VOGONS


Reply 19360 of 27171, by Joakim

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I was looking through my parts and found a pci sound card called Aureon 5.1 by Terratec. Looking online there seems to be 3 cards, the plain 5.1, Fun and the Sky... I seem to have plain one as it sais nothing on the board.

Anyway looking for drivers i installed the 'Fun' drivers from vogons archive. They were marked to be for XP but it actually installed on windows 98SE. tried in a few games and they actually worked. Also the control panel installed ok.

Edit Freudian spelling error of Aureal Aureon

Reply 19361 of 27171, by PC@LIVE

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Today I restarted one of the i430VX I have, the PC was fixed not long ago, it had a Dual-Voltage problem, solved by replacing the MOSFET (?) (TIP110A).
On this PC I loaded and ran HWinfo for DOS.
I am running this program on various older PCs, it is a diagnostic program, but there is no bench.

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AMD 286-16 287-10 4MB HD 45MB VGA 256KB
AMD 386DX-40 Intel 387 8MB HD 81MB VGA 256KB
Cyrix 486DLC-40 IIT387-40 8MB VGA 512KB
AMD 5X86-133 16MB VGA VLB CL5428 2MB and many others
AMD K62+ 550 SOYO 5EMA+ and many others
AST Pentium Pro 200 MHz L2 256KB

Reply 19362 of 27171, by Caluser2000

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Getting my old Win98rtn system prepared to get fiired up for the first time after over 12 years of being asleep. It's an IMB PC300GL with Celery 300 slot 1 cpu. It served the familywell for around 5 years sharing a ppp connection with 2 other systems for a few years before we went ADSL. It is still in good condition after all these years. Just gave the out side of the case with ajax kitchen bench cleaner cream. Documentation is is still available at IBM which is handy. It was a very stable MS Windows 98 set up with really no big issues at all. Never had to restall the OS every 2 month and on the original installation it had in 1998 without OEM cruft.

Might do a Netinstall minimal installation of Devuan BeoWolf to make sure everything is functioning properly..😉 https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan

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There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 19363 of 27171, by SteveC

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I built a replacement power supply for my IBM PS/2 model 70 using a mini ATX 12v PSU (like a picoPSU) (one of these - https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07D71R7D8)

I still need to wire in the clunky switch and tidy it up but it works!

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Reply 19364 of 27171, by TheAbandonwareGuy

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I'm backkkkkkk!!!!

So anyways two topics I want to discuss:

First off, does anyone else feel like the "Retro tech wave" has reached vintage PCs? I'm looking up prices for stuff I used to see listed for $20 BIN on eBay 2 or 3 years ago ALL THE TIME and now alot of that stuff is going for $50+ BIN with extensive bidding wars on anything auctioned with a low starting price. Like GeForce 6800 PCIe cards are now just as expensive as AGP, I'm for sure glad I've got two of them already. I had a shelf collapse on my PCIe 6800GT though so I need to retest it, really hoping it still works because apparently they are no longer $25 dollar cards and I should expect to pay $100+ if I need to replace it. A minute ago I saw some guy a few towns over with pallets of old hardware and I told him I would pay double scrap price and he sent me a pic of what he had and I asked how much he wanted for the IBM Pentium II I was seeing as he said "Give me a minute" looked it up on eBay and then said "$500" so I looked it up myself and he was using the first unsold listing he saw, that was for one in MUCH better condition with everything preset up and upgrades installed (and it was actually a sister model, not the exact same model). I tried to correct him and tell him the proper way to look stuff up on eBay and he said "Either take it or leave it, I don't need someone telling me how to use eBay" so I told him to go peddle his garbage elsewhere. Are we to the point where I'm the asshole for thinking offering double scrap price for a 90s PC is a fair market value? Like I've got enough of what I want I will never feel inadequate in terms of what hardware I have again, but it sucks seeing a hobby I thought was immune to the commoners stumbling in and ruining everything going this directio. I thought the skill requirements would keep that from happening, 99.99 percent of people are too stupid to figure out how to make a retro PC work for more than 5 minutes, unlike plopping a game into a SNES and being off to the races which anyone can do.

Second off, the game "Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection".... Has anyone else noticed this game is super common in the wild but its always missing one of the two discs? I noticed this and I've started buying the half sets every time I see them, now I've pieced together two different copies.

Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone: https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c
I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction

Reply 19365 of 27171, by gerry

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TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2021-07-05, 15:51:

I'm backkkkkkk!!!!

So anyways two topics I want to discuss:

First off, does anyone else feel like the "Retro tech wave" has reached vintage PCs? I'm looking up prices for stuff I used to see listed for $20 BIN on eBay 2 or 3 years ago ALL THE TIME and now alot of that stuff is going for $50+ BIN with extensive bidding wars on anything auctioned with a low starting price. Like GeForce 6800 PCIe cards are now just as expensive as AGP, I'm for sure glad I've got two of them already. I had a shelf collapse on my PCIe 6800GT though so I need to retest it, really hoping it still works because apparently they are no longer $25 dollar cards and I should expect to pay $100+ if I need to replace it. A minute ago I saw some guy a few towns over with pallets of old hardware and I told him I would pay double scrap price and he sent me a pic of what he had and I asked how much he wanted for the IBM Pentium II I was seeing as he said "Give me a minute" looked it up on eBay and then said "$500" so I looked it up myself and he was using the first unsold listing he saw, that was for one in MUCH better condition with everything preset up and upgrades installed (and it was actually a sister model, not the exact same model). I tried to correct him and tell him the proper way to look stuff up on eBay and he said "Either take it or leave it, I don't need someone telling me how to use eBay" so I told him to go peddle his garbage elsewhere. Are we to the point where I'm the asshole for thinking offering double scrap price for a 90s PC is a fair market value? Like I've got enough of what I want I will never feel inadequate in terms of what hardware I have again, but it sucks seeing a hobby I thought was immune to the commoners stumbling in and ruining everything going this directio. I thought the skill requirements would keep that from happening, 99.99 percent of people are too stupid to figure out how to make a retro PC work for more than 5 minutes, unlike plopping a game into a SNES and being off to the races which anyone can do.

I suppose things got a little rarer, a few more people are entering the 'relive my past' age coinciding with PC tech, there are more YouTube and other media things on the subject and speculators are taking chances on getting high prices.

one dissatisfaction is that when (not if, when) that p2 fails to sell for anything near $500 you can't go back and say "see! told you". It's luck, if you are the first to point out the price is silly you get rebuffed, some weeks later someone else comes along and offers $100 and gets it, smiles all round - but you are the one who corrected the seller, a kind of injustice really!

anyway, when prices are too high I won't buy, if something breaks and would cost 4x to replace, then its just broken and gone really

Second off, the game "Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection".... Has anyone else noticed this game is super common in the wild but its always missing one of the two discs? I noticed this and I've started buying the half sets every time I see them, now I've pieced together two different copies.

i found this with lots of multi-disc games in sale out in the wild, or there are 2 cds but not of the same game - always worth checking before hand 😀

i wonder if this game in particular, having been popular among kids perhaps, is more likely to have lost a disc because kids tend to be less organised

Reply 19366 of 27171, by Mister Xiado

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Classic everything has jumped up in price, first from trust fund hipsters paying a mint for "retro" tech to get "nerd cred", then due to massive payouts in the United States, giving people more money to spend on frippery, so they wouldn't mind paying for for what they would previously blanch at, and now by the devaluation of currency, which artificially increases costs across the board. This has almost completely stymied my desire to acquire a system and upgrade it to the maximum, good parts tend to be sold from the back end of the world, for a princely sum, if not a king's ransom.
Previously, everything was basically priced as if it was in a junk pile at a yard sale. It's not like there was some new discovery that increased the utility and inherent value of older tech, just more people thinking of it as an investment, or sixty cents worth of gold to be harvested from several hundred pounds of classic computers. Utterly disgusting.

More on topic, I'm almost ready to perform the DALLAS surgery I've been putting off, but I think my Packard Bell system is the best candidate for now, as it's not missing any essential components, and is easier to disassemble.

b_ldnt2.gif - Where it's always 1995.
Icons, wallpapers, and typical Oldternet nonsense.

Reply 19367 of 27171, by Caluser2000

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Seem to have taken over half the lounge floor again. It's only been two weeks since I cleaned it up.

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There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 19368 of 27171, by PC@LIVE

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TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2021-07-05, 15:51:
I'm backkkkkkk!!!! […]
Show full quote

I'm backkkkkkk!!!!

So anyways two topics I want to discuss:

First off, does anyone else feel like the "Retro tech wave" has reached vintage PCs? I'm looking up prices for stuff I used to see listed for $20 BIN on eBay 2 or 3 years ago ALL THE TIME and now alot of that stuff is going for $50+ BIN with extensive bidding wars on anything auctioned with a low starting price. Like GeForce 6800 PCIe cards are now just as expensive as AGP, I'm for sure glad I've got two of them already. I had a shelf collapse on my PCIe 6800GT though so I need to retest it, really hoping it still works because apparently they are no longer $25 dollar cards and I should expect to pay $100+ if I need to replace it. A minute ago I saw some guy a few towns over with pallets of old hardware and I told him I would pay double scrap price and he sent me a pic of what he had and I asked how much he wanted for the IBM Pentium II I was seeing as he said "Give me a minute" looked it up on eBay and then said "$500" so I looked it up myself and he was using the first unsold listing he saw, that was for one in MUCH better condition with everything preset up and upgrades installed (and it was actually a sister model, not the exact same model). I tried to correct him and tell him the proper way to look stuff up on eBay and he said "Either take it or leave it, I don't need someone telling me how to use eBay" so I told him to go peddle his garbage elsewhere. Are we to the point where I'm the asshole for thinking offering double scrap price for a 90s PC is a fair market value? Like I've got enough of what I want I will never feel inadequate in terms of what hardware I have again, but it sucks seeing a hobby I thought was immune to the commoners stumbling in and ruining everything going this directio. I thought the skill requirements would keep that from happening, 99.99 percent of people are too stupid to figure out how to make a retro PC work for more than 5 minutes, unlike plopping a game into a SNES and being off to the races which anyone can do.

Second off, the game "Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection".... Has anyone else noticed this game is super common in the wild but its always missing one of the two discs? I noticed this and I've started buying the half sets every time I see them, now I've pieced together two different copies.

My friend, unfortunately the IQ is not the same for everyone, it happens that some consider the old PCs useless and give them away, while others consider them pure gold.
Currently I have difficulty finding isa or pci cards at normal prices, coprocessors that until recently sold at doubled or tripled prices, CPUs that previously sold in batches now sell them individually at lot prices.
For me it's a hobby, I'm trying to make a private museum of old PCs, but if I have to pay the crazy prices for these PCs, I need monthly superstar budgets.

AMD 286-16 287-10 4MB HD 45MB VGA 256KB
AMD 386DX-40 Intel 387 8MB HD 81MB VGA 256KB
Cyrix 486DLC-40 IIT387-40 8MB VGA 512KB
AMD 5X86-133 16MB VGA VLB CL5428 2MB and many others
AMD K62+ 550 SOYO 5EMA+ and many others
AST Pentium Pro 200 MHz L2 256KB

Reply 19369 of 27171, by PTherapist

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A couple of bits of retro activities - firstly, got myself a little 17-compartment organizer to store all my various computer bits and catalog their location, rather than have them scattered in numerous places. So I've filled it with various DIP chips, processors, RAM, adapters, brackets etc. At least now I'll know where some of my useful components are, as well as finally having a record of the DIP & PLCC chips I have (ie. EPROMS, SRAM, DRAM etc etc)

The other activity is a bit more interesting - on a whim I decided to have another look at my Devon IT LT310 Thin Client, with Via C7 (Esther) 1.0GHz CPU & 512MB RAM.
I'd put it away a couple of years back due to it being faulty. After some time switched on, I'd start getting random errors and crashes. I ruled out the PSU at the time, as the motherboard inside took a standard ATX connection and so I was able to test a different PSU easily. This left overheating and the addition of a CPU fan didn't seem to make any difference, hence I figured the motherboard was bad and shelved it.

Fast forward to today, I tested it out booting from Hiren's Boot CD. Sure enough, the same symptoms reappeared. Prime95 would fail with a "hardware failure" and S&M Stress Tests indicated errors with L2 cache before giving a BSOD before completing all of it's tests.

I realised the only thing I hadn't tried, as I didn't think it would be the cause, was to look at the RAM. I was going to replace it with a different DDR2 module, but then first decided to head into the BIOS and set the RAM timings manually, just to see if it would make any difference. Well, I'll be damned, it worked - it's now stable! I guess the BIOS on this thing, when left at automatic timings was getting them wrong and leading to instability.

EDIT to add: I went back into the BIOS and set the timings back to automatic, but left the RAM manually underclocked rather than automatic. Automatic was setting it to 266MHz, but it only seems happy at 200MHz. So maybe it was a speed issue, as opposed to just timings. I guess this motherboard doesn't really like DDR2-667 memory sticks, hence being limited to 200/266.

Of course there could be other things wrong with this still, I'll have to add an SSD and try to install an OS to be sure. But it's sure looking promising so far, Prime95 has been running successfully for hours and S&M passed all of it's tests.

Reply 19370 of 27171, by PC@LIVE

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Restarted a 486 VLB motherboard with faulty L2 cache, the PC only works by disabling it, but the performance is obviously a bit lower.
When it worked fine, the L2 cache amount was increased from 128KB to 256KB, adding chips where they were missing and resetting jumpers.
Unfortunately, despite cleaning the pins of the chips, the problem was not solved.
In the ISA post card I read in the display 96 and 95, I have to investigate to understand what creates the problem, I would exclude that they are the defective cache chips, since the ones I had added work, but you should try these if they work in another MB, or it would be necessary test them in some way.
Disabling the cache from Bios, on the other hand, works without problems, and it is possible to start various programs, I have run some for DOS.

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AMD 286-16 287-10 4MB HD 45MB VGA 256KB
AMD 386DX-40 Intel 387 8MB HD 81MB VGA 256KB
Cyrix 486DLC-40 IIT387-40 8MB VGA 512KB
AMD 5X86-133 16MB VGA VLB CL5428 2MB and many others
AMD K62+ 550 SOYO 5EMA+ and many others
AST Pentium Pro 200 MHz L2 256KB

Reply 19371 of 27171, by Merovign

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Helping pare down the volume of my CPUs, maybe I'll do RAM next (gotta figure out a way to do it without spending too much plastic on it). Or print out more trays and strip down some mobos to make storing them easier.

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A tiny step toward organization and sorting.

PIII's, Celerons, K6-2 500 and MMX 233, Socket 478s from 1.6 GHz to 3.4 GHz, various AMDs from 939 to AM3, and P4s, PDs, C2Ds, C2Qs, and a few socket 115x Pentiums and i-series.

Edit: It occurs to me I should try to make a Slot 1 / A stand of some sort.

Last edited by Merovign on 2021-07-06, 05:07. Edited 1 time in total.

*Too* *many* *things*!

Reply 19372 of 27171, by fosterwj03

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I just had a retro-LAN party with my kids. We played several rounds of Unreal Tournament '99 Deathmatch. It really brought back some memories.

BTW, Unreal still works pretty darn well on Windows 10 and modern hardware. A real testament to the programmers.

Reply 19373 of 27171, by chrismeyer6

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fosterwj03 wrote on 2021-07-06, 02:00:

I just had a retro-LAN party with my kids. We played several rounds of Unreal Tournament '99 Deathmatch. It really brought back some memories.

BTW, Unreal still works pretty darn well on Windows 10 and modern hardware. A real testament to the programmers.

That must of been a ton of fun there's nothing like good quality family time. I can't wait untill my two boys (2 &6) are old enough to do that.

Reply 19374 of 27171, by Bruninho

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bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-07-04, 06:15:

Installed the Mario NES shell in place of the one that had crumbled to pieces.

IMG_20210704_004132186~2.jpg

IMG_20210704_004124458_HDR~2.jpg

Looking beautiful!!

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 19375 of 27171, by bjwil1991

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I'm planning on starting a retro LAN party by building a couple more of the Windows 98SE and Windows XP machines and use my main desktop as the server for the games.

Bruninho wrote on 2021-07-06, 02:41:
bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-07-04, 06:15:

Installed the Mario NES shell in place of the one that had crumbled to pieces.

IMG_20210704_004132186~2.jpg

IMG_20210704_004124458_HDR~2.jpg

Looking beautiful!!

Thanks. I have another one to re-shell once I get everything settled.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 19376 of 27171, by Caluser2000

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Fired up my project Acorn RiscPC after quite a long hiatus . Some thing is obviously up with the hhd a RiscOS wouldn't load from it. No problem because it has partial RiscOS on two rom on the mobo with some relatively basic applications to play around with. And of course you can shell out to the command Iine like you can with MS Windows 3.1. I'll put the hdd in one of my P4s and see whats up with. It could be just some thing minor or completely stuff. We'll see. Handy systems those 32-bit P4 systems...😉

In the olden days computers came with dead tree manuals that were quite comprehensive. Tons of info about setting up your system, trouble shooting and the like. You could relax in your favorite comfy chair and go through them.. There was no need to have a permanent connection to the interweb...😉

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There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 19377 of 27171, by Caluser2000

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The HP P200mmx packed a sad last night and doesn't. Done the normal trouble shooting stuff. To replace it I'm putting together a AMD K6-2 400AFR based system on a Super Socket 7 mobo. Should be fun...😉

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There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 19378 of 27171, by SteveC

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Just got reacquainted with this old beast today - been handed down a few times and made it back to me! I had it from new as my work laptop and it was rubbish back then!

HP (Compaq) nx9105
Athlon XP 2800+
512MB RAM
40GB HDD
Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go 32MB

First boot since 2014 and flat BIOS battery but otherwise working fine!

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Reply 19379 of 27171, by SteveC

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SteveC wrote on 2021-07-06, 20:33:
Just got reacquainted with this old beast today - been handed down a few times and made it back to me! I had it from new as my w […]
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Just got reacquainted with this old beast today - been handed down a few times and made it back to me! I had it from new as my work laptop and it was rubbish back then!

HP (Compaq) nx9105
Athlon XP 2800+
512MB RAM
40GB HDD
Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go 32MB

First boot since 2014 and flat BIOS battery but otherwise working fine!

Not entirely sure this is correct, but at least I know the laptop is Y3604 compatible 😁

The JBL Pro speakers just nearly blew my head off though!

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