What retro things have you done today?

Cheers for the links!
So I have the vt82c686b so that is handling the SB emulation.. After reading those I took a look deeper into the bios and found this:


Oddly SB is disabled but it was still working. It is actually decent sounding combo in dos with the windows software synth.
It seems to work on IRQ5 and 7 even tho the bios has it set at 5?

Technically I could fit my DIY adlib for pure DOS FM and use JazeFoxes tool to enable the SBPro emulation for sounds..

Edit: Yep, that works nicely :D
 
Last edited:
I went to B&Q this afternoon and left the new Q6600 system downloading stuff. When I get back it's sitting at 50c on the desktop and the fans are hardly spinning; it seems to have a very lazy fan controller. Is the CPU currently on fire? No? OK I'll stick to 1100rpm no worries. Downloads also top out at 2.6mbps even though older boards have hit higher on this dongle (and the dongle can do 14mbps on a new machine). I wonder if it is a USB problem.

I therefore changed over the cooling, put a PCI USB2 card in, and also put my other Q6600 in (which never reported temps like that in my old motherboard) and took the opportunity to take some pics.

86cvjPfh.jpg


Proper cooler! And 8GB of DDR800MHz RAM

ySL1wRGh.jpg


A mess of black and silver (and a RX 570X) until my 4890 arrives.

MWACYmQh.jpg


The old 80 or 92mm cooler vs the 120mm cooler I tell it not to worry about.

4JrbDfmh.jpg
 
@almoststew1990 You’ve got me thinking about at least collecting the bits for a C2Q build. Still a bit too new for me to really bother, too quick for XP and anything newer my actual gaming PC can do. But, the bits are about as cheap as they are going to go, so getting ahead of the game might be advantageous!

In actual retro news, I’ve bought a replacement Slot-1 board that has support for 133/33 (fsb/PCI) speeds, so should be able to clock the nuts off the Tualeron.

I’ve also bought a GeForce 6800 XT 256MB finally to replace the one I killed over a year ago! This one cost double what the last one did, but is fully boxed, so that’s nice.
 
Philscomputerlab is always on about "staying ahead of the trends" Im sure he said recently it might be time to start getting the higher end stuff from that era while it is "cheap"!

I do wonder if there will be as much interest in that stuff in the future as modern pcs can mostly handle all of those games fine unlike the software from the 90s we are all fond of.
 
LewisRaz said:
Philscomputerlab is always on about "staying ahead of the trends" Im sure he said recently it might be time to start getting the higher end stuff from that era while it is "cheap"!

I do wonder if there will be as much interest in that stuff in the future as modern pcs can mostly handle all of those games fine unlike the software from the 90s we are all fond of.
Click to expand...

At some point there will be a shift in technology that is likely to be architecturally different to what we currently have, which will probably have the effect of making Win7 through to current day hard to run on what will then be modern hardware.

Think the leap to quantum computing or a shift to RISC.
 
High end Socket 775 never really reached "junk" cheap, I guess because it's still fairly useful for every day PCs so has held some utility-based value rather than the "intrinsic" value that retro parts have today. I'm writing this on the Q6600 and with 8GB of RAM (two mismatched pairs of RAM) and a far too modern GPU it works fine. Windows, opera, Spotify all load up quickly. Compare to a 14 year old CPU in 2006, which would have been a, what, 66Mhz 486? It's probably also affected by the crazily high second hand prices for the early i5s and i7. Having said that I'm not sure there is going to be a better time to get high end Socket 775, even if now isn't a particularly good time!

paradigm said:
Still a bit too new for me to really bother, too quick for XP and anything newer my actual gaming PC can do. But, the bits are about as cheap as they are going to go, so getting ahead of the game might be advantageous!
Click to expand...

Yes, I am building this as a "how far can I push it" like I did with my i7 860 rather than a useful XP PC. It will probably be repurposed as a XP PC at some point with a dual core just because I can have a sound card and GPU on the same board due to the layout.
 
Just bought a TNT2 Pro, didn’t even know if I wanted it, but oh well :/

Really wanted an Ultra, but they are expensive these days. This pro was only £5.
 
Last edited:
paradigm said:
Just bought a TNT2 Pro, didn’t even know if I wanted it, but oh well :/

Really wanted an Ultra, but they are expensive these days. This pro was only £5.
Click to expand...
The highest 3dmark99 score on my chart is a TNT2PRo. The embedded one in my compaq with 1ghz P3.
The athlon 1ghz with TNT2 Ultra score 200 less even tho the athlon got a higher cpu score. Likely due to drivers but still interesting.
 
paradigm said:
@LewisRaz, what are the clocks of your TNT2 Pro? The TNT2 Pro was a die-shrink (220nm vs 250nm for the Ultra) and they typically clock HIGHER than the Ultra.
Click to expand...
To be honest mate I have no idea. Its the compaq SFF desktop which is now in storage. My assumption was that it was set up better with all the softpaqs. With the ultra I just used one of the earliest drivers I found that worked. And the via 4 in1 drivers from philscomputerlab. Without any bios tuning either.
 
So today I swapped the fans on the Voodoo 5 5500 PCI. I had no idea that these were 5v fans as standard, so the 12v 40mm jobbies I put on were barely turning, sometimes not starting at all without a flick to get them going.

Put some new 5v 40mm fans on this morning and that's a lot better. Faster RPM, more airflow and no manual intervention!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom