H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-01-02, 15:33:

Made a set of DOS 6.22 installation disks - not sure why, as I remembered, I haven't run pure DOS since the 486 days :lol: And even then, I think I installed 95 on it ...

Also played GTA2, mostly to show it to the kids who play GTA V on their Gaming PC and PS5 respectively.

Running in W98 on a PIII 600, it's pretty impressive, how much smoother it ran in GLiDE on an Voodoo1 than on a Matrox G400 (The G400 at 1024x768 though, but still)

I find having a trio of DOS 6.22 disks is handy too! It seems easier to bootstrap some troublesome systems with DOS first, then 9x later.

Cool about GTA2 as well, that was my first GTA and it's still such a great and fun classic. :D

Today I installed Duke3D from a real Atomic edition CD onto my 486 DX2-66 system. Since that is the minimum CPU for the game I didn't expect great performance, but it was very playable even with high details and normal screen size. I used a Stealth24 (S3 86C801) ISA VGA card, no VLB, and it still was smooth at 320x200.

From my experience, an Intel 486 is more than powerful enough to run Duke3D at default settings.

Cosmic wrote on 2025-01-04, 04:55:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-01-02, 15:33:

Made a set of DOS 6.22 installation disks - not sure why, as I remembered, I haven't run pure DOS since the 486 days 🤣 And even then, I think I installed 95 on it ...

Also played GTA2, mostly to show it to the kids who play GTA V on their Gaming PC and PS5 respectively.

Running in W98 on a PIII 600, it's pretty impressive, how much smoother it ran in GLiDE on an Voodoo1 than on a Matrox G400 (The G400 at 1024x768 though, but still)

I find having a trio of DOS 6.22 disks is handy too! It seems easier to bootstrap some troublesome systems with DOS first, then 9x later.

Cool about GTA2 as well, that was my first GTA and it's still such a great and fun classic. 😁

Ah, good point to have it for debugging purposes.

OTOH I do have a 386dx40 (well, overclocked dx33) that might be fun playing with DOS on, so, no problem 🙂

Finished my mounts for my Asus SL730-DL. I ended up finding a generic slotket mount someone had posted and modifying it to fit the Asus slotket. I also didn’t like that their design required you to remove the mobo to use a custom backplate so I modified the design to let me use the stock mounting hardware that was already on the board. Came out well I think, seems pretty solid. Printed with PETG for a little heat resistance.

Cosmic wrote on 2025-01-04, 04:57:

Today I installed Duke3D from a real Atomic edition CD onto my 486 DX2-66 system. Since that is the minimum CPU for the game I didn't expect great performance, but it was very playable even with high details and normal screen size. I used a Stealth24 (S3 86C801) ISA VGA card, no VLB, and it still was smooth at 320x200.

You should set the video mode to S3 in duke3d.ini.

I setup iSCSI for my Windows 2000 machine, did a quick video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMinvNZVPbo

mwdmeyer wrote on 2025-01-05, 04:08:

I setup iSCSI for my Windows 2000 machine, did a quick video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMinvNZVPbo

Great little video. I think this will come in handy for me for a future project.

Finally repaired my Nvidia Quadro 2 Pro (physical damage) and converted it to a Geforce 2 Ultra. Very happy!

Nvidia Quadro 2 Pro - Trying to fix [FIXED] - Now convert to Ultra [DONE]

Played around with my DOS machine for a bit today. Repaired a flaky 5V line going to the PS/2 port, I stole it (bodged) from the USB port right next to it. Problem solved.

Installed a proper CD-ROM in it, and it's now using both a GoTek and real 1.44MB floppy.

Also finally got around to putting FastTracker II on it! Now I can jam like I did in the 90's!

I also want to see if the Opti and AWE64 sound different using it. Opti is a bit noisy on some tunes, but sounds good otherwise. Will mess with it more tomorrow.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-01-05, 09:50:

Played around with my DOS machine for a bit today. Repaired a flaky 5V line going to the PS/2 port, I stole it (bodged) from the USB port right next to it. Problem solved.

I've seen that happen where there's a re-settable fuse on the PS/2 power, and it gets "half blown" or doesn't reset properly or something. These are also known as PPTCs and the type seen on motherboards are usually a pinkie nail sized square green thing with a symbol that looks a bit like 1X1 but is actually two Vs overlapping. Think it's usually the "1812" footprint, but volt/amp ratings are different for ones that look the same. Part of their operation is thermal, so to get them to behave right, you can use an iron or hotair to "pretend resolder" them and they might pass current properly again after they've cooled down an hour.

I am only "somewhat aware" of them, not an expert, but my thoughts on why they misfire is: Heatsoaking from the motherboard, they either get warm enough that a sub threshold spike sorta trips them.... orrrr, they get a bonafide reason to pop but due to the motherboard continuing to run and stay warm for a while after, don't cycle cold right and reset properly.

I just moved to another apartment and my retro PC fell down a full flight of stairs. I feared the worst, so I got myself a fire extinguisher and turned it on today to test it - and everything still works fine.
The massive steel case from the 90s seems to have prevented serious damage, which makes me really happy.

Apart from a small bend in the side panel you can't even see any damage! 😁

You should probably back up that hard drive and keep an eye on it though.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-05, 15:02:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-01-05, 09:50:

Played around with my DOS machine for a bit today. Repaired a flaky 5V line going to the PS/2 port, I stole it (bodged) from the USB port right next to it. Problem solved.

I've seen that happen where there's a re-settable fuse on the PS/2 power, and it gets "half blown" or doesn't reset properly or something. These are also known as PPTCs and the type seen on motherboards are usually a pinkie nail sized square green thing with a symbol that looks a bit like 1X1 but is actually two Vs overlapping. Think it's usually the "1812" footprint, but volt/amp ratings are different for ones that look the same. Part of their operation is thermal, so to get them to behave right, you can use an iron or hotair to "pretend resolder" them and they might pass current properly again after they've cooled down an hour.

I am only "somewhat aware" of them, not an expert, but my thoughts on why they misfire is: Heatsoaking from the motherboard, they either get warm enough that a sub threshold spike sorta trips them.... orrrr, they get a bonafide reason to pop but due to the motherboard continuing to run and stay warm for a while after, don't cycle cold right and reset properly.

I thought I was going crazy, I recently repaired a bad data line connection to that area thanks to a ripped out via and lifted trace. Everything was working good until the other day. So I tore it all back down and started probing around, 5V line was only making contact when the board was flexed, but could not figure out exactly where or why it was happening. Visually, everything "looked good". So, I finally just bodged in a jumper from the 5V line feeding the USB ports next to it that don't get used in this build anyway.

I will have to go back and see if I can find that fuse the next time I tare into it, just to see. 😀

On a side note...

I decided to tare apart an old Barracuda Spam Firewall from the early 2000's to recover the MB and PSU from it. I haven't seen one of these in years...but the motherboard and PSU, if good, still are useful on their own.

Someone had soldered some wires for the front panel display directly to the LPT port on the back, quick and dirty, but it seems to have worked for them.

After making the obligatory blood sacrifice to the PC gods in hopes everything still worked while removing the solid 10oz. copper cooler, it reveled an old Sempron 2200+, nothing special. Cleaned up all the old paste and burned dust out of the cooler. Will use a standard cooler if the MB is good.

Tested the PSU and it seems to be good. Now all I need to do is test the MB. Wish me luck! If it's good, can be used for a future build, I'm thinking XP era. 😀

StriderTR wrote on 2025-01-05, 19:27:

I thought I was going crazy, I recently repaired a bad data line connection to that area thanks to a ripped out via and lifted t […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-05, 15:02:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-01-05, 09:50:

Played around with my DOS machine for a bit today. Repaired a flaky 5V line going to the PS/2 port, I stole it (bodged) from the USB port right next to it. Problem solved.

I've seen that happen where there's a re-settable fuse on the PS/2 power, and it gets "half blown" or doesn't reset properly or something. These are also known as PPTCs and the type seen on motherboards are usually a pinkie nail sized square green thing with a symbol that looks a bit like 1X1 but is actually two Vs overlapping. Think it's usually the "1812" footprint, but volt/amp ratings are different for ones that look the same. Part of their operation is thermal, so to get them to behave right, you can use an iron or hotair to "pretend resolder" them and they might pass current properly again after they've cooled down an hour.

I am only "somewhat aware" of them, not an expert, but my thoughts on why they misfire is: Heatsoaking from the motherboard, they either get warm enough that a sub threshold spike sorta trips them.... orrrr, they get a bonafide reason to pop but due to the motherboard continuing to run and stay warm for a while after, don't cycle cold right and reset properly.

I thought I was going crazy, I recently repaired a bad data line connection to that area thanks to a ripped out via and lifted trace. Everything was working good until the other day. So I tore it all back down and started probing around, 5V line was only making contact when the board was flexed, but could not figure out exactly where or why it was happening. Visually, everything "looked good". So, I finally just bodged in a jumper from the 5V line feeding the USB ports next to it that don't get used in this build anyway.

I will have to go back and see if I can find that fuse the next time I tare into it, just to see. 😀

On a side note...

I decided to tare apart an old Barracuda Spam Firewall from the early 2000's to recover the MB and PSU from it. I haven't seen one of these in years...but the motherboard and PSU, if good, still are useful on their own.

Someone had soldered some wires for the front panel display directly to the LPT port on the back, quick and dirty, but it seems to have worked for them.

After making the obligatory blood sacrifice to the PC gods in hopes everything still worked while removing the solid 10oz. copper cooler, it reveled an old Sempron 2200+, nothing special. Cleaned up all the old paste and burned dust out of the cooler. Will use a standard cooler if the MB is good.

Tested the PSU and it seems to be good. Now all I need to do is test the MB. Wish me luck! If it's good, can be used for a future build, I'm thinking XP era. 😀

Ah, what a pain in the butt. That sounds more like a hairline crack you haven't seen... places that can happen that are real buggers are where a pad lifts and cracks off the trace, you can look all day for those and not notice, because it's in the shadow of the corner made by the blob of solder on the pad. Then also actual vias can come adrift and if they were supposed to connect to an internal plane, that's a real bugger to sort out. Most often it's one end or the other though.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-05, 20:30:

Ah, what a pain in the butt. That sounds more like a hairline crack you haven't seen... places that can happen that are real buggers are where a pad lifts and cracks off the trace, you can look all day for those and not notice, because it's in the shadow of the corner made by the blob of solder on the pad. Then also actual vias can come adrift and if they were supposed to connect to an internal plane, that's a real bugger to sort out. Most often it's one end or the other though.

Oh yeah, I definitely think there's damage on that line somewhere I just couldn't see, even under magnification. I had two options, keep probing around until I find it, or just grab the 5V from somewhere else.

The latter was much faster, especially at roughly 1:00AM when I was doing this. 😜

StriderTR wrote on 2025-01-05, 19:27:

I thought I was going crazy, I recently repaired a bad data line connection to that area thanks to a ripped out via and lifted t […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-05, 15:02:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-01-05, 09:50:

Played around with my DOS machine for a bit today. Repaired a flaky 5V line going to the PS/2 port, I stole it (bodged) from the USB port right next to it. Problem solved.

I've seen that happen where there's a re-settable fuse on the PS/2 power, and it gets "half blown" or doesn't reset properly or something. These are also known as PPTCs and the type seen on motherboards are usually a pinkie nail sized square green thing with a symbol that looks a bit like 1X1 but is actually two Vs overlapping. Think it's usually the "1812" footprint, but volt/amp ratings are different for ones that look the same. Part of their operation is thermal, so to get them to behave right, you can use an iron or hotair to "pretend resolder" them and they might pass current properly again after they've cooled down an hour.

I am only "somewhat aware" of them, not an expert, but my thoughts on why they misfire is: Heatsoaking from the motherboard, they either get warm enough that a sub threshold spike sorta trips them.... orrrr, they get a bonafide reason to pop but due to the motherboard continuing to run and stay warm for a while after, don't cycle cold right and reset properly.

I thought I was going crazy, I recently repaired a bad data line connection to that area thanks to a ripped out via and lifted trace. Everything was working good until the other day. So I tore it all back down and started probing around, 5V line was only making contact when the board was flexed, but could not figure out exactly where or why it was happening. Visually, everything "looked good". So, I finally just bodged in a jumper from the 5V line feeding the USB ports next to it that don't get used in this build anyway.

I will have to go back and see if I can find that fuse the next time I tare into it, just to see. 😀

On a side note...

I decided to tare apart an old Barracuda Spam Firewall from the early 2000's to recover the MB and PSU from it. I haven't seen one of these in years...but the motherboard and PSU, if good, still are useful on their own.

Someone had soldered some wires for the front panel display directly to the LPT port on the back, quick and dirty, but it seems to have worked for them.

After making the obligatory blood sacrifice to the PC gods in hopes everything still worked while removing the solid 10oz. copper cooler, it reveled an old Sempron 2200+, nothing special. Cleaned up all the old paste and burned dust out of the cooler. Will use a standard cooler if the MB is good.

Tested the PSU and it seems to be good. Now all I need to do is test the MB. Wish me luck! If it's good, can be used for a future build, I'm thinking XP era. 😀

You'll have to recap the board. I had one and those caps were hot garbage.

PcBytes wrote on 2025-01-05, 23:03:

You'll have to recap the board. I had one and those caps were hot garbage.

The V2DP board? I haven't messed with one in 20 years? Give or take.

Thanks for the heads up. I probably wont get to test it for a week or two, I'll keep that in mind. 😀

I have been testing my Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb build with Pentium III 933Mhz:

Return to Castle Wolfwnstein Runs great
American McGee Alice Runs great
Halflife 1 Runs great
Unreal 1 Runs great
Serious Sam Runs great
Deus Ex rums poorly. Well under 20FPS
Black and White 1 Runs poorly. Aboout 20fps

Black and white states that you need a Pentium II 350Mhz and an 8Mb 3D Accelerator. I hate to think how it would run on such a system.

For the last two weeks or so I've been prepping 8-10 computers for a retro-lan. Gettings parts, testing, installing, making images, scripts etc to make deployment easier.
Furthermore as I was gifted a 3d-printer, I've been printing and making my own Startech ide2sat2 -adapter holder. hours and hours on Fusion - then waiting.
Most recently, today, I fixed a Liteon DVD-rom. The eject-button was busted. ALPS something, I recognized from another hobby where I've changed "many" and I had spares.

Recapped three or so boards (BF6, KT6V and some random SS7-board), built my "dream" machine into a red Fractal Define focus G;
- 1.1GHz/100 P3
- BX133-raid, contemplating if I should use the BF6 instead, as the HPT370 sits unused.
- SB Live!
- 3c905
- GF4 4200 ti AGP8x
Once my main rig gets a case-upgrade, I will install some freed up unicorn-vomit in that Fractal design case :>