I finally got a video of my P4 rig working.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyhsCuUB3MI

3.4Ghz p4 EE
ati x850 XT PE
ageia physx

man this thing just plays everything I want to.

luckybob wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyhsCuUB3MI

Mmm, that Alpha cooler...

Also, Team America is most probably the greatest movie in the history of movies ever, amen, hallelujah etc.

Well, you won't believe it but I managed to infect all of my computers (which is quite a few - old and new ones) with a Polish virus named Pieck.4444 or nicknamed Kaczor. Through one freakin' floppy with LapLink! That fu**er got formatted now 😁

Well, I guess tommorow I will be disinfecting all the day 😁

krivulak wrote:

Well, you won't believe it but I managed to infect all of my computers (which is quite a few - old and new ones) with a Polish virus named Pieck.4444 or nicknamed Kaczor. Through one freakin' floppy with LapLink! That fu**er got formatted now 😁

Well, I guess tommorow I will be disinfecting all the day 😁

At least it wasn't Natas. I got that one from some random floppy way back in the day. It screwed up the boot record and instead of booting to DOS, it would just display a bunch of ASCII characters.

http://virus.wikidot.com/natas

I'm trying to get my Mac SE/30 running long enough to make a video about Apple UNIX. Previously recapped the board but an important video chip had corroded legs and is too small to work on for a novice like me. After like the 5th soldering attempt it seems to stay running...

Installed the old 60GB Hitachi HDD into my Compaq Presario C700 notebook, installed Windows 7 Pro with SP1, and unfortunately, my wireless card won't work with it. I installed the drivers, and nothing. It's a TP-Link TL-WN722N V1.10 wireless dongle, and the internal wireless card that was in there would crash the system.

I figured I downloaded the wrong drivers for the card as my eyesight at night isn't that great. As for the HDD, I'm planning on getting a 480GB SSD or using the 320GB HDD I have in my Athlon 64 system and put both Windows 7 and linux on the drive.

Straightened and seperated about a dozen or so legs on a Voodoo 2 12MB that was acting strangely. Hopefully things will be resolved now. I will try the card in an SLI configuration tomorrow.

Marginally "retro" but I just inaugurated my new soldering iron (an Ersa RDS80) by replacing a couple of bulging caps on the Peshen rev 2.0 motherboard of a Lenovo ThinkStation (i946GZ chipset, Pentium dual core E2140) I found on the street outside the local zoo a few weeks ago. Hadn't done any re-capping for quite a while, but after a bit of messing around (RoHS solder is stubborn stuff...) the new caps are nicely doing their job and I can boot again. Good practice if not totally retro, practice that will prove useful if I find my mid/late So7 board with K6plus support with tons of bad caps. And it looks like my stock of Panasonic/Matsushita caps I bought years ago are still good.

Almost finished by Pentium 4 build today. Installed a Geforce2 MX 400, a floppy drive, a DVD+RW DL drive, and the ASUS iPanel Deluxe. The iPanel is quite cool. It's completely hardware-driven, shows POST code, CPU speed, temperatures, fan speed, and voltages. 😀

Already had Windows ME installed yesterday.

I put a Netflix DVD out in the mailbox, and raised the little flag on the mailbox. Double-retro!

derSammler wrote:

Almost finished by Pentium 4 build today. Installed a Geforce2 MX 400, a floppy drive, a DVD+RW DL drive, and the ASUS iPanel Deluxe. The iPanel is quite cool. It's completely hardware-driven, shows POST code, CPU speed, temperatures, fan speed, and voltages. 😀

Already had Windows ME installed yesterday.

Ha! I remember wanting an iPanel back in the day when I ran a CUSL2. Cool stuff

Decided to research the history of one of the computers in my collection, my Toshiba T5100. I wanted to do so because it originally came from Germany, and it had the name "Wolfgang Schmittel" on it. Turns out he was a very well known German corporate graphics designer, and he actually helped design the logo for the Braun razor company. He also wrote some books about corporate logo/graphics design, and is well known enough to have his own German Wikipedia page. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en& … tel&prev=search

You never know what you might be able to dig up on one of your old computers! 😳

Thought about repairing a broken PSone I had. Tested another one with broken CD lid that I got recently for parts for next to nothing, only to find out it works! After frankenstein transplanting some plastics, I now have a proper, nice looking one. 😜

appiah4 wrote:

Straightened and seperated about a dozen or so legs on a Voodoo 2 12MB that was acting strangely. Hopefully things will be resolved now. I will try the card in an SLI configuration tomorrow.

Aaaand it worked flawlessly! Another Voodoo 2 brought back toplam life.

Reinstalling MS-DOS 6.22 by floppies on old IBM Thinkpad 486, attached on huge Dock II - this dock I've searched for a lot of time, is interesting for the external ISA slots, speakers and SCSI cdrom. The original 500mb HD has not any bad sector, so I'm using it while searching for the correct CF adapter to use. Just trying to find the correct ASPI driver to use with the SCSI cdrom, at the moment. In one of the external ISAs I've mounted a SB16 CT2940.

hnnnnnng that is so bloody amazing! Does the dock II have ISA slots?

For some odd reason, Windows 95C on my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus under the performance tab when I right-click on My Computer it shows the following:

1Compatibility mode paging reduces overall system performance.
2Drive C: using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system.

What gives? I used the Ontrack Disk Management software on a diskette to use the full 4.6GB storage capacity on my HDD.

Here's my autoexec.bat and config.sys on the system:

1:CONFIG.SYS
2
3DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
4DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM 16384 D=256
5BUFFERS=40,0
6FILES=80
7DOS=UMB
8REM DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\DOS\DRIVERS\EEPROM.SYS /880C0000
9REM DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM HIGHSCAN I=B000-B7FF 16384 D=64 WIN=B500-B7FF WIN=F300-F7FF
10REM DEVICEHIGH /L:3,4560 =C:\WINDOWS\IFSHLP.SYS
11REM DEVICEHIGH /L:1,12048 =C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE
12rem DEVICEHIGH /L:2,12048 =C:\WINDOWS\SETVER.EXE
13REM DEVICEHIGH /L:3,3760 =C:\XCDROM.SYS /D:CDROM
14DEVICEHIGH /L:2,3760 =C:\XCDROM.SYS /D:DELTA52X
15rem DEVICE=c:\sb16\drv\ctsb16.sys /UNIT=0 /BLASTER=A:220 I:5 D:1 H:1
16DOS=HIGH

1:AUTOEXEC.BAT
2
3SET SOUND=C:\SB16
4SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H1 P300 T6
5@echo off
6\tandy\sndoff
7SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E
8C:\SB16\DIAGNOSE /S
9C:\SB16\MIXERSET /P /Q
10call yamaha.bat
11@ECHO OFF
12PROMPT $p$g
13SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND;C:\DRIVERS\DOS\UTILITY;C:\UTILITY;%PATH%
14rem LH /L:0;1,6160 /S SHSUCDX /D:CDROM
15LH /L:0;2,6160 /S SHSUCDX /D:DELTA52X
16dir D: > CD-rom.txt
17cdbq -p2 -dm -s600
18lh cmouse19
19univbe5
20LH /L:1,6384 C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\doskey /insert
21SET COPYCMD=/Y
22LH /L:0;1,45472 /S smartdrv a- b- c+ d /e:23768 2048 128

Is there anything wrong here? Also, I looked at the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\IOS and there's no reg file labeled NOIDE in there (which is good). Would it be the IDE driver? The motherboard utilizes the OPTi chipset, and Windows 95C never complained on a PC Chips M912 v1.7 board that used a WinBond I/O card.

edit: found out I had smartdrv (MS-DOS 6.22 version) in the C drive (root directory), and I forgot the autoexec.bat goes by the file name either listed in the paths setup or if the file is located on the root directory.

Got an IBM 4.3GB SCSI drive in the mail today. Here's how it sounds. http://k003.kiwi6.com/hotlink/lkue75t0ba/IBMSCSI.mp3

Just tested some parts I got recently. I hooked up an interesting looking Socket 3 board equipped with an AMD DX4-100, UMC chipset, pci, isa, vlb, COAST slot, 30pin and 72pin SIMM slots... very odd board. Then I saw some really suspicious looking super chintzy onboard cache memory that didn't look at all correct for a board like this. Sure enough, its a PC Chips M919:

http://redhill.net.au/b/b-96.html

Notorious fake cache board! The molded in model number on the chips totally gave it away. I've never seen a real chip marked this way...

Too bad though. The BIOS setup is really cool, has a Windows-looking interface that has mouse support and a ludicrous amount of options, plus its the first working VLB board I've come across, as most were ruined by leaky batteries years ago. The board does feel rather flimsy though.

It seems to work fine though. I played with it a bit, installed DOS 6.22, ran some benchmarks and CACHECHK. It probably works fine for some DOS stuff, but I imagine I'd run into a lot of problems with game performance without any L2 cache. Does anyone use a fake cache board in a retro rig? What can you actually do with it?

There is one PCChips board on eBay that has fake L2 cache, but another board revision has the sockets and jumpers for the L2 cache. My plan is to buy both boards and put the sockets and jumpers for the L2 cache from the one board to the other. My Packard Bell doesn't have L2 cache installed and certain games and OSes need L2 cache to run smoothly. Heck, I get 23-40fps in Doom with low/high detail, full/medium screen size without the L2 cache. With it will be higher than that.