Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-21, 00:09:

I love the look of that system. It turned out very nice indeed. Now all you need to do is decide what to put on it for a case badge.

Thank you!

For case badge, I've ordered one of these. I like the look of simple black & chrome badges.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-11-21, 00:19:

I have an idea... […]
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I have an idea...

😁

If the one I ordered doesn't arrive, I'll consider this as an alternate. 😉

I suspected that my CWT 350W was being naughty so I bought a Seasonic Focus Gx550 to replace it. Dfi board replaced with an Epox MVP3e-M and an AMD K6III/400 doing the processing duties. Gpu is a Dell branded Nvidia GF5200FX running into a 50" Samsung via a std DVI to HDMI adapter (Original X-Wing / Msdos 6) Memory is a single 256MB stick, storage a 32GB sandisk sd card and Gotek floppy emulator.
Sound card = Soundblaster 16 Value into a Graham Slee Voyager portable headphone amp. Input a Steelseries 7G kb, Sensei USB mouse and CH Products Mach iii joystick. There is also an Intel Pro/1000 GT NIC and a 5 port usb card with an NEC chipset.
I have since installed into an Antec VSK4000 case and added a Sony DVD drive.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-11-19, 18:31:

These days you have oh-so-many devices in your private network, doing who-knows-what and sometimes even drilling upnp port-holes […]
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Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-19, 11:55:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-11-19, 10:21:

I very strongly recommend you not do that on your NAS! SMBv1 is very unsecure protocol.
Create a simple VM with some minimal linux instal (e.g. debian netinstall) and configure it to mount your nas shares and then re-share them with SMBv1 support. Whenever you need your retro machines to access nas, you just run your premade vm. And when you are done, you shut the vm down. (NB! You can also use that VM to mount iso images and the drive can also be shared for retro usage - there's your "CD drive emulator"!)

Behind a NAT firewall on a private home network, there is no reasonable surface area to be attacked. It's not a big deal.

These days you have oh-so-many devices in your private network, doing who-knows-what and sometimes even drilling upnp port-holes in. Peoples' homes are littered with "IoT" and "Smart" devices, any can be an entry point. So there is quite a bit of surface. 😉
And oh boy, when someone was reading such "tutorial" and is going to follow them with their every-day laptop. 😁
But what had to be said, has been said. Some people still insist on not putting fire alarm in their ceilings, too...

Well one must be crazy to keep IoT devices in the same main home network. I keep all my IoT devices separate network "jail". Well almost all some like TV and Nvidia Shield need access to my lan/nas.
Actually I'm aware of solution you suggested with dedicated WM image running legacy samba. I have currently "lazy" Unbuntu NAS setup. Have been thinking about dedicated NAS Op.system where I can spin up/down various images. My current 5y old 4 core Pentium Silver J5005 CPU needs top be upgraded probably...

All my IoT stuff is connected to my Guest Network, which is completely separated from my regular network and it's traffic, by both the router's internal settings and the network frequency, so those devices can do whatever they want or need to, without bothering or connecting to any other devices connected to the router, except out-and-back in connections to and from my ISP to those devices, when I call up control software on my phone or tablet, for any particular IoT device.

Law212 wrote on 2023-11-20, 18:38:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-11-20, 18:30:

Lol now I'm getting lighting glitches and out of place polygons on this Voodoo 1, guess now the framebuffer memory is having some trouble... I did clean the flux and in doing so probably dislodged yet another chip leg.

I wish I had the patience and skill to even attempt to do repairs like that.

Thanks, this card has confounded me for a while as in a year+
I even found the real pinout / schematic for the Voodoo 1 to get to this point, it's nice that I can call it sort of done now.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-11-20, 18:30:

Lol now I'm getting lighting glitches and out of place polygons on this Voodoo 1, guess now the framebuffer memory is having some trouble... I did clean the flux and in doing so probably dislodged yet another chip leg.

Ah, I really should've pulled out the soldering iron last. The real cause of the flashing textures? I have the Diamond Monster 3D drivers installed and the control panel software has an option to speed up the Monster 3D - that's really setting an environment variable to boost the clockspeed of the Voodoo 1 from 50MHz to 57MHz. I had rem'med it out for normal clockspeed testing.
The card worked in Tomb Raider because that was in DOS and I hadn't re-run the control panel that resets that option. But jumping back to Windows and reviewing the control panel reset the GRX clock speed option and clearly 57MHz is a bit much for this card in Unreal, but 50MHz is fine. I'm fine with that - Unreal is really a bit much for the Voodoo 1 on this test PC, though it's how I played it back in the day 😀

In cleaning it and resoldering things to test, I broke loose some pins on the RAMDAC that I had repaired and some more marginal traces broke.
Several times today I've broken and re-fixed this card by resoldering this wire and that wire and breaking another thing. But now it's as good as it's getting and I'll just enjoy it for what it is 😀
There's some really bad jitter visible on text in 3D mode but eh, it works.

Aging capacitors can also cause memory errors and graphical glitches.

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

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-21, 22:32:

Aging capacitors can also cause memory errors and graphical glitches.

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

Hehe, this particular 3Dfx card doesn't have a single electrolytic capacitor, take a look 😀 It's a complete trainwreck:
Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

It looks even worse now I've tried bodging stuff on to fix the RAMDAC jitter problem. It works and isn't crashing in games so I'm calling it good for now 😀

DerBaum wrote on 2023-10-08, 21:53:

Today was a mixed bag of retro computing... […]
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Today was a mixed bag of retro computing...

Thanks to vogons user @Balog i now have a second FastRAM Card and a 287 co-processor for my ast premium 286.

First good news:
The 287 co-processor works perfectly fine.

I removed the "jumper" co-processor and installed the new one. That was simple.
2023-10-08 21.56.32.jpg2023-10-08 22.48.21.jpg

The FastRAM card itself works. It detects the 512k ram and works.
Now the Problem:
If i install both fast ram cards only one card works. You can set the switches for first/second card and give each one an address.
Each card for itself works (mine with 1MB and the other one with 512k). But i cant get the to work together.

My theory is that the first card has to be fully populated before the second card is used. But i have not enough memory chips (missing at least 36 chips to test this theory)...

At least i know the second card works.

Now the really bad news.
I think i have killed the 5 1/4 floppy drive.
While i was tinkering with the computer i wanted to boot from a 3 1/2 floppy.
I connected the floppy drive to the system but i reversed the data cable.
I noticed the drive lights are both on and turned off the computer.
I turned around the data cable and started again.
From that moment i can not get the 5 1/4 drive to read disks.
The drive seeks normal on bootup, and when i want to read from it it starts to spin , drops the head and after 5-10 seconds i get a general reading error.

Does somebody have an idea what could be blown? here are some pictures of the drive.
2023-10-08 23.12.39.jpg2023-10-08 23.12.46.jpg

Sometimes i have the feeling i am a little bit stupid.

Today i tried to install my newly repaired second floppy drive into this machine.
But i tried the original drive one last time before i put the frames on the new drive...

And it works.
No seriously. It just works.

And i think i know why...

When i reversed the data cable my boot disk was in the drive, and i think reversing the cable somehow activated the write operation and that corrupted the boot sector of my diskette...

And here is the stupid part : I never tried another properly formatted disk. And when i tried a disk it was a DD 360k disk wich i didnt notice and tried to format it to 1,2mb.

Now i have 2 fully working TEAC diskette drives. Thats ok for me too...

Just took me 6 Weeks to figure that out 😁

DerBaum wrote on 2023-11-22, 00:03:

Sometimes i have the feeling i am a little bit stupid. […]
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Sometimes i have the feeling i am a little bit stupid.

Today i tried to install my newly repaired second floppy drive into this machine.
But i tried the original drive one last time before i put the frames on the new drive...

And it works.
No seriously. It just works.

And i think i know why...

When i reversed the data cable my boot disk was in the drive, and i think reversing the cable somehow activated the write operation and that corrupted the boot sector of my diskette...

And here is the stupid part : I never tried another properly formatted disk. And when i tried a disk it was a DD 360k disk wich i didnt notice and tried to format it to 1,2mb.

Now i have 2 fully working TEAC diskette drives. Thats ok for me too...

Just took me 6 Weeks to figure that out 😁

So Good news ! And the moral of the story is: do not have a floppy disk in a drive when you connect it to a motherboard and power it up. Hmm I haven't yet but is good to know !

DerBaum wrote on 2023-11-22, 00:03:

Sometimes i have the feeling i am a little bit stupid.

...

Just took me 6 Weeks to figure that out 😁

Heh, I can't talk, took me 2 years, some gap in between to figure out a drive screwup. It was with IDE CDROMs though went through a load and was getting 90% bad ones... come to figure out some long while later that the cable I was using has an intermittent connection. So my hours of testing was for nothing. So STILL have a pile of CDROMs to go through and test with a GOOD cable 🤣

Started up the (re)installation of my Digital Venturis 575 just around midnight - but the part where Windows 98 copy files during the installation ware ridiculously slow, so I ended up going to bed...
Typed in the username and serial key this morning and at the next restart I turned the computer off to go to work. Tonight I will continue the installation - especially if I find my box where I have my CD with drivers...

Last night I was about to throw out my Compaq Deskpro 590 from the balcony.... I am beginning to consider to just stop that project forever.

Getting some life into this Celeron 400 machine. All it took was a fresh CR2023. The easiest fix of all. 😁

PD2JK wrote on 2023-11-22, 13:16:

Getting some life into this Celeron 400 machine. All it took was a fresh CR2023. The easiest fix of all. 😁

DSC_7005.JPG

Ah! I wish life was as simple as that when you own a Compaq... unfortunately it's never simple when owning a Compaq :laugh:

CrazyCatman wrote on 2023-11-22, 13:43:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-11-22, 13:16:

Getting some life into this Celeron 400 machine. All it took was a fresh CR2023. The easiest fix of all. 😁

DSC_7005.JPG

Ah! I wish life was as simple as that when you own a Compaq... unfortunately it's never simple when owning a Compaq :laugh:

Hehe yeah I know what you mean, I owned a Presario 433 and a Prolinea 575, both soldered on batteries if I recall correctly. Not hard to replace, but needs some TLC. 😜 That goes for the BIOS (on a dedicated HD partition) as well.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-11-22, 13:16:

Getting some life into this Celeron 400 machine. All it took was a fresh CR2023. The easiest fix of all. 😁

DSC_7005.JPG

Why do I smell PCChips from nearly 1100km away 🤣

PcBytes wrote on 2023-11-22, 18:40:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-11-22, 13:16:

Getting some life into this Celeron 400 machine. All it took was a fresh CR2023. The easiest fix of all. 😁

DSC_7005.JPG

Why do I smell PCChips from nearly 1100km away 🤣

You are awfully close! 😁

The board is a PCPartner AP133BS3 with on board Creative ES1373 AudioPCI !

Apart from having made nice labels for the disks that were going to help me out....

I came to the conclusion that I do not want to waste anymore time in the old summerhouse Compaq DeskPro 590.

Added a Compact Flash card to get the 8 GB drive and a little more speed but after setting it up with the Setup disk I first of all get a 1782 Disk Controller Failure. Then after making sure that the cable was seated correctly I get a 1790 Drive 0 Size error - which is probably due to the amount of sectors on the flash card is too high for the BIOS (or the wmic command in Vista simply give me the wrong data).

I then decided against my original plan to take the 850 MB drive from my Venture 575 to install that one and set it up instead. That one I have the correct data from the Phoenix BIOS.
With this one there was no error messages and it loads into the Diagnostics disk I've inserted. However this require a reboot, and I've noticed that this computer really do not like to be rebooted as it will hang in there last screen shown - in this case a blank grey one while I hear the usual boot beeps (this time I can hear errors).

So no; I am done with it. I think I will take the soundcard out and use that one in the Venturis instead of the SoundBlaster PCI card to be able to install a PCI USB card and I might also see if I can make the GF4 PCI card work in the Venturis - mainly just to lower my loss on parts bought.

The main issue seems to be that I can do something - as long as I run the Compaq Setup utility at every boot because it somehow don't want to save the configuration although the 3 MB partition seems to be made. If I skip this step I don't have access to the hard drive - but as soon as I enter the Setup with my Setup disk, I can see that it is written to be correct. So I no longer can be bothered; despite reading various guides, forum posts and watched videos I can't seem to make it work.

While fighting with this I had my grandfather's old Amitech laptop doing an installation of Windows 2000: it is originally delivered with Windows XP although it only had 256 MB RAM (if I remember correctly) and has a sticker on stating that it is Designed for Windows 2000 Professional and Windows Me - and honestly even with a fresh installed Windows XP it was really slow. I've installed an mSATA drive instead of the original 2.5" IDE (which have kept - it also has the XP recovery sector of I want to convert the drive someday) and installed 2K - also to help me out making some of the Rompaq disks for the DeskPro to get that one running. I still need to install a bunch of the drivers, including the driver for the SiS 630 graphics chip.

The Venturis is also installed with 98 SE and just need the driver works as well.

Started planning a case swap for the retro pc.
Im not really looking forward to it, only to be done. 😉
My biggest fear is that something will break.

I also finally pushed my commandline soundfont loader program to github.
I linked it in this thread; sfloader - Command line soundfont loader for SB32 and AWE64

Lots of testing and benchmarking. Currently benchmarking the Pentium 200 vs Pentium MMX 200 vs Pentium Pro 200 in conjunction with various video cards.