creepingnet wrote on 2021-04-14, 04:02:

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Updated and changed the banner on my website - crazy, I"ve been doing the Creeping Network thing off/on for over 20 years now, seems like yesterday.
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Cool and interesting website. Nice collection of hardware — and articles. I'm embarrassed to say I've never seen it before, but I'm a newbie here. I'm gonna spend some time reading up...

Finally found an Irongate driver (760 chipset) which doesn't crash and burn a fresh 98SE installation. (v1.20).

paprika wrote on 2021-04-14, 06:02:

creepingnet wrote on 2021-04-14, 04:02:

...
Updated and changed the banner on my website - crazy, I"ve been doing the Creeping Network thing off/on for over 20 years now, seems like yesterday.
...

Cool and interesting website. Nice collection of hardware — and articles. I'm embarrassed to say I've never seen it before, but I'm a newbie here. I'm gonna spend some time reading up...

Thx. The articles are still a work in progress, I tend to work on them in between doing other things in life, or on my lunch break.

Currently upgrading my 386 board from the ISA/EISA variant to a 3/486 that has 3 VLB slots and upgrading the storage from the HDD to an 8GB Industrial CF card (CF-IDE w/ XT-IDE on the NIC).

My Nakamichi SCSI CDROM came in - so much excitement!

For nothing. Drive is broken, just shuffling noises internally, no reaction to button pressing. Wasn't very well packed.

Fan-F99king tastic.

Did you open it up and see if maybe just the tray came off the track. That's happened to me with a few used drives I got that were "packaged" with just a few old plastic bags.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-15, 00:01:

Did you open it up and see if maybe just the tray came off the track. That's happened to me with a few used drives I got that were "packaged" with just a few old plastic bags.

I contacted the seller and asked if I could do that without violating a return policy - he seems happy to send me a replacement, but I don't really want to wait one month.

On a lighter note, I finally got around to putting in an ATX power supply into my 233 MMX and reducing the CPU cooler speed from a million RPM to probably the right speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4WLuc4aaG4

This was completely ad-hoc, a beerepair, but an old friend joined the channel 2/3rds of the way in. That was way cool! He mentioned prince of persia, and I happen to have it on there.

The new power supply is working well, I'm gonna go play HOMM 2 on it for a bit 😁

A couple of posts above reminded me of something. When powering up really old hard drives, it's often a good idea to let them spin up and just leave them alone for half an hour or an hour so everything can come up to temperature and settle down. I used to look after IBM RS/6000 systems back in the day and this was a golden IBM rule when replacing any hard disks.

I too recall this being told to me in the 90s. Not sure how it affects modern drives, I suppose the platter/head alignment can be off due to different alloy contraction/expansion rates, so I've always followed this rule.

Finaly managed to do the POST test for my Intel Batman motherboard, looks promising so far

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

dosbench tests also work nicely, will compile a list of results soon

Y'know, I never thought I couldn't get my Shuttle board working with a P233MMX...

...well, I did.

So I would only get crashes (SUWIN errors during 95/98 setup, SCANREG errors under 98SE, and sometimes the motherboard doing a "halt-then-crash-and-catch-fire" among other things) with the P233, yet nothing with the P133. I initially chalked it up to a faulty component on the board (like the regulators heating up or the chipset not being able to handle the bus speed of the P233...) but no it was way simple than that. Read on please.

Today I decided to give it another go, set the jumpers correctly, until I found a weird jumper on the board. JP44. (on this picture it is closed, but when I initially got the board, it wasn't):

So I thought "what if this jumper was the key to get my P233 working?", and it is!

I remembered at that moment that someone on this forum said (can't remember who) that the first Pentiums (based on the P5 core) were very tolerant to slightly higher-than-normal voltages, and since the P133 is a P5 chip... I thought perhaps the P233 (being a P55C chip if my memory serves me right) didn't like off-spec voltages... I put a jumper cap on the JP44 header and fired the system up, fingers crossed...

...aaaannnnd

It's posting, but will it work with Windows?

Well at first I got met with a message saying that the settings were lost (I kinda expected that the BIOS would freak out with the new CPU), so I reconfigured the BIOS and voilà! It started Windows just fine, without any crashes or anything.

To anyone who has a Shuttle HOT-555A board, a Pentium MMX chip and ran into the same issues, check if JP44 is closed, and if it isn't, put a jumper cap on it.

yesterday....

- Successfully replicated my SHSCD vittual ISO drive setup on the M/75, 7th Guest and Killing Moon are now installed and working perfectly. Kind of perplexes me that I have better graphics performance on the M/75 than the P/75 though....same chip, same RAM, but the M/75 is a 486 and the P/75 is a Pentium.

- More unsuccessful experiments with WSSXLAT.EXE, there's a guy on YouTube who got it working on his Toshiba with Wolf3D, I have not the foggiest idea what I'm doing wrong here. DEVICE=C:\WSS\WSSXLAT.EXE sbio=220 i=7 d=1 and DEVICE=C:\WSS\EMM386.EXE 512 RAM - and still nothing. However, I think the Crystal CS-4231-KQ has some quasi-SB compatibility because that thing clicks and I've even had some digital audio go through it in SB mode on a program.....so not sure what the heck is going on. The game doing that stuff was Tyrian 2000...

- Finally got Tyrian 2000 to run without Hanging (at least until I exited). Setup/Tyrian.exe hang when I start them and it claims I have a SoundBlaster pro....it's kind of insane. I used FILE0001.EXE instead and my god this game runs AMAZING on the M/75. Also the control via trackball is really nice on the Versa, almost more precise than arrow keys, and the sound quality with WSS is top notch.

Started a page on my website on WSS. I'm also researching how PCMCIA cards work, and took apart one of the broken Aironet cards I have to take a look inside at the pins, looks like it might be doable to make something on a single layer board that fits in the old Aironet casing. I was toying with the idea of maybe adapting Sergey's Adlib board for PCMCIA - and figure out if there's any way to send audio back to the internal speaker like the TDK Music 8000/9000, Panasonic CF-VEW21x cards, and Panasonic Sound/SCSI.

creepingnet wrote on 2021-04-15, 18:43:

yesterday....

Started a page on my website on WSS. I'm also researching how PCMCIA cards work, and took apart one of the broken Aironet cards I have to take a look inside at the pins, looks like it might be doable to make something on a single layer board that fits in the old Aironet casing. I was toying with the idea of maybe adapting Sergey's Adlib board for PCMCIA - and figure out if there's any way to send audio back to the internal speaker like the TDK Music 8000/9000, Panasonic CF-VEW21x cards, and Panasonic Sound/SCSI.

Good to see another PCMCIA enthusiast on the forum ) I like this format as well and it's really cool to have more new deivices. Apart from sound cards would be cool if someone made a 16 bit PCMCIA-USB adapter. These exist only in Cardbus format.
In your earlier post you mentioned a card with a built in speaker. A type II card can't really accomodate a proper speaker and it's going to be of poor quality. But a type III (a thicker card that occupies two slots) card can actually take a normal speaker. This is just something to think about.
As for sending audio to the speaker, I'm no expert, but it looks like to be a standard feature that is described in the official PC Card Standard document.

Today I started on my EISA/VLB 486 build. I recently picked up a boxed Asus VL/EISA-486SV1 motherboard. Today the EISA IDE Cache Controller arrived. It's a DC620B which i believe is manufactured by Tekram. It came populated with 4mb of ram which was a nice bonus. I put the bare basics together today, Cirrus Logic -GD5429 VLB Graphics and 20mb of 60ns Ram. It was pretty painless to get going. The floppy function on the controller was disabled, but after re-enabling that in the configuration menu the drives kicked into life. It's got a seagate 1.2gig HD which had an existing dos install.

From a brief mess with it, Doom appeared to run really smooth, although i plan to get Phil's Bench pack on it to find out how it performs. I quite excited to complete this build.

Not today, but yesterday on my Pentium 2 build I installed Works Suite 99 just for curiosity (the only works version I used before then was Works 2000), and I installed everything only to then shortly after just removing everything that it came with except Works 4.5 and Word 97. I also installed Internet Explorer 6 SP1 for no real good reason.

Earlier today the most retro thing I did was revisit a couple of classic music tracks from Need for speed (Romulus 3 and Quantum Singularity). I don't have the games they came from installed on that Pentium 2 PC, but I do have a modern patch version of NFS3 that allows it to run better on newer machines and windows 10.

Bondi wrote on 2021-04-15, 19:36:

Good to see another PCMCIA enthusiast on the forum ) I like this format as well and it's really cool to have more new deivices. […]
Show full quote

creepingnet wrote on 2021-04-15, 18:43:

yesterday....

Started a page on my website on WSS. I'm also researching how PCMCIA cards work, and took apart one of the broken Aironet cards I have to take a look inside at the pins, looks like it might be doable to make something on a single layer board that fits in the old Aironet casing. I was toying with the idea of maybe adapting Sergey's Adlib board for PCMCIA - and figure out if there's any way to send audio back to the internal speaker like the TDK Music 8000/9000, Panasonic CF-VEW21x cards, and Panasonic Sound/SCSI.

Good to see another PCMCIA enthusiast on the forum ) I like this format as well and it's really cool to have more new deivices. Apart from sound cards would be cool if someone made a 16 bit PCMCIA-USB adapter. These exist only in Cardbus format.
In your earlier post you mentioned a card with a built in speaker. A type II card can't really accomodate a proper speaker and it's going to be of poor quality. But a type III (a thicker card that occupies two slots) card can actually take a normal speaker. This is just something to think about.
As for sending audio to the speaker, I'm no expert, but it looks like to be a standard feature that is described in the official PC Card Standard document.
09gu80.pdf

Thx for the tip-off on audio. By speaker though I was meaning one of those flat-speakers you find in things like electronic greeting cards, not the greatest quality. But if audio passthrough is standard then I'd prefer to use that. That was one of the most elegant things about those Panasonic cards. Problem is finding them is incredibly hard, and I'm kicking myself on passing up a KXL-D745 Sound/Scsi on Ebay a 4-5 months ago. Looking at the Cisco Aironet AIR-LMC352 I took the cover off last night, I was shocked just how simple the traces on that card are - that was a little encouraging.

A USB card would be another cool one and something else I'd love to have. I have seen USB ISA cards before, they're very rare, but they are doable apparently.

creepingnet wrote on 2021-04-15, 20:27:

A USB card would be another cool one and something else I'd love to have. I have seen USB ISA cards before, they're very rare, but they are doable apparently.

I didn't know a USB controller for ISA bus actually existed. Are you sure? I was always under the impression that USB was exclisively PCI and on compatible.

Pulled Z420 out of storage and replaced the 4 core Xeon then installed 8 core 25MB cache xeon processor. Now 16 threads goodness and cooking using cpu stress in CPU-Z made heatsink throw off heat and working well because I was using NT-H2 paste.

Thinking of swapping out for Noctua heatsink for 2011 socket but need to measure height to see if I have room for that.

Cheers,

Bancho wrote on 2021-04-15, 20:22:

It was pretty painless to get going.

heh, you're not using EISA how you're supposed to - painfully 😉

Bondi wrote on 2021-04-15, 20:40:

creepingnet wrote on 2021-04-15, 20:27:

A USB card would be another cool one and something else I'd love to have. I have seen USB ISA cards before, they're very rare, but they are doable apparently.

I didn't know a USB controller for ISA bus actually existed. Are you sure? I was always under the impression that USB was exclisively PCI and on compatible.

Actually LoTek made something like that for a time - https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_USB_Adapter - basically it allowed you to boot off of a USB Stick as a Hard Disk drive without any drivers and mapped it as a regular HDD using the BIOS on the card, which could double for loading BIOS Boot ROMS for other things like PXE or XT-IDE.

Then there's this thing - https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A% … QAAAAAdAAAAABAO - Simtec ISA board with USB Slots on it, I think it's for development uses but I'd think there would be a way to utilize that or map it.

While I'm not really a coder I Can see where the problem with a full featured, functioning as expected in Windows USB card on ISA would be impossible. We would need to have new expectations and a more creative way of going about it than just "let's make it where it plugs and plays like expected" because in DOS or Win3x it will never ever happen. I would liken it to things like using WiFI in DOS - people say it does not exist because it's not a common thing to do, or have done at the time, but it exists, and it's clunkier, and takes more skill and knowledge, than say, just plugging in a USB stick or punching in an SSID's password in WIndows.

I could see this working similarly - sort of like SHSUCDX - it'd be a small storage TSR you could load temporarily when you need the card, and unload it when you don't - sort of like MSCDEX. However, this is all unresearched and theoretical based off my limited knowledge of how these things work at the moment, but I won't throw it out the window since I've been right on this stuff more than once. If someone wanted to use I/O devices - like mice, and whatnot, there would need to be custom DOS drivers written for them, which as the VCFED thread said about it - would be "driver hell" - but most of us I think would only be using this sort of thing for storage anyway really.