Because I find imgur extremely confusing to work with, here are some things I've been working on over the last week:

Played a little bit of Doom on my DECpc 433. I knew this would be the case, but the 486DX33 in it was a little too weak for any decent amount of playability.

Messed around with trying different CPUs. Ended up going as far as an AMD 5x86 133Mhz chip, but ended up putting the original 486DX33 back in for originality reasons 😀

Then I dug out this really oddball luggable system. It's kind of like a Compaq Portable III clone, except it uses regular desktop parts (except the PSU and Gas Plasma display). It originally came with a non functioning 486 board, this system now has a Pentium 166Mhz socket 7, 10GB hard drive, slot loading DVD-ROM drive (simply because slot loading on this is easier to use than a vertically aligned tray...), and so on. Not sure what I'll do with this...

That's a cool portable system. How does the video output get to the plasma display? Wonder if it could be replaced with a colour TFT.

I spent an evening trying to get sound in some Lucasarts games (Loom, Monkey1, DOTT, S&M) but failed. DOTT under DOS 7.1 only produces speech, in Win98 music is there too but I get a horrible hanging note (SB16 Vibra) during the intro. Maybe my machine is too fast (P3 @ 450).

pojo wrote:

I spent an evening trying to get sound in some Lucasarts games (Loom, Monkey1, DOTT, S&M) but failed. DOTT under DOS 7.1 only produces speech, in Win98 music is there too but I get a horrible hanging note (SB16 Vibra) during the intro. Maybe my machine is too fast (P3 @ 450).

Supposedly the latter Vibras (Vibra16c) have DSP v.4.16 which should be free of the hanging note bug. I don't know first-hand because I don't have one of those cards.

pojo wrote:

I spent an evening trying to get sound in some Lucasarts games (Loom, Monkey1, DOTT, S&M) but failed. DOTT under DOS 7.1 only produces speech, in Win98 music is there too but I get a horrible hanging note (SB16 Vibra) during the intro. Maybe my machine is too fast (P3 @ 450).

LucasArts and Sierra adventure games typically have the problems you mention at any speed faster than a slow 486. Try using setmul to disable caches. This gives the most genuine performance of any software-based slowdown program.

clueless1 wrote:

pojo wrote:

I spent an evening trying to get sound in some Lucasarts games (Loom, Monkey1, DOTT, S&M) but failed. DOTT under DOS 7.1 only produces speech, in Win98 music is there too but I get a horrible hanging note (SB16 Vibra) during the intro. Maybe my machine is too fast (P3 @ 450).

LucasArts and Sierra adventure games typically have the problems you mention at any speed faster than a slow 486. Try using setmul to disable caches. This gives the most genuine performance of any software-based slowdown program.

Yup. I get adlib corruption in IJFA with my Socket 7 machine in K6-2 mode.

orinoko wrote:

Because I find imgur extremely confusing to work with

Fixed. Also, see my attempt at explaining: Making clickable embedded images using Imgur image hosting service

I put WinXP on my 2006 iMac dumpster find. These old iMacs make surprisingly good "early XP" gaming systems! The 20" IPS panel runs at 1680x1050 and has an impressive amount of color "pop" and contrast. The built in speakers are by far the best I've heard from an all in one. Nice, rich midrange and great stereo separation when you're sitting in front of it. They actually sound much nicer (and produce more bass) than those cheap 2.0 Logitechs you can get. The machine is also whisper quiet. The fan only really spins up during POST. Even after hours of combined CPU+GPU load the fan runs at a low, barely audible speed.

The video chip is only a Radeon X1600 128MB. After some testing, I've determined that this GPU is right around the speed of a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. Quick 3DMark runs confirm this:

3DMark01: 21280
3DMark03: 6237
3DMark05: 2840
Which is about as fast as 9800 Pro 128MB with a 2.6GHz A64.

The star of the show, however, is the processor. This machine now has a Core Duo T2600 running at 2.16GHz, the second fastest Yonah CPU available. Nice and cool, this stupid fast CPU can, at times, boost the machine's DX7/8 gaming performance to beyond that of an Athlon XP 2800+ with a 6800GT!

So will I use this machine as a dedicated early XP gaming rig? Nope! I've had amazing luck getting most of my XP games to run on my Windows 7 machine. But at least it was a fun experiment.

clueless1 wrote:

LucasArts and Sierra adventure games typically have the problems you mention at any speed faster than a slow 486. Try using setmul to disable caches. This gives the most genuine performance of any software-based slowdown program.

Thanks, I'll try setmul even though disabling L1/L2 cache in BIOS and using throttle.exe gave no progress.

Today I was taking apart the power supply of my Compaq Deskpro machine (Pentium II). I am pretty sure the PSU is dead since the machine worked when I got it for about a week, then one day it would not power on.

The idea is to replace the internals with a new power supply, I don't know what it will be yet. The original is rated about 90W, think it was about 7A on the 5V rail. These machines use a weird 14-pin molex but it seems possible to use ATX PSU of some sort.

Upgrading my Unisys 286. 630mb HDD and VGA.
From 20mb HDD and EGA.

stamasd wrote:

pojo wrote:

I spent an evening trying to get sound in some Lucasarts games (Loom, Monkey1, DOTT, S&M) but failed. DOTT under DOS 7.1 only produces speech, in Win98 music is there too but I get a horrible hanging note (SB16 Vibra) during the intro. Maybe my machine is too fast (P3 @ 450).

Supposedly the latter Vibras (Vibra16c) have DSP v.4.16 which should be free of the hanging note bug. I don't know first-hand because I don't have one of those cards.

Yup, they are.... And some have OPL chip. (my vibra's have it)

brostenen wrote:

Upgrading my Unisys 286. 630mb HDD and VGA.
From 20mb HDD and EGA.

whats the gain from that, except maybe vga games? is there anything that visibly speeds up?

mrau wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Upgrading my Unisys 286. 630mb HDD and VGA.
From 20mb HDD and EGA.

whats the gain from that, except maybe vga games? is there anything that visibly speeds up?

The gain, is not to use an old noisy EGA monitor and the MFM were about to give up.
I have to look into RAM upgrade now, and find out what soundcard I need next.
And finally, I don't need to park the heads anymore, bacause of the selfparking heads in the IDE.
That has allways been something that I forgot. Though the MFM is about to give up, it still works.
Amazingly it has never been changed, it's the original drive, that came with the machine.
(it's my childhood machine, that my parents bought)

Stiletto wrote:

orinoko wrote:

Because I find imgur extremely confusing to work with

Fixed. Also, see my attempt at explaining: Making clickable embedded images using Imgur image hosting service

That is greatly appreciated, Stiletto 😊 That forum posting is going to come in handy!

Give me a 486, and I'll make it purr. Give me an image file, and I fumble with a image hosting website... 🤣

bjt wrote:

That's a cool portable system. How does the video output get to the plasma display? Wonder if it could be replaced with a colour TFT.

When I got it, the system was half gutted. It was being used as a field machine by Telecom (precursor to Telstra). The plasma display connected via a IDC ribbon cable to a little daughter board mounted on the drive chassis, and there was a 26 pin IDC connector on it... Thinking I had nothing to lose in trying, I connected a standard 40 pin IDE cable between that and a VGA card, on the VESA feature plug. Just made sure that pin 1 was lined up correctly, and let the remaining pins run off the side of the plug. I really should take a photo. Anyway, I didn't have a 30cm 26pin IDC cable so I used that instead.

It had so much noise on the picture though, that I thought that it was broken. Tried playing around with some jumpers on the daughter board and so on... not much luck. Then I realised that the closer the cable got to the PSU casing, the better the picture was... so I got some clear packaging tape, some aluminium foil and made a shield for the cable, with one end connected to ground. It worked! And now we have picture 😊

So I guess in summary, as long as the graphics card has a VESA feature connector on it, I can use it in this system, which is nice. I guess you could swap it out with a TFT LCD if you made some major changes to it, but the plasma display is quite quirky as it is. I like quirky 🤣

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PeterLI wrote:

IMO Doom runs fine on a 486DX33.

Yeah, I would have thought so too... however it's not an entirely fast experience, and on first run, Doom had actually resized the play window to be smaller 🤣

For the record, it's got 8MB RAM, 256K of cache, using an onboard VLB S3 86C924. Not entirely bad specs for it, I would have thought.

Retro activity today... hmmm. Let's see.... I totally used a hot glue gun to anchor a case pin on the front of my ancient ATX case after I had super-glued the pin in place first a few days ago. Hopefully, the hot glue will anchor it securely enough for me to take the front panel on and off as I make changes to the inside or whatever. That pin holds the side panel in place along with the rear thumb-screw.

With reservation, I finally disassembled my ABit AN7 nForce2 Barton XP-M system. I wasn't using it, and I needed the case. All the parts got stored away separately. The motherboard is safely (I hope) stored in it's original box.
The AN7 was probably my favorite home built daily-use PC I ever had, and it had been left assembled since it was my main PC several years ago. I had bought the board as never used NOS from eBay, and everything about it's condition confirmed it really was NOS.
Everything in that build just seemed perfectly in sync, it was awesome for my vanilla Morrowind days and daily desktop use back then. Every function of that board worked perfectly and it even had good onboard sound.
It was made obsolete for my usage when H.264 video was adopted by youtube. The system which replaced it, a Phenom2, was obviously faster but has always had little hiccups and things that don't work quite like they should. The AN7 was a dream up until it just got too slow.

Discovered that the case has cutouts for AT style serial/LPT ports and a front support for long expansion cards, so I guess it's an early ATX case that can hold Baby AT boards. I never noticed that before.

In place of the AN7, that case now has an Athlon64 system with an Asus A8N-SLI. Moved my data files to a server so I can use this machine for everyday stuff in place of my Phenom2 machine. It uses much less power. The Phenom2 will just be for games, at least during the summer. The server uses power too but I need it running regardless.

orinoko wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

IMO Doom runs fine on a 486DX33.

Yeah, I would have thought so too... however it's not an entirely fast experience, and on first run, Doom had actually resized the play window to be smaller 🤣

For the record, it's got 8MB RAM, 256K of cache, using an onboard VLB S3 86C924. Not entirely bad specs for it, I would have thought.

At the time I played DOOM+DOOM2 on a 486DX2/66 with an ISA Cirrus Logic card. I thought it was great, but if I played it again today on that system I have no idea what I'd think.

shamino wrote:

At the time I played DOOM+DOOM2 on a 486DX2/66 with an ISA Cirrus Logic card. I thought it was great, but if I played it again today on that system I have no idea what I'd think.

Indeed, my first playthrough was on my original 486DX2/66, Number 9 GXE64 VLB, back in 1998 when I was 12. I could probably still play it that way since I dont actually mind the lag all that much...

OWW Now I wanna build up my original 486 again and play Doom! 🤣

Edit: Fixed quote tag