What retro things have you done today?

[hohum]

Completely gutted.
PC was packed alright, not amazing but would not have expected this amount of damage after I opened it.

It has taken one hell of a shunt to bend thick steel like that!!!
The floppy drive is a right off.
The HDD/floppy cage will need some bending to make it fit again.
The case is cracked and that bend underneath it seems very difficult to correct.
Several jumpers on the motherboard have taken such a hit that they fell to pieces.
The CPU was hit so hard it took the fan off of the heatsink(4 screws!!) and the CPU had even started to lift from the socket.
The soundcard was hit and broke some superficial plastic from the ISA slot.

It took me a while to come to terms with it and slowly take it apart and assess each part.

Somehow, after replacing the broken jumpers, bending pins back and crossing my fingers.. It actually boots.

That sucks. Can you claim anything from the courier/seller?

I remember ordering a Amstrad monitor, the CTM644 RGB Colour Monitor, for my 6128.
On the delivery day, I had the blinds slightly open just enough to see out, but not see in - I was getting dressed. I watched in astonishment as the Yodel bloke literally threw the boxed monitor over my gate, the monitor missed the grass and landed on my path, corner first. To say it was smashed was a understatement, all the bottom plastic feet had smashed inwards pushing the main pcb upwards towards the tube. The corner that took the full brunt of my path, was smashed, and the plastic monitor shell was cracked everywhere. There was no bubblewrap protection, only old newspaper. Took 4 weeks of the seller trying everything to not refund me, in the end ebay stepped in a refunded me.

That would have angered me immensely, have no patience for people behaving like that (the courier mainly, but also the seller).

 

[LewisRaz]

That sucks. Can you claim anything from the courier/seller?



That would have angered me immensely, have no patience for people behaving like that (the courier mainly, but also the seller).

I have not contacted them yet. Wanted to see what was what first.
Have already took the battery off and cleaned the small amount of green that had started chewing on some traces.
Will leave it until the weekend now but it should be a nice machine by the time I have turned it around!

 

[paradigm]

Picked up (on a whim) an interesting looking AMD K6-II in what looks to be an adapter to run it in older non "Super" Socket-7 (and 5) motherboards.

 

[almoststew1990]

Today I overclocked my 650MHz P3 to 864MHz by upping the FSB from 100 to 133MHz. It's completely stable even with 100MHz RAM and have nudged some games from unplayable to playable (games which have minimum specs of 500MHz!)

 

[LewisRaz]

Cleaned up the new case today. Not too bad now! Going to have to glue the 3.5" drive cover in as the plastic catch has snapped. Need to get a spare floppy out of the loft too. This system happily recognises my IDE-CF with 1gb card in so thats a bonus.



Here is some of the internals:


A sound card. It works although I could hear a lot of noise. Ive read it can be because it was too close to other cards so I have moved it as far away as possible and will try again once windows is installed.


VLB IO controller card. It works fine.


The motherboard: Gigabyte GA-486VS. Seems solid enough and is well documented online which is great.


A Ram stacker! converts 4 30 pin to 72pin socket. Populated with 4x1MB


16mb 72pin simm. First time ive seen a 16mb one.

Always nice to have an ISA NIC.


I am currently using an ISA trident 8900C for display as it was the only isa vga I have. It might be nice in future to populate the PC with a VLB VGA card.

Well on my way to making my perfect 486!

 

[almoststew1990]

Nice original soundblaster (2.0) - looks to be the same as the one I picked up at the beginning of the year. The noise could be because you don't have a -5v rail on your powersupply, if you're using a modern one.

Also, get some CMS chips in there! I can't read if your CT1336 chip is 1336A or not, which means you need to use slightly different CMS chips

 

[LewisRaz]

Nice original soundblaster (2.0) - looks to be the same as the one I picked up at the beginning of the year. The noise could be because you don't have a -5v rail on your powersupply, if you're using a modern one.

Also, get some CMS chips in there! I can't read if your CT1336 chip is 1336A or not, which means you need to use slightly different CMS chips

It is the original PSU mate with -5v!

it’s a 1336 too not an A variant. What would the CMS chips actually add? I was going to use my Yamaha card instead

 

[almoststew1990]

A very different style of audio - 12 square wave voices (in addition to the opl FM synthesis). It's a neat sound and I actually prefer it to some basic ablib audio. Most games that support it also support FM synthesis anyway, but it is a cool option to have. It also adds value to your card. It sounds like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vp3d58w6uebtu6t/Time of Lore Part 1.mp3?dl=0 Time of Lore (Part 1)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojlfi7cn04gz29h/Time of Lore Part 2.mp3?dl=0 Time of Lore (Part 2)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxiqo7cby5fml2j/SOMI R.mp3?dl=0 (secret of Monkey Island - not the best tune but should at least allow easier comparison!)

 

[LewisRaz]

A very different style of audio - 12 square wave voices (in addition to the opl FM synthesis). It's a neat sound and I actually prefer it to some basic ablib audio. Most games that support it also support FM synthesis anyway, but it is a cool option to have. It also adds value to your card. It sounds like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vp3d58w6uebtu6t/Time of Lore Part 1.mp3?dl=0 Time of Lore (Part 1)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojlfi7cn04gz29h/Time of Lore Part 2.mp3?dl=0 Time of Lore (Part 2)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxiqo7cby5fml2j/SOMI R.mp3?dl=0 (secret of Monkey Island - not the best tune but should at least allow easier comparison!)

I will have to have a listen later. I was going to start a thread on vogons to see which card to pick for the machine. I was certain the Yamaha would win but this sounds interesting

 

[LewisRaz]

Made some good progress with the 486 tonight but once windows had installed the CDROM drive dissapeared never to return again?!

Cant figure this one out and cant install any drivers without it

 

[LewisRaz]

well I swapped out my cdrom and it works now.

Found this shortly after:

https://datasure.com/pioneer2.html

 

[Methanoid]

I've ordered some bits to build a rig for Amithlon (sort of an Amiga emulator but more than that)...

Anyone got 2x512Mb DDR2? Amithlon wont even boot if you have more than 1GB present in system-

 

[ST_Craig]

Well, I'm set for some retro goodness.

The wheel is just a spinner, the wheel lifts off when finished. Inside, isn't the Arcade 1-up hardware, it's a I7 4790k, 16Gb, Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4Gb, 4Tb of storage, and MAME, Retroarch, and a few other emulators.
And finally, some Nintendo retro gaming.

Stock GBA SP, AGS 001 screen - getting a AGS 101 mod soon, and a 16Gb EZFlash.

 

[LewisRaz]

Well, I'm set for some retro goodness.

The wheel is just a spinner, the wheel lifts off when finished. Inside, isn't the Arcade 1-up hardware, it's a I7 4790k, 16Gb, Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4Gb, 4Tb of storage, and MAME, Retroarch, and a few other emulators.
And finally, some Nintendo retro gaming.

Stock GBA SP, AGS 001 screen - getting a AGS 101 mod soon, and a 16Gb EZFlash.

Love that cab!

 

[ST_Craig]

Love that cab!

Thanks. I normally suck at anything like this, but I followed a guide on the net and it was all fairly easy to put together.
As a small update, I had some 50p buttons, a USB 3.0 extension for arcade cabs, and a small trackball, all arrive yesterday.

The trackball will eventually sit under the space where it is now, just need to get the right drill cut-out piece. Amazing difference to trackball games like Missile Command, Centipede, etc..

The 50p buttons really add that something, to the cab. They light up when the cab is on, and it looks great at night. I wanted a proper coin door and mechanism, but this small cab isn't really built for that, it's slightly too flimsy.

 

[LewisRaz]

Really do like that!

I am off work indefinitely now so going to have plenty of time to get some of my project PCs done.

 

[ST_Craig]

Wish I had room to start my PC project.
It's a Pentium 2, 16Mb ram, Matrox Millenium gfx card, Voodoo 2 8Mb, Soundblaster AWE32 + 8Mb, 8x CDRom, 3.5" Floppy drive. No IDE drive, I want one of those IDE to SDCard devices, then I will install DOS and Win98SE.
I also have a 15" SVGA CRT Monitor, which will complement it perfectly.
At the moment, I am using Dosbox for retro PC games. It's a good alternative, and because it's emulated on a PC it still feels authentic.

 

[almoststew1990]

I have quite a space efficient retro set up at the moment. It's a Via EPIA ITX system, with a (slow) 800MHz CPU. I've put 128MB of DDR1 memory in its single slot, and a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in its one PCI slot. It's about the same speed as a Petium 3 450MHz (at a guess) and quite happy playing early 3D games like Driver.



FM synthesis (or some kind of emulation) seems to work well through "Dos in Windows", not sure what the correct word for it is. I'm currently playing Daggerfall with it set up to have Soundblaster sound effects and music sent through MPU-401 or whatever it is called.



16MB of RAM seems awfully low for Windows 98, really you're after 64MB or 128MB I'd say to go with your Pentium 2. Considering it's still so cheap I'd be tempted to upgrade it.

My retro activity for the day is replacing my 17" Dell which just has VGA input for a Hanns-G 19" LCD which has both DVI and VGA. I can now have a Windows 98 / DOS retro PC and a XP PC set up at the same time, yay!

 

[LewisRaz]

That sounds like a nice little set up!

 

[almoststew1990]

Yes it's pretty versatile but I am already bored of it - comes with being stuck indoors a lot I think! I am already thinking of replacing it with something (anything) else. I've probably built about 4 PCs since Friday evening so I need to stop and have a think about what I actually want to play, and build, before I go insane!