Hi all,

This weekend managed to save from the jaws of the recycle a gorgeous Gateway E4100 (black with silver face). It's a Pentium 4 Prescott @3.4 Ghz.

Being an Intel D865GLC motherboard I had to convert this to a Win98se battleship of sorts...

It didn't had a dedicated gpu, so I added a FX5900xt for good measure, now it's blazing fast, way too fast for Win98.

Xicor wrote on 2020-10-14, 15:33:

Hi all, […]
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Hi all,

This weekend managed to save from the jaws of the recycle a gorgeous Gateway E4100 (black with silver face). It's a Pentium 4 Prescott @3.4 Ghz.

Gateway_e4100.jpg

Being an Intel D865GLC motherboard I had to convert this to a Win98se battleship of sorts...

It didn't had a dedicated gpu, so I added a FX5900xt for good measure, now it's blazing fast, way too fast for Win98.

Warning about cleaning the plastics on that case. It will instantly start discoloring if any type of caustic cleaner is used such as rubbing alcohol, etc. It's unfortunate, but I found out firsthand.

liqmat wrote on 2020-10-14, 16:02:

Xicor wrote on 2020-10-14, 15:33:

Hi all, […]
Show full quote

Hi all,

This weekend managed to save from the jaws of the recycle a gorgeous Gateway E4100 (black with silver face). It's a Pentium 4 Prescott @3.4 Ghz.

Gateway_e4100.jpg

Being an Intel D865GLC motherboard I had to convert this to a Win98se battleship of sorts...

It didn't had a dedicated gpu, so I added a FX5900xt for good measure, now it's blazing fast, way too fast for Win98.

Warning about cleaning the plastics on that case. It will instantly start discoloring if any type of caustic cleaner is used such as rubbing alcohol, etc. It's unfortunate, but I found out firsthand.

Good tip !!! Luckily I used "baby wipes" on this one, and as rule of thumb I tend to use first the less aggressive cleaning method.

Having completed all of the games on my 486, I finally connected it to the network so that I could copy another 445MB worth of DOS gaming goodness from the file server. ISA network cards sure are poky. It took about an hour to get everything transferred. The machine's 1 gig hard drive is just about full now, but I reckon it'll take me 5 years to play through all of those games. 😀

I also installed a NOS Radeon 8500DV in my socket A AGP testbed. After trying out a few games and benchmarks on it I can honestly say that the 8500 is a much better GPU than I remember! Interestingly, the PCB has a floppy style power connector on it. For the longest time, I thought the 9700 was the first Radeon that needed additional power.

We also got the first snow of the season this morning and woke up with the shivers! So I stumbled out of bed and cranked that poor unsuspecting thermostat up to 22.5 degrees C. You know what? All this time I've been putting up with thrifty 19 degree winters but that ends today. I mean, now I can play those 445 megs of extra DOS games in nothing but a t-shirt, with going shirtless a definite possibility. The gas bill will be a monster and Mother Nature probably thinks I am one, but I don't care because now I can make s'mores over the heating vents, and that's pretty great.

I installed Devuan 3 on my old Toshiba NB200 that for the last 6 months, and for some reason I can't figure out, was way slower than even its specs would imply, no matter what OS I tried (antiX, Mint XFCE, NetBSD, FreeBSD, WinXP, Win7 etc.), what RAM it had, what HDD or even SSD it had! I even serviced that thing, which turned out to be a good idea, although largely ineffective in solving my problem. Well, somehow it ended up being quite snappy with that distro, even capable of web browsing, true to the word 'netbook' after all these years. In fact, I'm using it right now to post this. The keyboard on it is a pure joy.

I also installed Devuan on my overkill ME/2k P4 PC, mostly to have ME and 2000 (which are on separate HDDs) easily choosable via GRUB without having to press F11 to choose the boot device from the BIOS, but also to have a usable Linux environment to browse the web for patches to the games I play on that PC, using that very same PC without having to worry about vulnerabilities or incompatibilities with the modern web. It's surprisingly slower than my netbook. I also figured out how to load soundfonts and play MIDI files on the Audigy 2 card using the actual Emu10k2 chip, rather than a software synthesizer. That one was a bit challenging, but worth it 😉

If you're wondering, Devuan is basically good old Debian, except it doesn't have systemd, using the older SysVInit instead. I picked it because I thought it would be more lightweight than a mainstream distro due to the less 'bloat'. Turns out, it didn't really make a difference as far the P4 is concerned at least. I'm not changing the distro on my A100 anytime soon, either. I want to have all of my computers to run some form of Linux/Unix at some point, old or new. That should be fun on my Pentium MMX 😉

Because it's been a few weeks, I thought I might as well beat Dark Forces again. This time it only took around two hours.

BetaC wrote on 2020-10-16, 02:50:

Because it's been a few weeks, I thought I might as well beat Dark Forces again. This time it only took around two hours.
image0.jpg

I've been playing this game lately. The level design in this game can be super frustrating. Maybe "Dark Corners" should have been a better name for this game. 😆

pan069 wrote on 2020-10-16, 03:57:

BetaC wrote on 2020-10-16, 02:50:

Because it's been a few weeks, I thought I might as well beat Dark Forces again. This time it only took around two hours.
image0.jpg

I've been playing this game lately. The level design in this game can be super frustrating. Maybe "Dark Corners" should have been a better name for this game. 😆

Once you've gone through it enough times, you learn how to get around most of the weird issues, and can even skip the majority of some levels. The trick with the elevators in the detention level comes to mind, same with the mines-on-wall trick on Coruscant.

Just made an 26 pin (laptop) to 34 pin floppy drive adapter, so I can use a laptop floppy drive in a small case. Works fine after I found out that I need to connect Drive Sel A to Drive Sel B on the other side and Motor Enable A to Motor Enable B.

adalbert wrote on 2020-10-16, 19:47:

Just made an 26 pin (laptop) to 34 pin floppy drive adapter, so I can use a laptop floppy drive in a small case. Works fine after I found out that I need to connect Drive Sel A to Drive Sel B on the other side and Motor Enable A to Motor Enable B.

IMAG2605.jpg

Great work !

liqmat wrote on 2020-10-14, 16:02:

Xicor wrote on 2020-10-14, 15:33:

Hi all, This weekend managed to save from the jaws of the recycle a gorgeous Gateway E4100 (black with silver face). It's a Pent […]
Show full quote

Hi all,
This weekend managed to save from the jaws of the recycle a gorgeous Gateway E4100 (black with silver face). It's a Pentium 4 Prescott @3.4 Ghz.
Gateway_e4100.jpg
Being an Intel D865GLC motherboard I had to convert this to a Win98se battleship of sorts...

It didn't had a dedicated gpu, so I added a FX5900xt for good measure, now it's blazing fast, way too fast for Win98.

Warning about cleaning the plastics on that case. It will instantly start discoloring if any type of caustic cleaner is used such as rubbing alcohol, etc. It's unfortunate, but I found out firsthand.

The Silver parts liqmat ? I remember cleaning the silver on the front of a old generic ATX case, it discolored the silver to a grey odd look 🙁
It was more like paint than silvered plastic and the alcohol did screw it up. Started using Windex on bezels after that and have not had that same issue since.
Thanks for the reminder ! Added: same goes for some generic cases with clear blue, green or other surrounds on the bezel, alc will fog it to an ugly look.

Exactly. The grey/silver parts. I ruined the case. I was so pissed at myself. Lesson learned.

I beat Dark forces yesterday, which means that I have to, by law, beat Jedi Knight in one sitting. This time it only took about two hours.

I also attempted to see if I could overclock and underclock my Pentium 2, and managed to completely forget what the jumper settings are for the specific multipliers and FSB settings. Oh well, I have more time tomorrow.

Yesterday I kind of restored an old laptop that was given to me for free several years ago. It's a 2007 HP (so it has heating issues) with AMD Turion X2 @2GHz, 3GB RAM, 15.4" screen and an ATI mobility HD3XXX video card. Had to disassemble it completely to replace the thermal paste on the CPU and reconnect the CPU fan (it was unplugged, no idea why or how). After doing that, the laptop can at least stay on and do several memtest passes (previously it would last a couple minutes tops, before overheating). Now I have to find a SATA HDD for it. I tried a 500GB one, but it does not seem to like it, it says there's no HDD (disk is tested OK).

Discovered today a really dumb mistake I'd made:

Been having some stability issues with a recent Athlon XP Socket A build. Would crash in games and then I discovered today it was failing with Prime95 too and causing system freezes. Suspecting the installed Athlon XP 3200+ CPU to be overheating, I set about removing the cooler and doing the usual clean & reapply thermal paste routine etc.

As soon as I removed the cooler I finally discovered the problem - installed on this board was an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU. I'd been accidentally overclocking the 2500+ thinking it was actually a 3200+. OOPS!

Now I shall set about installing the REAL 3200+ and hopefully all my troubles should go away.

Edit: that didn't make a difference. Board must be junk!

I finally found a working PC Card wireless adapter and software combination that works with WPA-PSK on Windows 98 SE.

The winning combination is a 3Com 3CRWE154G72 with McAfee Wireless Security 4.1.

3Com's own wireless monitor refused to find my access points, even though it found the ones of my neighbours, and the one time that I did it didn't manage to get an IP via DHCP.

McAfee's program (and probably WSC Guard 4.0, the same program that was then bought by McAfee) worked immediately.

To install the wireless client it required me to apply the KB243199 update first. This update patches NDIS.VXD to resolve some crashes, which I think I was indeed encountering. The update is still available for multiple languages on Archive.org, fortunately.

Also installed Cygwin on that machine so I can use rsync to keep my pre-installed DOS games collection up to date, wirelessly 😀

Tinkered some more with a recent Socket A build (MSI K7N2 motherboard) with stability issues.

Removed the Radeon 9600 card & it's drivers and installed a GeForce FX 5700VE instead, with the 61.76 forceware drivers in Windows XP. This too was unstable just like the Radeon was. But after tweaking the AGP voltage settings in the BIOS, raising the voltage slightly, it is now rock solid (something which did not work with the Radeon). 3DMark scores have increased and games now play perfectly. All temperatures within normal specs etc. So I guess I'll stick with the GeForce FX for this build.

It's very odd, either this motherboard is faulty (no visibly bad capacitors however), or it's just extremely picky with AGP graphics cards!

Spent all day with OleDb and MS Access, trying to create a table in a migration-like manner, and insert data in it.

CREATE TABLE IF EXISTS ?
-> Forget it. You've got CREATE TABLE, and you'll have to catch an exception if it already exists.

A sensible DateTime type ?
-> F* you. You'll get a type mismatch error until you discover that I don't want milliseconds in my DateTime object, thank you.

Ugh, I'd forgotten how painful Access SQL is...

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-10-18, 19:01:

Spent all day with OleDb and MS Access, trying to create a table in a migration-like manner, and insert data in it. […]
Show full quote

Spent all day with OleDb and MS Access, trying to create a table in a migration-like manner, and insert data in it.

CREATE TABLE IF EXISTS ?
-> Forget it. You've got CREATE TABLE, and you'll have to catch an exception if it already exists.

A sensible DateTime type ?
-> F* you. You'll get a type mismatch error until you discover that I don't want milliseconds in my DateTime object, thank you.

Ugh, I'd forgotten how painful Access SQL is...

Is there an OPEN TABLE function with a return value that would let you see whether it exists?

Only in VBA, sadly. Nothing like that with Access SQL.