What retro things have you done today?

Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Nope, clock is 66mhz so it should be running at normal speed. I tried th Vanta in an xp machine and i loaded fine and passed 3dmark2000.

Trying a 6200 in the socket7 now because I am curious as to why no Vanta will work here.
Maybe it’s just trying to tell you that Vantas are poor :p

It could be just down to an incompatibility. I’ve got a dual socket 370 board that simply won’t work with my Radeon 9800XT, but is fine with the Voodoo 3 and Geforce 4200ti. The radeon is fine in my OTHER dual P3 board, and both are VIA Apollo PRO 133A chipsets.

Have you tried all the PCI slots?
 
Associate
Joined
27 Dec 2004
Posts
1,199
Be curious to see if XP makes a difference, but it's not really a solution! Have you tried removing all other expansion cards?
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,734
Location
North Essex
its been on "installing network" for about 15 minutes now so I might not get to find out :p

Yea this has all been with an empty system. Wife and daughter fell asleep and I cant remember what work is so I have time to kill with silly things like this :)
 
Associate
Joined
27 Dec 2004
Posts
1,199
I don't know much about that card! Also, one day we'll all have a clearout of retro stuff, and only then truly realise just how much we've accumulated ;)
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,734
Location
North Essex
Oh yes I hope the wife is not nearby when that happens!

The card is a Sound Galaxy NX Pro. Supposed to be very compatible and also has a scsi controller and connector which is something I have never used before. Yamaha chip is present too
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,734
Location
North Essex
This the one with Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source Compatibility? If so, nice catch! I can imagine that card is quite noisy though.
Thats the one. Will have to see about the noise! cant be any worse than one of my yamaha ones that I have!.

Also invested in some proper shielded and plated aux leads so I can run the sounds into my main PC and have it all come from the same speakers.

I also only paid 18.99 delivered and it comes with the original manual and some copies of the driver disks too. Not many decent ISA cards for that money
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,734
Location
North Essex
Took a break from the S7 system last night and installed the dx66 from @paradigm. Thanks very much for that!
Doom now runs a lot better and duke3d is playable!
The biggest difference I noticed was simcity 2000. I was playing it for well over an hour and it did slow down eventually but nowhere near as fast as the sx50 did. Its quite a different machine from how it started. 486sx50 with 0 cache to dx2 66 with 256kb cache :)
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,734
Location
North Essex
I'm just glad to hear the CPU worked, as I've still not got a working 486 machine to test it in. It came installed in a DOA board :(
It fired right up! I was slightly nervous as there was no obvious notch or key on the socket!
I used a drop of superglue in each corner and a little thermal paste in the middle and slapped an old heatsink on it. Seems happy enough.

Thats a shame its board was DOA! It must be toast if you cant fix it ;)
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Thats a shame its board was DOA! It must be toast if you cant fix it ;)

Yeah I've tried everything I could think of trying. Repaired some corroded traces, put in a new BIOS battery, reflashed the BIOS, tried 3 CPUs and more sticks of RAM than you can be bothered to count, the board just beeps in a pattern that doesn't seem to be listed in any beep code lists for the AMI BIOS it has. I even tried a random BIOS from another 486 board. I'm sure it's RAM related but I can't find anything obviously wrong unfortunately.
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Rather annoyed at the Amazon seller of the storage box I ordered to do the retrobriting in. Turns out the dimensions of the product were for the cardboard box it came in, which means the case front panel doesn't fit.

I am going to keep the box and try smaller pieces in it though just to practice the technique. Got the 5 1/4, 3 1/3, and sliding door covers on the go now (they've been in the sun for 4 or so hours). I'm also going to try the salon creme/clingfilm approach under UV light (my eeprom eraser) for really small stuff.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,734
Location
North Essex
Thats a shame! I really dont like the ones that cant be diagnosed. Got a bit of an OCD for either fixing things or accepting the reason it cant be fixed.

My "scrap lot" has just turned up.
The AWE32 looks like new except a little scratch on the rear, its taken the coating off of the traces but I've shone a torch through (proper high tech!) and they dont appear broken.
The pins on the VLB card have all straightened out and I can plug ide/floppy cables on them easily now. It looks undamaged but the previous cables were locked in with hot glue so that could explain how the pins were damaged trying to remove them. I will test that once the VLB gpu arrives.
There was also an X-Fi SB0770 Dell / Alienware OEM soundcarad which looks in good condition. They sell on ebay for the same price as the whole lot so thats a bonus.
Think the rest will just go onto my own scrap pile, couple of USB controllers and pci wifi cards. an agp fx5200 and an isa modem.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
Posts
3,734
Location
North Essex
Rather annoyed at the Amazon seller of the storage box I ordered to do the retrobriting in. Turns out the dimensions of the product were for the cardboard box it came in, which means the case front panel doesn't fit.

I am going to keep the box and try smaller pieces in it though just to practice the technique. Got the 5 1/4, 3 1/3, and sliding door covers on the go now (they've been in the sun for 4 or so hours). I'm also going to try the salon creme/clingfilm approach under UV light (my eeprom eraser) for really small stuff.
Thats annoying! hopefully you can still get it done.
My VLB gpu just arrived and was posted in... a Jiffy bag...
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that I've bought another Voodoo 3 to try and repair, it was a faulty V3 3000 AGP that should hopefully arrive tomorrow. It was cheap enough that I don't care if it doesn't work, but fingers crossed it's repairable (or even just simply works fine). Worst case scenario is that I transplant the 6ns RAM from it onto my V3 2000 board and overclock it a bit higher.
 
Back
Top Bottom