I added an expansion pak to my N64. Now it has the same amount of RAM as my 486...yet it can run games that are approximately a billion times more complex.
Isn't life strange? A turn of the page OMG TIME TO PLAY MAJORA'S MASK!!

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-07-12, 07:25:

I added an expansion pak to my N64. Now it has the same amount of RAM as my 486...yet it can run games that are approximately a billion times more complex.
Isn't life strange? A turn of the page OMG TIME TO PLAY MAJORA'S MASK!!

It's even stranger when you get an everdrive, and can magically play patched n64DD with only the Expansion Pak actually being needed.

I played UT99 and Blood today

GOTEKs still growing on trees… prepared another couple of GOTEKs following the standard procedure.

• soldering some pin headers

• flashing the firmware

• adding an OLED display

• adding an active buzzer

OK, got to admit - did a real bad job on cutting out the pocket for the display this time. Anyways, still looking for some time to design a custom front bezel for those drives to make them look more like the real deal.

Those last ones I bought seem to have a rather dark color.

darry wrote on 2020-07-10, 22:33:

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-07-10, 22:17:

darry wrote on 2020-07-10, 15:37:

Agreed that 133MHz FSB on a 440BX is overclocking . That said, my 440BX based P3B-F 1.03 is stable running at 133MHz with an FX5900XT , as are many other P3B-F boards .

The Abit BX133 was obviously marketed as being 133MHz capable and I doubt they had to resort to binning chipsets.

My guess would be that 133MHz FSB on the 440BX chipset itself just works, even if out of spec, and that stability issues on certain boards are implementation dependent .

Out of curiosity, how did you get an 8x AGP video card to run in a 1x/2x AGP slot?

Geforce FX cards are universal AGP capable . They can run in a3.3 volt AGP 1.0 slot at AGP 2X speed .
See http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

Will a Geforce FX card still play mid-2000's (up to 2005) games well in a AGP 1.0 slot?

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-07-12, 19:40:

darry wrote on 2020-07-10, 22:33:

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-07-10, 22:17:

Out of curiosity, how did you get an 8x AGP video card to run in a 1x/2x AGP slot?

Geforce FX cards are universal AGP capable . They can run in a3.3 volt AGP 1.0 slot at AGP 2X speed .
See http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

Will a Geforce FX card still play mid-2000's (up to 2005) games well in a AGP 1.0 slot?

Only if they are DX8 (not DX9). DX9 came out in 2003 so bear in mind many games between 2003 and 2005 will not run well on the FX (e.g. Halo, FarCry, HL2, etc). Best off using a WINXP PC with a powerful PCIe gpu for games between 2003 and 2006 (inclusive).

Moved my Pentium 3 rig into a Chieftec Dragon.

Now to paint the case beige.

kolderman wrote on 2020-07-12, 19:58:

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-07-12, 19:40:

darry wrote on 2020-07-10, 22:33:

Geforce FX cards are universal AGP capable . They can run in a3.3 volt AGP 1.0 slot at AGP 2X speed .
See http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

Will a Geforce FX card still play mid-2000's (up to 2005) games well in a AGP 1.0 slot?

Only if they are DX8 (not DX9). DX9 came out in 2003 so bear in mind many games between 2003 and 2005 will not run well on the FX (e.g. Halo, FarCry, HL2, etc). Best off using a WINXP PC with a powerful PCIe gpu for games between 2003 and 2006 (inclusive).

Even 2002 is pushing it a bit for the GPU CPU and the CPU will be a significant limiting factor too by 2003. Things moved fast back then .

Getting the itch to build again. I planned on building an early PII system a year or so back but put it on hold. Found myself on eBay seeing what's out there tonight.

Repalced a few caps on my CT3670, because it was picking up a lot of noise. I thought it will help, and it is way better, but still it has a bit of background noise. I will continue tomorrow. I hope, by recapping the whole card, it will sound great again...

Backed up the Diamond SpeedSTAR VGA rev. C6 ISA card (ET4000AX) ROM chips: High, Low, and Character BIOSes and will do an inspection of the card to see what's going on. Could be corrosion on the pins and I'm out of both vinegar and DeoxIt D5 as I use vinegar for household cleaning and the DeoxIt D5 was used on a board that refuses to work.

Seriously thinking about converting my 486 back to a PCI motherboard. Getting sick of VLB's limitations and having a non-functioning turbo button.

Ahh but PCI 486 boards just don't have the same charm to them do they?

Where there even any PCI 486 boards out by 94? 94 and earlier is kinda the latest date i like stamped on alot of my 486 parts ,

Yes, heck pci actually started out on 486 platform ... In 1992 ! These boards are rare though and they use intel chipsets.
By 1994 UMC had released the 8886/8884 chipset and sis the 85c496/497 iirc, two very solid 486 PCI chipsets !

My retro activity of the day: I'm posting this from a OS X 10.5 Leopard VM on QEMU (UTM for iOS) using TenFourFox.

The whole VM is slow as hell but everything except audio works. It's surprising usable considering its a 2017 iPad Pro 12.9-inch and I have only 2GB of RAM available for the VM.

I think I need to tweak TTF and update the OS later. My first mac in 2010 had Snow Leopard and was an Intel Mac. So this is how a PowerPC Mac looks like... (rolleyes).

EDIT: That was fun, but I will not keep that VM on my iPad. It's shitloads slower than my Win 98 VM there. I will just back it up somewhere though, and waiting for a possible newer iPad Pro upgrade, as long as osy86 manages to get UTM working on iOS 14 without being attached to Xcode. For now I will not update to any of these betas.

Got the video card to work. It wasn't the card that wasn't broken, apparently, the 3Com boot ROM address was conflicting. After I got that all sorted out, I had to re-enter everything in the BIOS, minus the hard drive, and after I saved the settings (also after I disabled the Cyrix L1 cache via BIOS), it won't boot up again. Put the Trident DOS decelerator card back in and that works. So I'm stuck at this point and not sure if it's capacitor issues or the ROMs are just bad.

Changed the DIP Switch 1/3 to OFF and that worked. So it must've been set wrong or something else might've hit a snag.

Tested an un supported AMD K62 in an older socket7 board and got a nice string.

amadeus777999 wrote on 2020-07-14, 07:09:

Tested an un supported AMD K62 in an older socket7 board and got a nice string.

I ran an old Socket 7 board for years with a K6-2 displaying as a 486. A couple of years back I found a BIOS update and flashed that (was to fix an issue not related to the CPU identification) and it then correctly recognised the K6-2.

amadeus777999 wrote on 2020-07-14, 07:09:

Tested an un supported AMD K62 in an older socket7 board and got a nice string.

IIRC my MSI MS-5146 also showed this with a K6-2, though it was one of the later ones. (400 or 450 I think)

amadeus777999 wrote on 2020-07-14, 07:09:

Tested an un supported AMD K62 in an older socket7 board and got a nice string.

This was my k63 - 400 in a board with modded voltage before I found a bios update. It would even show different speeds sometimes.

Interesting - I like the oddities.