Murugan wrote:

Finished my humble gaming room/mancave. Still need to sort out some issues again with my 386 :( http://i.imgur.com/PfdKgJml.jpg […]
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Finished my humble gaming room/mancave. Still need to sort out some issues again with my 386 🙁

hey, I remember these speakers from my teenage years. Want to buy it, however I dont know what brand / how to identify them to find in any auction or whatever.
Can you tell me what is the brand / producer / etc of this speakers? Anyone here who have the same speakers / other branding?

retropol wrote:

Murugan wrote:

Can you tell me what is the brand / producer / etc of this speakers? Anyone here who have the same speakers / other branding?

Looks like these, although they might be a rebrand: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Active-95A-Multi-Med … xkAAOSwASBdGp0p

And another: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Juster-Activ … 5.c100010.m2109

Brand new: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Juster-Activ … m4383.l4275.c10

Managed to fix a PC (well, almost) that came with a interesting (and bizzare) Socket 478 on a 423 adapter.

First off. DUST. Sweet Jesus Christ almighty, I think I've inhaled at least 10kg of dust from that thing.
Then, motherboard was nearly dead. FDN338 transistor up in smoke along with a 3055 regulator for the RAM slots. An dead ASUS P5K\SE EPU and a dead H55 motherboard proved to be helpful in replacing the components, and I got the board to finally POST.

Finally, I noticed something absolutely awry, and it's REALLY hard for me to believe - all components, except the board, were dated 2007. How is it in any way possible to sell such a machine (Willamette based Celeron) in 2007, with just 256MB of SDRAM, a ATI Rage XL 8MB PCI and a 56k modem? By 2007, I'd expect to see at least a DDR2 board in there.

More to the point, what OS was running on 256mb in 2007?

Haven't checked the drive yet, but if I'd be to say, probably XP SP2 or SP3. That's what I usually found, unless it's been upgraded over the time to Windows 7. The drive is a 80GB Maxtor, so any of these two is possible to be in there.

EDIT: Yeah, I was right. XP SP3, and it's running dog slow. Oh well, maybe I'll drop in a good actual Willie and install 2000 Server. Oh, and TOP on my checklist, is to replace that nightmarish Spire fan. Sweet god, I got a headache after just 2 minutes of using it.

Does anyone know why Direct3D doesn't work with my Ti4400 or VooDoo2 card? I get these messages hen I try to run the Direct3D:

Ti4400
Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x887602eb (error code)
Direct3D 8 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)
Direct3D 9 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)

VooDoo2
Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 46 (GetDC): HRESULT = 0x88760249 (Can't create DC)
Direct3D 8 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)

I reinstalled Windows 98SE (files copied over), reinstalled the nVidia drivers, and still nothing. The nVidia Control Panel says the nVidia card is running on AGP 2x while the BIOS is set to 4x mode and DXDIAG shows the video memory as 2.5MB instead of 128MB.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Does anyone know why Direct3D doesn't work with my Ti4400 or VooDoo2 card? I get these messages hen I try to run the Direct3D: […]
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Does anyone know why Direct3D doesn't work with my Ti4400 or VooDoo2 card? I get these messages hen I try to run the Direct3D:

Ti4400
Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x887602eb (error code)
Direct3D 8 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)
Direct3D 9 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)

VooDoo2
Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 46 (GetDC): HRESULT = 0x88760249 (Can't create DC)
Direct3D 8 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)

I reinstalled Windows 98SE (files copied over), reinstalled the nVidia drivers, and still nothing. The nVidia Control Panel says the nVidia card is running on AGP 2x while the BIOS is set to 4x mode and DXDIAG shows the video memory as 2.5MB instead of 128MB.

Sounds like that OS is screwed. I would verify the cards functionality with another machine.

Finished setting up my 386SX-25 with MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0, then installed about two dozen 87-89 games on it.

It's the oldest computer I have but I feel fairly unsympathetic to it for some reason; its game library overlaps greatly with my Amiga computers and I have found it good for very little software.

Speaking of Amiga, I upgraded my A500's Denise to a Super Denise so now it's officially an ECS computer. At 42MHz it really makes my 386 somewhat obsolete. Maybe I should add a MIDI card to my 386 and use it with Munt-Pi and that could help differentiate it a bit.

practiced soldering a DVI port on an old TNT2 AGP card that came in a Dell Optiplex PIII workstation I picked up recently but upgraded to a 256mb Geforce 6200.

I was actually hopeful that the DVI port would be functional once soldered in as pretty much all possible pads are occupied, and many of the traces from the DVI pins clearly go through circuitry but alas - no video signal seems to be coming out.

Sometimes, there needs to be a series of capacitors and resistors for the DVI port to function or is disabled in the video BIOS and possibly needs an upgrade to the latest one.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Sometimes, there needs to be a series of capacitors and resistors for the DVI port to function or is disabled in the video BIOS and possibly needs an upgrade to the latest one.

Yeah I think you're right about the BIOS. Since pretty much every possible solder pad is already occupied I figured there was a chance it might just work. This also is a Dell part so it might need a specific BIOS.

I ended up just tossing the card as it was really just a project for me to practice soldering the DVI connector in preparation for converting my Quadro 4000 SDI to dual DVI out (the SDI card plugs into an upward-facing DVI port, so it is already physically there but I need to swap it out with a right-angle port).

appiah4 wrote:

It's the oldest computer I have but I feel fairly unsympathetic to it for some reason; its game library overlaps greatly with my Amiga computers and I have found it good for very little software.

Yes I'm with ya, my 386 and 286 - and even my 486 for the most part - were fun to build but I rarely go to the trouble of hauling their heavy arses out of the shed and use them.

kolderman wrote:

More to the point, what OS was running on 256mb in 2007?

I'd have been running Win2K or a stripped down XP install with that much. Heck, according to my records, I was. Fancy that.

Considering making a small number of Windows 95 icons. I don't currently have a system with Win95 installed on it (just 3.11, 98, 7, and 10), so I'm dragging my feet on it. Ironically, it will be more difficult to work with more colors, and produce not-garbage results. Not to mention, 4 bit icons should be included, just for the sake of doing it properly. So, more than double the work.

retropol wrote:

Murugan wrote:

Finished my humble gaming room/mancave. Still need to sort out some issues again with my 386 🙁

hey, I remember these speakers from my teenage years. Want to buy it, however I dont know what brand / how to identify them to find in any auction or whatever.
Can you tell me what is the brand / producer / etc of this speakers? Anyone here who have the same speakers / other branding?

Hi AFAIK there are numerous brands with speakers like this. I have bought a second pair and it's different brand and also different Wattage. If you want I can look this afternoon.
Those on Ebay are really expensive 🤣. I bought mine for 5€ each,second handed.

Yesterday I started my P4 2.0 build from all the spare parts I have. What else do you do with spare parts :p

Went through that HDD box worth of 512kbit cache chips, using my new PCChips M912 and an Am5x86. Last time I had a lot of time for such things I did the same with my 256kbit chips.
The board came with 256k of really shitty cache, btw. It couldn't take the fastest timings, not even at 33MHz. After the first few rounds I set the bar to 50MHz/3-1-1-1/1WS write and threw away everything that couldn't run a Doom timedemo. Now I have a pile of cache to take back for recycling, and another pile of keepers.

None could do 2-1-1-1/0 at 50MHz, btw. Even the best exhibited texture errors in Doom. Most couldn't even start it (or boot DOS to begin with).

40MHz 2-1-1-1/0 is imperative but it shouldn't be a problem for the remaining chips. I don't want to go through another round...

Oh, and tried 3*60MHz too. A bit unstable at 3.3V but seems to work nicely at 4V.

It was yesterday. Today, I don't know yet. I'm on a short holiday, I plan to go out on a bicycle ride.

Today I discovered that someone made a standalone OPL2 / OPL3 vgm player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4uoOnVM3_w

So there's another thing to draw my interest once I've got through a few of my othyer projects 😁

badmojo wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

It's the oldest computer I have but I feel fairly unsympathetic to it for some reason; its game library overlaps greatly with my Amiga computers and I have found it good for very little software.

Yes I'm with ya, my 386 and 286 - and even my 486 for the most part - were fun to build but I rarely go to the trouble of hauling their heavy arses out of the shed and use them.

I guess once you go Amiga, there's no going back 😀

I may try to do some DOS networking with this PC and try to get it to work with my Munt-Pi without SoftMPU (using Keropi's Music Quest card) to differentiate it more I guess.

Sigh.
It was not as easy as anticipated to get my 486 assembled.

One major part of the difficulty was getting the parts:
-Headland HT340-cacheless chipset based mobo (it is the upgraded 486 version of the well-known HT12 286 mobo)
-Spea V7 Mercury (135MHz DAC) - only managed to find a dead one...
...so instead of that Spea V7 Mirage (100MHz DAC) with Micron RAMs
-VGA-modded Hercules card (98 Hz text/graphics mode refresh rate)
-AHA-1542CF SCSI disk controller with 2 Fujitsu 73GB 15k SCA drives attached
-Winbond IDE CDROM/Floppy/multi-IO
-SMC 8013EWC network card
-CMI-8330 SP-DIF soundcard
-16-bit 16650 serial card

Hardware seems to work fine so far.
Power supply is in spec (<40mV p-p ripple).

Now I can finally close the case to do some DOS windows setting up.

Some photos, from the workshop:

The cards. Almost full...

VGA output. Very sharp, as one can expect from 100MHz DAC. Will be of better refresh rate after installing the spea utilities.

Hercules card output (rgb adjusted to my preferred bluish green).
(As its output is 0.7V max, it looks dark if the monitor is not turned bright. Will correct that some day)

Ah yes, the strange-looking Hercules clone card, respective what is remaining of it ...

And its 9pin-VGA cable adapter

Phew.

I finally got around to two mini-projects.

1. 3D printing the SD-IDE bracket a user posted on this forum. It has some issues with the rear screw holes not lining up, but I think that is more on the PCBs not being consistent than the print.

2. I originally purchased some plastic bonder to repair my car's bumper cover. Turns out it works REALLY well fixing cases too. I used a dremel to sand a wide V-groove in the plastic and cleaned it before applying the bonder. I still need to purchase plastic filler and paint to hide the crack (if possible). I could always leave it with a Kintsugi vibe.

found a good use for my fine pencil today...

one of the pins was curled over 180°, had to get it out with a knife before I could slide the pencil over to try and wiggle it straight again

...not perfect... but usable I guess

all in all a lot easier than using tweezers

and now...

I am not quite sure yet if I should even bother with this one 😵
I hate what some people are doing to these poor cpus 😢