mmx23 wrote on 2020-04-06, 19:59:

Speaking the prices, at launch, the cheapest Pentium Pro costs around 1000 usd ( 150 MHz) and 200 MHz 256k costs 1200 usd.
Of course, high price was because of low yelds but other reason was the fact that only P Pro was able to be used in 4 way cpu servers.

You are correct about the price of P.Pro cpu's back then. The P.Pro 200 256k and 512k was first released late November 1995, the 1mb cache version took another month or so before release. The 256k was at $600 and the 512k was at about $675 for the first month or so but due to demand and low yield they both doubled in price by mid Jan of 1996 and stayed there for quite a while. I have a receipt from that time (end of Dec 1995) showing the P.Pro 512k at $675 and the Asus P6NP5 motherboard was $275. I worked for HPc at the time and got those at "wholesale price" due to my connections.
Other things that were extremely expensive back then was RAM and good SCSI drives, 128Mb EDO (4x32mb) cost $650, two ST32550WC's cost near $1500 for the pair ! Yikes.

mmx23 wrote on 2020-04-06, 19:59:

Quake 1,2 and 3 engines is using only one cpu, even they are launched under NT kenel OS which know 2 cpu's. Quake 3 has an patch to use the 2nd cpu's but it was experimental and the second cpu was used only for audio. It was until the Quake 4 engine when 2 cpu's could be used in games.

It wasn't a patch, it was enabled by an in-game variable (r_smp). And it wasn't for audio, it was for the "server", basically you've got a single CPU for rendering only and another for everything else.

Quake 3 could use the second cpu for audio. Definitelly is using it for something helpfull. Here is an test made by Anandtech and the speed gain is 5 to 10% when using 2 cpu's in Quake3.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/368/33

I have an ALR Revolution 2x server , you may see it here https://imgur.com/gallery/K53aX7k ,with two P Pro's at 200 / 256k and in the next followind day's I will post the results in single vs dual cpu Quake3 bench under WinXp.

mmx23 wrote on 2020-04-07, 08:20:

Quake 3 could use the second cpu for audio. Definitelly is using it for something helpfull. Here is an test made by Anandtech and the speed gain is 5 to 10% when using 2 cpu's in Quake3.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/368/33

I have an ALR Revolution 2x server , you may see it here https://imgur.com/gallery/K53aX7k ,with two P Pro's at 200 / 256k and in the next followind day's I will post the results in single vs dual cpu Quake3 bench under WinXp.

You have a description of what r_smp does here: http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/renderer.php .

Oh good more playing with Quake 3's SMP support 😀
Don't forget to post results here
quake3 SMP-scaling thread…

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-01-07, 21:26:

My guess is NEC. I doubt NOAA had special covers made that matched perfectly as well as the oval shaped tape strips that look to perfectly match the covers.

Seems so. Found this ad and thought about this thread

Is there any interest in having my system run with r_smp at 0 and 1 in W2K?

Yes, please test it. I didn't managed yet to make it work on my ALR system, is freezing at start when using r_smp 1. I'm using Q3 v 1.11, but I'll search for another version to test. (should be at least 1.08 in order for smp to work).
On my config, with r_smp 0, I'm getting, no matter the rezolution, 20 fps. Video 3d card is an Quantum3D Sbi 220 - dual Voodoo 2.

feipoa wrote on 2020-04-07, 19:29:

Is there any interest in having my system run with r_smp at 0 and 1 in W2K?

Definitely!
I'm not expecting the results to be pretty but the "official thread" is very P3 biased at the moment.

Sorry guys, but Vogons didn' t send me an email saying that this thread had been replied to. I only noticed it when another user quoted my text from above in another thread totally out of context. I have another upgrade for the system that I am waiting on, so I'll pull it out again soon. The updated Vogons site doesn't seem to be as proficient at sending out reply thread reminders. Is everyone else having this problem as well?

I'm having similar issues with site notifications

That's a nice system. Would be interested but I really can't justify shipping/another dual CPU EISA system on the NX chipset. Mine is the Micronics board with the CPU sockets in the way of the PCI slots. Then there's some other stuff. I caught the EISA bug and the MCA bug.

I was sent here by njroadfan on the VCF as there are some new EISA .cfg files found.

I've speed-read this thread as it's 17 pages, so I'm probably out of the loop. Someone mentioned the NEC ftp site is down. I had a mirror, and its on archive.org now:
https://archive.org/details/ftp.necam.com

What happened here it's all blue? Clearly designed by an IBM enthusiast.

The NEC Proserva V Plus uses the 430HX chipset, not the NX. I've upgraded mine to dual P233MMX chips using interposers.

Did you happen to archive the files from the following link? I'm looking for these files.
https://support.necam.com/Drivers/?M=453

The listing is as follows:

Applications
Seagate ST19171W/WC Firmware DB32. Fixes false "dead" drives on Mylex controllers.

BIOS
DAC960-P / PL BIOS 1.41 Firmware 2.73-0
ProServa V+ BIOS Upgrade

Main Board
ProServa V+ Utilities Disk
ProServa V+ Factory Defaults Utilitites for BIOS 1.00.14WL14
ProServa V+ System Configuration Utilities
ProServa V+SCSI Tools for Adaptec 6370 and 7870 Controllers

Other
ProServa V+ User's Manual

The file names are:
s9gbdb32.exe
273t0.exe
T34201F3.EXE
T34201U3.EXE
T34201D3.EXE
T34201S3.EXE
T34201R3.EXE
VPLUSMAN.HLP

The archive link contains a dozen 512 MB download files in this format, ftp.necam.com.00 , Are these all parts of a zip archive? How do I view all of them to search for the files I want?

The files are all listed in this NEC archive tho I think, with the exception of the manual, they've all already been retrieved (albeit with different filenames) from the original Zenith support link on page 1

NEC ftp directory tree - https://ia601508.us.archive.org/5/items/ftp.n … com/dirtree.txt

Retrieval / Viewing 'Howto' - https://ia601508.us.archive.org/5/items/ftp.n … am.com/info.txt

Oh, the files are all identical to those provided by Zenith, but with different filenames? I was hoping NEC had their own tweaked BIOSes, and in particular, those with an updated Adaptec firmware.

I have downloaded all the files to a folder. The extraction instructions provided in info.txt are inadequate for my current knowledge set.

1on DOS, use the COPY command to copy all files to one big one, then 
2open with winzip or somthing. You may need the /B option for COPY.

Does anybody know what's the exact string of characters I need to type into the Windows XP command console to put these files into a single archive?

EDIT: I decided to boot up my linux system to extract the files, then copied them over to XP.

I've checked the first file on the nec website and that's there. HX system, very nice. Really should go back and read the whole thread.

I think this might work, I tried it with some smaller files:
copy /b ftp.necam.com.* ftp.necam.com.tar

then open in winzip/winrar

The linux split command just chops up the file into file01, file02...etc. Al that's needed is to append file02 on the end of file01, etc.

another alternative:
type ftp.necam.com.* > other_file_name.tar
type ftp.necam.com.* > ftp.necam.com.tar <<<This ads the target file ftp.necam.com.tar to it's self as well, making a total mess.

Get a thinclient (or other low watt pc) with Linux on it. How can you live without Grep? Does anyone have space to host it? Very annoying archive.org wont let dir's. Have you seen the size of compaq's ftp archive? Wish they were all individual files.

Yeah, it's a very nice system. Can take 512 MB of ECC EDO RAM too. Rarely do you get EISA, PCI, ISA, and a dual CPU HX-based combination. EISA and the extremely attractive case did it for me. You may still be able to get them from CPUshack on CPU-World. I think he was looking for ways to get them shipped even cheaper.

Thanks for the command tips, but I already booted up my Ubuntu system (running on a Mac Pro 1,1 desktop tower) and have copied the files back over to Windows. I'm using 7zip to compress them using the Ultra compression method now.

Attached are the two latest BIOSes. One from NEC, the other from Zenith. The .ROM files have the same save date but a slightly different modified save time. Looking at the ASCII in a hex editor, I see both have a date of 11/16/95 and mention AIC-7880 BIOS v1.24. So they are probably the same files.

cyclone3d wrote on 2019-11-05, 04:05:

If anybody has access to the manual or utilities for this server it would be awesome.

NEC links to their old ftp server which apparently no longer exists.
https://support.necam.com/Drivers/?M=453&x=14&y=7

Attached are the files for this server in case you don't want the whole ftp archive.

---

As this system is basically an upgraded Intel ALTServer, Ive converted an intel help (.hlp) file for that board to HTML. Took the whole weekend:
http://66.113.161.23/~mR_Slug/deviceInfo/Intel/

Among other things that may be relevant, It contains a pinout for the I/O riser.
===
Edit:
Just been reading thru the thread and the ALTServer documentation. Noticed there was an issue with not finding a BIOS recovery mode. Two of the "Reserved" jumpers J7A and J5A, are "Boot Option" and "Boot Block". Perhaps they carried thru with this board.
http://66.113.161.23/~mR_Slug/deviceInfo/Inte … /images/bm8.gif
For more details, scroll down to "Jumpers" here:
http://66.113.161.23/~mR_Slug/deviceInfo/Inte … l/ALTSERVE.html
---
Did anyone ever find out if this board is a Intel one? Figure it's unlikely that Zenith modded the ALTServer to this board. surely Intel is the OEM.