What retro things have you done today?

A new used hard drive arrived this morning by DPD I never knew they delivered on a Sunday... I ordered it for the TINY PC I'm working on. I set the hard drive up for a Windows 95 install and then at the end of the installation I got the blue screen of death. The optical drive is fine and the Windows 95 installation CD is an original in new condition. The computer froze so I had to turn it off by the plug and back on again. It ran scan disk and booted up fine into Windows 95. I then got an error message about a missing DLL file... I needed to install my video card and sound blaster card which I was unable to do I kept getting errors that the program has performed an illegal operation along with missing DLL file, SETUPAPI.DLL. I think the hard drive maybe the problem. Scandisk detected errors but fixed them.... right after installation.

I've used these drivers before on other computers and they worked fine. The video card is ATi Radeon 9200 128 and the sound card is a Sound Blaster Live 5.1

Edit: I'm getting another replacement hard drive sent. I guess no matter how well a hard drive is packed it can still go bad from transit due to there delicate nature.
 
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I bought a 4GB SSD for a fiver listed as disk on module. Its basically a board from an SSD drive "SATA" I might give that a shot in the IBM PC via a IDE to SATA adapter and see how it runs with OS/2 WARP & Windows 98. I'm getting a bit desperate in terms of getting hold of a fully working IDE hard drive. It would be interesting to see how long an SSD works for under Windows 98.

I've never tried OS/2 WARP before. I wonder if OS/2 WARP would be suited to an SSD? it reminds me of MAC OS9 and old MAC OS is basically Linux with a face lift. Linux is fine on SSD. I'm not sure what OS/2 WARP is based on but if its like Linux it may have no problem running on SSD. Does OS/2 WARP support Windows software? I've just downloaded OS/2 WARP so I will be giving it a try later on.

While I'm on the subject of old operating systems. I made a RISC OS machine with an ARM board and I've currently got RISC OS 4 running on it from SSD I have downloaded RISK OS Direct which has lots of cool stuff on it. I've almost finished my RISC OS ARM PC build I just need to do a few finishing touches to it and get the 3.5 inch floppy drive working. Floppy drives were configured differently to standard PC floppy drives on RISC OS Acorn computers. RISC OS booted from a ROM chip then all the software ran from a hard drive and floppy.
 
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Back to the TINY PC. I had no end with it, installing Windows 95 blue screens and driver issues so I thought I'll try Windows 98SE just out of curiosity. So I formatted the drive and started again and installed Windows 98 until the blue screen appeared at exactly the same stage as on the Windows 95 installation. I then got a Windows protection error and the computer would not go any further after many restarts it just kept getting stuck on Windows protection error. So I thought to myself I've seen this error before, it then occurred to me that error normally shows if there is either to much Ram or to little Ram. The system had 64MB of Ram which is enough for a Windows 98 install...

Well I thought I'll change the Ram with a 128MB stick and I was going to have the 64MB stick in there as well but I thought I'll remove the 64MB stick first and try the 128MB stick to see if the computer accepts it. and it did plus I noticed a noticeable difference and the Windows 98 install stopped displaying that error and continued with the install as normal. Everything is working now as it should.

I don't want to speak to soon but that 64MB stick of Ram was the issue.

My video card installed I'm yet to install the Sound Blaster.

I don't think that either the video card or driver was compatible with Windows 95 but working fine now under Windows 98.

So a case of bad Ram. Sorted.
 
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I really must get myself a copy of 98 Lite. 98 Lite is a piece of software that lets you add and remove things that you don't need like internet explore and everything associated with it plus other things you don't need and allows you to remove other features in the task bar and start menu so that your left with a minimum Windows 98 install which would be good for slower computers under 160MHz. It then basically becomes Windows 95 but with the hardware support of Windows 98.
 
I've not messed with any Retro gear since moving house. Most of it is packed away, but I got the itch to mess with something, so have started working on a little P3 MATX tower. Its got a Coppermine 1.1ghz installed. I'm going to add a GF3 Ti 500 to it, an Audigy 2ZS and a Vortex 2 card. Still a work in progress.

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This is the TINY PC as complete as its going to be. I still have a few things I need to do like finding a hard rive replacement. Its currently running from a CF card at the moment.

I need to change the CPU fan as its very noisy and find a middle drive bay cover or make one.

Its all working. Windows 98 SE MS Office 2000
Processor: 500MHz
RAM: 128MB
HDD:16GB CF Card
Optical Drive: DVD
Sound Blaster Live
ATi Radeon 9200 128

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Retro6 said:
This is the TINY PC as complete as its going to be. I still have a few things I need to do like finding a hard rive replacement. Its currently running from a CF card at the moment.

I need to change the CPU fan as its very noisy and find a middle drive bay cover or make one.

Its all working. Windows 98 SE MS Office 2000
Processor: 500MHz
RAM: 128MB
HDD:16GB CF Card
Optical Drive: DVD
Sound Blaster Live
ATi Radeon 9200 128
Click to expand...

Nice little machine, but Radeon 9200 is probably a little new if going for period correctness - I imagine these probably would have shipped with a TNT2
 
Armageus said:
Nice little machine, but Radeon 9200 is probably a little new if going for period correctness - I imagine these probably would have shipped with a TNT2
Click to expand...
I;m not to fussed about period correctness in this machine. The main goal was to get it working. I'm quite fond of the Radeon 9200's and those series in general as they are cheap and I have drivers for them. Some other graphics cards it can be a nightmare hunting down drivers.

I believe these TINY PCs shipped with a Micro-Star MS 6178 which has onboard graphics and had no AGP slot. All the ones I've seen have that same motherboard. I replaced the motherboard in mine because all the electrolytic capacitors were bulging on the board. To replace them all, it worked out cheaper just to get another socket 370 motherboard on ebay plus I get an AGP slot so even better.
 
The HP keyboard arrived. Its great quality , and does have a nice tactile feel. but just to confirm i popped off a key and its def not mechanical. It will be replacing the DEC one for now. but the blue tat windows 98 era one maybe more suitable. will wait and see

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Nice Keyboard Kurgen and thanks for the info. I almost bought one but wanted the ones with the click.

I got my new used replacement hard drive for the TINY PC and installed Windows 98 and my drivers all went well no issues and then I played some old games after two hours the I get colored lines on the screen. I thought maybe the game had crashed but after a restart the colored lines remained. The Radeon 9200 has died. I confirmed this by swapping out another GPU I borrowed from another retro build.

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I only just got this Graphics card two weeks ago and I don't think the seller will be to happy. Oh well these things happen. I gave the contacts a wipe with some IPA but no luck.

I got out my old box of GPU's I don't know if any of these work or whether it be easy to find drivers for them if they do work. I've sorted out 5 graphics cards out to test. Hopefully I can use one of them.

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This PC was almost finished as well.
 
The TINY PC is back up and running.... again.

I went with the Radeon 7000 64MB slightly more period correct. I was thinking about going for the old TNT GPU which would have been period correct but I was unable to find drivers for it, so I went with the good old Radeon 7000. I find the driver right away for this card. Hopefully thats it now. Alls I need to do is find a middle drive bay panel and it will be complete.
 
Retro6 said:
The TINY PC is back up and running.... again.

I went with the Radeon 7000 64MB slightly more period correct. I was thinking about going for the old TNT GPU which would have been period correct but I was unable to find drivers for it, so I went with the good old Radeon 7000. I find the driver right away for this card. Hopefully thats it now. Alls I need to do is find a middle drive bay panel and it will be complete.
Click to expand...


did you look on nvidia site, it took about 3 clicks to get to the TNT windows 98 drivers

ForceWare Release 70 | 71.84 | Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95 | NVIDIA
 
I decided to have a play about with Windows Millennium Edition on an old Pentium III machine I was working on last night. I have the original Install CD in my Operating System collection but never used it so I thought I'd give it a whirl and its actually not that bad. It seems stable and I've not yet had any issues with it. A lot of people say that Windows Me is buggy etc. One thing that surprised me was that Windows Me detected and installed all my onboard hardware, which previous Windows versions did not. I've been testing game compatibility and I will do some more later. So far no issues.

Was Windows Millennium Edition really as bad as people made out?
 
Retro6 said:
Was Windows Millennium Edition really as bad as people made out?
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Yeah pretty much, was a long time ago now but I recall going back to '98 and then upgrading to XP.

Me was released in September of 2000, would have been bad PR to release the millennium edition in 2001, so was definitely rushed.

Microsoft knew it was crap too, hence why XP was launched only 13 months later.

LGR has a good video on Me.

 
Retro6 said:
Was Windows Millennium Edition really as bad as people made out?
Click to expand...

Yes and No.

It introduced a lot of improvements - particularly in Hardware support (USB mass storage, Windows Image Acquisition for scanners), as well as integrating the superior Windows 2000 TCP/IP Stack.


The big down side was the removal of real DOS support (both the ability to reboot into DOS mode, and also a number of limitations on Windowed DOS applications). At the time, DOS game backward compatibility was still a reasonable requirement, so most stuck with Windows 98SE to retain this,

(Whilst XP also lacked real DOS, the DOS Virtual Machine NTVDM was further improved, and later 3rd party addons such as VDMSound increased compatibility even more)
 
It was the time when things were moving more towards Windows based games from that era and away from DOS... there are a few down sides but nothing drastically bad. I tested many DOS games in Windows Me and they all play but some are missing audio where as others have some sound but missing the game music, although I think that maybe more to do with the poor onboard audio chip and DOS compatibility than Windows Me itself. Windows Me is noticeably slower than Windows 98 but other than that I wouldn't say its a bad operating system.

I really like Windows Media Player 7 I think I will install that in Windows 98 as it still has that late 90s look so wouldn't look to out of place in Windows 98. I sometimes install Windows Media Player 9 on some of my Windows 98 builds but is doesn't really fit that well, too much XP eye candy going on where as Windows Media Player 7 fits in a lot better in Windows 98. I will probably rip the drivers from Windows Me as well as a few other little things to use under Windows 98.
 
I'm working on an old keyboard. From looking at the diagrams its a PC Type 1 keyboard which uses the following...
Pin 1 Clock
Pin 2 DATA
Pin 3 Reset
Pin 4 Ground
Pin 5 Power

Type 2 keyboards don't use pin 3. And on PS/2 keyboards, pin 3 is Ground.

If I could get this keyboard working that would be amazing even if it only partly worked. The diagrams can be very confusing but with some testing of the multi meter I can find ground and 5v power leaving the clock and data pins which narrows it down to two pins and there are no markings on the inside of the keyboard on the PCB to say what the pins are. I will use a scrap motherboard to test the keyboard on.

In theory it should be straight forward... but things get a little complex because it would seem that Pin 1 is power which is not the same in the wiring diagram.

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