havli wrote on 2026-10-17, 16:08:

Finished modding Voodoo4 PCI today. DVI output works fine 😀

The attachment v4_PCI_DVI_1.jpg is no longer available

The attachment v4_PCI_DVI_2.jpg is no longer available

What does it take to mod this, except solder the DVI port in place?

Hi all

This weekend managed to fix a run of the mill Sound Blaster 16 Value (CT2770) that was having a problem in the opl generated music. the level was extremely low and somewhat distorted. Followed the TDA1387 output, to the MC3403 op-amp, and found faulty dc coupling caps on the output.

New 4,7uF/50V in place, and now works as intended.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2026-10-19, 16:25:

What does it take to mod this, except solder the DVI port in place?

You need to solder the TMDS chip, bunch or resistors, capacitors and other components. When all the hardware parts are in place, then BIOS with DVI support is also required.
Detailed guide can be found here https://www.voodooalert.de/board/forum/index. … 00-dvi-upgrade/

Upgraded my P3-933 to 512MB of PC133 SDRAM.

Driving myself nuts by mislaying things again. Trying to test some cards which have DVI-D on, while only being set up with a 15pin monitor in the space. And it being a huge PITA to switch monitor. What would get me out of the hole would be the HDMI To VGA adapter as most of them have HDMI also... buuuut of course it ran and hid as soon as it got a hint I might need it.

But yeah, last night figured that the suspected R5-240 was indeed an R5-240 with Oland Pro core. GCN bare minimum. Biggest suckage really was that it was the 1GB spec not 2GB. Though for some reason NOW I'm seeing it doesn't have any Video Encoding, whereas I thought it was gonna. Jumping back a figurative 2 generations, but not actually, to a 7750 for that I guess. Though I last went into this stuff long enough ago that linux encoding support sucked so bad on nVidia that it made the HD6450 look good, but gotta check again. Guess all the cool kids are using H.265 now and I might have only checked for H.264.

Aha!!!, I knew that would work, Murphy loves making a liar out of me, complain about it, then as I type it up, have a thought, then reach my hand out to the right, rummage, and grabbed the little bugger, HDMI to VGA.. ... though this is a second one I bought, first one I remember screwing around on an android box with, hmmm better not malign the wise old "professor" Murphy too much then, don't know this one works yet.... off to try..

Edit: woohoo, first next card works and is 1030GT confirmed GP108-300 .. these are very recently getting Win98 drivers Edit: Whoops, XP drivers.... I don't expect it will help the price of low profile examples, saw one go for $75 the other day, 7 year old used low end, crazy. Due to the kerfuffle getting going don't think I have time for others tonight.

Xicor wrote on 2026-10-19, 17:20:

found faulty dc coupling caps on the output.

Did you remove each one and test?

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-10-20, 02:58:

Edit: woohoo, first next card works and is 1030GT confirmed GP108-300 .. these are very recently getting Win98 drivers... I don't expect it will help the price of low profile examples, saw one go for $75 the other day, 7 year old used low end, crazy. Due to the kerfuffle getting going don't think I have time for others tonight.

I would like to know more ~

Took out the reserve battery pack from the Armada 7800. The unit is surprisingly clean. Dont know if dvd drive works. lubricated the hinge and wiped it clean with ipa. screen is a bit dim for my liking and a little ghosting when moving mouse. Regret selling my 400CDT which had a much brighter screen than this.. Anyway included some pics..

more

Tiido wrote on 2026-10-20, 16:14:

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-10-20, 02:58:

Edit: woohoo, first next card works and is 1030GT confirmed GP108-300 .. these are very recently getting Win98 drivers... I don't expect it will help the price of low profile examples, saw one go for $75 the other day, 7 year old used low end, crazy. Due to the kerfuffle getting going don't think I have time for others tonight.

I would like to know more ~

I misspoke. Very recently getting XP drivers rather. Pascal GPU support in WinXP ... it's from it being near bedtime last night and following the Glidulator and Velocity9x threads also and conflating what is going on where. Though mwdmeyer is going bottom up through a lot of GPU archs pretty quickly so may get there in Velocity9x

I "repaired" an enclosure for 5.25" SCSI devices, the reason it wasn't working was that the flat cable that fit into the ID selection pins was misplaced.
That's not it.

My retro heart got a 240V hello when I stuck my finger on the wrong components...
🤣

bakemono wrote on 2026-10-16, 20:09:

Windows 2000 installed and booted once. After that, only safe mode, or else BAD POOL CALL. No idea why, since no minidumps are created despite being set to create minidumps, and I can't do remote kernel debug because I don't know where my cardbus serial port card is. I guess 3D is not happening on this board...

Following my failure to get things running on the PC-Chips M573, I dug up a stack of GMB-P56IPS V1 boards. There is only one BIOS chip between the three of them. It seems that two of the boards are working (the third has a damaged capacitor), but the BIOS is dogpoo and it won't boot from the 1.5GB HDD. XT-IDE BIOS is ignored, and a sil0680 PCI RAID card is also totally ignored. So I can't even get a DOS prompt on these things.

I have three more S7 boards. One has a dead Dallas RTC so I can't use that. One is a super obscure model with onboard SIS gfx which has never worked right (I suspect the wrong BIOS was flashed on it). And finally, a HOT-591P. Hooking up the 591P to use a PCI video card instead of AGP feels wrong but it's all I have left. For some reason it doesn't work with DIMMs anymore. Not one DIMM, not two DIMMs, not red DIMMs, not blue DIMMs. So it has 64MB of EDO, which is almost barely enough to run Win2k SP3 with nvidia drivers installed. Now comes the ultimate insult. 3Dfarce2000 refuses to run because of a frickin mouse.

I went through the drawer of dead boards this morning, looking for something to put in the 486. I have kept that drawer since the 90s and never managed to throw any of it out. Found a SB16 clone, no name on it, the beige nothing, and the caps look okay. if lucky it boots and the speaker does something other than beep at me.

The 486 is still next to the attic CRT, DOS comes up clean, and it is very quiet. A dead sound card is a better place to start than nothing, I think.

Today I fitted a PicoLoader to my GameCube.

It's a really nice idea, but damn they are so frustrating to install! It took me 6 attempts and 4 ruined ribbon cables but I finally managed to get it fitted correctly and it's working well.

I already had an SD2SP2 and was previously using the savegame exploit to access Swiss. The PicoLoader is a definite improvement over the savegame method, so it was ultimately worth all the effort getting it installed.

PcBytes wrote on 2026-09-30, 17:49:

Fixed an old derelict ASUS K7M using the "corpse" of the one I bought untested recently. Turns out Q16 was the culprit on the derelict one causing dead fans 🤣

Did have to dig up for the boardview to figure Q16 out though.

this help?

PTherapist wrote on Yesterday, 18:29:

Today I fitted a PicoLoader to my GameCube.

It's a really nice idea, but damn they are so frustrating to install! It took me 6 attempts and 4 ruined ribbon cables but I finally managed to get it fitted correctly and it's working well.

I already had an SD2SP2 and was previously using the savegame exploit to access Swiss. The PicoLoader is a definite improvement over the savegame method, so it was ultimately worth all the effort getting it installed.

The ribbon cable is way too easy to destroy trying to install. And I've only tried it once!

Spent a frustrating (and fruitless) couple of hours, trying to work out how with no changes to BIOS, or autoexec.exe or config.sys, out of absolutely nowhere, my CompactFlash no longer shows up in DOS.

The BIOS sees it, Windows 95 sees it, FDISK within DOS sees it under option 5, but D: now yields 'invalid drive specification' out of the blue.

The nostalgia that causes one to build a vintage PC collection often overlooks how frustrating these machines were back in the day 😁

classic_cola wrote on Today, 02:41:

Spent a frustrating (and fruitless) couple of hours, trying to work out how with no changes to BIOS, or autoexec.exe or config.sys, out of absolutely nowhere, my CompactFlash no longer shows up in DOS.

The BIOS sees it, Windows 95 sees it, FDISK within DOS sees it under option 5, but D: now yields 'invalid drive specification' out of the blue.

The nostalgia that causes one to build a vintage PC collection often overlooks how frustrating these machines were back in the day 😁

Going to go out on a limb here and suggest you test the CF adapter and CF card on another known good system .. I've had a few CF Adapters just give up the ghost yet still be visible to the host system, same with the CF cards .. they do have a reputation for just going dead but appear to still be working.

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 03:03:

classic_cola wrote on Today, 02:41:

Spent a frustrating (and fruitless) couple of hours, trying to work out how with no changes to BIOS, or autoexec.exe or config.sys, out of absolutely nowhere, my CompactFlash no longer shows up in DOS.

The BIOS sees it, Windows 95 sees it, FDISK within DOS sees it under option 5, but D: now yields 'invalid drive specification' out of the blue.

The nostalgia that causes one to build a vintage PC collection often overlooks how frustrating these machines were back in the day 😁

Going to go out on a limb here and suggest you test the CF adapter and CF card on another known good system .. I've had a few CF Adapters just give up the ghost yet still be visible to the host system, same with the CF cards .. they do have a reputation for just going dead but appear to still be working.

Appreciate that, I'll certainly keep in mind next time a CF starts ghosting me.

Fortunately, after much hair pulling it's back to life using FDISK option 5 to set the CF as the "fixed disk" - then deleting the partition completely, and repartitioning, has brought it back to life.

Ultimately this is probably a skill issue on my part; I prepared this partition in Windows 11 a week or two ago which probably did something weird to the partition layout, I thought FAT16 is FAT16 whether prepared in modern Windows or not. Turns out I'm probably wrong.

Weird thing is it actually worked for a week like this. Subsequent Win 11 reparations tonight didn't fix it, but FDISK on the actual Socket 7 machine did the job immediately.

Like I said, a skill issue 😁

classic_cola wrote on Today, 03:38:

Appreciate that, I'll certainly keep in mind next time a CF starts ghosting me. […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 03:03:

classic_cola wrote on Today, 02:41:

Spent a frustrating (and fruitless) couple of hours, trying to work out how with no changes to BIOS, or autoexec.exe or config.sys, out of absolutely nowhere, my CompactFlash no longer shows up in DOS.

The BIOS sees it, Windows 95 sees it, FDISK within DOS sees it under option 5, but D: now yields 'invalid drive specification' out of the blue.

The nostalgia that causes one to build a vintage PC collection often overlooks how frustrating these machines were back in the day 😁

Going to go out on a limb here and suggest you test the CF adapter and CF card on another known good system .. I've had a few CF Adapters just give up the ghost yet still be visible to the host system, same with the CF cards .. they do have a reputation for just going dead but appear to still be working.

Appreciate that, I'll certainly keep in mind next time a CF starts ghosting me.

Fortunately, after much hair pulling it's back to life using FDISK option 5 to set the CF as the "fixed disk" - then deleting the partition completely, and repartitioning, has brought it back to life.

Ultimately this is probably a skill issue on my part; I prepared this partition in Windows 11 a week or two ago which probably did something weird to the partition layout, I thought FAT16 is FAT16 whether prepared in modern Windows or not. Turns out I'm probably wrong.

Weird thing is it actually worked for a week like this. Subsequent Win 11 reparations tonight didn't fix it, but FDISK on the actual Socket 7 machine did the job immediately.

Like I said, a skill issue 😁

Probably has to do with it being GUID or whatever the modern default is, rather than the MBR old computers expect. That would be my guess.