What retro things have you done today?

Duke · 3 Feb 2019 at 09:55

As mentioned here, it seemed a good idea to have a 'What have you done today' thread for all things retro related.

So what have you been up to or got planned?

I will kick off by saying I'll be playing this when it comes out

https://www.romerogames.ie/sigil/

SIGIL™ is a free megawad created by John Romero for the original 1993 DOOM®. It contains nine single-player and nine deathmatch levels. The free megawad will be released in mid- February 2019 and requires players own the original 1993 registered version of DOOM® in order to play. SIGIL™ is the spiritual successor to the fourth episode of DOOM®, and picks up where the original left off.

Duke · 4 Feb 2019 at 16:33

Tee Hee Johnson said:
I installed CorsixTH last night and started playing through Theme Hospital at glorious 1440, can see the whole hospital... more or less!

Reminded me of this post I saw yesterday - https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/am8a0l/looks_great_on_4k/

Duke · 4 Feb 2019 at 18:41

almoststew1990 said:
OpenRA is great! I play it semi regularly on my 1080p screen.

Same

Duke · 17 Feb 2019 at 09:35

Nice. Pretty sure you'll find a backplate for the mobo online easily enough too.

Duke · 21 Feb 2019 at 12:54

Eww ECS - remember them. Very cheap boards and prone to failures

Most had SIS chipset so maybe being VIA it actually lasted longer

Duke · 22 Feb 2019 at 06:24

Very tidy

Duke · 23 Feb 2019 at 12:28

I'm guessing the Voodoo card is holding it back most as from what I can try to think back on, that CPU should be 'quick' for the age of the rest of the kit?

Duke · 23 Feb 2019 at 19:30

GeX said:
Via, soldered and quick? Nah. I thought they had weak FPU like the Cyrix chips, so ok for business but trousers for gaming.

Quick as in shouldn't be holding back other components

Yes they weren't great.

Duke · 14 Apr 2019 at 12:56

Great system for the price. Bung a small SSD in that and it'll be quite snappy in XP. Agree about the FX5500, used to build loads of machines with those and the 5200s in them and the really low end ATI ones at the time.

Duke · 27 Apr 2019 at 22:13

Flibster said:
Local charity shop pickups today. 3 monitors, all from the same shop and REALLY cheap. Didn't have any prices on as they'd just taken them in. But I swooped. They also had a couple of unknown brand 4:3 LCD's in 19" and 20" sizes. Left those, as well as a 37" Panasonic (I think) 1080P LCD TV, although I was tempted.

Didn't know they did monitors, will be checking in a bit more regularly now.

Dell 2007FP 1600x1200 4:3 monitor - £5
Dell 2007WFP 1680x1050 16:10 monitor - £8
Dell 2407WFP 1620x1200 16:10 monitor - £10

Happy with that.

2007FP will be arcade cabineted - got a HP T620 Plus thin client that'll power it. Might run it vertical for arcade and maybe a bit of virtual pinball.
2407WFP will become a monitor on my desktop.
2007WFP... don't know yet. Might get sold on.
But I do love the 16:10 screen ratio. So much better than 16:9 for PC use.

Nice find

Duke · 2 Jun 2019 at 09:02

LewisRaz said:
Got old trusty out of the loft to try out some of my older collection.

Classic installer that

Duke · 27 Dec 2019 at 20:07

cee-S-dee said:
Been putting together a quite unusual Pentium III Socket 370 Machine. Board is an ECS P6S5AT, which is a board based on a SiS635T chipset which interestingly supports DDR memory. I currently have it setup with 512 DDR 3200, Pentium III 850 Coppermine at 1.13ghz and a Geforce FX 5900XT. This board is know to actually have a 166fsb with correct dividers for AGP spec which if the chip can run would be 1.4ghz. Having fun playing about with it.

How is an ECS board still alive after this long?

Expect you'd get better performance from Intel chipset but can't remember if they were still using RDRAM in this era of CPUs?

Duke · 27 Dec 2019 at 20:46

Yeah I never went the RDRAM route but did know some that did - that stuff ran HOT! And expensive as you say

Speed over latency.

Duke · 20 May 2020 at 14:48

That looks like smokers crud?

Can you get a P4 Northwood in there? The P4c was so good back in the day, 2.4 @ 3.3GHz :cool:

Duke · 20 May 2020 at 21:06

paradigm said:
essentially a lower clocked FX5800 Ultra

Duke · 31 May 2020 at 21:21

That'll be quite a nippy machine now, especially on XP.

Duke · 2 Jun 2020 at 21:15

LewisRaz said:

lol I've not seen that cooler in so long! Never had one myself.

Duke · 11 Jun 2020 at 19:41

Was the Parhelia the one that was meant to 'change everything' in the gpu world or am I mistaking it for something else? I remember that about one non-ATI/Nvidia card and it ended up being a bit rubbish.

Duke · 21 Jun 2020 at 21:05

I've got my old 3DMark scores online on their database still, although unfortunately 2001 isn't listed on there (tbh it became just a cpu benchmark pretty quickly). But here is the oldest 3DMark 2003 result from years ago

I don't remember having a P4 2.6 - it would have been my P4c 2.4 @ 3.1GHz

Code:

Score 1859 with NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 and Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.60GHz 16/04/04

Graphics Card
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
# of cards 1
SLI / CrossFire Off
Memory 64 MB
Clock frequency 320 MHz
Memory clock frequency 608 MHz
Driver version 4.4.0.3

Processor
Processor Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.60GHz
Clock frequency 3,100 MHz
Physical / logical processors 1 / 1
# of cores 1

General
Operating system 32-bit Microsoft Windows XP (5.1.2600)
Memory 510 MB

Might be of interest to compare to.

Duke · 22 Jun 2020 at 14:07

I like the quote from there

I don't know if I want to sell it, or just to gloat. If you are mad enough or rich enough to buy it now, then be my guest.