brostenen wrote:

Strange..... I have an FIC PA-2013 and it works 100℅ with both TNT2-Pro and Ultra.

Would you be so kind and list the driver versions for the chipset and graphics card?

I use 6.18 for the graphics and VIA AGP driver 4.43h.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Strange..... I have an FIC PA-2013 and it works 100℅ with both TNT2-Pro and Ultra.

Would you be so kind and list the driver versions for the chipset and graphics card?

I use 6.18 for the graphics and VIA AGP driver 4.43h.

I think you used the version of 4-in-1 that are too new. I used both 4.29 and 4.35 were 4.35 gave me the best results.
There are talk about modding the registry for the AGP settings and stuff like that. Been reported here before.
For nVidia, I used everything from version 29.42 and down. Plus Detornator3 versions.
This is of course only TNT2 cards on my FIC board. Sorry for the late answer. Keep letting me know if this helps... 😀

Fighting with a P4 motherboard to get XP installed. I want to install XP to a CF card to do some testing. The CF card is seen by the system very well by itself, but as soon as I plug in a CD drive, it doesn't see the CF anymore. Even if they're correctly jumpered master/slave in the same IDE channel. Even if they're on separate channels of the IDE controller. Even if they're on different IDE controllers altogether (the board has a standard IDE controller, and a separate EIDE controller and supports more than 4 IDE devices).

Yes, I could make a bootable USB for XP, but this has turned into a crusade for me to get it to work. Especially since I want to have a CD unit available in the final system.

I have tried several different CF/IDE adapters, and the same happens with all. CF alone -> CF seen. CF and CD -> only CD is seen. FWIW it's an ASUS P5LD2-V REV 1.03 motherboard. Picture: http://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/b … a7504b6b960.jpg (this is the actual picture of the motherboard from the posting where I got it; yes, it has a mismatched IO plate)

Grrr.

I am about to start my retro day 😁

Firstly I am going to replace the K6-3 (2.2v) in my "Junker-SS7" PC for a K6-3+ 400MHz at 1.6v.
Secondly is setting up my 1997 High End and play with it (probably do some upgrades)

and finally I have to replace some ATX PSUs that died...

Arctic wrote:

Firstly I am going to replace the K6-3 (2.2v) in my "Junker-SS7" PC for a K6-3+ 400MHz at 1.6v.

Nice. Exact same CPU that I'm using. I overclocked it to 550 MHz though.

Spent my spare time this weekend building up my 'first' 486 machine (still had most of the parts), only to find that the Dallas RTC was totally dead (surprise surprise). Pulled the motherboard and desoldered the RTC, hacked it up carefully and soldered in a couple of wires to a CR2032. I had to resolder the RTC back onto the motherboard, since it was so close to the ISA slots that I couldn't use an IC socket instead.

What was weird was when I put it all back together again, and tried to power it on, the system would just beep once, repeatedly. Like some kind of RAM error. I took everything out, including RAM and it would still beep continuously. It would only POST if I took the battery out...

I tried POSTing and going into the BIOS setup and then putting the battery in - well this just made the system act all weird and laggy. To be really silly, I tried POSTing with a dead battery which seemed to work fine (except of course the CMOS battery flat error being displayed still). I went into the BIOS, set the BIOS defaults, and just before saving and rebooting, I swapped out the battery with the new one. After successfully saving, the system POSTed fine!

I can only presume some weird values were being stored in the CMOS and it needed to be reset with a good battery in place, and so on.

Imagine how fun that would have been if I had just replaced the Dallas RTC with a new one soldered onto the motherboard!

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Arctic wrote:

Firstly I am going to replace the K6-3 (2.2v) in my "Junker-SS7" PC for a K6-3+ 400MHz at 1.6v.

Nice. Exact same CPU that I'm using. I overclocked it to 550 MHz though.

I'll try to clock it at 600MHz 😎
I just hope I can achieve that on max. 2.0v

So Ive got this P1-166mmz Ive been working on for some time, it has a Nec PCX-2 , S3 Virge DX, 64mb ram and a 166mhz MMX Pentuim, it had a big bottle neck when playing Quake 2 and Unreal using the Nec , I was still getting sub par frame rates at 640x480 , so I thought over the weekend I decided to swap the motherboard (166mhz was the highest it could go) with a 200mhz capable board and cpu ...

The new board worked a bit better the old one had two blown serial ports , but sadly it had the dreaded 8gb hdd limit, luckily there was a hacked bios out there I could use, sadly it didnt like the bios a lot but clr-cmos seemed to have resolved any instabilities.

This is the result:

Still slow 😒 and a bottle neck , interesting thing is its fine with the Voodoo 2 😒

Also been researching building a 486 anyone got any info on these adapters , specifically the dip switches:

orinoko wrote:

Imagine how fun that would have been if I had just replaced the Dallas RTC with a new one soldered onto the motherboard!

Great story and cautionary tale indeed!

FaSMaN wrote:

Also been researching building a 486 anyone got any info on these adapters , specifically the dip switches:

Capture2.JPG

Capture.JPG

Seems to be a voltage regulator IMHO (VRM); those would be used to plug 3.3V chips into 5V motherboards. They are referenced on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_DX4
The EZ1085CM is a variable voltage regulator and the DIP switches are probably used to select the output voltage, but without a part number I couldn't dig any further information.

You could probably plug it into a 5V motherboard, without a CPU in it, and try to measure the voltage between a positive supply pin and a ground pin on the adapter for various combinations of the DIP switches. It would be great if you could post results back here for future reference.

I have been 'retro' these days (benchmarking a lot of hardware) but one in particular is the NexGen NX586-P90. Finally I got the time to assemble a Nx586 system and I was surprised by it's quick and snappy performance on the DOS-prompt. I loaded the system with a V7 Mirage (S3 805 VLB-card) with Wait-State 0 and it's outrageous how fast it can get ASCII chars on the screen! It leaves 486's and Pentium PCI systems in the dark 😀.

However, benchmarks like Doom run fine but by far not as fast as a Pentium 100 PCI. Nevertheless I'm impressed by NexGen's product considering it's 1994 technology and they were new in the game 😀.

For all you pic-geeks 😀:
Clickable![/url]

Began to fill up my 286 with games from 1982 to 1990.
Then I played some alleycat for the first time since 93.

Continued messing around with my first 486 machine. Managed to get it to boot from an old Seagate ST157-A IDE drive, since it refuses to find and boot from anything else, hard drive-wise.

Installed the DOS and Win3.1 drivers + software for the CMI8330 soundcard I have installed in it (was my first sound card hehe). Was nice to listen to the test audio tracks again after such a long time. It's probably been at least 10 years since I last used this card.

Ended with playing some Skyroads and Space Quest 6.

FaSMaN wrote:

So Ive got this P1-166mmz Ive been working on for some time, it has a Nec PCX-2 , S3 Virge DX, 64mb ram and a 166mhz MMX Pentuim […]
Show full quote

So Ive got this P1-166mmz Ive been working on for some time, it has a Nec PCX-2 , S3 Virge DX, 64mb ram and a 166mhz MMX Pentuim, it had a big bottle neck when playing Quake 2 and Unreal using the Nec , I was still getting sub par frame rates at 640x480 , so I thought over the weekend I decided to swap the motherboard (166mhz was the highest it could go) with a 200mhz capable board and cpu ...

The new board worked a bit better the old one had two blown serial ports , but sadly it had the dreaded 8gb hdd limit, luckily there was a hacked bios out there I could use, sadly it didnt like the bios a lot but clr-cmos seemed to have resolved any instabilities.

This is the result:

166.JPG

200.JPG

Still slow 😒 and a bottle neck , interesting thing is its fine with the Voodoo 2 😒

Also been researching building a 486 anyone got any info on these adapters , specifically the dip switches:

Capture2.JPG

Capture.JPG

The south Bridge that comes with all HX and VX boards tops out at 8gb so that is why the bios hack didn't work. TX on up goes to 40GB+
Run overlay software like one does on older systems 😉

The BIOS works perfectly now with a 20gig hard drive now that I have cleared the CMOS 😀

nforce4max wrote:

The south Bridge that comes with all HX and VX boards tops out at 8gb so that is why the bios hack didn't work. TX on up goes to 40GB+

I don't believe this is true. I'm running an 80GB drive on an Asus P55T2P4 (HX chipset), no problems at all.

Resumed work on my custom expansion PCB to add memory and IO capabilities to the Z80-in-a-FPGA that I have been playing with so I can turn it into a full-blown CP/M machine. Previously interrupted because some SRAM chips took an eternity and a half to arrive from China.

Thinking about a few tasks that I want some machine(s) to be set up to perform, and trying to figure out how to best allocate the available hardware to do them. Getting confused, then realizing that with the amount of PC hardware I have laying around, it's rather ridiculous for me to think I don't have the parts I want for all of it. And yet, I still think I need more parts.

Sad retro day for me. In the process of attempting to fix a VLB socket 3 board I destroyed the socket and the CPU (AMD DX/40 - one of the first ones) due to incorrect pin orientation. Dumbass. Fortunately I do have another VLB board but I'm always sad when something retro dies 🙁

brassicGamer wrote:

Sad retro day for me. In the process of attempting to fix a VLB socket 3 board I destroyed the socket and the CPU (AMD DX/40 - one of the first ones) due to incorrect pin orientation. Dumbass. Fortunately I do have another VLB board but I'm always sad when something retro dies 🙁

Sad day for me too. I think I ruined a working FIC VT-501 motherboard when trying to test a Pentium-200 CPU I found... that god damned heatsink retention clip was so tight that it scraped the motherboard near the CPU socket. The damage doesn't look that bad actually, but now I get a continuous beeping when I power on. I tried another CPU and it worked the first time, but on subsequent bootups I got the beeping again. 😢

It's just a crappy VX mobo, but it always worked so well that I'm kind of sad... 😢