What retro things have you done today?

cee-S-dee · 7 May 2021 at 16:29

I can flash you a BIOS and put it in the post mate. I have a couple of spare BIOS chips.

I had a MSI BX board in a Viglen machine. I know the board I had, there were different revisions which would/wouldn't support coppermine cpu's. Mine had a little "C" sticker on the VRM chip indicating coppermine support. I never took any photo's of it unfortunately

edit.. actually I do have a photo. You can see the blue "C" sticker near the CPU

LewisRaz · 7 May 2021 at 17:18

cee-S-dee said:
I can flash you a BIOS and put it in the post mate. I have a couple of spare BIOS chips.

I had a MSI BX board in a Viglen machine. I know the board I had, there were different revisions which would/wouldn't support coppermine cpu's. Mine had a little "C" sticker on the VRM chip indicating coppermine support. I never took any photo's of it unfortunately

edit.. actually I do have a photo. You can see the blue "C" sticker near the CPU

That would be super helpful mate. My cpu is a deschutes so should be alright on any revision.
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/ms6119

I think the top one would be the right one as this board has the "plug and play cpu function" aka no switches. All cpu speeds are done in bios.

You can see at the end of the AGP slot yours has the switches but my version does not!

I am not fully understanding this DMI thing but is it definitely a BIOS settings issue? Would you expect a nice new bios to sort it?

cee-S-dee · 7 May 2021 at 17:33

LewisRaz said:
That would be super helpful mate. My cpu is a deschutes so should be alright on any revision.
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/ms6119

I think the top one would be the right one as this board has the "plug and play cpu function" aka no switches. All cpu speeds are done in bios.

You can see at the end of the AGP slot yours has the switches but my version does not!

I am not fully understanding this DMI thing but is it definitely a BIOS settings issue? Would you expect a nice new bios to sort it?

I've downloaded p2.9 bios, and will burn it to a rom this evening. I'm not sure what could cause the DMI freeze but a bios flash is always something to try when things go wonky!

paradigm · 7 May 2021 at 18:03

cee-S-dee said:
I'm not sure what could cause the DMI freeze but a bios flash is always something to try when things go wonky!

Same. I’m sure the DMI data is in the BIOS anyway, so it would make sense that it could be a BIOS issue. I remember having a dual socket A board back in the day that would hang in a similar way, it needed a BIOS reflash.

LewisRaz · 7 May 2021 at 18:36

The bits I have read online do say its part of the bios. So a flash would hopefully fix it!

Tee Hee Johnson · 8 May 2021 at 00:41

almoststew1990 said:
I bought a 7990. I'm going to pair it with an i7 860 and see how well an 11year old CPU and 10 year old GPU can handle modern games (this might be stretching the definition of retro so thin I can see through it )

@Tee Hee Johnson they still come up fairly regularly on eBay but you need to be patient if you don't want to spend £50 plus on something like a Nvidia 6800. It also depends if you mean good as in "not a crappy MX card" for XP or good as in a late, Windows 7 capable card like an X1950 or 7800 or something which will be very expensive.

Sadly I don't want to really spend more than £50, that tends to be more than the rest of the system combined.

Considering the rest of my components and the uptake of PCIe in 2005, I'm looking for anything before 2005 and AGP.

The best I have so far is my x800se, wich certainly doesn't break any speed records! (and I felt lucky to get that for £20 delivered)

paradigm · 8 May 2021 at 05:58

Tee Hee Johnson said:
Sadly I don't want to really spend more than £50, that tends to be more than the rest of the system combined.

Considering the rest of my components and the uptake of PCIe in 2005, I'm looking for anything before 2005 and AGP.

The best I have so far is my x800se, wich certainly doesn't break any speed records! (and I felt lucky to get that for £20 delivered)

Use Wikipedia to work out the Quadro and FireGL equivalents of the respective GeForce and Radeon cards, they are usually FAR cheaper than the consumer cards!

Something like this, which should be equivalent to a Geforce4 Ti4400. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NVIDIA-Q...-/124706479448?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49286

Or something like this that is essentially an X800XT: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AS-NEW-A...-/111496320244?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49286

Can’t find a good example for sale at the moment, but the Quadro FX 1000, 2000 or 3000 make good facsimiles of the GeForce FX5800/5800U/5900U. My 1000 cost me around £30, and my 3000 was £50.

Another good tip is to search for the manufacturers name rather than the chip name. So for example (made up as I can’t remember one of the top of my head), you might want a Geforce 6800GS, bu Asus might have called their card the V990. If you get a seller that doesn’t know what they have, they’ll advertise using what markings are on the PCB!

cee-S-dee · 8 May 2021 at 13:15

@LewisRaz BIOS is in the post mate. Should hopefully be with you on Monday.

LewisRaz · 8 May 2021 at 13:39

cee-S-dee said:
@LewisRaz BIOS is in the post mate. Should hopefully be with you on Monday.

Thank you very much mate! I was up until 1am last night trying every bios setting imaginable. And even some other CPUs in a slocket (It didnt like either of them but they were far newer than the board).
Such a frustrating problem!

cee-S-dee · 8 May 2021 at 18:26

Seeing as the weather has been rubbish today, I decided to start building a 754 Athlon 64 machine. Installed Win98SE so far. Will Install XP tomorrow for Dual Boot

AMD 3400+ Athlon 64 CPU
Copper Zalman Cooler
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R
2GB Corsair 3500 DDR Ram
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB
Sandisk 128GB SSD (40GB for Win98)
400Watt Coolermaster PSU
Inwin Case
Pioneer DVD Drive.

No Sound installed yet. Thinking Audigy 2, A3D Vortex 2 and ESS Solo 1 to handle any DOS stuff.

Ran 3DMark 2000 and it netted me 21800 Points

LewisRaz · 8 May 2021 at 18:47

cee-S-dee said:
Seeing as the weather has been rubbish today, I decided to start building a 754 Athlon 64 machine. Installed Win98SE so far. Will Install XP tomorrow for Dual Boot

AMD 3400+ Athlon 64 CPU
Copper Zalman Cooler
MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R
2GB Corsair 3500 DDR Ram
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB
Sandisk 128GB SSD (40GB for Win98)
400Watt Coolermaster PSU
Inwin Case
Pioneer DVD Drive.

No Sound installed yet. Thinking Audigy 2, A3D Vortex 2 and ESS Solo 1 to handle any DOS stuff.

Ran 3DMark 2000 and it netted me 21800 Points

That case is very nice! All of your retro gear is so clean!

LewisRaz · 9 May 2021 at 15:28

Some crappy pickups today but only spent £1. Needed Sims superstar opened as my only copy is sealed. I also was one of the few people in the world that loved Sonic R and this version is far easier to buy than the big box.

cee-S-dee · 9 May 2021 at 16:15

@LewisRaz I'm terrible for cleaning any retro gear I get mate, and I try my best to keep my cases clean. Nice pickups on the games!

A bit more work on the 754 machine this afternoon... Adding sound.

These are the cards I've installed,

Aureal Vortex 2 (For A3D Compatible games)
ESS Solo 1 (Awesome DOS Compatibility due to ESS's TDMA driver)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (For EAX Stuff)

The Solo 1's ESFM FM Synthesizer sounds really good.

I had to move the Audigy to the bottom slot as I was getting a boot loop with it in the slot above.

And all cards installed in Win98. Next to install WinXP

phatboy · 10 May 2021 at 09:27

What a machine! welcome to the 754 gang

Tempted to swap the 9800XXL into mine now lol

Also was someone after a white serial mouse a while back? and did they manage to sort it?

cee-S-dee · 10 May 2021 at 11:54

phatboy said:
What a machine! welcome to the 754 gang Tempted to swap the 9800XXL into mine now lol

Thanks dude! I had a 754 machine back in the day for a good while (3500+ DFI Lanparty NF3) and it lasted me a long time from what i remember!

The Yamaha TG100 midi module showed up today. Only been able to test the Demo song on the unit, but it sounds good. I'd call this a Lo-Fi module. I'm interested to hear it with some dos games.

phatboy · 10 May 2021 at 12:41

cee-S-dee said:
Thanks dude! I had a 754 machine back in the day for a good while (3500+ DFI Lanparty NF3) and it lasted me a long time from what i remember!

The Yamaha TG100 midi module showed up today. Only been able to test the Demo song on the unit, but it sounds good. I'd call this a Lo-Fi module. I'm interested to hear it with some dos games.

I would love to get a DFI board again, they were such great bits of kit. I was 939 and had the RDX200

I hadn't thought about dual booting, but the idea is now quite tempting already have XP build so could use the second drive for 98.......hmm

LewisRaz · 10 May 2021 at 18:43

@cee-S-dee Thank you so much mate!!!

cee-S-dee · 10 May 2021 at 18:58

Ahhhh nice one.

Interestingly I saw that unknown flash type when I flashed my bios (via floppy disk) on my msi board.

Hopefully it should be OK.

LewisRaz · 10 May 2021 at 19:18

cee-S-dee said:
Ahhhh nice one.

Interestingly I saw that unknown flash type when I flashed my bios (via floppy disk) on my msi board.

Hopefully it should be OK.

The socket 7 board I got off of you a while back says the same thing. Never affected it! Just happy to solve that issue and get on with the build. Really missed this PC the last few weeks.

I might even try and hot flash the old bios and see if it can be revived or if it is dead.

cee-S-dee · 10 May 2021 at 21:49

Setup the Yamaha TG100 tonight and played some midi's on it. It's not a bad little module. It's definitely more Lo-Fi with its 12-bit samples, but sound more akin to something you would get on a card. Obviously being its own module output is nice and quiet with good punch. I have noticed the Snare is quite overpowering though and was really obvious when I tried the MU10 straight afterwards.

Still a nice addition to what is now quite a tall Midi tower of power and deffo worth the £25!