VOGONS


Reply 16580 of 27186, by pixel_workbench

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I tried unsuccessfully yet again to get a Trident 9850 AGP video card to work on my Via Apollo Pro 133A board, and it still locks up in 3D games despite all my BIOS tweaking, Powerstrip settings, and driver reinstalls. The card works fine on an Intel chipset though.

If this is any indication of the "fun" and "challenge" an AGP card would provide in a SS7 board, then I will gladly skip that mess and stick with my "boring" Slot 1 440BX board.

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P2 400 unlocked / Asus P3B-F / Voodoo3 3k / MX300 + YMF718

Reply 16581 of 27186, by Shagittarius

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RetroLizard wrote on 2020-09-05, 07:39:
kolderman wrote on 2020-09-05, 06:11:

Cleaned and built out a Shuttle SS51G PC. Fresh thermal paste, swapped the HDD for a SSD and replaced the CD-rom, bios update, and a fresh copy of Win98 has given it new life. Also a chance to use some components I was not running anywhere else: Geforce4-4400 and a SB Live!. Note how small this PC is compared to my previous compact which it is resting on.

Out of curiosity, where do you find cases like that?

Shuttle PC
https://us.shuttle.com/

Reply 16582 of 27186, by creepingnet

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Finally succeeded at my first old CRT TV set repair last night. About 2 week ago I got two free TVs from a guy in hopes one would work, one did, the other needed a little "help".

TV #1 (Working from Day 1)
1993 Magnavox CML192C102 27" CRT TV - I've been using this with the Nintendo and Atari 2600 so far, all it needed was a minor tweak to the Focus and it's like brand new (if you don't include some HEAVY scrubbing with sanitary wipes to get all the dirt off of it).

TV #2 (fixed last night)
1989 Mitsubishi CS-2720R
This poor thing was missing it's control access door, covered in stickers, and had a frayed power cord. I bodged the power cord back together for testing, would not power on at all. Opened it up, had about 30 years of dust inside of it - it looks to terrible I thought the TV had been in a mudslide or something. Last night, on a whim, I discharged the tube, took the whole chassis out, checked the fuses, checked solder joints - found the Flyback had a couple oxidized joints, and clearly the real problem was that the solder joints for the transformer that triggers the power-on relay was cracked. So I touched all those up and made sure continuity was not a problem. Cleaned up all the wires and tidied up the cable routing. Repaired my now broken bodge, put some UL electrical tape over it - pressed power - and it came right up. Still needs some tweaks, but that's about it.

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My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 16583 of 27186, by pentiumspeed

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Ooh a RCA chassis TV! RCA CRT is very good that late in time, I knew their designs too well, used to repair them for a living.

1. When you find bad solder joints, especially raised resistors and horizontal driver transformer which is small grey one sitting between small transistor driver and larger horizontal transistor that drives flyback transformer, that one with thick red wire that goes over to the top terminating in a suction cup, no need to pop that off or you will get bit by 25KV shock, laughs. You must remove these resistors and other items (do one at a time), that said small transformer, okay you have to actually scrape the soldered pins/leads part down to bare copper. Also replace all small capacitors in and around power supply section.

Also watch out for soldered rivet eyelets on these too, they were oxidized since new and need to be buffed clean with abrasive eraser or sanding rubber bit after desoldered completely clean then scrape the pins that goes through these.

Resoldering does NOT help here on any TVs, speaking from experience, mechanical abrasive and mechanical scraping with a knife works *best* after desoldered.

Once done, it is very nice RCA after taking care of these short comings.

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 16584 of 27186, by PTherapist

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Received a new addition to my collection, a Games Console from the 1970s with 3 games -

Jon11Pbl.jpg
o5pTTh9l.jpg
v5E5rBrl.jpg

It's a Radofin-branded "1292 Advanced Programmable Video System" console.

The left controller had a snapped/missing stick, so I improvised by using an old pen casing wrapped in some masking tape. It shall suffice for now and works quite well. 🤣

Another retro-related activity for today was restoring an old Sony TCM-919 cassette player. Needed new belts and general cleaning. A work in progress, as I fitted the new belts and got it playing back ok, but fast forward & rewind is not functioning correctly. Clearly needs more work when I get some spare time. Once it's working properly it will be ideal for loading games onto my Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair ZX Spectrum & Acorn Electron computers.

Reply 16585 of 27186, by assasincz

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Made some new decoration today - Hercules 3D Prophet 8600LE. I used to have one of these as a teenager, it was my first graphics card that I got specifically for gaming. This one is faulty though (some RAM issues). But makes a nice display, I love the blue!

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Reply 16586 of 27186, by pentiumspeed

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Worked on Deskpro 386s , first booted it first to make sure PSU is good, then swapped out boards for 386/25e and booted that upgraded computer up. No problem. Tested the 32 bit memory expansion card in it with extra 4mb module on it. Sees 9MB no problem in setup but the CMOS Dallas IC is flat. I'll take care of that later.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 16587 of 27186, by vetz

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Been playing around with my new timeperiod correct 1997 build with ASUS P/I-P65UP5 using (build log with pictures will come at some point)

  • Dual Pentium II 300mhz (SL2HA)
  • 192MB EDO 60ns RAM
  • Matrox Millennium II,
  • Canopus Pure3D 3DFX Voodoo Graphics (6MB)
  • PowerVR PCX2,
  • AWE64 GOLD
  • Asus PCI-2940UW (Asus MediaBus card) SCSI+SB16
  • IBM Ultrastar 9ES 9.1 GB SCSI harddrive
  • Plextor SCSI 40x CD (this drive is not period correct since its from 2002, but I do not own a black bezel drive from 1997. SCSI CD-ROM would have been installed in a system like this back in 97, so in it went

Managed to install the whole build into an old ATX case (which is the only case I have which will let me install the P65UPs CPU board AND also supports mounting an AT motherboard). The case is black, so I've installed black bezel'ed CD-ROM drive and floppy.

Thought I had bought a LVD harddrive (IBM Ultrastar 9ES) which came out in 1997, but after alot of testing and error searching I found out I got the FAST SE version (only upto 40mb/s, not 80mb/s). Kind of disappointed I didn't notice when I bought it on Ebay as I thought all 80pin SCA drives were LVD. In practice I don't think it matters unless it's using the cache for transferring.

Next thing I spent alot of time on were setting up Windows NT. It just wouldn't boot after install. Turns out you need to have the parition WITHIN the first 2gb on the entire harddrive. Luckily PartitionMagic 5.0 managed to move the partitions around without me having to reinstall everything. Running dualboot Windows 95 OSR 2.5 and Windows NT SP3 (staying within 1997). The P65UP5 must be one of the first motherboards to support boot from CDROM, it's very nice!

I've installed Office 97, Photoshop 4.0, Adobe Premiere and IE 4.0 in Windows NT. It's very snappy for running that time correct software. The SCSI drive seems to be NOS and I'm very happy with it (no loud whine from it).

I wanted to see how quick it would be in SP6a and webbrowsing, so I've temporarily upgraded the WinNT installation to try out Opera and RetroZilla.

http://www.win3x.org/uh19/ works great on IE 4.0 (I even tried it out in IE 2.0, but search didnt work), really looking forward to when that site also includes drivers for expansion cards!

Do anyone know if a black bezel SCSI drive from 1997 exists at all?

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 16588 of 27186, by PTherapist

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Dug out one of my PCs from storage to have a look what was inside, as my records didn't list any specific information about it. I couldn't remember anything about what was inside this PC, other than the installed CPU, RAM & HDD. Opened it up and was greeted with this:

FkfLDCMl.jpg

Lovely & red, but not so nice after a quick google search and finding out what it was - PC Chips M810L Rev 7.1C

Then to my surprise as I removed the screwed in cooler - AMD Duron CPU is soldered. 😲

I love the cooler, trying to pass off the CPU as a "Duron 1200+" when it appears it's nothing more than an 850MHz Duron slightly overclocked to 892MHz. 🤣

I got this PC free from a family friend many years back. They were pretty clueless about PCs so understandable how they ended up with such an oddball system like this.

The motherboard goes into storage now anyway, as I'm going to reuse the case for a Coppermine PIII 1.0GHz build.

Reply 16589 of 27186, by luckybob

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The whole "1200+" thing was actually a marketing thing from AMD. People only bought MHZ. So Intel made "faster" chips when in reality, the 850mhz Duron was likely very close in performance to Intel's 1200.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 16590 of 27186, by red_avatar

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johnny_cache wrote on 2020-09-05, 13:25:

Thanks so much for posting. God I miss these. I am actually finding some pretty cheap results on Ebay now. Can't decide between that or a Kayak XU.

Jesse

I paid €100 for mine including shipping from the US (I'm in the EU) so they sell quite cheaply. It was in excellent condition as well. Well worth to get as a retro rig since it's good looking, has solid hardware, very easy to work with, has a lot of slots for expansion, high compatibility and a solid BIOS.

Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870

Reply 16591 of 27186, by TheChexWarrior

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Voxel of AI items in the 90s. Some levels and models-content in the retro world. I made those.

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    Tomb Raider 4 level design.
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    Tel Aviv City in Unreal 1.
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    Opera Tower Tel Aviv, Unreal Engine 1.
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    Azrieli Towers, Tel Aviv. From 1997 to now.
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    Voxels of AI items in the 90s.
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Last edited by TheChexWarrior on 2020-09-07, 21:40. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 16592 of 27186, by red_avatar

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luckybob wrote on 2020-09-07, 18:53:

The whole "1200+" thing was actually a marketing thing from AMD. People only bought MHZ. So Intel made "faster" chips when in reality, the 850mhz Duron was likely very close in performance to Intel's 1200.

All companies play the "numbers" game sadly. Lots of misleading numbers to hide crappy performance. I know a lot of casual gamers who don't realize that a GTX 780 is WAAAY faster than a GTX 1050. Don't get me wrong, the X50 and X60 series were generally good entry cards for less serious gamers but I've seen quite a few people "upgrade" to a 1050 only to discover they get similar or worse performance over their GTX 770.

Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870

Reply 16593 of 27186, by appiah4

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PTherapist wrote on 2020-09-07, 18:33:
Dug out one of my PCs from storage to have a look what was inside, as my records didn't list any specific information about it. […]
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Dug out one of my PCs from storage to have a look what was inside, as my records didn't list any specific information about it. I couldn't remember anything about what was inside this PC, other than the installed CPU, RAM & HDD. Opened it up and was greeted with this:

FkfLDCMl.jpg

Lovely & red, but not so nice after a quick google search and finding out what it was - PC Chips M810L Rev 7.1C

Then to my surprise as I removed the screwed in cooler - AMD Duron CPU is soldered. 😲

I love the cooler, trying to pass off the CPU as a "Duron 1200+" when it appears it's nothing more than an 850MHz Duron slightly overclocked to 892MHz. 🤣

I got this PC free from a family friend many years back. They were pretty clueless about PCs so understandable how they ended up with such an oddball system like this.

The motherboard goes into storage now anyway, as I'm going to reuse the case for a Coppermine PIII 1.0GHz build.

That board has Universal AGP and would be great for a fast Voodoo 3 build. I have one such build in the works, using a Socket A KT133 with a Duron 1300MHz myself.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 16594 of 27186, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Got a similar board with a soldered Thoroughbred Athlon XP 2000+

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Reply 16595 of 27186, by darry

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luckybob wrote on 2020-09-07, 18:53:

The whole "1200+" thing was actually a marketing thing from AMD. People only bought MHZ. So Intel made "faster" chips when in reality, the 850mhz Duron was likely very close in performance to Intel's 1200.

I remember AMD's rating scheme, but not something as optimisic as calling an an 850Mhz a 1200+ . I bet that was a PC Chips maneuver. I doubt it had AMD's blessing in any way shape or form . Additionally, the pre-overclocking is unlikely to have been sanctioned by AMD either .

Reply 16596 of 27186, by flupke11

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Went through some mainboards for testing, and discovered I have a whole bunch of Asus P5PE-VM. Tested 4 so far and only encountered one dud, which is pretty good. I was pleased to see they all support Core2Duo up to X6800, so I'll keep one aside for a silent Win98 system.
Also tested a Via C3-1333 Nehemiah based mini-ITX board, which works and gives me a score of 893 in Speedsys. That's ok, but fares poorly compared to the 3332 the "el cheapo" E1500 gets on the Asus.

Reply 16597 of 27186, by PTherapist

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darry wrote on 2020-09-07, 22:07:
luckybob wrote on 2020-09-07, 18:53:

The whole "1200+" thing was actually a marketing thing from AMD. People only bought MHZ. So Intel made "faster" chips when in reality, the 850mhz Duron was likely very close in performance to Intel's 1200.

I remember AMD's rating scheme, but not something as optimisic as calling an an 850Mhz a 1200+ . I bet that was a PC Chips maneuver. I doubt it had AMD's blessing in any way shape or form . Additionally, the pre-overclocking is unlikely to have been sanctioned by AMD either .

That's what I was thinking. A quick google search doesn't shed much light on the issue.

Reply 16598 of 27186, by PTherapist

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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2020-09-07, 21:48:

Got a similar board with a soldered Thoroughbred Athlon XP 2000+

PC Chips M825G.JPG

Wow, makes me wonder exactly who these motherboards were aimed at.

Reply 16599 of 27186, by appiah4

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darry wrote on 2020-09-07, 22:07:
luckybob wrote on 2020-09-07, 18:53:

The whole "1200+" thing was actually a marketing thing from AMD. People only bought MHZ. So Intel made "faster" chips when in reality, the 850mhz Duron was likely very close in performance to Intel's 1200.

I remember AMD's rating scheme, but not something as optimisic as calling an an 850Mhz a 1200+ . I bet that was a PC Chips maneuver. I doubt it had AMD's blessing in any way shape or form . Additionally, the pre-overclocking is unlikely to have been sanctioned by AMD either .

These early Durons (and Athlons too for that matter) did not have a PR+ rating scheme anyway, that only started with the AthlonXP. A Duron 1200 ran at 1200MHz. I'm fairly sure it's just that the motherboard has several different versions with different speeds of Duron CPUs bolted onto it but they all use the same cooler, which was enthusiastically labelled 1200 after the fastest option.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.