The second picture looks like an awesome wallpaper!!!

Bruninho wrote on 2020-10-29, 03:23:

The second picture looks like an awesome wallpaper!!!

Thanks. It was quite literally me shoving an iPhone 11 inside a case, so it being a nice picture is wholly accidental.

badmojo wrote on 2020-10-28, 23:55:

PTherapist wrote on 2020-10-28, 18:25:

Received a LumaFix 64 that I ordered and installed it into my Commodore 64 today. Immediately after installation and without any tweaks, the picture was already vastly improved. A couple of short tweaks later and it was practically as good as it's ever going to get. S-Video output now has correct colours with no checkerboard effect and the vertical lines are practically invisible in both Composite & S-Video modes. I just need to test it out on multiple TVs now, to see if any further tweaks are required.

That's great to hear, I wasn't ever happy with mine and eventually took it out. I could definitely improve the stripes but it would vary from colour to colour, so I'd get the blue on blue command line looking good for example, but then Commando (very brown) not so much, so I'd tune it again for that game, and the blue on blue looked bad again. In the end I gave up and settled for a little bit stripey everywhere - this is with svideo BTW so a great image otherwise. I tried different VICIIs with it too and that made a difference, so it might be a case of working for some machines more than others.

My VIC-II is an 8565, in a C64C. The vertical bars are still present, but only very faint and just noticeable on certain colours. It's certainly better than before where they were visible on all colours and I can probably tweak this a bit further when I get around to trying it on a better screen. The biggest advantage for me with the LumaFix 64 though is definitely the standardized S-Video output, without the horrid checkerboard and muted colours effect that just looked nasty.

Today I rebuilt my Socket 478 P4 PC into a new permanent case, ready for my 2nd 2003 build. The case is identical to my 1st 2003 build, but I discovered that it was in a much worse state - when I picked up the case it was like a scene out of a comedy - the front fell off, followed by both sides 1 after the other.

An hour or so later after glueing broken plastic clips back together and hot glueing the HDD LED & power buttons back into place, all is now well. Cheapo case that is about 16-17 years old, so it's to be expected I guess.

Other retro activity today - I recently bought a soldering station, as I desperately needed something a little better than the crap soldering iron I had. So I dug out my old broken 8088 motherboard and set about a couple of repairs. Firstly a tantalum had snapped off, so I resoldered that back into place. Secondly, a SIPP module had a snapped leg that was stuck inside the socket on Bank 0 on the motherboard. Luckily I was able to remove the broken leg from the socket, without having to desolder the socket and then I soldered a new leg onto the SIPP module. No idea if the SIPP module is even working, but if it is it should have 256K.

The motherboard is still not working, but the Programmable Interrupt Controller chip looks burnt out so I've ordered a replacement fairly cheaply and I'll see if that can finally bring this motherboard back to life.

Soldering time today - I recently found a third MSI MS-6168 i440BX with onboard Voodoo3-2000 8MB.

First one ran everything up to Tualatin but had bad video RAM. Second rock solid but despite being exact same revision with exact same BIOS (I swapped EEPROMS) and exact same VRM circuitry, it utterly refused to boot with Coppermine, let alone Tualatin. This new one came with Coppermine, and no artifacts, at least not in BIOS screens, but before I could see that it needed some work: had to replace nine caps:

Mission accomplished. Nice somewhat shiny but completely flat and functioning Panasonic caps installed. Tomorrow I see if the CMOS battery still holds a charge, then I see what happens if I hook up the SSD with Win2k I used with the other two...

dionb wrote on 2020-10-30, 23:41:

Soldering time today - I recently found a third MSI MS-6168 i440BX with onboard Voodoo3-2000 8MB. […]
Show full quote

Soldering time today - I recently found a third MSI MS-6168 i440BX with onboard Voodoo3-2000 8MB.

First one ran everything up to Tualatin but had bad video RAM. Second rock solid but despite being exact same revision with exact same BIOS (I swapped EEPROMS) and exact same VRM circuitry, it utterly refused to boot with Coppermine, let alone Tualatin. This new one came with Coppermine, and no artifacts, at least not in BIOS screens, but before I could see that it needed some work: had to replace nine caps:

IMG_20201031_001510.jpg

Mission accomplished. Tomorrow I see if the CMOS battery still holds a charge, then I see what happens if I hook up the SSD with Win2k I used with the other two...

If you have three you can give me one 🤣

kolderman wrote on 2020-10-30, 23:43:

[...]

If you have three you can give me one 🤣

Can you fix bad BGA chips? If so you may be in luck 😉

Today I learned that CPU-Z Can't figure out what a Permedia 2 Graphics Blaster is, as per my Validation.
https://valid.x86.fr/mqm0k0
I have since been searching for a newer driver than the one that's up on the Driver Library to see if it will fix the issue I am having in Lego Island, while also searching for a way to get my intel PRO1000 GT working. There are easy to find windows 98 drivers, but none I can find for Windows 95.

dionb wrote on 2020-10-30, 23:41:

Soldering time today - I recently found a third MSI MS-6168 i440BX with onboard Voodoo3-2000 8MB. […]
Show full quote

Soldering time today - I recently found a third MSI MS-6168 i440BX with onboard Voodoo3-2000 8MB.

First one ran everything up to Tualatin but had bad video RAM. Second rock solid but despite being exact same revision with exact same BIOS (I swapped EEPROMS) and exact same VRM circuitry, it utterly refused to boot with Coppermine, let alone Tualatin. This new one came with Coppermine, and no artifacts, at least not in BIOS screens, but before I could see that it needed some work: had to replace nine caps:

IMG_20201031_001510.jpg

Mission accomplished. Nice somewhat shiny but completely flat and functioning Panasonic caps installed. Tomorrow I see if the CMOS battery still holds a charge, then I see what happens if I hook up the SSD with Win2k I used with the other two...

Good work ! With no AGP slot can see why fixing it is the only alternative 🙁

Technically retro - I picked up a 33 year old Hyundai from Quebec, in "condition" (it works, carburettor and fuel system is... not great) and within three hours of registering it, got hit by an 18 wheeler, then drove it home another 500 KM after reporting the damage, which is laughably minor.

My damage can be fixed with a bottle jack and a chain, a beer, and 30 minutes of work, (it happened at less than walking speeds) whereas the truck got way more damage, somehow. Tough as nails, these cars.

Would you mind posting pictures of the car?

Yeehaw!

MS-6168 running with P3-1400S

Unfortunately UT gave me a BSOD soon after I actually started playing, so 1400MHz (and it's power draw) and/or 133MHz on an uATX, highly integrated BX board seems too much. Will play around with voltages to see if I can solve that.

Edit:
It's the power draw. System is rock-solid with P3-600E overclocked to 800MHz, so 133MHz FSB, but crashes almost as quickly with Tualeron 1200 as with the P3-1400S. Looks like Tualatin is no-go unless I can power the CPU with a separate VRM or something - which I don't have :'(

No surprise really with a 1999-era BX board built with cost reduction, not top performance, in mind. Tomorrow will check with P3-1000EB, see what that does.

Spent a couple of hours organizing different versions of Duke Nukem 3D, verifying OS compatibility with various versions of eduke32 for 9x and 2000, getting all of the expansions usable both in DOS and eduke32. (Requires batch files and switches for eduke32) (Requires switching con files and batch files and switches for DOS)
Only thing left is to figure out how to get World Tour working correctly with eduke32. I can manually select the maps which seems to work but surely this can't be correct....
https://forums.duke4.net/topic/8966-world-tou … bility-stopgap/

Can also confirm that Vesa works correctly in Windows 2000 with the Quadro FX 1300 without any hacking so that's nice.

/EDIT
/Okay, need to use a build of eduke32 that supports WT, extract the stopgap to the eduke32 directory. Now episodes are viewable. Use console to enable and disable commentary.
//So current minimum OS for WT is Windows 2000 with Blackwingcat kernel installed
///You can load the maps on 9x and 2000 with the 2010 build of eduke32 though but no commentary and no CON

Finished refurbishing Radeon 9500 card that I won on eBay auction for 10€.

Before pics:

After cleanup and with new cooler and memory heatsinks:

Got lucky on R300 silicon lottery with this one. All 8 pipelines are functional with modded driver, and GPU clocks just shy of 400MHz 😁.

Very nice that card looks great and with the better cooler should have a happy long cool life

Testing new PS/2 mouse to serial converter PCB with Worms 😀

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-10-31, 10:53:

Would you mind posting pictures of the car?

Stored for the winter, along with my other Pony (Tuned with a 4G63 engine 😁 )

I finished it too close to bed to mention it on the same day, but yesterday's retro activity was completing a very delayed blog post reviewing unit test frameworks that are easy to use and can build into real-mode DOS executables using Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9.

Here's a screenshot of what my recommended choice (greatest) looks like when running in DOSBox.

The post also has plans and research (but no tooling yet) for doing functional testing on DOS stuff. (TL;DR: Give the program to be tested a serial console and write your functional tests on another machine, such as the host DOSBox is running on.)

Jed118 wrote on 2020-11-02, 00:01:

https://i.imgur.com/OosFIUsm.jpg […]
Show full quote

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-10-31, 10:53:

Would you mind posting pictures of the car?

Stored for the winter, along with my other Pony (Tuned with a 4G63 engine 😁 )

Wow that thing looks to be in excellent shape body wise that's a nice find. The 4g63 engine is a good motor with lots of potential. That's a good setup with the garage it's nice to have room to store the cars over winter.

It was case restoration weekend:

The case is from Microstar (A local business that seems to have been importing their hardware in the early 90s) from whom I bought my own 486 DX33 in 1994. This one has no spec stickers, but there is a warranty sticker on the back that says the computer's I/O card was replaced in late 1996. It was probably a similarly aged 486 build. The case looks pretty similar to what I had, though mine was a full tower with a flap door in front. Anyway, I will rehouse my current 486 build (U5S-33) in this, then sell off its current yellowed case.