I hope no one minds me popping a quick question in here, since i figured it's too small for its own thread.

Does anyone know how bad the extra overhead from upping the mouse polling rate using tools like PS2Rate has on Pentium Classic/PMMX CPUs?

I'm currently using it to set the rate to 200hz for smooth fps action, but I am slightly worried about any performance hits.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-12-19, 08:52:

PD2JK wrote on 2020-12-18, 21:27:

I thought the 9500/9700 (Pro) was the last card to have AGP 2x backwards compatability.

They are supposed to. They don't always.

It usually depends on the layout or video chip. My 9600XT is only 8x/4x supported, but the 9700 AIW Pro is compatible for 2x-8x, yet I need to test that in my SS7 board since it came with the board bundle I won months ago.

For retro activity, I was wondering why my newly acquired 8x CD-ROM PCMCIA wasn't working on my Austin PN/312 TFT laptop and dummy me forgot to load 1 driver (well, it was loaded on there, but I removed it for quicker boot times and neglected to add REM to the driver line in the config.sys file): CARDTALK.SYS

Sadly, the CD drive is set as drive F and I'm looking for ways to assign the CD drive as drive D and the other as drive F-Z

On my Satellite Pro 410CDT, the same thing with the 40x I/O Magic CD-ROM PCMCIA drive: the last 2 CardSoft drivers were in reverse order and now the drive works in DOS and I'm really happy that it works now after all these months of searching.

I referenced a readme manual I found online and it showed which drivers to load per manufacturer (CardSoft (Toshiba 410CDT), Data Book (which is my Austin/AMS laptops PCMCIA controller), and many others).

In case anyone needs a reference for setting up a CD-ROM PCMCIA drive on a laptop, here you go: README for setting up a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive

Remember: switch the PCMCIA CD-ROM driver to the corresponding driver for your drives.

The EXP CD-ROM MultiMedia Kit has 2 options when installing: CD-ROM only (great for laptops with integrated Adlib and SB Pro compatibilities) or CD-ROM and Sound Card (great for laptops without sound/FM and for those Toshiba laptops that only have Windows Sound System and no FM).

I finally took my FX 5700 Ultra for a bit of a test drive today. You know, this old midrange GPU isn't half bad! Has a pretty swank cooler for an old budget card! It's much bigger than the 9800 Pro cooler, and covers the VRAM as well. It's also ahead of the GF4 Ti4400 at higher resolutions, which I think is pretty impressive. Always thought the old GF4 Ti would outperform a midrange FX, but I may have been thinking about the 5600 Ultra. Anyway, that doesn't appear to be the case, and I doubt the TI4600/4800 would really change the overall ranking.

Here's a bit of quick n' dirty benchmarking against the Ti4400 and 9800 Pro. Yeah, it's not very detailed, but I probably spent a grand total of 45 minutes benching the 5700 Ultra, and am just reusing my old TI4400 and 9800 Pro results. 😀

Q3A, 1024x768
Ti4400: 211 FPS
5700U: 218.7 FPS
9800P: 220.2 FPS

Q3A, 1600x1200
Ti4400: 120.6 FPS
5700U: 143.5 FPS
9800P: 196.1 FPS

Doom3, 1024x768 - Medium preset
Ti4400: 22.1 FPS
5700U: 29.8 FPS
9800P: 47.6 FPS

3DMark 2001SE Default
Ti4400: 10,106
5700U: 10,840
9800P: 12,632

3DMark 2003 Default
Ti4400: 1822
5700U: 3477
9800P: 5406

4800 is just a 4200 with AGP 8x it is slower than 4600. Thanks nVidia.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-12-20, 02:18:

4800 is just a 4200 with AGP 8x it is slower than 4600. Thanks nVidia.

Not a 4400?

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-12-19, 06:58:

Tonight I was working on getting another 486 setup going. […]
Show full quote

Tonight I was working on getting another 486 setup going.

Motherboard is a FIC 486-PIO-2.

I had ordered some EEPROM chips that would work for this board so I could update from the ancient version that came on the board on an EPROM.
So I went ahead and flashed it to the newest one which was a beta with Y2K support.
Well, it kept giving me a no video beep code and I finally decided to try an ISA video card and it fired right up but said that the CMOS checksum was bad and then proceeded to try to boot from the floppy drive.
After it booted, the keyboard input was not giving the correct keypresses.
Decided to try the latest regular BIOS and it worked.
So instead of using my programmer to update to the beta BIOS I used the flash program to do it on the board. Same results as writing it with my programmer.
Since there were two different beta BIOS files available for my version of the board.. one said it was for using with a programmer and an EPROM and the other with the flash program and an EEPROM, I downloaded the one that said it was for use with a programmer and programmed the EEPROM chip with that and now it works.
Uggghhhh. stupid corrupted or downright bad BIOS image caused me a couple hours of trouble and almost giving up on the board.
Is it somebody here who owns http://cwcyrix.duckdns.org ? If so, they need to know that the BIOS file for the FIC 486-PIO-2 with the name of 1175B701.BIN is no good.

I have a FIC 486-PIO2, got my Y2K BIOS from http://cwcyrix.nsupdate.info/ftp-archives/ftp.fic.com.tw/ and it worked but not sure if it was 1175B701.BIN
Cannot remember if I needed the B or C version.. will check later
Nice board when it works proper! Good job !

Played around with an old Trantor T128 8bit ISA SCSI card, works fine so far. Played around saving some old BIOS with the new TL866ii+, that went well too 😀

I finally setup my second Megadrive with MegaCD along with its own Open Source Scan Converter and TV.

Because there's no such thing as too much Megadrive in my life.

Did some progress on the Super P54VL-PCI board using vinegar and 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol for ridding of gunk.

Gallery: http://imgur.com/a/k1REmmt

The board needs more cleaning at the bottom and reflow on the solder joints.

Soldered a clone of a SoundBlaster 1.xx sound card.
This is not a replica, as is the case with Snark Barker, this is an independent project from the distant past (from 1994-1995). The firmware for the microcontroller is also not copied, but developed by the author independently. The author (Jura Vanin aka JIV) distributed an archive with a circuit of this device on the FIDO network in 1995.

oh thats neat

both the sound card, and that poor P54VL-PCI board.

kolderman wrote on 2020-12-20, 02:20:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-12-20, 02:18:

4800 is just a 4200 with AGP 8x it is slower than 4600. Thanks nVidia.

Not a 4400?

It's kind of a mess; In theory Ti4200-8x should replace Ti4200, Ti4800SE should replace Ti4400 and Thi4800 should replace Ti4600.

In practice a lot of people made Ti4200-8x cards and branded them Ti4800.

The P54VL-PCI is getting close to being cleaned off. Just another vinegar bath and some more 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol treatment and a reflow on those solder joints along with a 3.3V fixed CPU VRM installation since I have a spare at hand.

So this board should, if I'm lucky, might live.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-12-20, 10:05:

kolderman wrote on 2020-12-20, 02:20:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-12-20, 02:18:

4800 is just a 4200 with AGP 8x it is slower than 4600. Thanks nVidia.

Not a 4400?

It's kind of a mess; In theory Ti4200-8x should replace Ti4200, Ti4800SE should replace Ti4400 and Thi4800 should replace Ti4600.

In practice a lot of people made Ti4200-8x cards and branded them Ti4800.

I thought all TI4800s were AGP 8x Ti4600s. Never knew there were also Ti4200-8x cards branded as Ti4800.

Anyway, I got around to overclocking the 5700U today. Figured that with the massive cooler and auxiliary power, this card might have a bit of overclocking potential. I was able to get the core running at 550MHz (from 475) and the memory at 480 (from 450).

I'm really starting to like this card. The DX7 performance is certainly there. Was playing American McGee's Alice on it today at 1600x1200 and yeah...smooth as silk! I almost don't want to put it back in storage. Thought I'd never say that about an FX, but this one is nothing like the FX5500s that I'm used to. It's well over twice as fast, sometimes even approaching triple the speed!

Q3A, 1024x768
Ti4400: 211 FPS
5700U: 218.7 FPS
9800P: 220.2 FPS
5700U OC: 220.8 FPS

Q3A, 1600x1200
Ti4400: 120.6 FPS
5700U: 143.5 FPS
5700U OC: 155.2 FPS
9800P: 196.1 FPS

Doom3, 1024x768 - Medium preset
Ti4400: 22.1 FPS
5700U: 29.8 FPS
5700U OC: 32.0 FPS
9800P: 47.6 FPS

3DMark 2001SE Default
Ti4400: 10,106
5700U: 10,840
5700U OC: 11,021
9800P: 12,632

3DMark 2003 Default
Ti4400: 1822
5700U: 3477
5700U OC: 3610
9800P: 5406

AFAIK, Nvidia FX cards only suck in DX9 games. Their legacy DX8.1 and prior performance is still good.

Received a 2nd Commodore Plus/4 computer today. Surprisingly it worked, I bought it as "untested". It was pretty filthy and the keyboard needed a complete dismantling & cleaning job which was rather tedious and took me several hours.

I ended up mixing and matching parts from the 2 computers to end up with 1 really good Plus/4 & full working clean keyboard and the other just for spare parts, with yellowed & faulty keyboard, with several brittle keys that snapped upon removal (easy glue repair job though). After doing this I was able to fully ascertain the condition of the 2nd (original) keyboard and I could probably clean it all up, repair the ribbon cable and retrobright it in the future.

Hammered on the NEC Versa P/75 all weekend long off and on reproducing Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest) NES maps in OHRRPGCE. Hauksness was a total pain in the rear with all that random tileage to signify destruction. I figured I'd attempt to recreate Dragon Quest first so I could get a hang of how that engine works before Using it for my own creations.

In one of my latest purchases I found a Expertchips EXP84491 V1.2 motherboard that included a 486DX2. The MB posted fine with the DX2 but failed with a more appropriated CPU ( for a pci chipset), namely an Intel DX4 or an AMD DX4-120.

No beeps, no bus activity,absolutely dead. Main voltages could not be at fault, so checked the core voltage and found that there was none.

Turn my attention for the regulation circuit, and found that the trany D45H2A was faulty. After replacing tested the LP2951, and turned to be ok.

Do not be alarmed, this trany is what I had laying around, a new platoon of them are on route to a more permanent fix. The voltage core was now as expected.

Tested again with DX4-120, and now it boots.

Ps: I have a feeling that the cache is fake.....

Still messing with HX DOS Extender, trying to get some Win9x programs working, and learn how to use it. I want to eventually be able to dump M$ completley for retro-gaming and use FreeDOS.

Did a bunch of digging around on various NanTan FMA laptops (FMA2110-FMAK9200) and started building a page on my site on those, and the Samsung Sens machines. I've dug up all I Can on the versa. Some of this is looking around.

I found a vintage 8086 laptop for real cheap locally. It's a rebadged NEC under the Bondwell name.....seriously thinking about getting it after the holidays once some finance things are sorted out. Actually, I'm looking at expanding into buying up broken-up older (Pentium II and older) laptops on E-bay and fixing them up, loading them with FreeDOS, and flipping some of them - and continuing to collect Versa - just found out the 2000 model is a DX4, and I've been looking at another 486 model as well lately that's a little slower - they won't work with my docking station, but it'll be cool to have nonetheless.

> I found a vintage 8086 laptop

Unlikey. A luggable at best.

A few months back, I restored a Gateway 2000 low-profile 486 DX2-50 desktop PC. It came with an 83 MHz Pentium Overdrive processor, and I added a few upgrades as well. Below are the new specs:

Intel 486 LPX Motherboard with ISA Riser (5 slots); 33 MHz Bus Speed; Integrated CL GD-5428 VLB Video (1 MB RAM)
Pentium Overdrive – 83 MHz
32 MB FPM RAM
40 GB EIDE Hard Drive (Bootable Using On-track Disk Manager)
12x CD-ROM Drive
1.44 MB HD Floppy Drive
NE2000 Compatible Network Card
Opti 82c930 Sound Card with Integrated Wavetable and EIDE

I might sound crazy, but I decided to install NT 4.0 SP6 in a dual boot with DOS. And, it isn’t terrible. It boots in about as much time as a P4 takes. It runs MS Office apps without any problems, and I can play MP3s with Media Player 6.

I have to say that I actually like NT 4 better on this computer than Win95. Much more stable. If anything, the Cirrus Logic graphics hold it back quite a bit with 1024x768 resolution limited to 256 colors in the default drivers. Overall, I do think NT runs just fine on this platform.