What retro things have you done today?

[paradigm]

I'm pretty confident that I could replace that resistor network using my hot air station, but I'd want to practice first.

/looks around

Ah, Lewis' old Socket 7 board that doesn't work. Yep that's got resistor networks on it that look the same size

 

[LewisRaz]

I'm pretty confident that I could replace that resistor network using my hot air station, but I'd want to practice first.

/looks around

Ah, Lewis' old Socket 7 board that doesn't work. Yep that's got resistor networks on it that look the same size

What a hero

Let me know how confident you feel... If I find something soon then you can have it regardless

 

[paradigm]

What a hero

Let me know how confident you feel... If I find something soon then you can have it regardless

Well the components I soldered onto my Kyro II to voltmod it were certainly smaller (around 1/4 the size), and the components I soldered onto the broken Voodoo 5 5500 were about the same, and they both work

 

[almoststew1990]

Today was another good day. The old couple I bought the £10 Soundblaster 2 from put an ad up for three old games. They said they hadn't forgotten me and had wondered if it would be me picking them up!

Spoiler: Many pictures

Disney Animation Studio - my first 5.25" disks (it also has the 3.5" disks).





Note the thickness of the Getting Started book (and the manual!)










Next, Oil's Well (I'm sad I missed the "pun name" phase of gaming )








This is the manual...

It also came with a pretty cool Sierra 10 Year magazine!






oh boy my favourite - the game blaster. And the game supports it too!

Finally, Archipelagos




I'm getting minecraft crossed with walking simulators crossed with The Magic Carpet (or whatever it was called) vibes on this one. Looking forawrd to see what it is all about!

Inside is a low rent manual and some backups as well as the original disk.

So how should I go about backing these up to disk files? Ideally can I do it in DOS - make a direct copy of the disk (B to my Gotek floppy (A rather than just copy the contents?

 

[paradigm]

What a hero

Let me know how confident you feel... If I find something soon then you can have it regardless

Managed to remove and replace a resistor network chip on that old board of yours without issue. So I’m pretty certain it won’t be too difficult, I’d just shield the CPU socket with some scrap metal so it doesn’t melt!

I’m happy to give it a go for you anyway, clearly it’s up to you!

 

[LewisRaz]

Managed to remove and replace a resistor network chip on that old board of yours without issue. So I’m pretty certain it won’t be too difficult, I’d just shield the CPU socket with some scrap metal so it doesn’t melt!

I’m happy to give it a go for you anyway, clearly it’s up to you!

Well I just got this for £35: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/363347003441 - Still more than I would like but given the prices for all other buy it now boards I guess it is alright.
I am hoping it will let me run my current p3 cpu at 100mhz(This board doesnt seem to do 133mhz), either that or ill go down to my 400mhz P2 from the compaq..


So I wont be needing the jetway board anymore!

@almoststew1990 that is an incredible haul... I use winimage to make backup floppy images in windows 98. Its a 30day trial that is really dumb (just set the pc date back and it never ends...)

 

[almoststew1990]

thanks - I paid £15 this time, but they also threw in a box of 20 new unused floppy disks (whilst I am trying to sell a box of floppy disks and holder thing on gumtree for £5!)

Edit I asked on vogons and they said just use diskcopy A: B:

 

[LewisRaz]

thanks - I paid £15 this time, but they also threw in a box of 20 new unused floppy disks (whilst I am trying to sell a box of floppy disks and holder thing on gumtree for £5!)

Edit I asked on vogons and they said just use diskcopy A: B:

Thats cheap just for the disks....! The going rate seems about £1 per floppy on ebay. At least it was when I got some a few months back.

 

[!bluetonic!]

@almoststew1990 what a great haul.

I have Disney's 'stunt island', which must have been epic back in the day. Unfortunately, my short attention span can't get going with it..

Thankfully MemMaker in Dos gave me enough conventional memory to run it.

I'm loving the Awe32 Value. I never realised that you can emulate GM or MT32 using AweUtil command. I was looking for games that natively supported the card for music.

And for floppy backups, I highly recommend the Super Card Pro or WinImage.

 

[paradigm]

I have Disney's 'stunt island', which must have been epic back in the day. Unfortunately, my short attention span can't get going with it..

Even back in the day it was ruddy hard to really get into, even though it was great.

Just so long as you’ve done the Golden Gate Bridge stunt, that’s clearly the best one

 

[LewisRaz]

VGA capture card arrived today. Seems to work well enough!

Do seem to get some banding across the video if it scrolls up or down too fast..? Will have to play around with the software.

 

[watercooledman]

This all has me very interested in building an old pc again.

 

[paradigm]

VGA capture card arrived today. Seems to work well enough!

Do seem to get some banding across the video if it scrolls up or down too fast..? Will have to play around with the software.

What capture software are you using? I’m currently on the hunt for a solution to capture my varying video cards! What resolutions does it support?

 

[LewisRaz]

What capture software are you using? I’m currently on the hunt for a solution to capture my varying video cards! What resolutions does it support?

I used OBS for that as the epiphan software has stupid frame rates that resolve just could not work with.

Its fairly limited at "higher" VGA resolutions I think at 1600x1200 it can only do 12fps but for me its mostly going to be for DOS stuff at far lower resolutions. The windows pcs can record their own desktops anyway.

 

[almoststew1990]

I'm loving the Awe32 Value. I never realised that you can emulate GM or MT32 using AweUtil command. I was looking for games that natively supported the card for music.

I also did not know this! I'll give it a try when it's set up again. Is it good mt32 emulation?

 

[!bluetonic!]

I also did not know this! I'll give it a try when it's set up again. Is it good mt32 emulation?

I've had and sold an MT32 which was great but under used by me.

Monkey Island sounds great on the Awe32 using MT32 emulation.

My ears aren't finely tuned, so I'm no critic. I think my Karaoke singing is amazing.

I'm happy with my sound card collection.
Sound blaster Live with Live Drive
Ensoniq Soundscape lite
Yamaha Audician ISA with S2 wave table ISA
Prodigy 192 with midi header board
A few Aztech cards

I genuinely think I don't need anything else retro wise.

I have a:
386
P90
P200
P3 750
P3 1000
AMD 64 Win XP

Covering everything from DOS, W311, W95, W98 to XP. The only thing I feel I'm missing is a Win2000 build. But I have no time for that right now.

It's the bottom one that's turned into the best all rounder for all XP games I lusted after.

I do have a couple of later machines waiting to become 'retro'.

And I smile at Victor Bart on YouTube with his ambition for a retro LAN party running servers and network hardware of the time. Top marks.

 

[paradigm]

Finally managed to arrange a time to collect the Dimsatech bench and start setting up the Asrock “OldPC” benchmarking rig. This is going to be a triple-boot system with Windows 98 on an IDE to CF, Windows XP on a SATA SSD, and Windows 7 on another SATA SSD. Hoping to bench every PCI, AGP 1.5v (so AGP 4x and 8x) and PCIe card (up to around 2008) that I have, with a Core 2 Duo running at 3.12GHz.

Hopefully I’ll be able to document most of the build and subsequent benchmarks in a series of videos once I’ve got the cameras set up and the capture device configured!

 

[cee-S-dee]

Looking forward to seeing the results. Be interesting to see how much the drivers across the different OS's effect performance.

I picked up a 4coreDual sata 2 recently for £5. It has a strange issue with the temp reading of the cpu. I haven't got round to flashing the BIOS yet mind.

I wish they spaced out the agp and pci-e slot a bit better. They did a better job with the spacing on the 939 board.

 

[paradigm]

Looking forward to seeing the results. Be interesting to see how much the drivers across the different OS's effect performance.

I picked up a 4coreDual sata 2 recently for £5. It has a strange issue with the temp reading of the cpu. I haven't got round to flashing the BIOS yet mind.

I wish they spaced out the agp and pci-e slot a bit better. They did a better job with the spacing on the 939 board.

Mine was unwilling to boot from my Core 2 Duo (would happily boot from the Celeron D it came with) on the stock BIOS (v1.5), first thing I did was pop the BIOS chip out and throw it on the minipro to flash with 2.20a. Seems a lot more stable with the newer BIOS. Oh, and it didn’t like my PCIe Geforce 6800 with BIOS v1.5 either!

Agreed on the PCIe placement, means it’s impossible to use both the AGP and PCIe with a dual slot AGP card. Shame. I guess I could get a PCIe riser cable.

Is yours a rev 1 or rev 2 board?

Oh and beware a BIOS flash might kill the onboard NIC by wiping the MAC address. There is a fix out there, a DOS util called mac.exe that can re-flash the burned in address.

 

[cee-S-dee]

Mine was unwilling to boot from my Core 2 Duo (would happily boot from the Celeron D it came with) on the stock BIOS (v1.5), first thing I did was pop the BIOS chip out and throw it on the minipro to flash with 2.20a. Seems a lot more stable with the newer BIOS. Oh, and it didn’t like my PCIe Geforce 6800 with BIOS v1.5 either!

Agreed on the PCIe placement, means it’s impossible to use both the AGP and PCIe with a dual slot AGP card. Shame. I guess I could get a PCIe riser cable.

Is yours a rev 1 or rev 2 board?

Oh and beware a BIOS flash might kill the onboard NIC by wiping the MAC address. There is a fix out there, a DOS util called mac.exe that can re-flash the burned in address.

I believe my board is a v1.xx not sure on the exact rev. Cheers for the heads up on the MAC. I'll throw the BIOS Chip in the programmer at some point.

Need to recap the 939 board too!