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

Yesterday I downloaded Fallout 1 from the Epic Games store.

Tested it on my Pentium II build: it works!

The strange thing is: it starts only after opening the dxdiag menu 🤔

Before, it gives me this DirectX error:

Demetrio wrote on 2022-12-23, 23:18:

Yesterday I downloaded Fallout 1 from the Epic Games store. […]
Show full quote

Yesterday I downloaded Fallout 1 from the Epic Games store.

Tested it on my Pentium II build: it works!IMG-20221223-WA0011.jpeg

The strange thing is: it starts only after opening the dxdiag menu 🤔

Before, it gives me this DirectX error:
IMG_20221223_233302.jpg

I'd reinstall Direct X, and try various versions, actually I'd just do the final DX9 unless that doesnt fix it.

It's likely the Epic ver of Fallout is using the sfall ddraw.dll which is incompatible with 9x. Try deleting or renaming it if you want vanilla Fallout to work on 9x.
AFAIK, the lowest supported OS by sfall is Windows 2000 and XP+ are the versions the sfall dev supports.
I'm thinking this usage comes from these versions of the game being orginal Fallout patched to latest official version with the High Resolution patch installed but I haven't looked at the Epic version.
Thinking for 9x likely the TeamX patches may be the best bet for original fallout.

Nowadays you'd be better off running F1 using fo1in2 (installer requred Vista last I checked back in 2020 but you could install on Vista and copy over files to XP, haven't tried earlier) or Fallout 1 DOS Patcher (F1DP). Don't mess with FIXT. There's been ALOT of fixes for F1 and F2 over the years but the games can be finished just fine without.

Life is strange.

Today, after more than 20(twenty) years of daily->weekly service, the ridiculously tiny fan/cooler on my Asus GF4 Ti 4400 graphics card finally started to sound like a lovesick hairdryer.

Briefly pulling out the onboard fan connector led to strange effects, even in 2D, so.... I finally (!) had a use for that cheapo China VGA fan I bought many years ago.

Now, next conundrum was HOW to actually fit the new cooler to the now naked gpu chip.... As the holes would not match, and the writing on the package was clearly not meant for my card version, even if it said GF4xxx, the suggested mm hole distance was way off. So, eventually I found a (wrong) combination of holes that seemed to fit(though cooler slightly tilted), but then next issue arose - what side of the card and in what order was each of all those small screws and bits actually meant for ?? As there were some strange threaded 'disks'/thick metal 'washers' inlcuded.

And, here comes the fun part: after some headscratching, I ended up on google, and somehow found a youtube video... where someone we all know and love (no, not Santa! 😆 ) was doing exactly the same, with the EXACT same card model !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs7Dr3en3zU

GPU cooler from eBay / GeForce4 Ti 4400 cooler upgrade
PhilsComputerLab

bestemor wrote on 2022-12-24, 00:08:

Life is strange. […]
Show full quote

Life is strange.

Today, after more than 20(twenty) years of daily->weekly service, the ridiculously tiny fan/cooler on my Asus GF4 Ti 4400 graphics card finally started to sound like a lovesick hairdryer.

Briefly pulling out the onboard fan connector led to strange effects, even in 2D, so.... I finally (!) had a use for that cheapo China VGA fan I bought many years ago.

Now, next conundrum was HOW to actually fit the new cooler to the now naked gpu chip.... As the holes would not match, and the writing on the package was clearly not meant for my card version, even if it said GF4xxx, the suggested mm hole distance was way off. So, eventually I found a (wrong) combination of holes that seemed to fit(though cooler slightly tilted), but then next issue arose - what side of the card and in what order was each of all those small screws and bits actually meant for ?? As there were some strange threaded 'disks'/thick metal 'washers' inlcuded.

And, here comes the fun part: after some headscratching, I ended up on google, and somehow found a youtube video... where someone we all know and love (no, not Santa! 😆 ) was doing exactly the same, with the EXACT same card model !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs7Dr3en3zU

GPU cooler from eBay / GeForce4 Ti 4400 cooler upgrade
PhilsComputerLab

I hope you were a little more sparing with the thermal paste. =)

Discovered my Epson Equity III+'s front cover had cracked. Not sure how it happened, but all those little plastic struts had split apart.

Applied some acetone and clamps and hopefully that will seal it back together.

Frustrated with the laptop I just got. Has a 233mhz MMX, ESS 1879, however it has Neomagic MagicGraph 128XD graphics and yes that chip is responsible for it having janky scrolling on two of my favorite titles Jazz Jackrabbit and Keen 4. Very unfortunate

Cleaned my Orion TVCR0950b inside and out (except the tube got dusted off and the power board got the same treatment since I didn't want to risk damaging the set. The VCR portion wasn't working very well at all until I cleaned the sensor off with a bit of contact cleaner and 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol on the heads and the sensor to prevent the plastic sensor from fogging up.

https://imgur.com/gallery/8Iefw88

Here's a gallery of the small, cute unit. The future plan is to modify it to allow RGB and s-video once I gather more deets on the box for the jungle and microcontroller chips.

DosFreak wrote on 2022-12-24, 00:01:

It's likely the Epic ver of Fallout is using the sfall ddraw.dll which is incompatible with 9x. Try deleting or renaming it if y […]
Show full quote

It's likely the Epic ver of Fallout is using the sfall ddraw.dll which is incompatible with 9x. Try deleting or renaming it if you want vanilla Fallout to work on 9x.
AFAIK, the lowest supported OS by sfall is Windows 2000 and XP+ are the versions the sfall dev supports.
I'm thinking this usage comes from these versions of the game being orginal Fallout patched to latest official version with the High Resolution patch installed but I haven't looked at the Epic version.
Thinking for 9x likely the TeamX patches may be the best bet for original fallout.

Nowadays you'd be better off running F1 using fo1in2 (installer requred Vista last I checked back in 2020 but you could install on Vista and copy over files to XP, haven't tried earlier) or Fallout 1 DOS Patcher (F1DP). Don't mess with FIXT. There's been ALOT of fixes for F1 and F2 over the years but the games can be finished just fine without.

Renaming ddraw.dll did the trick!

Thanks a lot 🍻

My new retro network build network. It serves something else too but 4 vlans, one for retro and other for various iot's and the rest for my home network. Nothing fansy but working. Pfsense and 4 gigabit ethernet ports. Works with everything for my retro nas serving drivers and os's, games 😀

Decided to play the untested GPU lot lotto again:

Paid $68 shipped for:

2x BFG 8800GTS 640MB OC
1x EVGA 9800GT 1GB (more rare than the 512MB GT)
1x XFX 7600GT
1x EVGA 8600GT (Passive cooled)
1x EVGA GTS 450

Seller seems to primarily sell sporting goods and sports cards, so they probably are actually untested. The GTS were probably an SLI pair so its likely either both works or at least one works.

Dug through my stash to get AN430TX and socket 370 intel with 815 boards out, ordered AIMM card for it. Does help big time as I had one once.

Lost the PIII 1.4GHz processor, will keep looking. I know it is somewhere.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-12-25, 00:58:

Dug through my stash to get AN430TX and socket 370 intel with 815 boards out, ordered AIMM card for it. Does help big time as I had one once.

Lost the PIII 1.4GHz processor, will keep looking. I know it is somewhere.

Cheers,

Oh, I have one of those AIMM cards. I don't believe I own any boards that use them though. Such a neat little quirky thing. It kind of reminds me of a year-2000 version of the RAM expansion cards from the 80s.

As it turns out, all of my EDO, including the RAM in my SE/30 that is provably not bad, triggers the DOS 6.22 "MEMORY ALLOCATION ERROR" on this motherboard. I'm just at a loss.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-25, 01:51:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-12-25, 00:58:

Dug through my stash to get AN430TX and socket 370 intel with 815 boards out, ordered AIMM card for it. Does help big time as I had one once.

Lost the PIII 1.4GHz processor, will keep looking. I know it is somewhere.

Cheers,

Oh, I have one of those AIMM cards. I don't believe I own any boards that use them though. Such a neat little quirky thing. It kind of reminds me of a year-2000 version of the RAM expansion cards from the 80s.

AIMM provides separate fast channel to integrated GPU and helps reducing load on main memory. Used on 810 and 815 chipset with IGP. Does make difference. Think embedded memory on a IGP that intel used in few processors later on.

Cheers,

BetaC wrote on 2022-12-25, 18:19:

As it turns out, all of my EDO, including the RAM in my SE/30 that is provably not bad, triggers the DOS 6.22 "MEMORY ALLOCATION ERROR" on this motherboard. I'm just at a loss.

Maybe try Goldmem or something similar (like Memtest86) to test your memory.

https://www.goldmemory.cz/

Upgrade z440 CPU to 2699 v3. Nice and fast. Gtx 970 needs 8 pin and 6 pin. Z440 700w PSU has 2x6 pin. Looking at getting rx 6600 on the cheap
picked up a 3060ti instead for £250. rx6600 seller was timewaster (wanted £160)

Tested a whole bunch of early-2000s video cards. Mostly FX 5200 and MX440 cards. Then updated some missing information on the nvidia GPU chart wiki to save my sanity. It's kind of crazy how the charts have such detailed information, and yet some things just seem to be missing entirely. Like the fact that MX440 (NV17 or NV18 AGP 8x cards) cards with 64bit 166(333)Mhz memory exist. I think I have one single Geforce 4MX card which has a 128bit memory bus... and probably a dozen or more that are 64bit, and those are almost all labeled "MX440", and nearly all of those have 166Mhz memory.

I had to oil a fan on a PNY Verto Ti 4200 64MB (a beast of a value card at the time!) and one of the screws had clearly been mangled by a previous owner at some point. All of my cheapo mini screwdriver\bit sets were doing a terrible job of getting the stubborn screw out because the Phillips head had been almost entirely ground out. The metal on my screwdriver bits was just too soft. Thankfully, my almost new Ifixit repair kit had some much higher quality bits that were hard enough to get the job done. I am SOOOO glad I picked up that kit with my MicroCenter "New Customer" discount when I traveled past one a few months ago. I was disappointed that there were really NO good deals on anything useful in the store (highly overrated place outside of the crazy deals that pop up from time to time), so I just used the coupon on something that I otherwise would never be able to get cheaply. Got what I thought was an overpriced ~$30 kit for like $5, and I see now that it was absolutely worth it. I've only ever had good quality large tools... never good quality tiny tools.

Also, as my final retro activity worth mentioning... After many many runs of 3dMark2001SE testing the hardware mentioned above, I threw in a Quadro FX3000 to see how much better some of the tests ran. Then it hit me... I haven't run 3dmark2001SE on my main PC in probably 15 years... at least! So I installed it on my main PC (Ryzen 5800X3D, RTX 3060 Ti) and wow... it's amazing how bad it makes the textures and models look when they are pegged at 999fps at 1080P with 8xAA. I didn't run the full benchmark suite, but just as a quick comparison, the FX3000 (basically a Geforce FX5900 non-ultra) on an Athlon XP@2Ghz got like ~87fps average in Nature at 1024x768, default settings. My modern system managed like 1150fps at 1920x1080 with 8xAA, and just under 1300fps at default settings. The high poly count 8-light test was like 27Mvertices\sec on the FX3000 and around 2300Mvertices\sec on the new system. And the difference in noise level between the GPUs is... non-trivial. 🤣

And my 3060Ti is barely even worth mentioning compared to the latest high end GPUs. Truly amazing how far real time computer graphics has come in the past 20 years, in spite of the thermal, power and process limitations.

EDIT: I would just like to add... I don't want to hear anyone complaining about whether the latest GPUs are named "properly" for their performance\price. I just tested an XFX GeforceFX 5600XT. This card has the exact same configuration as a 5200 (non-ultra) except it has 64bit 166Mhz DDR and a 235MHz core clock, compared to the average 5200's 64bit 200mhz DDR and 250Mhz core clock. So, despite the (awful) active cooler, it is measurably slower than even the cheapest OEM FX5200 card with passive cooling. Wow... What a joke. At least the caps are okay, despite being "RIFEKING" brand. I'm glad XFX upped their game after this era.

pan069 wrote on 2022-12-25, 20:41:

BetaC wrote on 2022-12-25, 18:19:

As it turns out, all of my EDO, including the RAM in my SE/30 that is provably not bad, triggers the DOS 6.22 "MEMORY ALLOCATION ERROR" on this motherboard. I'm just at a loss.

Maybe try Goldmem or something similar (like Memtest86) to test your memory.

https://www.goldmemory.cz/

I'll give it a shot when I have the time. For all I know, it could be a bad floppy controller at this point.