TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-07-05, 06:51:

Well, I tested the G4 MDD I acquired last week. The computer is dead, power supply is blown up. It had a Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edi […]
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Well, I tested the G4 MDD I acquired last week. The computer is dead, power supply is blown up. It had a Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition in it which someone had connected via a cheap molex splitter that decided to give up the ghost and took the power supply with it.

The red+ pin on the video card side was completely carbonized, black as coal. So the molex connector had to go, I decided to use my mediocre soldering skills to (over the course of about 3 hours) replace the molex connector with a female molex cable (salvaged from the very molex splitter that made an attempt on this card, no less). When I say I'm mediocre at soldering, I'm not kidding. But it SHOULD work...

The question is did the shitty molex connector take the graphics card along with the PSU. I won't know the anwser to that until I figure out how to flash a PC VGA bios onto it without a functioning AGP Mac.

If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me, but I suppose using a DMM on beep mode between yellow and black should pretty much tell you if it's gone too. That, or check that one SMD mounted polymer capacitor near the 5v rail - that may also tell if the card went bad.

I have ventured out into a field of retro computing that I never thought that I would. The backstory is simple. My youngest brother wish a retro gaming machine with WindowsXP. So I have to do some tests to see if I can whip up something a bit on the cheap side. I have been looking at various different sales add's online for stuff that are from around some 2008/12'ish. And it hit me. Why not test an old MacMini from late 2009 with bootcamp setup and all that? The one that I have is the model with some Core2Duo and Geforce-9400. I believe that it is a mobile chip, but GF-6800 is good enough for some 04/06 era games anyway, and the 9400 is newer.....

So I went ahead and found the Bootcamp 3.1 version online, and downloaded the 3.2 update from Apple. For some reason I was unable to find it on my OsX 10.6 installation media as I have it on a USB stick only. Ran the bootcamp util and installed a special modded XP SP3 that are pre-activated and have a bunch of extra SATA drivers and stuff. I dont know exactly what is on it, and I really dont care, as long as it is working. After installation, I installed bootcamp and ticked off the OsX partition as the default boot partition. Then I began to install games and test out stuff. And I was not disappointed at all. It is fast enough to run games such as MOHAA and Pirates in 1024x768 and maxed out settings.

If people are looking for a nifty and handy small form factor XP compatible machine, then a late-09 Mac Mini is a nice solution. It is fast enough for mid-era XP games as far as I can tell. It has a generic and almost universal physical design, and it does not take up much space. Basically I am now on the lookout for one more for my brother, and they seem to be cheap these days. The question now remains, if I am getting into XP gaming? Well.... I like Pirates as one of the only XP games, but it is not a must for me. Though I like the idea of using a Mac Mini as a writing tool, with OsX installed. And I have an Mac Mini G4 1.42ghz for some MacOS-9 or MorphOS computing. So the answer must be, that I will keep the Intel Mac for that single XP game and for writings. But I have found out what I need to find for my brother.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-07-03, 17:35:

To me radio pliers and work the best. Some people says ballpoint pens also work, but you need one with a big enough hole and metal head (or whatever it's called where the tip comes out from.)

Thanks for the answers. I used one of those tool even if I put some eletric tape on the ends to have a soft pressing on the plastic. I wonder if exist a specific tool.

Today I installed and tested an old early Amd E-350 APU (on which I added 8GB DDR3@1066 and a SSD@SATAII) and brand new board to use it hopefully as generic office itx config. It has not really a cold SoC @40nm which has a dual core 1,6Ghz SSE4a x64 2 x 512Kbytes L2 cpu with the integrated DX11 (OpenGL 3.1 on the radeon linux driver) Radeon HD 6310, 80 shaders @ 500Mhz iGPU which is quite powerful compared to the Atom dual core GMA I tried but of course at higher power demands. With the PicoPSU having a lower final power demand compared to usual cheap ATX psu, the board with freqs/voltages automatically changing works in the range of 15-30 watts where the Atom dual core 1,9Ghz SSSE3 with its GMA "smartphone oriented GPU" doesn't pass the 20 watts limit but they had iGPUs not even comparable on the shaders/fill rate benchmarks.

I carefully changed the thermal paste that was too old on the APU heatsink but still it seems to run at high temperature anyway and the fan accelerate quite often.
The cpu performance doesn't seems much better for now compared to the last generation dual core Atom, I was really expecting more but the iGPU compensate a lot (!) compared to the very difficult Atom/GMA driver portable power saving oriented design that had much different performance target at first. I'm using Linux for now with Wine and these are 3DMark results: 5960 3DMark2001SE, 2709 3DMark05.

- Started Seiging Zoma's castle in Dragon Warrior III
- Fixed up the Versa P/75, only for it to get knocked and screw the screen up (ordering another screen soon)
- Started setting up all the other laptops (but FMA3500C) for the XJ10BT PCMCIA ethernet card, ran a LAN cable through the back of my theater chairs in my office - so I have 10mbps Internet while I watch TV
- Booted up the V/50, it's doing well, still wonky with the HDD controller, but it works so no complaints

Me and the wife are discussing maybe putting a computer or two in the bedroom - I'm thinking iMac and maybe the Compaq (and put one of those Serial WiFi modems on it), with the NEC Speakers I have yet to use. I'm thinking she wants to play around in DOS some again, hehe.

Upgraded DOS to v5 on the PS/1 model 2011 and spent a while going through the hard drive and tidying it up. I have copied out all the IBM bits from the DOS v4 that it came with that was a right mess of v4, v4.01 and v5 bits so I can still run all the BIOS config utils and the famous 4 quadrant IBM ROMSHELL.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-07-05, 06:51:

Well, I tested the G4 MDD I acquired last week. The computer is dead, power supply is blown up. It had a Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edi […]
Show full quote

Well, I tested the G4 MDD I acquired last week. The computer is dead, power supply is blown up. It had a Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition in it which someone had connected via a cheap molex splitter that decided to give up the ghost and took the power supply with it.

The red+ pin on the video card side was completely carbonized, black as coal. So the molex connector had to go, I decided to use my mediocre soldering skills to (over the course of about 3 hours) replace the molex connector with a female molex cable (salvaged from the very molex splitter that made an attempt on this card, no less). When I say I'm mediocre at soldering, I'm not kidding. But it SHOULD work...

The question is did the shitty molex connector take the graphics card along with the PSU. I won't know the anwser to that until I figure out how to flash a PC VGA bios onto it without a functioning AGP Mac.

Couldn't you just put it in a PC along with a working PCI card then flash the Mac Edition card with a PC compatible Radeon 9800 VGA BIOS ?

That's what I did with a Mac edition Radeon 9600 variant a while back .

I finally managed to run the emulation of SB16 in DOS games in W98SE on nForce3 chipset and Audigy sound card. Honestly, I wasn't really hoping for that after reading through many discussions on the Internet and dozens of futile attempts. In the end, however, the board did yield and so I can finally select a suitable case for unibuild W98/XP based on s.754, which I think is a bit unfairly overlooked and underrated.
Of course, it's not pure OPL, but as a substitute on the board without the ISA slot and DDMA support in the chipset, it'll do just fine.
https://uloz.to/tamhle/WhGjKnmAYIHs#!ZJR1AwR2 … 2H1MUyHZJR4ZN==

Ydee wrote on 2022-07-06, 12:01:

I finally managed to run the emulation of SB16 in DOS games in W98SE on nForce3 chipset and Audigy sound card. Honestly, I wasn't really hoping for that after reading through many discussions on the Internet and dozens of futile attempts. In the end, however, the board did yield and so I can finally select a suitable case for unibuild W98/XP based on s.754, which I think is a bit unfairly overlooked and underrated.
Of course, it's not pure OPL, but as a substitute on the board without the ISA slot and DDMA support in the chipset, it'll do just fine.
https://uloz.to/tamhle/WhGjKnmAYIHs#!ZJR1AwR2 … 2H1MUyHZJR4ZN==

I have no idea why you tortured yourself with nF3 to this end when K8T880/M880 can actually do all that completely hassle free..

appiah4 wrote on 2022-07-06, 13:20:

Ydee wrote on 2022-07-06, 12:01:

I finally managed to run the emulation of SB16 in DOS games in W98SE on nForce3 chipset and Audigy sound card. Honestly, I wasn't really hoping for that after reading through many discussions on the Internet and dozens of futile attempts. In the end, however, the board did yield and so I can finally select a suitable case for unibuild W98/XP based on s.754, which I think is a bit unfairly overlooked and underrated.
Of course, it's not pure OPL, but as a substitute on the board without the ISA slot and DDMA support in the chipset, it'll do just fine.
https://uloz.to/tamhle/WhGjKnmAYIHs#!ZJR1AwR2 … 2H1MUyHZJR4ZN==

I have no idea why you tortured yourself with nF3 to this end when K8T880/M880 can actually do all that completely hassle free..

Some people want to watch the world burn, others just enjoy the pain of it all and go back for second helpings.

You're right that everything would be simpler and faster with VIA chipset, but my reasons:
1) Mainboard MSI should have been lying dormant here in pretty red just with nForce chipset
2) It also features Turions with low consumption and performance +/- comparable to Athlon64 and Sempron64, which I once had
3) It matches the red MSI video card 6800, which I also had in box
4) After installing patches by R.Loew, seamless functionality of both SATA and SSD native, with 2GB DDR in W98SE
The last thing I missed was sound support in DOS games, which didn't work for classic PCI soundcards with FM thanks to the unsupported DDMA in nForce3 chipsets. Now I have at least this. Tell me, it won't make a pretty red beast, haha?:-)

Broke out the NanTan laptops (DFI MediaBook FMAP9200M and BSI Notebook 3500C) and got the driver/utility/resource files uploaded to my website finally so people can get those - also re-added all the NEC versa stuff to the site as well from my "resource page" at Geocities as my google-site is going away - I hate the "new google sites" design - prefer the cold-hard HTML of neocities.

I upgraded myself to having a nice 32 bit clean ROM, and some other nice things, on my SE/30.

BetaC wrote on 2022-07-06, 21:03:

I upgraded myself to having a nice 32 bit clean ROM, and some other nice things, on my SE/30.
AA8B0A3D-FC90-4377-9621-F5A2100E8F0C.jpg

That is a lovely looking bit of kit right there !

Does it have that lovely old electronic smell to it ?

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-06, 21:25:

BetaC wrote on 2022-07-06, 21:03:

I upgraded myself to having a nice 32 bit clean ROM, and some other nice things, on my SE/30.
AA8B0A3D-FC90-4377-9621-F5A2100E8F0C.jpg

That is a lovely looking bit of kit right there !

Does it have that lovely old electronic smell to it ?

Yeah, what's nice is that it's such an early motherboard revision that the ROM just straight up fits and stays in place, unlike a lot of SE/30s.

Ydee wrote on 2022-07-06, 14:19:

You're right that everything would be simpler and faster with VIA chipset, but my reasons: 1) Mainboard MSI should have been ly […]
Show full quote

You're right that everything would be simpler and faster with VIA chipset, but my reasons:
1) Mainboard MSI should have been lying dormant here in pretty red just with nForce chipset
2) It also features Turions with low consumption and performance +/- comparable to Athlon64 and Sempron64, which I once had
3) It matches the red MSI video card 6800, which I also had in box
4) After installing patches by R.Loew, seamless functionality of both SATA and SSD native, with 2GB DDR in W98SE
The last thing I missed was sound support in DOS games, which didn't work for classic PCI soundcards with FM thanks to the unsupported DDMA in nForce3 chipsets. Now I have at least this. Tell me, it won't make a pretty red beast, haha?:-)

I got a shipment the other day of some DDR 400 sticks, in amongst them was 6 lovely bright red PCB 1gb sticks, I have never seen a red PCB that nice before, actually unusual to see red PCB for ram sticks. (They dont have heat spreaders but with how nice they look in Red and Gold it would be a shame if they did)

Going to set them aside after testing till I find an equally nice 426/478 board to put them into. (I wonder if a PIII DDR board will take 1gb DDR sticks)

I did a thorough comparison of the VSTs that I have installed, using the massive pile of RuneScape MIDIs, which are GM.

My ranking is as follows.....

1. Edirol HyperCanvas - It has a HQ GM/GM2 bank that gets the job done. On a lark, I tested it with SC-55 GS files, just to see what would happen and it was all out of whack, so it doesn't handle GS well.

2. Edirol VSC-MP1 - It has a smaller and more comprehensive GM2 bank than the HyperCanvas and is also newer, but it is certainly decent enough to satisfy most people who just want decent MIDI playback. It doesn't disappoint with GS files for the SC-55, as it has a GS mode as well. Many people confuse the VST version with the stand-alone version, but they are two completely different soft-synths in their design and function. The VST does not have access to the three different SoundCanvas banks (SC-55, SC-88, and SC-88 PRO) and was built with the SC-88 PRO bank, because that model was intended for musicians to use, like the VST is.

3. Yamaha S-YXG50 - It is considered acceptable for gaming and basic GM MIDI playback, but it really only shines when playing XG files that take advantage of the XG Engine. The basic GS playback is certainly acceptable, so it is no slouch there and probably won't disappoint most. The downside is that you really need XGEdit or similar software, to really enjoy it for more than basic playback.

I picked about a quart of Blueberries with more to pick later, off my dads old plants that I transplanted back in 2015. He had them since about 2000 which makes them vintage ;p

I f*cked and then unf*cked my new WIn 95 box trying to learn about various stuff and things. Pretty productive actually, learned loads.

BetaC wrote on 2022-07-06, 21:03:

I upgraded myself to having a nice 32 bit clean ROM, and some other nice things, on my SE/30.
AA8B0A3D-FC90-4377-9621-F5A2100E8F0C.jpg

I am no Mac guy but that thing does look beautiful..

appiah4 wrote on 2022-07-07, 07:00:

BetaC wrote on 2022-07-06, 21:03:

I upgraded myself to having a nice 32 bit clean ROM, and some other nice things, on my SE/30.
AA8B0A3D-FC90-4377-9621-F5A2100E8F0C.jpg

I am no Mac guy but that thing does look beautiful..

Old Macs did have very nice looking motherboards, you could tell the engineers took some pride in making sure the layout didnt look like a dogs breakfast.