henryVK wrote:

Thanks for your answer! I'm glad you're getting such a kick out of this and, for what it's wort, it's always good to document things online for others. I had a great working Highscreen branded 386 laptop that was my uncle's, way back in the early 90's. Stupidly, I gave it away and have regretted it ever sinde.

Oh man, I have so much stuff I now regret throwing/giving away. You simply can't keep everything but it's so hard to know what's going to be of value and what's going to be useless/worthless in a few years.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Probably because of the chipset issue with Windows 98SE. I had USB 2.0 work on a KM266Pro-MLV (DFI) board that has a buggy AGP bus when I enable the fast write and set the size higher than 32MB. Every other board I have (Shuttle AV18V31, FIC K8M-800M, and PCChips M871G v1.5) works with USB 1.1 and 2.0 in Windows 98SE without issues. Like I said, it's a hit and miss with certain chipsets that are used on the USB ports for Windows 98SE that can cause the crashes to occur whereas Windows XP would work regardless. I had a USB 2.0 card that would cause a bit of issues, but, I finally fixed it by installing the correct drivers and the chipset drivers for the motherboard.

I think I had USB going as well, on an Asus A7N266-E as well. Yeah... Must me some sort of ChipSet bug or something. Yet with the use of the onboard sound, I might just throw in a USB 2.0 card. If I am going to use it for a replacement for my Intel d815-eea2 based machine. And then again. I tend not to use USB at all on Win98. I much prefer the old school of PS/2. If my PS/2 mice all dies, then I will begin using USB mice.

Speaking of P3 and Win98. As I have two SocketA boards and one GeodeNX CPU heading my way, then I might switch to SocketA anyway. And only if that Asus board is Geode compatible. Need to find more replacement boards, in order to make sure that I can still run 98 without issues in the future.

Any advice on what Socket-754 boards, that are good and stable Win98 options?

Today I found the hard drive of the Windows 3.1 laptop was infected with the Manzon virus! A nice gift from the previous owner! I was backing it up ready to restore the files to another hard disk when Windows 10 quarantined half the com and exe files. Whoops! Looks like it was infected in 1996 looking at when command.com was modified. I thought the machine was oddly slow(er than it should be).

I was getting ready to wipe it and do a fresh install of DOS and Windows when I stumbled on a small utility written by a now long disappeared programmer for his friend which actually blocks and cleans out the virus. If anyone is interested, it can be found here https://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=1&l= and scroll down to f-manzon.zip.

Here is the document that goes with it. It makes for interesting reading. Sorry about the funky characters. The .doc file used some weird encoding that Word couldn't make out.

1°±²  ÛÛÜ °±²ÛÛÛÛÜ °±²     °±²  ÛÛÛ   ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜ ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÜÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÜ
2±²Û  ÛÛÛ ±²Û  ÛÛÛ ±²Û     ±²Û  ÛÛÛ   ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ     ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ     ÛÛÛ
3²ÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ²ÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ²ÛÛ     ²ÛÛ  ÛÛÛ   ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ     ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ          ÛÛÛ
4ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ     ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ   ÛÛÛÜÜÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ     ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ          ÛÛÛ
5ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ     ßÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ   ²ÛÛßßÛÛÜ ²ÛÛÛÛÛÛ ²ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛÜ     ²ÛÛ
6ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ÛÛÛ          ÛÛÛ   ±²Û  ÛÛÛ ±²Û     ±²Û  ÛÛÛ      ÛÛÛ     ±²Û
7ÛÛÛ  ÛÛÛ ßÛÛÛÛÛÛÛ ßÛÛÛÛÛÛ ÛÛÛÛÛÛÛß   °±²ÛÛÛÛÛ °±²ÛÛÛÛ °±²  ÛÛÛ °±²ÛÛÛÛÛ     °±²
8
9°ßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßß°
10°                   holy beast productions (c)opyright 1995                   °
11°ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ°
12
13
14Information about F-MANZON
15ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
16
17This is just a killer for the MANZON virus released in the PETRA-RM.ZIP
18package. I did this one mostly because I was asked by a close friend.
19Nothing special about it.
20
21Most important of all, you are using this program at your own risc and
22nothing is guranteed. But I have tried it on 1000 samples of the
23virus.
24
25How to use F-MANZON
26ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
27
28Just run F-MANZON.EXE and it will search the current directory and all
29it's subdirectories for the MANZON virus, and clean all infected files
30(you won't be prompted). If you want to search a specific directory or
31drive simply apply the path as parameter to F-MANZON :
32
33Ex.  F-MANZON A:\
34
35If you want to break the program just press CONTROL-BREAK.
36
37How to use F-BLOCK
38ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
39
40Execute F-BLOCK and it will CRC check itself and if it has been changed, 
41it will write a msg on the screen and halt. If the CRC is sucessful
42it will go TSR and if you run an MANZON infected file it will write a dummy
43msg on the screen and block the virus, this means you can run all infected
44files and you won't get infected.
45
46About MANZON
47ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
48
49This is a POLYMORPHIC COM/EXE infector with variable size. No payloads found
50(destructive procedures) but it might sometimes fail to infect files and that
51will make the file invalid. It won't infect files called :
52F-*.*, SC*.*, TB*.*, FV*.*, FI*.*, VI*.*, K-*.*
53
54(now you know why the main files are called F-MANZON.EXE / F-BLOCK.EXE, 
55 because F stands for Fairlight .... not)
56
57Technical Information about F-MANZON
58ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
59
60When you execute F-MANZON it will perform diffrent checks :

61
62þ 32-Bit CheckSum Check
63þ Search Memory for Manzon
64þ Search for the virus in EXE/COM files using algorithms (no scan strings)
65þ Clean all infected files (no prompting)
66
67To break the program just press CNTRL-BRK when ever you want.
68
69Technical Information about F-BLOCK
70ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
71
72þ 32-Bit CheckSum Check
73þ Look for the virus in memory
74þ Go resident
75þ If an infected file is executed it will pop up an uggly msg box on the 
76  screen and after that the virus will be blocked, this means you can run
77  infected files without having to worry about virus infected.
78
79
80Other information
81ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
82I have used my previous virus interface with this scanner/cleaner, I know
83there is many functions that could be added and I would have added them
84if I had any time, but the most important thing is that it can clean the
85viruses. There is no diffrence in last version of my MANZON cleaner except
86that this one includes this funky documentation.
87
88         ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
89          Fairlight Friendly Coders - When your dreams come true!
90                             hOly BeAST 1995
91         ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
92

Wow, funny that modern antiviruses will still detect and remove viruses from 1996!

Spent some time troubleshooting a conflict between the Gravis Ultrasound CD3 card I picked up recently and the network card in my not-so-new-anymore Socket 7 build. The Ultrasound works great otherwise. Tried all kinds of different settings for the base address, IRQs and DMAs, but nothing made a difference. The CD support on the card is disabled via the jumpers (I was getting the exact same conflict when I put my GUS Classic card in that machine also anyway). The network card is a 3Com 3C509B-TPC, and is running on IRQ 10. According to the Win95 Device Manager, the card is running in "ISA mode" (says that in the device name itself). I have a vague recollection that may have been some way that could be changed .. ? but I don't really remember now to be honest. Probably misremembering. Regardless, as it stands, I cannot change the IRQ setting in Device Manager, but could change the IO address range... though no change to that setting would resolve the conflict either.

Finally just decided to try swapping the 3Com 3C509B-TPO (different card, 'O' instead of 'C') that was in my 486 to see if this would make a difference. Sure enough it did, the conflict is gone. According to Device Manager is running in "PnP mode" on IRQ 9 and I can freely change the IRQ setting this time (left it alone though).

I guess I should probably check out the 3Com driver package for these cards ... maybe there's a tool in there for this that I've missed all this time, haha. I like these network cards because they don't require any additional driver for Windows 95/98 usage and under DOS I just use the '3C509.COM' driver with mTCP tools like FTP and SSH2DOS, etc. As a result I never bothered grabbing the actual driver installation files.

Anyway glad the conflict is gone. 😀 Also realized that the Win95 Ultrasound driver basically serves no purpose for me in this build since I have a YMF719 card in it providing Sound Blaster support. The Ultrasound driver for Windows 95 apparently sets up the Ultrasound for Sound Blaster compatibility and conflicts with the YMF719. The DOS 'ULTRINIT' driver is more then adequate for my usage both under plain ol' DOS and also for playing DOS games from within Windows.

Nothing retro the last few days. Been testing a bunch of hardware described as "mostly not working."

Narrator: It was mostly working.

I am happy, just tested a series of socket 7 cpu's:
Rise mP6 - 266: Works
IDT WinChip 2 -266GTA (actually a 233mhz model) works, even on 2.9V instead of 3.3V... 😲

Sadly, both AMD K6 166ALR cpu's have issues.
With one of them inserted there is no reaction, not even on the diagnostic card.
With the other one it gets stuck on 41:0d.. no clue why.

The broken one will be delidded, curious how it looks below, the other one will be tested again on another board.
If it still doesn't work then I will need to find a new one..
Relatively to the other 2 that do work this is rather a minor issue.

Trying to fix my old P133 rig (aka "the tower of pain" because it's troublesome to the point of being painful!) :

the floppy drive got stuck (crap), a few drops of silicone-based lubricant on the motor axis and it's good as new!

The CD drive (à shitty noname 50x cd drive) had trouble to open, I tried to fix it but no dice so I chalked it up as beyond repair and smashed it (in fact it worked but only when disassembled if I dared to reassemble it, it would quit working, this went as far until it stopped working the tray motor started smoking..i really was fuming hence why I smashed it to bits)

Then I got my Vibra16 working, that card gave me a lot of problems.

I am itching to have some PCBs produced. For what, I'm not sure. But I've heard about how cheap and easy it can be these days. And certainly there were times in the past when I thought it would be cool to make a custom PCB for something or other, but without having any familiarity with the process it's hard to know where to begin or how feasible a project might be. So I was checking out some relevant websites and fooling around with KiCad 4.0.7 which works on Windows 2000. For a project I was thinking about a simple cartridge-type board with a ROM socket that could be used to test homebrews. But maybe it would have multiple edge connectors to plug into multiple systems? Then I was browsing an auction site to see what kind of chips were available and said to myself "hey look at the price on these Yamaha FM chips" and ordered a few just for the heck of it.

In other news, I've been wanting to program an EPROM for a while but the darn eraser quit working. I bought another eraser (different type) and that one worked once and then also quit. Then I got some doohicky with UV LEDs in it (something to do with curing nail polish? I forget exactly) and decided to see how long it would take for this thing to erase an EPROM. It had a timer that caused it to shut off automatically after a minute or so. I soldered in a jumper wire to make it stay on. This experiment is currently running.

I went downstairs to look for a screw driver bit and remembered that I have a ROM emulator. Derp. So I could use that to test something in lieu of an EPROM.

I installed Symantec Game Pack on my 486 battlestation today.

Stupidest games I've ever played. BUT I LOVE THEM!

So, as I mentioned here, I picked up an XP era case, so I can finally progress with the Pentium 4 build I wanted I wish I had in 2004, but I was broke. I have almost everything I need. All that's left is a period correct sound card.

The case I got is one made by Mercury. Yesterday night I already installed a NEC IDE DVD drive, 3.5" floppy drive and the mobil rack case and an FSP ATX-350PNF PSU.
The PSU is a bit new, about half the age of the rest of the PC, but it's reliable and 350W for a PC of that era was plenty.

The next to be installed is a Gigabyte P4i65G motherboard with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and 1GB DDR400 RAM, a Sapphire Radeon X800XT graphics card and the 80GB HDD.

The CPU is a Prescott. Originally I wanted a 3.4GHz Northwood with a different motherboard, but after I installed the CPU, the MBO never booted up again (with any compatible CPU) and I didn't have the balls to try the Northwood in this new one without having a spare. It's hard to find a period correct motherboard wich can handle the top CPUs. This Gigabyte however came cheap with the Zalman cooler, the Prescott and 512MB of RAM so basically all I had to do with it is to double the RAM and add new thermal paste to the CPU.

P4i65 isn't made by Gigabyte. It's made by ASRock.

PcBytes wrote:

P4i65 isn't made by Gigabyte. It's made by ASRock.

My mistake. Not that it really matters.

RandomStranger wrote:

So, as I mentioned here, I picked up an XP era case, so I can finally progress with the Pentium 4 build I wanted I wish I had in […]
Show full quote

So, as I mentioned here, I picked up an XP era case, so I can finally progress with the Pentium 4 build I wanted I wish I had in 2004, but I was broke. I have almost everything I need. All that's left is a period correct sound card.

The case I got is one made by Mercury. Yesterday night I already installed a NEC IDE DVD drive, 3.5" floppy drive and the mobil rack case and an FSP ATX-350PNF PSU.
The PSU is a bit new, about half the age of the rest of the PC, but it's reliable and 350W for a PC of that era was plenty.

The next to be installed is a Gigabyte P4i65G motherboard with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and 1GB DDR400 RAM, a Sapphire Radeon X800XT graphics card and the 80GB HDD.

The CPU is a Prescott. Originally I wanted a 3.4GHz Northwood with a different motherboard, but after I installed the CPU, the MBO never booted up again (with any compatible CPU) and I didn't have the balls to try the Northwood in this new one without having a spare. It's hard to find a period correct motherboard wich can handle the top CPUs. This Gigabyte however came cheap with the Zalman cooler, the Prescott and 512MB of RAM so basically all I had to do with it is to double the RAM and add new thermal paste to the CPU.

How many cuts has that case given you?

oeuvre wrote:

How many cuts has that case given you?

Only 2. One on my left thumb the other on my right pinky. But I can cut mylself with anything.

Was clearing out another of my sheds, when I accidentally came across some keyboards that I'd stashed away in there. About a year ago I was desperately searching for an XT compatible keyboard and today I find 2 of them!

These are the pre-clean up pictures:

The top 1 is nothing really special, but I kept it just for the novelty of blue coloured keys. This one is PS/2 and likely came bundled with my Olivetti PCS 11 386SX PC.

It's the bottom 2 keyboards that are of most interest, being XT & AT switchable. The middle Cherry keyboard needs a bit more TLC than just a little cleanup, has a stuck key and the casing is loose.

The Cherry would have been the original keyboard on my old 8088 PC that I had back in the early 1990s.

Man literally everyone finds AT desktop cases these days. Gotta save up my pennies and buy from you guys, I think everyone here threw them out in the 90s.

BUT I have had some awesome hauls lately, to put that salt in context.

On the bench at the moment is a funky Thermaltake case, will probably make someone a nice XP retro machine (I don't like working on this case so I will likely sell/give this one).

It has a proper Intel motherboard:

I thought it might be earlier but it's a G35 / Socket 775 with a Core2Duo, still fine for an XP machine. It's PCIE so plenty of good video cards on the shelf for this one. The two rear exhaust fans were screeching like banshees so I'm cleaning them.

These cases *look* like they'd be easy to maintain but now I'm inside one it's a mess. I will clean up the cable routing a little. It has 4Gb so no upgrades for an XP machine needed. It's Retro, if barely.

But kind of on the vintage side is:

This came out of (actually is still in) a Packard Bell P1. It's the OEM version of the OPL3-based Aztech Sound Galaxy 16 (or 32, same chipset oddly). Apparently doesn't have any of the SB 2.0/16 bugs, should be interesting.

Kind of getting AGP cards lined up to test in the DTK PII from liqmat, latest are a 32Mb TNT2 (had the 16 already) and a Matrox G450 w/ dual VGA. Still waiting for a good deal/find on a Voodoo2. Like everyone else, mine disappeared (or was thrown out) 15-20 years ago in one of my moves.

Found a couple of 92mm fans in really good shape, one for extra cooling for the DTK, one for a Dell R450. 120mm fan *might* fit in the DTK but the R450 is too narrow.

Someone gave me an old Mac Mini with a firmware password problem. Pretty sure it wasn't stolen and it had been properly reset for data security but you couldn't boot to anything but the main HD because of a firmware password that had been lost. No original receipt, couldn't get Apple to reset it. They said they spent a week trying to figure out how to fix it to no avail.

(opens case, sticky note with password on inside)

PTherapist wrote:

[...]
It's the bottom 2 keyboards that are of most interest, being XT & AT switchable. The middle Cherry keyboard needs a bit more TLC than just a little cleanup, has a stuck key and the casing is loose.

The Cherry would have been the original keyboard on my old 8088 PC that I had back in the early 1990s.

Can't quite make out the sticker. That looks like a G80-1000SDG. If so very nice board!

Merovign wrote:

[...] […]
Show full quote

[...]

But kind of on the vintage side is:

Aztech.jpg

This came out of (actually is still in) a Packard Bell P1. It's the OEM version of the OPL3-based Aztech Sound Galaxy 16 (or 32, same chipset oddly). Apparently doesn't have any of the SB 2.0/16 bugs, should be interesting.

[...]

Yep, AZT2320, so 4th gen Aztech SBPro2.0 clone. So simple&bug-free it's almost boring (assuming PnP works OK... which is why I prefere non-PnP 3rd gen). It contains a genuine Yamaha OPL3 too.

The card was known as 'Rocky 2.5' within Packard Bell and was relatively trouble-free last-gen modem/sound combi. Then again, 'relatively' was vs IBM mWave-based cards under Win95, whcih makes anything look trouble-free.

Posted in wrong tread, sorry

Continue "flying" my NF7-S setup. Yesterday I went through the accumulated 9500/9800/X800 pile, today I tried a Thorton 2600+ that's new in my collection and looked up a Barton that can take 11*200 MHz at stock voltage for a test piece. Now I have it (will recycle those that couldn't do it) and decided to slim down my DDR pile to those that can do DDR400/2-3-3-6 at stock voltage. So I'm chain-running memtest86 to divide the heap. It won't be too long until we won't need any more heating in the house so it was high time...