Tested an AGP Radeon 3850 on an Athlon XP Nforce2 system. Read somewhere that the video driver requires SSE2, which I'm happy to report is not true. Card works fine using normal catalyst drivers.

I just tried to run one of the LMS we do at work in a Win98SE with RetroZilla 2.2.

Amazing how it rendered almost perfectly. It just missed some of the background gradients where it is white.

Opens the door and peers through.

Wow, it has been five months since I've been on VOGONS. Lot of things in life happened, a lot of time spent on Discord spent, and a lot of retro projects I have been slowly doing in the background.

Can't wait to post some new threads here again. 🤣

I have jerryrigged a small fan on the Northbridge of my Tualatin RDD. I know it's not much, but at least it will help the machine run a little bit cooler. I've also tried to go beyond 146MHz in terms of overclocking, but no dice. It seems that if I go beyond 147.31MHz, I get freezes and BSODs always with the same STOP code: 0x000000D1 Driver IRQL not less or equal. I really would like to have a set of three PC150 512MB sticks...

Upgrading some Alpha DS10 and DS20E servers at work with UltraSCSI LVD Solid State drives, and installing some Compact Flash DDS/DAT tape emulators.

I took my 486's insanity to the next level....

- put the DVD-RW drive and the HDD on separate IDE channels (finally)
- Started experiments with SATA HDD on a Kingwin ADP-06 SATA to IDE Bridge Adapter
- Managed to get a 256GB SSD I had laying around (the spoils of being in I.T. for years and knowing people) w/ Maxblast DDO to work on my 486 DX4-100 - BLOODY fast! Might be worth a new round of DAW experiments.

Scary part is the 486 ALMOST tried to boot Pinguy Linux, when I first put the SSD in there, 🤣. Kernel Panic halted that (probably due to mismatch between BIOS and SSD capacity).

Re-organizing a lot of my stash into filing cabinets.

Received my Asrock "4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0" motherboard from Hungary, cleaned her up, swapped in the Core 2 Extreme 6800 CPU, 4gb of DDR2 (the included manual says it supports only 2gb, but it is showing over 3gb), and after some testing to make sure it worked... rebuilt my retro rig.

New core, although at some point I will recap an old PSU and hope to switch this back to the dual Pentium III Tyan board, this will do for now.

Also in the midst of this, swapped the Asus SATA DVD-RW drive for a new-old-stock Plextor IDE DVD-RW drive for compatibility with games that need analogue audio from the optical drive.

So far Windows 98 has been formatting the 80gb partition I set for it for about an hour (78% done as I write this), so the Win98 and Win2k setups may have to wait for tomorrow.

tested the Slot A system I bought recently with 12MB Voodoo 2 SLI and probably ran a game in native glide for the first time in 20 years 😀

I never had a Slot A, and my Voodoo 2 only was 8MB and no SLI back in the day so venturing into new territory... and I'm loving all of it.

Finally got around to playing some PowerPC ports of Doom 3 and UT 2004 on my recently upgraded G4 tower.

For a GeForce 7800GS, the performance is very poor in both games. Around 32 fps in Doom at 1024x768; well below what my A64 4000+ can accomplish with the same GPU (106 fps). Even my PIII-S @ 1.63GHz w/ a 6800GT can push 50 fps.

That's just terrible for a pair of 1.25GHz G4s with 2MB of L3 each. Remember when Apple were calling these things Pentium crushing "supercomputers?" Geesh...

Been going through another hardware cull mood. Today was sorting the Socket 478 boards and setting aside the ones I don't want to either sell or give away locally. They've always been odd to me as a collector. Won't be as compatible as Socket 370 for Win98/DOS, won't be as powerful as 775 for XP, so I can't justify keeping too many.

This is the one that always gives me trouble when I come across it - the ABit TH7II-RAID. Notable for being one of the very early Socket 478 boards with a variety of features that was certainly unusual, or even ahead of its time for 2001.

Sporting the infamous Intel 850 chipset with everyone's favourite RDRAM, built in RAID capabilities with a Highpoint controller on-board and something that wouldn't be amiss on higher end boards today - a seven segment LCD for BIOS codes and an on-board Power & Reset button, it was certainly a looker.

Why does it cause me trouble when I come across it? The board has Rubycon caps. The highly regarded Rubycon MBZ series of caps, in fact. And yet, some of them have gone poof. Not unusual for the capacitor plague era, but from a Rubycon capacitor? Very unusual. I'm not sure what caused it. Bad power supply (I hope so.)? Poor ventilation? Too much heat? Bad capacitor batch? Poor board design?

If going through the hassle and expense of a recap using replacement good quality caps leads me to the same situation, then I don't really want to keep the board.

I'll have to sit on this board and think about it some more. Even with the dodgy capacitors, I know the board still works. It was running 24/7 from 2001 until 2018 or so. To complement this text, I took some pictures of it. I believe I've posted some pictures of this board here before, but here's some new ones.

Any thoughts about reasons for keeping or offloading it are welcome.

Created a "grey theme" for Windows 98SE (feels a little too light to call it a "dark theme"). Feel free to download the attached .txt file, replace ".txt" with ".Theme", and try it out.

x0zm_ wrote:

Been going through another hardware cull mood. Today was sorting the Socket 478 boards and setting aside the ones I don't want t […]
Show full quote

Been going through another hardware cull mood. Today was sorting the Socket 478 boards and setting aside the ones I don't want to either sell or give away locally. They've always been odd to me as a collector. Won't be as compatible as Socket 370 for Win98/DOS, won't be as powerful as 775 for XP, so I can't justify keeping too many.

This is the one that always gives me trouble when I come across it - the ABit TH7II-RAID. Notable for being one of the very early Socket 478 boards with a variety of features that was certainly unusual, or even ahead of its time for 2001.

Sporting the infamous Intel 850 chipset with everyone's favourite RDRAM, built in RAID capabilities with a Highpoint controller on-board and something that wouldn't be amiss on higher end boards today - a seven segment LCD for BIOS codes and an on-board Power & Reset button, it was certainly a looker.

Why does it cause me trouble when I come across it? The board has Rubycon caps. The highly regarded Rubycon MBZ series of caps, in fact. And yet, some of them have gone poof. Not unusual for the capacitor plague era, but from a Rubycon capacitor? Very unusual. I'm not sure what caused it. Bad power supply (I hope so.)? Poor ventilation? Too much heat? Bad capacitor batch? Poor board design?

If going through the hassle and expense of a recap using replacement good quality caps leads me to the same situation, then I don't really want to keep the board.

I'll have to sit on this board and think about it some more. Even with the dodgy capacitors, I know the board still works. It was running 24/7 from 2001 until 2018 or so. To complement this text, I took some pictures of it. I believe I've posted some pictures of this board here before, but here's some new ones.

Any thoughts about reasons for keeping or offloading it are welcome.

Keep it and recap it. Some of the Rubycon caps may have been fed through a absolutely crap PSU, because otherwise it's unexplainable. MCZ did suffer from this (see the Dell SFF boards over at BCN) but not MBZ.

Paired with either a GF 5700/5900 or a 9700 Pro, you might be able to pull of a nice machine along with a 2.8GHz non-HT (because I'm not sure if the i850 does support HT) Northwood Pentium 4.

Here's a link if you need any help with the board (drivers, latest BIOS and such)

https://soggi.org/motherboards/abit/TH7II-RAID.htm

the_ultra_code wrote:

Opens the door and peers through.

Wow, it has been five months since I've been on VOGONS. Lot of things in life happened, a lot of time spent on Discord spent, and a lot of retro projects I have been slowly doing in the background.

Can't wait to post some new threads here again. 🤣

Welcome back.

appiah4 wrote:

the_ultra_code wrote:

Opens the door and peers through.

Wow, it has been five months since I've been on VOGONS. Lot of things in life happened, a lot of time spent on Discord spent, and a lot of retro projects I have been slowly doing in the background.

Can't wait to post some new threads here again. 🤣

Welcome back.

Thanks!

Found some time to try installing the COAST module I bought, into my PC Chips Socket 7 motherboard. No luck however, it's not detected at all.

I'll look into it further tomorrow, might just be dirty contacts. I've also ordered a new EPROM chip so I can program a newer BIOS for this board, without touching the original chip.

Result of three evenings soldering after putting the children to bed:

Works perfectly too 😀

Still running the 486 with the 256GB SSD under Windows 95, even after installing several things, boot time is still the same at around 30 seconds....I might make this my new Win95 setup for the machine. Right now I'm ripping my CD/DVD-RW's needed to run games to Virtual CD-ROM - hey, I have seemingly endless disk space now, so why not. Still hella fast and I've not even loaded the WD VLB IDE Controller chipset drivers yet.

Also, decoupling the DVD-RW from the same IDE channel as the HDD has made a nice improvement in install speeds as well.

Is there a 4GB SSD somewhere? I would like to install one in my Packard Bell 486 over the CF adapter I have as it's a bit sluggish at times.