vutt wrote on 2024-06-18, 19:24:

Today I found out that not all VGA manual switches are created equal. I have used Nedis branded 2:1 VGA switch for long time. We […]
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Today I found out that not all VGA manual switches are created equal.
I have used Nedis branded 2:1 VGA switch for long time. Well until button physically broke. Thought that why not get 4 port "Aliexpress" one next. Well there is reason why branded one cost 15EUR in local shop compared to Aliexpress 4EUR one.
4port one is not broken, but it does not pass info for Win98 PnP. I had manually force Monitor drivers. It flickers whenever I open display properties.
Do those boxes contain chips? They do not need power...

Anyways ended up buying Nedis again. Happy with it despite potential button reliability issue.

Wouldn't replacing the button switches on the broken Nedis one be an option ?

PcBytes wrote on 2024-06-19, 18:35:

darry wrote on 2024-06-19, 15:53:

PcBytes wrote on 2024-06-19, 13:54:

Well, that's something. I get 2.25V instead of 3.3v. No ISA slots present on the VP6.

EDIT: Yup, there's something going on with the 3v3 line of the mainboard - probing directly on the PSU gives 2.81V, and testing the PSU alone on the 3v3 rail gives 3.4v (since it has a 3v3 sense, these tend to run a tad higher on that line.)

Maybe something on the board is semi-shorted and bringing down the 3.3V rail, likely generating extraneous heat in the process ?

If so, a thermal imager, IR thermometer or a touch test might help find the culprit .

Touched every component I could for extra heat. Nothing heats up out of the ordinary.

It might be worth measuring the actual current draw on the 3.3V rail. If it's within the PSU's nominal capabilities, then maybe the PSU has trouble with regulation of that rail ?

Not something I did, but something I learned when I was researching high end XP era parts.

TIL that there are a few AGP graphics cards that require additional PCIe 6-pin power because they launched during the transition period into PCIe.

Most of you probably already know this, but I just thought it was interesting and wanted to share.

Also, I want an X1950.

darry wrote on 2024-06-20, 02:42:

PcBytes wrote on 2024-06-19, 18:35:

darry wrote on 2024-06-19, 15:53:

Maybe something on the board is semi-shorted and bringing down the 3.3V rail, likely generating extraneous heat in the process ?

If so, a thermal imager, IR thermometer or a touch test might help find the culprit .

Touched every component I could for extra heat. Nothing heats up out of the ordinary.

It might be worth measuring the actual current draw on the 3.3V rail. If it's within the PSU's nominal capabilities, then maybe the PSU has trouble with regulation of that rail ?

I went back to the square one with the 3v3 rail - inserting an AGP card brings the 3v3 line back to the standard spec.

To try and solve the sudden issue of CHKDSK not running because "does not appear to be a Windows 2000 disk", I compared MBRs and boot sectors between the new HDD and the (partial) dump I made of the original HDD. The only difference I found was that bit 0, offset 0x41 in the boot sector had toggled. So I cleared the bit on the new HDD and restarted. Windows did not prompt to run CHKDSK. I right-clicked on the C: drive, went to error-checking and clicked yes to run the check at next boot. Restarted again. Prompted to run CHKDSK but still "does not appear to be a Windows 2000 disk". Haha. So I haven't solved the issue but I did discover that bit 0 offset 0x41 in the boot sector appears to be the flag that tells Windows to run CHKDSK.

I used Arch btw.

The Arch Linux 32 installation images are meant to be burned to a CD; I don't have any spare optical drives, so I chose to install the OS from a flash drive.
I eventually succeeded, though I had to run isohybrid, specify a custom root= parameter, write the image to an unused hard disk partition and... rebuild the initramfs image with IDE drivers for the ALi chipset. That last step was a load of fun.

I have yet to set up X due to an outage at my ISP. I'll see if I can play downloaded YouTube videos on this machine; I actually pulled this off on Windows XP with mplayer.

Today has been fun, I got a dead Toshiba Satellite 460CDX for less than a tenner which I'm not even sure covered postage. The seller knew it didn't work, they had stripped out the hard drive and half the screws were gone.
Through the course of today I've taken it from a dead Toshiba Satellite 460CDX that gaves codes 05 & 4C - which according to the Tecra 730CDT maintenance manual, 05H / 05Hex is "SM-RAM Check" and 4C is meaningless i.e. it stopped running meaningful code after reaching post code 05, so a RAM fault...

Back to a working Toshiba Satellite 460CDX: Re: Toshiba 460CDT - POST/Flash codes?
And hopefully that will help mattlacey and anyone else with a Toshiba Satellite 440CDX / 445CDX / 440CDT / 445CDT / 460CDX / 465CDX / 460CDT / 465CDT laptop, four little traces completely broke the computer.

Once it was working, I found out the original screen is not only garbage (DSTN) but also broken:

So for fun and because I've wanted to do this for a while now, I converted it from a 460CDX motherboard that drives that DSTN screen, into one that drives an active matrix TFT - it's a Toshiba Satellite 460CDT now

That line? This is a faulty screen, I'm not gonna do weird electronic tests on a good screen 😁
The mod only requires moving 20-ish 0603 resistors from one spot to another, there's good clearance around them so it's pretty easy to do, gonna detail it in a new thread in a bit. It's much easier and less involved than this previous hackup: Upgrading a Toshiba laptop from DSTN to TFT panel - The Satellite 400CS becomes a 400CDT
(which I made look way worse than it is, you can easily make a 430CDS into a 430CDT by putting the video card + LCD from the 430CDT onto the 430CDS motherboard. Good if you've got a dead 430CDT but a working 430CDS)

Today I replaced the original P133 CPU of my Dell OptiPlex GS-5133L by a P200.

I think I'll replace the passive heatsink by one with a fan...

Picked up this lovely little desktop from the local makerspace.

486dx33, 4meg ram, 165mb hdd. Had to tinker with the video card but it booted right up after that.

Does thinking about a weird retro topic count as retro activity?

I was just reading about some different CPUs (because reasons) and I read that the A8-3870K was the last AMD CPU to support 3DNow! instructions. I had never considered that they stopped including these instructions at some point. That got me wondering if anyone has ever built an overly specific build focused on 3DNow! performance. A higher end Phenom II X4 or X6 would likely be decently faster than a 3870K, so if there were some old versions of games or programs that heavily made use of 3DNow! it'd be interesting to see how they ran on the highest performing 3DNow! processors versus a Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge or Haswell Core i5, since those are generally seen as the top chips for an overpowered Windows XP system.

Anyone have all the requisite hardware and software to do a test like this? The closest thing I have on hand is an AMD 760G chipset DDR2 board with an Athlon II X3 435 (I think). Not really on the same level as a DDR3 equipped board with a Phenom II X4 980 or X6 1100T...

Seemed like AMD stopped promoting 3DNow by the time multithreaded advantage was a reality in gaming, so I think you'd want to go for maximum single core speed. So Phenom X2 overclocked past 4Ghz or something. Hard to dig out a comprehensive game list though, here's some...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001109071400/ht … dnow/optimized/

Anyhoo, I'll put it in volume 5 of my todo list for when I've got the x6 1090 up and running, or try some on my x4 955 before that.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-06-22, 03:02:

Seemed like AMD stopped promoting 3DNow by the time multithreaded advantage was a reality in gaming, so I think you'd want to go for maximum single core speed. So Phenom X2 overclocked past 4Ghz or something. Hard to dig out a comprehensive game list though, here's some...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001109071400/ht … dnow/optimized/

Anyhoo, I'll put it in volume 5 of my todo list for when I've got the x6 1090 up and running, or try some on my x4 955 before that.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Any games (or patches) that would have made specific use of 3DNow! to improve performance would have been produced long before most games benefited from multicore processors.

Thankfully, single core performance was pretty solid for the Phenom II line, even if Sandy Bridge wiped the floor with it. I have no idea how much of an improvement 3DNow! offered overall, but it's interesting to think that there may be some specific pieces of (very old) software out there where a Phenom II is the fastest CPU you could get without having to use some much more modern OS + CPU combination (Windows 10 + Ryzen or Skylake for example).

Though I would also tend to suspect that the 3Dnow advantage wasn't so great that IPC gain in Intel over 3 or 4 generations from the last equivalent AMD CPU it was optimal on, would tend to wipe it out.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-06-22, 04:44:

Though I would also tend to suspect that the 3Dnow advantage wasn't so great that IPC gain in Intel over 3 or 4 generations from the last equivalent AMD CPU it was optimal on, would tend to wipe it out.

Yeah, it is unlikely that there are many (or any) situations where the Phenom II would win over anything faster than an i5 2400, but some of the outlier benchmarks floating around the internet show them within a few percent, which is kind of crazy since others show even an i3 2100 destroying the best Phenom II. It is just something I'm curious about honestly.

Like, how would standard Q2 perform compared to the one with the 3DNow driver on a Phenom II? How would the results look on Intel CPUs?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/160/10

In those benchmarks a K6-2 333Mhz saw almost a 70% improvement.

Obviously a K6-2 relied on hit heavily because it was severely lacking in essential areas without it, but I do wonder how much of a boost a newer CPU would have since a lot of the newer features that modern CPUs benefit from isn't a factor at all (SSE, SSE2, etc.). It's possible the 3DNow focused stuff would actually hurt performance on newer chips since they have been designed to be fast without it.

I received a CD-ROM drive today to replace the barely functioning drive in my dedicated DOS machine. It works great... but it's extremely noisy and also suffers from random pauses whenever it spins up/down.

However, ChrisR3tro's CDBeQuiet! tool (http://tools.dosforum.de/#cdbq) works great with this drive, and I was able to slow it down to 4X and resolve both issues. Very pleased!

newtmonkey wrote on 2024-06-22, 07:45:

However, ChrisR3tro's CDBeQuiet! tool (http://tools.dosforum.de/#cdbq) works great with this drive, and I was able to slow it down to 4X and resolve both issues. Very pleased!

Nice. I was looking for an equivalent to eject -x SPEED on Linux.

I don't suppose you know of one for Mac OS 9?

pjturpeau wrote on 2024-06-21, 21:58:

Today I replaced the original P133 CPU of my Dell OptiPlex GS-5133L by a P200.

I think I'll replace the passive heatsink by one with a fan...

https://turpeau.net/pierrejean/retro/dell-optiplex-gs5133l
That is a nice website, you should totally put a link in your signature. Looking at your pictures PSU is pushing air directly into the heatsink and out the back, so its not so much passive as optimized for the case used. Dell did this a lot all the way to Pentium 3 with success.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-06-22, 11:48:

That is a nice website, you should totally put a link in your signature.

*nod* Static site generators backed by Markdown really do seem to encourage that kind of simplicity of design but that one has a particular airy elegance to it.

I'm also working on a static site generator for my blog (which began as something I wrote as a single-page renderer when my brother wanted the family to start maintaining Christmas wishlists and mine had huge "Ask around/check thrift store" sections to be managed) but its current template is a lot more condensed.

(Yeah, I did get a bit nerd-sniped by the project. However did you know?)

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-06-22, 11:48:

https://turpeau.net/pierrejean/retro/dell-optiplex-gs5133l
That is a nice website, you should totally put a link in your signature. Looking at your pictures PSU is pushing air directly into the heatsink and out the back, so its not so much passive as optimized for the case used. Dell did this a lot all the way to Pentium 3 with success.

Thanks, I try to keep the website as basic as possible...
About the heatsink, I saw the holes in the side of the PSU blowing to the heatsink. However, the P200 has a higher TDP and I prefer to take no risks...

Veeb0rg wrote on 2024-06-21, 23:02:

Picked up this lovely little desktop from the local makerspace.

486dx33, 4meg ram, 165mb hdd. Had to tinker with the video card but it booted right up after that.

Beauty. Would you share a full picture of the chassis? Love those chunky desktop designs from that era.