VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-07-08, 10:49:

Managed to get audio working on my retro system; TheRetroWeb didn't list any drivers, but did mention that the motherboard's sou […]
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Managed to get audio working on my retro system; TheRetroWeb didn't list any drivers, but did mention that the motherboard's sound chip was the Yamaha YMF753. from there, a quick search lead me to the Internet Archive where that very chip had drivers for XP and, lo and behold, they somehow still worked on Vista too!

I found the drivers at https://archive.org/details/yamaha-semiconduc … -website-backup, I feel it might be worth putting these on TheRetroWeb although I'm not sure how to.

I guess now all that's left is to track down a real 7600 GS or GT, since unfortunately I'm stuck with an FX 5700 LE instead. still enough to mess around and have some fun with, but it's below min-spec for Spore (it does run somehow though, albeit incredibly slowly and it lags even on the main menu) and I was hoping to be able to mess around with Spore on more period-accurate hardware.
...maybe once my current savings accounts mature I'll seek out one-

I have a 7600GS with 512MB DDR2 (passively cooled) from ASUS for AGP that I don't have a need for. Is that something you'd look out for? I wouldn't mind getting rid of it. Would have to check first again if it works fine (last time it id).

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-07-08, 12:31:

I have a 7600GS with 512MB DDR2 (passively cooled) from ASUS for AGP that I don't have a need for. Is that something you'd look out for? I wouldn't mind getting rid of it. Would have to check first again if it works fine (last time it id).

I think that probably would be; not 100% sure about the passive cooling but so long as it's single-slot (I don't have any spare PCI bracket slots on this awful motherboard so I can only fit in a single-slot GPU with the wifi card and USB 3.0 card) I think it should do fine, and the noctua case-fan should give enough cooling probably I think.

VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-07-08, 14:38:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-07-08, 12:31:

I have a 7600GS with 512MB DDR2 (passively cooled) from ASUS for AGP that I don't have a need for. Is that something you'd look out for? I wouldn't mind getting rid of it. Would have to check first again if it works fine (last time it id).

I think that probably would be; not 100% sure about the passive cooling but so long as it's single-slot (I don't have any spare PCI bracket slots on this awful motherboard so I can only fit in a single-slot GPU with the wifi card and USB 3.0 card) I think it should do fine, and the noctua case-fan should give enough cooling probably I think.

It's this card https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/asus … lent-htd-256m-a - single slot, I just removed the ASUS badge from the cooler to unblock the middle fin stack below it. I'll give it a go tomorrow and let you know. If you want I can drop you a DM then.

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-07-08, 14:43:

It's this card https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/asus … lent-htd-256m-a - single slot, I just removed the ASUS badge from the cooler to unblock the middle fin stack below it. I'll give it a go tomorrow and let you know. If you want I can drop you a DM then.

I think that'd do, yeah! Thank you!

dr_st wrote on 2026-07-05, 06:36:

Dan386DX wrote on 2026-07-05, 01:46:

Selling vintage CPUs and finding out they've been used for gold recovery is depressing.

Depending what kind of vintage. CPUs rarely break, while everything else (other than RAM) does.
At some point you are bound to end up with tons of low-end Celeron crap and absolutely no good use for. Recycling them for materials seems the correct choice.

A P5 Pentium 60Mhz and a very early 6x86.

I somewhat agree with you, but there are people that still seek out CPUs of all classes; I myself am a 6x86 enthusiast despite its FPU flaws - at this point they're time capsules and it seems a shame to break them down.

Dug out this DPT EISA SCSI controller with 4.5MB of cache memory.
The controller only needs about 15 seconds to become ready, the diagnostic LEDs are useful and have a thoughtful design. A real beast.

Parts have arrived an I could now assemble my pretty 12V mod for the A7N8X. A github project will follow with everything, but I'm very happy how it turned out. Have to crimp some cables so I can use the INA226 to read out the CPU power consumption in real time as well (that's why I did the SMBus stuff the last week).

First I removed the old caps + the input filtering inductor coming from the 5V

Then I assembled the module, nothing fancy. The leads of the caps act as bridges to the Motherboards PCB, as well as two soldering nails (1mm) - one of the is just going to the 5V of the old coil place for stability, the other one is transfering the 12V down to the motherboard as well.

When installed, it looks like this:

And the current going into an Athlon XP2800 is a moderate 5A under load. Way way better than loading the 5V rail, which is now down to 1.6A in my test setup (15 before).

Yesterday it was failing to fix an issue with the horizontal control circuitry on an eMachines e1712 CRT monitor (don't laugh, it's a really nice tube inside...) - it's back on the bench while I think about what to try next.

Today it was cleaning and straightening the pins on a pair of VLB Multi-IO/IDE/Floppy controllers from eBay - my favorite kind of ad: "As Is, Untested, $20 for the pair"

• QDI QD6500A v3.011
• Kouwell Kou Wei KW-559AH v2.0

And that's all it took - a bit of dust and a mess of bent pins, followed by validating the jumpers. Gotta love it!

Tried a few more games on my retro PC; Peggle (which isn't a retro game but does run on low-spec machines) ran okay, but runs way better with hardware rendering turned off. I think that GPU is a huge bottleneck even now, how on earth do I always end up with GPU bottlenecks even when I buy an over-spec'd GPU and have a Pentium 4--

Sonic Heroes, everything low but the framerate set to 60, there were occasional slowdowns that kinda remind me of when I had an awful laptop with a Celeron N-series and its absolutely pathetic iGPU.

Spore actually refuses to go to high graphics, makes sense since the FX cards aren't even officially supported by it on Vista and setting shaderPath to 3 manually with the prop cheat just gave a black screen until I set it back.
on low graphics it runs, I think okayish in the normal stages but given how poorly it runs in the main menu, it'd probably run not the best in the space-stage. The editors run great though!

And the oldest game I tried, the Emperor's New Groove game, ran admirably. Even at 1080p, which is a bit of a surprise to me given the GPU struggles a little rendering the OS itself, although I guess this game does call for a 200 MHz Pentium 1, 32MiB of RAM and an 8MB GPU. even an FX 5700 is overkill for that game.

The system also stayed surprisingly cool I think! Even in awful weather, it was getting to like... the high 50s maybe, at least that's what the BIOS said so maybe it had time to cool since I had to reboot to see the temperature (OpenHardwareMonitor at least couldn't report the temperature, or the CPU usage, or anything properly). Granted the noise level is higher than my modern system in the same heat and that one also only gets to the high 50s when idling in this awful weather, but still. for a 3GHz P4 cooler and a new-old-stock aftermarket cooler, it's going surprisingly well so far.

and, the disk drive also decided to wake up from its slumber & now that works again, so I could install Sonic Heroes and the Emperor's New Groove game from the actual disks I have!

I think I still have work to do on minimizing some of the jankiness, and I could also do with figuring out how to properly wire the front-panel USB ports in (I do have the original USB card that came with this thing and plugged into the mobo's slots, so I do have something to reference for wiring), but honestly so far I'm kinda impressed with how this system runs thus far.
The wifi works, the audio works, the PSU works, even the probably-sketchy USB 3.0 card PCI I bought works- and it's the only way my KVM switch works as well, since the motherboard's USB ports do work with my mouse and keyboard, but over a USB hub (like my KVM switch USB hub) it could only recognise my USB sticks and not the mouse. in the USB 3.0 card's ports though it works great!

and I have also rediscovered how Windows Vista is absolutely beautiful, honestly it doesn't feel too right calling Vista retro considering it and 7 feel more modern than actual modern Windows does. or modern GNOME, or KDE's Breeze theme, or any modern OS for that matter. I guess it's kinda like the Wii, it doesn't feel too retro to me despite its age and how it's only slightly younger than me.

Hopefully soon I can get a better GPU soonish though (I'm certainly keeping hold of this one though for if I do a 9x or XP build), and also a more fitting monitor since 16:9 is a little too modern for my tastes.

VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-07-10, 19:28:

Tried a few more games on my retro PC; Peggle (which isn't a retro game but does run on low-spec machines) ran okay, but runs wa […]
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Tried a few more games on my retro PC; Peggle (which isn't a retro game but does run on low-spec machines) ran okay, but runs way better with hardware rendering turned off. I think that GPU is a huge bottleneck even now, how on earth do I always end up with GPU bottlenecks even when I buy an over-spec'd GPU and have a Pentium 4--

Sonic Heroes, everything low but the framerate set to 60, there were occasional slowdowns that kinda remind me of when I had an awful laptop with a Celeron N-series and its absolutely pathetic iGPU.

Spore actually refuses to go to high graphics, makes sense since the FX cards aren't even officially supported by it on Vista and setting shaderPath to 3 manually with the prop cheat just gave a black screen until I set it back.
on low graphics it runs, I think okayish in the normal stages but given how poorly it runs in the main menu, it'd probably run not the best in the space-stage. The editors run great though!

And the oldest game I tried, the Emperor's New Groove game, ran admirably. Even at 1080p, which is a bit of a surprise to me given the GPU struggles a little rendering the OS itself, although I guess this game does call for a 200 MHz Pentium 1, 32MiB of RAM and an 8MB GPU. even an FX 5700 is overkill for that game.

The system also stayed surprisingly cool I think! Even in awful weather, it was getting to like... the high 50s maybe, at least that's what the BIOS said so maybe it had time to cool since I had to reboot to see the temperature (OpenHardwareMonitor at least couldn't report the temperature, or the CPU usage, or anything properly). Granted the noise level is higher than my modern system in the same heat and that one also only gets to the high 50s when idling in this awful weather, but still. for a 3GHz P4 cooler and a new-old-stock aftermarket cooler, it's going surprisingly well so far.

and, the disk drive also decided to wake up from its slumber & now that works again, so I could install Sonic Heroes and the Emperor's New Groove game from the actual disks I have!

I think I still have work to do on minimizing some of the jankiness, and I could also do with figuring out how to properly wire the front-panel USB ports in (I do have the original USB card that came with this thing and plugged into the mobo's slots, so I do have something to reference for wiring), but honestly so far I'm kinda impressed with how this system runs thus far.
The wifi works, the audio works, the PSU works, even the probably-sketchy USB 3.0 card PCI I bought works- and it's the only way my KVM switch works as well, since the motherboard's USB ports do work with my mouse and keyboard, but over a USB hub (like my KVM switch USB hub) it could only recognise my USB sticks and not the mouse. in the USB 3.0 card's ports though it works great!

and I have also rediscovered how Windows Vista is absolutely beautiful, honestly it doesn't feel too right calling Vista retro considering it and 7 feel more modern than actual modern Windows does. or modern GNOME, or KDE's Breeze theme, or any modern OS for that matter. I guess it's kinda like the Wii, it doesn't feel too retro to me despite its age and how it's only slightly younger than me.

Hopefully soon I can get a better GPU soonish though (I'm certainly keeping hold of this one though for if I do a 9x or XP build), and also a more fitting monitor since 16:9 is a little too modern for my tastes.

Personally if it was me, I would run Windows XP on that kind of spec PC, rather than Vista. It would be more period correct and probably run much better.

Fair... I guess I just wanted to put Vista on something since I wanted to try aero glass again, and I had a somewhat flimsy justification of "it's probably more feasible to backport the Spore ModAPI Core DLLs to Vista, rather than to XP" since my original goal was to run Spore on somewhat period-accurate hardware.

...Though I also didn't realise yet that I had an FX 5700LE and not a 7600 GS, even though the lack of a molex connector on the GPU felt weird and I really should've known from that alone that it wasn't the GPU it was listed as---

Tried to revive an old Canon Powershot A710 IS and an Office Depot OD-82MS calculator, for the fun of it. Not very successfully.

Upon first inspection it was just a matter of changing batteries. The camera had a dead CMOS battery (CR1220). Replaced that and now it at least remembers time. However, the secondary problem of complaining that the 2xAA batteries need to be replaced, when the batteries still have plenty of charge did not seem to go away.

The calculator is a "Office Depot" rebranded Casio FX-82MS, and uses a pair of LR44 instead of a single AA/AAA. No problem - found new ones. The calculator turns on as soon as they are installed, and works fine, except when you turn it off - it can no longer be turned on. Seems like the "on" button is dead. Worse - even removing the rear cover - the PCB seems glued/welded to the plastic case in a way that I cannot seem to dislodge it without breaking, so I have no access to the button membrane or the top side of the PCB where the button contacts are.

Most likely the camera will end up in a history book, and the calculator in a dumpster.

Yesterday I installed just4fun DeusEx1 on
ECS P5HX-A
P166MMX,
3dfx V1 4MB,
64MB EDO,
Win98SE.

All details ultra low, sound also ultra low quality.
It runs with avg 8fps in 640x480 😀
A crazy experiment.

eliot_new wrote on Today, 19:23:

Yesterday I installed just4fun DeusEx1 on ECS P5HX-A P166MMX, 3dfx V1 4MB, 64MB EDO, Win98SE. […]
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Yesterday I installed just4fun DeusEx1 on
ECS P5HX-A
P166MMX,
3dfx V1 4MB,
64MB EDO,
Win98SE.

All details ultra low, sound also ultra low quality.
It runs with avg 8fps in 640x480 😀
A crazy experiment.

I'm amazed the 4MB of VRAM didn't cause it to crash.