davidrg wrote on 2022-03-31, 09:51:

I've no idea what's good for a system like this...

If you want something to compare to then this is a great resource: Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project

Made sweet retro deals for GEforce 7950GX2, Voodoo III 2K AGP, ASUS Agea PCI card, Asus TUSL2-C and others...

Also found this JESUS, i am AOpen fan, this board is one of the rare ones i am looking for (Che Che too and Tube series boards), but fk that price...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/154889484007?hash=it … GcAAOSwqdxhWK5J

badmojo wrote on 2022-03-31, 11:20:

davidrg wrote on 2022-03-31, 09:51:

I've no idea what's good for a system like this...

If you want something to compare to then this is a great resource: Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project

I used his benchmarks and ran though all of them! I'll have a look and compare.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-03-31, 10:48:

davidrg wrote on 2022-03-31, 09:51:

I benchmarked my 486! I've no idea what's good for a system like this but I guess it is what it is. CPU is an Am486DX4-100, Motherboard is a DataExpert EXP4045. Video card is a VLB S3 805 which claims to have come out of a DECpc according to the VGA BIOS. Disk controller is some random 16bit ISA thing. The disk seems awfully slow but I'm sure its normal enough and this is just the first time I've ever benchmarked a disk of this age.

bench.png
mem.png

Let me do this for my 5x86-120, I'm really curious as to how they would compare..

So, here goes:

Welp... I found out why I had issues with VT6421A PCI SATA/PATA controller cards not getting detected on boot on my P233. Story time...

I bought two a long time ago to try and mod XBox360 drive and they laid around since. They worked fine then (about time when Core2Duo were mainstream) but for some reason they don't now. They have ROM chips so it should have it's own BIOS on boot time, and yet nothing shows up beside regular BIOS boot...

I thought maybe it's something to do with too old PCI standard on my QDI Titanium IB+ so I tried them on one Athlon X2 I had nearby. It booted to XP and I got prompted with "found new hardware". OK, so they do work. Great, lets try flashing them with custom (or just updated) firmware I found here http://toastytech.com/files/w95stuff.html.
But flasher tool said "Unknown LPC" and returned strange strings for flash chip ID (FFh/FFh)... Google wasn't that helpfull so I was puzzled a bit and took off sticker that was on ROM chip to see which one is it. It was CAT28F010N. Haven't encountered this one before, but it looked like standard 128kB flash ROM so it should work...

And then I noticed one small detail that explained all of this... ROM chip isn't soldered!

On each side only two pins are soldered to hold it in place! I tried checking few of these unsoldered pins for continuity and yup, no continuity, they're not even touching the pads below... So although these cards have ROM chips they're not used and they behave the same as variants without firmware. That's why there's no drive check on boot, but it gets "noticed" in windows.

Well... now I have new project. Desolder chip on one and pop it in standalone programmer to see if they're real or just dummy chips. Nothing would surprise me now... If they're real I'll flash firmware into it and solder it back on to see if that does something.

The more you know...

That's interesting. So there are no drives available from DOS then? I guess all of the standard BIOS functions are absent as a result.

Yup, as far as DOS is concerned there is nothing. That's normal behaviour for these cards without ROM chip. Windows drivers initialize it and drives are available in Windows. Just not bootable and not accessible in DOS.

The strange part is that this XBox360 procedure had to be done in DOS. XBox360 DVD Drive had to be connected to SATA port on VT6421A controller and tool that was used to read/write it's flash worked only from DOS. And flashing worked fine with this card. I only did it once, but it worked. Maybe that tool had firmware components integrated so it could "drive" this card. I remembered that tool didn't work when connected to chipset SATA controller, only via (pun not intended) these cards.

I'll have to see if I still have these tools somewhere and look a bit what's actually bundled.

I have finally caught up my CD ripping backlog (I use DBPoweramp). As these CDs are all thrift store purchases and most of them are 30+ years old, I believe that this qualifies as a retro activity . I have ripped over 100 CDs in the last 2 weeks, mostly while watching a movie before going to bed .

This is sometimes quite tedious as some discs are scratched and/or degraded to point of only being readable on some drives .

On that note, I will share a little "secret" of mine : one of the best drives I have found to handle marginally readable audio CDs is the disc loader mechanism from an old Norcent DP300 set-top DVD player . This player uses an IDE interface for its disc loader (this was a thing on at least some DVD players in the early 2000s, including some from the likes of Apex Digital and Arcam), so the loader mechanism can be hooked up to a PC over IDE or with an IDE to USB interface .

In my case, the loader is a DVS DSL-710A and it rocks on marginal disks . On the audio side of things, it supports C2 error reporting too . This drive has been better than any of the Plextor drives I own. The only drives that come close are my LG GCE-8527B and my Asus SBC-06D2X-U (apparently OEMed from Pioneer) .

If I ever have to deal with a hard to read data CD, I will definitely give this DVS drive a shot .

EDIT :
Full disclosure: I have several dozen CD/DVD drives and have ripped over 1700 audio CDs so far (over the last 10ish years) .

Solo761 wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:01:

Welp... I found out why I had issues with VT6421A PCI SATA/PATA controller cards not getting detected on boot on my P233. Story […]
Show full quote

Welp... I found out why I had issues with VT6421A PCI SATA/PATA controller cards not getting detected on boot on my P233. Story time...

I bought two a long time ago to try and mod XBox360 drive and they laid around since. They worked fine then (about time when Core2Duo were mainstream) but for some reason they don't now. They have ROM chips so it should have it's own BIOS on boot time, and yet nothing shows up beside regular BIOS boot...

I thought maybe it's something to do with too old PCI standard on my QDI Titanium IB+ so I tried them on one Athlon X2 I had nearby. It booted to XP and I got prompted with "found new hardware". OK, so they do work. Great, lets try flashing them with custom (or just updated) firmware I found here http://toastytech.com/files/w95stuff.html.
But flasher tool said "Unknown LPC" and returned strange strings for flash chip ID (FFh/FFh)... Google wasn't that helpfull so I was puzzled a bit and took off sticker that was on ROM chip to see which one is it. It was CAT28F010N. Haven't encountered this one before, but it looked like standard 128kB flash ROM so it should work...

Card.jpg

And then I noticed one small detail that explained all of this... ROM chip isn't soldered!

ROMChip01.jpg ROMChip02.jpg

On each side only two pins are soldered to hold it in place! I tried checking few of these unsoldered pins for continuity and yup, no continuity, they're not even touching the pads below... So although these cards have ROM chips they're not used and they behave the same as variants without firmware. That's why there's no drive check on boot, but it gets "noticed" in windows.

Well... now I have new project. Desolder chip on one and pop it in standalone programmer to see if they're real or just dummy chips. Nothing would surprise me now... If they're real I'll flash firmware into it and solder it back on to see if that does something.

The more you know...

You probably already know this, but at least some VIA PCI SATA controllers have issues with SATA drives that are capable of SATAII or higher .

Yes, that's where custom firmware from page I linked above might help 😀.

At the moment I use 120 GB SATA SSD, via SATA to IDE adapter, on this P233 MMX where I wanted to use this card.

While connected to motherboard (QDI Titanium IB+, i430TX chipset, I flashed patched bios to allow up to 128 GB HDDs) it works, but I can't get DMA to work. I check it on HDD in device manager, reboot and it's unchecked... According to ATTO benchmark I get 10 MB/s tops.
I have Win98SE installed and I think it's something to do with BIOS. I have also have IDE DVD drive and it also can't enable DMA, tried Seagate 10 GB IDE HDD and again the same.

Yesterday I tried Promise SATA300 TX4 controller. Installed the drivers, removed SATA to IDE board and plugged it directly, it worked, but performace was even poorer than via motherboard IDE controller. A bit less than 10 MB/s and inconsistent.
I then tried Promise Ultra100 TX2 I had from back in the day, reinstalled SATA to IDE board and with this combo I get almost 60 MB/s, HDD doesn't have DMA tickbox, I guess drivers take care of that.

That's why I wanted to test this card since it has both IDE and SATA 😁.

And I've run out of PCI connectors, graphics card, voodoo 1, network card and audio card. I had to replace ESS Maestro PCI card with ISA sound card to plug promise card 😁.

I have had issues with VIA expansion cards, such as USB, on older non-VIA chipsets, especially anything prior to 440BX. So this could be an issue with controller compatibility specifically.

I've never tried a VIA disk controller, but it might be reasonable to expect the same behavior, as they may be tracking a later PCI specification that isn't backwards compatible.

I thought that maybe firmware of these cards used some instructions that weren't available on MMX pentiums and that it doesn't work because of that so I tried this Athlon X2 and it worked in Windows, but then I noticed that there wasn't any boot screen related to the card. And at the end noticed that ROM chip isn't soldered 😁.

At this point I'm more curious if it's possible to make them work or if it' really dummy ROM chip 😁. Luckily desoldering should be easy.

Received some small heatsinks today, which I attached to nine mosfets of my Pentium 4 system, that I am building at the moment.

Ah the simple bliss of right sized heatsinks... that's what made 486 heatsinks hard to find you know, everyone in the very early oughts cutting them up for RAM and MOSFET sinks 🤣

darry wrote on 2022-04-01, 06:05:

I have finally caught up my CD ripping backlog (I use DBPoweramp)

Now that's a name I haven't read in a long, very long time.

darry wrote on 2022-04-01, 06:05:

I have finally caught up my CD ripping backlog (I use DBPoweramp). As these CDs are all thrift store purchases and most of them […]
Show full quote

I have finally caught up my CD ripping backlog (I use DBPoweramp). As these CDs are all thrift store purchases and most of them are 30+ years old, I believe that this qualifies as a retro activity . I have ripped over 100 CDs in the last 2 weeks, mostly while watching a movie before going to bed .

This is sometimes quite tedious as some discs are scratched and/or degraded to point of only being readable on some drives .

On that note, I will share a little "secret" of mine : one of the best drives I have found to handle marginally readable audio CDs is the disc loader mechanism from an old Norcent DP300 set-top DVD player . This player uses an IDE interface for its disc loader (this was a thing on at least some DVD players in the early 2000s, including some from the likes of Apex Digital and Arcam), so the loader mechanism can be hooked up to a PC over IDE or with an IDE to USB interface .

In my case, the loader is a DVS DSL-710A and it rocks on marginal disks . On the audio side of things, it supports C2 error reporting too . This drive has been better than any of the Plextor drives I own. The only drives that come close are my LG GCE-8527B and my Asus SBC-06D2X-U (apparently OEMed from Pioneer) .

If I ever have to deal with a hard to read data CD, I will definitely give this DVS drive a shot .

EDIT :
Full disclosure: I have several dozen CD/DVD drives and have ripped over 1700 audio CDs so far (over the last 10ish years) .

I'll have to bear that in mind, so far haven't had anything that terrible. Have a small stack that I've been meaning to get ripped myself. I knew of the "some DVD players have IDE internals" thing, but I didn't realise they were actually any good.

A Geforce4 MX420 GPU (NV17?) runs on 1.60V. Let it be known.
I'm about to recap a card, so I was figuring out how each of the caps are connected. 2 of them are on the GPU Vcore output.
I'm tempted to use polys for those caps, but since they come in lower voltage specs I needed to figure out what voltage they'd need to handle. To my surprise, nobody on the internet has ever posted what a normal GPU voltage is for the Geforce4MX or Geforce2 GPUs. At least not that I could find. So I powered it up and put a meter on them - the answer is 1.60V.

PS - techpowerup.com's ideas of GPU successors and predecessors makes my head hurt.

I did the heatsink chopping-up thing, once. Never again.

Far too much metal dust anxiety and cleanup to be worthwhile. Everything within a 5m radius of the workspace (including own skin + clothes + hair) afterwards has some quantity of microscopic metal shards (aka Magic Shorting & Random Fault Dust) randomly all over it. Virtually gotta walk through a decontamination shower before you're safe to go within a metre of anything electronic afterwards!

All over a measly $1 bit of aluminium.

Spent about 3 hours this evening trying to get a Gravis Ultrasound Extreme installed and running.

Ended up going through 2 different machines and multiple ISA slots before it would even get detected by the setup program. A fresh install of DOS 6.22 later, I finally got into the setup program only to be greeted by total failures of the DMA channel testing. After spending forever trying to fix that, discovered that is a bug with the setup program itself. Then after ignoring the errors, got it initialized and it works!

Now I'm afraid to move it. 😳

Yesterday and today have been working on setting up my "overkill DOS testbench". I want that for mostly testing hardware and at one time i probably use it to start creating soundcard catalogue, that contains recordings of all kinds of soundcards and you can compare them side-by-side.

But for now, i got it set up. What it is then.

• Chaintech 6AIA2 motherboard. (VIA VT82C693A chipset. Has all kinds of workaround-support for PCI soundcards in DOS, from TDMA and stuff up to SB-Link cable) In addition, it also has built-in ESS SOLO-1 soundcard, which is very good for DOS.
• Intel Celeron 433MHz ("Overkill enough". Though if i get my hands on some older Pentium 3 that works on this board, i'll upgrade)
• 256MB PC133 SDRAM (on 66-83MHz bus, works well with CL2)
• nVidia Vanta 16 (16MB, great DOS compatibility! I tried Radeon 9250 cards, but they are slightly incompatible in high-res dos vesa modes, having artefacts and stuff)
• 512MB CF card as HDD
• A great 420W quiet ATX PSU, which also has negative 5V supply. (I also have ATX -> AT adapter)
• Amazing DELL 2007FPb LCD with 1600x1200 resolution and HUGE amount of video-inputs: DVI/HDMI, VGA, S-Video, Composite. Also has USB hub built in.

On this setup, i can test ISA and PCI soundcards of all kinds. I can also test AGP, PCI and ISA videocards. And it's fast so it saves time every time i need to wait for the computer to do something. My interest really ends with Pentium MMX and this setup here works beautifully as an "overkill approach" for up to Pentium MMX era.

And in general, on this table, i have everything i need for any kind of retro-debugging. On the left, there's floppy drive and under it, in white box, i have some "ready-to-go" ISA super-io card, vga, etc. Monitor has plethora of inputs, PS/2 keyboard (and adapters for DIN5 and USB, if i wish), PSU with all voltages i would ever need and network, sound, whatever more right on the table to use.

I love it, where there's an actual place that is prepared to work with retro hardware!

NB! Fun fact: You can see a small network switch on the table as well. It's a 10Mbps hub, with coaxial network port. For my retro-enjoyment machines (386, 486, P-MMX) i connect them to network over coaxial - just like it is appropriate.