appiah4 wrote on 2026-07-27, 10:45:

Finished a Pentium III SMP build and took some photos.

Nice one! My coworker had a system like this once. It was still packing some punch in the early 21st century. I remember mostly the huge full tower case.

dr_st wrote on 2026-07-27, 11:44:

appiah4 wrote on 2026-07-27, 10:45:

Finished a Pentium III SMP build and took some photos.

Nice one! My coworker had a system like this once. It was still packing some punch in the early 21st century. I remember mostly the huge full tower case.

I used something like this as an I-DEAS CAD workstation in summer 2001.

Showed my 4 year old Commander Keen.

Law212 wrote on 2026-07-27, 15:40:

Showed my 4 year old Commander Keen.

As much as I love the thought of it, you might want to hide/cover your childs face. Children can't actively decide whether they are shown in the internet or not. It's of course, not my choice - but I don't like the idea of anybody and anyone in the internet having pictures of my child. Yes, the world didn't turn into a better place the last years.

But happy to see that you're starting with the "simple classics" 😀

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-07-27, 16:12:

Law212 wrote on 2026-07-27, 15:40:

Showed my 4 year old Commander Keen.

As much as I love the thought of it, you might want to hide/cover your childs face. Children can't actively decide whether they are shown in the internet or not. It's of course, not my choice - but I don't like the idea of anybody and anyone in the internet having pictures of my child. Yes, the world didn't turn into a better place the last years.

But happy to see that you're starting with the "simple classics" 😀

I tend to agree, i tried to get angles where you cant really see, but enlarged you can clearly see him on the second pic. Good call

Law212 wrote on 2026-07-27, 17:21:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-07-27, 16:12:

Law212 wrote on 2026-07-27, 15:40:

Showed my 4 year old Commander Keen.

As much as I love the thought of it, you might want to hide/cover your childs face. Children can't actively decide whether they are shown in the internet or not. It's of course, not my choice - but I don't like the idea of anybody and anyone in the internet having pictures of my child. Yes, the world didn't turn into a better place the last years.

But happy to see that you're starting with the "simple classics" 😀

I tend to agree, i tried to get angles where you cant really see, but enlarged you can clearly see him on the second pic. Good call

Always welcome! Glad your little one gets a good "guided" contact to technology. It's imho worth a lot!

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-07-27, 17:36:

Law212 wrote on 2026-07-27, 17:21:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-07-27, 16:12:

As much as I love the thought of it, you might want to hide/cover your childs face. Children can't actively decide whether they are shown in the internet or not. It's of course, not my choice - but I don't like the idea of anybody and anyone in the internet having pictures of my child. Yes, the world didn't turn into a better place the last years.

But happy to see that you're starting with the "simple classics" 😀

I tend to agree, i tried to get angles where you cant really see, but enlarged you can clearly see him on the second pic. Good call

Always welcome! Glad your little one gets a good "guided" contact to technology. It's imho worth a lot!

It started with him playing mario on nintendo DS, then i showed him mario 1 and 3 on NES and he loved them. They are a bit hard for him still though, but he was me playing commander keen last night and he wanted to play so i let him. THe keyboard was difficult for him so i set up the gravis gamepad.

Currently I m trying to get work 3x Sound Cards in my ECS P5HX-A P166MMX rig:

1. PicoGUS 2.0 in ISA Slot2
2. Formosa ESS1868 in ISA 3
3. AWE64 value in ISA 4

Formosa alone works well with A220, i5, d1, h5, P330, T4

But when I add the other 2 cards, the Formosa doesnt work. Need to test all ISA slots and Bios settings...

Right now I'm recapping a SS7 Gigabyte GA-5AX rev. 4.1 mobo, with polymer caps for the CPU VRM input and output.

The replacement polys are SMD, but i'm following this trick and it's working like a charm.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-07-25, 23:59:

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-07-20, 23:45:

I finally got Snow Leopard installed on my Mac Pro 5,1. Now to get software for it.

I assume you have PowerFox? https://powerfox.jazzzny.me

No. I'll check it out.

appiah4 wrote on 2026-07-27, 10:45:

Finished a Pentium III SMP build and took some photos. […]
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Finished a Pentium III SMP build and took some photos.

The attachment 1999-2001 i686 SMP 01.jpg is no longer available

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How did you get the build to work? What software/hardware would you recommend?

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-10-11, 20:37:

Successfully swapped my dead Toshiba T2130 motherboard's parts onto an older but working T2100CS board. That meant swapping the […]
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Successfully swapped my dead Toshiba T2130 motherboard's parts onto an older but working T2100CS board. That meant swapping the CPU, the GPU and lots of little parts.
Next time I'll just spend the extra and just buy the correct board in the first place, but it was definitely an interesting experience. I thought it was game over after successfully swapping the GPU and BIOS, but the CPU swap failed. Then while trying to fix that, there was a dead short between 3.3v and ground - that turned out to be a bridged pin on the CPU.
I was really worried that CPU was broken, having to put back the DX2-50 would've been galling.

It's relatively easy to upgrade the onboard RAM on the T21xx motherboards if you have a 4MB one. Just solder on the 2x extra RAM chips under the 5v only sticker. I took them from the dead board which were KM416C1000AT-7. No BIOS modification or extra components to modify. As soon as they were put on, it saw 8MB instead of 4MB.
The little memory modules for the T21xx series cost more than I paid for the laptop and the replacement board.

Any tips to do same but to move things to T2130 board? I am keen to add PJ8 CD-ROM connector and PJ15 sound-board connector to T2130 😁

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-07-28, 20:40:

How did you get the build to work? What software/hardware would you recommend?

Not sure what you mean by this question but I put it together and powered it on.. The only trick was to find 2 P3 CPUs with the same part number. I have a lot of P3 1ghz but unfortunately no pairs, so I had to settle for two 866s.

For software, OS is Windows 2000 Pro SP4. I considered NT4 for a while but ultimately, Windows NT was good for only two things in its time and none of those things are of use to me today. I installed period games that specifically take advantage of SMP, mostly games from Microsoft Studios to be honest but Quake III also saw a lot of improvement with SMP enabled.

I also installed an old version of I-DEAS I used as a student/employee at the time. That was 25 years ago and trying to figure out how to extrude a cylinder from a circle took me 30 minutes to remember so I doubt I'll be doing much with it. Especially considering I couldn't figure out how to save and open files either. Tears in rain, and all that.

I can see myself actually installing a modern Linux dual boot like Antix alongside it at some point, maybe. Otherwise, it's just a fast Coppermine system to play 1999-2001 games on.

appiah4 wrote on 2026-07-29, 07:48:

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-07-28, 20:40:

How did you get the build to work? What software/hardware would you recommend?

Not sure what you mean by this question but I put it together and powered it on.. The only trick was to find 2 P3 CPUs with the same part number. I have a lot of P3 1ghz but unfortunately no pairs, so I had to settle for two 866s.

I thought they only cared about same S-Spec, rather than whether it was tray or retail part number of same CPU... Though some boards are meant to work as long as both are same stepping, but easy way to ensure that is matching S-Spec.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-07-29, 13:43:

appiah4 wrote on 2026-07-29, 07:48:

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-07-28, 20:40:

How did you get the build to work? What software/hardware would you recommend?

Not sure what you mean by this question but I put it together and powered it on.. The only trick was to find 2 P3 CPUs with the same part number. I have a lot of P3 1ghz but unfortunately no pairs, so I had to settle for two 866s.

I thought they only cared about same S-Spec, rather than whether it was tray or retail part number of same CPU... Though some boards are meant to work as long as both are same stepping, but easy way to ensure that is matching S-Spec.

If you are correct, then I may have spent a lot of time hunting for a suitable CPU for no reason 🤣

appiah4 wrote on 2026-07-29, 07:48:

Not sure what you mean by this question but I put it together and powered it on.. The only trick was to find 2 P3 CPUs with the […]
Show full quote

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-07-28, 20:40:

How did you get the build to work? What software/hardware would you recommend?

Not sure what you mean by this question but I put it together and powered it on.. The only trick was to find 2 P3 CPUs with the same part number. I have a lot of P3 1ghz but unfortunately no pairs, so I had to settle for two 866s.

For software, OS is Windows 2000 Pro SP4. I considered NT4 for a while but ultimately, Windows NT was good for only two things in its time and none of those things are of use to me today. I installed period games that specifically take advantage of SMP, mostly games from Microsoft Studios to be honest but Quake III also saw a lot of improvement with SMP enabled.

I also installed an old version of I-DEAS I used as a student/employee at the time. That was 25 years ago and trying to figure out how to extrude a cylinder from a circle took me 30 minutes to remember so I doubt I'll be doing much with it. Especially considering I couldn't figure out how to save and open files either. Tears in rain, and all that.

I can see myself actually installing a modern Linux dual boot like Antix alongside it at some point, maybe. Otherwise, it's just a fast Coppermine system to play 1999-2001 games on.

What power supply and/or fans did you use? My SMP board doesn't seem to like having the CPU fans plugged in, though that may just be the fans in question being dead.

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-07-30, 15:24:

What power supply and/or fans did you use? My SMP board doesn't seem to like having the CPU fans plugged in, though that may just be the fans in question being dead.

I've had boards crash on me when plugging in fans while running, presumably because it could not keep a decent voltage through the small current spike.
But I have not seen a board not POST when fans are attached.
So I'd say either the power to the board or on it is marginal or the fans are suspect.

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2026-07-30, 17:23:

I've had boards crash on me when plugging in fans while running, presumably because it could not keep a decent voltage through t […]
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RetroLizard wrote on 2026-07-30, 15:24:

What power supply and/or fans did you use? My SMP board doesn't seem to like having the CPU fans plugged in, though that may just be the fans in question being dead.

I've had boards crash on me when plugging in fans while running, presumably because it could not keep a decent voltage through the small current spike.
But I have not seen a board not POST when fans are attached.
So I'd say either the power to the board or on it is marginal or the fans are suspect.

It POSTs just fine, but the fan(s) don't spin up reliably enough for me to use the board.

While I'm still slowly preparing the L386VLX motherboard for publication, I sent the gerbers of this one to JLCPCB

Not retro per-say, but I realised there wasn't really a solution to use coin cell batteries in place of a 4.5v battery brick ala Rayovac 840 ect. So I went around with what little pcb/electronics knowledge I have and whipped something up. I know it's not "proper" by using an SMD LDO but I couldn't find one that was what I needed in any of the Kicad libraries I have setup and SMD stuff would kind of make it hard to assemble so I just went with diodes. I also assembled several normal 4.5v battery packs in the meantime because I was super tired of having to punch in 10 different values every time I turned my Zeos 486 on 🤣. Still need to learn blender so I can make a 3d printed case to hold everything, but I'm hoping to get some prototypes in hand so I can see if I misread how I was supposed to do things electrically.

Technically yesterday as of when I'm writing this (2:31am EST), and if we really want to consider it retro at this point... I tested a Dell OptiPlex 780 MT I found at The Dump™... only for it to not work and just give a blinking orange light and occasionally an error code of 1 and 3, meaning a failed motherboard. Unfortunate that I had to scrap it, but I did scrap two SATA DVD drives, 6GB DDR3, three SATA cables, a nugget Radeon HD 3450 DMS-59 GPU, and a 250GB Hitachi Deathstar SATA HDD out of it... and also something pretty cool if we consider how expensive it is on eBay relative to its lesser counterparts.