I grabbed a second Startech CF-IDE adapters and a cheepo Verbatim 2gig CF card today since they where cheap.

Il be using the 2gig card to hold the swap file for my Win95 machine. No biggie if it diess earlier. Much cheaper for it to go, then the nice SanDisk Extreme cards I use for the main HDD.

Attempted to prettify Windows 3.0 on the Tandy 1000 TL/3 setup. Hooray. The restrictions concerning wallpaper usage in real-mode, and at higher resolutions, are... especially fun.

I tried to blindly connect a 2x4 USB header to a 2x5 USB socket. I found the two Ground pins, and assumed that the rest was the same as a regular 2x5 (it just skipped the 2x1 S-Ground pins) and wired it up . After 30 minute of use I smelled a burn. Opening up the case I found that two of my dupont cables had started melting. Oops.. Apparently the pinout is different..

I'm amazed that I did not cause a short or the system did not blow a fuse. It was 100% stable the whole time. Now when I go into BIOS and look at system health, I see 15.5V on the 12V rail, for whatever reason. Not sure if the BIOS is wrong, or if this is a critical problem with the board or PSU.. I will measure the +12V rail on the molex connectors today.

Cloudschatze wrote on 2020-10-06, 04:22:

https://www.symphoniae.com/Tandy/win30_tl3_s.jpg Attempted to prettify Windows 3.0 on the Tandy 1000 TL/3 setup. Hooray. The r […]
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Attempted to prettify Windows 3.0 on the Tandy 1000 TL/3 setup. Hooray. The restrictions concerning wallpaper usage in real-mode, and at higher resolutions, are... especially fun.

Just out of curiosity, is that some tiled window manager you're using or did you meticulously align those windows by hand?

Just digging through my consoles and replacing internal tabbed batteries with battery sockets. Dragging my feet on ordering rechargeable cells for my Dreamcasts, because they cost multiple times more than a plain CR2032, and I barely use the systems anyway. Replaced the battery in my 1.0 version of Ocarina of Time with a socket and new CR2032. It's working fine, but the installation was ugly. The RF shielding inside the cartridge doesn't provide much room for sockets, and the only ones I had that were low enough profile to fit under the shield didn't align with the lands on the board, so I had to install them at a weird angle and use wires. NES carts are similarly annoying, but SNES carts have plenty of space, vertically.
As far as computers go, I haven't fiddled with my Win95 project (adding My Pictures et al to the system) due to burnout, which seems to murder every project. Seems like after I got my main 486 and Pentium systems online and in good working order, the motivation to do more kind of melted. If I feel better, I may try importing mydocs.dll from Windows 98 to see if that can be hammered into Windows 95 to make it treat specific directories as user/system folders, as seen in Windows XP and later.

I am working on my S775 system that didn't get any attention in the recent past. Installed an Audigy2 + LiveDrive, cleaned up some cables and now I am setting up a fresh copy of Windows Vista x64, mainly because it's totally period correct and I don't have any other Vista system around. At this point I just want to find out if it's really that terrible once both service packs are installed.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-10-06, 08:12:

I tried to blindly connect a 2x4 USB header to a 2x5 USB socket. I found the two Ground pins, and assumed that the rest was the same as a regular 2x5 (it just skipped the 2x1 S-Ground pins) and wired it up . After 30 minute of use I smelled a burn. Opening up the case I found that two of my dupont cables had started melting. Oops.. Apparently the pinout is different..

I'm amazed that I did not cause a short or the system did not blow a fuse. It was 100% stable the whole time. Now when I go into BIOS and look at system health, I see 15.5V on the 12V rail, for whatever reason. Not sure if the BIOS is wrong, or if this is a critical problem with the board or PSU.. I will measure the +12V rail on the molex connectors today.

Sounds like somewhere along the way 12V got shorted/spliced with 3.3V? If the 12V was running a little high, like say 12.2-ish volts, that'd be near perfect for 15.5V...

gex85 wrote on 2020-10-06, 12:44:

I am working on my S775 system that didn't get any attention in the recent past. Installed an Audigy2 + LiveDrive, cleaned up some cables and now I am setting up a fresh copy of Windows Vista x64, mainly because it's totally period correct and I don't have any other Vista system around. At this point I just want to find out if it's really that terrible once both service packs are installed.

You'd have to compare it against Windows 7 on the same system, to see how bad it really is.

Performance issues aside, UAC will drive you crazy in Vista!

appiah4 wrote on 2020-10-06, 08:12:

I tried to blindly connect a 2x4 USB header to a 2x5 USB socket. I found the two Ground pins, and assumed that the rest was the same as a regular 2x5 (it just skipped the 2x1 S-Ground pins) and wired it up . After 30 minute of use I smelled a burn. Opening up the case I found that two of my dupont cables had started melting. Oops.. Apparently the pinout is different..

I'm amazed that I did not cause a short or the system did not blow a fuse. It was 100% stable the whole time. Now when I go into BIOS and look at system health, I see 15.5V on the 12V rail, for whatever reason. Not sure if the BIOS is wrong, or if this is a critical problem with the board or PSU.. I will measure the +12V rail on the molex connectors today.

Might be the 12V has been shorted and regulation tried to compensate, f*ing the regulation totally up, maybe even damaging some sense circuitry in the power supply ..

PTherapist wrote on 2020-10-06, 14:31:

gex85 wrote on 2020-10-06, 12:44:

I am working on my S775 system that didn't get any attention in the recent past. Installed an Audigy2 + LiveDrive, cleaned up some cables and now I am setting up a fresh copy of Windows Vista x64, mainly because it's totally period correct and I don't have any other Vista system around. At this point I just want to find out if it's really that terrible once both service packs are installed.

You'd have to compare it against Windows 7 on the same system, to see how bad it really is.

Performance issues aside, UAC will drive you crazy in Vista!

UAC was the first thing I disabled 😉
I will probably set up a dual-boot system with Windows XP. Having installed Vista Ultimate x64, both service packs, some updates and some drivers, I was a bit shocked to find that the 32GB SSD that I intended to use as a system drive was almost full. The bare system alone takes up about 20 GB, add 4GB pagefile and 4GB hibernation file and voilà, only 2.5 GB free space left on drive C:. Crap. I'll have to clone it to a bigger partition on the spinning disk (WD Raptor, so it should at least be fast enough).
I did some 3DMark Vantage benchmarking with the GTX 285 that lives in there, and the results are on par with those I found online, so I am pretty satisfied with that.

Vista is like WinME - something I can' t help but like... from a safe distance.

NautilusComputer wrote on 2020-10-06, 14:00:

Sounds like somewhere along the way 12V got shorted/spliced with 3.3V? If the 12V was running a little high, like say 12.2-ish volts, that'd be near perfect for 15.5V...

H3nrik V! wrote on 2020-10-06, 17:01:

Might be the 12V has been shorted and regulation tried to compensate, f*ing the regulation totally up, maybe even damaging some sense circuitry in the power supply ..

There is 12.2V on the 12V molex rail and a perfect 5V on the molex rail so it's probably not an issue with the actual regulation. If anything, it's probably a BIOS bug (shows 12V+3V instead of 12V) or a sensor fault. Either way, it seems to be harmless.

I don't like how HOT my Matrox G450 seems to run though. I will probably remove the rear exhaust fan and mount it to the front as a front intake fan, as that would blow directly onto the expansion slots and cool it a bit.

pan069 wrote on 2020-10-06, 09:36:

Just out of curiosity, is that some tiled window manager you're using or did you meticulously align those windows by hand?

Not sure about being meticulous or anything, but it's all manually arranged.

Hooray for 1-bit "stipple" art...

Can anybody identify what type of motherboard this is (brand/model)? Want to see how large the supported HDD capacity can be.

I connected a small mixer to my DOS gaming machine. It's small but built well with a metal enclosure, and has four inputs—just right for my setup:

1. Soundcard output
2. MT-32 output
3. SC-55 output
4. CVX4 Covox clone

I did this because I've found that some games with MT-32 soundtracks mute the LINE IN on my soundcard when they start (most notably for me, Might & Magic III and Prince of Persia 2). I also figured it would better to run the MT-32 and SC-55 outputs separately rather than daisy chaining them. This means I can also just turn both units on whenever I turn my PC on, and then use the mixer to mute whatever is not being used by a particular game (as a side effect, this means I can use the screen on the SC-55 to monitor channel levels for the MT-32!).

With this, I am pretty content with this machine. It took a few months of scrounging for parts where I could, getting used to DOS again, and troubleshooting little issues here and there... but now I can run anything from speed-dependent games (Wing Commander) to early unaccelerated 3D games (Quake) on actual hardware with the "ideal" music device for each game, so I feel like I'm in gaming heaven 🤣.

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-10-07, 05:59:

Can anybody identify what type of motherboard this is (brand/model)? Want to see how large the supported HDD capacity can be.

Perhaps a FREE COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY, INC. 80486L-EISA ?

https://th99.infania.net/m/E-H/31246.htm

http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/2529

Yep that looks like the right board.

I doubt you can figure out the max hdd capacity for it that way though, this is mostly a software problem (bios) and not a hardware level (unless you want to go above 128GB)

The wallpaper now cycles each time Windows starts. Such a meaningful life I lead.

Cloudschatze wrote on 2020-10-08, 02:59:

Such a meaningful life I lead.

Don't ever change, Cloudschatze! I like your style 😁

And... the full-color/resolution version of the active Windows wallpaper is now displayed in-place when launching an application that leverages the Tandy graphics chipset.

Why, I'm practically a shoo-in for the "Worlds Biggest Dork" award!