ragefury32 wrote on 2020-06-06, 00:52:

[...] The BIOS is gimped and missing quite a number of features. You cannot disable the onboard Realtek RTL8139C, and there are no options to control the Embedded ESS solo1 like set it up with a dedicated IRQ. [...]

Have you tried editing the BIOS to see if there are hidden options? I had a much newer Igel thin client that ran an Award BIOS that had heaps of hidden items, easily unlocked using CBROM.

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Today (well, yesterday) I did some work on a Viewtop S3 Virge DX.
- RAM was upgraded from 2 to 4 MB using chips salvaged from another dead S3. They're a different brand but 35ns EDO is 35ns EDO.
- Replaced the original ROM, which suffered from the brightness bug, with an EPROM* flashed with the Diamond 3D 2000 firmware. This allows me to kill two birds with one stone. First I now have sane black levels, and second I can now use Diamond's drivers.
- Removed the filter on the RGB lines. The FCC probably isn't happy (not that it matters where I live) but the picture improved dramatically, now it does 1280x1024 without smearing.

Filter is gone: removed the capacitors going from the signal lines to ground, and replaced the ferrites with zero ohm links.

Moment of truth.

* Protip: What do you do if you have to erase an EPROM but you don't have a UV eraser? Just leave it outside the window for 3 months or so.

andrea wrote on 2020-06-06, 10:13:

Today (well, yesterday) I did some work on a Viewtop S3 Virge DX. - RAM was upgraded from 2 to 4 MB using chips salvaged from an […]
Show full quote

Today (well, yesterday) I did some work on a Viewtop S3 Virge DX.
- RAM was upgraded from 2 to 4 MB using chips salvaged from another dead S3. They're a different brand but 35ns EDO is 35ns EDO.
- Replaced the original ROM, which suffered from the brightness bug, with an EPROM* flashed with the Diamond 3D 2000 firmware. This allows me to kill two birds with one stone. First I now have sane black levels, and second I can now use Diamond's drivers.
- Removed the filter on the RGB lines. The FCC probably isn't happy (not that it matters where I live) but the picture improved dramatically, now it does 1280x1024 without smearing.

* Protip: What do you do if you have to erase an EPROM but you don't have a UV eraser? Just leave it outside the window for 3 months or so.

I have two S3 Trio64V cards and one of them is noticeably brighter than the other. Is that the brightness bug you're refering to? Also, aren't 3 months a bit excessive?

TechieDude wrote on 2020-06-06, 11:43:

I have two S3 Trio64V cards and one of them is noticeably brighter than the other. Is that the brightness bug you're refering to? Also, aren't 3 months a bit excessive?

Like black is grey? Probably yes then. It's not so much of a bug but rather because of the default brightness set in the bios, some cards have a value that is too bright, perhaps they thought it would compensate for tired or substandard monitors back in the day.
Have a look here S3 AGP Cards (and possibly others) Too Bright, it seems you can fix it by writing to a couple of registers on the card using a debug fix, but I feel like switching to a Bios that's ok to begin with it's a better "definitive" fix.

Is 3 months too much? Yes, but it depends on where you live and how's the weather like. The chip was erased during the winter, with mostly cloudy weather. I read the rom every 10 or so days, after 6 weeks it started showing some FFs, then I kinda forgot about it for a while and 6 weeks later i remembered and checked it, and it was finally empty.
Assuming it's summer time and your window sill is in direct sunlight for most of the day i'd guess a month (or even 3 weeks) would suffice.

andrea wrote on 2020-06-06, 11:59:

Like black is grey? Probably yes then. It's not so much of a bug but rather because of the default brightness set in the bios, s […]
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Like black is grey? Probably yes then. It's not so much of a bug but rather because of the default brightness set in the bios, some cards have a value that is too bright, perhaps they thought it would compensate for tired or substandard monitors back in the day.
Have a look here S3 AGP Cards (and possibly others) Too Bright, it seems you can fix it by writing to a couple of registers on the card using a debug fix, but I feel like switching to a Bios that's ok to begin with it's a better "definitive" fix.

Is 3 months too much? Yes, but it depends on where you live and how's the weather like. The chip was erased during the winter, with mostly cloudy weather. I read the rom every 10 or so days, after 6 weeks it started showing some FFs, then I kinda forgot about it for a while and 6 weeks later i remembered and checked it, and it was finally empty.
Assuming it's summer time and your window sill is in direct sunlight for most of the day i'd guess a month (or even 3 weeks) would suffice.

Yep, exactly that. The other card has the correct brightness, so I might just copy the BIOS from that one if I get a EEPROM burner. Any decent one you can recommend? Being able to work with Linux would be a wanted bonus, but not a requirement.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-06-06, 12:26:

andrea wrote on 2020-06-06, 11:59:

Like black is grey? Probably yes then. It's not so much of a bug but rather because of the default brightness set in the bios, s […]
Show full quote

Like black is grey? Probably yes then. It's not so much of a bug but rather because of the default brightness set in the bios, some cards have a value that is too bright, perhaps they thought it would compensate for tired or substandard monitors back in the day.
Have a look here S3 AGP Cards (and possibly others) Too Bright, it seems you can fix it by writing to a couple of registers on the card using a debug fix, but I feel like switching to a Bios that's ok to begin with it's a better "definitive" fix.

Is 3 months too much? Yes, but it depends on where you live and how's the weather like. The chip was erased during the winter, with mostly cloudy weather. I read the rom every 10 or so days, after 6 weeks it started showing some FFs, then I kinda forgot about it for a while and 6 weeks later i remembered and checked it, and it was finally empty.
Assuming it's summer time and your window sill is in direct sunlight for most of the day i'd guess a month (or even 3 weeks) would suffice.

Yep, exactly that. The other card has the correct brightness, so I might just copy the BIOS from that one if I get a EEPROM burner. Any decent one you can recommend? Being able to work with Linux would be a wanted bonus, but not a requirement.

I have a MiniPro, it does everything I ask it to do and more, but it's mostly windows-only.

Today (more like yesterday) I messed my Windows XP/Linux installation by accidentally rewriting the first 512MB of the hard drive on my XP machine. I was on Linux trying to write an image to a CF card (for usage on my 486 laptop) and I specified the wrong destination device. Fortunately, even with the partition table overwritten, Linux kept seeing its volumes correctly so I could take a backup of all the information I have (mainly music and CD images) to another machine and reinstall. Too bad I lost my Doom3 and Quake 4 saved games, because the Windows XP partition was unreadable after my error.

I'm messing around with PCem, trying to find the optimal\best configuration my PC (and games I want to play) can handle.

Edit: also trying to rebuild my P3 machine with a PCI TNT2M64 and a voodoo 1

I finally managed to bring back my Optiplex GX110 to life. After trying to troubleshoot what I thought was a PSU or motherboard problem, it turned out the P10 dell connector from the PSU had a weird short. Fixing that brought everything back up and we are a go.

I love this desktop. I just wish I had the ISA riser for this. It's near impossible to find (the 3 slot one with 2xPCI and 2xISA..)

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-06, 08:42:

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-06-06, 08:17:

...Because there’s no way to tell whether the ISA slot will behave well either with a sound card

No way to tell? So you can't just install a sound card there and test it?

What, buy an ISA sound card just to test it? This Igel-J is the only device in my home that has an ISA slot.

The priority for this box is:

A) Pick up some RAM (the SiS 530 has a memory controller akin to the Intel 440 series) to upgrade the machine from 64 to 256 or 512MB of RAM - the RAM that I have laying around tends to be laptop SODIMMs. This is both to allow it to deal with more modern Linux, and/or to support shsucdrd (mounting ISOs in DOS). Right now the goal is to allow it to support the talkie version of Monkey Island, TIE Fighter ‘94 and/or US Navy Fighters.

B) Boot into one of the more recent Linux distributions and use dmidecode or flashrom to dump the BIOS contents for analysis. As far as I know Igel pulled support for the J-series back in 2003, and the board (5BLSP-A) has no publicly available BIOS updates. Getting the board data sheet itself from the internet archive was already enough of a pain.

The major thing to solve here is figure out why essolo.sys locks up on load and whether it has anything to do with resource conflicts (my guess is the Realtek RTL8139C on the board), and once that is solved, figure out whether the essolo driver was essential for getting SFX working. It seems to work for TIE Fighter and Wolf 3D without it, but the oddity is that the voiced narration for legends of Kyrandia - Hand of Fate fails to come in, even though other SFX plays just fine. Day of the Tentacle also seems to lock up after about 20 seconds. That could also be the use of umbpci to ease conventional memory usage.

C) Replace the K6-2E with a K6-2+ (preferably a K6-2+ embedded version with Powernow support and better thermal ratings (the entire thing is currently passively cooled). As it stands the only thing that I can do on setmul with the K6-2E was turn off the L1 cache, which limits possibilities (can’t deactivate onboard L1/L2 and mess with the multiplier the same way you can with a K6-2/3+). Then later on I might have to look into the possibility of adding active cooling. Right now I have a USB powered fan blowing on the heat sink block if it’s getting too hot (it’s a 29C day today)

D) Maybe install a 3dfx voodoo2 or Savage4 PCI (if I need extra GPU grunt or if I want better DOS compatibility - Rowan VESA for stuff like Overlord or Navy Strike doesn’t seem to favor anything semi-modern with the exception of S3 cards) or a Yamaha YMF719/SB Vibra16 (if I really need ISA sound that badly). The concern here is the single PCI/ISA slot not cooperating.

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-06-05, 21:13:

On another note: How on earth do people enjoy the original Tomb Raider? Playing the 3DFX version and even with custom controls, […]
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On another note: How on earth do people enjoy the original Tomb Raider? Playing the 3DFX version and even with custom controls, i just can't get the hang of it.
Everything feels so slow and delayed. Especially trying to time jumps + ledge grabbing. The Camera gets all over the places and theres no way to position it where you want (i can kinda forgive this though as a flaw of 90s 3D platformers).

Its just alot of wandering around places, with annoying platforming segments unhelped by the slow controls. Not much action!

Maybe i just need to try this again on my modern machine with a proper controller. 😒

I always found the controls for the classic Tomb Raider games very logical (1-5 at least). You don't have to worry about where the camera is facing, if Lara is positioned facing a certain direction then that is the direction you are going to move when you press Up. Timing jumps is easy, since you can perfectly align Lara up to the edge of a platform by walking straight up to it and you won't fall off with walk pressed!

With regards to actual gameplay though, whilst I enjoy the original Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II is a much better game overall, with more action. Though my favourite overall is the 4th, lots of wandering about and backtracking through multiple previous levels to solve a puzzle.

Put my new Cirrus Logic GD-5428 in my 386-DX40.

It is pretty nice being able to do GUI acceleration on an old computer like this!

Only problem was that the card was unstable with it's hard-wired 0-wait state configuration on this particular system.

Since I was unable to change this using a jumper on the card, I had to stuff a bit of plastic into the ISA slot to block pin B8 between the card and the motherboard. Definitely a hack, but it works well. Given I am running at 13.33mhz ISA bus, there is only a small performance difference with 0 wait states turned off.

canthearu wrote on 2020-06-06, 15:08:

Put my new Cirrus Logic GD-5428 in my 386-DX40. […]
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Put my new Cirrus Logic GD-5428 in my 386-DX40.

It is pretty nice being able to do GUI acceleration on an old computer like this!

Only problem was that the card was unstable with it's hard-wired 0-wait state configuration on this particular system.

Since I was unable to change this using a jumper on the card, I had to stuff a bit of plastic into the ISA slot to block pin B8 between the card and the motherboard. Definitely a hack, but it works well. Given I am running at 13.33mhz ISA bus, there is only a small performance difference with 0 wait states turned off.

13.3 MHz ISA BUS is pushing it a bit, but I can understand why it would be desirable from a performance standpoint. I hope the disk controller and sound card don't mind running like that .

As for the wait state thing, have a look at mclk093b.zip . It allows changing clock speed and, I believe, wait states .

darry wrote on 2020-06-06, 15:28:

13.3 MHz ISA BUS is pushing it a bit, but I can understand why it would be desirable from a performance standpoint. I hope the disk controller and sound card don't mind running like that .

As for the wait state thing, have a look at mclk093b.zip . It allows changing clock speed and, I believe, wait states .
mclk093b.zip

Yeah CPUCLK/2 (20mhz) is too much for the CD-ROM drive, so I have to use CPUCLK/3 instead.

Everything works find at CPUCLK/3 😀

I gave the utility a go, It doesn't have any settings to change the ISA wait states mode. Too bad, the crash I got was really edge case, while running wintach, the video card would crash while doing the CAD workload.

Still a very fast card though in windows 3.1 and windows 95. Does 256 color up to 1024 x 768 in non-interlaced modes without breaking a sweat.

Got 2x128 MB of PC133 SODIMM SDRAM sticks for my Packard Bell Chrom@ laptop. For 2,70 €, shipping included (same country)

It's the maximum supported by its motherboard.

Windows 98SE will stop swapping so much next time I look at some old vb6 code in the Visual Basic IDE.

I wonder if I can get Visual Studio .NET 2003 installed. I've got .NET Framework 2.0 installed but no dev environnment for it.
Also, I heard it comes with a (terrible) VB6 to C# code converter from Microsoft (or is it VB .NET ?)

Installed rLoew's PATCHMEM on my P4 overkill PC and maxed out the RAM to 2GB just for the hell of it. After all, it's meant to be overkill. While testing it though, I did have a bit of a mishap: the y axis of my PS/2 mouse somehow slipped out of its place. Putting it back in place was trivial, and within 10 minutes, I was back in business. The system itself seems to work just fine. I'll test it more extensively at a later time, though.

Lost a Diamond Speedstar Pro VLB in the mail today. My current VLB VGA died as i expected would happen soon, and the Speedstar i ordered a month+ ago didn't show up.

Thankfully seller gave me a refund. Now im back to arguing in my mind weather i wanna invest in another VL card or just give up on this DX4 build and put the cash towards my P3 project.

Right now my Pentium 3 machine is just sitting on the side as im not happy with it yet, iv been spending alot of my time on a P133 and i'd really love to do a "Tricked out Socket 5" build 😀
But at the sametime a part of my brain wants a DX4-100. and im limiting myself to two PCs here because A: Space, and B: I couldn't possibly see myself moving between 4-5 computers just to play different games.

I really wanna do that 133 machine. But i have all these 486 parts lying around and i kinda feel like i need finish it to get my moneys worth.
Plus, anything that 133 could do, even tricked out, my V2 Sli P3 rig would hopefully do better anyway. But i have been developing a softspot for these early Pentiums...

gah! So many choices ;-;

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-06, 09:37:

It does.

But judging from the pictures, a Voodoo2 will not fit in there anyway.

Yes it will. The chassis has a removable metal flap for the PCI slot (the plastic slot on the front was used for an optional Igel Smartcard reader) so there's room to fit it.

I am also not opposed to using a Dremel on the plastic bezel if needed be.

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-06-05, 21:13:

On another note: How on earth do people enjoy the original Tomb Raider? Playing the 3DFX version and even with custom controls, i just can't get the hang of it.
Everything feels so slow and delayed. Especially trying to time jumps + ledge grabbing. The Camera gets all over the places and theres no way to position it where you want (i can kinda forgive this though as a flaw of 90s 3D platformers).

I remember having the same problems when I first played it, on the PS1. PS or PC though, the trick to timing jumps is to use the jump back key (default: down arrow). That always creates enough space to run up with. Once you begin running, you can hold the jump (and grab) at any point during the run up.

You can ignore the camera, it doesn't influence Lara's movements in the same way as, e.g. Mario 64. As long as you can see what you're doing, of course!

That other thread reminded me that I have a Roland RA-50 in storage with a broken keyboard pcb (literally, it's broken into halves). Started fixing it today.

I was installing Windows 95 OSR2.5 in a VM when I was surprised to see that I had the option to choose between Windows 3.1 (Program Manager) and Windows 95 interfaces during the install process. I have never seen that.