At last, i have a 486 VLB system! I was missing a motherboard, but now i got it.
So obviously i spent huge amount of my sleeping time this night to build and set it up.
During this week, i hope to find time to set it up as a killer win 3.11 machine. (DX4-100MHz, 128MB ram, VLB IO and video, +sound + nic)

I started playing Baldur's Gate 2 in my Windows 98 PC (KTA7-Raid + 6800GT) but it runs like garbage. Tons of slowdown and I don't know why. Disabling directdraw acceleration helps for some reason when it comes to scrolling but the moment the game throws some effects into the mix it slows to a crawl. Maybe the 6800GT isn't playing nice with the motherboard? I'll need to look into it some more tomorrow.

Got the Armada M700 up and running with all the drivers and utilities. Got the battery calibrated and surprisingly holds a charge, and the CMOS battery has been replaced as the IR drivers wouldn't work without it for some odd reason.

Windows can disable the display stretching, but I cannot find a spot in the BIOS to disable it completely (although, DOS games do look good without the pixels being overstretched), or settings g the time and date for that matter either.

The Slot 1 build is postponed until I get replacement y SD-RAM and Slot 1 sockets as they are not working properly, even my contact cleaner doesn't do justice very well.

GigAHerZ wrote:

At last, i have a 486 VLB system! I was missing a motherboard, but now i got it.
So obviously i spent huge amount of my sleeping time this night to build and set it up.
During this week, i hope to find time to set it up as a killer win 3.11 machine. (DX4-100MHz, 128MB ram, VLB IO and video, +sound + nic)

128mb ram is asking for trouble.

appiah4 wrote:

GigAHerZ wrote:

At last, i have a 486 VLB system! I was missing a motherboard, but now i got it.
So obviously i spent huge amount of my sleeping time this night to build and set it up.
During this week, i hope to find time to set it up as a killer win 3.11 machine. (DX4-100MHz, 128MB ram, VLB IO and video, +sound + nic)

128mb ram is asking for trouble.

Well... challenge accepted!

appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

IIRC there are 2 metal tabs that attach to the bottom of the front end of the floppy drive and you just slide it in there til it clicks.

Photos would be greatly appreciated.. I want to know if it is something I could maybe 3d print..

It is a metal tray that allows the floppy drive to sit in it. The tray has a metal surround that allows it to be pulled through the *front* of the chassis, behind the fascia cover. It can be released and then clicked back into place using the two metal tabs below the front of the drive. Because it consists of two layers, and is very particular in its design, it may be difficult to 3D print.
As you can see from the attached photos, there are 2 metal trays. The lower, empty one is for a secondary hard drive. I used to use if for a secondary 3.5" IDE HDD some years ago. Since moving to flash storage, the tray is now empty; simply held in place by 2 screws in the front of the chassis, located just below the floppy drive (see photos) The two trays are different from each other, as they were both machined by Dell to fit specific drives (1 floppy, 1 HDD). I suspect you would have better luck 3D printing the HDD tray as it is simpler in design and I don't see why you wouldn't be able to alter it to accommodate a floppy drive instead, which just screws into the front.

This is the best I can do for photos I'm afraid as I had to rush to take these photos before it was packed and sent off for storage (it will be stored for some time). There was no time to disconnect the cabling, remove the drive and remove the tray.

Received an Xbox Original console that I ordered today. I never owned one back in the day and so I'm basically just plugging the gap of that era of gaming.

Haven't done much with it as of yet, just tested it is working and tested out a couple of games. It needs a bit of a clean and I haven't opened it up yet to check for any issues, I'll be doing that tomorrow hopefully. So far it seems to be working well enough though and I've been playing a bit of Halo 2 & Dead Or Alive 3.

The ultimate plan is to softmod it & upgrade the HDD. I can get started on all that just as soon as I receive the USB adapter I have ordered.

For whatever reason, when I was softmodding my Xbox, I had to use my Xbox 360 to format a memory card to XFAT so the original Xbox would recognize it. Just a heads up, in case you have similar difficulties with the process. Also, keep your original HDD. It may come in handy in the future. That is, don't unlock it and reformat it for other purposes.

janskjaer wrote:

It is a metal tray that allows the floppy drive to sit in it. The tray has a metal surround that allows it to be pulled through […]
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appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

IIRC there are 2 metal tabs that attach to the bottom of the front end of the floppy drive and you just slide it in there til it clicks.

Photos would be greatly appreciated.. I want to know if it is something I could maybe 3d print..

It is a metal tray that allows the floppy drive to sit in it. The tray has a metal surround that allows it to be pulled through the *front* of the chassis, behind the fascia cover. It can be released and then clicked back into place using the two metal tabs below the front of the drive. Because it consists of two layers, and is very particular in its design, it may be difficult to 3D print.
As you can see from the attached photos, there are 2 metal trays. The lower, empty one is for a secondary hard drive. I used to use if for a secondary 3.5" IDE HDD some years ago. Since moving to flash storage, the tray is now empty; simply held in place by 2 screws in the front of the chassis, located just below the floppy drive (see photos) The two trays are different from each other, as they were both machined by Dell to fit specific drives (1 floppy, 1 HDD). I suspect you would have better luck 3D printing the HDD tray as it is simpler in design and I don't see why you wouldn't be able to alter it to accommodate a floppy drive instead, which just screws into the front.

This is the best I can do for photos I'm afraid as I had to rush to take these photos before it was packed and sent off for storage (it will be stored for some time). There was no time to disconnect the cabling, remove the drive and remove the tray.

Thank you very much. Unfortunately, that bay is apparently a lost cause on my D333.. I will just keep the floppy where the zip drive was, and the zip drive will have to go into another PC..

Mister Xiado wrote:

For whatever reason, when I was softmodding my Xbox, I had to use my Xbox 360 to format a memory card to XFAT so the original Xbox would recognize it. Just a heads up, in case you have similar difficulties with the process. Also, keep your original HDD. It may come in handy in the future. That is, don't unlock it and reformat it for other purposes.

On my Original Xbox, the old 10GB HDD blew smoke and I still have the 80GB HDD I replaced it with 6 years ago, and mine currently has a 480GB SSD with a SATA to IDE (Startech.com brand) and an 80-conductor IDE-40 cable (3 foot long). Revision 1.6b is the one I own and the clock cap is a higher quality than 1.0-1.5, softmodded my Xbox using the Splinter Cell exploit by copying the save directory and the other ones to the 80GB HDD using a newly created Xbox HD Maker software, unlocked the HDD, copied the directories on there, and locked the HDD.

Finally recapped my 3 RTC caps in my 3 Xbox Classics 😀
Replaced a buckling spring on one of my model F's but I still need to test it after reassembly. If it works, it was the easiest assembly for me even though I read horror storries about it :p

@Ptherapist: don't forget to repaste your Xbox and replace or remove the RTC cap.

Started assembling my second A1200. 😀

PTherapist wrote:

Received an Xbox Original console that I ordered today. I never owned one back in the day and so I'm basically just plugging the gap of that era of gaming.

Haven't done much with it as of yet, just tested it is working and tested out a couple of games. It needs a bit of a clean and I haven't opened it up yet to check for any issues, I'll be doing that tomorrow hopefully. So far it seems to be working well enough though and I've been playing a bit of Halo 2 & Dead Or Alive 3.

The ultimate plan is to softmod it & upgrade the HDD. I can get started on all that just as soon as I receive the USB adapter I have ordered.

Whatever you do, don't miss the Knights of the Old Republic series, the Fable series, Psychonauts and Ninja Gaiden. If you're into driving games, the Burnout series are great too.

Used to love the SSX games too, they manage to catch the feeling of snowboarding somehow, and make those horns start growing, just as in real life 😁 Been skiing since I was a toddler though, dunno if those games are for everyone.

Well as an update, I haven't gotten around to cleaning the Xbox all out etc yet, but I did go ahead and softmod it today. A relatively painless process and I had no issues with the 512MB USB memory stick I decided to use. It formatted fine and worked a treat.

I tested out transferring over a couple of games via FTP to the small HDD currently residing in there. I did struggle at first as most games wouldn't work, until I noticed my FTP client was set to the wrong transfer mode. With that fixed, it all went well.

Also just for fun, I installed XBMC too. I can imagine this was brilliant back in the day for it's multimedia abilities & app/game launching all under 1 interface, but I don't really have much use for it myself nowadays other than for the novelty factor.

kaputnik wrote:

Whatever you do, don't miss the Knights of the Old Republic series, the Fable series, Psychonauts and Ninja Gaiden. If you're into driving games, the Burnout series are great too.

Used to love the SSX games too, they manage to catch the feeling of snowboarding somehow, and make those horns start growing, just as in real life 😁 Been skiing since I was a toddler though, dunno if those games are for everyone.

I've played quite a few of these games on PS2 & GameCube and I do love Burnout 3, so am looking forward to comparing the Xbox versions. I have to agree with you that the SSX games are quite fun, even if I do kinda suck at playing them. 🤣

Ran some 20 year old software on a 24 year old hardware.

Made a functional backup of my DOS install for my 486 laptop... unfortunately discovered that the hard drive in said laptop is likely dying. It can create files fine but any deletion totally corrupts the partition table and FAT, whether it be through del or deltree or whatever. I have an SD adapter on the way for it, but it's on the slow boat from Shenzhen and isn't guaranteed to work with its BIOS... I hope it's intelligent enough to let you use non-Toshiba hard drives.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Ran some 20 year old software on a 24 year old hardware.

Amazing! Which linux distro is it?

bfcastello wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

Ran some 20 year old software on a 24 year old hardware.

Amazing! Which linux distro is it?

Turbo Linux 6.0(server version which doesn't have as many user applications) running Gnome 1.x with icewm window manager and Stone theme. Wish I knew back then how well you can customize linux. Maybe I would have adopted it earlier. Turbo linux was based on RedHat 6.x .so rpm based, but with some better setup tools. Biggest thing is getting over the file system layout and how to use a terminal. I just think of the command line as a more powerful Dos now, that can do far more.

Collecting boxed copies of old OSs is a hobby of mine. You can see the variations between distros. Some were more polished then others. Not all had the same layout, setup or way of installing software. Of course they were no where near as bloated back then as well. As you can see from the screen shot Netscape Navigator can make posts on vogons.org with no issues at all. Personally I think any computer hobbyist should have at least some experience with linux.

Caluser2000 wrote:

bfcastello wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

Ran some 20 year old software on a 24 year old hardware.

Amazing! Which linux distro is it?

Turbo Linux 6.0(server version which doesn't have as much user applications) running Gnome 1.x with icewm window manager and Stone theme. Wish I knew back then how well you can customize linux. Maybe I would have adopted it earlier. Turbo linux was based on RedHat 6.x .so rpm based, but with some better setup tools. Biggest thing is getting over the file system layout and how to use a terminal. I just think of the command line as a more powerful Dos now, that can do far more.

Collecting boxed copies of old OSs is a hobby of mine. You can see the variations between distros. Some were more polished then others. Not all had the same layout, setup or way of installing software. Of course they were no where near as bloated back then as well. As you can see from the screen shot Netscape Navigator can make posts on vogons.org with no issues at all. Personally I think any computer hobbyist should have at least some experience with linux.

I used RedHat 5.0-5.2-6.0-6.2 between 1998-2001 and yes, that experience taught me a LOT about computers.