tehsiggi wrote on 2026-03-07, 15:10:

Feels like building a mod-chip for a graphics card. WIP - more to come. Layout done.. some small tweaks necessary. PCB width is too large as well.

Some nice addition for R300 based graphics cards.

The attachment khan.png is no longer available

Finally got to it again, busy times.

Hardware prototype is ready, so some softwareing is inbound.

All on the no-love 9500Pro i repaired. I grew fond of this card.

Quickly hand-soldered prototype:

Mounted on the card using double sided tape:

Added some crude wiring and debug connections:

Card inside the system. Heartbeat is going and card still happy:

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 15:45:

Yeah I recognise those speakers by sight. Probably only came with systems or multimedia kits or something and weren't really a standalone product. Coming in an era where everyone was getting "free" 2-7W speakers with their system, this sort included, and standalone sets were higher power.

Just seen this, only picture of them I can find. Looks like a lot of the others sets they had at the time. Also very cheap...

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 16:12:

Finally got to it again, busy times. […]
Show full quote

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-03-07, 15:10:

Feels like building a mod-chip for a graphics card. WIP - more to come. Layout done.. some small tweaks necessary. PCB width is too large as well.

Some nice addition for R300 based graphics cards.

The attachment khan.png is no longer available

Finally got to it again, busy times.

Hardware prototype is ready, so some softwareing is inbound.

All on the no-love 9500Pro i repaired. I grew fond of this card.

Quickly hand-soldered prototype:

The attachment khanMonitor_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Mounted on the card using double sided tape:

The attachment mounted_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Added some crude wiring and debug connections:

The attachment wired_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Card inside the system. Heartbeat is going and card still happy:

The attachment installed_proto.jpeg is no longer available

What does it do?

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 17:24:

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 16:12:

Finally got to it again, busy times. […]
Show full quote

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-03-07, 15:10:

Feels like building a mod-chip for a graphics card. WIP - more to come. Layout done.. some small tweaks necessary. PCB width is too large as well.

Some nice addition for R300 based graphics cards.

The attachment khan.png is no longer available

Finally got to it again, busy times.

Hardware prototype is ready, so some softwareing is inbound.

All on the no-love 9500Pro i repaired. I grew fond of this card.

Quickly hand-soldered prototype:

The attachment khanMonitor_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Mounted on the card using double sided tape:

The attachment mounted_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Added some crude wiring and debug connections:

The attachment wired_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Card inside the system. Heartbeat is going and card still happy:

The attachment installed_proto.jpeg is no longer available

What does it do?

It'll add monitoring to R300, R350 and R360 cards incl. the main voltages, GPU and ambient temperature.. Incl. Rivatuner Support.

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 17:39:

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 17:24:

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 16:12:

Finally got to it again, busy times. […]
Show full quote

Finally got to it again, busy times.

Hardware prototype is ready, so some softwareing is inbound.

All on the no-love 9500Pro i repaired. I grew fond of this card.

Quickly hand-soldered prototype:

The attachment khanMonitor_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Mounted on the card using double sided tape:

The attachment mounted_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Added some crude wiring and debug connections:

The attachment wired_proto.jpeg is no longer available

Card inside the system. Heartbeat is going and card still happy:

The attachment installed_proto.jpeg is no longer available

What does it do?

It'll add monitoring to R300, R350 and R360 cards incl. the main voltages, GPU and ambient temperature.. Incl. Rivatuner Support.

I have those cards. Is it to protect them damage, provide earlier warnings?

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 19:13:

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 17:39:

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 17:24:

What does it do?

It'll add monitoring to R300, R350 and R360 cards incl. the main voltages, GPU and ambient temperature.. Incl. Rivatuner Support.

I have those cards. Is it to protect them damage, provide earlier warnings?

Yes, it's an easy way to have monitoring for them. It'll not be as good as on RV350 or RV360, as the temperature sensor is not in the die, but on the substrate in form of an NTC, but it'll give a good insight into the cards thermals. It'll also be handy to compare cooler performance on those cards.

RivaTuner lets you slightly overvolt, undervolt, overclock, or underclock, as you deem appropriate, in addition to thermal/power monitoring.

In some versions, it lets you fake the identity of the card so quadro functions can be turned on.

wierd_w wrote on Yesterday, 19:19:

RivaTuner lets you slightly overvolt, undervolt, overclock, or underclock, as you deem appropriate, in addition to thermal/power monitoring.

In some versions, it lets you fake the identity of the card so quadro functions can be turned on.

That is not applicable to R300 series cards. As there is no software control for their power supplies. And apart of the XT variants, non of them have temperature monitoring by design. Also non of them have voltage monitoring. Exceptions are some Gigabyte and Tyan models, which provide that functionality through a Winbond chip (found on 9200, 9600 or 9800 cards).

Furthermore I'll have the monitor work in two modes: LM63 emulation, allowing for temperature only monitoring and a custom mode + custom plugin for Rivatuner, which also makes the voltages visible. The LM63 mode will work ootb with RivaTuner, ATITool and Everest Home.

Neat.

For anybody who has a Radeon X850: what is the weird circled connector for? It looks like something you would find on a sound card for things like CD_IN.

Seriously... Sometimes I think I am retarded... So disappointed in myself... Let me explain...

Today, as it still Easter break for me, I thought I'd fiddle with some vintage computing. I hadn't touched anything for months as I was too busy with work. Anyhow, I had this old AT style case lying around and I thought, let's build a Pentium / Win95 machine in it, I should have enough parts to do so. Anyhow, long story short... This case has a power switch on the front that caters for old style AT power supplies, you know the ones with the power button attached to the PSU? So, I dig around in my stash of PSUs and I find not one, but two! brand new 230W, vintage AT power supplies. I am always a bit cautious when it comes to this vintage of PSUs but since they are the right fit for this case, let's go with it. So, to test the first one, I grab an old broken hard drive for some load and hook up the PSU and switch it on. POP! Shit... Well, there you go... You can't trust these old vintage PSUs. even if they're never used. Let's test the other one as well, they can't be BOTH bad, can they? Same test, POP! Well, what you'd think. Old shiity PSUs... Luckily I didn't have any good hardware attached to it, I say to myself.

Goes and check the back of the PSU. Ah, they were both set to 115v instead of 230v... I am so dumb. It literally didn't cross my mind... Two, probably good, PSUs gone within the time span of 10 mins...

And that was my retro activity for today. I'll be putting all my gear away now, it might be forever this time... 🙁

pan069 wrote on Today, 03:20:

Seriously... Sometimes I think I am retarded... So disappointed in myself... Let me explain... […]
Show full quote

Seriously... Sometimes I think I am retarded... So disappointed in myself... Let me explain...

Today, as it still Easter break for me, I thought I'd fiddle with some vintage computing. I hadn't touched anything for months as I was too busy with work. Anyhow, I had this old AT style case lying around and I thought, let's build a Pentium / Win95 machine in it, I should have enough parts to do so. Anyhow, long story short... This case has a power switch on the front that caters for old style AT power supplies, you know the ones with the power button attached to the PSU? So, I dig around in my stash of PSUs and I find not one, but two! brand new 230W, vintage AT power supplies. I am always a bit cautious when it comes to this vintage of PSUs but since they are the right fit for this case, let's go with it. So, to test the first one, I grab an old broken hard drive for some load and hook up the PSU and switch it on. POP! Shit... Well, there you go... You can't trust these old vintage PSUs. even if they're never used. Let's test the other one as well, they can't be BOTH bad, can they? Same test, POP! Well, what you'd think. Old shiity PSUs... Luckily I didn't have any good hardware attached to it, I say to myself.

Goes and check the back of the PSU. Ah, they were both set to 115v instead of 230v... I am so dumb. It literally didn't cross my mind... Two, probably good, PSUs gone within the time span of 10 mins...

And that was my retro activity for today. I'll be putting all my gear away now, it might be forever this time... 🙁

Don't be so hard on yourself, I like to think those things would never happen to me but one day I was distracted and forgot to flip the voltage switch on a new PSU I acquired. I was very disappointed, but after swapping a fuse and a couple of varistors it was like new again. Same with reversing the P8-P9 AT power connectors, I've known about it forever but I still mess it up from time to time when my head is somewhere else, thank god for short circuit protection!

If you think 2 PSUs is too much, let me share a story I witnessed first hand in the early '00s at work: so, it's about this guy who had recently joined the company as a junior IT team member. His first assignment, mere days after being hired, was to set up a bunch of brand new PCs for a team that was about to start working on a project. This dude lines up a row of about 10 PCs, connects the cables and then proceeds to quickly flip the power switches on the back of the PSUs, one after another until he did the entire row... you can imagine what happened: when he then tried to power on the first PC with the front button, nothing happened... he tried the same on the next 2 or 3 and I think at that point he realized his mistake.

The poor guy was pale as a ghost and about to break into tears! I'm not sure if anyone told him that the new PCs came from the distributor set to 115V instead of 230V by default but probably the nerves of this being his first job and not hearing the fuses popping over the office noise did him bad. Luckily the IT boss was a really cool dude, but I never saw the guy setting up any hardware since that day, I think he became a DB admin.

RetroLizard wrote on Today, 02:56:

For anybody who has a Radeon X850: what is the weird circled connector for? It looks like something you would find on a sound card for things like CD_IN.

Should be the AUDIO passthrough of the cards VIVO connector. Basically you can connect it to an input of your sound card and if you use VIVO audio is being passed through the graphics card to it.

tehsiggi wrote on Today, 04:06:

RetroLizard wrote on Today, 02:56:

For anybody who has a Radeon X850: what is the weird circled connector for? It looks like something you would find on a sound card for things like CD_IN.

Should be the AUDIO passthrough of the cards VIVO connector. Basically you can connect it to an input of your sound card and if you use VIVO audio is being passed through the graphics card to it.

Interesting. I wonder if any of my cards support it. Would I need a particular cable for it?

RetroLizard wrote on Today, 04:16:

tehsiggi wrote on Today, 04:06:

RetroLizard wrote on Today, 02:56:

For anybody who has a Radeon X850: what is the weird circled connector for? It looks like something you would find on a sound card for things like CD_IN.

Should be the AUDIO passthrough of the cards VIVO connector. Basically you can connect it to an input of your sound card and if you use VIVO audio is being passed through the graphics card to it.

Interesting. I wonder if any of my cards support it. Would I need a particular cable for it?

I just checked a gain. I think I've mistaken this with the connector on the All-In-Wonder cards. I just tried to think about if I ever had a VIVO card with a dongle for audio. And the only one I could think of was not ATI, but Nvidia (6600GT) - So I checked some schematics of the VIVO variants from the Radeon 9000 Series (would probably be the same for the X series) and the connector, while looking like CD-Audio, is more likely to be Component Video - the schematic supports that this is an input:

Probably for a secondary slot bracket or front panel input.

I tried to take a look at the X850 manual and saw nothing about that connector. Probably wasn't looking in the right place.

Old program/screensaver 1998-2004

Greetings,

So I am trying to find the name of a screensaver, program, shareware, freeware etc from the time period of 1998-2004. There might be a possibility it's
from a pc magazine from that time period. I'm not a 100%(I used to watch it when I was young). It basically plays a bunch of continuous scenarios of a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses on a beach using a metal detector to find stuff. He would walk back and forth and sometimes he will go back into his hut on the beach and chill. I remember other parts such as a parrot occasionally sqwakiing or the guy getting abducted by aliens. It is in a cartoonish style, such as Johnny castaway but it is not Johnny castaway. 

Does anyone have any idea of what this could be?

... scratch.

MattRocks wrote on Today, 05:29:

RetroLizard wrote on Today, 02:56:

For anybody who has a Radeon X850: what is the weird circled connector for? It looks like something you would find on a sound card for things like CD_IN.

That's your power supply input.

The yellow one is 100% not the power supply input. There is a 4 pin Molex type connector next to it for that purpose.

Edit: Seen you've seen it now as well 😉

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 12:29:

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:47:

Living wrote on Yesterday, 00:24:

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember givi […]
Show full quote

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember giving away my used ram that i had in stock (the ones too small to sell) just to be a less painful process

By 2005 even a K6-2 500Mhz was obsolete and STILL found people with that Compaq Presario 7478 (and similars) with that DOG slow Seagate 10GB with the black cover around and 192mb of ram (64 original), oh God...
One kept his Pentium 3 1Ghz running until 2015 for general use, especting that i do some voodoo magic to make it fast.
Another kept using an Athlon xp 2000+ with a massive 25GB PST on outlook at least until 2016 and refused to upgrade (she wouldnt listen), and blamed me that it took ages to load. I kindly sent her to suck a d...eventually.

dont get me wrong, i have no problem keeping old computers for only one task (like the 386 at the hardware store for an excel list), but cmon! dont you value your time?

but the explosion in tracking is the killer because that's extra web calls for each user interaction - and each web call hits that encryption/decryption. The only way to evade all of that is to offload the encryption/decryption/tracking to a server.

Ad blocker plugins and pi-hole type boxes help a lot, less garbage, less CPU work.

pi-hole is a godsend! I can't even imagine my home LAN being without one anymore, using the internet is an absolute torture when I'm outside..