What retro things have you done today?

The USB/AC97 cables were annoying me so I managed to pass them underneath the motherboard.

nAYQohD.jpg


almoststew1990 said:
Dual 4c4t Conroe/wolfdale CPUs (or whatever the Xeon equivalent is) have always intrigued me and considering my 3.3GHz Q6600 is/was borderline playable in a few modernish games a couple of years back I hope you give that PC a workout with a modern GPU trying modern games! Except for missing instruction sets getting in the way!
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These are Harpertown (Yorkfield derived) :)

I will be limited by the GTX260, especially because of the PCI-E 1.1 8x slot (equivalent to PCI-E 2.0 4x) - My T5400 (which this is replacing) had a PCI-E 2.0 16x slot, but sadly the motherboard in that was faulty, hence this project.

I did some searching though and the difference between 2.0 16x and 1.1 8x is only something like 10% at worst, which would be a lot ordinarily, but for an occasional use retro PC I'm not really bothered. I am more interested in how it looks and whether or not it works properly, which it seems to!
 
Plugged my N64 back in. I want to get a nice HDMI cable for it. Wanted to go with a RetroTink but that's too expensive for how much I'll use it.

Any recommendations
 
Acme said:
The USB/AC97 cables were annoying me so I managed to pass them underneath the motherboard.

nAYQohD.jpg




These are Harpertown (Yorkfield derived) :)

I will be limited by the GTX260, especially because of the PCI-E 1.1 8x slot (equivalent to PCI-E 2.0 4x) - My T5400 (which this is replacing) had a PCI-E 2.0 16x slot, but sadly the motherboard in that was faulty, hence this project.

I did some searching though and the difference between 2.0 16x and 1.1 8x is only something like 10% at worst, which would be a lot ordinarily, but for an occasional use retro PC I'm not really bothered. I am more interested in how it looks and whether or not it works properly, which it seems to!
Click to expand...

I'd be interested in the CPU benchmarks for that PC, like can it keep up with say a 4c8t Haswell? Maybe even a first gen 8c8t Ryzen 1700 or 1600 or whatever it was
 
almoststew1990 said:
I'd be interested in the CPU benchmarks for that PC, like can it keep up with say a 4c8t Haswell? Maybe even a first gen 8c8t Ryzen 1700 or 1600 or whatever it was
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At a guess, not a snowballs chance in hell. Especially not the Ryzen. I'd be surprised if it manages half what a 4c Ryzen can.

What benchmarks should I do?
 
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almoststew1990 said:
I'd be interested in the CPU benchmarks for that PC, like can it keep up with say a 4c8t Haswell? Maybe even a first gen 8c8t Ryzen 1700 or 1600 or whatever it was
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Geekbench 3:

Ryzen 1700 3GHz (8 cores)
single core score: 3500
multi core score: 27000

2x X5460 3.16GHz (8 cores)
single core score: 1620
multi core score: 9413

Passmark:

Ryzen 1700 3GHz (8 cores)
CPU Mark: 14831
Single thread: 2000

2x X5460 3.16GHz (8 cores)
CPU Mark: 4106
Single thread: 1300

To compare to something current, a Celeron 6305E, a 1.8GHz 15W embedded/mobile CPU, has a passmark single thread score of 1200, and its overall score with just 2 cores/2 threads is 2000, or almost half that of the dual Xeon machine.

And the dual Xeon machine has a TDP of 240W. :D
 
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!bluetonic! said:
I was looking to RGB mod my N64. In the end I bought a Japanese unit that was RGB enabled. This was more cost effective. I use an Everdrive to play UK games. I run this through the Ossc convertor.
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I got a jap n64 from ebay that had already been modded and I use everdrive as well
 
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I fired up my dell Inspiron 5100 - the laptop that got me through uni.

5 years ago I upgraded the ram and replaced the HDD with a larger capacity disk with higher rpm and made it dual boot with Lubuntu to make it snappier.

I also tried an adapter to try and speed it up by using a CF card as the HDD - but this proved to be too slow from what I remember so I abandoned that venture and reverted to the higher rpm IDE.

Anyway, the laptop boots fine into windows xp and Lubuntu... No plans for the laptop, just nostalgia!!
 
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Pickers said:
I fired up my dell Inspiron 5100 - the laptop that got me through uni.

5 years ago I upgraded the ram and replaced the HDD with a larger capacity disk with higher rpm and made it dual boot with Lubuntu to make it snappier.

I also tried an adapter to try and speed it up by using a CF card as the HDD - but this proved to be too slow from what I remember so I abandoned that venture and reverted to the higher rpm IDE.

Anyway, the laptop boots fine into windows xp and Lubuntu... No plans for the laptop, just nostalgia!!
Click to expand...
I have a similar laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1150, which was my main computer from 2004 to 2007.

I replaced some of its parts today. I bought some from an eBay listing last month. I replaced the palm rest which was very worn, and the broken DVD drive. Although they didn't need replacing, I replaced the keyboard as mine was more worn, and the display assembly. The hinges of the replacement are in better condition, and the display is brighter and not so yellowed.

I also upgraded the memory several years ago, upgrading it from 512 MB to 2 GB. I remember the 40 GB hard drive died in 2010, and I replaced it with the same model.

I just have it running Windows XP, using it occasionally for the same reason. I will have to try Lubuntu on it too.

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I've got an Amiga Drawbridge floppy drive working (the one created by Rob Smith), and I managed to image a disk of personal files I'd not accessed in over 30 years.

I had to clean the disk first using a kit I bought online, but once cleaned it worked fine. I have a large bag of disks that were very poorly stored to go through, many will probably not read, even after cleaning, but even being able to get back a fraction is a miracle. It's also really cool to boot WinUAE and hear the click, click of the drive when there's no disk in it then insert it and be able to boot from it or examine the contents using Workbench or the CLI.

Amazing bit of kit, I'd 100% recommend it for Amiga enthusiasts.
 
Ravenger said:
I've got an Amiga Drawbridge floppy drive working (the one created by Rob Smith), and I managed to image a disk of personal files I'd not accessed in over 30 years.

I had to clean the disk first using a kit I bought online, but once cleaned it worked fine. I have a large bag of disks that were very poorly stored to go through, many will probably not read, even after cleaning, but even being able to get back a fraction is a miracle. It's also really cool to boot WinUAE and hear the click, click of the drive when there's no disk in it then insert it and be able to boot from it or examine the contents using Workbench or the CLI.

Amazing bit of kit, I'd 100% recommend it for Amiga enthusiasts.
Click to expand...

Have you got a link to the disk cleaning kit you used?
 
About a year ago I decided to put a small PC in my home workshop with the intention of maybe printing a few things once in a blue moon. This has now developed into a place where I now enjoy spending my free time the most :D It's a great escape and love playing all the retro stuff as much now as I did back in the day. The little CRT works so well for the gaming stuff but I've just hooked up a freeview box too and there's something very nostalgic about using it for this and takes me back.



I'm using RGB for the gaming stuff with a DAC + headphones/speakers, but just BNC video (with a single phono audio) for the telly and it gives a surprisingly good picture. Ideally I would like to connect it via Svideo but I haven't been able to find a Scart to S-video with outwards signal. Not sure if exists but will keep looking :)
Would also like to find a gadget to hook up to Line B just for the sake of filling it all up but don't know what yet. Any suggestions appreciated.

Edit: Moved a few things around and now have the ao486 core on the Mister working with the PVM, still needs some work but getting there.

 
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