Sort of gave up looking for one of these for my AST Pentium 75, but this fella arrived in the mail today, in fairly good nick.
Now just have to find the time to put everything together...

libby wrote on 2022-07-31, 18:55:

no breakout box sadly. not sure if there's a jerry rigged version or cable out there. it's got a DE-9 connector so I suspect there's a breakout cable of some sort around

Yeah. If I can find an IBM Music Feature Card with the breakout box, I might be able to make a schematic of it, create a PCB, and go from there.

Got a DFI P5BV3+ Rev C off of ebay. Not 100% set on what I want to do with it. Has 64MB of RAM and a Cyrix MII 300+ on it right now.
Would be a nice little DOS gaming box with a S3 card and a Voodoo II in it.

A K62 or k63 400 would be really really nice too.

Toriessian wrote on 2022-08-10, 17:20:

Got a DFI P5BV3+ Rev C off of ebay. Not 100% set on what I want to do with it. Has 64MB of RAM and a Cyrix MII 300+ on it right now.
Would be a nice little DOS gaming box with a S3 card and a Voodoo II in it.

A K62 or k63 400 would be really really nice too.

Nice board! I like that it has 4 PCI slots instead of 3. Both of my SS7 boards only have 3 slots so I can only choose 3 of the 4 cards I'd like to use: ATA133 card, USB 2.0, Fast ethernet, or an Audigy 2. Looks like you have some on-board cache too which is handy, with a K6-3 or K6-3+ you can use it as L3 cache and get a bit more performance.

I recieved the Dell U2412MB monitor today, and I am happy to report that it is indeed 15khz compatible with PAL Amiga500, using a simple 23-Pin to 15-Pin adaptor. Though not perfect, as phase and clock need to be adjusted. Furthermore it has some nice aspect ratio settings. 4:3, 5:4 and 16:9...... This is a good find for just 40,32 Euro plus shipping.

brostenen wrote on 2022-08-10, 21:11:

I recieved the Dell U2412MB monitor today, and I am happy to report that it is indeed 15khz compatible with PAL Amiga500, using […]
Show full quote

I recieved the Dell U2412MB monitor today, and I am happy to report that it is indeed 15khz compatible with PAL Amiga500, using a simple 23-Pin to 15-Pin adaptor. Though not perfect, as phase and clock need to be adjusted. Furthermore it has some nice aspect ratio settings. 4:3, 5:4 and 16:9...... This is a good find for just 40,32 Euro plus shipping.

Dell-U2412MB-01.jpg
Dell-U2412MB-02.jpg
Dell-U2412MB-03.jpg

Image quality looks great. Congrats.

Today I stopped by a thrift store I've never been to before, and they had a tower for sale! It's an independent shop and whatever written or unwritten policy that causes St. Vincent DePaul and all of the other thrift stores around here to never sell such things isn't a policy they observe. So I got this for $15.00: Antec case, Asus K8V SE Deluxe (I hoped it was Socket 939, but it's 754) a Thermaltake 480 watt PSU with a 40 amp +5, a 3400+ CPU, a pair of WD PATA hard drives, a BFG 7300 GT 512 AGP card, and a mix of Corsair and generic DDR.

At first it refused to POST, and after much fooling around I removed some of the memory and then it booted up. After more fooling around, I realized that if it had one of the Corsair CMX1024 sticks it would work, but if I put the second one in it would only sit there with the fans spinning with no sound coming from the POST speaker. I tried some other memory and it had no issues. I'm not sure how that Corsair memory ended up in this thing because it seems unlikely that it was working fine then just stopped.

I've never before seen a motherboard with yellow PCI slots.

Let alone a brown PCB. Excellent find, my friend. I wish some thrift stores had something interesting. The last system I got was the 386 running on a 486DLC-33 back in 2020 for $10 and that system got upgraded to a better board.

Does anyone here like Wildcats ?

Found this little Wildcat VP970 and decided to rescue it and add it to its brothers, tho this one will be thrown into the GF4 Rig to see how it compares, really love how the board has reliefs that show its layers really lovely looking card.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-11, 03:49:

Does anyone here like Wildcats ?

s-l1600 (2).jpgs-l1600 (1).jpg

Found this little Wildcat VP970 and decided to rescue it and add it to its brothers, tho this one will be thrown into the GF4 Rig to see how it compares, really love how the board has reliefs that show its layers really lovely looking card.

I've never heard of them before.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-08-11, 04:37:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-11, 03:49:

Does anyone here like Wildcats ?

s-l1600 (2).jpgs-l1600 (1).jpg

Found this little Wildcat VP970 and decided to rescue it and add it to its brothers, tho this one will be thrown into the GF4 Rig to see how it compares, really love how the board has reliefs that show its layers really lovely looking card.

I've never heard of them before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Dlabs

Ever heard of 3DLabs ?

Reviews put the VP970 performance between the Quardo 980 XGL and FireGL 8800 so it should be interesting to see if the final drivers for it improved that or not, at least itll be better than the Permedia 2.

Professional level graphics cards never made a whole lot of sense once OpenGL went mainstream for games in the early 2000s era with feature complete ICDs. There are probably some special exceptions for unsupported extensions and Quadros bragged about using ECC memory, but I never saw any real benefit to these products since around their time.

Quadros since then are more valuable for their high quality components, multiple digital outputs, and support contracts than actual performance over consumer hardware. If there isn't a particular feature you want or need, then there isn't much reason to choose it otherwise.

There were some minor exceptions where NVIDIA tried to differentiate itself with special drivers for major packages like AutoCAD and 3D Studio MAX. It's possible that there were some optimizations to be had there, but the software specific optimizations fell away in favor of more generic "certified" drivers.

It was always really cool to see huge professional cards of the past. It's too bad that they never translated into any value on the gaming side.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-08-11, 05:45:

Professional level graphics cards never made a whole lot of sense once OpenGL went mainstream for games in the early 2000s era w […]
Show full quote

Professional level graphics cards never made a whole lot of sense once OpenGL went mainstream for games in the early 2000s era with feature complete ICDs. There are probably some special exceptions for unsupported extensions and Quadros bragged about using ECC memory, but I never saw any real benefit to these products since around their time.

Quadros since then are more valuable for their high quality components, multiple digital outputs, and support contracts than actual performance over consumer hardware. If there isn't a particular feature you want or need, then there isn't much reason to choose it otherwise.

There were some minor exceptions where NVIDIA tried to differentiate itself with special drivers for major packages like AutoCAD and 3D Studio MAX. It's possible that there were some optimizations to be had there, but the software specific optimizations fell away in favor of more generic "certified" drivers.

It was always really cool to see huge professional cards of the past. It's too bad that they never translated into any value on the gaming side.

I use my 980 XGL as a replacement Ti 4800, works beautifully as a gaming GPU, I grabbed the Wildcat because its not ATI or nVidia and that makes it an interesting card to have on the shelf. It wasn't at all expensive either though at release I think it was in the 1100USD ballpark IIRC.

Quite an interesting little card, Im curious to see how it handles OpenGL games.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-11, 05:50:

Quite an interesting little card, Im curious to see how it handles OpenGL games.

Wildcat VP, unlike Wildcat, also supports DX8 😉.

The VPU was a 'generic' shader processor and didn't distinguish between vertex/pixel shaders, so it's kinda like a Unified Shader Architecture a couple of years before ATi coined the term. It's one of those before it's time architectures that unfortunately didn't really live up to the hype. Oddly, the VP560 may have even employed a form of TBDR, different to the other VP series. Developers mentioned 'Tiled Rendering' at the time, but I don't think anyone outside the team that worked on VP really knows (UK based team designed and developed VP, rather than US who worked on the Intergraph wildcat lineage).

liqmat wrote on 2022-08-10, 23:08:

brostenen wrote on 2022-08-10, 21:11:

I recieved the Dell U2412MB monitor today, and I am happy to report that it is indeed 15khz compatible with PAL Amiga500, using […]
Show full quote

I recieved the Dell U2412MB monitor today, and I am happy to report that it is indeed 15khz compatible with PAL Amiga500, using a simple 23-Pin to 15-Pin adaptor. Though not perfect, as phase and clock need to be adjusted. Furthermore it has some nice aspect ratio settings. 4:3, 5:4 and 16:9...... This is a good find for just 40,32 Euro plus shipping.

Dell-U2412MB-01.jpg
Dell-U2412MB-02.jpg
Dell-U2412MB-03.jpg

Image quality looks great. Congrats.

It still has these fine vertical stripes of fuzz to it. Personally I am a bit picky, but at least it is way better than the result I get on my Dell 2001-FP monitor. Yup. Both can display 15khz, but the 2001-FP is way worse. However. I am already using HDMI output on most of my Amiga's anyway. That is a mix of scandoublers and RGBtoHDMI solutions and then I feed the signal to the DVI port of my monitors. The 2001-FP works perfect for this. The biggest question that I have with my U2412-MB is how it will display my RetroTink line doubler, with HDMI-DVI cable. That is for my Commodore64 machines. It it is just as good as my Samsung TV, then I will use the U2412-MB instead.

Picked up this Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA Socket 478 motherboard which came with a 3.06 533fsb CPU. Should make for an intersting high end DOS/Win98 build

Plz before doing anything recap it. The caps Soyo, abit and others used at the time can pop at any second. Edit: Those shiny silver crappy caps on your particular board give me PTSD. Since I thought they were fine when I pulled them off a dead 478 Soyo matx ATI based board to "fix" a 462 Abit board's primaries. They swelled and popped 3rd power on, despite checking in spec b4 using them on the Abit.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-08-11, 02:54:

Today I stopped by a thrift store I've never been to before, and they had a tower for sale! It's an independent shop and whatever written or unwritten policy that causes St. Vincent DePaul and all of the other thrift stores around here to never sell such things isn't a policy they observe. So I got this for $15.00: Antec case, Asus K8V SE Deluxe (I hoped it was Socket 939, but it's 754) a Thermaltake 480 watt PSU with a 40 amp +5, a 3400+ CPU, a pair of WD PATA hard drives, a BFG 7300 GT 512 AGP card, and a mix of Corsair and generic DDR.

At first it refused to POST, and after much fooling around I removed some of the memory and then it booted up. After more fooling around, I realized that if it had one of the Corsair CMX1024 sticks it would work, but if I put the second one in it would only sit there with the fans spinning with no sound coming from the POST speaker. I tried some other memory and it had no issues. I'm not sure how that Corsair memory ended up in this thing because it seems unlikely that it was working fine then just stopped.

I've never before seen a motherboard with yellow PCI slots.

Ripoff of DFI Lanparty colorscheme 😁 1GB is enough ram for 754 XP / 98 PC anyway so 1GB single channel ddr400 is plenty for the platform. 754 is undervalued platform for the os-support it has. I have one of these board in box too and was going to do 98/xp build with ATI 9800 pro but ended up on Asrock 775Dual-VSTA for now.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-08-11, 02:54:

Today I stopped by a thrift store I've never been to before, and they had a tower for sale! It's an independent shop and whatever written or unwritten policy that causes St. Vincent DePaul and all of the other thrift stores around here to never sell such things isn't a policy they observe. So I got this for $15.00: Antec case, Asus K8V SE Deluxe (I hoped it was Socket 939, but it's 754) a Thermaltake 480 watt PSU with a 40 amp +5, a 3400+ CPU, a pair of WD PATA hard drives, a BFG 7300 GT 512 AGP card, and a mix of Corsair and generic DDR.

At first it refused to POST, and after much fooling around I removed some of the memory and then it booted up. After more fooling around, I realized that if it had one of the Corsair CMX1024 sticks it would work, but if I put the second one in it would only sit there with the fans spinning with no sound coming from the POST speaker. I tried some other memory and it had no issues. I'm not sure how that Corsair memory ended up in this thing because it seems unlikely that it was working fine then just stopped.

I've never before seen a motherboard with yellow PCI slots.

I have the Non-SE version of the same board in my Socket 754 AGP PC, I love it. As far as I know there are only minor revisions between the two (the NIC is different, maybe also the Codec). My setup is Athlon64 3700+, 2GB RAM, X800XT PE, Audigy2 ZS, Windows XP.

I believe I had to swap a few bloating caps before use, so be sure to give it a good visual inspection.

I've recently completed a couple of new PCI/VLB card siblings:

Matrox Ultima PCI/VLB lite:

Diamond Stealth 32:

Diamond Stealth 64 PCI/VLB (also have a 4 MB PCI version somewhere in storage)

And ATI Graphics Ultra Pro: