What retro things have you done today?

Caporegime
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26 Aug 2003
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Leafy Cheshire
Pressed ahead with my own fan mount design for the Voodoo 3 3000, as although the one I'm using fits for now, if I ever need the adjacent PCI slot then I can't use the fan any more. So I'm printing one that ducts the air from a 60mm fan above the card, through 90° and over the heatsink. Should be printed by the early evening.

voodoo3-fanmount-top1.jpg
 
Associate
Joined
5 Dec 2002
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1,774
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The 80's
Guys, if my motherboard supports E7300/400/500 Wolfdale CPUs, is it likely it'll support the 8 and 9 series even if the CPU list doesn't list them?

The 8 and 9 series are 1333 FSB CPU's right? That board officially supports 1066 max. Might be a modded bios out there which will add microcode's in but you will be still overclocking at 1333fsb
 
Associate
Joined
5 Dec 2002
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1,774
Location
The 80's
Pressed ahead with my own fan mount design for the Voodoo 3 3000, as although the one I'm using fits for now, if I ever need the adjacent PCI slot then I can't use the fan any more. So I'm printing one that ducts the air from a 60mm fan above the card, through 90° and over the heatsink. Should be printed by the early evening.

voodoo3-fanmount-top1.jpg

Nice! looking forward to see how this turns out.
 
Associate
Joined
8 Dec 2011
Posts
28
Just Arrived this morning, Amazing little piece of kit for anyone on here who doesn't know of it already: Dreamblaster S2 Wavetable midi board from serdaco/serdashop; not only that but a Chill & Phil midi/Gameport to Wavetable adapter (got the solder kit so threw it toegther n testing now) Sound from these is great had the Dreamblaster S1 for a while now, S2 is just as good if not better and smaller. I've not tried the bigger X series boards yet but I plan to in the future.

Basically they allow MPU-401 General Midi/Waveblaster sound on sound cards with a wavetable header and with the adapter a midi/gameport(card needs to support MPU-401 which most do except early Soundblaster/Soundblaster pro, most of the clones have it though) For the price of these vs a retro wavetable board or a SC55/SC88 or CM32/ MT-32, They're really good can't recommend them enough. The chill & Phil adapter have line in and out so you can passthrough or to a sound card's line in to mix the midi with the FM sound. really nice bit of kit.

9 euro for the adapter
35 for the S2 wavetable board, well worth it.

So my retro activities today will be listening to awesome retro game midi sound, got DOOM playing in the background now :D
 
Associate
Joined
5 Dec 2002
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Location
The 80's
Just Arrived this morning, Amazing little piece of kit for anyone on here who doesn't know of it already: Dreamblaster S2 Wavetable midi board from serdaco/serdashop; not only that but a Chill & Phil midi/Gameport to Wavetable adapter (got the solder kit so threw it toegther n testing now) Sound from these is great had the Dreamblaster S1 for a while now, S2 is just as good if not better and smaller. I've not tried the bigger X series boards yet but I plan to in the future.

Basically they allow MPU-401 General Midi/Waveblaster sound on sound cards with a wavetable header and with the adapter a midi/gameport(card needs to support MPU-401 which most do except early Soundblaster/Soundblaster pro, most of the clones have it though) For the price of these vs a retro wavetable board or a SC55/SC88 or CM32/ MT-32, They're really good can't recommend them enough. The chill & Phil adapter have line in and out so you can passthrough or to a sound card's line in to mix the midi with the FM sound. really nice bit of kit.

9 euro for the adapter
35 for the S2 wavetable board, well worth it.

So my retro activities today will be listening to awesome retro game midi sound, got DOOM playing in the background now :D

Sweet pickup! I have the S2 mounted on my Yamaha YMF719 soundcard. For the money its a great sounding synth.. it doesn't have the quality of the Roland/Yamaha stuff, but you're not paying those prices! I really want the Chill & Phil adapter as i could move it between machines.
 
Associate
Joined
8 Dec 2011
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28
Sweet pickup! I have the S2 mounted on my Yamaha YMF719 soundcard. For the money its a great sounding synth.. it doesn't have the quality of the Roland/Yamaha stuff, but you're not paying those prices! I really want the Chill & Phil adapter as i could move it between machines.

Totally, I don't have the space for a SC55 setup sadly so one or two of these does the trick nicely, and it's great being able to swap round externally or for cards with no wavetable header, waiting on a board arriving which has a YMF71* onboard, but not wavetable header, should make a nice little system.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
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3,732
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North Essex
Ah I have been thinking about the S2 as a bday present to myself. Seeing good reviews on it everywhere I look!

Today I finally got the motivation to build the dx4 system.
Stole the cache from a dead S7 board and tried that poorly looking VLB controller I had, along with the new VLB VGA card and it posted first time :D
Cut up an old 4 pin fan extension cable and soldered my external battery to it and connected it to the external battery holder. Looks quite tidy.
Just chucking dos on it quickly to make sure the FDD and HDD/CD all work ok! and Then I will finish it up and install windows 95.

Think I did well from that scrap lot. £10.50 for AWE32. VLB I/O and Creative SB 0770. The rest chucked into a box to form my own scrap lot.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 May 2016
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3,732
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North Essex
That looks really smart!
Finished my dx4 system.
This aztech sound galaxy is a great card. Was concerned by some posts saying its extremely noisy but my experience is the opposite. Possibly the cleanest sound of all my ISA soundcards!



Currently sat on top of my voodoo system. The creative CDRom is dead and just there to fill the gap.

I would love to wire up the LCD speed display but it looks way beyond what I understand. The turbo button is working tho!
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
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37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
S478 Shuttle XPC SB51G arrived and MY GOD WHAT A MESS. The externals whilst a bit grubby and a few scratches here and there aren't actually too bad (though I'll likely respray the front panel back to silver rather than the silver and rubbed-through-to-beige look it currently has). The inside though... where the hell has this lived it's life, it is filthy, and it's not just regular dust, it's thick and black and chunky!

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This needs a massive clean and then also a re-cap as the board is just littered with bulging caps.

The Celeron that came with it will be going in the bin in favor of a proper P4. This board supports HT, but I'm not sure I'll use it as perhaps Win98 might be a better fit than XP? 2K is not really worth the bother as I've got my Dual-P3 rigs for that.
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
Well, board is cleaned up and I found a 2.8GHz P4 (533 FSB) in a box, seems to POST fine so even if these caps are causing an instability somewhere, it's worth recapping as it at least works. Played with the limited overclocking (i.e. I can raise FSB, nothing else, no voltage control, etc) and it'll post up to 3.318GHz which is nice, I doubt it's stable at that but it should be good for at least 3.1GHz if it'll POST at 3.3!

Just need to get the chassis tidied up then :rolleyes:
 
Associate
Joined
23 Nov 2018
Posts
378
That looks like smokers crud?

Can you get a P4 Northwood in there? The P4c was so good back in the day, 2.4 @ 3.3GHz :cool:

Agreed, that looks like a smokers PC!

And I had the exact same P4C chip back in the day. Cheapest of the lot I think but could overclock it to 3.4ghz usually and then it outclassed the 1k or more chips.

I bought the cpu and spent about 500 quid on a custom water cooling setup with my 9800 Pro I think it was or maybe something newer and it was still cheaper than a 3.2ghz cpu at the time or 3.4 or whatever it was. Plus with the bumped up fsb due to the overclock it ran great!

Best cpu I've owned myself for overclocking I think.
 
Caporegime
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
37,508
Location
Leafy Cheshire
The odd thing is there’s no nicotine smell at all. Oh well, it’s cleaned up now. Might need a new PSU (or at least a dismantle and a recap), as the 12v rail is weak (11.32v). The other rails seem fine so I assume the PSU is OK on the whole.

So Nvidia Quadro FX 1000 is installed (essentially a lower clocked FX5800 Ultra, it has the same RAM so in theory should clock up fine). Still undecided on 98SE or XP SP1a.
 
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