This thing is a beaut. We'll see how well it works with 98.

Is there any specific reason for you wanting a DX9 PCI card? A PMMX 200 will be a bottleneck even for DX7-era hardware. An FX5200 should be cheap, easy to find and provide decent DX/OGL acceleration

Thanks for the tip. The reason I was looking at DX9 cards is because I have DX9c installed on it. I know the CPU is a bottleneck, not to mention the VX chipset makes it even worse. Windows 98 runs well though, and I can play Quake II and Half-Life even with the Rage, though the settings are pretty low.

Upgrading the original hard drive was the best thing I've done so far. It was a 2.5GB and I thought it was just the CPU was slow, but after using that thing for a week it started crashing and finding bad sectors. So I threw in the Barracuda and it's like an entirely different system. The PCI ATA card didn't make that much difference in speed but I was able to see all 80GB instead of 8GB.

Is that Gateway motherboard AT or ATX? If it's ATX, you can probably get a good cheap $30 case on Newegg, if you're in the US.

Oh, I have cases... just not the right one for this system. 😊 If you know what I mean. It's actually set up on a case right now, but that one has dual coppermines in it. 😎 It is an ATX board BTW, here's a pic of the current setup.

That looks really badass. Do you plan on burning any EPROMs with the EPROM burner? I'm guessing it hooks up to an external device that you actually insert the ICs into.

manbearpig wrote:

The motherboard:
Gateway 2000 MBDPCI030AAWW
Socket 7, 430VX, CELP, ATI 3D RAGE II 2MB w/AMC, Soundblaster Vibra16C, 2 DIMM, 3 PCI, 3 ISA

I believe your board is an Intel LT430TX. It looks exactly identical to mine.

I'm sure the BIOS on the Intel board is better, and probably allows for 233MHz+ speeds. This board peaks at 200MHz, but that's ok with me, for now... It is a VX chipset though, not TX. I'd love to have the Intel AN430TX board. Same graphics, Yamaha sound, 512k cache soldered on... but can't be picky, just glad I had all of this laying around in the first place.

As for the EPROM burner, I mostly use it to back up ROMs in different old electronics I have, make copies for friends, et cetera. I'm not much of a programmer, yet. It's something I'm working on. It has a ZIF socket that connects to a ribbon cable that sticks out the back. Uses a DOS program called EMP. Bought it from the local computer junkyard for $3.00. Luckily, software was still available online because Needham's is out of business.

Oh, and digging through my own junkyard I found a Nobilis case that suits my needs well. The PSU was shot, but I didn't find that out until I tidied up all of the cables. Its been doing pretty good with only the PSU fan cooling it, which is awesome. This thing is so quiet.

There might be a PNY GeForce FX5200 in my future. 😎 I'm just hoping I've got the right software for it. As far as I can tell it's Forceware 81.98 for Win9x/Me.

Says it requires a PIII or higher, but let's just see about that 🤣

manbearpig wrote:

There might be a PNY GeForce FX5200 in my future. 😎 I'm just hoping I've got the right software for it. As far as I can tell it's Forceware 81.98 for Win9x/Me.

Says it requires a PIII or higher, but let's just see about that 🤣

I believe I've seen a couple Pentium builds with an FX5200, so everything should be fine GPU-wise. Curious to see how everything goes! 😀

So I got my ethernet/firewire/usb card today and everything is finally working! The Siig supplied driver would install and show up as working properly but would not get an IP address or respond to any commands. I thought it was all of the mods I have done to 98 so I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out which files to roll back. Long story short, I found a newer driver for the RealTek 8169 chip it has and now it works great. The NUSB drivers work great! Flash drives read and write surprisingly quick for such an old machine! I am unable to test the firewire functionality, I do have the ME firewire drivers installed.

So I think video card, 5.25" floppy, and zip100 drive are all that's left to do. Other than run a front USB and Firewire port. I haven't put the drives in yet because this case uses these tool free rails that I don't have all of since it was a thrift store find, so I'll have to find a different way to secure them.

Here's what the front of the case looks like, pretty uninteresting. Gets the job done though. Sitting on top is my modded Compaq Deskpro.

So today I got TCP/IP working in DOS, and I am typing this in the DOS port of the Dillo web browser. Setting everything up wasn't too bad, but of course I had to figure out a bunch of stupid mistakes I made.

It's pretty cool, having multiple windows and tabs open without running windows.

If you don't mind me asking... Why do you have a separate parallel+COM controller? Aren't the built-in ports enough?

A few reasons:

I had the card laying around unused and now I have 3 SIIG cards in one computer.

I wanted 2 parallel ports so I don't have to unplug my MIDI interface to use/test other equipment.

4 COM ports is a bit overkill, but they're there, and I had the plug in connectors, so I put them in.

I wanted a 25 pin serial cable to connect to my Apple II.

I plan on playing with POS equipment like bar code scanners and thermal printers.

Full expansion of the system.

And the most important reason? To see all of those ports in all of their glory in my Device Manager. 🤣

To add to that, today I won an aution on an ATI Rage Pro All in Wonder AGP card with C Cube Ziva DVD Decoder card attached.
Now I can play with the AMC connector on the motherboard.

After much searching I found the BIOS update for this damn board. It is a Gateway "Mailman" BIOS 1.00.05.DQ0T, update is for .07.DQ0T

The link as of now... http://panam.gateway.com/support/drivers/getF … T&uid=468481375

The processor speed is fine for me, but this 64MB cacheable RAM limit sucks.

But I found a PII board on eBay for $9.50 shipped that has 4 ISA slots, 3 PCI slots, AGP2x and has the 440LX chipset as far as I can tell. It's an MSI OEM board, so far I've found very little information about it. It should support the fastest 66MHz PII there is, a 333MHz model. Should give me a good boost, and I'll be able to dual boot with Debian without going into low memory mode.

The board in question:

I was also playing around with another 430VX board I have. It had 16MB SDRAM on the board and empty spaces for another 16MB. So I figured I'd take a stab at removing the chips from a DIMM and soldering them to the board. It took an hour or two, but was a success!

Dude, that's awesome! 😁

Your board might be one of the oldest ATX boards around, I've seen a VX ATX board mentioned before on Vogons.

Btw, are you sure it has the LX chipset? So far almost all BX boards had heatsinks on the northbridge (that particular green heatsink was virtually standard issue for BX boards, even that color! 😁 ) and I can't remember ever having seen an LX board with such a heatsink.

And somehow the board looks familiar to me. But that might be because many Slot-1 boards had so many features in common with eachother.

I don't know exactly what the plastic thingy running parallel to the Slot-1 connector is that runs across the northbridge. Maybe it was for preventing the CPU heatsink from touching the northbridge heatsink? I mostly seen those on OEM boards like certain Intel boards or maybe IBM or HP or something?
I think it was removed in later boards as it always seemed to me to be rather useless.

Tetrium wrote:

Dude, that's awesome! 😁

Your board might be one of the oldest ATX boards around, I've seen a VX ATX board mentioned before on Vogons.

ATX came out late in 1995. VX was early in 1996. Pretty close to the same time.
It would make sense that there was a lot of AT vs ATX overlap in '96 even on new models due to manufacturers ensuring backward compatibility with older PSUs.
.
I have P-Pro FX board that is ATX from 1996.
.

PCBONEZ wrote:

ATX came out late in 1995. VX was early in 1996. Pretty close to the same time. It would make sense that there was a lot of AT v […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

Dude, that's awesome! 😁

Your board might be one of the oldest ATX boards around, I've seen a VX ATX board mentioned before on Vogons.

ATX came out late in 1995. VX was early in 1996. Pretty close to the same time.
It would make sense that there was a lot of AT vs ATX overlap in '96 even on new models due to manufacturers ensuring backward compatibility with older PSUs.
.
I have P-Pro FX board that is ATX from 1996.
.

I never found a lot of Socket 7 ATX boards in the wild here (the few Socket 7 ATX boards I did find were all TX boards and I think all of them were ASUS), the vast majority that I found was AT (and I mean way over 90% or so). It's different for Super 7 though (slightly more ATX in the wild I think and most AT Super 7 boards tended to be made more for the more lower end of the market spectrum), or at least here in The Netherlands and Slot 1 AT boards were an even more significant minority (only ever saw a few and usually made by pcchips and similar).

It's like other standards, it takes some years before a new standard becomes a standard defacto. ATX didn't start getting mainstream until around the end of 97 or so?

I don't know what my oldest ATX board is, but it's probably one of those ASUS boards I mentioned earlier.

The compatibility you mentioned is correct, many AT boards in that time also had ATX-style powersupply connectors on the mainboard in addition to the standard 2 AT ones (ATX boards never had the AT style connectors as ATX boards typically won't fit in AT cases anyway).