Finally succumbed to the allure of super socket 7. I can remember no end of issues and hassles with this platform in general back in its heyday, but the Asus P5A I've stumbled upon seems to be a really good performer. I really like it!

All in the name of trying to keep it running for hopefully another couple decades -

-new Rubycon caps (replacing old Rubycons best I can tell, wow, primo stuff!)
-Cooler Master 2U copper heatsink on the CPU + Noctua 60x25mm fan
-slapped a heatsink on the ALi northbridge

Haven't tried overclocking yet, but should have plenty of cooling headroom 🤣

Just got a Voodoo3 (shocking, I know!) for the build and need to clean it up + repaste + see if I can cleanly attach a fan.

kaputnik wrote:

Designed and 3d printed a custom sleeve to accommodate a larger and less noisy CPU fan in the SS7 build I'm working on:

shroud1.PNG

Nice 😀 That should be much quieter than the 50mm and 60mm fans from that era.

I 3d printed something too, anyone want to guess what it's attached to? 😁

Sound Blaster or equivalent?

Snark Barker?

Thermalwrong wrote:

Nice :) That should be much quieter than the 50mm and 60mm fans from that era. […]
Show full quote

kaputnik wrote:

Designed and 3d printed a custom sleeve to accommodate a larger and less noisy CPU fan in the SS7 build I'm working on:

shroud1.PNG

Nice 😀 That should be much quieter than the 50mm and 60mm fans from that era.

I 3d printed something too, anyone want to guess what it's attached to? 😁

20191009_002922.jpeg

It is, the difference is huge 😀

From the port configuration and the volume wheel it looks like an SB Pro, but guess that answer is too obvious to be correct? 😀

Replaced the crappy chinese pot on my adlib clone card with a proper Bourns logarithmic pot. Unfortunately I couldn't find the correct shaft length so it's about 2mm longer. I can live with it.

kaputnik wrote:

Thermalwrong wrote:

Nice :) That should be much quieter than the 50mm and 60mm fans from that era. […]
Show full quote

kaputnik wrote:

Designed and 3d printed a custom sleeve to accommodate a larger and less noisy CPU fan in the SS7 build I'm working on:

shroud1.PNG

Nice 😀 That should be much quieter than the 50mm and 60mm fans from that era.

I 3d printed something too, anyone want to guess what it's attached to? 😁

20191009_002922.jpeg

It is, the difference is huge 😀

From the port configuration and the volume wheel it looks like an SB Pro, but guess that answer is too obvious to be correct? 😀

Correct! 😊
I got hold of an SB Pro 2 CT1600 for a relatively okay price the other day, but it had no bracket. Now it has one - my design for the snark barker didn't work perfectly though, it turns out the Game/DB15 port sticks out so far that I had to recess that part of the bracket for the card to even be able to fit in the ISA slot.

kaputnik wrote:

Designed and 3d printed a custom sleeve to accommodate a larger and less noisy CPU fan in the SS7 build I'm working on:

Very nice print. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to print a front of old computer case, since they are getting hard to come by.

Thermalwrong wrote:

Correct! 😊
I got hold of an SB Pro 2 CT1600 for a relatively okay price the other day, but it had no bracket. Now it has one - my design for the snark barker didn't work perfectly though, it turns out the Game/DB15 port sticks out so far that I had to recess that part of the bracket for the card to even be able to fit in the ISA slot.

Tbh, I think it's much more fun getting hardware in a bad or incomplete condition and fix it up, rather than just buying in mint condition and plug it in. Restoring stuff like that is so satisfying, the tinkering is really the best part of the hobby. For example, the P5A-B in the build I printed that sleeve for was dead on arrival. It came from an industrial grade laser engraver an old subcontractor was repairing. Swapped a generic but fully working S7 AT board for it. Reflashing the corrupted BIOS, replacing the VRM caps, and a good clean brought it back to life again 😀

What material did you use? Looks like PLA. Now you found a way to get it working anyways, but a hint for the future, PETG is really ductile and strong even in thin prints, you could easily get away with printing that bracket in the same thickness as the original steel bracket if you do it with the flat side down. Since it doesn't support any connectors, you don't need any rigidity to speak about, it's basically just a dust cover. You can always make the fastening tab a little bit thicker if you want.

Turbo -> wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

Designed and 3d printed a custom sleeve to accommodate a larger and less noisy CPU fan in the SS7 build I'm working on:

Very nice print. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to print a front of old computer case, since they are getting had to come by.

Thanks 😀

Well, someone's bound to have tried it. The problem though, is that a whole case front is far too large to print in one piece in a regular hobbyist printer, and I don't believe the precision is good enough to get a perfect fit between parts directly out of the printer. It would probably need quite a lot of post print work to look good.

Or do you perhaps mean 5.25" bay covers? Those would be easy to make 😀

kaputnik wrote:

Turbo -> wrote:

Very nice print. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to print a front of old computer case, since they are getting hard to come by.

Or do you perhaps mean 5.25" bay covers? Those would be easy to make 😀

Yes, you understood me correctly. I meant the whole front side.

Some cleaning & testing today, the items -

Some moderate cleaning later and the Datasette units look a bit more presentable. They are both a little yellowed with age, which isn't showing on my pics, but nothing major -

I couldn't test the datasette units as I don't yet have a Commodore 64, but I've already gone ahead and purchased replacement drive belts as at least 1 of these units has a kinked belt, whilst the other appears fine but I'll replace it anyway. The unit on the right is my oldest one, used and abused in well over 20 years so is clearly in the worst state and apart from cosmetic issues the only other issue I can see is the pinch roller is looking pretty tatty, with brown residue formed over the years.

I tested out the 5V output from the 2 power supplies with my multimeter. There's no load when the readings are taken but good to check as a rough guide. The results I got -
Left PSU = 5.25-5.26V
Right PSU = 5.27V

Now to just wait until I get a C64 to replace my missing one. I don't expect to be using the Datasettes much, as I'm looking to get an SD2IEC instead to avoid the game clutter, but it will be good to have them functional and available to use once again.

kaputnik wrote:

Thermalwrong wrote:

Correct! 😊
I got hold of an SB Pro 2 CT1600 for a relatively okay price the other day, but it had no bracket. Now it has one - my design for the snark barker didn't work perfectly though, it turns out the Game/DB15 port sticks out so far that I had to recess that part of the bracket for the card to even be able to fit in the ISA slot.

Tbh, I think it's much more fun getting hardware in a bad or incomplete condition and fix it up, rather than just buying in mint condition and plug it in. Restoring stuff like that is so satisfying, the tinkering is really the best part of the hobby. For example, the P5A-B in the build I printed that sleeve for was dead on arrival. It came from an industrial grade laser engraver an old subcontractor was repairing. Swapped a generic but fully working S7 AT board for it. Reflashing the corrupted BIOS, replacing the VRM caps, and a good clean brought it back to life again 😀

What material did you use? Looks like PLA. Now you found a way to get it working anyways, but a hint for the future, PETG is really ductile and strong even in thin prints, you could easily get away with printing that bracket in the same thickness as the original steel bracket if you do it with the flat side down. Since it doesn't support any connectors, you don't need any rigidity to speak about, it's basically just a dust cover. You can always make the fastening tab a little bit thicker if you want.

Yep, it's just PLA - I'm trying to use up the last of the silver filament that came with my i3 mk3 and it's just about done now. I'll have to try out PETG, but my printer is getting a bit janky right now, I think the belts need tightening or something.
It does have a tab on the back that the top of the card screws onto, so I can't print it flat and still have that feature unfortunately.

This evening, I rescued a Toshiba Tecra 8000 from being destroyed by its Varta batteries, then enjoyed some gaming on my Toshiba 750DVD - it has nice display scaling and an integrated OPL4-ML wavetable 😀

I waited in all day for a PSU which never actually arrived.

My sleep pattern's gone out of the window which always seems to happen when I have a bit of time off work so I've spent the past 7 hours playing GTA 3 (it's 4:48am atm).

Thermalwrong wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

Thermalwrong wrote:

Correct! 😊
I got hold of an SB Pro 2 CT1600 for a relatively okay price the other day, but it had no bracket. Now it has one - my design for the snark barker didn't work perfectly though, it turns out the Game/DB15 port sticks out so far that I had to recess that part of the bracket for the card to even be able to fit in the ISA slot.

Tbh, I think it's much more fun getting hardware in a bad or incomplete condition and fix it up, rather than just buying in mint condition and plug it in. Restoring stuff like that is so satisfying, the tinkering is really the best part of the hobby. For example, the P5A-B in the build I printed that sleeve for was dead on arrival. It came from an industrial grade laser engraver an old subcontractor was repairing. Swapped a generic but fully working S7 AT board for it. Reflashing the corrupted BIOS, replacing the VRM caps, and a good clean brought it back to life again 😀

What material did you use? Looks like PLA. Now you found a way to get it working anyways, but a hint for the future, PETG is really ductile and strong even in thin prints, you could easily get away with printing that bracket in the same thickness as the original steel bracket if you do it with the flat side down. Since it doesn't support any connectors, you don't need any rigidity to speak about, it's basically just a dust cover. You can always make the fastening tab a little bit thicker if you want.

Yep, it's just PLA - I'm trying to use up the last of the silver filament that came with my i3 mk3 and it's just about done now. I'll have to try out PETG, but my printer is getting a bit janky right now, I think the belts need tightening or something.
It does have a tab on the back that the top of the card screws onto, so I can't print it flat and still have that feature unfortunately.

Got an i3 Mk3 aswell, it's really great with PETG. Never ever had the oozing and stringing problems everyone's talking about, and the print quality is very close to that of PLA. Haven't looked back at other materials since I started using it, the only exception being PLA, since it got quite different mechanical properties. Sometimes you want the extra rigidity. Got a couple of rolls of ABS I'm desperately trying to use up, but can't seem to find any applications where I don't rather want PETG 😁

Yeah, new belts tend to slacken a bit after some hours of operation, you probably need to tighten them up. The rule of thumb when working with belt driven fans etc is to recheck new belts after 3 days of run time. After that, you should never have to retension them again.

As a marine engineer, you get some experience of it, I'm doing it without any measurements at all, in this case simply by squeezing the belt together between thumb and index finger. If correctly tensioned, it should take some force. Double checking it by plucking the belt like a guitar string, it should give off a deep bass tone.

Otherwise, I noticed that the i3 uses Gates belts. They're usually very well documented. If you want to use a more scientific method, I'm sure you can find the correct tensioning force for that particular belt on their homepage 😀

Also, check the pulley/idler alignment while you're at it, remember I had to readjust it shortly after assembling the printer.

I'll make a better post about this later, but I just had to share because I think this is nuts. I "accidentally" managed to get dual-GPUs and multi-monitors working in Win98. Okay, I vaguely knew this was possible, but I thought it was for specific matching workstation GPUs with specialized drivers (i.e. Matrox). But no, apparently you can use whatever you want, and the way you set it up is (1) install the video card and the normal driver you'd always install, and (2) there is no step two.

^^ that's a Voodoo3 driving the left half of the desktop, and an ATI Rage running the right half. Head asplode.

I didn't even have to mess around with hardware profiles or disabling specific drivers. I just put the V3 in, installed its software, and it worked.

There are some caveats with this setup, the big one being that not every card is supported as primary video. The specific list of supported cards includes most ATI Rage models but seemingly no 3DFX ones, and I've also found some forum scuttlebutt saying it works better if the PCI card is primary. That's how I have it set up here, the system is set to init the PCI Rage first in the BIOS, then Windows starts the AGP Voodoo as it boots up.

As far as I can tell, Direct3D & OpelGL stuff always runs on the primary card, which is the Rage. D3D is pretty painless but OGL is a bit fiddly and unstable with both heads active.

I let FInal Reality run all the way through and got exactly the same scores as when the Rage was installed on its own.

ATI CIF progs "just run" on the Rage, as you'd expect:

...while GLIDE stuff jumps over to the Voodoo card. How cool is that?

Does the mouse smooth move between screens?

^^ Yep, and you can drag windows smoothly across the boundary or position them halfway between, just like on a modern machine with a deliberate multi-head GPU. You can even mismatch and max out the resolutions on both displays (1600x1200 on the Voodoo's monitor and 1280x1024 on the Rage's, in this case), but I'm running them at 1024x768 here to keep things simple.

Honestly I'm not surprised you can do this, but I'm floored at how simple it was to set up and how well it works. I've run into a few issues and gotten a BSOD (from trying to switch back and forth between display drivers within the same game), but this is Win98 after all. I always thought true multi-heading on Windows didn't come around until XP.

OK, I'm absolutely stunned by this..

What happens, if you run the Direct3D test from dxdiag on your secondary card (3dfx Voodoo)? Does that utilize the Voodoo card?

xjas wrote:

I'll make a better post about this later, but I just had to share because I think this is nuts. I "accidentally" managed to get […]
Show full quote

I'll make a better post about this later, but I just had to share because I think this is nuts. I "accidentally" managed to get dual-GPUs and multi-monitors working in Win98. Okay, I vaguely knew this was possible, but I thought it was for specific matching workstation GPUs with specialized drivers (i.e. Matrox). But no, apparently you can use whatever you want, and the way you set it up is (1) install the video card and the normal driver you'd always install, and (2) there is no step two.

SO HED.png

^^ that's a Voodoo3 driving the left half of the desktop, and an ATI Rage running the right half. Head asplode.

20191010_003208.jpg

I didn't even have to mess around with hardware profiles or disabling specific drivers. I just put the V3 in, installed its software, and it worked.

There are some caveats with this setup, the big one being that not every card is supported as primary video. The specific list of supported cards includes most ATI Rage models but seemingly no 3DFX ones, and I've also found some forum scuttlebutt saying it works better if the PCI card is primary. That's how I have it set up here, the system is set to init the PCI Rage first in the BIOS, then Windows starts the AGP Voodoo as it boots up.

As far as I can tell, Direct3D & OpelGL stuff always runs on the primary card, which is the Rage. D3D is pretty painless but OGL is a bit fiddly and unstable with both heads active.

20191010_011339.jpg

I let FInal Reality run all the way through and got exactly the same scores as when the Rage was installed on its own.

ATI CIF progs "just run" on the Rage, as you'd expect:

20191010_012638.jpg

...while GLIDE stuff jumps over to the Voodoo card. How cool is that?

20191010_012845.jpg

Did this back in the day, and it worked more or less flawlessly. Used to be into illustration, a second monitor to keep the toolbars on to free up workspace was really useful. It didn't cause any problems I can remember with gaming either.

I recall it the other way around though, that the PCI (secondary) card had to have specific support, but you could use any AGP card as primary. Had a Voodoo Rush or Banshee as primary card in that rig, might have ran the dual monitor setup with a TNT later on too, and some S3 PCI card as secondary, probably a Virge or Trio V64. This was about 20 years ago though, so can of course not guarantee I remember it correctly.