ragefury32 wrote on 2021-03-25, 19:26:

And to be honest, I really don’t see the hype regarding the YMF...my ESS Solo sounds pretty much like it

That's to be expected. The YMF and ESS cards are not dissimilar, reputation- or performance- wise. Both highly-competent cards for what they do, and both occupying the "best bang for buck / high availability" place on the scale.

That said, both have different abilities, pros and cons. For example the YMF(7x4) doesn't have ESFM, or the degree of native DOS compatibility that comes with the ISA bus, and the ESS doesn't have 'authentic' Yamaha OPL, or (in Windows) XG / PowerYMF capabilities.

I think the draw of the YMF724/744/754 is not so much where it's in late Pentium III laptops, but that they were fairly common in laptops. And as a PCI card, are one of the few PCI cards with a real OPL3. Probably nicer for installing into newer systems.

I agree with your issues with the Sony YMF audio too, getting the drivers to work with Windows 98 / ME is often impossible and something about how those audio chips are implemented in the Vaios makes installing the specific driver essential rather than optional.

Today, with my newly received PCBs, I put together the YM2608 (OPNA PC98) and YMF262 (OPL3) MegaMod boards for my MegaGRRL player, been thoroughly enjoying some PC98 tracks on real hardware 😁

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-03-25, 22:28:

ragefury32 wrote on 2021-03-25, 19:26:

And to be honest, I really don’t see the hype regarding the YMF...my ESS Solo sounds pretty much like it

That's to be expected. The YMF and ESS cards are not dissimilar, reputation- or performance- wise. Both highly-competent cards for what they do, and both occupying the "best bang for buck / high availability" place on the scale.

That said, both have different abilities, pros and cons. For example the YMF(7x4) doesn't have ESFM, or the degree of native DOS compatibility that comes with the ISA bus, and the ESS doesn't have 'authentic' Yamaha OPL, or (in Windows) XG / PowerYMF capabilities.

Well, on a laptop you don’t really have a choice of popping in something better per-se (unless you have PCMCIA sound cards or a docking station that can take a sound card).

The ESS Solo-1 on the TP240 is a PCI card just like the YMF724/44/54, and it’s actually quite rare for a ThinkPad to have one. Only 3 mainline IBM models (240, 390E, 390X) from the P2/P3 era have them - the rest are either from their Acer-based i-series model lines or use Crystal sound chips - in fact, the TP240x use the same Crystal CS4281 as the X20/x21 series machines).

From what I’ve seen so far the YMF754 on the Vaio behaves just fine (minus the curious issue that it does not seem to work correctly on Wing Commander Privateer), but there are “quality of life” issues on the Vaio that makes me lean more towards the ThinkPad even though the Vaio is technically superior.

For one, it’s easier to get old Thinkpad device drivers for Win98, while Sony deleted its driver archive for anything prior to Win 8, and the user communities simply didn’t save some drivers. The fact that Sony “bin” their hardware according to markets and only provide one set of driver for a given machine (the SR31k is the US version of the win2k running SR9GK with the XGA screen, while the SR9G is the WinMe version with SVGA screen and a slightly slower CPU) meant that I’ll have to hunt down drivers off the older SR1, which might or might not have Win98 drivers despite the fact that the machine is about 95% similar internally). That scavenger hunt nonsense gets old real fast.

Then there is the issue of what the built-in I/O controller does - the Thinkpad 240 has key combos that will, say, adjust LCD brightness or sound volume at all times (even within the BIOS screen), while on the Vaio some of those work while others fail (you can mute it but you can’t volume up/down?). On the Toshiba Portege 7220CTe, Toshiba simply put in a simple volume control potentiometer.

The fact that the 240 has a much better keyboard and feels more solid does make it more of a joy to use, and it really matters on small machines.

Went thru some boxes of old CD's and found some MS Developer and Technet disks from 1997 and 1999 had forgot about. Brought back some good memories, unfortunately have lost many over the years due to stupidity (thinking: will never need them again after they were a few years old). Maybe the best find was the original 1997 WinNT 3.51 Workstation, DDK and SDK disks plus the 1997 Win95 OS, SDK and tools cd's....
Added: just realized was in my 30's when I got them.. wow am I getting old 🤣

Horun wrote on 2021-03-26, 04:05:

Brought back some good memories, unfortunately have lost many over the years due to stupidity (thinking: will never need them again after they were a few years old).

I lost the same way my original Solaris 8 and 9 x86 installation disks. Still regret having thrown them away.

Repaired a T4400C power supply board. Unit powered up, and I get a nice whopping 20 minutes off the battery.
Also swapped the drive with a 340mb microdrive and it worked well.

For 3 days.
Then the LCD started acting funny so I looked in there too.
Turns out some SMD electrolytics blew out on the "brain" board. Now waiting for replacements to arrive from mouser to go replace those too.

Luckily didn't get very far onto the actual panel, so shouldn't be too bad of a job.

Horun wrote on 2021-03-26, 04:05:

Went thru some boxes of old CD's and found some MS Developer and Technet disks from 1997 and 1999 had forgot about. Brought back some good memories, unfortunately have lost many over the years due to stupidity (thinking: will never need them again after they were a few years old). Maybe the best find was the original 1997 WinNT 3.51 Workstation, DDK and SDK disks plus the 1997 Win95 OS, SDK and tools cd's....
Added: just realized was in my 30's when I got them.. wow am I getting old 🤣

whenever i see old technical info like this i always think - all this information, this detailed stuff about how it works and now it's not really needed, its fading away fast

it just seems strange to go from hot off the press to mostly irrelevant in a decade or so, and its so fast with computers & software, it all moves on at such a pace

If you can, share them with sites that try to preserve them ! 😀

That's where I found MS Visual C++ 4.1, which is the last version still compatible with Win32S.
It also still perfectly runs on Windows 10. The dev environment, and the executables you can make with it.

MP if you don't know which site I'm talking about. 😀

Horun wrote on 2021-03-26, 04:05:

Went thru some boxes of old CD's and found some MS Developer and Technet disks from 1997 and 1999 had forgot about. Brought back some good memories, unfortunately have lost many over the years due to stupidity (thinking: will never need them again after they were a few years old). Maybe the best find was the original 1997 WinNT 3.51 Workstation, DDK and SDK disks plus the 1997 Win95 OS, SDK and tools cd's....
Added: just realized was in my 30's when I got them.. wow am I getting old 🤣

Thanks to your post, the sins of the past have come back to me. I remember throwing away a number of boxes of NOS 80s/90s software like MS DOS, MS Money and Adobe products about 12 years ago. I just kept very few items (like MS DOS, sealed...).

Luckily, out of laziness, I packed the free floating single items in crates to dispose of them together. Which I didn’t do.

Reading your post this morning made me revisit those crates and I started to browse through them.

For obvious reasons I will not dispose any of those items anymore.

First MS product I found

First bunch of Adobe stuff I found

Does automotive stuff count? I went guts deep into my 6.9 idi diesel and my dad helped me fix a bunch of things. 1985 and zero computer controls, so pretty ancient.

BigDaddyM wrote on 2021-03-25, 20:24:

Can you upload a photo of the back of the card?

Sure. I also checked if it posts. If HWiNFO gives correct data about the card, then it seems to be underclocked. It seems it should run at 125/125MHz. That should be a massive performance loss.
I added some thermal paste since there was none under the heatsink. It's still very hot to the touch. Maybe because the relatively overpowered CPU?

I'm planning on giving it some W98SE benchmarking at a later time. I'm still looking to pick up some early 3D accelerators before that.

CMB75 wrote on 2021-03-24, 12:10:

Instead of wasting my lunch break at work I wanted to do something useful. So I started soldering the XT-IDE rev 4A kit. […]
Show full quote

Instead of wasting my lunch break at work I wanted to do something useful. So I started soldering the XT-IDE rev 4A kit.

Well, that’s what you get when you forget to take your wife’s spare reading glasses or if you’re to lazy to make an appointment with your local ophthalmologist.
XT-IDE-rev-4A-wip-001.jpg

Yes, it is that much easier to do at home with your magnifying glasses, maybe it was just a stupid idea to begin with...

Probably the worst soldering job I've done, yet. But it's done and working. Confirmed, it is a stupid idea to do these kind of jobs in the lunch break with rudimentary equipment. (tried, evaluated, dismissed)

Thermalwrong wrote on 2021-03-26, 00:25:

I think the draw of the YMF724/744/754 is not so much where it's in late Pentium III laptops, but that they were fairly common in laptops. And as a PCI card, are one of the few PCI cards with a real OPL3. Probably nicer for installing into newer systems.

I agree with your issues with the Sony YMF audio too, getting the drivers to work with Windows 98 / ME is often impossible and something about how those audio chips are implemented in the Vaios makes installing the specific driver essential rather than optional.

It's not nearly as common as you might think (at least not the PCI based 724/44/54s) - during the PCI / 440 chipset era (probably anything after, say, P54C and before the rise of AC97) the major laptop vendors tended to include these:

Toshiba -
ESS Maestro or AC-XG, some DS-XG on Satellite Pro models. Their AMD budget line uses Ali chipsets that might have the embedded Trident 4dWave inside.

Dell -
Crystal CS4237B, Neomagic AC97 (no pure DOS SB support), then ESS Maestro/Allegro starting with the 3800/CPx models and going to AC97 after the C600/4100 or the C810/8100 (the next models have Crystal CS4205s)

IBM -
Mostly a Crystal shop, 3 mainline models and the Acer designed I-series have the ESS Solo-1. IBM went full AC97 with the X22/T23 via the CS4299s, if I remember correctly.

Compaq -
Mostly ESS based on the Intel side, some of the 1800T series are ESS Solo-1, then the rest are Maestro based up and until the n610c (which is right during the Carly Fiorina/HP merger). Their AMD models are similar to the Toshibas.

HP -
Mostly an ESS shop back on the Omnibook days. HP's laptop division were pretty much subsumed by Compaq's after merger.

NEC -
No idea, they are not that popular in the US, and their market segmentation is nearly as bad as Sony. Probably some Alis and SiS chipsets in their fleets.

Sony -
The Sony Vaio line (at least the PCG-SR/C1 series) are one of the few that seems to use Yamaha DS/AC-XG consistently, at least between its Intel and Transmeta machines.
(its on-brand considering that Sony named it VAIO to stand for Video/Audio, Input/Output) They do have a few AMD models that is the exception to the rule. They went full AC97 around the time their machines shipped with Mobile Radeons.

If you see a high number of Yamahas, think about whether they are the PCI (any YMF > 720), or ISA based (YMF 262/289/715/719). I tend to see the latter, especially when dealing with the older IBM I-series and Toshibas from back-in-the-days.

As for whether Yamaha YMF PCI models are a good idea in laptops? *eeeeeeeh* - it depends. The DS-XGs are slightly less compatible than the ESS Solo-1, at least in my experience when it came to hardware where you cannot shuffle cards (I have a YMF724 in one of my single PCI slot thin clients, an AOpen Cobra 744 in another, and the 754 in the Vaio SR9GK) and you have no idea whether someone actually ran lines between the southbridge to the sound chip to make it function like a PC-PCI link - it's also not something that can be remedied easily. Setupds also seem less stable than the esssolo/essaudio equivalent.

*ugh*. I really need to hunt down some Vaio laptop recovery CD ISOs...

Soldered Triple-Head i8275 VGA ISA8 board by freddy.

I finally got my 1000 watt power supply and tried to run two GTX570's in SLI mode on Windows XP (32bit) and 7 (64bit).
Since I own a board with an X38 chipset (Asus P5E3 WS) the NVidia drivers need to be hacked to display the SLI option.

NVidia and their "certified chipsets" nonsense...it's all just software that locks you out, they should've been sued into oblivion for this.

Anyway...SLI works really well on Windows 7. I had to use the 382.33 drivers and a custom version of DifferentSLIAuto that can be easily built with Visual Studio:
https://github.com/system1357/DifferentSLIAuto

I had no luck on Windows XP. I tried various tools (HyperSLI, SLIPatch) and driver versions from the beginning of 2012 (when those tools and the GTX570 were common).
Cannot get the SLI option to show up in the NVidia control panel, no matter what I'm doing. 🙁

I'll probably need to try the 64bit version of XP and see if that makes a difference...

Apart from this, the system is very capable. It can run Crysis on highest details at 1600x1200 resolution and I can even play Prey from 2018 on medium details - one GTX570 is way below the minimal recommendation for this game. 😁

Today I took this Socket7 motherboard from the closet, it is a 5SVA-E with a Cyrix MII-300 Black.
The VGA is 8MB PCI, permedia chip manufactured by 3DLabs.
In the next few days I will start it, to make us some bench.
There is a Fujitsu Hard Disk, I don't remember the capacity but there should be a Windows installed, I think W98 but I'm not sure.

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-03-26, 20:40:

The VGA is 8MB PCI, permedia chip manufactured by 3DLabs.

Does the PowerColor card (3D labs only made the chip) have a model name and/or FCC ID on the rear? I'm guessing it's a Permedia 2, not an NT, 2V or 3? I'm adding it to the database that will soon be updated on gpuzoo.com

debs3759 wrote on 2021-03-26, 21:10:

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-03-26, 20:40:

The VGA is 8MB PCI, permedia chip manufactured by 3DLabs.

Does the PowerColor card (3D labs only made the chip) have a model name and/or FCC ID on the rear? I'm guessing it's a Permedia 2, not an NT, 2V or 3? I'm adding it to the database that will soon be updated on gpuzoo.com

Yes, you're right, the chip is from 3DLabs, while the card is from PowerColor.
I don't remember the model, but maybe it's that C3000 Ver. 2.0 written under the GPU.
I remember it is a Permedia, but I think it is the first edition so not Permedia2.
This weekend I should turn on the PC, and from the Control Panel I will be able to tell exactly what it is.

Googling vintage computer information, for a new and awesomme project. That is about all I can say at this point.
I can reveal, that the project is a combination of technologies, that most people would not think about.

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-26, 23:34:

Googling vintage computer information, for a new and awesomme project. That is about all I can say at this point.
I can reveal, that the project is a combination of technologies, that most people would not think about.

Wow thanks for posting I can't wait