Lately, I've been doing some changes with a couple of my main retro rigs (the Celeron-433 build and the Dell Optiplex GX150). Remember when I said I was sticking to Windows 95OSR2.5 on the Celeron rig? I changed my mind and decided to change the operating systems on both rigs by installing Windows 98SE on the Celeron and replacing Windows 98SE with Windows ME on the GX150.

I decided to do this for a couple reasons:
1. Windows 98SE has been giving me some issues on the GX150. Once in a while, the system would freeze (most infamously: it froze as soon as I installed drivers for the SB Audigy 2 sound card, but it didn't freeze when I installed them on Windows 2000). So I thought I'd give Windows ME a try to see if it would be any different. From what I've heard, Windows ME tends to work better on slightly newer hardware compared to 98, so I thought it'd be worth a shot.
2. Since the GX150 was the only Windows 98 machine I had setup at the moment, I figured I'd install 98 on one of my other computers to balance things out. I decided to install it on my Celeron-433 rig, partially because I got bored of Windows 95 and I already have a few other computers that run it.

I've just finished installing Windows 98SE on the Celeron rig, it detected most of its hardware out of the box (including the Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card and the ATI Rage Pro GPU), the only components I'll have to install drivers for are the Voodoo2 and the RTL8139 Ethernet NIC. Upon getting ready to install Windows ME on the GX150, I discovered that the DVD-ROM drive was dead, so I replaced that with a Pioneer DVD-RW drive that I bought at Goodwill a few months ago. Right now, I'm formatting the hard drive, let's see how this goes.

Found an iMac G5 that isn't full of bad caps...

Got 10.4.11 installed, got classic installed, but couldn't find anything that would actually mount a .DSK image...

Icon pack 25. That makes and even 200 icons for Windows 3, of varying utility. Yay. I would make icons for Win9X, but I'd already done that 20 years ago, and new ones would be pushing the boundaries of the site's theme of the early/mid-nineties. Also, there are fifteen point eight trillion Win9X icons out there already. Also, burnout kills the imagination.

We're moving in the next few months so I've started going through some of my stuff to see what I'm keeping and what I'm getting rid of - might make use of the hardware giveaway thread for some of it, but would anyone be interested in stuff either shipped or picked up from Southern Ontario, Canada?

Pulled out an old Cisco PIX 315 I've had hanging around for a couple years that I never used... might still use it for a retro lab, but I was doing some research and noticed mentions of the PIX line using standard Intel/AMD x86 parts, with early ones using 486 class CPU's. Well turns out mine isn't 486 based, but it does have a nice clean 200 Mhz Pentium MMX in it!

So oddly enough, if you're looking for Socket 7 or possibly Socket 3/5 CPUs, scrapped turn of the millennium network gear might be a place to look!

Just got another addition to my Quantum3D collection in yesterday, Quantum3D Obsidian2 200SB! With the rare optional fan rail system!

Cleaned it up and erased the contacts to get rid of any oxidization.

Played some Half Life and it worked perfect first try. (:

Progress on my Osborne keyboard:

Soldering completed (and debugged and fixed), controller written and it works!

At least, you press keys, they generally register and the input gets fed to the computer. What it lacks is any way of detecting how long a key is pressed for, any form of modifier use and general reliable usability. Oh, and the keyboard itself lacks any form of delete...

Refining the software (and thinking of a way to delete after all...) is for another day. Come to think of it, I might just use Caps Lock as a modifier for the modifier keys 😉

I got my Tandy 1000 graphics library working on Open Watcom and my sprite compiler is working better than ever.

Looks like Mortal Kombat and King's Quest combined. Very interesting.

Currently working on the GameBoy DMG-01 bundle by inspecting and repairing the items in question. I cleaned the nasty battery acid/corrosion on the one battery terminal for the DMG-01 system (had a little bit of corrosion on it) and the Nuby GameLight (had heavy battery acid and corrosion on the terminals). Both work, however, I need to fix the vertical lines on the DMG-01 system and clean it up as it has crud on it. No yellowing, which is nice and I'll be working on the newly acquired desktop from a fellow Vogoner.

Edit: fixed the vertical line issue on the DMG-01 successfully and it's 100% functional. First time fixing the vertical line issue the right way.

ryoder wrote:

I got my Tandy 1000 graphics library working on Open Watcom and my sprite compiler is working better than ever.

Awesome. I've been working on my 286 sprite and graphics library for DOS. Been inspired by playing Bitmap Brothers games on my 286, Gods and Speedball, trying to emulate the performance that they get out of those games on such low-end hardware.

I assume that when you say, "sprite compiler", that you compile your sprites into op-code? I have that planned for the future but currently focusing on just RLE sprites. If I need more performance (which I probably will) then for non-clipped sprites I will also introduce a compile sprite technique.

Benchmarked my 386SX some. Sounds about right for an SX-25?

Got a text from a friend's dad yesterday evening, "You don't happen to have a spare Asus P5A-B mainboard to sell?". Explained to him that no, I don't have one, that it's one of the hotter retro mobos, and next to impossible to fetch at a reasonable price here, if you even can find one. If he told me what he was up to though, I could perhaps come up with alternatives. This guy is retired since a few years, and got plenty of spare time, wondered if he'd been bitten by the retro bug by some odd chance 😁

Turned out he's repairing an old broken CNC plasma cutter, which is equipped with a P5A-B mobo, some custom ISA control card, a special PCI graphics card with dual outputs, and is running DOS. The CPU is a Pentium 133. Funny choice of mobo for that CPU, I would certainly have gone for a 430 series chipset board if I didn't need more than 66 MHz FSB. Perhaps a question of availability when the machine was built?

Figured any old AT board should do the job, scrounged up a working 430VX board from my stashes, and suggested we swap boards. He gets the tested and working board from me to replace the P5A board, and I get the latter back, to give repairing it a shot.

Even the transport problem was elegantly solved. My friend is going to visit her parents - they live in the southern part of the country, 500 km from here - tomorrow. Sending the board with her, and she brings back the P5A when she goes back 😀

So, soon I've got a P5A-B to try to restore during rainy days. Really looking forward to it, haven't really done anything retro computing related for quite a while 😀

Finishing up a system I'm currently working on. Replaced the dead CMOS battery, installed the data cables (COM, LPT, FDD, and HDD), the power connectors, and the motherboard connections: HDD LED, Reset switch, power LED (connects to the PSU), and PC speaker (the real PC speaker, not the squeaker cam speaker that are in today's computer cases).

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/yQxH85Ul.png […]
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That's a bit confusing 😵

Not been doing a lot PC wise lately, got myself a PS2 console and have mostly been playing around with that and using Free McBoot with OPL to run PS2 games over Ethernet. I was tearing my hair out the other night when OPL stopped working. No amount of reconfiguring, changing cables or rebooting the host PC would make a difference. Then after about 1 hour of much cursing, I discovered a rather dumb mistake - I'd accidentally placed the iso of a PS1 game into the samba share folder for OPL. It totally locked up OPL when it tried to read it and I couldn't even remove the file from the folder in Windows without disabling the ethernet first. 🤣

Other than that, an "old" activity, but not really retro - I replaced the laser on my Xbox 360 drive, which was suffering the common "Open Tray" problem when inserting DVD or Game discs and you had to tap the top of the console repeatedly after inserting a disc to get it working. I could have tried tweaking the DVD pot on the old laser, but even if it had worked it probably wouldn't have lasted long so I went with the new one instead. The new laser resolved the issue and now it's happily reading all types of disc again.

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/yQxH85Ul.png […]
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Speaking of 9x.... 🤣

No, you're not seeing things. I took my liberty and literally set up a Beta 1 build of WinME as a gaming OS. Close to 98SE, but with native (yes, native) USB support. Stable, although drivers are a bit of headache, but that's 9x for ya.

needs moar OEMINFO.INI + OEMLOGO.BMP

For quick reference:

OEMINFO.INI wrote:

[…]
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1[general]
2Manufacturer=Company Name
3Model=Custom
4
5[Support Information]
6Line1=" For technical support and service,"
7Line2=" buy a new computer."

Your logo image, at least in Win9X, 2K, and XP, should be 180x114, and 8 bit color if you want transparency. Palette index 0 will be your transparent color. If you use Paint Shop Pro to create and edit your logo, you can change palette settings under Colors, Edit Palette (in in PSP X, Image, Palette, Edit Palette). Double-click palette index 0 and change it to a color not used in your image. I usually use bright green (#00FF00) or bright purple (#FF00FF). The filenames I use for my images are:
9X: oemlogo.bmp
2K: oemlogo-2k.bmp
XP: oemlogo-xp.bmp
The batch file below handles renaming the files after they've been copied to the appropriate directory. This just allows you to use different images for different Windows Versions, so you can make era-appropriate logos, if that's your fancy.

And for easy-peasy installation of your custom logo and information:

OEM.BAT wrote:

[…]
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1echo off
2copy oemlogo.bmp %systemroot%\system32
3rem ***************************************************
4rem Script for deploying OEM INFO and OEM LOGO to
5rem different operating systems
6rem Simon Butler, Amset IT Solutions Ltd. 12-12-03
7rem see http://www.amset.info/netadmin/oemlogo.asp
8rem Requirements
9rem Image file for Windows 2000 named oemlogo-2k.bmp
10rem Image file for Windows XP named oemlogo-xp.bmp
11rem And oeminfo.ini file.
12rem
13rem All three files should be placed in the same
14rem directory as this batch file
15rem If running from login script, place all three files
16rem in your "netlogon" share on the domain controllers.
17rem Remember - if you are running from a network share
18rem it must be a mapped drive!
19rem ***************************************************
20
21rem Get the OS and dump to file
22ver >%systemdrive%\ver.txt
23
24Rem now find the operating system and act accordingly
25findstr "4.0" %systemdrive%\ver.txt
26if not errorlevel 1 goto nt4
27findstr "5.0" %systemdrive%\ver.txt
28if not errorlevel 1 goto win2k
29findstr "5.1" %systemdrive%\ver.txt
30if not errorlevel 1 goto winxp
31findstr "5.2" %systemdrive%\ver.txt
32if not errorlevel 1 goto win2003
33
34goto win9x
35
36:nt4
37set OpSys-NT4
38echo %OpSys% >>%systemdrive%\result.txt
39rem Windows NT4 settings
40
41copy oeminfo.ini "%systemroot%\system32"
42copy oemlogo-2k.bmp "%systemroot%\system32"
43del "%systemroot%\system32"\oemlogo.bmp
44rename "%systemroot%\system32\oemlogo-2k.bmp" oemlogo.bmp"
45
46goto next
47
48:win2k
49set OpSys=Win2K
50echo %OpSys% >>%systemdrive%\result.txt
51rem Windows 2000 settings
52
53copy oeminfo.ini "%systemroot%\system32"
54copy oemlogo-2k.bmp "%systemroot%\system32"
55del "%systemroot%\system32"\oemlogo.bmp
56rename "%systemroot%\system32\oemlogo-2k.bmp" oemlogo.bmp"
57
58goto next
59
60:winxp

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61set OpSys=XP
62echo %OpSys% >>%systemdrive%\result.txt
63rem Windows XP settings
64
65copy oeminfo.ini "%systemroot%\system32"
66copy oemlogo-xp.bmp "%systemroot%\system32"
67del "%systemroot%\system32"\oemlogo.bmp
68rename "%systemroot%\system32\oemlogo-xp.bmp" oemlogo.bmp"
69
70goto next
71
72:win2003
73set OpSys=Win2003
74echo %OpSys% >>%systemdrive%\result.txt
75rem Windows 2003 settings
76
77copy oeminfo.ini "%systemroot%\system32"
78copy oemlogo-xp.bmp "%systemroot%\system32"
79del "%systemroot%\system32"\oemlogo.bmp
80rename "%systemroot%\system32\oemlogo-xp.bmp" oemlogo.bmp"
81
82goto next
83
84:win9x
85set OpSys=9x
86echo %OpSys% >>%systemdrive%\result.txt
87rem Windows 9x settings
88
89copy oeminfo.ini "%systemroot%\system32\"
90copy oemlogo-2k.bmp "%systemroot%\system32\"
91del "%systemroot%\system"\oemlogo.bmp
92rename "%systemroot%\system\oemlogo-2k.bmp" oemlogo.bmp"
93
94goto next
95
96:next
97echo done >>%systemdrive%\result.txt
98echo Cleaning up!
99del %systemdrive%\result.txt
100del %systemdrive%\ver.txt
101rem if problems, put REM in front of above two lines
102rem to read the results files.

Put all of these on a floppy or flash drive, insert, and run the batch file.

I'm almost done with my hard disk plexiglass thing!

https://youtu.be/lTxyFkq1r9k

It was hot upstairs so I reorganized some stuff down in the retro room. Decided to hook up my MSX2 system and verify it was still working (been a few years). It still showed the correct date! But it had a 1.4GB HDD connected to a Sunrise IDE cartridge. I had to smack it a few times to get it to spin up, and then some files wouldn't read so I guess it's dying. Time to salvage some data while I still can (of course I probably have all the same files on my PC somewhere)