Fairly sure I had the 'Alpha 1 Rocket Base' and the 'Beta 2 Command Centre' as well as a load of other basic sets. Of course the last time I saw it, they were all just mixed together in a big plastic bucket in the attic of my parents house. I'm sure they'll ask one day to remove the last of my 'rubbish' from their house 😁

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-02-08, 09:00:

Fairly sure I had the 'Alpha 1 Rocket Base' and the 'Beta 2 Command Centre' as well as a load of other basic sets. Of course the last time I saw it, they were all just mixed together in a big plastic bucket in the attic of my parents house. I'm sure they'll ask one day to remove the last of my 'rubbish' from their house 😁

Well one’s rubbish is another’s treasure, I am sure my neighbors and their son are glad to be rid of all that stuff. I am going to add each and every salvagable part and set to my collection. There are some other things mixed in with those Lego’s such as true rubbish, Play Mobil, and some marbles. I found a Pikachu and dinosaur which I liked enough to keep for the time being. The rest of what I don’t wish to keep I will return to them so they can bring it to a thriftshop. So others can buy and enjoy that stuff.

Did some more trace patches and redid the solder on a few legs for the IC socket for the EPROM BIOS and no change. Looks like the trace repairs from the EPROM IC socket to the keyboard controller is required or something else is dead.

So.. I am finished with my LGA775 Win98/XP build.

Except I hit an unexpected roadblock: The IDE DVD-ROM turned out to be dead.

So now I arranged for picking up 2 SATA DVD-RWs as well as an E6600 to replace the E4600 I have in there right now.

That small hiccup aside, I managed to get Win98SE installed with 2GB RAM and it works fantastically so far. I never used such a responsive Win98SE install before..

Getting the Sound setup (Realtek ALC861 for HD Audio, SS Solo1 for FM Synthesis & Wavetable daughterboard) working for everything will be a fun challenge though.

Do you want a motherboard to go with that HSF? 😁

Continuing my Spring Circle SF586 saga. Found out the SCSI boot issue: the board will only boot from SCSI with 2840VL adapter if drive A is enabled in BIOS. It doesn't have to actually work or even be connected to anything though...

Now moving on to networking. 3C90x config util crashed system on first boot. This is also going to be fun...

This weekend.....I pulled out my ol' BeigeBeast mATX desktop (modern LInux Box) - it's a Core 2 P8800, so it hardly counts as vintage - but what I was doing was testing to see about running The Sims 1 on it (I already have running almost everything modern on Steam using Proton working), well, I got it working, using The Sims Complete Collection and Nutris to configure WINE for the installer. Works wonderfully. Being as I have Beigebeast and the Lenovo T61 for my Linux boxes (both Core 2 Duo), this is great because it means I won't need to be using Win9x/XP/NT so much anymore (I'm really championing FreeDOS in making our retro-computers quasi-day-to-day usable).

appiah4 wrote on 2021-02-08, 10:22:

So.. I am finished with my LGA775 Win98/XP build. […]
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So.. I am finished with my LGA775 Win98/XP build.

Avenger WIP 01.jpeg

Except I hit an unexpected roadblock: The IDE DVD-ROM turned out to be dead.

Avenger WIP 02.jpeg

So now I arranged for picking up 2 SATA DVD-RWs as well as an E6600 to replace the E4600 I have in there right now.

That small hiccup aside, I managed to get Win98SE installed with 2GB RAM and it works fantastically so far. I never used such a responsive Win98SE install before..

Getting the Sound setup (Realtek ALC861 for HD Audio, SS Solo1 for FM Synthesis & Wavetable daughterboard) working for everything will be a fun challenge though.

Beautiful color scheme on that first pic!

Voodoo 5 5500 cooling mod, with some Evercool Cyclone's (Blue & Red LED). I need to get the right crimp tool to make the mini-jst connectors so I don't have the ugly heatshrink tubing on there. I tried taking the back of the fan off to solder directly, but they used some sort of epoxy on the back which is plastic, so I didn't want to break it trying to get it apart.

wiretap wrote on 2021-02-09, 02:59:

Voodoo 5 5500 cooling mod, with some Evercool Cyclone's (Blue & Red LED). I need to get the right crimp tool to make the mini-js […]
Show full quote

Voodoo 5 5500 cooling mod, with some Evercool Cyclone's (Blue & Red LED). I need to get the right crimp tool to make the mini-jst connectors so I don't have the ugly heatshrink tubing on there. I tried taking the back of the fan off to solder directly, but they used some sort of epoxy on the back which is plastic, so I didn't want to break it trying to get it apart.

Royally nice job you did there!

Lovely job, now clean off that rust on the bracket! 😁

I reconfigured my ethernet switches to isolate all five of my retro computers (Windows 9x and XP) from the main network.

Now they are all networked together on a separate subnet, where there is no router, no Gateway, and no DHCP server (static IP for everyone, old school!). They can still access one of my NAS applicances which happens to have two ethernet ports (the NAS serves up driver installers, imaged backups, and CD iso's). They can still see each other (for LAN games), but they can't get to the internet. Also, none of the internet enabled devices on the main network can see the retro computers.

Was this a necessary activity??? probably not! ....Retro Activity? ? ? Yes!

Then I uninstalled the antivirus software from the Windows XP computers (they were probably doing nothing but wasting CPU resources anyway).

I installed drivers on my LGA775 PCIe Win98SE build. Everything seems to work fine, however 3DMark99 locked up halfway through the benchmark last night. I don't know if it had anything to do with the Lowe 2GB patch I am using or the ABSURDLY high FPS I was getting (700fps in some tests). Possibly the X850PRO I am using may have overheated as well, I will look into removing the heatsink and replacing the thermal compound.

Putting together a matx sleeper build in an old dimension p3 case. Just tore down the pc and am replacing the PSU with a 500watt psu, a am3+ motherboard, a $30 25 watt 8 core Opteron and 8gb of old lp ddr3 samsung memory with some free 180gb SSD's and a super low profile copper cpu fan to fit below the PSU. Throwing in a old Quadro equivalent of a 128bit 256 8600gt for now and shoould stream movies to my old tv no problem. Something like a rx 550 4gb would be nice later down the road.

The motherboard has an IDE connector so I can even reuse my matching beige dvd drive.

My brain just melted watching my LGA775 system blitz through 3DMark99 at 400+ fps on Windows 98SE..

appiah4 wrote on 2021-02-09, 11:53:

My brain just melted watching my LGA775 system blitz through 3DMark99 at 400+ fps on Windows 98SE..

I'm not sure your setup is doing everything it should be or if its a limitation with 3DMark 99. Here are my results with my Xeon3230 @ Stock with an AGP Radeon 9800 Pro:

I have an X850 as well which if I remember correctly pretty much double the score of my 9800 Pro, but I haven't had it installed in a while so I can't give you exact numbers. However even though our scores are pretty much the same I would say I had an average of over 200+ FPS most of the time, so perhaps you are getting performance that 3dMark isn't properly calculating for some reason.

Shagittarius wrote on 2021-02-09, 19:49:

I'm not sure your setup is doing everything it should be or if its a limitation with 3DMark 99. Here are my results with my Xeo […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2021-02-09, 11:53:

My brain just melted watching my LGA775 system blitz through 3DMark99 at 400+ fps on Windows 98SE..

I'm not sure your setup is doing everything it should be or if its a limitation with 3DMark 99. Here are my results with my Xeon3230 @ Stock with an AGP Radeon 9800 Pro:

3dmark99_x3230W-Radeon9800Pro128MB.jpg

I have an X850 as well which if I remember correctly pretty much double the score of my 9800 Pro, but I haven't had it installed in a while so I can't give you exact numbers. However even though our scores are pretty much the same I would say I had an average of over 200+ FPS most of the time, so perhaps you are getting performance that 3dMark isn't properly calculating for some reason.

I think for these kinds of uber cards the benchmark is mostly CPU bottlenecked. I used an E4600 which is a 2.4GHz CPU, your Xeon is also 2.66GHz. It seems Phil got around 40K with an E8600 which is a 3.33GHz CPU, roughly 40% faster than mine, and his score is roughly 40% above mine.

Case in point;

-havli got 40K+ on a 4GHz+ Phenom: https://hwbot.org/submission/2427925_havli_3d … agp_47865_marks
-flamethrower got 21K+ on a 3.4GHz P4 Prescott: https://hwbot.org/submission/3603280_flamethr … gp_21823_marks/

So yeah I could probably push my E4600 to 3GHz+ and blreak 35K easily, but I don't feel like overclocking this PC will achieve much. I just want it to run Win98 and DOS games, and a modern Linux distro for convenience.

EDIT: Also, my X850 is a Pro (12 Shaders) not X (16 shaders) so it does not have twice the brute force of a 9800PRO, more like 1.5x.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-02-09, 20:09:

I think for these kinds of uber cards the benchmark is mostly CPU bottlenecked. I used an E4600 which is a 2.4GHz CPU, your Xeo […]
Show full quote

Shagittarius wrote on 2021-02-09, 19:49:

I'm not sure your setup is doing everything it should be or if its a limitation with 3DMark 99. Here are my results with my Xeo […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2021-02-09, 11:53:

My brain just melted watching my LGA775 system blitz through 3DMark99 at 400+ fps on Windows 98SE..

I'm not sure your setup is doing everything it should be or if its a limitation with 3DMark 99. Here are my results with my Xeon3230 @ Stock with an AGP Radeon 9800 Pro:

3dmark99_x3230W-Radeon9800Pro128MB.jpg

I have an X850 as well which if I remember correctly pretty much double the score of my 9800 Pro, but I haven't had it installed in a while so I can't give you exact numbers. However even though our scores are pretty much the same I would say I had an average of over 200+ FPS most of the time, so perhaps you are getting performance that 3dMark isn't properly calculating for some reason.

I think for these kinds of uber cards the benchmark is mostly CPU bottlenecked. I used an E4600 which is a 2.4GHz CPU, your Xeon is also 2.66GHz. It seems Phil got around 40K with an E8600 which is a 3.33GHz CPU, roughly 40% faster than mine, and his score is roughly 40% above mine.

Case in point;

-havli got 40K+ on a 4GHz+ Phenom: https://hwbot.org/submission/2427925_havli_3d … agp_47865_marks
-flamethrower got 21K+ on a 3.4GHz P4 Prescott: https://hwbot.org/submission/3603280_flamethr … gp_21823_marks/

So yeah I could probably push my E4600 to 3GHz+ and blreak 35K easily, but I don't feel like overclocking this PC will achieve much. I just want it to run Win98 and DOS games, and a modern Linux distro for convenience.

EDIT: Also, my X850 is a Pro (12 Shaders) not X (16 shaders) so it does not have twice the brute force of a 9800PRO, more like 1.5x.

Absolutely no reason to overclock, those scores are more than you will ever need to max out anything you'd want to run on this system. I was just curious about the score.

I have a little testing bench by my main computer desk that gets used to test laptops and things. Mounted on the shelf above it is an 8" 4:3 LCD that I 3d printed the casing for, which is great for testing my many computers / motherboards.

A while back (during lockdown 1 I think), I decided to make up an ATX + 3 ISA slot riser PCB and that ended up sitting on shelf by the testing bench, with an Advantech PCA-6134 card fitted. That's kind of become my favourite 'quick testing' PC since it's tiny, fits on the shelf and can fit any ISA soundcard or video card I want to check out.

But it was scratching up the shelf, the pins and even the standoffs were chewing up the wood. And it didn't have a turbo button, or a real power button, all the wires and cards were just dangling around.

So I decided to fix that 😁 Now the sharp bits on the front and back of the riser are covered and at last the cards can be screwed into place so that they don't short on each other.
The whole 3d printed case idea is something I've been slowly working on since I got my 3d printer nearly 2 years ago, but this is the largest one so far.

It was designed up in fusion 360 using the PCB designs I made up in eagle, the toughest part by far was getting the reference parts in, since ISA ports and 3d models of ISA cards aren't something that pop up when I search for them. Now there's a real turbo button, ATX on/off switch and a reset button, from some switches I had laying around.
This is printed in PETG so it doesn't melt in use and the screws that hold in the cards are screwed into square nuts embedded in the plastic so they can't strip out. The wooden dowel rods I had laying around make it pretty sturdy for a pile of plastic too.

I've got 5 PCBs, so now I'm tempted to make some more of them. But from here, what I really want to do is expand this to fit a baby-AT motherboard like the little 386 DX motherboards or the 4DPS. Everything does line up on this one, so I'm fairly confident I've got the right dimensions to do it - though I am planning to use some hardboard or maybe plexiglass to cover the expansive areas, it's got to be printable on my Prusa i3

Drawers and vent panels. Oh, boy.