Ahrle wrote on 2026-06-01, 12:23:

SC-88 Pro, first part of project 357575 (35th birthday, computer #75 in collection, P75 equivalent (already failed but yeah x)) […]
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SC-88 Pro, first part of project 357575 (35th birthday, computer #75 in collection, P75 equivalent (already failed but yeah x))

Also ordered and on the way:
MIF-IPC-B
MPU-401
SC-55 MK2
Gainward W32i 1MB
CT3900 + 4x16MB (upgrading an SB32 while at it)
Similar style miditower (vlb crippled/insufficient space in current case)
DFI 386 board + DX33 and 8MB RAM for desktop case

PC spending PR beaten by over 100%, otoh just half a 5090 for all this amazement 😁

Victim in question, bonus points if you can guess the game 😁

Nice SC-88 Pro! I also have one that's a fairly recent addition to my collection. Certainly beats the default soundfonts on the AWE64/Live for DOS. Just make sure to open it up and verify the transformer is wired correctly for your region.

It's a bit hard to see in the image, but for me the black wire had to be moved from the '100' terminal to the '120' terminal.

Another order arrived today.

Socket 939, Athlon64 4000 CPU (ADA4000DKA5CF)

The plan for this one is to pair it in a build with X1950Pro. I was also considering the single core FX but the price is just insane and the performance difference is not big at all.

Bought today in a lot of retro MB, two quite dated, one relatively more recent (from the beginning of this century), normally I do not consider such lots, because the price normally for this type of cards is quite high, however after a short evaluation, at least from what you see in the photo, they do not seem to be in terrible condition 😥, this enticed me to buy the lot, which includes a MB 286, a 486, and a 775.
Starting from 286, from what I see, it has a 286 Harris CPU, which should work at 20 MHz, the chipset looks like UMC, so I would say that it is possible that it is one of the last MB 286, I don't know the manufacturer or the model, for the moment I don't have enough time to search on TRW, where I think you can find useful info on this and the other cards.
The VLB 486 motherboard is equipped with an Intel 486DX2-66 CPU, and the chipset is SiS, I hope 🤞 that the L2 cache is real and works.
Finally, the ASROCK 775, is a model that I could have among the boards under repair, but I hope this one works.

The ASROCK board I think doesn't have a real AGP port. It's different from the 775i65G(no V) variant.
But not sure atm. Just want to say have an eye on that.

ChrisK wrote on 2026-06-04, 11:58:

The ASROCK board I think doesn't have a real AGP port. It's different from the 775i65G(no V) variant.
But not sure atm. Just want to say have an eye on that.

Purple AGP = fake AGP. That's how ASRock got AGP on non-AGP chipsets (845GV, 865GV), using their "AGI" branded slot.
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asrock … 5i65gv-rev-1-00

Just bought my first ever 5 1/4 inch diskette drive.
It's a Mitsumi/Newtronics D509V2. It was very easy to find a link to the pdfs with the jumper settings.
My struggle now is to find media to test it as I have none.
Please correct me if I'm wrong as this is information my head did not retain properly from the 80/90s:
DS/DD or 2S/2D or 48tpi means 360K
DS/HD or MD-2S or M2HD or 96tpi means 1.2M
Diskettes are either too expensive, mislabelled and/or hard to find. (This is the part I enjoy less regarding the retro computing hobby.)

Not too long ago I use to find 5.25 floppies in goodwill. Haven't seen any lately though.

TheMLGladiator wrote on 2026-06-02, 17:49:

Nice SC-88 Pro! I also have one that's a fairly recent addition to my collection. Certainly beats the default soundfonts on the […]
Show full quote

Ahrle wrote on 2026-06-01, 12:23:

SC-88 Pro, first part of project 357575 (35th birthday, computer #75 in collection, P75 equivalent (already failed but yeah x)) […]
Show full quote

SC-88 Pro, first part of project 357575 (35th birthday, computer #75 in collection, P75 equivalent (already failed but yeah x))

Also ordered and on the way:
MIF-IPC-B
MPU-401
SC-55 MK2
Gainward W32i 1MB
CT3900 + 4x16MB (upgrading an SB32 while at it)
Similar style miditower (vlb crippled/insufficient space in current case)
DFI 386 board + DX33 and 8MB RAM for desktop case

PC spending PR beaten by over 100%, otoh just half a 5090 for all this amazement 😁

Victim in question, bonus points if you can guess the game 😁

Nice SC-88 Pro! I also have one that's a fairly recent addition to my collection. Certainly beats the default soundfonts on the AWE64/Live for DOS. Just make sure to open it up and verify the transformer is wired correctly for your region.

The attachment PXL_20260107_182030580.jpg is no longer available

It's a bit hard to see in the image, but for me the black wire had to be moved from the '100' terminal to the '120' terminal.

Thanks for heads up, thankfully noticed before just attaching a travel adapter x)
Is your mod for 230V or 110?

EduBat wrote on 2026-06-04, 21:32:

Just bought my first ever 5 1/4 inch diskette drive. It's a Mitsumi/Newtronics D509V2. It was very easy to find a link to the p […]
Show full quote

Just bought my first ever 5 1/4 inch diskette drive.
It's a Mitsumi/Newtronics D509V2. It was very easy to find a link to the pdfs with the jumper settings.
My struggle now is to find media to test it as I have none.
Please correct me if I'm wrong as this is information my head did not retain properly from the 80/90s:
DS/DD or 2S/2D or 48tpi means 360K
DS/HD or MD-2S or M2HD or 96tpi means 1.2M
Diskettes are either too expensive, mislabelled and/or hard to find. (This is the part I enjoy less regarding the retro computing hobby.)

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-06-05, 06:24:

Not too long ago I use to find 5.25 floppies in goodwill. Haven't seen any lately though.

All the thrift stores in this part of Ontario seem to put media in the stationary and office supplies, so if you are looking alongside electronics for them, you are in the wrong place. Though I think I also found some bagged in amongst craft and household stuff hanging up once. Seems like I've found retrocomputing stuff just about anywhere in a thrift store once though. Motherboard in the tools section. Game CDs in the music or DVDs. Heard of sometimes flashy boxed cards/boards ending up shelved with boxed toys and games.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-05, 13:48:

EduBat wrote on 2026-06-04, 21:32:

Just bought my first ever 5 1/4 inch diskette drive. It's a Mitsumi/Newtronics D509V2. It was very easy to find a link to the p […]
Show full quote

Just bought my first ever 5 1/4 inch diskette drive.
It's a Mitsumi/Newtronics D509V2. It was very easy to find a link to the pdfs with the jumper settings.
My struggle now is to find media to test it as I have none.
Please correct me if I'm wrong as this is information my head did not retain properly from the 80/90s:
DS/DD or 2S/2D or 48tpi means 360K
DS/HD or MD-2S or M2HD or 96tpi means 1.2M
Diskettes are either too expensive, mislabelled and/or hard to find. (This is the part I enjoy less regarding the retro computing hobby.)

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-06-05, 06:24:

Not too long ago I use to find 5.25 floppies in goodwill. Haven't seen any lately though.

All the thrift stores in this part of Ontario seem to put media in the stationary and office supplies, so if you are looking alongside electronics for them, you are in the wrong place. Though I think I also found some bagged in amongst craft and household stuff hanging up once. Seems like I've found retrocomputing stuff just about anywhere in a thrift store once though. Motherboard in the tools section. Game CDs in the music or DVDs. Heard of sometimes flashy boxed cards/boards ending up shelved with boxed toys and games.

I find a lot of Hard drives, 3.5 inch floppy drives and sometimes i will come across a 5.25 inch floppy drive. Any time i see them i buy them.

Got around to my last hardware pickup

Symantec VelociRaptor 1100, aka Cobalt RAQ 3 (I'm pretty sure I believe it's a raq 3, matches the pcb layout, but i can't find a layout for raq4 pcb to compare), it has an AMD K6-III 450mhz + 256mb ram.

I want to max the ram, it has an ALi Aladdin V chipset (can't tell what version), I've seen rumours it can take 1gb but I dont believe that, I put a spare 512mb in it and it came up so that's good.

the bad....

eth0: Invalid EEPROM checksum 0x244f, check settings before activating this device!
eth0: Intel PCI EtherExpress Pro100 82559ER, 00:10:E0:03:6F:10, I/O at 0x6040, IRQ 11.
eth0: Receiver lock-up workaround activated.

it has onboard dual Intel EtherExpress Pro100's.... with corrupt eeproms 🙁 apparently, its a good thing the velociraptor has 4 nic's, 2 on a pci card (

except the dual PCI nic card is the exact same chip... so all 4 nic's have the receiver lock-up bug 🙁, but the PCI card does not have corrupt eeproms...

so now I need to hunt for a dual nic PCI card thats built into the existant cobalt linux 2.2.16 kernel..... eesh... maybe we will just live with it 🤣

Tried reflashing them?
Sometimes bits get dementia.

myne wrote on 2026-06-06, 02:32:

Tried reflashing them?
Sometimes bits get dementia.

once im able to restore it (need some ide 2 sata connectors) with the special restore cd, i have some ee100 eeprom tools to poke at it but nothing can fix the error in the silicon that this chip has (which is on all 4 nic's). the software workaround degrades performance 🙁 but its pci so not like it can sustain 4 1gb nic's at saturation anyway.

I made an eBay offer a Radeon 9000 as a way of having a DirectX 8.1 card in my collection, since I sold my old 8500 LE ages ago to fund the purchase of a 9700 Pro back in 2004. I offered the seller $40 CAD for it on a $60 asking price, they accepted, so now I have one coming in the mail next week! I guess I'll need to do a write-up or video about it once I finish putting it through its paces, but it'll be fun to revisit the R200/R250 era again and see how well that card would have performed in Doom 3 since I originally bought it for that game (and as a much-needed upgrade to an ailing S3 Savage4).

[Double post]

MadMac_5 wrote on 2026-06-06, 04:08:

I made an eBay offer a Radeon 9000 as a way of having a DirectX 8.1 card in my collection, since I sold my old 8500 LE ages ago to fund the purchase of a 9700 Pro back in 2004. I offered the seller $40 CAD for it on a $60 asking price, they accepted, so now I have one coming in the mail next week! I guess I'll need to do a write-up or video about it once I finish putting it through its paces, but it'll be fun to revisit the R200/R250 era again and see how well that card would have performed in Doom 3 since I originally bought it for that game (and as a much-needed upgrade to an ailing S3 Savage4).

It won’t run D3 well. Radeon 9000 is pretty much like 8500MX and both 8500/9100 and 8500LE, not to mention 9700, are significantly faster. The performance of 9000 should be around FX5200/5500 ballpark AFAIK.

D3’s id Tech 4 engine is extremely demanding and for high detail you practically needed 9700/9800 for any kind of smooth gameplay. When the game was released, there was no GPU available that could run ultra details in a meaningful way. So, I would expect you need to use low-ish resolution and most options turned to low if you want to aim for a smooth experience.

PcBytes wrote on 2026-06-04, 18:18:

ChrisK wrote on 2026-06-04, 11:58:

The ASROCK board I think doesn't have a real AGP port. It's different from the 775i65G(no V) variant.
But not sure atm. Just want to say have an eye on that.

Purple AGP = fake AGP. That's how ASRock got AGP on non-AGP chipsets (845GV, 865GV), using their "AGI" branded slot.
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asrock … 5i65gv-rev-1-00

There's nothing wrong with fake AGP because real AGP was a gimmick. Or, more cynically, AGP was Intel's attempt to tame the graphics card industry.

Think about it. The year was 1997. Top end monitors were boasting resolutions of 1800×1440. To render basic desktop GDI at 1800x1440 you need >600MB/s. AGPx1 system RAM peaked at 266MB/s. AGPx1 fails that most basic test because the graphics card needs dedicated VRAM to keep up with the monitor.

Even more damning is that motherboards are on slowest upgrade cycle, and PC66 SDRAM of the time had a peak bandwidth of 533MB/s. Graphics cards are on the fastest upgrade cycle, and VRAM at the time was boasting 1.6GB/s bandwidth. Their different upgrade cycles means it was always economically impossible for new system RAM to catch up with new VRAM.

AGP is faster than PCI at pre-processing transactions - that's the stuff that happens before the game begins, such as loading textures. What that means is that an AGP system might start playing a game a few milliseconds sooner than a PCI system, but once you start playing.. which is once everything is VRAM.. PCI graphics cards can be identical to AGP graphics cards.

And, to maximise AGP slot stability we disable AGP chipset features: in the BIOS we select minimum aperture size, we disable sideband addressing, and that's okay because disabling AGP delivers no measurable real-world setback. If I'm honest, I wish the BIOS would allow me to set AGP aperture size to 0MB so that I can know all my system RAM to do something useful.

The only thing that materially mattered is that nobody wanted to leave their AGP slot empty, so the PCI market dried up. The real legacy of AGP is that it physically imposed exactly one graphics card slot meaning graphics APIs were forced to consolidate - why would Intel care about that? What is long forgotten is that 3Dfx were working on a motherboard chipset 😉

> that's okay because disabling AGP delivers no measurable real-world setback

Hard disagree. There is tons of transfers inside game loop. Slower connection means less draw capps can be pushed in case GPU is free to take the work. Hurts in low resolutions and in graphically light games.
The faster GPU the more dramatic the difference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSrdi4rVWWQ
AGP vs PCI video card performance discussion

Even 3dfx beefed up PCI version of Voodoo3 (which used AGP as faster PCI with no support for native AGP features) so it wouldnt lag behind AGP version.

I'm not letting you get away with that! First, let's summarise the linked Vogons thread..

Q. K6-2 (100MHz L2 cache) against K6-2+ (400MHz L2 cache), why is GPU performance lower?
A. That's not a GPU test! 🤣

rasz_pl wrote on Yesterday, 06:20:

Even 3dfx beefed up PCI version of Voodoo3 (which used AGP as faster PCI with no support for native AGP features) so it wouldnt lag behind AGP version.

Erm. What are you talking about? In what way did 3dfx beef up their PCI version? Either way, the real-world performance Voodoo3 PCI vs AGP results actually strengthening my argument because they show PCI sometimes outpaced AGP. 3dfx did not use AGP features and statements of the time include,

"The Voodoo3 2000 comes in both PCI and AGP flavors, although the only
real difference is in the fact that the AGP version will save you a PCI slot, as
the Voodoo3 2000 does not take advantage of any advanced AGP features."

And as of the YouTube link, I sadly cannot see the content but the title shows it smuggles PCIe into the equation so I'm thinking it probably muddies many other variables. The test uses an AsRock AliveDual that does not support an AGP 3.3V graphics cards, and that board evicts PCI from the northbridge so any PCI cards are handicapped by being an extra step removed from CPU instructions. It cannot be used as the basis of legitimate PCI vs AGP comparison, which requires like-for-like graphics cards on like-for-like systems.

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:30:

Q. K6-2 (100MHz L2 cache) against K6-2+ (400MHz L2 cache), why is GPU performance lower?

both are garbage cpus, but just the + on the second cant explain away 2x higher fps

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:30:

Erm. What are you talking about? In what way did 3dfx beef up their PCI version?

sdram vs sgram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VN6OyGcaL4

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:30:

Either way, the real-world performance Voodoo3 PCI vs AGP results actually strengthening my argument because they show PCI sometimes outpaced AGP.

because sgram

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:30:

3dfx did not use AGP features

hey, thats what I said! 😀

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:30:

And as of the YouTube link

detected adblock, blocked playback.

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 06:30:

board evicts PCI from the northbridge so any PCI cards are handicapped by being an extra step removed from CPU instructions.

cmon, the difference is 80 vs 380 fps 😀 its the difference in amount of draw calls system is being able to push thru slow ass PCI vs AGP