bjwil1991 wrote:

Installed the MediaVision Pro Audio Studio 16 card into my Socket 370 system with success after changing the IRQ and DMA to be set to ISA legacy and disabling the on-board audio, but in Windows 98SE, the sound effects are playing way too fast (about 10x faster), and I have the clock set to use the one that's on the card with the MS-DOS driver and set as 28MHz clock in Windows to no success. In MS-DOS mode, it works without issues, especially with the Sound Blaster settings (works in MS-DOS prompt in Windows as well).

I believe this is related to the power supply not having a -5v rail. See here: ISA Cards & Devices Requiring -5V

For my retro activity I tested out a Diamond Monster Sound MX400 and an Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 I obtained recently. I had to replace an SMD cap on the MX400 after I got it, but both cards were in overall excellent condition. I'm happy to say both cards work great! I tested a couple games that have DS3D or A3D support and they sound fantastic in both. I must say, I really miss Aureal. Using A3D with headphones is something else. I did notice that switching to headphone mode rather than "satellite speakers" makes things sound MUCH better in general in A3D games. I always liked the effects of A3D but there was always something a little bit off about the placement and volume level... switching to headphone mode, even with stereo speakers, seems to make things sound ten times better.

I also tested out my Diamond Stealth III S540 Extreme (Savage 4 Pro at 166Mhz). It seems like a pretty nice card overall. Its certainly no Voodoo 3 or TNT 2, but in the games that work well with it, it runs extremely well for an "underdog" card. Descent III didn't like it much, but Need for Speed High Stakes ran great. 😀 I like all the crazy Windows desktop options it provides and the 2D quality seems top notch. I also had no problems at all running it on a Dell 1907FP LCD, where as most cards I've used have required that I go into the monitor's settings and force it to "auto-adjust". This one had no alignment issues in anything I ran.

Biggest problem I had was dealing with crashes and freezing due to leftover non-PNP sound card drivers being loaded with Windows 98SE. I had to go into the system.ini (did it through msconfig) and uncheck a few stray items related to an old SoundGalaxy BXII I installed some time last year. After I did that, the SQ2500 worked like a dream. I was about ready to blame my 440BX for having the absolute worst IRQ\IO handling I've ever seen, but it turned out to be a software problem. Its too bad there isn't a reliable tool to reset and remove all non-standard drivers and registry entries from Windows 98. I'd be totally fine having all of that stuff wiped back to the way it was when I first installed the OS, but I don't want to lose all of the game installations on my test system.

pics or it didn't happen.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I also tested out my Diamond Stealth III S540 Extreme (Savage 4 Pro at 166Mhz). It seems like a pretty nice card overall. Its certainly no Voodoo 3 or TNT 2, but in the games that work well with it, it runs extremely well for an "underdog" card. Descent III didn't like it much, but Need for Speed High Stakes ran great. 😀 I like all the crazy Windows desktop options it provides and the 2D quality seems top notch. I also had no problems at all running it on a Dell 1907FP LCD, where as most cards I've used have required that I go into the monitor's settings and force it to "auto-adjust". This one had no alignment issues in anything I ran.

3D image quality on that card is top notch as well. It has really good texture filtering. I paired it with a k6-2 in my "Underdog" build and it turned out to be a very nice card to have. It's a shame that S3's previous 3D offerings gave Savage a bad name.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

jaZz_KCS wrote:

If you really would go by the expected lifetime values, most of them would need replacement after 6000h "already".

I meant, when measured how far off were they from the original ratings? Yeesh, any mention of capacitors is like walking on eggshells around here. 🤣

They were all within their tolerances.

And to add to the "6000h" statement: most are actually rated for 5000h, cheap ones even for as low as 2000h. However, that's power-on time, not age! Very high-quality caps are rated for 10,000 to 15,000h, like Panasonic Gold or Rubycon. Those are the ones I normally use.

Created a couple of no-cd versions from some of my games to play on my Pentium 133. 😎

Munx wrote:

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I also tested out my Diamond Stealth III S540 Extreme (Savage 4 Pro at 166Mhz). It seems like a pretty nice card overall. Its certainly no Voodoo 3 or TNT 2, but in the games that work well with it, it runs extremely well for an "underdog" card. Descent III didn't like it much, but Need for Speed High Stakes ran great. 😀 I like all the crazy Windows desktop options it provides and the 2D quality seems top notch. I also had no problems at all running it on a Dell 1907FP LCD, where as most cards I've used have required that I go into the monitor's settings and force it to "auto-adjust". This one had no alignment issues in anything I ran.

3D image quality on that card is top notch as well. It has really good texture filtering. I paired it with a k6-2 in my "Underdog" build and it turned out to be a very nice card to have. It's a shame that S3's previous 3D offerings gave Savage a bad name.

Savage2000 is an absolute destroyer as a DX6 card. Shame its TnL engine is complete shit.

DId the following over the weekend:

Setup my 2 Tandy 1000 Machines with one monitor / keyboard using a Monitor switcher and some Din5 extension cables to swap the XT keyboard between
Attempted and failed to make a Cable for my Canopus Pure 3D Voodoo1 Card using a VGA cable soldered to pins of a 9pin Minidin Adapter
Cleaned Out and Washed a Cooler Master Case for a build I am starting
Picked up a bunch of hardware from a person that was moving, including a couple monitors / video cards / motherboards / other expansion cards

Smack2k wrote:

DId the following over the weekend: […]
Show full quote

DId the following over the weekend:

...

Attempted and failed to make a Cable for my Canopus Pure 3D Voodoo1 Card using a VGA cable soldered to pins of a 9pin Minidin Adapter
...

I have one of those cards with the cable. Do you need a pinout?

I'd love one....I was going off of this:

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18659

My soldering isnt top notch and the pins on the adapter are really close together, so its possible I have some pins with solder between them, or one of the wires fell off the pin when I was trying to insert the adapter back into the metal housing and put the plastic casing on....

But please let me see your pinout as I am getting a 9pin minidin cable (M on both ends) and going to cut it and then solder the wires to the VGA Cable wires based on the pinout....trying to solder the wires to the pins again isnt gonna work...not steady enough with my soldering!

Smack2k wrote:

I'd love one....I was going off of this: […]
Show full quote

I'd love one....I was going off of this:

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18659

My soldering isnt top notch and the pins on the adapter are really close together, so its possible I have some pins with solder between them, or one of the wires fell off the pin when I was trying to insert the adapter back into the metal housing and put the plastic casing on....

But please let me see your pinout as I am getting a 9pin minidin cable (M on both ends) and going to cut it and then solder the wires to the VGA Cable wires based on the pinout....trying to solder the wires to the pins again isnt gonna work...not steady enough with my soldering!

Allright. The pinout on that forum is correct. I used a multimeter to measure all connections.

dat pun

^These pixels need to be all the same size. :p

/purist

Soldered some missing/ripped of caps on my V3 3000s. Considering this was my first time soldering anything SMD ever I am pretty pleased that I didn't kill anything, both cards work and hopefully last a little longer with their shiny new caps 😀

I've been toying around with a 3.2GB IBM TravelStar hard drive by installing Windows 95 and 98SE to see how well those two Windows versions work on a Dell Inspiron 8000.

Windows 95 was troublesome on there mainly because that laptop was new enough to have hardware it couldn't understand, the only Dell driver that happened to be compatible was one of the ESS Maestro 3i drivers which unfortunately hosed the system as I was greeted by a never-ending registry error loop upon reboot once the driver was installed, as for the video driver, I had to modify the Detonator 8.05 driver to work with the nVidia Geforce2 Go GPU because the official Dell driver was intended for 98SE/ME, it too was iffy because once the nVidia driver was installed, the system powered off once it went past the Windows 95 startup screen, reinstalling the driver in safe mode fixed that so at least I (might have) managed to be the only person in the world to make a Windows 95-compatible nVidia GPU driver that works with the nVidia Geforce2 Go GPU found in the Dell Inspiron 8x00 and Latitude C8x0 laptops.

As for Windows 98SE, simply using the Windows ME drivers for every piece of hardware (except for audio) works perfectly. Since Windows ME has built-in drivers for the ESS Maestro 3i, Dell's driver page for the Inspiron 8000 doesn't have drivers for that so I used the 9x drivers for other Dell laptops with the same audio chipset (Google search "m39ua05a.exe" to find the driver I used). All went fantastic until I installed Monster Truck Madness and somehow managed to cause the GPU to go haywire until I rebooted to safe mode and back to normal mode, then everything was normal again.

In the end, I DBAN'd the drive so now I have a clean 3.2GB laptop hard drive at my disposal for experiments with old laptops, I think my next experiment will be installing Mac OS 9 on a Powerbook G3 to see if it's worth the hassle to use a 4GB CF card and IDE adapter for a makeshift SSD. The Inspiron is back to using its usual 20GB Hitachi TravelStar hard drive with its original installation on Windows ME so all is still well on that laptop should you have a need to know.

Speaking of Inspirons, the battery on my Dell Inspiron 8200 has drained, so I took it as an opportunity to recharge it and within 2-3 hours, it went back up to 100% charged again. Kind of impressive for a 15-year old laptop battery to still hold a charge for a while.

Finally, I discovered that my Toshiba Satellite 315CDS has the option to completely disable CPU cache in the BIOS, so I tested that to see how well it holds up with the original DOS version of Tetris (which sometimes throws a "divide overflow" error on newer hardware). It plays like normal for the first time ever on that laptop, I didn't have time to run TOPBENCH to see which CPU it's comparable to, but I'll do that some other time.

Today I fiddled with some stuff I bought yesterday:

- A PC-Chips M598LMR motherboard (don't even say anything, I didn't know how high quality it was before I bought it) with a K6-2 CPU and a 64MB SDRAM
- A 5DVX 1.0 Motherboard (made by Zida (?)) with a P166 CPU and 4 SIMMS (2 of them are 8mb each, the other two are very VERY thin and don't work on that mobo or are broken)
- A couple of ISA Controller Cards, one with UMF chips the other is Acer branded.
- ISA Trident TVGA9000 card (without bracket 🙁 )
- Another 2 ISA Video cards (that I can't remember models... heh I'm getting old)
- FORCOM M396F VER 2.2 386 with some memory and no CoProcessor, Am386SX-33 chip and a newer revision of the same board but with a DX40 chip.

Almost done DBAN-ing and testing my spare hard drives, and putting info into a Microsoft Access document.

Played around with Creative Music System in 86box. Made these GIFs

xeon3d wrote:

Today I fiddled with some stuff I bought yesterday:

- A PC-Chips M598LMR motherboard (don't even say anything, I didn't know how high quality it was before I bought it) with a K6-2 CPU and a 64MB SDRAM
[...]

I think it is a nice board, I always use a M599LMR when I'm testing Socket 7 CPUs because you can just swap between anything from a basic Pentium to a K6-III without changing a single jumper, everything is just autodetected. I do not want to miss that board, eventhough it is by PC-Chips.

Some CMS demos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNeaNesNQf8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1yEz5aSLMk

My old faithful Crystal CM-1402E monitor begun to act up two days ago. Basically if you turn it on after it cooled down, picture is all jittery, especially horizontally (it's mostly bad in the corners), and once it warms up, it stabilizes and becomes steady. I'm not an expert of CRT monitors but I believe it might be a capacitor that's on its way out, so I have packed it with the purpose to bring it to someone who can repair it for me in future. Meanwhile, I dug out my old 15" SAM*TRON FP1554-V from 1998 (just turned twenty!) and after blowing the dust out of it and cleaning the VGA connector, I must say that the picture quality is actually... Quite good. Text is very sharp for a shadow mask monitor, I'd say almost Trinitron in quality, but if I push it to high refresh rates it gets very blurry. At the moment I'm running it at 720x576 at 70Hz since 800x600 is readable yes, but I find it a bit dispersive to my eyes, and 640x480 looks huge on a 15" monitor. The only thing I complain besides the size, is that while it's sharp, it's too sharp! Dithering looks pretty bad on it and I miss the way fonts are smoothed out on the Crystal.

On the other hand, I fetched a composite to S-Video adapter, and I was wondering how bad 640x480 would look on a 1980s 13" composite colour monitor... I think I'm going to do an experiment on Sunday and dig out my old Fenner DIN/Composite colour monitor that I used with my Commodore 64... 😎