Its a CR-563-C drive, should be 2x speed from what i can find.
So far the standard Sound Blaster 16 drivers work fine (for all the audio), just looking into the drive part as thats not getting power. (Its working though seperately from the enclosure)

Today I found a ASUS K8N-VM motherboard (without I/O shield unfortunately) with a AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.8GHz Palermo CPU (maybe is the E6 stepping version, the one with SSE3 and AMD64) + cooler and 2x 512MB DDR266 PC2100 DIMMs (one is from Samsung, one is from some obscure brand), and also with 2 white Sony MPF920 floppy drives, a black Sony DW-D23A IDE 16x DVD writer, with one floppy drive cable, one 80-conductor IDE cable and one 4 pin CD Audio cable.
Any opinions?

Nice little board. I love mATX.
But So754 is a somewhat limited platform imho. I had one when they came out but it didn't last very long performance-wise. So939 would have been the better choice.
For retro activitites that doesn't play any important role, though.

Just a quick one, nabbed this Tekram DC-690CD Cached Raid card for my 486 box, Having trouble finding the manual for it so if anyone has a link that would be awesome, comes with 4mb of cache which I will upgrade to 16Mb. From what little I have found it supports 4 HDDs of up to 4gb each in a raid or 2 HDDs and 2 optical drives ..not sure on this last bit.

I have a Tekram SCSI card in the box already but its only use it to support the internal ZIP drive ..hopefully the two can get along ok.

One of the few things I was still looking for is a Slot1 or S370 Board in Baby AT-format. I finally found one: Gigabyte GA-6VA7+. According to the seller unused, so I hope it still works.

Got this Null Modem cable:

I was surprised that they are still sold brand new in some places. Tried it out with some DOS games like Doom, Duke3D and Quake and they all worked perfectly. I mostly got it out of curiosity since I never experienced this kind of multiplayer setup back in the day. My friends and I all had (crappy) dial-up modems, and it was simply easier for us to use that instead of lugging our PC cases to one of the houses to play together.

I do like that there's no configuration with this. You just enter the COM port, its IRQ, baud rate and you're good to go. Interesting stuff.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-02-02, 16:04:

Got this Null Modem cable: […]
Show full quote

Got this Null Modem cable:

Null_Modem.jpg

I was surprised that they are still sold brand new in some places. Tried it out with some DOS games like Doom, Duke3D and Quake and they all worked perfectly. I mostly got it out of curiosity since I never experienced this kind of multiplayer setup back in the day. My friends and I all had (crappy) dial-up modems, and it was simply easier for us to use that instead of lugging our PC cases to one of the houses to play together.

I do like that there's no configuration with this. You just enter the COM port, its IRQ, baud rate and you're good to go. Interesting stuff.

If you are going to use it for file transfer on machines less than late 486, then I recommend this util http://aminet.net/package/comm/misc/twin_express it works PC to PC as well as to Amigas. It is the only util I have found that is capable of 56k connection speed out of 8250 UARTs on slow CPUs, normally you hit a wall around 19,200 or 38,400 or something. With faster CPU and 16550A or better, you can use the fancier point and click stuff and get the same speeds.

Got a handful of ISA video cards this week (Acumos AVGA2 and WDC 30/31).

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-02-02, 17:42:

Got a handful of ISA video cards this week (Acumos AVGA2 and WDC 30/31).

The Diamond Speedstar 24X is a great card. Very fast when set to 0WS (for an ISA card that is), excellent game compatibility and image quality, even on LCDs.

Paradise/WDC cards are usually underrated compared to the Tseng or S3, but they are just as good (applies for both ISA and VLB).

Yah the WDC ones are a coin flip of terrible or surprisingly good. Back in the day I got two terrible ones and never gave them a second thought, which means later ones that turned up I probably never tested, so potentially I have a hidden gem somewhere.

Powerhungry AGP monster

Babasha wrote on 2023-02-02, 19:45:

Powerhungry AGP monster

What CPU are you using in that rig, those scores seem low to me.

My ATI 9800 scores 22k

Shagittarius wrote on 2023-02-02, 23:17:

Babasha wrote on 2023-02-02, 19:45:

Powerhungry AGP monster

What CPU are you using in that rig, those scores seem low to me.

My ATI 9800 scores 22k

Does seem rather low for a 6800 Ultra, it should be well above the 9800 in score. (Perhaps bad AGP settings ?)

Been looking for this for long time, and just received this today, wanted something nice but was too expensive till now.
Based on SiS 5511/12/13 chipset. Have places for async or sync cache choice.

Comes with bit of ram and a unknown processor, have to unbox and check that out.
American Megatrends:
AMI ATLAS PCI-II

Update, Mint condition, comes with Pentium 133, set of two 4MB ti EDO modules. Very nice board.
Have to ask few questions.

Cheers,

This is a typical score for my 6800 Ultra. My HD 3850 only scores about 1,000 points more in the same system, so both are CPU limited though the 3850 more so.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-01-25, 22:09:

Also, I'm pretty pleased with this purchase (sellers photos)... […]
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Also, I'm pretty pleased with this purchase (sellers photos)...

1.jpg
2.jpg

Sticker on the computer says the system has a Paradise SVGA card of some sort. And that top card definitely looks like a mid-90s Sound Blaster...

Soo... after spending a little time comparing this photo to photos online...
6a.jpg

I determined that this computer absolutely has an AWE32 CT2760 (Rev. 1).
(pic from batyra.pl)
Sound-Blaster-CT2760-AWE32-Awers (Custom).jpg

... and the VGA card looks to be identical to this fantastic Paradise WD-90C31 card, which is also an awesome score. I believe these do 16bit color, unlike the older models.
wdc_wd_90c31_lr_f (Custom).jpg
I'm sure the board has battery damage and will need some work, but for the price I paid (especially after the shipping was adjusted by the seller) it was well worth it for these really nice parts, plus a really neat 486 ISA system that runs.

This detective work was a lot of fun. 😁

Just wanted to mention, this "AST Advantage! Plus 486DX2-66" arrived yesterday and sure enough, the CT2760 and WD90C31 match the ones I found pictures of above exactly. Then... I realized that CD-ROM drive was an original Creative "Sound Blaster" CD-ROM, model CR-563-B 😮!! So... I'm very pleased. Does anyone know if the CT2760 ever came in a CD-ROM combo set? The drive is actually attached to the sound card in this PC, which is something I honestly don't see too often, despite the fact that most cards back then had CD interfaces on them.

On top of that, it looks to have minimal battery damage. I haven't pulled the guts out of it yet for a thorough inspection, but I only see a little bit of white crud on the end of the battery facing the keyboard port. The other side is clean.

This thing is built like a TANK by the way... I've never seen such a premium\expensive feeling PC chassis. The metal is razor sharp, but I'm pretty confident that you could use the frame of this thing as a jack stand. 🤣

As for functionality, I can get it to POST but sadly I cannot seem to get it to boot from the hard drive or from a floppy. Even when I set the hard drive parameters properly it won't boot from that... and none of my boot floppies are recognized as bootable, despite the drive light coming on to check them. Is it possible that it's one of those quirky machines that just cannot function without a CMOS battery? This is, admittedly, the first time I've ever tried diagnosing a 486 system like this. I'm more familiar with older PCs with no BIOS setup, and newer PCs that have a lot more options than this one. I can't even figure out how to boot from the floppy without telling the system there is no hard drive, because it has no boot order selection. There's probably a key to press to make it do that, but I can't seem to find any info about this model online.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-02, 23:25:

Shagittarius wrote on 2023-02-02, 23:17:

Babasha wrote on 2023-02-02, 19:45:

Powerhungry AGP monster

What CPU are you using in that rig, those scores seem low to me.

My ATI 9800 scores 22k

Does seem rather low for a 6800 Ultra, it should be well above the 9800 in score. (Perhaps bad AGP settings ?)

my 5900xt scores 17k stock.

Warlord wrote on 2023-02-03, 02:57:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-02-02, 23:25:

Shagittarius wrote on 2023-02-02, 23:17:

What CPU are you using in that rig, those scores seem low to me.

My ATI 9800 scores 22k

Does seem rather low for a 6800 Ultra, it should be well above the 9800 in score. (Perhaps bad AGP settings ?)

my 5900xt scores 17k stock.

Yeah, I think 13K-14K is what I used to get with a Geforce4 Ti 4400 on an Athlon XP. Definitely something limiting a 6800 Ultra to get that score.

Just got this in the mail today. Had the opportunity to get it dirt cheap in "non-working" condition, and after reading the specs online it seems like it should have about the same playback capabilities as an SC-55? I figured it would be worth fixing.

Turns out, the period-correct looking, Japan-made 9v power adapter included with it was actually center positive. Oops! I hooked it up to a proper 9v center negative adapter and it works perfectly. 😮

I haven't tested it with retro games yet, but I played the demo songs and it sounds really nice.

I will be making a thread about it shortly since there is very little mention of this thing on VOGONS. 😀

Don't know. I also always struggled to get 3DMark scores as high as they are supposed to be, but this never translated to decreased gaming performance compared to official hardware reviews from reputable sites. Like for example my X800 XT AGP (with a 3GHz Prescott) scored close to 17000 points in 2001SE which should have been a score appropriate for an X700 series card. This lead me to not give a crap about 3DMark scores.