CMB75 wrote on 2020-06-14, 10:33:

Follow up on my dual king ISA slot project … SUCCESS

😮
Wow, congrats! Not the easiest thing to solder in, especially when the tin is not the easiest to remove from holes (even with desoldering wire).
You needed to just solder in the ISA slot and it worked or you needed to solder some other electronic parts? What about BIOS, you needed to patch something or it worked flawless?

seleryba wrote on 2020-06-14, 12:23:

😮
Wow, congrats! Not the easiest thing to solder in, especially when the tin is not the easiest to remove from holes (even with desoldering wire).
You needed to just solder in the ISA slot and it worked or you needed to solder some other electronic parts? What about BIOS, you needed to patch something or it worked flawless?

What has helped me when I've run out of desoldering wire is using a thin rod for cleaning desoldering guns or a metal paperclip after melting the tin. Keep wiggling it after having put it in the hole and remove the soldering iron, again keep wiggling so that the rod doesn't actually get soldered and then remove the rod as well.
The desoldering wire is also more effective with extra flux.

seleryba wrote on 2020-06-14, 12:23:

😮 Wow, congrats! Not the easiest thing to solder in, especially when the tin is not the easiest to remove from holes (even with […]
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CMB75 wrote on 2020-06-14, 10:33:

Follow up on my dual king ISA slot project … SUCCESS

😮
Wow, congrats! Not the easiest thing to solder in, especially when the tin is not the easiest to remove from holes (even with desoldering wire).
You needed to just solder in the ISA slot and it worked or you needed to solder some other electronic parts? What about BIOS, you needed to patch something or it worked flawless?

Thanks, but to be honest the process was rather simple and straight forward.

I made way too much fuzz about it myself. I read the specifications for different components, checked each and every supporting component (resistors, caps, etc.), measured everything multiple times (with and without load)… yada, yada, yada… bottom line: as always, you can only win if you dare to try.

Desoldering the solder pads was a real pain as I couldn’t use the desoldering gun (the pads are smaller than my smallest tip). So I had to use desoldering wire, again a time consuming but rather simple process. Soldering in an ISA edge card bus connector is really easy and done in less than 20 minutes.

Regarding the BIOS I already prepared extracting parts from the VTXE - again too much preparation work - it worked right out of the box. So, I guess I was really lucky on one hand, but well prepared if something would have gone wrong.

seleryba wrote on 2020-06-13, 16:10:

Haha, I know that feel. Last year I bought large amount of used floppy disks. Dug around and found some DOS porn floppies with looped animations and some "story" behind it. 😁 Well, it's still a time capsule somehow.

Were these by any chance the *.dl files (not *.dll, single d, single l)? If so and you stil have them - please let me know. I have a small collection of such files. What? It's a bit of history there.

Deksor wrote on 2020-06-13, 16:18:

Same here, I found port on old 360K floppy disks once 🤣. Can you imagine porn on EGA ? Well I saw it ... That was ridiculous ! (But still better than Atari 2600 porn I think lmao)

Frankly, I cannot. Do you have these still lying anywhere around?

TechieDude wrote on 2020-06-13, 16:49:

🤣 I had also found porn on my laptop (Satellite A100) when I first found it back in September. Homemade porn, in fact. Seriously, who the hell abandons their PC with porn of themselves?!

Was it at least watchable? I mean, some sights really make you want to bleach your eyes afterwards...

Yes I still have them

CMB75 wrote on 2020-06-14, 13:09:

Thanks, but to be honest the process was rather simple and straight forward.

Good for you! This board looks like the maximum what can be get from this platform. Hopefully games will work well. @TechieDude thanks for soldering tips.

About pr0n: I have sent PM for @OldCat, if anyone is intrested too, just give me note and I will just upload it here.

---

Today I have spent some time on my Compaq Prolinea 4/66 I bought a half year ago (that's a different machine than in previous post). Intel 486DX-66, 16 MB RAM, Tseng ET4000/W.

I have added CD drive for it. Didn't had any low speed one, so I decided to mount standard x52 and set the speed with some DOS and Windows tools. Removed some "52x speed" markings with a little bit of acetone. I won't do that on valuable hardware, anyway this CD is for price of ice cream. Now it looks like the original part and it is quiet.

Installed PS2Rate and change default choppy 40 Hz to 100 Hz. Now the mouse cursor is super smooth.

Installed some drivers for Aztech soundcard (that was painful, it was hard to download right ones) and better Tseng ET4000/W drivers by MicroLabs. Also installed some software I remember from my dad's PC from the 90s.

This build is so slow for Windows 95... But it has to be. That's how my dad's PC was. 😁

seleryba wrote on 2020-06-14, 17:47:

Today I have spent some time on my Compaq Prolinea 4/66 I bought a half year ago (that's a different machine than in previous post). Intel 486DX-66, 16 MB RAM, Tseng ET4000/W.

Nice ! I finally got around to near finishing a mid tower local purchase. Has an Intel D865PCD board, 2.93Ghz P4, 512Mb ram, Radeon 7000 AGP video, DVD/Rom and Creative Modem Blaster. Needed a HD so added a 250Gb Maxtor IDE and installed XP. Had some quirks and think I fixed most of them. The case is an Enlight with Enlight 300W PSU. Picked it up for $15 back end of April, had to drive about 45 minutes one way to pick it up. Some pictures of it back when first got it home: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Been a busy last week - finally figured out DDMA on the Igel Winterminal-J (Winnet IV). It turns out that deactivating delayed PCI operation disables DDMA on the southbridge. I also stripped down the thin client to its bare minimums to do a what-do-ya-know on the hardware.

And what do ya know, going through the motherboard manual there were an issue on a hard coded setting accessing the M-Systems DiskOnChip module (which was removed...it was supposed to emulate a custom ROM by implementing a 64k sliding window to its own address space via an upper memory block) I had to set it so it does not overlap access space with the D000 address needed by ESS to implement its DDMA. Once the DOC address was changed on the jumpers and DDMA turned on, SFX worked perfectly. The Solo-1 embedded onboard works fine now. Had to make sure that the embedded Solo is enabled via the jumper, and the Realtek RTL8139 is disabled. On the right side of the ESS1938S there is a 4 pin connector labeled MIT1...my guess is...Mitsumi CD audio interface? I’ll need to do a continuity test with the 2 side pins and pins 37 and 38 on the ES1938S itself (37 and 38 are Aux-A left and right, respectively,

The next one is to look at the PSU details - looks clean, the caps are all in decent condition...rather important as it is passively cooled (the fan grate does not contain a fan).

The 2x256MB 16 chip “low density” RAM (the same kind used in Intel 440 machines) arrived and was successfully recognized. This does make it easier to load ISOs into RAM and map them into virtual

drives in DOS. Not sure if I can toss a 512MB unit in there to get 768...I might have a unit I can borrow from my Cobalt Qube 3 Pro (that machine has 2x512 MB).

Next up, the K6-2+ Embedded variant has been ordered, and I am hoping for more options for downclocking the machine.

As for other accessories, I went for a few multimedia device enhancements - A cheap-ish 3dfx Voodoo 2, and a dual output equipped Appian Gemini (which is based on an S3 Savage4 MX with 16MB of VRAM). Also picked up a BTC ESS Audiodrive ES1868F ISA PnP audio card - this might come in handy should I need a joystick/media port. It has an IDE interface, which can be useful...

Then of course, now it’s time to figure out how to install an optical drive - the Winnet-J only has a single IDE44 interface. I was thinking of using an IDE44 primary/secondary cable (used in Amigas), then figure out how to recycle an old laptop drive - this would mean looking for an IDE44 to slimline optical drive interface, or failing that, something that can go between IDE44 to IDE40, and then use an IDE40 drive - the Berg FDC power connector will need to be recrimped to a Molex connector. The ideal would be to have the SD-to-IDE device on primary, the optical drive on secondary, Solo-1 as the “good enough” audio, and either 3dfx or S3 Savage as the better GPU for Win98, and then for DOS, either retain the Solo-1 or use the ES1868F.

Got 2 of the 3 issues squared away on my TI Extensa-Scholar ESS3/Acer E610CDT laptop and now know that a bad CMOS battery can cause the basic settings in the BIOS setup itself to lock up. 1/3 of the keyboard functions, but the rest does not, so either a new keyboard is required or repairing the current one, except the current one has keys that are faded.

Room design to the Lara Croft, aka Tomb Raider!! Level design the Wolf3D, Rise of the Triad, William Shatner's TekWar, Tel Aviv with Ray Dream 3D 😉.

Two things.. First, I installed the SAA1099P chips I got in the mail from Azerbaijan onto my Snark Barker. Now I have a Sound Blaster 1.0 with a DSP 2.0. Great. Except I still don't have the potentiometer, but that will be here tomorrow, so I guess in 24 Hours I will have this card finished.

Second, I opened up my MMX-200 1997 build, removed the ESS ES1868 sound card and replaced it with a C-Media CMI8330 because I'm curious about how well it's SB16 compatibility works, and how its FM Synth sounds.

Figured out why my Packard Bell swaps.

It normally has 256 MiB of RAM, but QEMM gimps it at 64 MiB with this line in AUTOEXEC.BAT :

1C:\WINDOWS\QEMM.EXE RAM

I don't know how to remove that limit while keeping the usage of QEMM (as it frees up a lot of precious conventional memory)

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-06-15, 21:29:

Figured out why my Packard Bell swaps. […]
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Figured out why my Packard Bell swaps.

It normally has 256 MiB of RAM, but QEMM gimps it at 64 MiB with this line in AUTOEXEC.BAT :

Copy code to clipboard

1C:\WINDOWS\QEMM.EXE RAM

I don't know how to remove that limit while keeping the usage of QEMM (as it frees a lot of precivous conventional memory)

Which version of QEMM do you use? Nevermind - Windows, anyway, up to 6.0 it could only address 64MB, from 7.04 up you'll have to use USERAM=1M-256M or UR=...

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM#Limitations

It's v6 indeed. I'll try that, thank you. 😀

Assembled my dual king project yesterday evening. Only some minor changes to be done like tidying up the cables…

But there are some things I’d like to change in the future:

1. A 3D printed airflow channel for the Voodoo5 (taking up only one but not two PCI slots)
2. A different USB 2.0 card with NEC controller (the one used is hogging three interrupts)

Does anyone know of an available USB-2.0-PCI-card with at least 2 ports which requires fewer interrupts while still working within DOS 6.22, Win98SE and WinXP? (I know there’s a thread, but it is six years old … Belkin seems to be available but I could not find any validated evidence of it using fewer IRQs.)

@CMB75

I am a simple man. I see a system with 2 cpu's, I get happy. I could nitpick about cable routing, but unless you have a window on the case, its a moot issue.

But to answer your questions/concerns:

1: Do yourself a favor and cut out the fan holes in the rear of the case. Get a proper size hole saw and just remove ALL that metal blocking the airflow. You can buy wire fangaurd. That is going to do more to improve temps than anything else. Also, why is 1 exaust port without a fan?

2: I just did a quick ebay search for "nec usb 2.0" And got 90+ results. Just pick a card that looks nice, AND doesn't come from china. 9/10 of my ebay searches I eliminate china as a source, for hopefully obvious reasons. Also be careful of the chinese dummy sellers that are local. When in doubt, buy a name brand. syba, siig, rosewill, belkin, etc. I looked at ebay germany and item number 253908153006 strikes me as card i'd pay money for (if I didnt already have a dozen usb cards).

luckybob wrote on 2020-06-16, 08:57:

2: I just did a quick ebay search for "nec usb 2.0" And got 90+ results. Just pick a card that looks nice, AND doesn't come from china. 9/10 of my ebay searches I eliminate china as a source, for hopefully obvious reasons. Also be careful of the chinese dummy sellers that are local. When in doubt, buy a name brand. syba, siig, rosewill, belkin, etc. I looked at ebay germany and item number 253908153006 strikes me as card i'd pay money for (if I didnt already have a dozen usb cards).

Yes, thanks, you're right it is still quite easy to find USB 2.0 PCI cards but do they use fewer than three IRQs? The one I use has the typical 4+1 configuration, works under MS DOS 6.22, Win98SE and WinXP but it uses 3 IRQs.

I've never cared about usb in a DOS environment.

Also 3 irq does not seem correct. Maybe 1 physical irq and 2 logical? I can see that. Maybe it's using more irq because it has more base ports.

Try a 2-port. Worst case scenario, you need a hub.

luckybob wrote on 2020-06-16, 09:30:

I've never cared about usb in a DOS environment.

Usually I don't use USB under DOS either but I don't want to use CF cards or networking* on this system. It's just convenient for the data exchange. And, as the system will tripple boot DOS,98SE,XP - I want to use USB2.0.

* for now

I'm the opposite, 3com or Intel network cards are my go-to means of working on these machines. I even have cards that can boot into windows over the network.

I'd try a 2 port usb card and see if that helps you.