Played a bit of FIFA 98 RTWC, tweaked a bit the Windows XP Pro "98 theme". Not much here to say.

I replaced the Voodoo 3 in my Dell Dimension XPS D333 with its original Riva 1128 and added a Voodoo 2 card. It looks and feels a lot more authentic now. I also added an AWE64 in addition to the Turtle Beach Montego, and routed the Line Out from the MBPro to the AUX In of the PCI card.

This configuration originally shipped with the Montego, but the D333 is a strange model that had all sorts of configurations:
- CDROM, DVDROM+MPEG2Decoder (which I have)
- Permedia2, Riva128 (which I have), 3DRagePRO
- AWE64 (which I added), YMF724, Montego (which I have), MontegoII.

Anyway, I now I have CQM, AWE Synth, A3D and Aureal SoftSynth to pick from on the same machine, and it handles almost every late DOS and Win9x game I want it to. It kind of became my favorite PC. I'll take some photos later. My only concern is that proprietary PSU in this thing, maybe I should stock up on some ATX to Dell converters while they are still available..

ShovelKnight wrote on 2020-06-04, 23:23:

Spent half an hour trying to understand what's wrong with my Cherry G80-3000 which had stopped working again. Last time I had to replace a leaking capacitor, this time everything looks ok at first sight. It briefly flashes its lights after I turn on the PC but then the PC starts beeping furiously and spits out the keyboard error. I will examine it in more detail tomorrow when I have more time.

After examining the PCB in good light I found 3 cracked solder joints in the controller area. Reflowed them and what do you know, it works perfectly for now.

Cleaned and lubricated the fan of my P2-450 today and installed it in my Epox EP-BX3 system (440BX Slot 1, obviously). While I was at it, I rearranged some of the expansion cards and added a second Diamond Monster 3D II 12MB for SLI.

Other hardware in this build:
Diamond Viper V550 (Riva TNT 16MB, AGP)
3com Ethernet adapter
Yamaha Waveforce 192XG sound card
Creative AWE64 CT4520
Adaptec AVA-2904 SCSI adapter for Ricoh CD-RW drive
40x IDE CD-ROM
16GB CF card on CF-IDE adapter

I also added the SB-LINK cable for the Yamaha and will try to see how it performs in DOS. Since this build is obviously targeted at Windows 98, DOS compatibility is not much of a concern here, so if the Yamaha + SB-LINK turns out to work good enough, I'd rather use the CT4520 in a different build.

A few things today and yesterday.

Firstly in my attempt to not spend money - I re-spliced the AV cable I made for my VIC-20, using better quality phono cables. In my haste to get it done however, I didn't insulate the individual wires properly and ended up shorting either the 6V or ground to the video wire when the cable was moved a certain way. Luckily I spotted the error after the VIC-20 crashed when I moved the cable and thus I avoided damaging it's VIC chip by prolonged use. Fixed the cable properly today and ordered a proper AV cable to replace it.

Also did some experimentation with retro brighting to a pair of crap throwaway PC speakers. Weather was a bit crap today however, with probably only about 2 hours of sunlight out of 4, plus I wasn't happy with the consistency of the mixture. All trial and error as I've never done it before. But I can already see the speakers almost back to their original colour, instead of the dark yellow they looked when I originally pulled them out of my loft. Some blotches & streaks, but I can work on that as I gain more practice. If they end up looking good and they already don't look too bad, I'll probably repair the speakers and get them fully functional again.

Packing up my shit. Was thrown out by my now ex. She gave me one month to find a new place.
For the record. What was the definitive reason, is none of my fault. All I can say, is that life happens.

At least you will have more time for retro gaming now.

I've been trying today (and yesterday) to get the network card in my Toshiba T5200 to work in DOS; I've got it working in WFW.
Now I'm trying to find the microsoft network client .

kolderman wrote on 2020-06-05, 19:47:

At least you will have more time for retro gaming now.

I am not really that into vintage gaming. I am more a kind of hardware guy. Gaming tends to get trivial after 15 to 25 minutes. 30 top. One of the reason why I never actually play any strategy games. Way more fun to build a 486 vintage machine, or setting up a RaspberryPI for 8 and 16 bit gaming, or upgrade an Amiga.

Other than that. Then yes. More time for building my Commodore64 replica machine. That SixtyClone I am working on.

Ebay finally ran out of those NIB Cobra Yamaha sound cards the day before i have the hobby cash to pick one up.
There goes another good stockpile of NIB sound cards ;-;

On another note: How on earth do people enjoy the original Tomb Raider? Playing the 3DFX version and even with custom controls, i just can't get the hang of it.
Everything feels so slow and delayed. Especially trying to time jumps + ledge grabbing. The Camera gets all over the places and theres no way to position it where you want (i can kinda forgive this though as a flaw of 90s 3D platformers).

Its just alot of wandering around places, with annoying platforming segments unhelped by the slow controls. Not much action!

Maybe i just need to try this again on my modern machine with a proper controller. 😒

Tomb Raider was a shit game when it came out. It aged terribly. Today it is about as fun as gauging my eye out with a blunt spoon.

More "retro" video transcoding today, kinda. Encoding 1080p video certainly isn't a retro activity, but the codec I'm using, WMV9-HD, is definitely getting old. I converted the best movie in the world Detroit Rock City from the 25 mbps H.264 source file on my server to a 10 mbps 1080p WMV-HD file.

Why on earth did I do that?

Tonight's movie night, and I'd like to bring my turbocharged PIII machine down to the Batcave and let it handle the video playback! However, 1080p H.264 is simply too much for a PIII--even one that's been overclocked to 1628 MHz. Fortunately, the Radeon 9800 Pro that's installed in this machine offers very good pixel shader 2.0 based WMV acceleration. No, it's not as efficient as the full bitstream decoding offered by today's GPUs with their dedicated video blocks. However, the partial WMV decode assistance is enough to allow the PIII-S @ 1628MHz to play 1080p WMV-HD without dropping any frames. CPU usage during playback hovers around 90%.

And besides, on a 4.3GHz Ryzen 3900X, transcoding to 1080p WMV takes absolutely no time at all. It's almost ridiculous how fast this thing spits out finished video frames!

Re TR:
I remember that the 3DFX version looked good. But the gameplay was trash and it crashed a lot. Meh.

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-06-05, 21:13:

On another note: How on earth do people enjoy the original Tomb Raider? Playing the 3DFX version and even with custom controls, […]
Show full quote

On another note: How on earth do people enjoy the original Tomb Raider? Playing the 3DFX version and even with custom controls, i just can't get the hang of it.
Everything feels so slow and delayed. Especially trying to time jumps + ledge grabbing. The Camera gets all over the places and theres no way to position it where you want (i can kinda forgive this though as a flaw of 90s 3D platformers).

Its just alot of wandering around places, with annoying platforming segments unhelped by the slow controls. Not much action!

Maybe i just need to try this again on my modern machine with a proper controller. 😒

The way to enjoy Tomb Raider is to not have played anything better than it. It's by no means timeless. Though I had played the game to completion on PSX, and had been impressed by the demo of the PC version, there is no way I would ever want to play it again. Watching someone do a playthrough of it recently was a chore by itself.

As for my Win95 project, it's halted, as the user directory structure is handled far differently in Windows XP, so there is no data to learn from. Much of it is handled by the shell, rather than being explicitly configured in the registry. There exists no data online regarding the registry data I would need to have Windows treat the data like directory links instead of the -nothing- that it does now. No point in finishing this set unless a magical Microsoft manual poofs in out of existence.

Received an Igel J series thin client (also known as the Winnet IV). Supposedly one of the smallest Socket 7 boards out there, and touted as “the ultimate retrogaming thin client” due to its integrated ESS Solo-1 instead of the usual Via embedded sound chip with SBPro legacy support...

Well, it’s not really that small. It’s actually bigger than my router-of-doom.

So what is it? When I got it the heat sink is loose and the securing clip fell off the retaining notch causing it to rattle. I actually had to pry out the plastic front bezel and release the 2 screws holding the heat sink in place. Out of curiosity I pulled the large heat sink off, and under the thermal pad lies an AMD K6-2E (embedded) 333MHz CPU, which consumes about 10w max and 2 watts idle. Unfortunately it’s not a K6-2+, so not much downclocking possibilities in setmul. The 2 PC100 SDRAM slots have 32MB DIMMs, giving it 64MB total. Subtract out 8MB for a VRAM cache used for the SiS 6326 based GPU on the SiS530 north bridge, and it’s 56MB. The SiS530 needs low density RAM so drop-in replacements off my Wyse WT8450XE (C3 Samuel 2 core based) didn’t work.
The embedded sound chip is indeed an ESS1938S Solo-1. There is a riser that can take either a 16 bit ISA card, or a PCI card...but not both. The entire device is passive cooling with no fans, and this includes the PSU as well.

So, was it a good retrogaming PC? In one word? Not really. The BIOS is gimped and missing quite a number of features. You cannot disable the onboard Realtek RTL8139C, and there are no options to control the Embedded ESS solo1 like set it up with a dedicated IRQ. DDMA doesn’t seem to work as expected so SFX support from the ESS soundchip doesn’t work as well, as, say, a Yamaha YMF724 on the Router-of-Doom. Trying to get the ESS Solo1 to work using the DOS mode essolo.sys will cause it to lock up. Using setpci to manipulate the control registers directly...works somewhat, but it’s not foolproof either. In a way it’s a choice between an embedded PCI soundcard hyped for excellent DOS compatibility (don’t seem to be the case), adding an ISA sound card (which might or might not work well) and losing the ability to l, say, have a better GPU (Voodoo2 or Savage4 PCI)

In a way you are still better off with a good retrogaming friendly laptop like a Toshiba Satellite 4280XDVD or an IBM Thinkpad T22. At least things tend to work well on those machines out of the box...

Why care about the Solo-1 at all if there's a 16-bit ISA slot?

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-06, 07:12:

Why care about the Solo-1 at all if there's a 16-bit ISA slot?

...Because there’s no way to tell whether the ISA slot will behave well either with a sound card (I am not even sure if I can disable the embedded ESS Solo-1 and free up resources) , and I want to use the PCI slot to drive a Voodoo 2 or something better.

Keh?

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-06-06, 08:17:

...Because there’s no way to tell whether the ISA slot will behave well either with a sound card

No way to tell? So you can't just install a sound card there and test it?

The Voodoo is PCI.. does the PCI slot share a bracket with the ISA slot?