flupke11 wrote on 2021-05-02, 21:36:

Brought my Sanyo XT back from the dead with the help of Waterbeesje. A good day today.

Great ! What was the main problem ?

I’ve been messing around with my magnum opus here – a Cyrix MII 300 based machine for early 90’s DOS -> Win9X stuff and then a Cedar Mill P4 machine running XP for games up to ~2005 or so.

They share the monitor / mouse / keyboard via a data switch, which works perfectly much to my surprise. No impact on image quality that I can see. Audio is shared via a little passive mixer. A second switch for the Cyrix machine allows me to switch b/w a game-port gamepad and stick.

That’s all well and good for the retro PC gaming I’m interested in but up until recently I also had a separate desk and CRT setup for my NES, C64, SMS, and PS1. I used a complicated Retrotink based mess of cables and switches to switch b/w them but there was still unplugging / re-plugging required, and it all took up a lot of space, so I decided to see what I could do about emulating them on my retro PCs.

After countless happy hours of testing and fine tuning I have each machine emulated to my satisfaction – all 8-bits on the Cyrix in DOS, and PS1 on the P4 (using an original controller via USB adapter).

old - less old

xD xD xD

Horun wrote on 2021-05-03, 00:49:

Great ! What was the main problem ?

First of all, I needed an ISA 8-bit VGA-card, since the CGA monitor was MIA. Thanks to the forum here, I could put in a Trident with a whopping 1 MB of video ram 😀.

As soon as I had visual, the MFM-drive seemed not to function (a Seagate 20 MB). Thanks to the Dutch Tweakers forum, we managed to fix it and in the end, it seems just a good clean on the connectors was enough to bring this rock solid Japanese-American Cold War love child back to the world of the living.

I'll do a proper thread on it in the systems sub.

Currently I have a couple of VXs on the bench, I had perhaps written about them some time ago.
One is a PCChips M549, 64MB RAM (2x DIMM PC-66), 2MB CL-GD5446 video card, ISA SB Vibra16S sound card (CT2800), 512MB HD IDE-CF adapter with W95.
The CPU was initially an iP.133, later it was changed to an AMD K6-2-400 CXT.
Having the switching regulators, there is no problem of overheating of the mosfets going up with the frequency.
I also found some undocumented FSB settings (to try).
The maximum CPU frequency would be around 500MHz (6X 83), but I am currently at 360MHz, because at 400 W95 it gives problems, to solve this problem I downloaded the file for K6-W95.
If I solve it imposed at 400MHz (6X 66), after I was considering whether to change the VGA with another better one, only missing the addition of two USB ports, if it was useful I could add a PCI ATA (100 or 133) or SATA controller, or a 4MB Voodoo PCI.

Starting experiments in an "E-Z Config" using the Access XX Menu System. Most of it is pretty straightforward except Internet Applications.

The new design I'm trying out on my NEC Versa V/50 does this....

Internet apps load the packet driver run DHCP, then run the internet application, then when the internet application is terminated, the packet driver is unloaded. This frees up RAM after using the internet on the computer is over. So far I have 3 BBSes, LInks, and SNTP setup - all working flawlessly, though I need to add the wired ethernet packet drivers and the drivers for my Orinoco PCMCIA Card to the laptops. If I like this, I might copy this setup over to my other machines (Tandy 1000, GEM 286, 486 Desktop FreeDOS config.....etc.).

flupke11 wrote on 2021-05-03, 10:07:

First of all, I needed an ISA 8-bit VGA-card, since the CGA monitor was MIA. Thanks to the forum here, I could put in a Trident […]
Show full quote

Horun wrote on 2021-05-03, 00:49:

Great ! What was the main problem ?

First of all, I needed an ISA 8-bit VGA-card, since the CGA monitor was MIA. Thanks to the forum here, I could put in a Trident with a whopping 1 MB of video ram 😀.

As soon as I had visual, the MFM-drive seemed not to function (a Seagate 20 MB). Thanks to the Dutch Tweakers forum, we managed to fix it and in the end, it seems just a good clean on the connectors was enough to bring this rock solid Japanese-American Cold War love child back to the world of the living.

I'll do a proper thread on it in the systems sub.

Ahh OK, Good work and thanks ! Great you got the old HD working.
I went something similar when an old Multi-sync monitor died and the XT had a 8 bit EGA card. Went thru all my 16bit ISA vid cards to find any that would work in 8bit, found 3 that have a 8bit/16bit jumper.
One is a Trident based and does work well but is not 1Mb. Maybe we should start a Topic about 'working 16bit ISA VGA in 8 bit XT slots' ?

Horun wrote on 2021-05-04, 02:08:

Ahh OK, Good work and thanks ! Great you got the old HD working.
I went something similar when an old Multi-sync monitor died and the XT had a 8 bit EGA card. Went thru all my 16bit ISA vid cards to find any that would work in 8bit, found 3 that have a 8bit/16bit jumper.
One is a Trident based and does work well but is not 1Mb. Maybe we should start a Topic about 'working 16bit ISA VGA in 8 bit XT slots' ?

We did that over ast vcf a few decades ago. Modem7 has them listed on his site under the vga link in the IBM 5150 section. http://www.minuszerodegrees.com/

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-05-04, 03:07:

Horun wrote on 2021-05-04, 02:08:

Ahh OK, Good work and thanks ! Great you got the old HD working.
I went something similar when an old Multi-sync monitor died and the XT had a 8 bit EGA card. Went thru all my 16bit ISA vid cards to find any that would work in 8bit, found 3 that have a 8bit/16bit jumper.
One is a Trident based and does work well but is not 1Mb. Maybe we should start a Topic about 'working 16bit ISA VGA in 8 bit XT slots' ?

We did that over ast vcf a few decades ago. Modem7 has them listed on his site under the vga link in the IBM 5150 section. http://www.minuszerodegrees.com/

Thanks ! have seen that but it only focuses on IBM and not clones. Even the section on 5160 XT is very limited. My Trident 9000 based card is not listed but works fine in three XT clone boards.
I think a list of cards that members have working in clones (naming the card and motherboard) would be more helpful than those lists because we are not "IBM only"... just my opinion.

Spent too long trying to figure out why DukeNukem1 wasn't outputting sound on my awe64 before realizing it was pc speaker only 😐 Didn't adlib come out years earlier?

kolderman wrote on 2021-05-04, 07:18:

Spent too long trying to figure out why DukeNukem1 wasn't outputting sound on my awe64 before realizing it was pc speaker only 😐 Didn't adlib come out years earlier?

Dangerous Dave and the first three Commander Keen games are also PC speaker.

Is there something like a DOS TSR that routes PC speaker sound to a standard Adlib / SoundBlaster through software? A card with a PC Speaker in is almost necessary for some of these older games.

Found an IBM Aptiva E-series 175 outside, but it was heavily exposed to the elements because the case and cd-drive are rusted and the bottom of the case and are around the modem card was caked in leaves and muck.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-05-04, 14:35:

Found an IBM Aptiva E-series 175 outside, but it was heavily exposed to the elements because the case and cd-drive are rusted and the bottom of the case and are around the modem card was caked in leaves and muck.

sounds like a good rescue story for the "i recently found this hardware" thread, are you going to restore it? it's surprising what electronics can put up with sometimes

gerry wrote on 2021-05-04, 15:06:

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-05-04, 14:35:

Found an IBM Aptiva E-series 175 outside, but it was heavily exposed to the elements because the case and cd-drive are rusted and the bottom of the case and are around the modem card was caked in leaves and muck.

sounds like a good rescue story for the "i recently found this hardware" thread, are you going to restore it? it's surprising what electronics can put up with sometimes

I don't know. i don't really have the space to work on things. And I don't know anything about really restoring a computer. I tried to at least disassemble it and remove the motherboard but something I can't see is holding it in place.

Soldering socket's on my next Commodore64...

Dude, that's going to look sick.

Finally got floppy drive #3 to work in my 386 machine and the MR BIOS almost works, but it keeps saying Please Wait on the screen or shows the blinking cursor after the RAM count.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-05-04, 20:52:

Dude, that's going to look sick.

Finally got floppy drive #3 to work in my 386 machine and the MR BIOS almost works, but it keeps saying Please Wait on the screen or shows the blinking cursor after the RAM count.

You will eventually get it to work 😀 Was it my C64 that you were referring to? If so, then yes. When it is done, then I might get an ATX case with a window on the side.

My favorite card in my PII DOS development machine is my Matrox Millennium II. Unfortunately it doesn't run Keen well. Today I was able to fix that.

The first issue is the color palette is all messed up. It turns out this is an issue with how the card implements the EGA overscan/border color. That color actually "tints" the palette on screen. I also saw this issue with 3DFX Voodoo 3/4/5. I was able to fix this by setting the border color to black - actually, this is recommended in Richard Ferraro's book "Programmer's Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards."

Second was scrolling. I located the scroll code in my copies of Keen 4/5/6 and took a whack at it, but then I found patches. I haven't fully digested what the scrolling patch does differently, but they use the original scroll code from the Keen4 shareware 1.0 demo.
https://keenwiki.shikadi.net/wiki/Patch:Scree … hoppy_scrolling

With both of these combined, Keen Galaxy engine games work fine on Matrox. A patch to set the border color to 0 was enough to fix 3dfx. I reproduce some of the issues in cksrcmod so I could change the code before writing a patch.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-04, 07:52:

Is there something like a DOS TSR that routes PC speaker sound to a standard Adlib / SoundBlaster through software? A card with a PC Speaker in is almost necessary for some of these older games.

Will dig thru my game archives, have some odd old stuff that may do that.