This weekend, for curiosity I've been trying out TRS-80 Color Computer games on my Dragon 32 computer, specifically cassette .cas files loaded via a CASDuino device.

I know the CoCo and the Dragon are similar, but I was curious to see what happens if you try to load a cassette image from a CoCo on the Dragon and I was quite surprised. Compatibility is hit and miss, but a lot does simply just work fine if it's programmed in machine code & doesn't rely heavily on the CoCo ROM, albeit in black & white for most games due to no NTSC artifact colour support on the Dragon. BASIC programmed stuff is non functional, no major loss there though. Some games that require keyboard input, due to the different keyboard mapping, for the most part you can usually find the correct key with trial & error.

A little bit of pointless fun and experimentation this weekend. Many of the worthwhile CoCo games were ported to the Dragon 32 anyway, either as direct ports or ports with different names. Still good to have options though. I did notice 1 improvement, the CoCo version of Zaxxon is a little better than the Dragon 32 version as it's in the high res mode and doesn't have the weird graphics glitches/missing graphics of the Dragon version.

I tore down a system that was seeing no love or use. I had meant to use it as an AGP/DVI capture source for DOS games but never got around to doing anything of the kind. So instead, I put together a build in its case that I had in my mind for a long time, a Frankenstein build with hardware across a few years. The aim was to bring together a lot of things from a range of years I am strongly nostalgic for.

So the components that went into this build:

AMD AthlonXP 2200+ 266MHZ FSB CPU
ASRock K7VM2 mATX Socket A Motherboard
3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP with active cooling mod
Terratec DMX XFire 1024 CS4624 PCI sound card (A3D 1.0 & EAX 2.0)
LG 16x DVD-ROM IDE
Seagate 80GB HDD IDE
FSP 300W ATX PSU with 30A on 5V rail
Windows 2000 SP4

It is a hybrid of the P3/Voodoo3 and AthlonXP/Radeon8500 PCs I had between 2000 and 2002. I haven't even touched the power switch yet, but I can't stop looking at it. I am daydreaming about playing so many games on this thing..

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-06, 07:38:

dormcat wrote on 2021-11-06, 07:08:

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-03, 12:57:

First I realized the motherboard had 20pin power connector and the PSU had 24pin -> two weeks of waiting for an adapter

You don't need an adaptor unless there's something else (e.g. a capacitor) blocking the addition 4-pin part of the 24-pin connector from PSU.

Yeah so I found out and asked for confirmation here, which I got. Unfortunately there was a cap on one side and a coil on the other side blocking it, can't remember which side the 4-pin part is (left?) but either way it was blocked.

Edit: Oh and there is a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 on its way to replace the SBLive! that turned out to be a dud. It was sold as tested and the seller is reputable, so I guess I'm good there, I just hope the drivers will play nicely. If not, I'll put it in my next build (rabbit hole deepens) and hunt down a Aureal Vortex 2 for the Win98 build.

The Audigy 2 is a nice card. Running one in my Win 7, XP gaming and music recording build I did last month. I wanted to use an X-Fi Elite Pro but it turns out I need to recap that one. I just got an Aureal Vortex AU8820B2 Rev A. Apparently it is an in-between model with some features of the AU8830 but with half the channels and no HRTF. I can't tell if that includes support for A3D 2 but with a date of 1999, maybe...
Anyway, it is going up on eBay. There don't seem to be many available and half the ones I see, the sellers are trying to pass them off as an 8830. I will probably only ask $20 for it though because even if it supports A3D 2.0, it is at reduced functionality and therefore probably really not any better than an 8810. And I would rather have any of my SB cards, from AWE64 on, really, than Vortex 1.

Built my SLI rig today:

Core 2 Extreme X6800
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4
4GB DDR2-667
2x Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB
128GB SSD
EVGA 80+ White 500W
I have been planning this one for about 18 months and finally came together in the last few weeks with the MB and CPU practically falling in my lap. I am looking forward to doing some overclocking. I will be starting out with FSB at 1333, RAM at 667 and the CPU multiplier set to 11 for a clock speed of 3668.5MHz. This is reportedly about as high as one can go with stock voltages. Then I will eventually be trying it with FSB at 1600 and RAM at 800 and CPU x10 for 4GHz. That is as far as I am going to push it with that Cooler Master cooler. To try to get up to around 4.5GHz, I have an Ares Black 5 which can keep a 140W Xeon cool. Probably be trying 1333/667 and x14 for 4669MHz and 1600/800 and x11 for 4400MHz.
I ran out of steam tonight and didn't get it fired up yet. I sure hope everything works. I will be crying in my beer if that motherboard is no good. I have Core 2 CPUs for days, extra memory and a spare 7800GTX.
I am thinking of eventually putting this in a modern glass panel case because it just seems too special to cover up. It would be my very first build in a modern case. I stuck my Ryzen in a vintage Antec tower.
I hope I didn't offend anyone by putting a CrossFire link on Nvidia cards, 🤣 Eventually, it will get an Nvidia branded link.
I also discovered that this motherboard supports up to 6 SATA devices in RAID 10 and since that is something I have been wanting to learn, I am going to make that a secondary function of this build. It will just be for archiving some music and videos I created and don't want to lose and free up a couple of backup drives. Since I am running XP on this machine, it won't be networked.

Crossfire bridge to SLI 2 nVidia cards? Heresy.

HangarAte2nds! wrote on 2021-11-08, 09:19:

Built my SLI rig today:20211107_224257.jpg20211107_224217.jpg20211107_224654.jpg20211107_224550.jpg Core 2 Extreme X6800 Gigabyt […]
Show full quote

Built my SLI rig today:20211107_224257.jpg20211107_224217.jpg20211107_224654.jpg20211107_224550.jpg
Core 2 Extreme X6800
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4
4GB DDR2-667
2x Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB
128GB SSD
EVGA 80+ White 500W
I have been planning this one for about 18 months and finally came together in the last few weeks with the MB and CPU practically falling in my lap. I am looking forward to doing some overclocking. I will be starting out with FSB at 1333, RAM at 667 and the CPU multiplier set to 11 for a clock speed of 3668.5MHz. This is reportedly about as high as one can go with stock voltages. Then I will eventually be trying it with FSB at 1600 and RAM at 800 and CPU x10 for 4GHz. That is as far as I am going to push it with that Cooler Master cooler. To try to get up to around 4.5GHz, I have an Ares Black 5 which can keep a 140W Xeon cool. Probably be trying 1333/667 and x14 for 4669MHz and 1600/800 and x11 for 4400MHz.
I ran out of steam tonight and didn't get it fired up yet. I sure hope everything works. I will be crying in my beer if that motherboard is no good. I have Core 2 CPUs for days, extra memory and a spare 7800GTX.
I am thinking of eventually putting this in a modern glass panel case because it just seems too special to cover up. It would be my very first build in a modern case. I stuck my Ryzen in a vintage Antec tower.
I hope I didn't offend anyone by putting a CrossFire link on Nvidia cards, 🤣 Eventually, it will get an Nvidia branded link.
I also discovered that this motherboard supports up to 6 SATA devices in RAID 10 and since that is something I have been wanting to learn, I am going to make that a secondary function of this build. It will just be for archiving some music and videos I created and don't want to lose and free up a couple of backup drives. Since I am running XP on this machine, it won't be networked.

You can run an XP system on your network as long as you don't give it internet facing capabilities. I use my XP systems to access ISOs, programs, and etc files on my NAS via SMB all the time. The Core2 Quads and their extreme derivatives do not overclock well. I never could get my X9650 over 3.6GHZ without encountering errors during prime testing, didn't matter how much voltage I fed it. If your not running anything that actually uses multithreading you would be MUCH better served by the dual core Extreme series X6800 or honestly an E8000 series Core2 Duo. I have a Core2 E8000 around here somewhere that is confirmed stable at the blazing speed of 4.6GHZ with a moderate voltage upkick. You will never get a Quad up to that speed without liq nitro cooling, and most games will run better with the higher IPC speeds on the first 2 cores.

Good to see SLI systems finally getting some love here. When I first joined and was buying up GPUs and hardware from the early 2000's everyone here acted like I was crazy. I don't frequent VOGONs as much as I used to, and my hardware buying has really slowed (partly because I have, for practical purposes, enough hardware to run practically any X86 program on original equipment down to the specific year). I actually am pulling all my GPUs from my machines out in the garage due to humidity and temperature concerns here in a couple of weeks (probably not super serious, but the garage door is opened daily and I have seen condensation on some of the hardware in there before) and the fact my GPUs are the parts that would be expensive to replace if they were damaged and put them all into double static bag storage inside the house. I honestly don't use my original hardware as much as I used to, the techniques for getting original games running on modern hardware faithfully have improved by just leaps and bounds and the last 5 years. The QX9650 is actually living in a machine with a GTX 560Ti and a SB Audigy2ZS hooked up to a 25" 1920x1200 monitor and it dual boots XP and 7 (some games designed for 7 have broken brightness controls, and for games like Bioshock thats kind of a big problem) so I can run 1600x1200 4:3 titles at native resolution without pixel stretching, its just like using a 1600x1200 monitor and honestly this machine covers 95 percent of my needs. It also has a full array of emulation tools that can get me over the edge with things like DOSBOX outputting to a SoundCanvas VM. The main thing honestly is just time, I feel like as I get older I'm less and less willing to spend 5 hours fucking with setting up a system, an additional 1 hour setting up my CRTs geometry, and then playing 1 or 2 hours of the game I actually wanted to play. The difference between how 16 year old me and 22 year old me value time is mind numbing. All the hardware is mostly a security thing at this point, by which I mean I know its there if I need it and realistically while (thankfully) most of my retro computer hardware is not skyrocketing in price, its not going to lose its value either.

BTW pull the coolers off those 7800GTXs, if there are not thermal pads between the memory chips and the cooler put some on. I've identified this as a major factor in GeForce 7000 failure rates, nearly every card I see without those pads fails immediately, the ones with it last. Some manufacturers put them on there, some did not because AFAIK NVIDIA didn't require them to. Also replace the thermal paste.

Managed to completely resurrect a very unknown 386DX machine:
Re: Help to identify: MULTIPRO VII-386DXV (UR INFINITY) [Searching for UM82C862 IO Controller Chip!]

HangarAte2nds! wrote on 2021-11-08, 09:19:

Built my SLI rig today:20211107_224257.jpg20211107_224217.jpg20211107_224654.jpg20211107_224550.jpg Core 2 Extreme X6800 Gigabyt […]
Show full quote

Built my SLI rig today:20211107_224257.jpg20211107_224217.jpg20211107_224654.jpg20211107_224550.jpg
Core 2 Extreme X6800
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4
4GB DDR2-667
2x Geforce 7800 GTX 256MB
128GB SSD
EVGA 80+ White 500W
I have been planning this one for about 18 months and finally came together in the last few weeks with the MB and CPU practically falling in my lap. I am looking forward to doing some overclocking. I will be starting out with FSB at 1333, RAM at 667 and the CPU multiplier set to 11 for a clock speed of 3668.5MHz. This is reportedly about as high as one can go with stock voltages. Then I will eventually be trying it with FSB at 1600 and RAM at 800 and CPU x10 for 4GHz. That is as far as I am going to push it with that Cooler Master cooler. To try to get up to around 4.5GHz, I have an Ares Black 5 which can keep a 140W Xeon cool. Probably be trying 1333/667 and x14 for 4669MHz and 1600/800 and x11 for 4400MHz.
I ran out of steam tonight and didn't get it fired up yet. I sure hope everything works. I will be crying in my beer if that motherboard is no good. I have Core 2 CPUs for days, extra memory and a spare 7800GTX.
I am thinking of eventually putting this in a modern glass panel case because it just seems too special to cover up. It would be my very first build in a modern case. I stuck my Ryzen in a vintage Antec tower.
I hope I didn't offend anyone by putting a CrossFire link on Nvidia cards, 🤣 Eventually, it will get an Nvidia branded link.
I also discovered that this motherboard supports up to 6 SATA devices in RAID 10 and since that is something I have been wanting to learn, I am going to make that a secondary function of this build. It will just be for archiving some music and videos I created and don't want to lose and free up a couple of backup drives. Since I am running XP on this machine, it won't be networked.

I'm sorry, does that even work? Only selected few P35 boards can do SLi, maybe you should've gone with ATI cards for CrossFire, that's guaranteed to work?

Resurrected an old Abit BP6 I had laying around with some fresh new capacitors. Still need to sort out the onboard HPT466 DMA66 controller - it doesn't detect anything, though the standard udma33 channel is working fine.

20 years late to the game, but, WOW! I understand the celeron/mendocino fascination from y2k.

Quake 3 FPS @ 640x480 (Abit BP6, voodoo3 2k), all at stock cpu vcore
Celly 466@stock - 28.4
Celly 466@525/75 - 44.0
Celly 366@550/100 - 52.2

Yikes! *massive* performance increases!

Had this saga that resulted me to have a better motherboard on my main 486 PC. 😀
QDI V4S471/G locks up with 1024kB of cache [Fixed! Nicer Award BIOS available!]

This, actually took more than a few days... Used my 3D scanner to rebuild the hinge on this Texas Instruments - Extensa 390CX laptop. Initially had no awareness of the good parts of the late TI / early Acer laptops - love this thing overall, it's got a nice OSD for volume / screen brightness that works in DOS, good keyboard/touchpad, bright 800x600 TFT, integrated CD drive and Yamaha OPL3-SAx audio.

I started off with the Acernote Lite 370PCX (which needed LCD repair, lots of plastics repair and a keyboard flex repair), then noticed this 390CX that I'd been passing up for ages. The service manuals for these things compared to IBM / Toshiba are amazing, so much detail.

Both the left corner of the lid and the left corner of the bezel were completely missing. It was a lot of work but I don't regret it, these TFT & DOS laptops deserve saving:

Here's how it started, it seems I didn't take a picture to start with when I got it, so here's the ebay pictures:

The redesign in CAD, the other side was damaged in different ways (repaired with low-temp thermoplastic), so I scanned it, re-designed it and it wasn't perfect but since it's only going to be installed on this one laptop ever, it doesn't need to be perfect and can be remodelled with a hot iron or dremel:

And finally, in place, the hinge plastic is still a bit fragile, it broke in a new way when I put it all together... superglue is now 90% of the structural strength of this laptop. But it's better than it was, my 3d print added some structure to it so it's not ripping itself apart. Used the soldering iron to re-melt the plastic on the other cracks:

That's an amazing job. Wish I had access to a 3D printer so I can make a new laptop display assembly.

I'm fiddling with the beloved and maligned VST MIDI Driver, trying to figure out why it won't work as it should. Once you've used it with the mighty XG soft-synths (or whatever else), it's kinda hard to go back to lame SoundFont MIDI. It will load and function perfectly when used after installing, but will be completely non-functional after a system reboot, and requires reinstallation to get the driver loaded and working as it should (until you reboot the system) be. After rebooting, Coolsoft MIDIMapper/VirtualMIDISynth doesn't recognize the VST MIDI source and it disappears from the options and Falcosoft MIDI Player won't run the VST Host application, because it no longer registers it as installed in the system, even though the software is installed. It's quite perplexing and I have no error messages or system logs to use for diagnosis. I've tried every workaround I can think of, including forcing the host app to run during startup - it won't show up in the active programs, except when called forth by the MIDI Player or the VST Driver config - and only loading the VMS after it runs, and nothing has been successful.

I spent a good long while soldering FDD and IDE pins on to that IO card I got recently.

Prosper wrote on 2021-11-08, 23:38:

Resurrected an old Abit BP6 I had laying around with some fresh new capacitors. Still need to sort out the onboard HPT466 DMA66 […]
Show full quote

Resurrected an old Abit BP6 I had laying around with some fresh new capacitors. Still need to sort out the onboard HPT466 DMA66 controller - it doesn't detect anything, though the standard udma33 channel is working fine.

20 years late to the game, but, WOW! I understand the celeron/mendocino fascination from y2k.

Quake 3 FPS @ 640x480 (Abit BP6, voodoo3 2k), all at stock cpu vcore
Celly 466@stock - 28.4
Celly 466@525/75 - 44.0
Celly 366@550/100 - 52.2

Yikes! *massive* performance increases!

I just got a bunch of old ATA-100 controller cards and looking forward to using them with my PIII hardware. Could work for your application too probably. The ones I have are widely supported; even a dos driver if I am not mistaken. They are also RAID controllers, in case I feel my game saves are just that precious 😜

While checking for some 486s I found misplaced Am5x86 133. Marked as dx4-133...
Straightened pins and going to test next w/e.

I spent some time using OS/2 Warp 4 on my retro overkill machine (Intel Core i5-3570) this weekend. It has a few quirks, but I think I’ve got it mostly working with widescreen graphics, stereo audio, USB (mostly), SATA/AHCI, and networking.

I never used OS/2 back in the day, but it is fun trying to get it working on modern hardware. I benchmarked the system, and it reports 50x the speed of a Pentium 166 MMX of the era.

I also found a "skin" for WIN-OS2 to make it look a little more like the Warp 4 GUI. It looks a lot less jarring in seamless mode now.

I still need to clean up the desktop and install a few more apps. Maybe I can get VLC Player working.

Here are a couple of screen captures from the working system:

OS/2 forever..

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-26, 15:55:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-24, 13:22:

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-10-23, 17:11:

i got my retro pc in post yesterday been working on it. So far the gpu freezes, the ram is non matching pair of half capacity i […]
Show full quote

i got my retro pc in post yesterday been working on it.
So far the gpu freezes, the ram is non matching pair of half capacity i bought
it has original windows 7 no sp
the foxconn motherboard based on via p4m800 chipset accepts Both DDR and DDR2 ram up to 2gb
the built in chipset graphics (64mb) has no official download for windows 7 but lower.
I am currently upgrading to sp1 with generic vga driver integrated graphics (low res ugh) then i will try find a chipset gpu driver .... does windows update still have drivers for seven?
it has the 3.06ghz P4 socket 478 Prescott
nice sata disk 1tb
It has misbehaved with 4 gpu's so far i limited agp to 4x mode and tried 2 x nvidias and 2x ati's they all crashed.
The memory modules crashed the integrated gpu so i swapped to ddr400 modules (brand new) to install sp1
In ddr2 it only supports 533mhz so 100mhz isn't much of a deal except single data rate will be needing to get some ddr2 533 later I am all out of that snail speed.
I have got official gpu driver to try out the ati that came with this tower again but if it freezes its in the bin.
Hopefully one of the others will work proper (experience index shouldn't crash)
If this effort fails I shall abort and move to xp but i hear prescott not so good on 32bit? I suppose I shall find out as last resort missed out on vista didn't need it with xp at all. 64bit well the multimedia part of that is mostly 32bit.
stupid gpu i have etch a scetch graphics because of you and i may have to settle for xp just to run you.

As an update its been installing 2gb patches today and just about to test the gpu's again.
Hopefully the updates, latest drivers and replaced system ram will encourage normal operation or its recycle time and although i have a sis 315 coming for another pc it'll have to do for this because I'm not loading xp after an all day update just for the chipset gpu 😀

Its finished. After replacing the DDR2 memory with DDR400, patching and driver updates the included GPU runs like new. The windows 7 experience index completed with latest Direct X installed without hang or BSOD. Ready to be my new favourite P4 HT except for the wind tunnel small fan PSU which is being replace by SATA era PSU and that means SATA to MOLEX adapters for the optical arrangements.
Future uses will be DOSBOX, console emulation, and a bunch of pre 2010 games (some i missed out on)

Seller contacted me said have the correct memory for me something to look forward to. I found the 3rd most fastest P4 HT socket 478 chip ever made lying around its the 3.40ghz model a couple hundred megahertz faster so I am installing it. (almost pointless but faster though)
The fastest one made was 3.80ghz but in 3.66 and 3.88 mass production was cancelled in favour of the new socket 775 (I have that stuff too)
Today it shall be heatsink compund for my 6600 GT card , the GPU in this box and the CPU. Then i shall see if the 6600 works better than the ATI.
New PSU now and the system is quiet and unlike the old one doesn't sound like a wind tunnel and make heat like a hair dryer (more SATA device power plugs and black molex connectors)

appiah4 wrote on 2021-11-15, 06:02:

OS/2 forever..

I wish. Loved WARP 3 when it came out. Never used any version beyond that.