What retro things have you done today?

I assume you know of Philscomputerlab where where he has an MS-DOS starter pack including d: drivers and a tiny mouse driver. Cute mouse I think. It also has autoexec and config.sys files made for a w98 build but can be tweaked to work in 6.22. cute mouse works fine for me on ps/2 and serial so I'd give that a go.

Have you got a proper cone pc speaker or the tiny little black piezo speaker attached to the motherboard? The comes are still really loud but are at least less piercing then then piezo ones
 
yes mate although I am running dos 5.0 currently and wanted as clean an install as possible before I ship it off.

Its a proper cone speaker so not as bad as the little ones but you are right they are loud and have no volume control :D
 
LewisRaz said:
This came up on FB marketplace but also spotted it on ebay when I was price checking it:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3d-Labs-Wildcat-II-5110-Video-Graphics-Accelerator-Card-Agp-Vga-Dvi-64mb/114111039235?_trkparms=aid=111001&algo=REC.SEED&ao=1&asc=20160908105057&meid=6f5b2890dda340c0adf7da692f26ba06&pid=100675&rk=1&rkt=15&mehot=none&sd=114111039235&itm=114111039235&pmt=0&noa=1&pg=2380057&_trksid=p2380057.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci:847ba1ff-4f64-11ea-b3d6-74dbd180b048|parentrq:4548eee81700a4e92276bcb2ffda87fa|iid:1

Never seen one of those before. Looks massive!
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The wildcat series were immensely impressive for professional workloads in the days before Quadro and FirePro. They however will NOT be any use for gaming as the driver stack simply wasn’t there.

That one doesn’t look like a particularly high end one either.

One of the few types of cards (outside of Apple specific cards with ADC ports) that actually used AGP Pro.
 
I do enjoy finding things I have never seen before. Interesting item!
Got the ad done for my 386 now. Priced it a little high but hopefully I can get some interest in it as the 2x 486 machines are being collected tomorrow so I will have 6 pcs under my stairs :o
 
I recently bought a couple of motherboard cpu combo's off of ebay, ended up both of them being off the same guy clearing out his attic.

The first was an Asus P5A, one of the few socket 7 motherboards with AGP, standard IO and power connectors, had been looking for one for months and I think I overpaid slightly - I paid £120. The P5A came with a Cyrix 166+ CPU, I only really wanted the motherboard to put in a faster K6. Anyway, after I bought it he said that he thinks he had another CPU in his attic, he found it and it was a K6-550! He threw it in for free as he thought I paid a bit too much.

The second was a MS6191(https://de.msi.com/Motherboard/support/MS6191.html) Slot-A motherboard with an Athlon K7-1000 in it! Another CPU that I was looking for for ages - I wasn't going to lose it on the auction. Again it went way more than I initially thought but it ended at £140. Was a bit gutted but I paid promptly, the next day he messages me and says that when digging in the loft he found another motherboard, SD11-FIC(http://www.motherboard.cz/mb/fic/SD11.htm) it looks really nice in person, and he would, again, throw it in for free!

So I got the P5A and K6-550(Cyrix166+) and a MS6191 Slot-A motherboard with a K7-1000 CPU with an extra SD11-FIC motherboard - all for £265.

Now I don't think I got an amazing deal, but with the extra motherboard and CPU it was a good deal in the end. I've just put the K7(MS6191) in a case and I'm going to put the P5A(K6-550) in a case as soon as it arrives.

Happy days.. All to relive my youth..

I've got a ATi Rage Fury Maxx to put in the Athlon system if I can, will need to see if it's all compatible, then I'll get my earplugs and get gaming..
 
P5A is a great motherboard but has the weirdness with K6+ CPU's and certain revisions of the board, although there is fix for this now. I have the AT versions of the same board (P5A-B) which i run a K6 III+ 450 in. Great little machine!

CHuJSpLl.jpg
 
Picked up the 2 486 pcs today. The pictures being blurry actualy helped the sale here. In person there is considerable rust and the desktop one has a dent in the top.... Nothing that cant be fixed with some sandpaper and a rew rattle cans however..
The good part is that the internals look extremely clean. I will test the PSUs on their own and then try and fire up the systems. Wont get a chance until tonight tho as the Mrs has banned me from bringing them into a clean house while they are so filthy :P
The seller also threw in another tower for free (Identical to the one I had purchased from him) but this has physically been underwater and I have not seen the insides. Could be fit for the scrapheap although if I can salvage the case and respray it I certainly will be!
 
hominid said:
The second was a MS6191(https://de.msi.com/Motherboard/support/MS6191.html) Slot-A motherboard with an Athlon K7-1000 in it! Another CPU that I was looking for for ages - I wasn't going to lose it on the auction. Again it went way more than I initially thought but it ended at £140. Was a bit gutted but I paid promptly, the next day he messages me and says that when digging in the loft he found another motherboard, SD11-FIC(http://www.motherboard.cz/mb/fic/SD11.htm) it looks really nice in person, and he would, again, throw it in for free!
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I had an MSI 6191 with an Athlon 800MHz that I sold on eBay not that long ago. I bought it as a bundle for £15 (with a 550MHz CPU) on a buy-it-now and then a year later sold it for about £45 after 6 weeks of reducing the price, and yet having people message me saying the CPU alone would sell for that, raise the price! I wonder if it is the same board.

It was rock solid and never gave me any problems with AGP speeds or compatibility with sound cards or anything.
 
almoststew1990 said:
I had an MSI 6191 with an Athlon 800MHz that I sold on eBay not that long ago.
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I bought it for the CPU, K7 1000's are rare these days and I've been looking for about 4-5 months. This was the first I've seen so I just had to get it, I put in a max bid of £150, thinking that it'll get nowhere near, and just got it as there was a sniper with less than 10 seconds to go. I've turned it on, it's working and I can get in the bios fine, I'll keep it in the MS6191 as it's nice and small for now and see how I get on.

LewisRaz said:
That is pricey hardware but the free k6-550 is very nice indeed! those fetch quite a bit on their own.
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I know I overpaid but my patience was done, it just so happened that both were from the same guy. He took pity on my and threw in the K6-550 and SDII-FIC for free so it was OK in the end. I've yet to test the P5A, will do later tonight if I get time, I haven't got the manual so I don't want to kill the K6 550 so I'm in no rush.

LewisRaz said:
Do you have a retro case or will you use something modern?
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I have today received an older Antec case, this one: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/b-gr...tower-case-380w-smartpower-psu-bg-025-an.html ,The P5A is going in that one, the Athlon K7 1000 is going in a Silverstone TJ08B as it's not a full ITX motherboard.

cee-S-dee said:
P5A is a great motherboard but has the weirdness with K6+ CPU's and certain revisions of the board, although there is fix for this now.
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I had to get it as it'll fit in a normal case as it doesn't have the keyboard connector like AT motherboards all do.. Do you have any information about the weirdness with K6 CPU's? I do have a K6-3 400, an old one that is 2.4V core 3.3VI/O, I've not looked into it but I would suspect the K6-2 550 would be the fastest? I'll try them both in due course, my front room is a mess at the moment so I need to stop procrastinating.

I also got a K7V with 800MHz K7 for £30 a while back, which I was content with, but when this 1GHz K7 came up I had to get it.
I also have a BP6 with 2x 433MHz celerons that OC to 650MHz I think, got too much hardware than I can use - I really need to log off Ebay :D

LewisRaz said:
Picked up the 2 486 pcs today.
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This is what I started on ebay looking for, I wanted a DX2-66 Intel system, my first ever system I bought for nearly £2k back in 1993? Most don't like to post but as I live on the coast most are too far to pick them up - will keep looking, and in the mean time acquiring more random hardware... Luckily I'm single, but the mess is starting to get on even my nerves - so it must be bad.. ;)

It's a disease I tell you!
 
I really need to start listing some parts, your post reminded me I have an Asus A7V and 1ghz athlon just sitting in a box. There is another athlon system in my loft too somewhere. All too modern for what I like to tinker with.

I managed to finally sort the 386s battery. I had completely destroyed the metal pads on the pcb where the battery goes through my messing about. A little bit of research online explained how to use the external battery connectors so after a delicate bit of soldering I now have a 2x 2032 coin powering the cmos. Much better situation than another barrel battery really.
 
Got the smaller one in and fire up the PSU - No smoke so time to plug it all in. Before I powered it I did remember that the seller said it was originally a 33mhz but he lost that cpu and chucked in a 50 to sell it. I did check the jumpers and they were set to 33 so I changed them to 50mhz with the handy sticker on the psu!
First time:

Cmos battery is flat but is an external Lithium battery so I can easily sort that.

Had to manually enter the HDD stats (a 204mb seagate) and then save the cmos.

Booted into a plain dos 6.22 :)

I will put up some pics of the case tomorrow but it looks like its been through a season of robot wars. Did clean it really well but the top of it has taken some anger.
 
Oh no, I won a ASRock E350M1 ITX soldered CPU/board thing for £17 that I still can't quite find a reason for.

I would hope it is adequate for XP gaming as it is a 1.6GHz dual core CPU which is apparently better than an atom clock for clock. It also has a PCI-E slot rather than just plain PCI like my old and current ITX projects had. If anything it will be interesting to see how well the PCI-E 2.0 @4x slot works with old PCI-E graphics cards.
 
DrBombcrater said:
I kind of agree with that, I used CRTs for something like 20 years and initially didn't miss them at all. But for retro computing CRTs have two fundamental advantages over LCDs; they make low res graphics look considerably better because they don't have a native resolution like LCDs, and they offer outstanding motion clarity even at low refresh rates.

With the passage of time I'd forgotten just how good motion on CRTs is until I dragged an old 19" VGA screen out of the cupboard (with some difficulty, it's damn heavy) and tried it out. No LCD I've ever used comes close, even ones with high refresh rates and black-frame insertion.
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And don't forget the high refresh rates. Until 144Hz/240Hz LCD monitors became fairly commonplace, pro level counterstrike gamers would still use CRT's. I bet some still do.
 
Todays things of a retro nature....

PCI MX4000 64MB GPU has arrived, managed to get it for £15 delivered which in the scheme of how much trickier they are to get hold of these days was pretty good.

Also one of the guys appeared from our server room and went "ahhh, might have found something for your love of old junk!" - Boxed Connect 3D Geforce2 MX200 AGP 32MB...…..which was nice :)
 
So the big 486 tower that I got has been really interesting. A huge 2 pcb ISA gpu that turned out to be a TIGA and doesnt work/needs something that I do not have.




The motherboard on it is huge. Think it had 13 screws to hold it in. Also had 3 power connectors (the 2 standard AT ones and a 3rd similar one)

Unfortunately I cannot get any life out of it. The PC turns on and stays on but no display is shown with any of the ISA gpus that I own. The HDD which I was hoping still worked to find the drivers for the above GPU sounded like a rocket trying to take off before then sounding like a car crash so it is safe to assume it does not work :D

The CPU is also on a seperate PCB and is soldered onto the board which I found interesting.

What I didnt expect however after looking at the flood damaged one was to see a socketed CPU on the card. I am carefeully trying to remove it as it has a heatsink and could be a dx2 (which would be a lovely upgrade to the 486sx I have running.). Its one of those sockets that really holds them in tho and with some corrosion too it might be difficult to get out.

The main prize really is the case. Its built like an actual tank and is really going to suit my early pentium build. Covered in rust and scratches but its all there. I plan to remove and scrub the plastics and have ordered some paint to respray it. Should look amazing when finished!
 
yea was properly stuck in there thanks to everything swelling up from the moisture. I binned it so I dont know what it is because if I broke the cpu I was thinking of buying on ebay I might get a bit mad :P
 
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