appiah4 wrote on 2022-01-25, 07:07:

Quoting myself for an update, I actually built a sleeper AM2+ Athlon II X4 PC. To solve the PSU problem I made my own NetVista […]
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appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-11, 17:55:

I found a nonworking beige IBM Netvista Pentium 4 in my collection I completely forgot about. […]
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I found a nonworking beige IBM Netvista Pentium 4 in my collection I completely forgot about.

Considering removing the insides and using the case for some sort of generic matx build.

Not sure what to build though..

Options:

-MVP4 Socket7 + Banshee
-PLE133T Socket370 + Banshee
-KM266 Socket A + Voodoo 3 (already built in a shitty case)
-P4M890 LGA775 + x800XTPE (already built in a shitty case but the NetVista PSU cant run this and I dont wanna buy a new SFX PSU)

Opinions?

Quoting myself for an update, I actually built a sleeper AM2+ Athlon II X4 PC. To solve the PSU problem I made my own NetVista to ATX PSU adapter, find it attached. Not yet tested, but should work

I'll post photos of the final build when done. This will be my 2005-2010 Windows Vista gaming PC. I never used or even once installed Vista, so I am looking forward to the horrible experience. The last time I had this experimet with Windows Me on my Tualatin system I actually liked it enough to keep it, we will see..

I have one question though, at the time a lot of people were sticking to Vista x86 because x64 was not very mature. I remember taking the jump into x64 with Windows 7 and never regretted it. What about Vista? Is it worth going x64 with an Athlon II and 4GB RAM?

Vista Ultimate with all service packs and updates along with a few community fixes is as good as windows 7 which shouldn't surprise anyone as Windows 7 is just Vista with more driver support and a new UI. I use Vista Ultimate on my Core 2 Quadzilla machine and it runs flawlessly, had little to no issues with it, but that might be due to all the drivers being available and mostly bug free.

Vista at release only got a bad rap because it had to deal with manufacturers switching over to a new way of handling drivers and many didn't bother to make Vista drivers and thus Vista had little legacy support for hardware, now days this isn't an issue and a debloated Vista is quite a good experience.

As for Vista 64, it should be no different from Win7 in that regards, with the right drivers itll be more than fine with 4gb, people tended to stick with 32bit due to lack of 64 bit drivers and not needing 8gb of ram this isn't an issue anymore so feel free to jump on in.

You should still have a 32bit OS like winXP installed as dual boot however, not all games liked Vista due to the changes to drivers and DirectX so you might find a game or three that will run better on XP32.

Steam no longer supports Vista though, right?

appiah4 wrote on 2022-01-25, 10:40:

Steam no longer supports Vista though, right?

Its almost impossible to get Steam running on XP but im pretty sure Vista was only dropped in 2019 so you may be able to find an older version of steam that will still work, the main issue with modern Steam is the version chromium it currently uses wont run under Vista, aside from that so long as you are on a CPU capable of SSE2 a mid 2018 version of steam should still work as long as you set it to never update. If you are on a CPU without SSE2 then you are SOL and even older versions dont work anymore and they cant log in either. (I might be wrong on this point but the last time I tried it refused to connect)

Once you are logged in you should be able to set your account to offline mode and copy across games from Win10 machine and they should work just fine. (I dont download on my retro rigs ...if I can avoid it, my Win11 machine is considerably faster for that purpose)

That said I dont usually bother with steam on XP or Vista since GoG generally has all the older games DRM free and there are other ways to get the rare ones it doesnt have (like eBay, Amazon and Black Flag voyages, abandoned trash piles on the web etc)

The harsh truth here is that Steam doesnt care about supporting older hardware and at some point in the near future even Win7 will get dropped. Perhaps if enough noise is made Vavle will make a retro stem store for XP, Vista and Win7 but Im not holding my breath which means we simply have to find ways around it even if that means running a Steam emulator to play the games we bought on the hardware we want.

Apparently the work around here still works, if you dont mind watching a video.
[solved] How to run Steam without SSE2 (Pentium 3 + Win XP)

https://msfn.org/board/topic/181799-trying-to … xtended-kernel/

I dug up a Microsoft InPort ISA interface card from one of my older storage boxes (Was cleaning house of old parts) and notice it has what looks like a PS2 port on it anyone know what it was used for ? I have never used a MS InPort device before and I dont recall where this card came from but it might be fun to track down whatever connects to it.

Bus mouse: https://deskthority.net/wiki/Bus_mouse#Microsoft_InPort

Looks like there are some adapters that would allow a USB mouse to be used with one: https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=827

snufkin wrote on 2022-01-25, 16:31:

Bus mouse: https://deskthority.net/wiki/Bus_mouse#Microsoft_InPort

Looks like there are some adapters that would allow a USB mouse to be used with one: https://www.waitingforfriday.com/?p=827

I was going to pitch it but I think Ill hold on to it, would be fun to hook a USB mouse to it and use it in a 286 or 386.

More progress on the NetVista Socket AM2+ build. The ECS A780VM-M2 motherboard I bought, advertised as being in working complete condition had:

- A dent on one edge that completely severed one lane
- Swollen Teapo caps
- One SATA port that was ripped off, revealing only pins
- A CR2032 holder with a snapped (-) leg

After repairing all of the faults (I did not replace the SATA port, just removed the pins.. There are five more, plenty enough for me) the board is now working fine. But that was a fucking hassle. Now I am waiting on the HD4850 to arrive, and when it does I will have rebuilt my 2011 PC. This NetVista sleeper will be a Windows XP x86/7 x64 dual boot for playing 2005 - 2010 games.

While I had the soldering iron out I went ahead and did a repair I have been procrastinating for years.. I replaced the broken VRAM decoupling capacitor on a Radeon 9250 PCI and now it POSTs again. I did not test it in 3D yet, but hope to do so soon.

I tracked down information on the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors on my Seagate ST3120a, attached a GoTek and fully booted my 486sx for the first time. I have now installed Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11,
Next I will track down the floppy disk images for a CT2800 (Soundblaster 16) and try and get the CD-ROM drive working too.

Was working on deciding what case to use for a Socket 7 build I am working on.

All of my AT cases have a Turbo button and the motherboard I am planning on using doesn't have a Turbo function. Blah.

Maybe I will change the case later on but I only have one AT case that doesn't have anything installed in it.

Also did some research on an ISA video card from 1991 that I saw for sale and found out with the RAM upgrade it retailed for $570. Ended up paying about $50 for it. Not something I would normally do for a card I might not end up using, but I've never seen one for sale, much less one with the RAM upgrade. Very little info out there about them but I did find a driver download so that is good.

I plugged in a CRT and Slot 1 motherboard into a surge protector in anticipation of testing recent Voodoo and ISA sound card purchases. That's as far as I got. New phone cases and screen protectors arrived today, so it was time to migrate two iPhones (iPhone SE 1st gen and iPhone 8 ) to two iPhone 13 Pros. The migration took most of the day. During the migration, I also upgraded two 4th gen iPad Airs to the latest iPadOS.

Not too much as of late, still on the fence with the NEC Ready 9522....only using half the 250GB HDD. Installed The Sims Complete Collection - runs like crap but it runs. Toying with adding Windows 2000 Dual-Boot (so I can have some modern NT abilities).

Have been getting more into playing Wolfenstein 3D on the Compaq. That project came together quite quickly. Want to start building out the BBS batch files soon so I can start telnetting around again.

Hopefully soon when the weather's better I might try rattle-canning the DVD-RW in the 286 gray (faceplate and all that), and retrobriting the Compaq DeskPro + the 5.25" drive in it so it looks a little more new-ish.

I have been working on a few projects. Tore apart my pentium 1 becuase im not happy with it.
Trying to fix up my P2 but waiting on some small parts. I put a diamond monster 2 3D card in it and just need a passthrough cable to test it out.
brought a pentium 3 that i had in storage at moms place , to look at and see if I want to set it up. I do have an extra voodoo 2 12 MB card i could use, but I also have a boatload of other agp cards i could put in it.
My P4 is almost perfect so ill keep it the way it is.
I have an IBM PS/1 system im trying to restore. Waiting on a HDD i ordered for it . 129 MB. Which is what it originally came with. I also want to find a disney sound source for it but i doubt ill find one.
I also have a couple 486 motherboards I may build but i need a bunch of parts for those.
but slowly but surely things are coming together.

Put the NEC Ready on the rack, believe it or not I had plenty of room for it, then broke out the Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 486 BLX4 75/25 monster and had a pleasant surprise my old copy of Wing Commander II still had good disks (all eight of em, I'm kind of surprised they had talkie games this early, and on 1.2M to boot), and apparently that Compaq has the best 5.25" 1.2M Floppy out of my lot as well because those disks were acting bad on my other machines with one (GEM 286, 486 Desktop)....guess some head cleaning is in order.

Stared for an hour at some dozen or so lines of assembly, trying to figure out why it doesn't work. Turns out I found a Cx486DLC core bug. Never seen it mentioned, could be Cyrix knew about it but without any offical errata document I have no way of knowing if I'm the first one to discover it or not.

Deunan wrote on 2022-01-27, 13:55:

Stared for an hour at some dozen or so lines of assembly, trying to figure out why it doesn't work. Turns out I found a Cx486DLC core bug. Never seen it mentioned, could be Cyrix knew about it but without any offical errata document I have no way of knowing if I'm the first one to discover it or not.

30 yrs later...
Satisfaction comes slow but this one has truly a + on the scale 🤣
Could this bug affect performance overall, like slower benchmarks?

Ugh I stayed up till 12:30am preparing my "last" 486 (I still have a Compaq all in one that has a power supply issue, but that'll wait until spring) systems - One is an AMD DX4-120 complete system, the other one is a DX2-80 (Ti CPU) barebones, but for some reason, configuring these boards was a pain in the ass. The 120Mhz has Windows 95 on it, 32 Mb RAM, a decent video card, so it's ready to be put into a case 😁

Nexxen wrote on 2022-01-27, 14:00:

30 yrs later...
Satisfaction comes slow but this one has truly a + on the scale 🤣
Could this bug affect performance overall, like slower benchmarks?

Yup, pretty happy with this find, however useless it is these days.

Sadly it's not a performance thing, but it does have the potential to upset mixed 16- and 32-bit code, like for example programs/games using DOS extenders that have to exit back to real mode to call any OS functions like file access. I have yet to verify if TI clones of DLC chips also suffer from it, and what about "full-fat" 486 cores from Cyrix. If it turns out TI's do not have this bug it might explain why some games glitch or crash in FM Towns with CPU swapped for Cyrix (but not TI). FMT systems are pretty weird in how they constanly switch between real and protected mode to service various interrupts.

Deunan wrote on 2022-01-27, 14:22:

Nexxen wrote on 2022-01-27, 14:00:

30 yrs later...
Satisfaction comes slow but this one has truly a + on the scale 🤣
Could this bug affect performance overall, like slower benchmarks?

Yup, pretty happy with this find, however useless it is these days.

Sadly it's not a performance thing, but it does have the potential to upset mixed 16- and 32-bit code, like for example programs/games using DOS extenders that have to exit back to real mode to call any OS functions like file access. I have yet to verify if TI clones of DLC chips also suffer from it, and what about "full-fat" 486 cores from Cyrix. If it turns out TI's do not have this bug it might explain why some games glitch or crash in FM Towns with CPU swapped for Cyrix (but not TI). FMT systems are pretty weird in how they constanly switch between real and protected mode to service various interrupts.

From my pov, that is a real issue. Ok, maybe FMT is the true suffer, but I have to ask if it was that difficult to spot by devs back then.

creepingnet wrote on 2022-01-27, 07:04:

I'm kind of surprised they had talkie games this early, and on 1.2M to boot

There was a handful of examples on 8 bit systems, but they were horrendously compressed and processed down to like 4 bit 5khz or worse. They also couldn't afford the RAM for many phrases, 5 seconds took up 20kB still, (When classic era 8 bits had a max of 64kB) so they were mostly novelty add-ons to smaller games.

However, there was another lot of "talkie" games, not many, that utilized phoneme based speech synthesisers, which were add on hardware for a number of systems, so you got basically low, normal and squeaky variations of a robot voice. Currah Microspeech was one model if you wanna look into it..

My Dreamblaster X2GS arrived today from Belgium so Ill be setting up the CT2230 tomorrow in a P3 1ghz rig to test it out !

Itll do till I can get an Orpheus.