clueless1 wrote:

Rare earth magnets are fun to play with and useful. Best refrigerator magnets ever. They can hold up a small child. 🤣

They are great fun indeed. 😀

I've been installing playing with a nice '486' system, but it has been a pain in the behind so far. I kept getting weird errors and hanging boot when booting from the FDD, it turned out the nice combo 3.5"and 5.25" floppydrive I got recently isn't very reliable 🙁

Then I kept getting 'Error loading GDI.EXE' errors while installing Windows 95. This goes away when I remove the cache module from the motherboard, so more to test/troubleshoot here I'm afraid 🙁

List of hardware in the system:
PC Chips/ECS M919 + cache module
AMD Am5x86-P75 CPU
64MB of RAM (maybe a bit too much)
S3 ViRGE/DX 4MB PCI video card

Have any of you played around with Midier in MS-DOS? It's a pretty nice MIDI player. If you have a Sound Blaster or compatible, try playing a few MIDIs with it. And if you want it to sound even more retro, before running MIDIER, run that sb122old in the same directory first.

I've been playing a ton of Lands of Lore CD on my Pentium DOS PC. Today I got to Castle Cimmeria, the final area of the game, and probably 80-90% to completion. Anyone else play this? This is the perfect CRPG for a working, married adult. Very "lite" by RPG standards, but still very "Dungeon Master-like", and short. howlongtobeat.com says it's a 17 hr game, which is much more manageable for a working adult than a 50+ hr RPG. I started this on 7/30, so I'm on day 22 of playing this. Hopefully I beat it within 30 days. 😀

I played some No Man's Sky today. That must be the ultimate anti-retro activity of the moment. Tar me, feather me and hang me upside down! 😀

Envious of that computer! Also profile shows Illinois, me aswell, but I have a hard time finding good recycling places, I'm just SW of Chicago, any suggestions if you are from the area. Thrift stores tend to be a dead end for me.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Today I officially became a member of Vogons. lol Seems like everyone here goes mad over these generic early 90's AT cases and […]
Show full quote

Today I officially became a member of Vogons. 🤣
Seems like everyone here goes mad over these generic early 90's AT cases and at long last I found one at the local recycling center. 😁

When I first got it I figured I'd have a 486 with a leaky CMOS battery, or at very least a filthy 486 or Pentium machine. However when I got it home and popped it open I was greeted with this sight!
(Of course the pic was taken after I started to remove components so I could clean the case)

I think I'm going to set this motherboard aside (it works perfectly) for use later and substitute one of my Socket 7 Baby AT motherboards since it would fit better in the case and also be more appropriate for the time period of the case (not really but it's closer ok! Geeze).

This is the case after a through cleaning with hot water dish soap, a scrub pad, dry cloth and a toothbrush. 😁 I can't wait to get this guy up and running again. 🤣

Having built a modern sleeper myself I just couldn't help but share this one. It's just too cool that I stumbled onto someones old sleeper computer. 😁

I am trying to test some hardware. My benchtable is ready again 😀
One part is reeally special!

Himitsu 😉

archsan wrote:

King_Corduroy wrote:

http://orig03.deviantart.net/73e9/f/2016/198/4/2/dsc06121_v01_by_mad_king_corduroy-daadlsq.jpg (It's not yellow it's just my des […]
Show full quote

(It's not yellow it's just my desklamp)

You did great job with cleaning & restoring, have you shared your methods somewhere else? This is a museum piece, well done! (Even the sticker is still on, gives you the "computer show/expo" feel...)

i had a packard bell 486 still in 1997! all of the computers around that time were trying to compete with each other for consumer confidence i remember my packard bell had stickers like that on it aswell.. and was all spiffy and "matchy matchy" with the speakers built into the matching monitor.. and was still running DOS/windows 3.11! loved that os!!!!! still do! such a cool operating system.. i dunno why they ever wanted to "get away from dos" i would prefer it now still if i could drop to DOS on a i7 running windows 10... its amazing how stupid smart people can be.

Played some Half-Life on a K6-III+ and Voodoo 3. The MiniGL driver works great, but the CPU is holding things back a little. Still, it's quite playable.

@Starlance Yeah I'm North of Chicago on the boarder of Wisconsin. No I get my stuff recycling centers most times.

@Chris Nova Thanks, yeah I myself love collecting Packard Bell computers. I have six already and soon I'll also be the owner of a Corner computer too complete with papers cd's, printer and keyboard and mouse. 😁

Setting up my Intel VC-820 board once again.
P-III 450, Rage 128 and SB-Live Value to play with.
Need to see whats on some of my HDD's.
So I did an unattended XP install for this.

Found a Pentium III in the dumpster with a broken case. I moved it into my old Lian Li PC86 case. Seems to have a proprietary Dell PSU as another working ATX PSU would not power on the computer. Ran a few passes of Memtest86 and all seemed well. Going to put Windows XP on it later.

Specs:
The Pentium III 533EB (supposedly sort of rare? Only 14 watt TDP)
Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2 Ultra)
384MB RAMBUS RAM
40GB IDE Seagate HDD
Sound Blaster Live!
ZiVA PC mpeg2 decoder

:sgraffite

Fun.... That board might be an old dell. Yet it looks like my Intel VC-820 board I posted about....
Same layout and all. Does you'r board have 820 chipset and SB-Link?
If they are the same board, only rebranded to Dell, then you have a really stable board.
It is not the fastest Slot1, yet I have not felt any speed issues in normal operation.
Only benchmarks will tell a difference. Really a great board.

Nice find bro.

Edit:
If I may give you an advice, then go for some lighter than XP on that machine.
To me it seems like it's a bit light on Ram and the CPU speed.

brostenen wrote:

:sgraffite […]
Show full quote

:sgraffite

Fun.... That board might be an old dell. Yet it looks like my Intel VC-820 board described....
Same layout and all. Does you'r board have 820 chipset and SB-Link?
If they are the same board, only rebranded to Dell, then you have a really stable board.
It is not the fastest Slot1, yet I have not felt any speed issues in normal operation.
Only benchmarks will tell a difference. Really a great board.

Nice find bro.

Looks like it may be as this is the manual that came up when I Googled the numbers on the board, and the front panel pinout in the manual turned out to be correct. It for sure is the 820 chipset. What is SB-Link?

sgraffite: Get a proper thread up on "System Specs" please mate 😀 That build deserves a full thread! Looking forward to some benchmarks.

I love those 440 boards.

sgraffite wrote:

What is SB-Link?

Ahhh yeah... It should have been SB-Link/PC-Pci.
These two names covers the exact same technology.

It is a technology in wich you can make a PCI soundcard act as an ISA card. Roughly speaking.
You connect a ribbon cable to the motherboard and connect the other end of the cable to the soundcard.
Not all PCI soundcards have a SB-Link or PC-Pci header.

Anyway...
Doing this, you do not need to load EMM386.EXE in dos, in order to use the soundblaster standard.
You know.... On cards like the SB-Live soundcard, when running MS-Dos 6.22.
The easiest card to buy, that has this header are an Yamaha YMF-724 the hardest seem to be an AWE64-PCI.
Or something like that. The PCI edition of the AWE64 is the only card from Creative that has this header.
Shure you can find other cards with this header, such as Chrystal based cards.

foey wrote:

sgraffite: Get a proper thread up on "System Specs" please mate 😀 That build deserves a full thread! Looking forward to some benchmarks.

Do you want my benchmarks. I did them one or two years back, with a slightly different hardware setup.
And they might be a bit slower than expected, as it was my first real retro machine that I did my first
set of benchmarks on.

brostenen wrote:

Do you want my benchmarks. I did them one or two years back, with a slightly different hardware setup. And they might be a bit s […]
Show full quote

foey wrote:

sgraffite: Get a proper thread up on "System Specs" please mate 😀 That build deserves a full thread! Looking forward to some benchmarks.

Do you want my benchmarks. I did them one or two years back, with a slightly different hardware setup.
And they might be a bit slower than expected, as it was my first real retro machine that I did my first
set of benchmarks on.

Sure, might as well, I don't see how it could hurt. I haven't actually built a retro machine and done a set of benchmarks yet. Did you do Windows 98 or XP?

Does drinking Hi-C Ecto Cooler and Crystal Pepsi count?

My friend made the observation that I started my retro PC kick just before those 2 things happened. Eerie.