BetaC wrote on 2020-12-02, 03:04:

KCompRoom2000 wrote on 2020-12-02, 02:38:

Now the iMac G3 has a working optical drive again. While it's technically a downgrade from the semi-original broken DVD-ROM drive, I'm just glad to be able to read CDs on it again without them getting stuck in the drive. Besides, I never found a reason to use DVDs on this computer as I have plenty of other computers that are capable of this task and every piece of software that I have for it is on standard CDs.

Really, though, there's little point to having a DVD drive for G3s. If it was 1999 and DVD-Video was something to be proud of, sure, but nowadays it's really only useful for installing Tiger without burning four CDs.

Don't you touch my optical drives.
I have DVD Drives up to the roof and it makes my HAPPY.
Alright ?

Signed: "old" people like me.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-12-02, 05:14:

Don't you touch my optical drives. I have DVD Drives up to the roof and it makes my HAPPY. Alright ? […]
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BetaC wrote on 2020-12-02, 03:04:

KCompRoom2000 wrote on 2020-12-02, 02:38:

Now the iMac G3 has a working optical drive again. While it's technically a downgrade from the semi-original broken DVD-ROM drive, I'm just glad to be able to read CDs on it again without them getting stuck in the drive. Besides, I never found a reason to use DVDs on this computer as I have plenty of other computers that are capable of this task and every piece of software that I have for it is on standard CDs.

Really, though, there's little point to having a DVD drive for G3s. If it was 1999 and DVD-Video was something to be proud of, sure, but nowadays it's really only useful for installing Tiger without burning four CDs.

Don't you touch my optical drives.
I have DVD Drives up to the roof and it makes my HAPPY.
Alright ?

Signed: "old" people like me.

Eeeeyeah. If someone perfects an optical drive Gotek that can work with JAE 50 pin (slimline laptop drives), IDE40/44 or SATA, you'll ditch the old optical drives in a millisecond, much like me. I only keep optical drives and media around because some vintage machines can't easily boot off commonly formatted USB drives, uses proprietary floppy drives and have hard drives that are a royal pain to get to (like, say, the Toshiba Portege M205 or the 15" Powerbook Aluminum).

Also, a G3 is perfectly cromulant for DVD playback, especially if you have a GPU with DVD motion compensation like a Rage128 - my Pismo Powerbook worked fine playing back DVD movies on its G3/400MHz card, and even better on its G4/550 MHz upgrade.

Oh. Yeah. What did I do today -
Swapped out the busted motherboard on a Thinkpad 240 with a cheap, known good RMA replacement - done in 10 minutes, and the machine is now functional. Just have to fix a topcase fracture.
Popped in a 256MB PC66/100 144 pin module, an SD2IDE adapter, a 128GB MicroSD card and started some planning work on getting Windows 98SE onto it.

Well no. I have a lot of old games to test/archive, which means a lot of optical discs lying around, and a lot of optical drives.
I also sometimes need to use an old optical drive in order to read/copy/run them (thanks DRMs). It also is part of the retro experience to me.
So I don't see it happenning anytime soon.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-12-02, 05:40:

Well no. I have a lot of old games to test/archive, which means a lot of optical discs lying around, and a lot of optical drives.
I also sometimes need to use an old optical drive in order to read/copy/run them (thanks DRMs). It also is part of the retro experience to me.
So I don't see it happenning anytime soon.

I am not sure what is the long term viability of original CDROM media as they age - my Unreal Tournament 2004 SE install CD (from the Atari Unreal collection) already exhibit bit-rot - the disk surface does not appear scratched but my my Lite-On, LG and Phillips DVD combo drives all seemingly have issues reading contents off the disk. I for one am glad that I didn't need to leave a disk in the drive to play certain games. That is my long term concern. The other concern is finding space to store the drives and the media.

That's why I'm archiving them, too.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-12-02, 05:14:

Don't you touch my optical drives. I have DVD Drives up to the roof and it makes my HAPPY. Alright ? […]
Show full quote

Don't you touch my optical drives.
I have DVD Drives up to the roof and it makes my HAPPY.
Alright ?

Signed: "old" people like me.

You don't need to tell me, I have both a CD and DVD drive in my 1.42 DP G4 for the sake of having both doors open. I was more making the point that G3 computers, in a modern setting, are rarely doing anything that would require more than a CD drive.

Did some work on the AMS laptop. Turns out the floppy drive isn't working at all (I took apart the broken Toshiba T4800CT and got the belt out of the floppy drive to replace the broken one in the AMS laptop) if I attempt to read diskettes. The floppy track spins, but the heads don't want to do anything, even though I greased the track and rails (it's possible the heads crashed). Another thing is the DSTN display is an eye sore, so the two items to fix or replace are going to be the floppy drive and the display from the dreaded DSTN to a TFT (found a parts laptop on eBay that I haven't bought yet that might share the same connections as the floppy drive and display).

Currently placing TSR and driver files onto my Packard Bell for the CMSLPT adapter, the video card drivers for Windows 95, and the monitor drivers as well since it never works past 800x600 resolution.

To be fair I rarely use them.
But "rarely" here means 6 months apart between uses at most.
That may be too much optical drive usage for modern people.

Not sure it counts as retro, probably stretching it a bit 🤣 -

but today I completely disassembled & cleaned out a fat PS3. This thing was literally full of dust in every nook and cranny you could find.

Also cleaned off the old crusty thermal paste from CPU & GPU and applied new thermal paste. Idle temperatures are now much lower and the fan is a LOT quieter, with fan speed controlled via webMAN MOD.

PTherapist wrote on 2020-12-02, 19:28:

Not sure it counts as retro, probably stretching it a bit 🤣 -

but today I completely disassembled & cleaned out a fat PS3. This thing was literally full of dust in every nook and cranny you could find.

Also cleaned off the old crusty thermal paste from CPU & GPU and applied new thermal paste. Idle temperatures are now much lower and the fan is a LOT quieter, with fan speed controlled via webMAN MOD.

You say it maybe isn't retro, and yet we are almost 15 years out from the launch of it. You might also want to look in to one of the japanese fans if you have the time and money, and assuming it isn't a ticking time-bomb Hardware Backwards Compatible model.

Fitted a 3Com Etherlink III network card in to my Redstone XT Turbo system, set it up to work in 8-bit mode and installed the packet driver for it.

Took my Amiga500 Revision 5 with internal HDMI for a spin, to test the stability of the adaptor.
Did not notice anything after testing some 15 games and watched 10 demos.

Went through another Dark Forces mission. I'm currently at mission 9: Nar Shaddaa. This game has been so far really funny, however I had to patch it to support mouselook, since I can't play with keyboard only anymore.

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-12-02, 05:39:

Oh. Yeah. What did I do today -
Swapped out the busted motherboard on a Thinkpad 240 with a cheap, known good RMA replacement - done in 10 minutes, and the machine is now functional. Just have to fix a topcase fracture.
Popped in a 256MB PC66/100 144 pin module, an SD2IDE adapter, a 128GB MicroSD card and started some planning work on getting Windows 98SE onto it.

Just finished up with the Win98 install. Had to enable fastvid and write combining to speed up the Neomagic 128XD. To be honest, this GPU received a lot of crap on Vogons for being slow. Yeah, but compared to what? It’s designed to be a power sipping 2D-only Mobile GPU. It does compare well with similar 2D only GPUs like the C&T 65550/Trident Providia. The S3 Aurora 64 (like the one on the Thinkpad Power 860) would have been ideal, but who knows what that’ll do to the design.

I tend to see smack talking and anecdotal evidence rather than actual benchmark numbers - from my own testing it seems to be just fine. D3D/OGL viable Mobile GPUs isn’t really a thing until the S3 SavageMX/IX or the Rage128 Mobility, and that's not available until you got to the Coppermine P3.

So how does it fare with the old stuff in DOS?
Pretty well.

Need for Speed...

Stunts / 4D sports driving

Oddly enough, Rowan games like Navy Strike or AirPowerhave no issues working in VESA mode for the Neomagic 128XD while running off the ATi Mach32 driver. It's fairly smooth.

Prehistorik 2 only had some graphics glitches on the Hybrid banner intro. Gameplay is fine.

Now if only CPUSPD supports Dixon128 / Mobile Mendocino machines for throttling, at least not on the base 300MHz model - cannot get Test Drive 3 or Wing commander 2 to work correctly in pure DOS mode since it’s way too fast.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-03, 02:54:

Went through another Dark Forces mission. I'm currently at mission 9: Nar Shaddaa. This game has been so far really funny, however I had to patch it to support mouselook, since I can't play with keyboard only anymore.

The game in it's base form supports mouse aiming, albeit horizontally only. I am still yet to try full mouse-look, but that's more down to me being too damn used to the normal mouse.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-12-03, 02:54:

Went through another Dark Forces mission. I'm currently at mission 9: Nar Shaddaa. This game has been so far really funny, however I had to patch it to support mouselook, since I can't play with keyboard only anymore.

I started playing a few months ago and got frustrated with the (seemingly) unnecessarily dark corners that are part of some levels. Even the first level has this dark cave part where you have jump across, I find that very frustrating. The levels don't seem to flow like they do e.g. in Doom.

Other than that, there is a lot to like about this game.

So I pulled my XPS M1730 apart and re-pasted the CPU and GPU which solved the overheating problem. Unfortunately Murphys Law immediatly there after kicked in and the hard drive shat itself.

Tomorrow I'm going to put it in the hotswap bay and see if it will let me pull my KOTOR II saves off before failing entirely.

PD2JK wrote on 2020-11-29, 21:16:

Wasn't happy with the noise from the sleeve bearing fan. So that's where two of my old friends come in, and keep the Palit GF3 T […]
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Wasn't happy with the noise from the sleeve bearing fan. So that's where two of my old friends come in, and keep the Palit GF3 Ti200 cool.

Yes, it's a three slot cooler. 😉

Nice.
Back in the day I had Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer on my GF 3 Ti 200 (It covered all of ATI's R300 familiy and also GF3 Ti). Total overkill for the card, but looked powerful 😁.

Nowadays I'm into maintaining my Amiga gear. Found six of my old joysticks, three arcade sticks and three flight-yoke type ones! The two were already fully working, I restored and cleaned the other three, will change a damaged 9pin female connector on the fourth later today. Got an external Amiga floppy adapter and used a PC drive to write new floppies, in order to test the stock Amiga drives which I (apparently correctly) suspected to have gone bad. Turns out that both the Epson SMD-400 and the Chinon A500 internal drives I had are inconsistent, even after trying to service them. Strange, given that the Chinon used to work last time I used it before packing the A500 away (several, possibly too many years ago!), yet a cleanup-recap-lubrication didn't revive it 🙁 Still haven't tested my A1200's TEAC drive, but from what I recall it was dying as well, or just misaligned - will have to repair or replace. The Epson did get a bit better after a thorough cleaning and a recap, as it wouldn't read anything initially, still it gets read errors where it shouldn't. Modified a PC Alps DF354H911C for internal Amiga use (DC, RY, DS0, HD switch signals) and it seems to perform pretty decently and silently, even with ready signal-sensitive demos such as Arte [SNT]. Now to see how it will fit inside the A500rev5, will have to do something about the eject button; .stl files are available on the Internet for eject buttons which fit this particular drive but I don't have a 3D printer! Apparently they also sell such buttons at amigastore etc, but I guess I'm really impatient 😜 Finally, while searching for kit in the storage, I found another Gotek (the original in the classic black 3.5" plastic case) which I got a couple of years ago for PC use, but never bothered to unpack and test it. Soldered a pin header and serial-flashed it with FlashFloppy, to use as DF1: with the external adapter, as an easy way to get ADFs on real disks with X-Copy.