keenmaster486 wrote:

ISA Ethernet? I have a 3Com 3C509 and it works great.

That could work.

My main goal is finding a card that's A) common and cheap as possible (no more than $20) and B) has good driver support in DOS and WFW3.11. There seems to have been a lot of Ethernet cards from tons of different manufacturers, would this be one of the better ones?

Pretty much all ISA cards will have packet drivers available, but I'd go a little further and recommend something supported by CRYNWR:
http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/00index.html

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I have my drives removable. Either using CF or SD adapters, or SATA drives with SATA to IDE bridges. Drive bay devices are plentiful. Shut down the PC, pull out the drive, put it in a card reader and load games. Especially once you use larger drives, like 80 GB with lots of DOS games, everything else is just too slow.

Hey Phil, do you have any issues with the SD to IDE adapters that you use? I have heard issues with reliability in the past, but nothing really solid. Also, do you have any specific kind that you recommend from your experience? The adapters in your videos look to be like the cheap generic stuff from Hong Kong on ebay.com? How do they compare, speed wise, to a normal CF card?

ElementalChaos wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

ISA Ethernet? I have a 3Com 3C509 and it works great.

That could work.

My main goal is finding a card that's A) common and cheap as possible (no more than $20) and B) has good driver support in DOS and WFW3.11. There seems to have been a lot of Ethernet cards from tons of different manufacturers, would this be one of the better ones?

3C509's are dirt cheap, extremely stable, and very widely supported. I second (or third?) the vote for one of them. I think I have probably a dozen of them sitting in a box somewhere just for such an occasion.

rkrenicki wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I have my drives removable. Either using CF or SD adapters, or SATA drives with SATA to IDE bridges. Drive bay devices are plentiful. Shut down the PC, pull out the drive, put it in a card reader and load games. Especially once you use larger drives, like 80 GB with lots of DOS games, everything else is just too slow.

Hey Phil, do you have any issues with the SD to IDE adapters that you use? I have heard issues with reliability in the past, but nothing really solid. Also, do you have any specific kind that you recommend from your experience? The adapters in your videos look to be like the cheap generic stuff from Hong Kong on ebay.com? How do they compare, speed wise, to a normal CF card?

I never use them long enough to be able to give a verdict on reliability. My projects are always quite brief. So yea, best to do your own research and tests, but for me they work great 😀

ElementalChaos wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

ISA Ethernet? I have a 3Com 3C509 and it works great.

That could work.

My main goal is finding a card that's A) common and cheap as possible (no more than $20) and B) has good driver support in DOS and WFW3.11. There seems to have been a lot of Ethernet cards from tons of different manufacturers, would this be one of the better ones?

I have to agree that the 3C509 is your best bet. It's cheep and gets the job done. I got mine working in WFW3.11.

3com and Intel are my go to cards in ISA and PCI flavors. They tend to simply work and actually have drivers.

ElementalChaos wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

ISA Ethernet? I have a 3Com 3C509 and it works great.

That could work.

My main goal is finding a card that's A) common and cheap as possible (no more than $20) and B) has good driver support in DOS and WFW3.11. There seems to have been a lot of Ethernet cards from tons of different manufacturers, would this be one of the better ones?

The 16-bit-ISA 3c509B (Etherlink-III) comes with a built in driver built in to the windows 3.11 networking that ships with the OS/software from microsoft. No additional software needed. And you can run a DOS utility to re-configure the address and IRQ's, then go in to windows 3.11 and it will auto-detect it (I think...) and then you're off and running. 3com dos software to configure it can even tell you if there's conflicting devices or not. It's really a slick, easy setup and they can be had for $6 - $10 on ebay used now.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

rkrenicki wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I have my drives removable. Either using CF or SD adapters, or SATA drives with SATA to IDE bridges. Drive bay devices are plentiful. Shut down the PC, pull out the drive, put it in a card reader and load games. Especially once you use larger drives, like 80 GB with lots of DOS games, everything else is just too slow.

Hey Phil, do you have any issues with the SD to IDE adapters that you use? I have heard issues with reliability in the past, but nothing really solid. Also, do you have any specific kind that you recommend from your experience? The adapters in your videos look to be like the cheap generic stuff from Hong Kong on ebay.com? How do they compare, speed wise, to a normal CF card?

I never use them long enough to be able to give a verdict on reliability. My projects are always quite brief. So yea, best to do your own research and tests, but for me they work great 😀

Have you considered using / reviewing one of those?
http://www.addonics.com/products/aeudmacf.php

Unlike the dumb IDE/CF adapters, they're designed to allow hotswap. Overall I would believe they are a more practical solution than having the adapter inside an HDD enclosure inside a rack. Easier to swap cards. They're intelligent enough to always show up in the BIOS even without a card inserted, not to mess up the BIOS boot order, but also to give the hand to the following hard drives to boot when no card is inserted, instead of giving an error message about no disc or no bootable partition.

I was quite impressed by the setup when I had one, but I had to send back as it was behaving erratically when a CDROM was on the same data cable under modern OSes. Hopefully the replacement they are sending will work fine.

Nice, not many front bay CF devices available.

I got the creator of Apple Disk Server to update his website with some new disk images, and in the process, he revamped the interface and encoding system to make them more reliable! (I just emailed asking him to add a couple more disk images, seeing as the site hadn't been updated for a few years; and he sent me a multi-paragraph reply about how it was enough to bump him in to doing a long-overdue update to the site anyway.)

jarreboum wrote:

Have you considered using / reviewing one of those? http://www.addonics.com/products/aeudmacf.php […]
Show full quote

Have you considered using / reviewing one of those?
http://www.addonics.com/products/aeudmacf.php

Unlike the dumb IDE/CF adapters, they're designed to allow hotswap. Overall I would believe they are a more practical solution than having the adapter inside an HDD enclosure inside a rack. Easier to swap cards. They're intelligent enough to always show up in the BIOS even without a card inserted, not to mess up the BIOS boot order, but also to give the hand to the following hard drives to boot when no card is inserted, instead of giving an error message about no disc or no bootable partition.

I was quite impressed by the setup when I had one, but I had to send back as it was behaving erratically when a CDROM was on the same data cable under modern OSes. Hopefully the replacement they are sending will work fine.

I bought a Startech-branded front-facing adapter from Amazon about a year ago. It was about $20. I discussed it in this post: Old Hard Drives

Pin modded a SPC370 slotket to accommodate for Tualatin CPU:s. Might be easier to do parts of the mod on the the CPU instead, but slotkets are kind of cheap, and doing it all on the slotket makes future CPU swapping easier, as you just have to fit the new CPU without insulating any pins on it.

Removed the sliding part of the socket, and desoldered the AN3, AJ3 and AK4 pins.

Soldered a piece of wire, thin enough to go through the pin holes in the PCB, to one of the pins, and slid its insulation over the pin base. It would of course have been easier to just snip the pin base and solder the wire to what was left of it, but keeping it gives additional strength when putting the pin back in place and fixing it to the PCB.

Slid the wire through the hole, and pushed the pin back in position. Shortened the wire down, and...

...managed to break it when stripping it. Had to redo the whole goddamn thing with a new piece of wire. Connected the wire to AN11, fixed the pin with a small dab of hot glue, and taped down the wire to the PCB. Tested the connection and checked for earth faults/shorts with the multimeter, all good. Put the socket back together again.

Since the BH6 board I'm planning to use the slotket with gives the option to set the right voltage from its soft menu, I skipped the voltage part of the mod for now. Will hold on with testing for a while, in case someone here notices some screwup I did 😁

If it won't work, the whole mod is reversible, since I didn't trim the AK4 pin down, or widened any pin holes 😀

I've found for 10 euro a quite old and yellowed pc case.Also rusty!
Looking in the back there was the old DIN keyboard connector, so i was sure it was a pentium or a 486.
Well, the motherboard was a tx chipset Asus, but instead of a pentium mmx i did find an AMD K6II 350... well wow! A bit of a letdown for the missing pentium, but i've never tried a k6!
Sure Amd was very versatile back then,nice compatibility with that older card! (Very generous Asus mobo too,ATX and AT power inputs , dimms and simms)
I did also find a nice Matrox Millennium inside,and my first als100 sound card.
I did find many, MANY cat hair. So today i:

1.Cleaned up with compressed air all components and case.
2.cleared from rust the case and also the CD drives and floppy.(still working tho!)
3.applied Hair decolorant to yellowed plastic and exposed 'em to the sun (will have to reapply it tomorrow,if it's sunny. I'm getting good results)
4.Cleaned ATX power connector with contact cleaner,had to do it because at first the PSU or mobo seemed dead.
5.Changed the rusty reset microswitch with a new one.
6.Changed heatsink with a bigger one, taken from a celeron. Also applied new thermal paste.

The system works fine!
After the cosmetic plastic case whitening, ill plan to put in a voodoo 2 and compare it to a pentium 2 with voodoo banshee

Few days ago I scored free Socket 7 board, so finally today I got the time to test it.

When I got my hands on it I just looked at it and thought Yeah, very, very crappy Socket 7 board with very dirty and sticky golden-plated CPU, so maybe my first Cyrix processor? Yeah!
So I grabbed it. But I didn't expect it to be this. I did know that there were many CPU makers back in the day, I heared about quite a few of them, but I haven't heard about ST X86 company before. Yeah, it is totally possible that this is Cyrix, but I am so dumb that I don't know it. 😁

Before first powerup I remembered that I need to inspect the board quite thoroughly, because it is not the first board from this particular place and every single one had messed chips. And sure, this did too. Somebody took out the BIOS chip and crudely jammed it back, so half of the pins were bent and misaligned, so I had to take it out and straight it up back again. When I thought it was good enough I stuck SDRAM stick in there, but the socket for that is very tight and crude. Yes, it was correct RAM I tried to put there, but my thought is it was so new technology back in the day (1996/7) so it is just not perfect. It sounds like metal cracking when you insert it and you need quite a force to do it and it retracting barely works. But yay, a socket 7 board?
When I finally powered it up, as every board I test it was a little bit stubborn and didn't want to post, but after few tries I convinced it it should wor. About testing and my observations, it is quite finicky, I had to reseat everything about three times until it started to behave. But right after that it blew my mind off. This board was not powered since late 2006, and when I entered BIOS settings it looked like this.

Yeah, you see right, only TEN MINUTES AHEAD! (That one hour is daylight savings.) It just blew my mind off! Ten years with half-inserted BIOS chip and only ten minutes ahead!
So I tried booting from floppy, worked flawlessly, tried booting HDD with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, also perfect. But after ten minutes of testing, quite big passive heatsink got very hot, at the fact so much it was barely possible to keep a hand on it. So it needs fan, but since that board doesn't have FAN plug, it is quite hard to find good fan with MOLEX plug.

After that I decided I need to sort through my stash of PSUs (about 30 of them) and look what caps I need to order so I can make them working again. That was way more boring 😁

krivulak wrote:

.....
So I tried booting from floppy, worked flawlessly, tried booting HDD with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, also perfect. But after ten minutes of testing, quite big passive heatsink got very hot, at the fact so much it was barely possible to keep a hand on it. So it needs fan, but since that board doesn't have FAN plug, it is quite hard to find good fan with MOLEX plug.....

Most PC Hobbyists should be able to rig up a fan. Even temporarily for test systems. Just cut the leads off, strip em and shove em in the yellow and black leads for a molex plug, I've done this many times. 😁

That's no brainer, actually I have few rigged fans, but I did that to 15 cm fans and they are quite too large to put on CPU 😁
I am looking for something a little looking-like-original, because I am that type of PC hobbyist 😁

The board isn't one of the best, but I really like the CPU! It's a Cyrix alright. Take good care of it! 😀

krivulak wrote:

Few days ago I scored free Socket 7 board, so finally today I got the time to test it.

When I got my hands on it I just looked at it and thought Yeah, very, very crappy Socket 7 board with very dirty and sticky golden-plated CPU, so maybe my first Cyrix processor? Yeah!
So I grabbed it. But I didn't expect it to be this. I did know that there were many CPU makers back in the day, I heared about quite a few of them, but I haven't heard about ST X86 company before. Yeah, it is totally possible that this is Cyrix, but I am so dumb that I don't know it. 😁

All of ST's x86 chips are Cyrix clones and can be treated as the same.
IBM and TI also made Cyrix clone CPUs (IBM also made/used Intel 386 and 486 dies, as well as having some of their own which are similar to Cyrix chips with added MSRs).

There are ways in software to test minor differences in some clone chips, but I believe ST to use or reproduce actual Cyrix dies. Cyrix 6x86 family chips are well know for overheating if they don't have active cooling.

Wow. That is almost exactly the setup I had back in 1997, although my CPU was branded Cyrix only, no ST or IBM. But most importantly, that board has the mythic "VXPro" chipset, a common sight for buyers on a budget at the time (like myself). The board is probably PCChips or one of its aliases, I remember when I bought it the manual cover just stated "Mainboard", as if they had tried really hard to make it as generic as possible! 😁

In any case, despite its dubious fame it worked very well for me while I used it. Now that I think of it, I don't even know what I did with that board and the CPU! Maybe it's still somewhere in my house...