ubiq wrote on 2026-04-28, 16:51:

Been spending some time checking out early 00's demoscene output. Interesting time of rapidly changing hardware. Surprisingly a lot of early Win2k adoption. Early 3d accelerated experiments as well as software rendering holdouts. Not too much 3dfx/glide stuff, but a lot of OpenGL. Which reminded me of the existence of GLSetup. I remember that being a pretty sweet util/driver back in the day, but can't remember what exactly it did. Can anyone refresh my memory - when did it make sense to use GLSetup, and is there any reason to care about these days in retro systems?

It never made any sense to use it, it was used by those too lazy and/or ignorant to install graphics drivers themselves. I suppose there is probably some edge cases where a user has only modem access, isn't going to waste time downloading drivers or doesn't recognize that they need to and is amazed when they run glsetup on their game CD and their games magically work or are faster. Probably the same people that went searching for those Nvidia drivers that emulate glide.

Today my 2 motherboards I bought on eBay came in. Sold as a lot, a Socket 939 and a Socket AM2, both with Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU. Would of been awesome test rigs to see the difference between the two. Well, I am not very happy. Yes they were sold as-is/untested as is a lot of the older hardware, which I've never had any problems with.... Neither of the boards work. The AM2 system will turn on, but no beep codes. Tried no ram, different CPU, different video cards, nothing. Took the heatsink off the CPU and you could feel it slowly getting warm. The 939, no beep codes or anything. It would turn on just long enough for the fans to start spinning after you turned the power to the power supply on. Then after it turned off, you would have to kill power to the PSU for a minute or so before I could try to turn it on again. Took the batteries out of them just to make sure settings were cleared, and still nothing.

Very disappointing as I was looking forward to having a 939 system again.

Stick a FAT bootable USB in and turn them on, if they start flickering the light on it, then they're trying to do a BIOS recovery. Then have fun times with rufus making a 32mb partition DOS boot device on a stick to flash proper BIOS.

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her up ... with surprises!

• The CMOS battery has held its charge for ~25 years! And, the date time has drifted forwards by 2 hours?
• The BIOS shows one HDD set by User, but actually all HDDs were stripped out long ago and there is nothing on the IDE bus today.. thinking suspects/motives/opportunities.
• And having a zeroed HDD geometry doesn't ring any bells - maybe that was an LS120, but I can't think why I would have an LS120 on Primary Master unless this I had demoted her to testbed.
• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?
• The fan is noisy and needs some sewing machine oil. Does anyone know of a good UK supplier?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-29, 21:34:

• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

Coincidentally I was just about to come post my retro activity from today about a very similiar issue. I finally revisited my Socket 7 / Pentium MMX build, the last issue several months ago I was dealing with was faint scrolling lines on the display. I replaced the PSU but that didn't do anything, not to mention I tried a variety of different motherboards, video cards, with / without vga switcher, plugging things directly into the wall, cooling, etc.

Today I finally decided to just run everything outside of the case and no scrolling lines or distortion, so now it's time to determine what about the case is causing a problem. It's a baby AT so it's pretty compact and while it has that iconic look and a mhz display I really don't like the way the motherboard sits in it. There must be some kind of improper grounding or something. Anyways, since you mentioned switching cases I thought this was relevant. Going to try some different standoffs or something and see how it goes.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-29, 21:34:

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her […]
Show full quote

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her up ... with surprises!

• The CMOS battery has held its charge for ~25 years! And, the date time has drifted forwards by 2 hours?
• The BIOS shows one HDD set by User, but actually all HDDs were stripped out long ago and there is nothing on the IDE bus today.. thinking suspects/motives/opportunities.
• And having a zeroed HDD geometry doesn't ring any bells - maybe that was an LS120, but I can't think why I would have an LS120 on Primary Master unless this I had demoted her to testbed.
• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?
• The fan is noisy and needs some sewing machine oil. Does anyone know of a good UK supplier?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

That's always great when the old tech not only still works, but still has the CMOS settings!

sunkindly wrote on 2026-04-30, 04:25:

Coincidentally I was just about to come post my retro activity from today about a very similiar issue. I finally revisited my So […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-29, 21:34:

• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

Coincidentally I was just about to come post my retro activity from today about a very similiar issue. I finally revisited my Socket 7 / Pentium MMX build, the last issue several months ago I was dealing with was faint scrolling lines on the display. I replaced the PSU but that didn't do anything, not to mention I tried a variety of different motherboards, video cards, with / without vga switcher, plugging things directly into the wall, cooling, etc.

Today I finally decided to just run everything outside of the case and no scrolling lines or distortion, so now it's time to determine what about the case is causing a problem. It's a baby AT so it's pretty compact and while it has that iconic look and a mhz display I really don't like the way the motherboard sits in it. There must be some kind of improper grounding or something. Anyways, since you mentioned switching cases I thought this was relevant. Going to try some different standoffs or something and see how it goes.

The attachment IMG_20260429_211549.jpg is no longer available

This is very interesting. Is the problem you're describing similar to the animated .gif in the first post in this thread?
Causes for common VGA output artifacts?

If so, it might be worth posting your findings there just in case it helps someone who finds that thread in the future.

Ever since I transferred my old AM2+ board to a tower case to fit it underneath an end table, it has had a recurring problem with the video card becoming loose in the PCIe slot and then it starts crashing or fails to boot. After the latest episode, I downgraded it to a low profile GeForce 210, to see if that would have fewer problems. Doesn't really matter that it's slower, since I don't use it to play games these days. Oddly enough, a Windows 7 app that had horrendous screen tearing before, works better now with the older 334 nvidia driver that is now installed.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-29, 21:34:

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her […]
Show full quote

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her up ... with surprises!

• The CMOS battery has held its charge for ~25 years! And, the date time has drifted forwards by 2 hours?
• The BIOS shows one HDD set by User, but actually all HDDs were stripped out long ago and there is nothing on the IDE bus today.. thinking suspects/motives/opportunities.
• And having a zeroed HDD geometry doesn't ring any bells - maybe that was an LS120, but I can't think why I would have an LS120 on Primary Master unless this I had demoted her to testbed.
• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?
• The fan is noisy and needs some sewing machine oil. Does anyone know of a good UK supplier?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

Well I have several PCs more or less the same as your AMD K6-2, even if I have them on motherboards of different brands, as for the power supply, the Delta PSUs I have them in as many PCs, and just recently I got a Delta of an HP 386/25 PC, which I will try soon.
However, in my opinion, if you try the power supply alone with one charge, that is, without connecting the MB, and it works, it should automatically work by connecting the motherboard, if it doesn't work I think there is something that causes the intervention of the short protection of the power supply.
For the moment I would say that the power supply, while working, could be for some reason, too sensitive, here maybe there could be some strange value somewhere in the protection circuit.

PC@LIVE wrote on 2026-04-30, 19:47:

Well I have several PCs more or less the same as your AMD K6-2, even if I have them on motherboards of different brands, as for […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-29, 21:34:

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her […]
Show full quote

I finally plugged together my old K6-2 in a smaller case (the original full tower Aopen HX08 feels excessive) and I powered her up ... with surprises!

• The CMOS battery has held its charge for ~25 years! And, the date time has drifted forwards by 2 hours?
• The BIOS shows one HDD set by User, but actually all HDDs were stripped out long ago and there is nothing on the IDE bus today.. thinking suspects/motives/opportunities.
• And having a zeroed HDD geometry doesn't ring any bells - maybe that was an LS120, but I can't think why I would have an LS120 on Primary Master unless this I had demoted her to testbed.
• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?
• The fan is noisy and needs some sewing machine oil. Does anyone know of a good UK supplier?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

Well I have several PCs more or less the same as your AMD K6-2, even if I have them on motherboards of different brands, as for the power supply, the Delta PSUs I have them in as many PCs, and just recently I got a Delta of an HP 386/25 PC, which I will try soon.
However, in my opinion, if you try the power supply alone with one charge, that is, without connecting the MB, and it works, it should automatically work by connecting the motherboard, if it doesn't work I think there is something that causes the intervention of the short protection of the power supply.
For the moment I would say that the power supply, while working, could be for some reason, too sensitive, here maybe there could be some strange value somewhere in the protection circuit.

The Delta works fine, and the VGA is fine too. What happened is... I was tired.. I was looking at the image on my phone instead of the screen directly! I'm glad to discover I can still do daft things 😁

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-04-30, 16:24:

This is very interesting. Is the problem you're describing similar to the animated .gif in the first post in this thread? Causes […]
Show full quote

sunkindly wrote on 2026-04-30, 04:25:

Coincidentally I was just about to come post my retro activity from today about a very similiar issue. I finally revisited my So […]
Show full quote

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-29, 21:34:

• No idea what is causing funny banding in the LCD blue background - assuming it's electrical interference as my other PCs aren't showing that. Any clues?

Electrical interference: My hypothesis is that the funny banding might be from the Delta PSU because I bought it used and when I cleaned it out, it was full of heavy industrial dusts (not organic). I used a hand powered rubber pump cleaner to blow air, and maybe that is insufficient to remove conductive particles that might cause electrical noise? Don't know..

Coincidentally I was just about to come post my retro activity from today about a very similiar issue. I finally revisited my Socket 7 / Pentium MMX build, the last issue several months ago I was dealing with was faint scrolling lines on the display. I replaced the PSU but that didn't do anything, not to mention I tried a variety of different motherboards, video cards, with / without vga switcher, plugging things directly into the wall, cooling, etc.

Today I finally decided to just run everything outside of the case and no scrolling lines or distortion, so now it's time to determine what about the case is causing a problem. It's a baby AT so it's pretty compact and while it has that iconic look and a mhz display I really don't like the way the motherboard sits in it. There must be some kind of improper grounding or something. Anyways, since you mentioned switching cases I thought this was relevant. Going to try some different standoffs or something and see how it goes.

The attachment IMG_20260429_211549.jpg is no longer available

This is very interesting. Is the problem you're describing similar to the animated .gif in the first post in this thread?
Causes for common VGA output artifacts?

If so, it might be worth posting your findings there just in case it helps someone who finds that thread in the future.

Yeah, it was basically just like that .gif! It was very subtle but still was driving me crazy enough to put the build aside for awhile. I'll put something in there once I test further and definitively pin down the case as the culprit.

Also interesting point about it being worse at certain resolutions. For me it was definitely a lot more noticeable in DOS menu / setup screens, like Doom's setup screen for example.

Still plugging away at my "new" Sear's Tele-Games Atari 2600.

Added a composite video mod. Works good and as expected. The only downside is it's one of the simple two transistor amp circuit type and there's some image ghosting. These mods work by pulling the signal that's being sent to the RF modulators and just amplifying it, so it's all combined. No separate luma control. So, they're hit and miss. On my unit, there's ghosting. I should have known becasue that same ghosting is seen in the RF signal.

So, I've decided to go with a different type of mod (CleanComp) that pulls the separate luma, chroma, and composite signals right from the TIA chip, giving you full s-video output, in addition to plain composite if you want it. The result is you get a much better output, and hopefully, no ghosting. It's supposed to arrive on Monday. I also replaced the flaky old ribbon cable in the unit, that really helped clean up the signal and resolve some stability issues with it.

Thanks to a generous AtariAge forums user, I was able to get 5 new DP-9 connectors super cheap to replace the joystick ports on my unit. One was OK, but brittle. The other was breaking apart. So, both are getting replaced.

Once it's all said and done. This old Atari 2600 is going to work better than new! Between it, and my 7800+ unit, new Hyperkin Trooper controller, and the VTP and overlay I just printed. I'm all set. 😜

And, of course, I'm growing my games collection. I'm having a blast. 🤣

Soo.. kid and wife are doing some gardening.. time for me to take a first look at the 3D Prophet 9800XT - grabbed to test-rig from the lab for that and brought it in.

Two bytes of two different memory channels affected. U56 and U59 - interestingly all four bit groups share the same resistor networks, but those all measured fine. You can ignore bit 11 - as from my experience, having other channels / bits fail hard will cause bit 11 on multiple channels to occur, though nothing ever happened to it (will be part of the upcoming 9800 pro /w XT layout repair)

Not much more to do for now, as I have no time for a deeper analysis yet. However, I replaced the broken fan already, which was a breeze!

I spent some time dropping sewing machine oil into old noisy fans and re-sealing them.

The noisiest ATI fans on ATI GPUs have (or had) large amount of dry black comb like foam where I expected to find tiny amount of oil residue, and their sealing surface is (and was) too small to hold an aluminium sticker/foil securely. That tiny area literally ~2mm of surface and no adhesive is going to hold very long on that.

Realistically, the original factory fitted sticker failed before it was even installed into its first PC. My first replacement aluminium tape failed my little QC fingernail test. I'm not confident my second attempts at aluminium tape will hold either because if I can't test it without causing failure!

So I'm suspicious. This particular fan was on a late variant mid-range gamer GPU, so for its audience it was sold maybe 3 to 6 months from obsolescence and any warranty was moot. Now I'm unsure how to note the issue: This fan is realistically as good as it ever was, and was designed new to last under 6 months?!

Sending my Acer 386sx33 motherboard for a repair, it wont boot, no post, all keyboard light are on. Will do anything to revive this acer 100-t mb as this is the exact first PC of mine.

Spent some time testing a bunch of IDE/SCSI CD/DVD ODD devices.
Only 3 out of 18 were broken, and all of them DVD drives with the CD non functional.
Was quietly hoping for a few more duds as I already have quite a few ODD's, but now I added another fairly impressive 5.25" tower...

Tried to test an IBM PGA card, no luck so far. IBM diagnostic disk able to see it in a list, but failed with the diagnostic.
Will continue with the close inspection under the microscope and ICs deoxit.

Susanin79 wrote on Yesterday, 22:05:

Tried to test an IBM PGA card, no luck so far. IBM diagnostic disk able to see it in a list, but failed with the diagnostic.
Will continue with the close inspection under the microscope and ICs deoxit.

Not many of those around and it's a sweet card to have! Maybe try in in CGA emulation mode (Jp W1 @ 1-2) first to see if it passes.

Just sent my first PCB revision to fabrication - a reverse-engineered duplicate of the DataExpert 367C motherboard with UniChip U4800-VLX chipset.
The challenge: there's no datasheet for the U4800-VLX anywhere. All 160 pins had to be mapped from scratch using PCB scans, photos, multimeter tracing, and cross-referencing with other designs (Groza's OPTi 495XLC SBC, Skiselev's SARC RC2016 386SX board).
This v0.1 is essentially a 1:1 copy to verify the reverse engineering is correct. If it works, future revisions will diverge with improvements (ATX power, VLB slots, expanded cache, etc.)

Fingers crossed! 🤞

Lopo wrote on Today, 06:37:

. All 160 pins had to be mapped from scratch using PCB scans

Reminds me of my project around ATIs RV280.. BGA pin mapping is fun.. or something like that 😁 Fingers crossed for good working first prototype!