Just received a beautiful Turtle Beach Tropez, it has one of my favourite synthesizer the ICS Wavefront.
The sound of this synth is a bit nostalgic to me.... here she is in all its glory :

It has expandable dram banks, which is a first for me on this particular chipset. Looking forward to play with her.

Soooo, a friend of mine got me this on a flea market:

Looks like it's a Evans & Sutherland 3D acceleration card with the "Freedom" chip. "Park City" might be the model name of the actual card, but so far I haven't been able to confirm this.

The card uses a whole bunch of chips, among them is S3 Vision 968:

This is of course a workstation card with support for OpenGL and hardware 3D acceleration in CAD and other professional applications. Now, the biggest question for me is, can it run glQuake?

I remember reading about John Carmack once getting sick with office bullshit and locking himself up in a hotel to work on Quake 3 engine in early 1998:

I’m getting a hotel room in a state where I don’t know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no distractions.

I bought a new computer specifically for this purpose - A Dolch portable pentium-II system. The significant thing is that it has full length PCI slots, so I was able to put an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator in it (not enough room for an intergraph Realizm, though), and still drive the internal LCD screen. It works out pretty well, but I’m sure there will be conventional laptops with good 3D acceleration available later this year.

Now, the Dolch he mentions has got to be a Dolch PAC 65 machine that uses a passive SBC backplane instead of a typical AT/ATX motherboard. Which means, no AGP slot. It also means that the display on that thing is driven by a videochip integrated into the processor board that connects using an LVDS-like cable. Here comes the "pass-through" part of the card:

On the other hand, a 1995 card could be too old for early 1998. Then again, Integraph Realizm is 1996 as well, and it looks like later E&S AccelGraphics boards are either half-length or they use AGP.

Thankfully I also got a set of 5 floppy disks with the card that contain drivers for WinNT 3.51, utilities and demos.

Tried running the demos on the disk (on a GeForce 3, because I had nothing else running ATM):

(you can see a short video if you click the thumbnail)

Looks like the model is missing the textures (that's what the SIMM72 memory module is for on the E&S card) and lightning (supposed to be produced by the spheres orbiting the head). Guess my next step would be to build a WinNT machine — I suppose it's going to be a WinNT 4.0 since most OpenGL games (including glQuake) don't support 3.51. If I am not mistaken, WinNT 4 should support the 3.51 drivers, too.

Does anybody have more info on this card? Maybe some drivers for later WinNT or Win9x? So far I've only found this press release that mentions "game development" as one of the possible markets for the card and promise of a Windows 95 driver "when ready". Archive.org doesn't have a full copy of Evans & Sutherland website for 1995-1996 and there are no mentions of Freedom on later copies.

This arrived with the post this morning.
Total damage: 5 bucks 😀

I got this 486 mainboard with PCI and 3.3V support. BUT I found no manual. It identifies itself as Terminator II upon boot but all information I could find online was for a mainboard with
only two ram slots and different jumper layouts. I will make a separate thread hoping that somebody might know where to get more information.

Luckily the voltage jumper is described nicely, so no issues there, at least.

Got these two beauties today: CT2940 and CT3910. They need a little cleaning. Also got two motherboards, one is Pentium II and the other is Pentium III.

Sony WEGA KV13FS110. Should be a great small TV for a retro gaming corner. Seller pic:

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-05, 16:45:

Sony WEGA KV13FS110. Should be a great small TV for a retro gaming corner.

Beautiful.

I love how 90s consoles look on a Sony Trinitron. Those scanlines must be witnessed in person, pictures don't do CRTs justice. I have one of those as well, and happily use it for my PlayStation 1&2, Sega Megadrive and SNES.

Yet another IBM product... no idea what system it was used for.

Miphee wrote on 2020-08-07, 07:31:

Yet another IBM product... no idea what system it was used for.

It's for the PCjr.

Man I haven't seen that rf modulator since I was a kid. My uncle gave me my cousin's old pcjr when I was a kid and that was in one of the boxes of parts for it. Thanks for the trip down memory lane good times.

imi wrote on 2020-08-04, 19:28:

so I found this hiding on ebay...

Intel InBoard XT to 386DX upgrade card :3c ...I wonder if this works fine in XT clones too, needs a good clean though ^^
hardware39_39.jpg

Wow, nice, I bought one inside Commodore PC10 few months ago, so yeah, it works in clones (although my had custom cable because original wouldn't reach the CPU socket in this machine, so yeah, I'm missing the original cable). Works like a charm - and shows as "386 XT machine" in CheckIt which is pretty cool. Those are pretty rare and usually expensive too.

New retro gear:

Whoops, wrong forum...

HanJammer wrote on 2020-08-07, 10:28:

imi wrote on 2020-08-04, 19:28:

so I found this hiding on ebay...

Intel InBoard XT to 386DX upgrade card :3c ...I wonder if this works fine in XT clones too, needs a good clean though ^^
hardware39_39.jpg

Wow, nice, I bought one inside Commodore PC10 few months ago, so yeah, it works in clones (although my had custom cable because original wouldn't reach the CPU socket in this machine, so yeah, I'm missing the original cable). Works like a charm - and shows as "386 XT machine" in CheckIt which is pretty cool. Those are pretty rare and usually expensive too.

awesome, thank you, I've got a PC10-III to try it in then :3
cpu socket is right next to the isa slots so the original cable should reach unless it is upside down or something.

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. Bought a Promise EIDE Pro Super I/O ISA controller card that has an EIDE BIOS that supports LBA for systems that are LBA-less (286, 386, and early 486 systems), and not one IDE, but two IDE ports and so many jumpers to configure each and every port (floppy enable/disable, IDE primary and secondary enable/disable, GamePort enable/disable, COM1 and COM2 enable/disable, plus HW address and IRQ assignments, and LPT enable/disable, plus HW address, DMA for ECP/EPP, printer port speed between uni-directional, bi-directional, ECP, and EPP, and IRQ assignments). This'll be perfect for my 386DX/486DLC computer system and using the Ethernet card will be a thing of the past. Soon, I will backup the BIOS and post it on here in case anyone needs it, make an XT-IDE Universal BIOS + XT-FDC BIOS in case I get a 360K drive and install it sometime externally. I think I got it at a great price and I will do a video about the card once I get my M326 V5.2 board installed and buy a 387-40 NPU for my system.

Also bought me a Cyrix FasMath C80387-40GP (new) for my M326 V5.2 board. This'll be a super fun upgrade from 33MHz to 40MHz (board swap).

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-08-05, 05:57:

i managed to get S3D terminal velocity running last night. beware. it is a nightmare. I'm running a diamond stealth pro 2000 4mb […]
Show full quote

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-08-03, 18:04:

Ordered an S3 Virge DX 4MB and an LC Power 550W PSU today.

The Virge will be mainly used for 2D DOS gaming, but I'm also a bit curious how S3D games like Terminal Velocity and Tomb Raider will work on it.

The PSU will hopefully allow my AthlonXP rig to run at higher clock speeds. It seems to have 40A on the 5V rail, so I should be all set.

i managed to get S3D terminal velocity running last night. beware. it is a nightmare. I'm running a diamond stealth pro 2000 4mb (virge DX).

the s3d versions of these games expect the 325 core (original virge, not gx/dx/gx2 etc) so you need to run a TSR and special launcher to run the games. I must have spent about 2 hours trying to get it working in Win95, but only just managed to get Terminal Velocity running in DOS. to complicate things, i found 2 different sets of TSRs/launcher fix exes. One was a zip called "s3dtool" and another "s3dpatch". both have similar files but one has extra win9x vxd drivers.

under DOS - in theory, run the TSR, then run the game's exe via the fix.

ie, "C:\Games\TV3D\S3DSRVR.exe
C:\Games\TV3d\S3DRUN.EXE TV.EXE"

this is what the readme says... but I'm almost certain that I loaded the exe via the TSR - C:\games\TV3d\s3dsrvr tv.exe

It was 2am so i was pretty flat by that stage. I'll double check it tonight; gonna try to run Descent 2 and Actua Soccer.

i was blown away with how well terminal velocity ran in svga 640x480, maybe 5-10fps less than what i'd get at 320x200 res in my 166mmx. it did screw up with z-fighting a few times but it can be fixed by entering a 2d menu and back again.

Thanks for this timely post. I scored one of those S3D discs not long ago ( Re: 3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D) ) and this week I finally have it in the same room as my S3D system. No luck on the first attempt to run Descent 2, so I'll look into this method.

Lot with some controller cards in very good condition. Bought because of the ACC Micro 3201 4xFloppy Controller.

The card is described here:
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/ACC_Micr … ctronics_KT-204

Its working and mine has a newer BIOS if someone interested:

Author By Ea-Chan Hu 88',12,26
ACC 3201 Advanced FDC Firmware V2.00

Bought a Packard Bell PB450 motherboard that is fully functional and cheap.

Hello, fist time posting. Just got an HD 2600XT off of Ebay and im currently bidding on a 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 AGP.

welcome!

PROTIP: Dont post ebay links here. Its a long story filled with drama.

My latest 2 hardware purchases.

Both are sellers pics although I have already received and tinkered with the athlon. Very interesting (and to my ear quite good) DOS compatibility on the sound.

The SS7 board is untested but looks ok and was a good price if it works. I really wanted an ATX one. CPU is included with it but unknown spec.