Friday night I watched the Meteoriks, where 8088 MPH won the award for best "That should be impossible on this platform!" demo.

Congrats to the team, it was well deserved!!

After lots of benchmarking and prep work this week on the "Benchmark Your System with Cache Disabled" project, I rewarded myself by closing up my system, setting it up properly, and playing a couple of hours of System Shock. Currently working on Level 6 (Executive).

Writing down HDD-Parameters on these small babies. Using the BIOS-HDD-Detect tool, on a Socket Super 7 mobo.

The converter are just one of those cheap ones from china. (Works fine, no issues at all)

I've got the same CF card one the far right. To this day I've only bought really cheap ones from eBay, they all work fine.

I don't know if it counts as retro but I reinstalled Windows and all of my games. A lot of them were pre-2000 and needed a lot of compatibility help in order to function on modern Windows. Diablo in particular was one of the easier ones to get working. Install, patch up to 1.07, then 1.09, then install an unofficial DirectDraw patch and run it as an administrator and you're golden.

Dallas RTC battery mod: success! BIOS settings are remembered again and the magic smoke did not leave the hardware!

Sweet.... Good job on that RTC

SquallStrife wrote:

Friday night I watched the Meteoriks, where 8088 MPH won the award for best "That should be impossible on this platform!" demo.

Congrats to the team, it was well deserved!!

Shame no one was there to receive it 😉

But, you know, they must have to prioritise ceremonies when there are so many awards to collect. Well done guys!

Today has been all about the fact that it's better to own a few of something and knowing where they are then owning a shitload of something and having no clue where they are.

I managed to tip over a huge pile of old keyboards while searching. On average 4 keys from each keyboard broke loose as in the plastic pin under the keys holding them to the switches broke in half. It's fixable with glue but then it wont be possible to fully disassemble these keys again. I really need to get things better organized.

Now I have also learned how hard it is to remove the broken plastic key "pins" from the switches without the correct tool, I need to get such a tool and a bunch of new keys, glue seems to messy for the better keyboards.

I have fully disassembled a Digital rubber dome keyboard so I could access the "swiches" from beneath and even remove the ones with broken off keys to see if I could push out the broken plastic pins but it was simply impossible without the correct tool, or at least impossible without damaging anything. I'm guessing that with the correct tool removing the remains of the key from the "switch" is easy.

I hate old brittle plastic!

I cleaned a Logitech mouse that was on its way to the trash can.

Was this Oddjob's mouse? What's with the dents?

Spent the afternoon building a box specifically for running OpenGenera (screw paying $5000 for a MacIvory!)

All the peripherals are SCSI and I took a few minutes to make a custom case badge. Also, no measly 32-bit x86 here! That's a 400mhz 64-bit Alpha CPU!
I would love to find out if Tru64 could support ISA SB16 cards. There is OSS but I want to keep my last PCI slot open.

I love those Nakamichi CD changers!

Was playing around with extremely high bit rate audio on an old 450MHz Katmai machine.

I had it play two albums as I did work around the house and in the yard yesterday. One was ripped from DVD-A (5.1 MLP) and converted to 5.1ch, 96/24 FLAC with an average bit rate of 8.1 Mb/s. The other album was from HDTracks (2.0ch, 192/24 FLAC, 5.4 Mb/s). Both were played over LAN from my file server.

The CPU usage was actually very high for audio, especially the 5.1 album. There were no problems with playback.

96KHz 5.1: 74-86%
192KHz Stereo: 22-27%
Regular old MP3 @ 320: 1-4%

This of course prompted me to quickly compare numbers with two faster machines:

Athlon XP 2800+
5.1: 5-8%
Stereo: 2%
Regular old MP3: 0%

Core 2 Duo e7500: 0% across the board.

BTW the Katmai and Athlon XP were running XP-SP3; the C2D was running Win7-64. All of them were using the same newish version of foobar2000 I had on my file server.

While at work made battery recalibration at my Toughbook CF-W4... well crap it shows 100% charged after 26 mins (saw how after 15% it show 100%) and eats all charge in 21 mins 😒

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I love those Nakamichi CD changers!

The two I own give me a lot of grief. when the belt guide isn't slipping on the discs the frame is slightly bent, causing all sorts of weirdness.

Restoring PC Case for my 486 build.. Bless the Magic Eraser!!

A few days ago I wrote that I was rebuilding my capture system, I did not get very far as rebuilding my work space trumped rebuilding the capture system in importance.

Today I spent an hour actully rebuilding the capture system, not just thinking about it.

This is my capture system.

This is how the capture system used to look inside. An Asus V8200 Deluxe Geforce 3 card did S-Video capturing, the CPU was a S939 Athlon X2 4200+, the OS XP-SP3.
The case does not allow for good cable management so I did not even try. Notice that the heatsink is totally clogged with dust and tar, I have now quit smoking again!

This thingy does not fit in the old capture system, it also came without a bracket.

Now it has a bracket.

To be continued.

That's funny, we used the same exact card to get the bracket from 😁

Regarding capturing, you might have to seriously upgrade your machine. Capturing at 1600 x 1200 60 fps my Haswell Pentium Anniversary CPU just handles it at around 70% CPU load.

I think a FX6300 would work well.