konc wrote on 2014-07-12, 18:22:

Just finished transferring all XT-Hercules (or simcga) capable games I own and could think of to a Schneider Euro XT. Time to s […]
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Just finished transferring all XT-Hercules (or simcga) capable games I own and could think of to a Schneider Euro XT.
Time to see now on a so-rare-yourself-and-your-geeky-things Saturday night what actually runs on the 512KB RAM this XT beauty has.
Sorry about the phone photos, I reallly don't know any better way to get a screenshot out of an XT running DOS 3.3 😀
(that amber... it can't be just memories, somehow I love it more than I probably should!)

That's awesome. I love it.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-10-21, 14:29:

Impressive soldering work. I can't even tell if it was modified or not. As if it came out of the box.

Thank you 😀

In the meantime I replaced the 2 Mira brand chips off the 9600 with the last 2 Samsungs off the Sodimm, as I thought it would be better for all the memory to be the same. Despite often being that better is the enemy of good, all went fine. I also did a small mod so that both memory supply rails sit at the same voltage (that was YOUR job Sapphire, not mine), now 2.79V, which is a bit high but nothing dramatic.

At the end of the day I got a fully working card, and the 166MHz-rated RAM seems to be stable at 230MHz, of which I'm not complaining.

Well I've gone slightly bonkers with my sound setup on my Tualatin machine! I removed the Turtle Beach Maui and replaced it with a EWS64XL, But I've managed to retain the Kurzweil midi as i populated the breakout bay with a Turtle Beach HOMAC 😀 I also added a CT2940 with Gen OPL3 and a DB50XG. It's currently all playing nicely in windows and it all comes out the Audigy. Next I have to tackle DOS. I'm going to use @PARUS multi channel mixer for the Audigy. But the DOS setup can wait for tomorrow!

Sound setup is now

Audigy
Vortex 2 MX300 With Trust Korg Module (300)
EWS64XL (310)
EWS64XL Midi-2 (HOMAC) (320)
SB16 DB50XG (330)

andrea wrote on 2020-10-21, 16:13:

Thank you :) […]
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Bruninho wrote on 2020-10-21, 14:29:

Impressive soldering work. I can't even tell if it was modified or not. As if it came out of the box.

Thank you 😀

In the meantime I replaced the 2 Mira brand chips off the 9600 with the last 2 Samsungs off the Sodimm, as I thought it would be better for all the memory to be the same. Despite often being that better is the enemy of good, all went fine. I also did a small mod so that both memory supply rails sit at the same voltage (that was YOUR job Sapphire, not mine), now 2.79V, which is a bit high but nothing dramatic.

At the end of the day I got a fully working card, and the 166MHz-rated RAM seems to be stable at 230MHz, of which I'm not complaining.

How's the performance of the card with the new ram?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-10-22, 12:42:

andrea wrote on 2020-10-21, 16:13:

Thank you :) […]
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Bruninho wrote on 2020-10-21, 14:29:

Impressive soldering work. I can't even tell if it was modified or not. As if it came out of the box.

Thank you 😀

In the meantime I replaced the 2 Mira brand chips off the 9600 with the last 2 Samsungs off the Sodimm, as I thought it would be better for all the memory to be the same. Despite often being that better is the enemy of good, all went fine. I also did a small mod so that both memory supply rails sit at the same voltage (that was YOUR job Sapphire, not mine), now 2.79V, which is a bit high but nothing dramatic.

At the end of the day I got a fully working card, and the 166MHz-rated RAM seems to be stable at 230MHz, of which I'm not complaining.

How's the performance of the card with the new ram?

On an 266FSB Athlon 2600+, in 3dmark 01, I get 5652 points at default (240 core/166 ram), 6573 pts overclocking the memory (240 core/230 ram) and 7280 overclocking everything (320 core/230 ram).

A 9200/9250 with 4ns Ram (which I know they exist), and perhaps 128MB instead of 256, could be interesting to play with.

EDIT: For the sake of comparison, on the same machine a 8500 flashed to 9100 @275/275 scores 8905, and a 9600XT 500/200 9668.

Nice it seems like it was a fruitful venture

Today I made a line in backplate. I needed to somehow feed the MX300 into the Audigy via an Analogue connection but the MX300 has no internal output headers. I had a bracket in my spares box and salvaged a backplate off a old soundblaster PCI card. Thankfully the jacks lined up spot on. the two jacks are connected to the AUX and CD-IN on the Audigy. Works exactly as I needed it too. Just need to set the levels for DOS using Parus's Audigy Mixer for DOS and then it's done!

What the F to do with old dead harddrives???? Yup I know what to do. Make a monitor stand for the vintage corner. 😜

Then I cleaned up some old toys from my childhood, and placed them on the shelf above my vintage corners table.
One Pezz-Darth-Vader and three small micro-transformers.

To Bancho and Brostenen those are both excellent and creative solutions I love them both.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-10-23, 12:25:

To Bancho and Brostenen those are both excellent and creative solutions I love them both.

Thanks.
And it is a woodgrain monitor stand. I think LGR would aprove. 😁

It looks like oak. I personally like the look of wood

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-10-23, 13:35:

It looks like oak. I personally like the look of wood

Oak is wood... 😉
It is actually chipboard, laminated with 5mm wood of some sort. Painted with some kind of dark stain and some kind of varnish or clear coat on top.

Setting up one of my 486.

Today and for the past couple of days I've been busy installing games on my recent 2003 WinXP build. Then I decided to setup LaunchBox, older version 4.4, to have a more fancy game launcher, rather than just using Windows Explorer shortcuts to batch files (for mounting the CD images etc).

A work in progress, but I'm quite happy so far with how it's running. Running LaunchBox as a "low priority" process, so as to not interfere with running games.

Obviously on these older versions the online scrapers no longer function, but it's local database is enough to fill in the info for about 90% of most games, then I just drag in the game covers & fanart/screenshots manually straight from web. It's easy/quick enough to manually fill in the info for the games it doesn't recognise.

PTherapist wrote on 2020-10-21, 04:47:

debs3759 wrote on 2020-10-20, 19:27:

PTherapist wrote on 2020-10-20, 18:49:

Personally I wouldn't recommend building a Media Centre PC/HTPC with any kind of stock cooler, it will be much too loud.

Also, is the Blu-Ray drive just for data usage? As I think you'll have problems playing back actual Blu-Ray movie discs on Windows XP, Windows 7 would probably be better for that.

It'll probably be the cheapest option for transferring rips, but I didn't know XP wouldn't offer good BD playback. Unfortunately I have never seen a pre-activated copy of 7, and I'm not sure I want to trust keys off ebay to activate.

Yes, ripping them would probably be the easiest option. The reason XP isn't good for Blu-Ray playback, is that PowerDVD 11 is the latest version that will run on either XP or Vista and PowerDVD 11 will struggle with a lot of newer titles due to updated DRM.

However another issue is if the onboard graphics has HDCP support? Otherwise it won't matter which OS you use as it still wouldn't work without 3rd party tools such as AnyDVD HD.

I think a cheapo GPU like a Geforce 210 or HD6450 would help alot with Blu-Ray playback on a system like that 😀

ODwilly wrote on 2020-10-24, 14:27:

PTherapist wrote on 2020-10-21, 04:47:

debs3759 wrote on 2020-10-20, 19:27:

It'll probably be the cheapest option for transferring rips, but I didn't know XP wouldn't offer good BD playback. Unfortunately I have never seen a pre-activated copy of 7, and I'm not sure I want to trust keys off ebay to activate.

Yes, ripping them would probably be the easiest option. The reason XP isn't good for Blu-Ray playback, is that PowerDVD 11 is the latest version that will run on either XP or Vista and PowerDVD 11 will struggle with a lot of newer titles due to updated DRM.

However another issue is if the onboard graphics has HDCP support? Otherwise it won't matter which OS you use as it still wouldn't work without 3rd party tools such as AnyDVD HD.

I think a cheapo GPU like a Geforce 210 or HD6450 would help alot with Blu-Ray playback on a system like that 😀

I'm thinking a GT 430 is the best of whet I have at hand.

PTherapist wrote on 2020-10-21, 04:47:

debs3759 wrote on 2020-10-20, 19:27:

PTherapist wrote on 2020-10-20, 18:49:

Personally I wouldn't recommend building a Media Centre PC/HTPC with any kind of stock cooler, it will be much too loud.

Also, is the Blu-Ray drive just for data usage? As I think you'll have problems playing back actual Blu-Ray movie discs on Windows XP, Windows 7 would probably be better for that.

It'll probably be the cheapest option for transferring rips, but I didn't know XP wouldn't offer good BD playback. Unfortunately I have never seen a pre-activated copy of 7, and I'm not sure I want to trust keys off ebay to activate.

Yes, ripping them would probably be the easiest option. The reason XP isn't good for Blu-Ray playback, is that PowerDVD 11 is the latest version that will run on either XP or Vista and PowerDVD 11 will struggle with a lot of newer titles due to updated DRM.

However another issue is if the onboard graphics has HDCP support? Otherwise it won't matter which OS you use as it still wouldn't work without 3rd party tools such as AnyDVD HD.

I found three different Win 7 x64 preactivated versions, so will be setting that up later, now the cooler arrived. Will be installing K-Lite Codec Mega Pack, with Media Player Classic.

I will never use integrated graphics other than for benchmarking prior to adding discrete graphics. I think I have a GT210, otherwise it'll be overkill with a GT630 😀

I got an AT-PS/2 adapter and a PS/2-USB adapter so I could use my Das Keyboard with my DOS machine. It's not period correct, but then again, very little of my DOS machine is period correct 🤣.

I'll keep my AT keyboard as a backup!

The glue have dried, so I used some time today, to set it up propperly on my vintage computing table. I really like the result of this. It is a nice way to recycle old computer harddrives. And the end result is exactly what I was aiming at.

My partner has stolen my "good" LCD monitor that has both DVI and VGA in - i.e. I can use two systems on the one screen. She needs it for "work" pfft. So I am back with my VGA only monitor and with my XP PC downloading The Witcher 2 from GOG on that screen I didn't want to disconnect it when setting up a different PC. I ended up using my 10 year old 32" Samsung LED TV to set up my DOS PC!

The Violet V.... *can't think of a cool name beginning with V* .......Violet Verisimilitude (great word) is still going strong! Now with my DX4-100, STB Lightspeed 128 and SB 2.0 (because of Phil's video the other week).

Today was a day of firsts because it's the first time on a pure DOS PC I've had enough IDE controllers to set up a CF card and a CD-Drive. So I had to set up Config and Autobat for that for the first time. Usually if I am using a CD drive in DOS its on a Windows 98 build which does it (or Phil does it) all for me. I've also realised that my STB Lightspeed 128 2.25Mb has specific drivers for Windows 3.1 so I should be able to get higher resolution and colour display. You'll be pleased to know it's an AMD DX4 so the sticker is valid this time :p

The TV had no issues at all with any resolutions that DOS has thrown at it so far. It looks alright too for such as large screen with 320*something display for Ultima6