derSammler wrote:

Really? Are you sure you are not just making up a story to complete your illegal copy of Ultima VII, because disk 2 is exactly the one that is missing in most disk image collections you can find out there.

U6.JPG

Maybe he's telling the truth and the 2nd disk just can't be imaged due to some copy protection scheme?

I own Serpent Isle floppies but not Black Isle.. They are available on CD-ROM though so it's not a big issue preservation-wise.

I'm a big fan of the Ultima games and own all versions of U7. There's no copy-protection on the disks. You can even just dump them with WinImage and they will work.

Was cleaning an LG CRD-8400B CD drive (40X) I'd come across - pretty dirty inside and out - but now it works perfectly, EXCEPT!!! the tray still won't open if there's no disc inside. So far I've

- cleaned any dust/dirt inside and out
- cleaned and checked PCBs
- cleaned optics
- lubed rails and spindles
- tried replacement belt

As far as I can tell it's an issue between the disc spindle bed & retention piece in the roof of the drive case, as if they bind when there's no disc, yet both parts are clean, free moving and undamaged when checked on their own. Other ideas welcome.

Might be the disc spindle that needs a demagnetization.

derSammler wrote:

I'm a big fan of the Ultima games and own all versions of U7. There's no copy-protection on the disks. You can even just dump them with WinImage and they will work.

Well, there goes that theory. 😎

derSammler wrote:

Really? Are you sure you are not just making up a story trying to complete your illegal copy of Ultima VII? Because disk 2 is exactly the one that is missing in most disk image collections you can find out there:

U6.JPG

But of couse you own the original game, and of couse its second disk refuses to dump correctly. What a coincidence...

You know, I’m new to the forum and trying to make conversation. I didn’t expect the very first reply I got would be from a jerk. I figured it’d at least take a week.

JudgeMonroe wrote:

You know, I’m new to the forum and trying to make conversation. I didn’t expect the very first reply I got would be from a jerk. I figured it’d at least take a week.

Time keeps on slipping. What's odd is, that kind of unwarranted snark is less common on certain anonymous imageboards, but classic computing typically occupies one thread on an already slow board on such sites. Speaking of useless comments on reputable sites, I'm having anti-fun reading through the comments from Microsoft's employees when people ask for help with obscure, but not unsolvable issues. I was hunting down the location in the Windows 95 registry where the online and offline icons for a mapped network drive are set, and found a thread with a similar question from 2009. The OP stated that she knew how to change the icons for specific drive letters, and even provided the whole registry path to prove this, and stated that she wanted to change both states' icons for a drive, to indicate whether it was online or offline. All of the responses ignored the painstaking details she had entered, and just told her to make a shortcut and change its icon. This is like telling somebody to make cereal when they're asking for a pancake recipe after listing the ingredients they have available.

exasperated_Chinese_man.jpg

Wanted to test a program in Win3.1 which I haven't been using at all for a while. So I did a fresh install onto the D: partition on my 486. Funny seeing it start up in 2 seconds... but the sound drivers, holy crud! I don't remember it being this difficult to make an SB16 work in Win3.1! I have the exact files preserved from twenty years ago when I actually used Win3.1, but adding the driver from control panel failed. Running winsetup failed. Manually editing system.ini failed. Trying to start from scratch with the installer from the driver disk also failed, because it says I'm running from win95. Had to give up for now.

JudgeMonroe wrote:

You know, I’m new to the forum and trying to make conversation. I didn’t expect the very first reply I got would be from a jerk. I figured it’d at least take a week

Peeps here are hyper sensitive to piracy imagined or real, and derSammler is better than everyone else regardless of how long they’ve been a member.

This is generally a helpful community though so give us another chance!

badmojo wrote:

JudgeMonroe wrote:

You know, I’m new to the forum and trying to make conversation. I didn’t expect the very first reply I got would be from a jerk. I figured it’d at least take a week

Peeps here are hyper sensitive to piracy imagined or real, and derSammler is better than everyone else regardless of how long they’ve been a member.

This is generally a helpful community though so give us another chance!

I really don't want to derail this thread with some meta bickering over the self-appointed marshals of the Software Protection Agency. I'll take your word that he's "better than everyone else," because I'll never know. What I do know is that after 30 years of talking to people online, you have to believe them when they tell you who they are, and these types of boards have Ignore lists for a reason.

Anyway, today I got up to some interesting retro activities with an old Gateway 2000 P5-90 but I may start a new thread about that.

edit: I should say in followup to my previous post in this thread, I put my 5.25" drive back into that PC and it seems to work fine, so I'm not sure why did doesn't work with the Kryoflux. It's one of those combo drives and the KF calibrates both drives to 83 tracks but only really works with the 3.5" (drive0) drive. The 5.25" (drive1) it won't spin and always reports "disk not inserted". This may require some more effort if I can't get a standalone 5.25" to work with.

There we go, this should do it for 4-bit Windows 95 icons. Hopefully I won't need a readme as long as this one ever again, but I'm at a loss for what to do next.

In action:

JudgeMonroe wrote:

My Kryoflux came yesterday, and my goal was to start archiving all my 5.25" disks, but it turns out I don't have a working 5.25" drive so I pulled a couple of Ultimas off the shelf to dump their 3.5" disks instead.

After a lot of trial and error I figured out a good workflow and got all the Serpent Isle disks dumped, but the Ultima VII disk 2 (3.5"-1.44MB) is giving me fits. Even though I have a set of "Good" tracks dumped from it the installer still fails. The installer, I think, concats archive segments from the first three disks and then unzips them, so I don't know 100% that it's Disk 2 with the problem, I just assume it because I had no bad sectors dumping disks 1 and 3.

Irritating. Even though I have multiple copies of this game (GOG, at least) I have a need for a complete set of working floppy dumps.

Can you take a picture of disk #2? Sometimes floppy disks can get horribly bad physically (I've had disks getting its magnetic substrate peeled by the reading head in the past just because of the disk being bad. This happened to me several times with different disks and drive. And of course all drive read other disks fine). Sometimes cleaning the disk gently with alcohol can help with bad sectors.

Deksor wrote:

Can you take a picture of disk #2? Sometimes floppy disks can get horribly bad physically (I've had disks getting its magnetic substrate peeled by the reading head in the past just because of the disk being bad. This happened to me several times with different disks and drive. And of course all drive read other disks fine). Sometimes cleaning the disk gently with alcohol can help with bad sectors.

A picture of the disk? Which part? I did clean this (and other problematic) disks with alcohol and thought it helped on some tracks but basically all the tracks from 71.1 to 79.1 ended up giving me bad sectors that even excessive reading wasn't able to push through...until it did, but like I mentioned I have a set of tracks for which Kryoflux gives the old "MFM OK" but the resulting image does not work in practice, so I know KF gave me a false positive on at least one of those reads.

Installed my Voodoo 3 PCI into my socket 478 machine. I already have a FX Quadro 2000 installed on this computer, and I had hoped that the voodoo 3 would just wake up every time glide game was launched. Didn't work out that way... But I can switch the graphics in my motherboard bios, which in a way works better! Windows 98 doesn't seem to mind having two display drivers installed, and will just load the appropriate driver it seems at startup.

Played some Unreal and and Quake II for a bit. I hadn't realized how different 3dfx looks compared to nvidia, even in quake II when both are running in opengl. The 3dfx texture filtering is a lot more aggressive, and the colors are a lot brighter. I also noticed that particle and lighting effects were more vibrant and saturated. Overall I am digging it. The Voodoo 3 just feels more right in these older games somehow 🤣

Doesn't win98 go through a whole hardware detection routine when it detects the primary display has changed and do driver installs and everything? I tried the bios switch trick once but gave up as it was too much of a pain.

^^ nice! I've got a 478 board with a universal AGP slot waiting, and a spare Voodoo3... I've been meaning to make a balls-out V3 system for ages but haven't gotten around to it yet.

This evening I was browsing on Ebay for interesting thin clients to mess around with, and then remembered I had this CLI ST5500X sitting in the back of a closet:

It has a 1GHz VIA Eden CPU (single-core, sadly), 1GB DDR2, and S3 UniChrome Pro II graphics w/32MB. Not too bad...

I dug it out and decided to install Windows 2000 for no real reason. The only disc I had ready turned out to be Advance Server, so that's what went on. 😜 It was a bit of a squeeze getting that onto the factory 1GB IDE DOM, but it worked out OK; ended up with ~320MB free even with DX9.0c installed and all the drivers. Since it has a gig of RAM it doesn't need much of a swap file with Win2K, which helps. I stuck in a freshly formatted 8GB USB stick for drive D:. Overall it seems to run pretty well, except for glacially slow file I/O to the USB stick.

I'm running a bunch of benchmarks on it right now, because of course I am. Results are what you'd expect - somewhere between my K6-2/500 and Athlon XP 1700+/S3 ProSavage8. It outpaces the Athlon in some stuff due to the newer video chip & system architecture, but the CPU is clearly slower. I saw a few rendering glitches with early OpenGL titles (i.e. GLExcess) but the DirectX stuff I've tried so far goes fine.

This is the first VIA CPU I've added to my benchmarking megasheet. I wasn't expecting much but it's actually not too bad! Seems like it would make a decent tiny box for Win98 (& looks like drivers are available) but 2K runs well enough too.

Edit: it turns out it's pretty decent running integer & SSE1/2 operations, but the conventional FPU sucks, giving pretty wildly inconsistent results. Here's ScienceMark's SGEMM for example:

SSE1: 1036.88 MFLOPS
C x87: 170.24

...on the Athlon those numbers are 2388 for SSE & 1134 for x87 (and 3064 MFLOPS using 3DNow. 😉 )

SuperPi on the Eden is barely faster than the K6-2.

Edit 2: L0L, turns out Cinebench 11.5 runs fine on Win2K SP4 & is rendering away. I'm expecting it to take at least an hour if not more, so I'm going to bed. 😜 Results in the morning. Now I really want an Eden X4 to bench.

> nice! I've got a 478 board with a universal AGP slot waiting, and a spare Voodoo3

Errr....be careful.....s478's idea of universal AGP might not be the same as socket 7's.

kolderman wrote:

Errr....be careful.....s478's idea of universal AGP might not be the same as socket 7's.

It's an SIS645 board (ASUS P4S333) with a "known compatible" 3.3V AGP slot.

JudgeMonroe wrote:

Deksor wrote:

Can you take a picture of disk #2? Sometimes floppy disks can get horribly bad physically (I've had disks getting its magnetic substrate peeled by the reading head in the past just because of the disk being bad. This happened to me several times with different disks and drive. And of course all drive read other disks fine). Sometimes cleaning the disk gently with alcohol can help with bad sectors.

A picture of the disk? Which part? I did clean this (and other problematic) disks with alcohol and thought it helped on some tracks but basically all the tracks from 71.1 to 79.1 ended up giving me bad sectors that even excessive reading wasn't able to push through...until it did, but like I mentioned I have a set of tracks for which Kryoflux gives the old "MFM OK" but the resulting image does not work in practice, so I know KF gave me a false positive on at least one of those reads.

Thé magnetic disk inside. Well since you cleaned it, I think this SOL ... Unless maybe you can image that disk in "raw" format with you kyroflux and then manually restore the bytes of the dead secctors but it's probably going to take a lot of time ...

kolderman wrote:

Doesn't win98 go through a whole hardware detection routine when it detects the primary display has changed and do driver installs and everything? I tried the bios switch trick once but gave up as it was too much of a pain.

No, not with my cards. The only bug I have run into so far is I can't seem to adjust the display with my voodoo 3, probably because I installed my nvidia drivers after the voodoo.