luckybob wrote on 2021-09-29, 05:43:

It repairs itself when we aren't actively destroying it.

The world came together to stop making cfc gasses.

We have the ability to act on CO2, but the "people" in control this world are busy with a dick measuring contest with rockets.

Plants like C02.

The higher the oxygen levels, the larger the reptiles and bugs/insects will grow. Possible it would also affect all other animal life in a similar way as well.

If the C02 levels get too low / oxygen levels get too high, the air will become flammable.

On the plus side, venomous snakes and possibly other venomous animals could become non-poisonous.

I read a study on this years ago where somebody conducted an experiment with venomous snakes in a controlled environment. Once the oxygen level in the air got to a certain point, the snakes' venom was no longer poisonous.

Hmm what is this game, nutty professor? I want in!

Ozon, O³ is just an unstable bond of oxygen (in our partial pressure at least.). Ozon wants to eat your awe64s (gold might be ok though)! So don't take your retro computers on high altitude base jumping. But the fall is more likely to kill you than the sunrays. Probability calculation is inc but MATLAB 1.0 on my 386 needs some time to print the result to screen.

null

Anders- wrote on 2021-09-29, 21:18:

Ozone? I like it in the stratosphere, at ground level (created by sunrays and ice pollution) - not so much. Bad for the plants and bad for us.

Still very useful for retrobrighting and killing cigarette odours on vintage electronics!

Another lucky day at the thrift store. I'm not typically one to care about a Compaq but given the time frame of this one, and if nothing else some useful components, I paid $10 for this guy. Dusty as hell inside, even after I blew out all the dust bunnies, so it'll need a good cleaning. My initial intent was to strip the components and dump the case and motherboard, but hell it fired right up so maybe I'll just keep it as a complete system. It has a Athlon 900 MHz CPU and Nvidia Vanta LT graphics card, not sure if that's good for anything, even old games. Also maybe somebody can tell me if the mobo is worth keeping. I have no shortage of retro PCs, so even if this fills a small niche, I'm OK with that.

The CPU should be a keeper for sure, but the rest, not so much. No ISA slot makes that setup a lot less useful than it could have been.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-09-30, 04:55:

The CPU should be a keeper for sure, but the rest, not so much. No ISA slot makes that setup a lot less useful than it could have been.

Depends. The VIA chipset could definitely have SB emulation available, opening up a larger range of DOS gaming options. And normally, these VIA chipsets are quite tolerant of the SB emulation of most of the PCI cards of the time.

A 900mhz CPU is definitely getting into the range where it is simply too fast and too much breaks with respect to DOS gaming anyway.

Brawndo wrote on 2021-09-30, 04:38:

Another lucky day at the thrift store. I'm not typically one to care about a Compaq but given the time frame of this one, and if nothing else some useful components, I paid $10 for this guy. Dusty as hell inside, even after I blew out all the dust bunnies, so it'll need a good cleaning. My initial intent was to strip the components and dump the case and motherboard, but hell it fired right up so maybe I'll just keep it as a complete system. It has a Athlon 900 MHz CPU and Nvidia Vanta LT graphics card, not sure if that's good for anything, even old games. Also maybe somebody can tell me if the mobo is worth keeping. I have no shortage of retro PCs, so even if this fills a small niche, I'm OK with that.

that's good for $10 and i'd keep it too, a clean up and that athlon 900 accompanied by around 512mb ram would be great for a windows xp or a 98se set up (or both dual boot)
can't tell what motherboard it is but i see 3 ram slots and an AGP , it looks very 1999 😀

That's a Compaq FIC AZ31 Uwave 217155-002 Socket A mobo.

gerry wrote on 2021-09-30, 08:13:

Brawndo wrote on 2021-09-30, 04:38:

Another lucky day at the thrift store. I'm not typically one to care about a Compaq but given the time frame of this one, and if nothing else some useful components, I paid $10 for this guy. Dusty as hell inside, even after I blew out all the dust bunnies, so it'll need a good cleaning. My initial intent was to strip the components and dump the case and motherboard, but hell it fired right up so maybe I'll just keep it as a complete system. It has a Athlon 900 MHz CPU and Nvidia Vanta LT graphics card, not sure if that's good for anything, even old games. Also maybe somebody can tell me if the mobo is worth keeping. I have no shortage of retro PCs, so even if this fills a small niche, I'm OK with that.

that's good for $10 and i'd keep it too, a clean up and that athlon 900 accompanied by around 512mb ram would be great for a windows xp or a 98se set up (or both dual boot)
can't tell what motherboard it is but i see 3 ram slots and an AGP , it looks very 1999 😀

You can take that either way, give it a hell of a lot more CPU, RAM and GPU and have the first half of XP gaming covered. Or put in a mobile chip you can set the handbrake on and pootle around in 9x/DX5 stuff. If you don't wanna buy anything you can probably pencil mod the multiplier down a ways. https://www.ocinside.de/workshop_en/socketa_resistors/ shows you how to get 5x there. You can unlock too if CMOS Setup lets you set multi, or you can set on board for easier changeover. Not all pencils work well though, collect up a few different, make short scribbles with them on paper and test with multimeter prongs a mm or two apart on resistance range, the one with lowest scribble resistance is your mod tool.

With a decent PCI sound card (ESS, ALS, maybe even Aureal or Yamaha too?) it will serve in DOS even without an ISA slot, as long, as it has drivers for DOS.

This beauty just arrived. I’ve been looking for one of these for ages, and this just so happened to be NIB. I intend to use it, but I plan to properly preserve the packaging and accompanying things. I’d like to film it for my small YouTube channel, and hopefully others can enjoy it there. I’ve always been curious about these cards; seeing as I missed out on a Number Nine Motion 771 VLB recently, this will more than satisfy my VLB cravings for some time!

I’m a bit shocked, as Mach64 VLBs are rare enough these days. That, and when they’re out there, they’re so dang overpriced. I probably paid more than I should’ve for this, but purchasing it felt like that once-in-a-lifetime “do it” moment.

I also managed to get a NIB Evergreen MXPro 200. Hopefully that’ll find its home in my Socket 5 VLB build. Fingers crossed it’s a later revision with a WinChip2 or even a WinChip2A! It’s a late box, with Windows 98 benchmarks on the back, instead of the earlier release with data from Win95.

WJG6260 wrote on 2021-09-30, 17:23:

I also managed to get a NIB Evergreen MXPro 200. Hopefully that’ll find its home in my Socket 5 VLB build. Fingers crossed it’s a later revision with a WinChip2 or even a WinChip2A! It’s a late box, with Windows 98 benchmarks on the back, instead of the earlier release with data from Win95.

Holy smokes an in-box WinChip? That's amazing.

I was reading about WinChip the other day and thought it was fascinating that they were originally building RISCy CPUs and later transitioned to CISC/x86. So although this is an x86 CPU, it has some elements of RISC design in it. They weren't as fast as contemporary x86 designs but I still think it's super cool to run software on such an interesting alternative design.

Cosmic wrote on 2021-09-30, 17:33:

Holy smokes an in-box WinChip? That's amazing.

I was reading about WinChip the other day and thought it was fascinating that they were originally building RISCy CPUs and later transitioned to CISC/x86. So although this is an x86 CPU, it has some elements of RISC design in it. They weren't as fast as contemporary x86 designs but I still think it's super cool to run software on such an interesting alternative design.

Hey, thanks!

You know, I've always found the IDT/Centaur designs intriguing. These chips are closer to 486s than Pentiums in terms of pure design features, and they're not the fastest, but they have a certain kind of charm to them. They work in basically any board, and they're pretty low-power. The RISC -> CISC move is pretty interesting; I will say that I was not aware of this, so thanks for sharing that! I need to look more into IDT generally; overall, though, their designs are pretty solid. I was particularly impressed with the leap to the WinChip2. Plus, the dang thing supports 3DNow! instructions, which is neat from the perspective of a non-AMD design.

I'm curious how fast this particular upgrade unit is. Evergreen made some nice products and this seems to have a similar quality about it. I'll have to crack it open once I get my VLB board in a case!

Nice find on the Mach64 VLB... especially boxed. Now you just need to upgrade it to 4MB.

I've only got the "lowly" MACH32 but I do have an ISA MACH64.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-30, 18:29:

Nice find on the Mach64 VLB... especially boxed. Now you just need to upgrade it to 4MB.

I've only got the "lowly" MACH32 but I do have an ISA MACH64.

Thank you!

I have seen the 2MB upgrades floating around, but the particular part numbers seem hard to find. Perhaps I can poach one off a PCI card, if there's one with the same part number?

The Mach32 is an awesome board! I love the 2MB variant especially, as the 64-bit RAM datapath makes it quite nice, especially in Windows. ISA Mach64s are awesome though! I'd LOVE to find one; I'm really into ISA graphics cards as of late. ISA for Windows acceleration actually seems to work really well.

I'd love to someday run across the EISA Mach32. That would be neat. They're so dang rare though!

More goodies arrived today. A brand new shrink wrapped Maxtor 120 GB external hard drive, which of course I'm going to open up and remove the drive itself for installation in a Windows 98 desktop. It seems like these external drives often get overlooked by people looking for a 3.5" IDE hard drive. Inside it's your typical ATA 133 DiamondMax hard drive.

An Audigy 2 ZS for my early XP PC.

A Radeon 9600 Pro, also for my early XP PC. It'll get upgraded to a 9800 Pro one of these days when I find one for a decent price.

Brawndo wrote on 2021-10-01, 05:02:

A Radeon 9600 Pro, also for my early XP PC. It'll get upgraded to a 9800 Pro one of these days when I find one for a decent price.

Make sure it works. These cards tend to die fast in my experience. 🙁

3 laptops in "lamentable" state 😀
IBM T22 PIII-900
Packard Bell Duron 1200
Acer C2D T5500

Filthy, with issues and with the least amount of ram possible (I have tons so it wasn't a real problem).

Brawndo wrote on 2021-10-01, 05:02:

More goodies arrived today. A brand new shrink wrapped Maxtor 120 GB external hard drive, which of course I'm going to open up and remove the drive itself for installation in a Windows 98 desktop. It seems like these external drives often get overlooked by people looking for a 3.5" IDE hard drive. Inside it's your typical ATA 133 DiamondMax hard drive.

Yup, though tread careful in capacities above about 250GB.. They started making custom USB controller boards to replace the IDE controller. Happened sooner on 2.5" externals than 3.5s . So if going that route with larger drives, attempt to confirm that particular external unit does actually have a standard drive in it. Possibly it will be acceptable in some instances to shuck the case off a USB drive and hook it up by internal USB 2.0 but not ideal.