1st ever PC case found - Pentium 166 MMX win98 build/rebuild - Ram issues

On personal hardware I went from a 200MB IDE drive to a 4GB SCSI-2 drive connected to of all things a Soundblaster card which had an Adaptec SCSI controller in it. Bought that at Brum NEC - some PC show which was common at the time.

The difference in performance on the single-core processors* of the time made me buy a proper Adaptec card.

The IDE drives of the time destroyed cpu performance as you couldn't queue/offload transfers.

*I went from 386SX to 486SX25 to a (smuggled) Pentium 60+m/b I bought in the USA on holiday ;)

Edit - I had multiple OS's on it so Windows/DOS limitations of the time didn't matter. All the decent OS's resided above 2GB....
 
Last edited:
Vestas said:
On personal hardware I went from a 200MB IDE drive to a 4GB SCSI-2 drive connected to of all things a Soundblaster card which had an Adaptec SCSI controller in it. Bought that at Brum NEC - some PC show which was common at the time.

The difference in performance on the single-core processors* of the time made me buy a proper Adaptec card.

The IDE drives of the time destroyed cpu performance as you couldn't queue/offload transfers.

*I went from 386SX to 486SX25 to a (smuggled) Pentium 60+m/b I bought in the USA on holiday ;)

Edit - I had multiple OS's on it so Windows/DOS limitations of the time didn't matter. All the decent OS's resided above 2GB....
Click to expand...

Thats a fair leap there! i remember buying my 3.2gb fireball, at the time we were going to get a 2.6gb drive but they were sold out. I think my grandad split the price difference with me as i didnt have enough money at the time. He said 3.2gb was huge at the time. Back then it didnt take long for newer hardware to come out though and a pc could be lagging behind after maybe a year.
I used to go the computer fairs regulary when they were going. My grandad was often building PC's for people buying components and it was the only place to go for good deals. Some things were mega cheap. You could pick up cheap keyboards new for £2 you would just find the odd few keys were moulded togther which needed a little bit of plastic broken off between them, i wonder if they were factory seconds. All the prices of components were wrote on big boards in pen. I remember the main company we used was one called Gold Chip. He would always knock a bit extra off the prices on the boards for us due to often buying parts from him. Great times, then Burger King on the way home usually!
 
NetMan said:
Meh all this modern stuff if you haven't had a 20MB drive the size of a breeze block you haven't lived.
Click to expand...
A Winchester? Never had one of those but did feel the need to add a 100MB external SCSI drive to an Atari ST without realising I could put none of the games on it. Think I got it running on an Acorn A4 laptop via a SCSI dongle. A4 footprint, monochrome screen and the better part of 2 INCHES thick to contain a whole 24MHz of CPU! :eek:
 
Beankp60 said:
Thats a fair leap there!
Click to expand...

It was after I brought the Pentium 60 + m/b back from the USA. I got tired of running DOS/Win3.1 on a 32-bit cpu (which was actually 64/128-bit internally) so looked elsewhere.

OS/2 initially - still remember the look on the work IT guy's face when I fired up 4 "DOS Boxes" with Win3.1 from inside OS/2 and they all ran faster than natively :D I viewed disk space differently from then on...

MS and IBM did a good job of killing OS/2, WindowsNT was buggy **** & Windows95 was mostly running on 16-bit shims which didn't work well (ie **** as well). I just got into the habit of dual/triple/whatever boot menus for whatever workload I needed.

Thinking about it, Windows is still buggy **** that doesn't run well so not a lot has changed in 30 years. For a while (Win7) MS seemed to have a reasonably stable OS that just worked. Can't monetise that though, can you?

As an aside for those of you with Steam, Bazzite works reasonably well if you want a Windows alternative. Obviously works better with AMD cards/chipsets than NVidia.
 
a few updates for you guys. I won an auction for a new old stock BenQ cd writer still in the box for a tenner so i got that yesterday. When it turned up the drive was open slightly. I installed it but it would only open about 20mm and not fully close either. So i removed it, took it apart and couldnt get the tray opening mechanism to work properly. I thought it was going to need to be sent back but i kept going with it and eventually just gave it a good pull and it made a horrible sound but the tray opened and closed now. I put it back togther with not much hope it would actually work but it works great. its a really nice quiet drive and the tray is really smooth! The drive the PC came with didnt seem quite right when i tried some cd's in it. I also added the cd audio 4b pin wire from the drive to the sound card as it was missing from the old drive.

Cd drive swapped over.

4 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I also got a 120gb ssd hard drive, drive tray and IDE to SATA adapter. Ive fitted the drive in the tray and put it inside the case but i havent connected it up yet to load windows on. i thought i would wait until the ram came which i ordered.

SSD installed ready for when i get chance to sort a win 98 SE install cd.

5 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I had seen a post about someone with this motherbaord or maybe a similar one installing some higher capacity ram and the board would not see the full amount but it worked ok. I thought it was worth a chance for a fiver and bought this set of 2x128mb sticks.

6 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I put one of them in without the edo ram and it posted showing 32mb, woohoo! so i added the second stick and it went up to 64mb! great stuff. Got lucky there! I also ordered a set of 2x16mb edo ram sticks and a set of 2x 32mb sd ram sticks. Basically if they were cheap auctions i thought i would just give them a go and hope i got lucky. I can either relist the other sets or maybe keep them for another build at some point.

3 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

https://flic.kr/p/2rCDudU

1 by Bean Beano, on Flickr

I also found out why the internal speaker wasnt working, one of the wires was cut, maybe it got caught in the cpu fan. So i soldered that back togther also.

Ive also got a sticker coming for the case which seems to be taking a while which should finish the case off a little.

Ive got some games installed so far and these are running.

Carnage
Doom
Doom2
Jazz Jackrabbit 2
Duke Nukem 3d
Duke Zone 2
Duke Xtreme - not fully tested yet
Outlaws.

A few more i plan to try are

Wolfenstein and spear of destiny
Rise of the triad
Star wars dark forces.
Various SCUMM adventure games like day of the tentacle, indiana jones - fate of atlantis as i never finished this when i was a kid. Sam & max, Full throttle, the dig ect
Im sure there will be others.

I might also put the CPU back to 233mhz eventualyl but i will see how it performs first as i might not need it any quicker.
 
Last edited:
Worth benchmarking the CPU with and without the overclock. Just that a 40% overclock seems like a lot for the era. Might be you got a 233 capable chip sold as a 166. Also worth checking what it does to temps with a cooler of that era too.
I know I ran a Pentium Pro 200 at 240 in that era but that's a 20% overclock and I thought even that was good!

The wiring is definitely a blast from the past. Glad it's not so hard to cable-manage these days!
You must have found the one copy of Windows ME that wasn't burned!
 
Cenedd said:
Worth benchmarking the CPU with and without the overclock. Just that a 40% overclock seems like a lot for the era. Might be you got a 233 capable chip sold as a 166. Also worth checking what it does to temps with a cooler of that era too.
I know I ran a Pentium Pro 200 at 240 in that era but that's a 20% overclock and I thought even that was good!

The wiring is definitely a blast from the past. Glad it's not so hard to cable-manage these days!
You must have found the one copy of Windows ME that wasn't burned!
Click to expand...

What should i use for the benchmarking? thats something i have never really done much of. Thats really weird i never noticed it says "windows me" in system properties. I think it does that as the USB drivers i used are maybe from Windows Me. Its definetely win98.
 
Its more a case of what can you actually find that will work for stuff of that era. I'd have a look at this: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=37982 and see if the download works - it certainly gets as far as Mediafire offering it so it looks hopeful.
Anything that'll test the CPU - Pi calculators even - anything that will just check you're actually getting some performance benefit to the overclock and that it isn't an illusion. You'll want to check the temps too - even if that has to be a thermometer on the heatsink - just to make sure it's not getting too hot.
 
Cool i will check it out. Im going to leave it at 166mhz for now. I do have a laser temperature reader thing i could use. There also wasn't any thermal paste on the cpu i noticed when i cleaned it so i will add a little.
 
Cenedd said:
Definitely a blast from the past this. A lot of it not good memorys to be fair. Can't help with the RAM issue but one thing I remember that's worth checking you do, is that in that era the edges of the steel where the case was pressed were usually not rolled over to give a nice safe edge. They were usually left as-pressed and razor sharp. If you pick the case up from one of those edges, you'll find it slide through your fingers like a hot knife through butter. You needn't ask why I remember this! :D
Click to expand...
Absolutely. It gut my hand like a fish. I've never seen anything like it (I was 11) before.
 
Ive connected the new ssd up using the ide to sata adapter but the bios cant detect the ssd. Ive had a search and it sounds like there is a bios limit on certain hdd sizes? I didn't know ow about this, only the win98 limit of 130 odd gb. Has anyone got any ideas?
 
Last edited:
Ack, you're into the arcane stuff now. I can't remember all that much about it - it being many, many years back, when I had hair, my own teeth and all that. But you used to get a bios limit on how big a disk it could handle in terms of addressing the disk to boot off it, as well as a limitation on how large a partition the disk format could handle.
I can recall some terms but only that might be of use to Google stuff. Go back far enough and the BIOS addressed the disk with CHS addresses; Cylinders, Heads and Sectors (you can see why this doesn't apply to solid state disks). After that came LBA, Logical Block Addressing. It could be that if your disk is too big, it won't even recognise it as a disk. If that the case, you're probably stuffed. There used to be something called an Overlay (sometimes a BIOS Overlay) that essentially lied to the BIOS that it was some supported scheme and then translated it afterwards. I doubt (although I have no particular basis for that) that this would be even vaguely supported on an modern (-ish) SSD but it might give you the terms to search and prove me wrong (or right... stranger things have happened!).
Also worth checking for Jumpers on the IDE to SATA convertor to see if it has one that presents the disk as much smaller that it actually is.
I can recall the 2TB limit but there was definitely at least one before that in the GB range. I'll be honest, I've long since reached the point that for new stuff to go in, something has to fall off the back!
 
Let me know when you work out the upper limit. I've certainly got a 120GB SSD (OCZ Arc) you could have if it's small enough. I may get some mechanical HDDs of an unreasonably small size in the foreseeable but they would also be of appropriate age and hence likely longevity. You'd be welcome to them once they're wiped though (if they're not also too big - the most recent have been 1TB but there's probably some more ancient stock about to be retired)
 
Does it need to be IDE? Or is it not possible to just format a disk to whatever the max volume size is?
I might be able to lay my hands on something <128GB, but would be SATA I'm pretty sure
 
Thanks for the offers and the help guys. Im hoping there is a way i can use this new 120gb SSD ive bought. More research is required i think. If i cant figure it out i will have to go with an old IDE drive i think.
 
Beankp60 said:
Thanks for the offers and the help guys. Im hoping there is a way i can use this new 120gb SSD ive bought. More research is required i think. If i cant figure it out i will have to go with an old IDE drive i think.
Click to expand...
This is one of the reasons I went SCSI in the 90s ;)

Unless the adapter you're using will do CHS/LBA translation in a way that a BIOS from those days will understand then I think you're screwed on SATA. You might be able to persuade the BIOS its a 4GB drive but I think that'll be your lot....

Edit - have you considered just using some old SCSI adapters/drives? There's bound to be loads around and given they were all enterprise-grade stuff in their day there's going to be a lot still working fine. Adaptec cards were the thing back then so you might be able to find some of them and they always had decent backwards compatibility/drivers for various OS's.
 
Last edited:
Now you mention SCSI and disk sizes, I was running SCSI drives in an array with 9GB 10k spin disks. I'd avoid those because of the noise to be honest (quieter these days).
It might be that you can boot of a small supported disk and then have a larger SCSI disk for storage if it isn't supported for boot. The SCSI card would have had it's own bios so that might well support booting from larger disks.
 
Cenedd said:
Now you mention SCSI and disk sizes, I was running SCSI drives in an array with 9GB 10k spin disks. I'd avoid those because of the noise to be honest (quieter these days).
It might be that you can boot of a small supported disk and then have a larger SCSI disk for storage if it isn't supported for boot. The SCSI card would have had it's own bios so that might well support booting from larger disks.
Click to expand...
You can boot Win95/98/Me directly from pretty much any size of SCSI disk - you just need to make sure the entire Win95/98/Me partition resides within the first 4096 logical "cylinders" of the drive.

The challenge is going to be finding a working PCI adapter card with drivers which are still downloadable. Adaptec cards/chipsets are the best bet.
 
This is probably the board you've got -


Noticed this about memory : "Provides 2 x 168 Pin DIMM to support SDRAM/EDO DRAM/Page Mode DRAM-supports "Table Free" configuration so that DIMM and SIMM can be installed in any combination up to 384Mb, except that SIMM 1, 2 and DIMM 2 can not be installed at the same time"
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom