Today I started packing up all my kit ready for a house move. I'm so glad I sold a lot of it off but I still seemed to have loads to pack up! I didn't realise I had so many cards. Not to mention Dreamcast and PS2 stuff.

I might start thinking of a longer term storage plan once I've moved.

I played around some more with my G4 MDD. Hooked up to the network, got Leopard up to date, and did some browsing around with the latest version of TenFourFox. What a painful, painful experience. The G4 hasn't aged well at all. Even with two of them cranking away at 1.25GHz, the modern internet is just unbearably slow. It's a mini furnace, too. I haven't seen this kind of room heating performance from a computer since I had my s939 Opteron 185 @ 3.13GHz. That Opteron was many times faster though.

I also did some more PowerPC gaming: Quake 4 and UT2004. Even with a 7800GS AGP, the gaming performance just isn't there. As with Doom 3, UT2004 runs slower on the dual G4 @ 1.25 than it does on my single PIII-S at 1.63GHz.

So I'm not sure if the G4's FPU isn't up to snuff, or if Leopard is simply too much OS for it (WinXP on the PIII-S is much snappier). I'm currently downloading Tiger, which has far lower system requirements.

Softmodded my Original Xbox using Splinter Cell and copying the saves from the Xbox HD Maker DVD I made with success. I now need to copy the game saves and ripper music to my main desktop so I can copy them to the 480GB SSD I made for the Original Xbox and purchase an adapter for it as the one I have broke on me.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

[...]did some browsing around with the latest version of TenFourFox. What a painful, painful experience. The G4 hasn't aged well at all. Even with two of them cranking away at 1.25GHz, the modern internet is just unbearably slow. It's a mini furnace, too[...]

I also did some more PowerPC gaming[...]the gaming performance just isn't there[...]

Yeah, it's kinda sad to mess with PowerPC machines and not be able to see the hype even compared to its comtemporaries. I can still browse the internet okay on a Pentium 4 -- it's not the quickest experience ever by anyone's imagination, but it blows even a dual-G4 machine out of the water. And makes less heat to boot! I think you're on the right track though by fetching a copy of Tiger for it -- Leopard was even considered slow for the time on a lot of G5 systems if I'm remembering correctly. Meanwhile Tiger ran acceptably on my 800MHz iBook G4 with only 256MB of RAM.

For my part today I sat down and played some music over the network on the Jaz cartridge install of Windows ME. So, 98SE with foobar2000 could play FLACs over the network without stuttering on Al-Jalima -- ME can barely play VBR MP3s over the network in WinAMP 2.95. It'll still error out sometimes. I'm not sure what's gone so horrifically wrong with ME's SMB stack, but I keep losing connection to my server when 98SE would be just fine.

Tested some cards from this
Bought these (retro) hardware today
lot and many are running. The nice CHIPS F82C451A VGA card on the top was missing some ICs but I rembered I have a very similar card that was also not running...still need to repair the crystals
(bottom).

I transferred the DRAMs of the 2nd bank and made a copy of the ROMs. Now the 1st card is running fine with these components. Attach the ROMs if somebody needs...

Played around with NetDrive today, a Novell rebadge of WebDrive. I wanted to see how well it works on Win95 for my current project, so I can have a mapped Network Drive of my local FTP containing my software, drivers, magazine, music, etc collection. I was testing this route as I'm not the biggest fan of all the hoops you have to jump through otherwise to share from Windows 10.

Thankfully, it seems to work swimmingly -- at least inside one of the VMs I use for quick software testing! Some pictures attached below.

We can see the FTP attached as drive X:

Can easily browse as I'd expect from any network drive.

And one of my biggest concerns were put to rest - it handles errors gracefully. I switched off the FTP service and tried to access folders and files and nothing crashes, and there was no BSOD.

Looking like a pretty solid solution with no fuss if it holds up this well long term with actual use.

replaced the rubber dome in an IBM Model M2 (Part No. 73G4614) keyboard with buckling springs that I had removed from a dead Model M. Luckily, the keycaps on this M2 were this kind and not this. All the keys function without problems and no more squishy keyboard 😀

Added some ports to my Amiga 600. 😊

bjwil1991 wrote:

Softmodded my Original Xbox using Splinter Cell and copying the saves from the Xbox HD Maker DVD I made with success. I now need to copy the game saves and ripper music to my main desktop so I can copy them to the 480GB SSD I made for the Original Xbox and purchase an adapter for it as the one I have broke on me.

Oh, the original Xbox, my favorite console since the SNES 😀 Especially back then, it was so awesome with XBMC. No way you could buy a comparable small form factor HTPC at that price point, and nothing used to beat it as an emulation box, was so nice to be able to do everything with the controller instead of fiddling around with mouse and keyboard to launch games. Also, the KotOR games, that's really how they're meant to be played 😀

Do you know what hardware revision yours is? If 1.5 or lower, you should consider doing a "TSOP flash". It's a way more robust method to load a hacked bios than a softmod, even more so when you're planning to swap drives. Also, you won't be limited to lockable drives anymore. Since you got your box softmodded already, you're more than halfway there. What's left to do is basically to bridge a couple of points on the mobo to enable writing to the BIOS TSOP, edit a BIOS image to your liking with EVTool/BIOSTool, and flash it. The EvoX dashboard got a reliable flasher built in, that's what I always used back in the day.

If it's 1.4 or lower, you could also look into doing a VGA mod, and flash a VGA BIOS. I'm using the X2_5035_VGA_67 BIOS, but there are other alternatives too.

If it's 1.1 or 1.0, the BIOS TSOP is 1024kB, which is four times a normal BIOS image's size. There are multi bios mods which lets you split the space in two or even four parts, that can be selected with a switch. Great if you want to switch between a VGA BIOS and a regular one, or if you simply want a backup when hacking around 😀 Done the two part split mod to my boxes, since some BIOS images (for instance the VGA one I'm using) are 512kB.

Since you're talking about installing an SSD in your box, be aware that it might fail POST with too fast storage devices. The BIOS can be edited to insert a delay to mitigate that if I remember it right.

Also, might be worth mentioning that it looks like the cheap SATA-IDE adapter I'm using in one of my Xboxes won't play nice with SATA 3.0 devices, tried a few of them before giving up, and installing a 500GB SATA 1.0 drive, that's been working perfectly since.

One more thing, earlier revisions uses an aerogel cap as RTC battery. Sooner or later it will burst, it's just a question of time. Just remove it, there's no need to find a replacement, the box will do fine without the RTC.

x0zm_ wrote:

Played around with NetDrive today, a Novell rebadge of WebDrive. I wanted to see how well it works on Win95 for my current project, so I can have a mapped Network Drive of my local FTP containing my software, drivers, magazine, music, etc collection. I was testing this route as I'm not the biggest fan of all the hoops you have to jump through otherwise to share from Windows 10.

Very interesting as I have the same issue with my retro PCs and Windows 10 share! Would you be interested in making a quick guide in how to set this up? Is Netdrive freeware now?

One of the other benefits I can see is that you can access the same FTP with mTCP in DOS

Netdrive is subscription-based, but a one-time, single user purchase is an option for a hundred AmeriCo brand FunBux™. Filezilla has a server option (and it's free), but I've never used it. I just use the client version for the usual FTP stuff.

Mister Xiado wrote:

Netdrive is subscription-based, but a one-time, single user purchase is an option for a hundred AmeriCo brand FunBux™.

I see that for the current version that supports Windows 10, but the legacy WIndows 95 version may be different? I can't even find such an old version on their website. According to Wiki the Novell version is discontinued https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetDrive

EDIT: The client version was free from Novell, Win9x version available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20040224180123/ht … gi?/2965552.htm

kaputnik wrote:

Oh, the original Xbox, my favorite console since the SNES :) Especially back then, it was so awesome with XBMC. No way you could […]
Show full quote

bjwil1991 wrote:

Softmodded my Original Xbox using Splinter Cell and copying the saves from the Xbox HD Maker DVD I made with success. I now need to copy the game saves and ripper music to my main desktop so I can copy them to the 480GB SSD I made for the Original Xbox and purchase an adapter for it as the one I have broke on me.

Oh, the original Xbox, my favorite console since the SNES 😀 Especially back then, it was so awesome with XBMC. No way you could buy a comparable small form factor HTPC at that price point, and nothing used to beat it as an emulation box, was so nice to be able to do everything with the controller instead of fiddling around with mouse and keyboard to launch games. Also, the KotOR games, that's really how they're meant to be played 😀

Do you know what hardware revision yours is? If 1.5 or lower, you should consider doing a "TSOP flash". It's a way more robust method to load a hacked bios than a softmod, even more so when you're planning to swap drives. Also, you won't be limited to lockable drives anymore. Since you got your box softmodded already, you're more than halfway there. What's left to do is basically to bridge a couple of points on the mobo to enable writing to the BIOS TSOP, edit a BIOS image to your liking with EVTool/BIOSTool, and flash it. The EvoX dashboard got a reliable flasher built in, that's what I always used back in the day.

If it's 1.4 or lower, you could also look into doing a VGA mod, and flash a VGA BIOS. I'm using the X2_5035_VGA_67 BIOS, but there are other alternatives too.

If it's 1.1 or 1.0, the BIOS TSOP is 1024kB, which is four times a normal BIOS image's size. There are multi bios mods which lets you split the space in two or even four parts, that can be selected with a switch. Great if you want to switch between a VGA BIOS and a regular one, or if you simply want a backup when hacking around 😀 Done the two part split mod to my boxes, since some BIOS images (for instance the VGA one I'm using) are 512kB.

Since you're talking about installing an SSD in your box, be aware that it might fail POST with too fast storage devices. The BIOS can be edited to insert a delay to mitigate that if I remember it right.

Also, might be worth mentioning that it looks like the cheap SATA-IDE adapter I'm using in one of my Xboxes won't play nice with SATA 3.0 devices, tried a few of them before giving up, and installing a 500GB SATA 1.0 drive, that's been working perfectly since.

One more thing, earlier revisions uses an aerogel cap as RTC battery. Sooner or later it will burst, it's just a question of time. Just remove it, there's no need to find a replacement, the box will do fine without the RTC.

It's the 1.6 revision. Forgot to post that on there.

bjwil1991 wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

Oh, the original Xbox, my favorite console since the SNES :) Especially back then, it was so awesome with XBMC. No way you could […]
Show full quote

bjwil1991 wrote:

Softmodded my Original Xbox using Splinter Cell and copying the saves from the Xbox HD Maker DVD I made with success. I now need to copy the game saves and ripper music to my main desktop so I can copy them to the 480GB SSD I made for the Original Xbox and purchase an adapter for it as the one I have broke on me.

Oh, the original Xbox, my favorite console since the SNES 😀 Especially back then, it was so awesome with XBMC. No way you could buy a comparable small form factor HTPC at that price point, and nothing used to beat it as an emulation box, was so nice to be able to do everything with the controller instead of fiddling around with mouse and keyboard to launch games. Also, the KotOR games, that's really how they're meant to be played 😀

Do you know what hardware revision yours is? If 1.5 or lower, you should consider doing a "TSOP flash". It's a way more robust method to load a hacked bios than a softmod, even more so when you're planning to swap drives. Also, you won't be limited to lockable drives anymore. Since you got your box softmodded already, you're more than halfway there. What's left to do is basically to bridge a couple of points on the mobo to enable writing to the BIOS TSOP, edit a BIOS image to your liking with EVTool/BIOSTool, and flash it. The EvoX dashboard got a reliable flasher built in, that's what I always used back in the day.

If it's 1.4 or lower, you could also look into doing a VGA mod, and flash a VGA BIOS. I'm using the X2_5035_VGA_67 BIOS, but there are other alternatives too.

If it's 1.1 or 1.0, the BIOS TSOP is 1024kB, which is four times a normal BIOS image's size. There are multi bios mods which lets you split the space in two or even four parts, that can be selected with a switch. Great if you want to switch between a VGA BIOS and a regular one, or if you simply want a backup when hacking around 😀 Done the two part split mod to my boxes, since some BIOS images (for instance the VGA one I'm using) are 512kB.

Since you're talking about installing an SSD in your box, be aware that it might fail POST with too fast storage devices. The BIOS can be edited to insert a delay to mitigate that if I remember it right.

Also, might be worth mentioning that it looks like the cheap SATA-IDE adapter I'm using in one of my Xboxes won't play nice with SATA 3.0 devices, tried a few of them before giving up, and installing a 500GB SATA 1.0 drive, that's been working perfectly since.

One more thing, earlier revisions uses an aerogel cap as RTC battery. Sooner or later it will burst, it's just a question of time. Just remove it, there's no need to find a replacement, the box will do fine without the RTC.

It's the 1.6 revision. Forgot to post that on there.

Well, then forget about most of the cool stuff, but you could at least always chip it 😀 Whilst softmods are free and all, they're quite sensitive. Your box could be bricked by file system corruption, mistakes, etc. Xbox modchips are basically piggybacking the onboard BIOS chip, and provides a way to load a (hacked) BIOS before any HDD accesses are made. Dunno about modern SSDs, are they really lockable? You'd need it to be to launch a softmodded system from it.

A chip would make that a lot easier. I used to like the SmartXX LT OPX. Was cheap, relatively simple to install, and could store loads of different BIOSes. Should be possible to find one today too 😀

Sedrosken wrote:

Yeah, it's kinda sad to mess with PowerPC machines and not be able to see the hype even compared to its comtemporaries. I can still browse the internet okay on a Pentium 4 -- it's not the quickest experience ever by anyone's imagination, but it blows even a dual-G4 machine out of the water. And makes less heat to boot! I think you're on the right track though by fetching a copy of Tiger for it -- Leopard was even considered slow for the time on a lot of G5 systems if I'm remembering correctly. Meanwhile Tiger ran acceptably on my 800MHz iBook G4 with only 256MB of RAM.

I just found something that the G4 is really good at: video playback!. In fact, it's so good at software H.264 playback--a very FPU intensive task--that I'm starting to think the poor web and gaming performance is just due to poorly optimized software, rather than a weak CPU. After all, the games I've tried on this machine (Doom 3, Quake 4, UT2004) were ported from Windows, and who knows how well.

With CorePlayer running on Leopard, I loaded up the regular 720p and 1080p MKV files that I use for benchmarking x86/Windows H.264 decoding performance. The dual-G4 1.25GHz machine not only played the 720p file flawlessly at only ~40 CPU usage, but actually managed to handle the 1080p file as well. That absolutely floored me. I was not expecting that at all. It completely outclasses the PIII-S machine, and in fact rivals my Athlon 64 running at 2.64GHz! I've read that CorePlayer uses AltiVec (the PowerPC equivalent of SSE2) quite heavily, and it shows!

Here are some comparisons to some x86 processors (the x86 stuff was tested using CoreAVC in MPC-HC under WinXP SP3)

H.264 1280x720 (5mb/s, Level 4, 24 fps):

Dual PowerPC G4 @ 1.25GHz (167MHz FSB, 2GB DDR-333, 256K fullspeed L2, 2MB external L3 cache per processor): ~40% CPU
Single Pentium III-S @ 1.63GHz (155MHz FSB, 2GB DDR-310, 512K fullspeed L2 cache): ~90% CPU
Single Pentium 4 @ 2.66GHz (533MHz FSB, 2GB DDR-333, 512K fullspeed L2 cache): ~80% CPU
Single Athlon 64 @ 2.64GHz (960MHz HyperTransport, 2GB dual-channel DDR-440, 1MB fullspeed L2 cache): ~35% CPU

H.264 1920x1080 (14mb/s, Level 4, 24 fps):

Dual PowerPC G4 @ 1.25GHz (167MHz FSB, 2GB DDR-333, 256K fullspeed L2, 2MB external L3 cache per processor): ~92% CPU
Single Pentium III-S @ 1.63GHz (155MHz FSB, 2GB DDR-310, 512K fullspeed L2 cache): 100% CPU, unwatchable
Single Pentium 4 @ 2.66GHz (533MHz FSB, 2GB DDR-333, 512K fullspeed L2 cache): 100% CPU, unwatchable
Single Athlon 64 @ 2.64GHz (960MHz HyperTransport, 2GB dual-channel DDR-440, 1MB fullspeed L2 cache): ~88% CPU

Edit: However, CorePlayer may be taking shortcuts to speed decoding performance. On the G4, I noticed some artifacting in a couple of very high-motion scenes. On the x86 machines, these scenes were completely clean.

kaputnik wrote:

Well, then forget about most of the cool stuff, but you could at least always chip it 😀 Whilst softmods are free and all, they're quite sensitive. Your box could be bricked by file system corruption, mistakes, etc. Xbox modchips are basically piggybacking the onboard BIOS chip, and provides a way to load a (hacked) BIOS before any HDD accesses are made. Dunno about modern SSDs, are they really lockable? You'd need it to be to launch a softmodded system from it.

A chip would make that a lot easier. I used to like the SmartXX LT OPX. Was cheap, relatively simple to install, and could store loads of different BIOSes. Should be possible to find one today too 😀

The problem is, I'm not good at soldering and I am going to do a file backup from the Xbox to my main desktop via FTP.

When I recently tried to find a memory test program that ran from DOS, and which could test more than 16MB (unlike the old CheckIt), I only found two programs and neither one worked (just froze with no error). So I made my own: DOSMEMU

-runs from DOS
-uses unreal mode
-tests the area from 2MB up to 2GB+ (specify memory size on command line)
-calls an XMS driver to enable the A20 line if available, if not then it tests even megabytes only
-does two passes, each time writing a pattern and then reading it back

Since the test overwrites memory contents after 2MB it's best not to have unnecessary stuff loaded (especially disk cache or ram disk!) and overwriting memory holes or other memory-mapped I/O is also a bad idea.

Bought this machine 2 years ago and never had the time to play with it until last night. Its an AST Pentium 75, 40MB Ram (came with 8Mb originally), 1.2Gb Conner, 3.5 Floppy, Sound Blaster compatible and a 4x cd-rom. I wish I would have had a 15" Sony Trinitron to go with it but my Sony S51 will have to do it for the time being.

Two questions come to mind:

1. How on earth do you open this particular case? I tried everything short of throwing the case against the walls.
2. Is there someone that could supply me with a zip containing usual software of that era, including a decent autoexec.bat and config.sys files? I need an EMS/XMS manager, mouse driver, cd-rom driver, SB init and a smartdrv to speed up things. Then the DOS itself, some utilities and couple of DOS games.

Thank you in advance!

vetz wrote:

EDIT: The client version was free from Novell, Win9x version available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20040224180123/ht … gi?/2965552.htm

Yup, used the Freeware Version 4.1 and FileZilla on the Win10 machine for this setup. Free and easy.

Just set up a stunnel conf on my macOS to be able to connect Outlook Express 5.0 (DOSBox, WFWG3.11) to Gmail. Works flawlessly.

I can imagine that the only working messaging app at the moment for really old OS like Win 3.x is mIRC? Doesn't quite help a lot...