What retro things have you done today?

Retro6 said:
The Windows 98 retro build I'm working on I'm going to try out a CF Card and see how long it lasts with Windows 98SE and lots of games installed onto it. I've never had much luck with them in the past but I will give it another shot just to see how things go. I have a dedicated 80GB SATA drive for it just encase. Not much I can do until my adapters arrive but everything else is ready. I just need to get a new/old game pad. The board I used is well known for being good with CF Cards.
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Be very interesting to see how the CF handles that level of read / write
 
!bluetonic! said:
My adventures with OS/2 Version 4 are coming to an end.

In a nutshell, it sucked.

I loved the hype of what OS/2 Version 4 was trying to do. But, the lack of support for hardware and peripherals in a time where in Windows, it 'just worked' is still true today.

The victim of the upgrade was a nifty ASUS A7N8X-VM. This is home to an AMD Athlon XP 2500 CPU.

From the off, the OS/2 software wouldn't boot. It didn't like the hard drive and the data that was on it. I guess, it was trying to be clever and dual boot, but not have the right sized partition as a boot manager drive.

I found some excellent software called PartLogic and used this to format part of the drive as '2GB' and hide the rest. This worked, but ultimately, the mechanical hard drive was failing. This was then replaced with an SSD drive and an IDE to SATA adapter. After a lot of effort, I managed to get the system booting without sound or ethernet.

I found an OS/2 project called uniaud. Long story short, sound worked in a default AVI and no other sounds would play.

By now, I was giving up.

In my journey, I rekindled some old software to ensure everything was working. Knoppix 7.2. It's ironic, that my chosen OS/2 is useless, and the overlooked, rescue/live boot CD that was helping me out recognised everything including sound and ethernet.

I also found an Oracle VM Image that contained a working sound OS/2 install. I'll have a play with that for now.

The final options would be getting a supported PCI Sound and Ethernet soundcard and trying again.





Goodbye OS/2, hello Windows 2000 Professional.
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I downloaded OS/Warp the other day with an idea in mind of the possibility of doing an OS/2 build but after doing a lot of thinking it be quite useless as there isn't much it supports or software to run on it. I may install it on a CF card and play around with it for a few days.

Coming to think of it in terms of old operating systems I did a RISC OS build a couple of years ago from an ARM board and I never quite finished it off. I was in the process of getting the 3.5" floppy drive to work with it and I wanted to use an SSD to store the RISC OS ROM to. I really must dig that out and finish it sometime.
 
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I follow this channel on YouTube called Scrap Computing, and the guy comes up with little projects for retro PC's. He just recently posted a video which could be a great little decive for slowing down CPU's to play older dos games. It uses a PicoPi.

Could be a real game changer for CPU's that arn't very flexible in speed like Pentium 2/3's. I will certainly be building one when (or if) he releases the details. Certainly worth a subscribe if your into retro PC's

 
almoststew1990 said:
My 2007FPb arrived and shocked pikachu face - its 16ms response time results in subtle but noticeable ghosting that bugs me.

My solid colour background also immediately showcased the panels uneven backlighting or constrast or whatever as there were vertical patches that are a bit darker.

The svideo input is surprisingly good however with ‘no’ noticeable input delay. It doesn’t look terrible for whatever analogue to digital conversion it is doing.

The screen and stand look in decent condition though at least.
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Never knew this existed. Sounds like the ultimate N64 / Dreamcast and retro PC panel. N64 was great on S-Video. VERY tempted to locate one of those
 
Retro6 said:
I downloaded OS/Warp the other day with an idea in mind of the possibility of doing an OS/2 build but after doing a lot of thinking it be quite useless as there isn't much it supports or software to run on it. I may install it on a CF card and play around with it for a few days.

Coming to think of it in terms of old operating systems I did a RISC OS build a couple of years ago from an ARM board and I never quite finished it off. I was in the process of getting the 3.5" floppy drive to work with it and I wanted to use an SSD to store the RISC OS ROM to. I really must dig that out and finish it sometime.
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There's lots of OS/2 software on the Hobbes portal. This is going to close down in April, so best get in there quick.

In my Windows 2000 adventure, the onboard NForce Ethernet was detected and looked healthy, but wasn't picking up any DHCP addresses.

Thankfully, there's always a lot of spares in my garage and a PCI Ethernet card later and DHCP worked correctly and I can now talk to my network.

I would have spent weeks fretting and trying to get this working in the past. Thank goodness for wisdom.

I've put a few things on the build, Winamp (obvs), Winzip and some GOG based games. It seems to have turned into a good build.
 
!bluetonic! said:
There's lots of OS/2 software on the Hobbes portal. This is going to close down in April, so best get in there quick.

In my Windows 2000 adventure, the onboard NForce Ethernet was detected and looked healthy, but wasn't picking up any DHCP addresses.

Thankfully, there's always a lot of spares in my garage and a PCI Ethernet card later and DHCP worked correctly and I can now talk to my network.

I would have spent weeks fretting and trying to get this working in the past. Thank goodness for wisdom.

I've put a few things on the build, Winamp (obvs), Winzip and some GOG based games. It seems to have turned into a good build.
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Windows 2000 is a brilliant OS, and one that is often overlooked. I've got a couple of Windows 2000 builds, one which is a dual core 2 AM2 and it plays all kinds of games I've thrown at it including a lot of 95 era games right up to more modern games from 2010 - 2015 era and yhe funny thing is I have a game that is from around 1997/1998 and it would never run well in Windows 9X but works flawlessly in Windows 2000 on the dual core 2 build.
 
phatboy said:
Never knew this existed. Sounds like the ultimate N64 / Dreamcast and retro PC panel. N64 was great on S-Video. VERY tempted to locate one of those
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That was the plan- one screen for a PC and a retro console (and can actually do two of each across VGA DVI Svideo and composite). I’m getting used to the screen now and I’ve stopped noticing blur now I’m not FPS games. The svideo quality is passable. But as a single screen for both it’s OK. I’m not sure what options there are for 4:3 monitors with tv inputs but for the same price I could have got any number of 10 year old TVs on gumtree which would do HDMI and component etc.
 
Just an update on the DOS/WIN95 PC build... its terrible for anything solid state. Some PC's are fine where as others aren't. My plan is to find a laptop IBM HDD for cheap, new/old stock one would be preferred rather than one that has been used for who knows how long... I remember seeing an ebay seller who was selling a whole box of new/old stock IDE drives of 20GB. I wish I had bought those now as those would have been useful to have on hand whenever I needed one.

Most IDE hard drives are over a tenner on ebay and CEX has none in stock. I don't fancy spending much on an old used IDE drive that may fail or arrives in a jiffy bag being knocked about in transit. There are plenty of 60GB SATA HDD's tho going cheap so I may just settle for one of those for the DOS/WIN95 build, I was also advised to go with a StarTech IDE to SATA adapter as the cheaper adapters can present issues. I just hope the issue isn't the IDE controller chip.
 
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Retro6 said:
Windows 2000 is a brilliant OS, and one that is often overlooked. I've got a couple of Windows 2000 builds, one which is a dual core 2 AM2 and it plays all kinds of games I've thrown at it including a lot of 95 era games right up to more modern games from 2010 - 2015 era and yhe funny thing is I have a game that is from around 1997/1998 and it would never run well in Windows 9X but works flawlessly in Windows 2000 on the dual core 2 build.
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I forgot how good Win2K was. It's incredibly nice to have an OS you can setup local accounts on :p. Its interface was clean and tidy and without faff or hideous widgets. It is rock solid as an office PC and yes, you can game.

Now ethernet is working, I can FTP stuff over to the box. I've installed an early version of ScummVM with.some titles.

The PC runs hot though. The beige box is toasty. The fans are loud. The CD drive is louder. Those were the days..

Another build is ticked off.
 
I believe there was a 2023 unofficial update for Windows 2000 SP4 to run even more modern apps as well as old by Blackwingcat and also a KernelEx I've never tried it tho but is interesting. Its probably more SSD friendly as well with it being NTFS.
 
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One of my IDE to SATA adapters arrived plus some more games to play. I'm now finishing up... Windows 98 installed fine and I found the driver for my video card right away first try. I'm just installing the sound blaster now.

For this build I went with...
AMD Athlon socket 462 1.6GHz processor
RAM: 256MB
SATA HDD 80GB via IDE
Sound Blaster LIVE
GPU: ATi 92500
3.5" Floppy Drive
DVD optical Drive

4e8U2Hm.jpeg
 
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