowerPC lovin' kinda mood, I brought out Super G5: my quad-core, liquid-cooled, air-conditioner breaking, crème de la crème of PPC rigs.

And since tomorrow is movie night, I've decided to put those AltiVec-infused wonder cores to work by creating a D-VHS Edition of the 17th best movie ever: Zoolander!

That's right: if I can somehow get all of this to work, I'll probably be the only dude in the world with Zoolander on glorious 1080i D-Theater tape.

Super G5's already crunching the numbers. She's taking my Zoolander MKV file (ripped directly from blu-ray), and transcoding the original 1080p H.264 video to a more DVHS-friendly 1080i MPEG-2 stream, at a constant bit-rate of 28mb/s. The machine's been working at it for a little over an hour now, and estimated time remaining looks to be roughly 5 hours. That's actually not bad at all! I forgot how much faster MPEG-2 encoding was/is on these old 2005 machines. It's H264 encoding that really brings pre-Core2 machines to their knees.

Of course, the next challenge will be getting the computer to talk to the D-VHS deck. However, it's all done through FireWire, and since these old PowerMacs were pretty much designed to be the video editor's BFF, I'm hoping that it'll Just Work. Hopefully in time for TGIF movie night!

That sounds like an awesome project. But please tell me your going to watch it on a projector.

Yesterday, recording and mixing tunes on BandLab, adding guitar and bass parts.

Today, messing with a bunch of old Servers at work that need Decommed. See if there's anything usable....maybe even build one out for our special I.T. File Share.

creepingnet wrote on 2021-07-16, 15:06:

Today, messing with a bunch of old Servers at work that need Decommed. See if there's anything usable....maybe even build one out for our special I.T. File Share.

How old? This guy could use some ECC SDRAM slung his way... Does this IBM board only work with ECC RAM?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-16, 10:32:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-07-16, 03:38:

It's summer, and since summer always puts me in a PowerPC lovin' kinda mood, I brought out Super G5: my quad-core, liquid-cooled […]
Show full quote

It's summer, and since summer always puts me in a PowerPC lovin' kinda mood, I brought out Super G5: my quad-core, liquid-cooled, air-conditioner breaking, crème de la crème of PPC rigs.

And since tomorrow is movie night, I've decided to put those AltiVec-infused wonder cores to work by creating a D-VHS Edition of the 17th best movie ever: Zoolander!

That's right: if I can somehow get all of this to work, I'll probably be the only dude in the world with Zoolander on glorious 1080i D-Theater tape.

Super G5's already crunching the numbers. She's taking my Zoolander MKV file (ripped directly from blu-ray), and transcoding the original 1080p H.264 video to a more DVHS-friendly 1080i MPEG-2 stream, at a constant bit-rate of 28mb/s. The machine's been working at it for a little over an hour now, and estimated time remaining looks to be roughly 5 hours. That's actually not bad at all! I forgot how much faster MPEG-2 encoding was/is on these old 2005 machines. It's H264 encoding that really brings pre-Core2 machines to their knees.

Of course, the next challenge will be getting the computer to talk to the D-VHS deck. However, it's all done through FireWire, and since these old PowerMacs were pretty much designed to be the video editor's BFF, I'm hoping that it'll Just Work. Hopefully in time for TGIF movie night!

That sounds like an awesome project. But please tell me your going to watch it on a projector.

👍 I wouldn't watch Zoolander any other way!

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-07-17, 01:39:

:thumbsup: I wouldn't watch Zoolander any other way! https://i.imgur.com/APB4NXr.png […]
Show full quote

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-16, 10:32:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-07-16, 03:38:

It's summer, and since summer always puts me in a PowerPC lovin' kinda mood, I brought out Super G5: my quad-core, liquid-cooled […]
Show full quote

It's summer, and since summer always puts me in a PowerPC lovin' kinda mood, I brought out Super G5: my quad-core, liquid-cooled, air-conditioner breaking, crème de la crème of PPC rigs.

And since tomorrow is movie night, I've decided to put those AltiVec-infused wonder cores to work by creating a D-VHS Edition of the 17th best movie ever: Zoolander!

That's right: if I can somehow get all of this to work, I'll probably be the only dude in the world with Zoolander on glorious 1080i D-Theater tape.

Super G5's already crunching the numbers. She's taking my Zoolander MKV file (ripped directly from blu-ray), and transcoding the original 1080p H.264 video to a more DVHS-friendly 1080i MPEG-2 stream, at a constant bit-rate of 28mb/s. The machine's been working at it for a little over an hour now, and estimated time remaining looks to be roughly 5 hours. That's actually not bad at all! I forgot how much faster MPEG-2 encoding was/is on these old 2005 machines. It's H264 encoding that really brings pre-Core2 machines to their knees.

Of course, the next challenge will be getting the computer to talk to the D-VHS deck. However, it's all done through FireWire, and since these old PowerMacs were pretty much designed to be the video editor's BFF, I'm hoping that it'll Just Work. Hopefully in time for TGIF movie night!

That sounds like an awesome project. But please tell me your going to watch it on a projector.

👍 I wouldn't watch Zoolander any other way!

Awesome!!!!. Last August we bought a really nice used projector of eBay and we just absolutely love it and our two boys just love movie night. We were supposed to have my son's birthday party at our local planetarium but with covid we couldn't so we bought the projector and a nice screen and brought the Planetarium home. We used the program WorldWide Telescope and it was just awesome. Best money I've ever spent seeing his face afterwards. This past winter with how early it gets dark it basically replaced our TV at night. Now we just need to get it mounted properly to the ceiling and get a proper motorized screen to replace the cheapy portable screen we got from Amazon.

Thanks to the ADB Wombat from BMOW, I have managed to do something that will be, at best, only minorly useful.

I have used an AEK II and an ADB Mouse I to control an iPad Pro. Thank you for attending my TEDTalk.

I've been leveling up on Overwatch and other blizzard games

Fired up my Ryzen setup before I sell off the board, CPU and ram and up cycle my EVGA GTX 760 to a friend. GPU died a horrible death within 30min of stress testing everything. Upon taking off the heatsink it appears there is some heat damage to the power delivery components on the PCB.

Only spare PCIE card was a Quadro FX 380. At least it runs Fallout NV pretty well!

Smoke tested my FX-8350 build (well, swapped the board and CPU from the FX-6300 and M5A97 R2.0 to the FX-8350 and M5A99FX Pro R2.0, but kept the 12GB RAM and other components) and almost every device is detected, except for the LS-120 drive (dead SATA data cable and I'm fresh out of data cables due to another build I'm working on and I used my last spare for the Blu-Ray RE drive). And dummy me plugged the reset to power and power to reset on the board, so I had to fix that and the power LED wasn't working since I plugged the wires in wrong.

Gotta test the Sound Blaster X-Fi SB1040 to see if the card works.

Putting together a 1st gen i7-920 machine out of some free parts for a friend. So far have a Antec 200 case, Rosewill Xtreme 750watt PSU, 24gb of ddr3 1600, a pair of 200gb intel SSD's in Raid 0 with a 500gb drive for a dedicated backup drive, a 2tb storage drive, and a XFX lga 1366 board.

Now if I can just find a half decent GPU for a half decent price. . .

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-17, 01:58:

Awesome!!!!. Last August we bought a really nice used projector of eBay and we just absolutely love it and our two boys just love movie night. We were supposed to have my son's birthday party at our local planetarium but with covid we couldn't so we bought the projector and a nice screen and brought the Planetarium home. We used the program WorldWide Telescope and it was just awesome. Best money I've ever spent seeing his face afterwards. This past winter with how early it gets dark it basically replaced our TV at night. Now we just need to get it mounted properly to the ceiling and get a proper motorized screen to replace the cheapy portable screen we got from Amazon.

That's fantastic man! Yep - I've gotta agree that one of the best parts of this hobby is seeing the look of sheer joy on people's faces when they experience proper projection-based home theater for the first time. It is a completely different experience from watching movies on even the biggest TVs.

A new screen can make a massive difference - pick the right one and it'll almost seem like you've upgraded your projector! I've had three different Stewart fixed frame screens on my wall since finishing my room back in 2003 and wholeheartedly recommend them. Be careful though; once you get that projector ceiling mounted and beaming on to a really nice screen, there's absolutely no turning back. Next thing you know, you'll be painting the walls, making your own acoustic panels, and automating the lights! It's a full time hobby man! 😜

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-07-19, 23:37:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-17, 01:58:

Awesome!!!!. Last August we bought a really nice used projector of eBay and we just absolutely love it and our two boys just love movie night. We were supposed to have my son's birthday party at our local planetarium but with covid we couldn't so we bought the projector and a nice screen and brought the Planetarium home. We used the program WorldWide Telescope and it was just awesome. Best money I've ever spent seeing his face afterwards. This past winter with how early it gets dark it basically replaced our TV at night. Now we just need to get it mounted properly to the ceiling and get a proper motorized screen to replace the cheapy portable screen we got from Amazon.

That's fantastic man! Yep - I've gotta agree that one of the best parts of this hobby is seeing the look of sheer joy on people's faces when they experience proper projection-based home theater for the first time. It is a completely different experience from watching movies on even the biggest TVs.

A new screen can make a massive difference - pick the right one and it'll almost seem like you've upgraded your projector! I've had three different Stewart fixed frame screens on my wall since finishing my room back in 2003 and wholeheartedly recommend them. Be careful though; once you get that projector ceiling mounted and beaming on to a really nice screen, there's absolutely no turning back. Next thing you know, you'll be painting the walls, making your own acoustic panels, and automating the lights! It's a full time hobby man! 😜

We can't wait till we get a much better screen and ceiling mount the projector. We try to have a weekly movie night with the kids. So far we've gotten through the first trilogy of Star Wars. Our son just absolutely loves the experience and it's just such a blast and a real moment of family enjoyment.

Not today, but not very long ago, updated my current rig from i5-4590 to i5-11400, 22nm -> 14nm. Had wanted to go with Ryzen but early 2021 availability was limited and prices still higher than MSRP, but I don't regret the 11400, it's a good value chip. I also seem to be getting the last of every generation haha, or go by RAM upgrade cycles, that was last of DDR3 and now last of DDR4. Should be interesting to see how DDR5 matures.

Also sold my Haswell parts but kinda regretting a tiny bit since it would be nice for a fast XP machine and to hold the legacy stuff like optical drive / X-Fi Titanium, and also serve as a backup rig that's powerful enough for Win 10 still. I am not too sure if Haswell supported XP or was it LGA1155 that was last?

Anyway if I would make a fast XP machine, it would be able to handle 1600 x 1200 with most XP era games maxed out, maybe some post-2008 and some remastered 90s games, be mATX instead of ATX so it's compact and be low powered GPU wise, probably i3 or Pentium would be enough.

Changed my daily driver systems, a P4 3.2Ghz(yes it plays youtube videos just fine), Zboard gaming keyboard to a smaller profile DELL multi-media keyboard. Who said PC systems are like LEGO? What a load of tripe.

Quite like it so it is saying on my desktop instread of a cardboard box in the shed like it was...😉

Deep cleaned the fans on the computer I'm building for my mom, including the front of the case, the side panel doors, on top, and the inside of the case (the bays had dust all over and the board, including the heatsink and the GPU needed a dusting), then installed the USB 2.0 internal multi-card reader, the 480GB SSD with Windows 10 Pro x64 (used as a test drive to see if the Secure Boot/UEFI boot works and will get a refresh of the OS) with the hot swap enclosure, and connected the data cable.

Also added 3x 120mm fans to my FX-8350 build to help keep the CPU cooled down more and did more cable management (not the best in the world, but it's an improvement).

Will post pictures of the systems soon.

What's deep cleaning, an hour in the ultrasonic parts washer with that orange smelling stuff that's officially banned and hard to get? 😁

Scrubbed the dust out and used 99.9% IPA on the fans and used soapy water on the side panels and the top of the case with light scrubbing and not too hard.