well that's good to hear, ty... I don't have anything against JS per se, but if it takes away from functionality, i.e. viewing an image as an image or if it takes extra steps to get there it's going to be annoying, as are animations like the image popping up like shown in the gif, not necessary imho ^^

How compatible is the JS used, will it work on IE 4 for instance?

The JS is supposed to work from IE6 and up. Which is good, considering that other JS scripts for image galleries won't run on IE at all.

On IE 5.5 and older, images will behave like normal anchors.

computerguy08 wrote on 2021-04-02, 16:05:

The JS is supposed to work from IE6 and up. Which is good, considering that other JS scripts for image galleries won't run on IE at all.

On IE 5.5 and older, images will behave like normal anchors.

That is really good. I appreciate all the effort to make the website compatible with older browsers.

Other parts of the site that will use JS (if you prefer it) will work on any browser capable of AJAX (IE5 onwards).

I have to say, it was pretty challenging to do that one, but I'm glad it works 😀

Hi, question:

Will there be an option to sort boards by their picture like in TH99 instead of or in addition to the motherboard names?
And will there be an option to group several groups together, like for instance wanting to look for a 370 board with ISA regardless of what CPUs it supports instead of having to pick PPGA, FC-PGA or FC-PGA2 and mount 3 separate searches?

Another thing, there may be a bit of a bug which should be easy to fix.

Reproduction steps: Select [s370 (PPGA)] and [ATX + microATX] and you will get zero search results.
I presume it will give a search result for boards that are ATX and µATX at the same time, of which none exist and I assume it was meant to group both ATX and µATX together as searching for ATX and microATX separately seems to work correctly =).

1. I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by "picture sorting". You meant if the pictures will be sorted alphabetically (by the board name, like in TH99) ?

2. The next update will bring an overhaul on how the CPU search works, where the socket and the platform will be separated.
This means you will be able to search for any boards with a given platform and/or a socket (not tied to each other). Which will include an "all platforms" option for any socket (and vice versa).

3. the microATX + ATX was a naming error (it's supposed to mean microATX with an ATX extension, we currently have only 1 board like this: http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/7378)
At the time of writing this, I've fixed the name.

Something that has to be done as well is to patch things so they're more accurate.

At the moment, form factor aren't quite accurate (they didn't exist in TH99 so I tried to automatically add it ... Which worked for the most part but some board have a "unidentified" form factor, or a wrong one).
Even when we'll have CPU sockets in the database, searching some of them won't be quite accurate either simply because some can't be guessed from the data, such as socket 5/7 and 486 sockets. For these, only finding the photos or documents about the board will solve the problem.

We'd like to improve the ram slot situation as well, but that'll mean looking through all the boards in the database ... We might need more hands for that 😁

Excellent looking updates. Appreciate the hard work as always.

Deksor wrote on 2021-04-03, 19:11:

Something that has to be done as well is to patch things so they're more accurate. […]
Show full quote

Something that has to be done as well is to patch things so they're more accurate.

At the moment, form factor aren't quite accurate (they didn't exist in TH99 so I tried to automatically add it ... Which worked for the most part but some board have a "unidentified" form factor, or a wrong one).
Even when we'll have CPU sockets in the database, searching some of them won't be quite accurate either simply because some can't be guessed from the data, such as socket 5/7 and 486 sockets. For these, only finding the photos or documents about the board will solve the problem.

We'd like to improve the ram slot situation as well, but that'll mean looking through all the boards in the database ... We might need more hands for that 😁

What is it exactly that you would want with this?
If I have some spare time, I wouldn't mind helping out a bit here. I've some experience with editing the Vogons wiki and do have some basic skills with editing databases (not with programming though).
And how would you prefer the data be delivered to you?

You can edit presentations in UH19 without knowing programming at all (or even databases), we've got a dedicated form for that.

Later I'd like to let anyone make an user account and use that form as well (with validation by admins for new users of course)

Here's a page you've never seen yet (but it's not a trade secret ^^) : our edit page.

Many things are automated, so it's very easy to add boards and mistakes/typos are harder to make 😀

What we need to do right now is to have the site and the database exactly how we like it (CPUs at the moment aren't really good, and RAM documentation is poorly made). Once it's ready, we'll have to check the 8000 boards we have to put the correct infos.

One thing I noticed is that it's apparently mandatory to include a (clear) picture when adding a new board and this will prohibit the addition of new entries. There are for instance around 10 motherboards made by ASUS which support the Mendocino of which I'm fairly sure only 1 (or 2 at the most) I would be able to provide myself.
Imo it's better to be able to at least add a new entry as a stub as this would increase the chance of someone else noticing.

This database seems simple enough. It's miles less complex compared to Creation Kit so I guess I will manage:P
The question is more about time.

It's not absolutely necessary, if you have some concrete info about the board, like a manual or a schema of the board.
I think you get the idea, the photo is there as a proof that the board is real and exists.

The photo can bring informations the manual might not provide (such as the socket or the chipset sometimes). If clear enough it can even be used to help people with a damaged motherboard to fix their own.

Deksor wrote on 2021-04-08, 22:09:

The photo can bring informations the manual might not provide (such as the socket or the chipset sometimes). If clear enough it can even be used to help people with a damaged motherboard to fix their own.

Re: Need help identifying extra socket on 486 SX and posible upgrades.

something more to add to http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/3025

After some work, I've finally figured out a way to turn the text found in the original images of MTL. The problem is, this lead to some strange glitches with 10% of the text which I don't think I can solve in the script I made.

Also, turning the whole schema automatically afterwards seem to create some problems as well.

And finally, there are schemas that must NOT be turned (SBCs for example). We only need to turn 180° the ATX, AT and Baby AT boards as far as I know (plus maybe some proprietary boards).

However as there are over 5000 images to turn, I or even our entire team can't do that. Even if we were all focused on this, it'd still be well over 700 images to review per member.

This is why I created this git repository https://github.com/Deksor/MTL-motherboard-turning
It contains all the images with pre-rotated text and all they need now is some human work to make them look perfect 😀

If you're willing to help, make sure you read README.md first !

Here's an example of what's expected :
The initial image :

The result :

Of course you must keep the SVG format and not replace them by PNGs. Also you don't absolutely have to remove the MTL logo. It's just less distracting without it (I may have a way to hide it. Maybe I could hide any elements that has this color)

Deksor wrote on 2021-05-08, 15:56:

After some work, I've finally figured out a way to turn the text found in the original images of MTL. The problem is, this lead to some strange glitches with 10% of the text which I don't think I can solve in the script I made.

Neat ! Is there any easy relation between the number in the url www.win3x.org uh19/motherboard/show/2100 <- and the number of the svg on github ?
I'm kinda annoyed by that one since, it doesn't depict the cpu, and the amount of dip sockets is wrong, also 2 rows of dip sockets are only double type, while they should be triple type. 😀

No, I made that mistake when creating UH19 to not reuse these ids (the reason is because I used stason.org as a source which replaced the ids with names making my life a lot harder now. I won't replicate that mistake for the other categories). However if you look at the picture, you can see "MH1760" on the top right corner. These are MTL ids. Later on they've added a "3" in front of the id, so if you check 31760.WMF.svg, you'll find the right schema 😀

Using these schemas for improvements is planned in the future. But for now I really want to keep them the way they are and just turn them.
In the future I'd really like to make the edition of pages open to the public (instead of using our forum) with an approbation system and also having a way to edit the MTL documents (to remove any mistakes), let people upload SVGs as schemas and this is also why I want to keep them as SVGs 😀.

Right now the server only accepts gifs and jpegs. The reason is because older browsers aren't compatible with SVGs. I'd like to implement a way to pre-render them as gifs.
But again I need to program this as well and we already have so many things to do (Hopefully the next update should come the next month which should bring tons of cool things, I hope you'll like it).

Curious why you are rotating the images ? Those of us that have used TH99 for 20+ years have gotten used to them oriented a certain way.
I under stand removing water marks but rotating the images 180 degrees does not make any sense to me. Am confused...

Horun wrote on 2021-05-09, 03:42:

Curious why you are rotating the images ? Those of us that have used TH99 for 20+ years have gotten used to them oriented a certain way.
I under stand removing water marks but rotating the images 180 degrees does not make any sense to me. Am confused...

Just a guess...
I'd go with... Rotating them makes the actual text on the photo's of the motherboards readable, name, model, without having to turn your monitor upside down, or doing a headstand in front of your computer.
and this way it actually looks like you're looking at the motherboard whilst stuck in a case, though that is also just a matter of perspective and case design.