Cheeky bastard. ^.^

"Uh-huh. Sure"

I once powered an entire mainframe with potatoes.

The company I work for is completely run by potatoes. My colleagues don't like it when I call them that though 🤣

My ASUS laptop runs on 10 russet potatoes.

I prefer chips.

Quick question.

I noticed that with my Voodoo5 5500, when in game, if I try to take a "printscreen" screenshot, I get this:

Now, I believe this is because of the fact that the card has its two VSA-100 chips in SLI, and this is just an unfinished picture from that SLI config.

I don't have this problem on the desktop - when you take a screenshot, it looks just as it should.

Does anyone know any way to side-step this problem using the "printscreen" screenshot, or any software that I can use in lieu of that method to take in-game screenshots?

I'm using the latest official beta driver version 4.12.01.0666 under Windows 98SE.

Not PC related, but I got my water heater to start up again since it's windy out and the pilot light went out because of it. Learnt the hard way that there was no hot water going through when I was taking a shower and washing my hands.

I have overclocked the X1950 Pro to the maximum stable limit on the RDD, if I go beyond it starts artifacting so I'm keeping it in a safe range. I scored 13035 points in 3DMark 2001 and 12848 points in 3DMark 2003, both running at default settings. I'm impressed.

the_ultra_code wrote:

Quick question. […]
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Quick question.

I noticed that with my Voodoo5 5500, when in game, if I try to take a "printscreen" screenshot, I get this:

Now, I believe this is because of the fact that the card has its two VSA-100 chips in SLI, and this is just an unfinished picture from that SLI config.

I don't have this problem on the desktop - when you take a screenshot, it looks just as it should.

Does anyone know any way to side-step this problem using the "printscreen" screenshot, or any software that I can use in lieu of that method to take in-game screenshots?

I'm using the latest official beta driver version 4.12.01.0666 under Windows 98SE.

That's 100% normal AFAIK. I had that with my Voodoo 3 as well - I needed Fraps to take proper screenshots in quite a lot of games.

Building a second retro capable PC in a rack case. We're going to throw some wheels on the rack it's in, connect the two PCs via serial, and get some head-to-head and co-op action where we can find it. Might be looking to expand the party cart to four machines for IPX play sometime in the future.

PTherapist wrote:

Battling with a VIA C7 based Thin Client. It seems to have hardware issues. […]
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Battling with a VIA C7 based Thin Client. It seems to have hardware issues.

Firstly the CPU overheats, which cleaning and applying new thermal paste doesn't cure. Secondly once I've gotten past the heat issue with the addition of a fan, system stability isn't great. DirectX games will freeze or cause BSODs in Windows XP and installing Graphics drivers in Windows 98 leads to a frozen black screen at boot.

I'm guessing failing capacitors are to blame for these issues, so I'm probably going to leave this mini project on the backburner for a while. Though I'm not ruling out bad RAM just yet, which I'm going to test before proceeding any further. As sometimes upon reboot it fails to POST with beep codes relating to the memory.

It uses a regular Mini ITX motherboard, so I'll probably end up replacing the motherboard. I notice a lot of cheap Atom based boards available would fit in this thin client case, whilst others would need some slight modifications for the ports in the back. But then I'd be verging further away from retro and more towards regular low powered emulation system.

An ECS anything with bad caps. Now that's something new! 🤣 At least it uses Panasonics for the CPU VRM.
An Intel D201GLY2 seems like it would fit, you'd only need to drill a hole for the third audio jack. Despite being Intel-made (and with the wonderful Intel bios) it uses a SiS 662 chipset which should have 98 drivers.
It also would be much faster than the C7 and old Atoms, being a Conroe Celeron.

In fact i was looking to do the same thing: i have the board and i need a case, and since even cheapo ITX cases are like 3x the cost of a bigger case of comparable quality, I'm keeping an eye open on ebay for a dead thinclient with a generic enough port layout and swap boards.

I have collected a small size car load of classic IBM hardware today. Even some original packagings are included. Quickly tested some things; unfortunately a 8518 color monitor is (almost) dead, but the two PS/2 model 80’s did power up. I have some more things to test.

I have replaced the data drive in my RDD, a Western Digital Velociraptor WD3000HLFS, 300GB with 32MB of cache, with the same model, except it has 64MB of cache, the WD3000HLHX. I'm amazed by the massive reduction of the boot time by just replacing the secondary hard drive. Yes, I use an SSD as an OS drive, but XP wasn't as fast as it is now to load. Previously, the splash screen lasted a couple of seconds but now it barely lasts a second before it loads the desktop.

andrea wrote:

An ECS anything with bad caps. Now that's something new! :lol: At least it uses Panasonics for the CPU VRM. An Intel D201GLY2 s […]
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An ECS anything with bad caps. Now that's something new! 🤣 At least it uses Panasonics for the CPU VRM.
An Intel D201GLY2 seems like it would fit, you'd only need to drill a hole for the third audio jack. Despite being Intel-made (and with the wonderful Intel bios) it uses a SiS 662 chipset which should have 98 drivers.
It also would be much faster than the C7 and old Atoms, being a Conroe Celeron.

In fact i was looking to do the same thing: i have the board and i need a case, and since even cheapo ITX cases are like 3x the cost of a bigger case of comparable quality, I'm keeping an eye open on ebay for a dead thinclient with a generic enough port layout and swap boards.

Cheers for the info, I'll keep any eye out for one of those.

With the prices for Thin Clients on eBay being quite reasonable at the moment, it'd probably just be easier to buy a working one that takes Mini ITX and then just gut it to fit the board you want.

SpectriaForce wrote:

I have collected a small size car load of classic IBM hardware today. Even some original packagings are included. Quickly tested some things; unfortunately a 8518 color monitor is (almost) dead, but the two PS/2 model 80’s did power up. I have some more things to test.

Nice!

Pics in Bought these (retro) hardware today 😀

red_avatar wrote:

That's 100% normal AFAIK. I had that with my Voodoo 3 as well - I needed Fraps to take proper screenshots in quite a lot of games.

A Voodoo3? Hmmm... can't say I remember taking any in-game screenshots that resulted in such a mess with my Voodoo3, but then again, I didn't do many, if any in-game screenshots with mine, so you may be right. 🤣

The thing is, with the Fraps version that I have for Windows 98 (1.9D, I believe), it gives me a "directinput" error on my PIII-S machine that has DX7 installed on it, which prevents me from using Fraps' hotkeys for screenshooting, whereas with my P4 machine which has DX9 installed, I get no such error, and I'm sure I would be able to hotkey-screenshot no-problem. I'm guessing it's because that version relies more-so on DX9, but if someone could share an earlier version that works flawlessly with DX7, that would be amazing.

Any who, wish me luck. 'Bout to do some thermal testing with my V5 5500, which will take a metric s***-ton of time. Hopefully will get some sleep tonight. 🤣

I got a new car. Been working on the process for days an I'm exhausted, but I have it now.

If I have enough energy tomorrow I'm going to swap a few old bits for more desirable old bits of hardware, thus the retro angle.

*Slaps top of car*: This baby can hold a whole lot of retrocomputing hardware!

Also prepped a 2007 iMac for a particular application for a customer over the last couple of weeks (in spare time). Kind of retro. Edge of retro? Found another one for the same process.

Received 4MB of 30pin memory from ebay and replaced a cap on a previously dead OAK ISA Video card, which alowed me to test my recently aquired 386 motherboard.

ITS ALIVE!!!

Already have an AT case, controllers and other stuff to make a full build, but I'll wait until I can get my hands on a VGA card that does not bottleneck everything.

I had quite a few of these late model PCI/ISA button cell battery based M-Tech R418W2 486 motherboards from the Pentium Pro Haul of 2018. So I decided to archive any variant of the BIOS I came across. This is now the most complete collection of BIOS versions for this board. I had to physically remove the BIOS chip from the M-Tech board and place it in a Socket 8 motherboard to backup and hot flash the BIOS properly with UniFlash v1.4 (thanks go to Vogons member Deksor for the advice on that). It would not read or flash the BIOS properly directly on the M-Tech board with Awdflash or UniFlash.

Note: One of the nicer features of this motherboard's BIOS is that it has a built-in IDE HDD low level format option.

Jumper settings for this board: https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/M/M … 18-PCI-486.html

Archived original support site (R418): https://web.archive.org/web/19981207012336/ht … ftp.mtiusa.com/

The BIOS files are now archived over at -0° in the AT BIOS images section: http://minuszerodegrees.net/at_clone_bios/at_clone_bios.htm