Why yes, I did spend 40 minutes troubleshooting a problem that ended up being "JP11 was a single peg off so the CPU wasn't getting split voltage". I'm not had at all. Nothing is wrong with an esoteric QDI 430HX board.

I replaced a belt today, along with a head transplant between two Citizen W1D floppy drives, and realigned the heads by hand... without a scope.

More information and lots of photos here:

Re: If you have a Compaq LTE series laptop with a broken floppy drive, check the belt!

Testing new config for the IBM DeathStar dual CPU - GPU system, since my AOpen went bit bad, and seems is unstable after windows logo, the system will crash in windows, or will not load the OS at all. Fails also to go in Safe mode some times, will fail every time new installation with errors... Changed every single damn part, so i know it is the mobo that is not working well... But that board was problematic since day 1 i got it, the previous owner was not careful with how he did use it, so the board needed recap, cleaning and fixing, was recapped, cleaned since there was coat of cigarette smoke on the whole mobo, the owner did also power up the board with SDram sticks on the wrong side "installed" that resulted in blown up pin of the sec mem slot, and some scratched PCB with bare traces on 3 places... Also BIOS Error rom message some times... Since i did fix it back in 2017 the board was working for the most part fine, but there was random restarts some times, guess now i know why that was, till now the board completely refuses to stay stable under load, no matter if is 1 CPU, weaker CPU or whatever... It will need investigation in order to know wtf is wrong... I was planning to replace that AOpen with the same one, but in mint condition, but this board is rare so GL with that...

The new mobo GIGAbyte GA-6VTXD (rev. 1.0), seems more then fine cant complain at all, since the board is in factory/ mint state, so i hope it will be rock-solid. The only x3 things that i dont like about it is the missing ISA slot(why the fuck they did bother to print it and have it on multiple of their dual 370 boards, and yet most of them dont have the actual slot tf..), the lack of Tualatin support and ofc the shit capacitors they did use.. They could use some quality japan caps, now it will need recap at some point, since these brands on that board are pure garbage (G-Luxon 🤣 what a joke..) ..

Will be on the look for another AOpen DX34R-U, since i consider that brand rock-solid.. My guess is some mosfet is half-working or some other part on the mobo have problem to behave like this..

Also tested couple of old IDE HDDs, Quantum BIGfoot (refurbished drive yeah the usual crap) but could not test it, as there was broken IDE pins 🤣, Conner 286 40MB Drive well it was working, but all sectors bad 🤣 ..And from that pack there is fine working Fujitsu 10GB...

While softmodding an OG Xbox for a coworker, I found myself debating whether or not my 233MMX should have the PCI Voodoo3 3000LC for maximum DOS compatability, or if I should just use my trusty old Matrox Millenium 1. I think I'm gonna stick with the Voodoo, but I implore people to change my mind.

Matrox Millenium has Windows 3.1 drivers. Try it with PC Tools 2.0 for Windows. It's amazing.

http://toastytech.com/guis/cpdesk.html

BetaC wrote on 2022-12-22, 00:40:

While softmodding an OG Xbox for a coworker, I found myself debating whether or not my 233MMX should have the PCI Voodoo3 3000LC for maximum DOS compatability, or if I should just use my trusty old Matrox Millenium 1. I think I'm gonna stick with the Voodoo, but I implore people to change my mind.

One neat thing you can do with the Millennium is run the Matrox accelerated version of the first Nascar Racing game from Papyrus (CD-ROM version). It's kind of amazing how much better it runs on systems that benefit from it, considering the fact that NO other games were made to utilize this capability. I know Matrox card were prohibitively expensive for most consumers at the time AND were not great with DOS, but if they'd managed to leverage (and market) this 3D acceleration early on things could have been a bit different. This was a full year before 3Dfx brought the Voodoo to retail... though their experience in arcade machines, connection with software devs and great marketing would certainly have made it tough for Matrox even if they'd focused on gaming more aggressively.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-22, 07:29:

Matrox Millenium has Windows 3.1 drivers. Try it with PC Tools 2.0 for Windows. It's amazing.

http://toastytech.com/guis/cpdesk.html

I'll give those a shot. First I need to waste life at work and then figure out why DOS 6.22's installer keeps giving me a "memory allocation cannot load command" error.

Tried booting the £5 untested motherboard combo that arrived today. Already knew it has some swollen caps but still had to give it a go 😁

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/arwd3i9Il4A

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-12-22, 20:39:

Tried booting the £5 untested motherboard combo that arrived today. Already knew it has some swollen caps but still had to give it a go 😁

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/arwd3i9Il4A

Nice! Hard to believe that some boards can function with leaky caps, while others can be so picky.

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-12-22, 20:39:

Tried booting the £5 untested motherboard combo that arrived today. Already knew it has some swollen caps but still had to give it a go 😁

I've seen visibly bulged and leaking caps work as well. To what degree, it's hard to tell. In contrast, I've also encountered failed capacitors that looked fine from a distance.

Repair shops hate me. I fixed defective memory on my video card with this one neat trick.

BetaC wrote on 2022-12-22, 17:23:

I'll give those a shot. First I need to waste life at work and then figure out why DOS 6.22's installer keeps giving me a "memory allocation cannot load command" error.

Try using himem.sys to scan your memory for errors.

I have also seen some terrible boards working just fine with leaky caps, my favourite board was faulty with no visual cap problems but replacing them fixed it!

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-22, 17:23:

I'll give those a shot. First I need to waste life at work and then figure out why DOS 6.22's installer keeps giving me a "memory allocation cannot load command" error.

Try using himem.sys to scan your memory for errors.
[/quote]

I’ll get to that eventually, but it’s weird because this RAM had no issues on a different board, and the windows 95 boot disk doesn’t have the problem. I’ve also encountered the 6.22 installer asking me to insert a floppy with symbols for a name when trying to use the integrated format function, which is almost making me think that it doesn’t like the promise 66 card.

If you're loading devices into high memory, it might be overwriting option ROMs and causing DOS to misbehave. I don't think that this should be an issue though if you boot from a DOS setup disk, as it likely doesn't load anything high.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-23, 00:34:

If you're loading devices into high memory, it might be overwriting option ROMs and causing DOS to misbehave. I don't think that this should be an issue though if you boot from a DOS setup disk, as it likely doesn't load anything high.

Yeah, the issue is perplexing to say the least. For all I know it might just be some dust on a contact in the slot, but I'd really hate to learn that this RAM doesn't like this board in particular.

Two Voodoo Rush'es are back to life - cleaning, soldering, drivers and registry patching!

Those are very nice. I think the Voodoo Rush is underrated. I wish I had bought one or two before prices started to get out of control.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-23, 20:40:

Those are very nice. I think the Voodoo Rush is underrated. I wish I had bought one or two before prices started to get out of control.

Shitty cards in all their ways. 🙁
Speed, electronics, drivers, BIOSes, support are bad as hell.

Babasha wrote on 2022-12-23, 16:41:

Two Voodoo Rush'es are back to life - cleaning, soldering, drivers and registry patching!

Nice!

I always thought the Rush cards were really cool looking... very old-school. Though looking at how mediocre the performance is in relation to board complexity reminds me of why 3dfx didn't survive very long. The Riva 128 was released just a few months later, is basically better in every way and does it all with one graphics chip and 4 RAM chips on a small and simple PCB. Those were really crazy times. 😁

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:02:

Though looking at how mediocre the performance is in relation to board complexity reminds me of why 3dfx didn't survive very long.

True, this was noticeable with the Voodoo5 and the VSA-100 architecture. A product that wasn't competitive with simpler GeForce and Radeon cards in terms of performance, power consumption, features and price. Another reason for the downfall of 3dfx was the acquisition of STB which alienated third-party manufacturers.

Got my Compaq Contra 3/25 booting today from CF Card via Anydrive DDO.... windows 3.1 fired up and Wolfenstein running ok.