Linoleum wrote on 2025-04-20, 15:01:

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-04-14, 12:45:

Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases. […]
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Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases.

The attachment PC Tower Rack.jpg is no longer available

Meanwhile, my workbench is an absolute mess which will be my next priority...

The attachment Workbench mess.jpg is no longer available

Any AT cases collecting dust in there? Asking for a friend... 😉

I might still have one or two spare, but shipping from the old world to Canada might not be worth it. One should pop up once in a while at local ads.

After cleaning 5 working AGP video cards, I saw this small smd on the table. So I guess this means I have 4 working AGP cards now.

UPDATE: I checked the FX5200 first, and fortunately the spot with the missing SMD was very easy to spot.

Fortunately, the pads are still intact. If it doesn't work, solder a small bit of wire to make it stay functional should the pads be having issues.

I did a bit of upgrades to my Macintosh Performa 476 by performing the following along with the fixes it needed:

Switching the jumper to make it run as a Quadra 605
Upgraded the processor from the XC68LC040RC25B to the XC68040RC33M
Swapped the resistors around to go from 25MHz to 33MHz
Fixed the system ID number to make the installation of Mac OS 8 possible

I also took the liberty of making the SyQuest SyJet 1.5 bootable on my system by using my Performa 450 with Silverlining Lite 2.2.1, formatted the disk as a Mac partition, made it where it can be bootable, and made it where it won't eject the disk automatically after rebooting, shutting down, or unmounting.

My other plan is to get a BlueSCSI V2 with Wi-Fi for the unit and use the SyJet 1.5 as a backup unit and copy files from one system to the other.

I got hold of a Diamond S540 32mb (Savage4) but I’d read somewhere (probably here) that you needed to be careful about S4 cards and the AGP slot and if in any doubt don’t use it. Since the only AGP mobo I have is a universal 8x/4x slot I wasn’t sure but after reading the S540 manual I set the jumpers to all closed for 4x support, disabled 8x support in the bios and then installed the card…

And all worked fine! Win2k that is on the hdd even had a driver and installed it. Nice stable image.

Just need to try installing win98 as nothing 3d seems to want to start, and the S3 installers all complain that the current OS isn’t supported.

I figure as well since the PCI Voodoo 4 is out of the machine I should look at doing something about the rattling fan… but not sure what yet. There’s a bit of movement when you press on the fan centre, are the bearings shot or could regreasing them solve that?

clownwolf wrote on 2025-04-20, 23:02:

After cleaning 5 working AGP video cards, I saw this small smd on the table. So I guess this means I have 4 working AGP cards no […]
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After cleaning 5 working AGP video cards, I saw this small smd on the table. So I guess this means I have 4 working AGP cards now.

The attachment 20250420_155820.jpg is no longer available

UPDATE: I checked the FX5200 first, and fortunately the spot with the missing SMD was very easy to spot.

The attachment 20250420_161259.jpg is no longer available

This is a very easy fix for anyone with the right soldering tools. Make sure to keep the capacitor with the card, so that you can measure it for ordering a replacement.

A tale of frustration and my own stupidity, trying to repair a Sony PS1 console that wouldn't properly read backup CD-R discs.

I played the Chinese lottery again and ordered a new laser assembly replacement from Aliexpress. I lost, it was dead on arrival! I also ordered a bunch of spindle hub replacements too.

I must have spent hours & days lubricating gears and rails, swapping different lasers to different assemblies, swapping spindle motors, swapping spindle hubs etc etc. I even played with the pot on a couple of the lasers, with the aid of a multimeter. The results were mixed and I wasn't happy, it still had issues with CD-R backups.

So realising that the laser assemblies in the PSOne Slim are generally more reliable, I bought myself a Slim console for around £25. It arrived today and guess what - it also appeared to be just as bad with CD-R backups.

Turns out that after all of that palaver, the PS1 simply doesn't like the type of CD-R discs I was using. Tried a Taiyo Yuden disc instead and BOTH consoles worked 100%. I really wish I'd have just tried that in the first place, I could have saved myself a lot of time and money. 😠

On the plus side now though, I now have a spare PS1 as a backup machine. 🤣

Seeking Help: Information on RasterOps Graphics Card with S3 P86C924 Chip
Hi everyone,

I recently acquired a vintage graphics card with an S3 P86C924 chip, and the boot screen displays the RasterOps logo. I'm looking for more information about the origin and specific model of this card. Does anyone have any details or knowledge about it?

hcyandluodayou wrote on 2025-04-23, 05:51:

Seeking Help: Information on RasterOps Graphics Card with S3 P86C924 Chip
Hi everyone,

I recently acquired a vintage graphics card with an S3 P86C924 chip, and the boot screen displays the RasterOps logo. I'm looking for more information about the origin and specific model of this card. Does anyone have any details or knowledge about it?

Welcome to VOGONS!

Wow, that is a really interesting card! Honestly, I have no idea what that is intended for... normally, 1990s graphics cards with multiple identical VGA chips would have multiple outputs and would use some kind of special software to provide multi-monitor support. Since this one just has a single VGA output, the first thing that comes to my mind is that it uses a non-standard VGA pinout and is actually intended to be used with a breakout cable (1 VGA -> 3 VGA). I know a lot of early VGA displays didn't utilize all of the pins, but I have no idea if it would be possible to squeeze three separate outputs from a single 15 pin port.

I'm sure someone else here has a far far deeper understanding of graphics chips from that time period and can maybe shed some more insight on how in the world you'd utilize three S3 924 chips on a single card with a single VGA output.

Also, being an ISA card, I am inclined to think that this was NOT meant for high resolution real time graphics with three displays. The ISA bus can barely handle the throughput of one real-time SVGA output... I imagine that having three displays would be at best 1/3rd of the speed per display. So, maybe it has some kind of application for digital signage or something similar.

Anyway... I find this thing really interesting and I am very curious about it myself. Thanks for posting!

EDIT: After looking at it more closely, I don't think there is anything real strange going on with the VGA output, so it probably isn't doing any weird breakout stuff. Each 924 chip seems to be connected to the next, and the VGA output clearly just has one normal-looking set of SMD components before it. Maybe the S3 924 has a provision for chaining together multiple chips... I have never seen more than one used on a card before this one though.

Also, for what it's worth, it looks like each 924 has 1MB of Toshiba VRAM (multiport DRAM). Datasheet is here.

And here is the datasheet for the RAMDAC. Doesn't seem like anything special, but I'm no expert in that area either.

Thank you very much for your professional explanation. This card indeed has only one VGA output interface. Can the three S3 chips work together like Voodoo to enhance the color depth or resolution of the graphics card? After all, this might be a RasterOps card, but it's strange because all the RasterOps cards I know of use NuBus interfaces. One of the S3 chips even has a manually soldered resistor. Is it possible that this is an engineering sample card?

I'm thinking of some kind of software toggle switch. Three semi-virtual displays you can select from. Awesome card nonetheless.

hcyandluodayou wrote on 2025-04-23, 08:05:

Thank you very much for your professional explanation. This card indeed has only one VGA output interface. Can the three S3 chips work together like Voodoo to enhance the color depth or resolution of the graphics card? After all, this might be a RasterOps card, but it's strange because all the RasterOps cards I know of use NuBus interfaces. One of the S3 chips even has a manually soldered resistor. Is it possible that this is an engineering sample card?

That is a good guess, but I don't think it would be possible for them to work together in that way. The RAMDAC is the thing determines the final output capabilities to the VGA display and this one looks pretty standard for the time period with very limited resolution support.

I did a little bit of digging regarding RasterOps and came up with the same thing as you. Almost entirely NuBus cards, and I don't recall any of them having any resemblance to this with three complete, modern graphics chips on one board.

I noticed the hand-soldered resistors too! It is funny how they are connected together, floating at right angles... this is an usual way to add them to the board. That said, it used to be quite common for production cards to have manually soldered components of some kind. I think the reason is that it was often just not possible (due to time and expense) to design and produce new PCBs once a flaw was found in a design (for example, a glitch in certain situations that did not show up until a production run had completed), so they would just have parts added on like this to fix the problems after production. So, it is most likely not an engineering sample or prototype since it otherwise has normal markings and labels, but it is always a possibility.

PD2JK wrote on 2025-04-23, 09:33:

I'm thinking of some kind of software toggle switch. Three semi-virtual displays you can select from. Awesome card nonetheless.

Ah, that is an interesting idea!

I wonder, is there any precedent for such a card to exist? What exactly would be the use case for it? I guess technically it could be done for performance reasons... for example, if special software told the card to hold different high(ish) resolution images in the 1MB of memory available to each chip, the software could then allow fast switching between those images without having to bring them over the slow ISA bus... but that seems like an extremely niche product, and I can't honestly imagine a practical use for it that wouldn't also be usable (if slightly slower) with a normal 1MB card. I don't think that would do anything to facilitate faster real-time interaction with the display since the ISA bus would still be the bottleneck.

Maybe if you were, like, doing 2D animation on a computer and you had to quickly flick between 2-3 frames to line everything up while drawing... but wow, that is super obscure and probably not what this is for. 🤣

Man... now I *really* want to know what this is! I think it needs it's own thread in the video section.

Thank you for joining the discussion, it was very interesting! Currently, I received help from "PC Hoarder Patrol" in another thread. He provided a news screenshot, and the result indeed surprised me.

hcyandluodayou wrote on 2025-04-24, 02:20:

Thank you for joining the discussion, it was very interesting! Currently, I received help from "PC Hoarder Patrol" in another thread. He provided a news screenshot, and the result indeed surprised me.

That makes total sense actually. 😀

hcyandluodayou wrote on 2025-04-24, 02:20:

Thank you for joining the discussion, it was very interesting! Currently, I received help from "PC Hoarder Patrol" in another thread. He provided a news screenshot, and the result indeed surprised me.

Ah! I see! Wow, that is really interesting. mkarcher's explanation in the other thread is really fascinating.

So, in a sense, you were much closer than I was with your original thought about the three chips working together the way a multi-chip 3dfx card might. In a way it really is like RAID-0 for VGA or a little bit like 3dfx's SLI (minus the RAM capacity) in the way it is splitting the data into smaller chunks and spreading them across multiple chips with their own memory.

It seems that the benefits of splitting the 8bit R, G and B channels to three different chips (versus just having one chip do all 24bits) may be the additional memory bandwidth (3x32bit?) and the amount of VRAM (3x1MB) available for displaying a single 24bit image, but this is pretty far out of my wheelhouse so I could be wrong.

It's possible that the software for this could be laying around in some of the huge driver collections and FTP archives, but no one has any need for them until now. I would suggest checking through this thread (the earlier posts may have lots of broken links at this point) to see if you can find any. Of course, you'll probably only find DOS or maybe Windows 3.1 drivers... maybe even just drivers that work for specific CAD or graphics programs. Still, I'd love to see the results of this crazy setup... just how much faster is it versus a standard ISA S3 924, or even higher end ISA cards?

Even without proper drivers, could you run through the DOS benchmark suite here and let us know the results? If you have a faster PC (not a 486) to install the card in that would probably be a good idea, and if you've got a couple other ISA graphics cards to test on the same system that would give us a baseline.
Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project

If you do ever get a chance to do this, quote me or send a PM so I get a notification about it, because I am very curious how this performs with or without drivers. 😀

It has arrived!

I know what I'm doing this weekend. 😀

If you're curious what I'm using it in...

https://theclassicgeek.blogspot.com/2024/02/a … s-3x-retro.html
https://theclassicgeek.blogspot.com/2025/03/i … ort-update.html

Today I managed to get my 486 to run windows 95 just long enough to get some CPU-Z validations going, purely so I can share links to them when people ask what I have. It also let me check to see if my Overdrive was working, which is luckily was. Even the fan runs without sounding bad.

I will eventually figure out a way to show off my Dual PPro board the same way.

Installed a Zalman cooler on my 9700PRO.

It's my all-time favorite VGA and they tend to die, so I will try to keep it cool.

Pino wrote on 2025-04-26, 02:41:

Installed a Zalman cooler on my 9700PRO.

It's my all-time favorite VGA and they tend to die, so I will try to keep it cool.

Does the bottom of the cooler fins touch the top of the AGP slot?

I got an old HP XE3L, 128MB + 10GB HDD. 12.1" with vinegar syndrome.
It powers on but gets stuck at POST screen, freezing after RAM check and never entering BIOS staying at "entering bios" forever.
HDD is detected from time to time and then it proceeds to the later stages of POST, but won't react to enter BIOS key, screen goes black and is then unresponsive to reboot.

HDD might be the issue, but opening it to check is a screw-fest of horror.

zuldan wrote on 2025-04-26, 03:21:

Pino wrote on 2025-04-26, 02:41:

Installed a Zalman cooler on my 9700PRO.

It's my all-time favorite VGA and they tend to die, so I will try to keep it cool.

Does the bottom of the cooler fins touch the top of the AGP slot?

That's just the angle of the shot, being taken from very close.