What retro things have you done today?

almoststew1990 · 23 Feb 2019 at 09:34

Acme said:
Picked up some 1980's wheels in my 1980's car while listening to 1980's music.

I was going to say "what are you doing out of Motors I thought you lived there?!" but even outside of Motors you're talking about motors

almoststew1990 · 23 Feb 2019 at 10:54

almoststew1990 said:
Today I pulled together a Glide build from spare parts...

I got this PC back out the cupboard now that my fan has arrived.

I forgot how incredibly slow it is. 3DMark 99 gives me 1467points (4103 CPU points); Quake 2 at 640*480 and 800*600 using 3DFX driver gives me 43FPS. Quake 3 runs at 25fps.

Duke · 23 Feb 2019 at 12:28

I'm guessing the Voodoo card is holding it back most as from what I can try to think back on, that CPU should be 'quick' for the age of the rest of the kit?

GeX · 23 Feb 2019 at 12:54

Via, soldered and quick? Nah. I thought they had weak FPU like the Cyrix chips, so ok for business but trousers for gaming.

Retro6 · 23 Feb 2019 at 14:39

Retro6 said:
I built another Windows 98SE machine out of some old parts I had and works surprisingly well although its not finished yet as the retro case I had isn't a standard ATX case and I will need a PCI/AGP extension cable so that I can fit a video card and sound card horizontally in the back of the machine so for now I'm just using the onboard VGA and a USB sound device. I could not get the onboard sound to work so a USB Sound Device will do for now.

I played some games on it and almost all my old games work on it without any problems.

Here are the specs:
Micro Star MS-6787 motherboard
2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor
512 MB DDR RAM "I don't have any 256 MB sticks" but works fine with 512 MB
80 GB Maxtor IDE Hard Drive
3.5 floppy drive
Beige DVD ROM drive

I don't need the PCI adapters now as I found another solution but I had to cut a small piece from the back of the retro case to get the sound card in and securely fix it in place with the modified metal fixing plate I made for it and I found and installed the drivers for it so I wont be needing that USB sound device now.

I had to do a bit of thinking to work around getting the video card to fit and a low profile video card was the way to go. I had a good rummage in my box of retro video cards but the first one I tried I could not found the drivers anywhere for it and the ones I did find never worked I also tried the catalyst drivers as well but it was a no go so I had to find another low profile video card and got that one going with drivers installed with the catalyst ATi driver. Now I just have to make a fixing plate for that to securely fix it in place. Next I'll be making a custom I/O shield for the motherboard.

Duke · 23 Feb 2019 at 19:30

GeX said:
Via, soldered and quick? Nah. I thought they had weak FPU like the Cyrix chips, so ok for business but trousers for gaming.

Quick as in shouldn't be holding back other components

Yes they weren't great.

Retro6 · 25 Feb 2019 at 20:13

A friend of mine gave me an old computer to repair this evening that isn't putting out a display and doesn't post so I've just opened it up and the first thing I noticed is there are two bulging 16v 1800uF electrolytic capacitors and one other bad electrolytic capacitor that has leaked out some nastiness onto the motherboard, hopefully this won't be an issue. I've ordered some new capacitors for it and hopefully the board might put out a display and post after the new caps have been soldered in.

Retro6 · 26 Feb 2019 at 20:11

I found some of my old games including a Games CD called Sci Fi Saturday that has lots of retro arcade games on it. The Games CD came free with the Daily Star back in 2001.

I'm gaming like its 1999 on my Windows 98 machine

Ninco! · 10 Mar 2019 at 15:59

Reinstalling Windows XP. Installed Papyrus NASCAR Legends on my ThinkCentre which borked my sound settings. Whereas my sound was working perfect before, spent minutes messing about with settings to no avail. Frustratingly I know I am missing a hidden option somewhere - only by the time I work it out, its quicker to reinstall XP.

The game runs really well, only come reboot, I was left with no sound. I purchased a big box version from a US seller for 99c (+ shipping) only some shelf wear but as new. It's amazing the seller actually honoured the sale and shipped to the UK! It was quite a rare game in the UK as it was never released in Europe since oval racing is not very popular.

SteveOver · 10 Mar 2019 at 16:06

Built a windows xp retro gaming pc using E8400 cpu, gt 620 1gb gpu, 4gb ram, small ssd (yep I know know win xp and ssds so will install tool to apply trim), 500gb hdd, cheapest case I could find. Got a load of old games from charity/boot sales/ebay. Going to show young nephews what they missed!

Ninco! · 10 Mar 2019 at 17:02

SteveOver said:
Built a windows xp retro gaming pc using E8400 cpu, gt 620 1gb gpu, 4gb ram, small ssd (yep I know know win xp and ssds so will install tool to apply trim), 500gb hdd, cheapest case I could find. Got a load of old games from charity/boot sales/ebay. Going to show young nephews what they missed!

Hi Steve, would you be able to share a link to the SSD Trim Tool you are going to use?

GeX · 10 Mar 2019 at 18:23

I had a long standing bet with a friend from school that his Pentium 200MMX would not do 300MHz - so he came over and we did some old school overclocking. It took 3.1v, but it posted at 300MHz - we dropped it down to 250MHz for installing Windows, which took an age and crashed mid way through; the though HDD didn't then respond on any further boots, so we're blaming that.
Put a K6-3 450 in instead, and got an install of XP going. The goal was to play a few rounds of Toca Touring cars. Once Windows was installed, I fired up 3DMark to test the system and it rebooted each time it tried to do anything 3D

Swapped out the GeForce 4MX for a Voodoo4 but the drivers weren't happy with that.
With timing running out, we grabbed my P3 system (with a TNT2) and finally got some laps in - with only minor graphical corruption

Retro6 · 10 Mar 2019 at 23:59

I've just been digging through a box in my attic and found some cool stuff that I forgot I had. I found lots of Sega Master Systems games that I wasn't even sure I still had and I found a Rockfire Joystick made for the IBM PC I'm not sure if it works as I can remember having two of these and one of them smoked, I think the one I pulled out is the good one although it doesn't have a standard connector so I may have to find an adapter for it so I can either use it on a USB port or serial port. I found some more of my old PC games including Wing Commander so I look forward to playing that.

almoststew1990 · 11 Mar 2019 at 18:39

I really wish my parents hadn't moved house 5 years ago or so. We dumped so much attic stuff, I can't even remember what anymore, and I certainly didn't care about retro stuff back then! I'm sure as a minimum there were quite a few big box games... Red alert, driver (still got the original jewel CD, probably my longest-owned possession), mid town madness, Network Q Rally...

Ninco! · 15 Mar 2019 at 19:32

almoststew1990 said:
I really wish my parents hadn't moved house 5 years ago or so. We dumped so much attic stuff, I can't even remember what anymore, and I certainly didn't care about retro stuff back then! I'm sure as a minimum there were quite a few big box games... Red alert, driver (still got the original jewel CD, probably my longest-owned possession), mid town madness, Network Q Rally...

Exactly what happened to me, when my parents moved they asked me if wanted to keep, only I had moved out and space was a bit of an issue, also I did not really care. I kept all the manuals, fold outs and now for the life of me I cannot think where they are stashed! I'm worried that I might have had another brainfart and binned!

Slowly picking up some big boxes, mainly iconic box games/art or favourites.

SLIPdiggers · 17 Mar 2019 at 10:05

Had a go at running through Sonic2 the other night with a friend. The chemical zone music is the best music in any sonic game in my opinion. Unfortunately we didn't have time to finish the game, despite only being 2 acts per zone in this one there is a lot of content!

There's a Sega sale on steam at the moment, this can be bought for just 99p!

LewisRaz · 17 Mar 2019 at 10:58

Picked these up today at first bootsale of the year: £2 each

Flibster · 17 Mar 2019 at 17:37

Ooooh... Digital Illusions Pinball games. Still some of my favourites. Still play Dreams, Fantasies and Illusions on the Amiga. Definitely worth £2.

Ninco! · 17 Mar 2019 at 18:17

Powermonger. A bargain

Today, ongoing sound gremlins with Soundblaster X-Fi HD and Windows XP, I thought it was an old game causing the issue. Nope, an intermittent fault or conflict which is making fault finding so frustrating! One day I get sound and the next reboot, nothing! I know it's working as my amp is picking up the optical signal. I seem to be getting closer to fixing, rolled back to earlier drivers and so far, so good.

On a positive note, I treated myself to another Dell U2412M monitor for retro gaming. I was a little hesitant as my old one must be getting on for 8 years old. I was never really happy with my original even from new, dreadful anti-glare coating which meant that whilst the image was crystal clear - just looked dirty (a known problem). Also the monitor's dreadful backlight bleed never helped. I kick myself for never returning, only it has a very sharp display & the main redeeming reason why I kept.

So being a glutton for punishment, I took a punt on a newer version since 1600x1200 monitors are getting a little thin on the ground. All recent reviews stated that issues with the AG coating were fixed with later revisions, bleed is a lottery as per the norm.

Now I rarely get lucky when purchasing a new monitor, only this latest revision is perfect, consistent image and Dell fixed the aggressive coating - its like night and day. Well chuffed.

jellybeard999 · 17 Mar 2019 at 18:28

Rebuilt my Shuttle SN41G2 from around 2002/2003.

I built this as my first custom PC with a mobile Athlon XP 2500 and ATI 9800. I upgraded to an NF7-S in a Lian-Li case with custom watercooling and put a duron :eek:

in the shuttle and my parents still used it (sparingly - they have a fairly recent laptop) until a few years ago.

I've resurrected it on the cheap with some parts I had lying around/scavenged; XP3200, 2Gb PC3200, 150Gb Velociraptor, nvidia 7600GS.

After many trials and tribulations installing XP (i'm not installing an ODD, and needed to slipstream SATA drivers) it's now running XP SP3 and has been tested on 3DMark01 and 03.

Now I just need to make a new front panel (to add some intake fans - it always ran warm, but the 7600 is passively cooled and i had some artifacts in testing) and paint the top cover - it was all fairly scratched/damaged anyway.

I ripped most of my games to ISO years ago (2004ish onwards) and have been digital only since around 2008, but the late 90s games may have been chucked

I'll have to have a look in the loft, but fear the worst. I might have to repurchase via GOG or similar.