What retro things have you done today?

LewisRaz said:
Managed to grab official dell dos 6.2 disk locally so I have those and the dell windows 3.11 disks to go with my old dell :)
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Oh damn! I meant to ask my dad to check if he had his old floppy disk box still as we used to have the proper DOS 6.2 and 3.11 disks at home.
 
The lot I have purchased also has the Dell 3.11 disks(so i will have 2 sets), along side probably 40+ other programs across CD and floppy (including photoshop 3.0 on floppy disk!)

I might put pictures up once it arrives to see if there is anything anyone wants (through MM to follow rules)
 
LewisRaz said:
The lot I have purchased also has the Dell 3.11 disks(so i will have 2 sets), along side probably 40+ other programs across CD and floppy (including photoshop 3.0 on floppy disk!)

I might put pictures up once it arrives to see if there is anything anyone wants (through MM to follow rules)
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Nice one, keep us posted :)
 
Got my main motherboard listed up tonight. On the hunt for a slot1 motherboard with 2 ISA slots if anyone comes across one at a decent price :)

Waiting on some thermal pads to arrive and then I can crack on giving the 3870x2 a refurb.

Thought I would share my little B roll montage that I had worked on for the compaq restoration seeing how its now dead in the water..: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBsd391LYDk&ab_channel=LJRRetroPCs
 
Fitted an Iomega Zip100 drive to my 486, and have an external one attached to my "modern" PC so I can copy over media without needing to rely on putting an insecure device on my network.
 
Ah ok cool, I found a Microsoft activation page that works like the phone thing but less of a chore as you can type the stuff in. All activated now :)
 
paradigm said:
Fitted an Iomega Zip100 drive to my 486, and have an external one attached to my "modern" PC so I can copy over media without needing to rely on putting an insecure device on my network.
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Sounds painful. 100MB zip disks and about 1.5MB/s if i remember correctly. They were shortlived as USB 1 and then USB 2.0 came out.

Much easier now to buy a USB 2 card and use pendrives which cost pennies. I just got a 128GB USB stick for £14. Works great on Win98 SE

There were some conflicts but now ive moved the USB PCI card to a different slot it seems fine

All that being said, I had an iomega zip 100 drive when I was at college in 2001. It replaced floppy disks I had which kept failing and i was losing college work including a whole project. A single zip disk replaced about 30 floppies and was reliable
 
When our tech director retired at end of 2018 he appeared at my desk and basically said "Owen in IT said you like old pc junk, want this?" Immaculate boxed parallel zip100 drive. Was over the moon. Managed to pick up 14-15 boxed disks for £12 on eBay last month lol. No idea what I am gonna do with them, I do have 3-4 zip disks with my college design work on somewhere though so be nice to get access to that again
 
Guest2 said:
Sounds painful. 100MB zip disks and about 1.5MB/s if i remember correctly. They were shortlived as USB 1 and then USB 2.0 came out.

Much easier now to buy a USB 2 card and use pendrives which cost pennies. I just got a 128GB USB stick for £14. Works great on Win98 SE

There were some conflicts but now ive moved the USB PCI card to a different slot it seems fine

All that being said, I had an iomega zip 100 drive when I was at college in 2001. It replaced floppy disks I had which kept failing and i was losing college work including a whole project. A single zip disk replaced about 30 floppies and was reliable
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USB support on 95 is dire, and USB polling massively cripples performance of even moderate CPUs let alone low end stuff that is end of life by the time Windows 98 came along! I noticed around 30% performance loss on my K6-3 with an NEC chipset USB2.0 card, and around 7% when switching that out for my VIA based card. The VIA card only works on 98 and upwards.

I happily use NUSB and flash drives on my K6-3 builds and upwards, but this 486 class machine that just isn’t possible.

Finally, it might only be 1.5MB/s peak, but at 100MB capacity, that’s still only a few minutes to transfer across, hardly the end of the world when most software of the time was 5-20MB. The larger stuff tended to be CD based (and even then only usually for the audio), so I can use CDs for those bits.
 
paradigm said:
USB support on 95 is dire, and USB polling massively cripples performance of even moderate CPUs let alone low end stuff that is end of life by the time Windows 98 came along! I noticed around 30% performance loss on my K6-3 with an NEC chipset USB2.0 card, and around 7% when switching that out for my VIA based card. The VIA card only works on 98 and upwards.

I happily use NUSB and flash drives on my K6-3 builds and upwards, but this 486 class machine that just isn’t possible.

Finally, it might only be 1.5MB/s peak, but at 100MB capacity, that’s still only a few minutes to transfer across, hardly the end of the world when most software of the time was 5-20MB. The larger stuff tended to be CD based (and even then only usually for the audio), so I can use CDs for those bits.
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Interesting, was the performance loss just with NEC and VIA cards connected or when a USB stick was connected?
How did you test performance, in something like SiSoft Sandra 99 CPU benchmark? (I'll try the same as have an NEC PCI card)
Did you try disabling the card in device manager

Yeh, i guess for 486 era a zip disk is easily enough to hold many games and software. Most games im using my retro build for are 1997-2001
 
Guest2 said:
Interesting, was the performance loss just with NEC and VIA cards connected or when a USB stick was connected?
How did you test performance, in something like SiSoft Sandra 99 CPU benchmark? (I'll try the same as have an NEC PCI card)
Did you try disabling the card in device manager

Yeh, i guess for 486 era a zip disk is easily enough to hold many games and software. Most games im using my retro build for are 1997-2001
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I originally detailed the performance loss with my NEC card and K6-3/Voodoo3 PC on VOGONS: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=73627 I was experiencing a performance loss of up to 40% in 3DMark99MAX/Quake2 and general CPU performance benchmarking software.

This was the case for simply having the card present (even when disabled in device manager). The only fix was removal of the card. The VIA card is much better in the K6-3 system, only really losing me a few % performance (1-3% depending on situation), but my older Pentium 200MMX system the VIA still lost anywhere up to about 7% system performance.
 
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