I got a Thinkpad 560X in perfect condition, with the original SCSI CDROM, floppy drive and recovery CDs.

Dumped those on archive.org, since no one had done it already: https://archive.org/details/etukfa-0
Such a great machine. No rubber anywhere, no pain. I only have to fix the hinges, because they are so stiff, they will break the case if not treated.

CMB75 wrote on 2025-04-14, 18:14:

😂 looks like Doc Brown’s lab, love it 👍🏻

Thank you! 😁

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-04-14, 12:45:

Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases.

the first thing i thought was "what kind of KVM can cope with all that!" 😀

From "today I found out" series - Second Reality DOS demo will not crash on faster machines if you keep files in drive root or simple X:DEMO/DEMOS directory.
I can run it now on my fast PIII rigs. If I really want to catch my mid 90-ies feel then I setmul l1d CPU. Feels like back in days when I had 486 SX-25...

Today I have finally gotten my third attempt at a 486 machine to seemingly stop fighting against me. I can take better pictures of the case if anyone wants, as I'm unsure of what it actually is.

I am using the same old GA486-VT motherboard that I bought about four years ago with an external battery pack. The big change is using a full 32MB of RAM that is admittedly running at 70 instead of 60ns thanks to me not having too many options available and using a WD 90C33 based VLB card for video (instead of my boxed ATi Mach 32VLB) and a Promise EIDEPro ISA card to allow me to access the entire HDD instead of just 503MB. Hell, I even threw in an ethernet card for the sake of it.

TES Arena is running basically perfectly outside of weird times where certain dungeons run slightly fast and others slightly slow, and after disabling the internal cache it seems to be running Wing Commader perfectly. I also now have the option of throwing in a Pentium Overdrive and or an AMD 5x86 133 if I want to speed things up for specific games and such, though the DX2/66 seems to be my sweet spot to cover things that were otherwise annoying to hit the speed of with my Pentium.

BetaC wrote on 2025-04-16, 23:33:

Today I have finally gotten my third attempt at a 486 machine to seemingly stop fighting against me. I can take better pictures of the case if anyone wants, as I'm unsure of what it actually is.

No idea, but search in google images give this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA0DZf8z5ao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9U03YbPGN4

LoK wrote on 2025-04-17, 00:59:

No idea, but search in google images give this: […]
Show full quote

BetaC wrote on 2025-04-16, 23:33:

Today I have finally gotten my third attempt at a 486 machine to seemingly stop fighting against me. I can take better pictures of the case if anyone wants, as I'm unsure of what it actually is.

No idea, but search in google images give this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA0DZf8z5ao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9U03YbPGN4

Wow, it's the same case as his 🤣. Awesome.

Moar play with the penplotter, mostly.

I've been doing experiments with modified pens again.

Still keep coming back to refilled pilot v5 pens.

I've bought another SS7 board and a new hard drive. Installed the Windows ME, all the drivers and updates. Tried a bunch of benchmarks, DirectX games and all works but OpenGL games (to be fair I only tested the Quake II engine games) cause the system to freeze. So, any ideas?

4in1443v VIA Driver and nVidia Detonator Driver v12.41 (Tried different nVidia drivers with no luck).

ME is kinda... not a good choice, IMO.

Win2k had much better driver support and reliability, and win98SE had much better DOS support.

I'd do dual booting 98se and 2k on a super-7.

I don't care about DOS support. Thing is it was working before, same graphics card, same chipset and same CPU. I'm suspicion of the VIA 4in1 driver.

Outfitted my Dual Xeon Dell Precision T7500 with two GT96o 2GB in order to either test SLI or PhysX.
WIN7 on Samsung SSD on seperate SATA3 Controller, dual boot with Linux Mint.
Will be my 2010 gaming rig.

dominusprog wrote on 2025-04-17, 17:07:

I don't care about DOS support. Thing is it was working before, same graphics card, same chipset and same CPU. I'm suspicion of the VIA 4in1 driver.

Make a fresh installation of ME and this time installed the VIA 4in1 V435, same thing.

dominusprog wrote on 2025-04-17, 19:23:

dominusprog wrote on 2025-04-17, 17:07:

I don't care about DOS support. Thing is it was working before, same graphics card, same chipset and same CPU. I'm suspicion of the VIA 4in1 driver.

Make a fresh installation of ME and this time installed the VIA 4in1 V435, same thing.

Downgrade the BIOS with the backup I've made before updating, now it doesn't recognize the 60GiB hard drive. I'll try with a smaller drive.

BetaC wrote on 2025-04-16, 23:33:

Today I have finally gotten my third attempt at a 486 machine to seemingly stop fighting against me. I can take better pictures of the case if anyone wants, as I'm unsure of what it actually is.

It looks like it was manufactured by Fountain Technologies, they made them for Quantex and Pionex.

Re: Classic case designs
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/vin … -computer.48081

I found my lost voxel pack I modeled and convert in 2021. A 21 of them. Enjoy them 😀
https://www.moddb.com/games/duke-nukem-3d/add … pack-for-duke-4

I jerry-rigged my own custom Sound Blaster Franken-drive! It's a mash-up of:

The internals from a Sound Blaster X-Fi Drive
The front panel and dial buttons from a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Drive (de-badged using a magic eraser)
A USB extension cord swapped in for the old FireWire connector
All connected to an Audigy 2 card and a NEC USB 2.0 card

I practiced installing a Zalman zm-80 Passive VGA Cooler. It took about 20 minutes, very easy to mount.

The test card for today is a GeForce 2. The small heatsink is what was cooling it before for comparison.

The back heatsink is crooked, but its an easy fix. I overtightened one of the screws onto the rubber washer so I just need to loosen it up a bit.

Since the point of upgrading the heatsink is to improve the card's lifespan, I will not be running them passively and will probably ziptie a fan on.

Problem solved! Turns out, setting the AGP to turbo mode (2X) in 4in1 version 435 is not a good idea. I'm assuming that version 443 enable the AGP 2x by default, which is such a shame that the chipset can't work correctly in 2x mode.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-04-14, 12:45:

Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases. […]
Show full quote

Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases.

The attachment PC Tower Rack.jpg is no longer available

Meanwhile, my workbench is an absolute mess which will be my next priority...

The attachment Workbench mess.jpg is no longer available

Any AT cases collecting dust in there? Asking for a friend... 😉