What retro things have you done today?

Well, that didn't go so well. The P4 Shuttle appears to have compatibility issues with the Kyro II to the point whereby it wouldn't actually power on with the Kyro plugged in, the K6-III has no such issue. I thought I'd try the AGP 4x mod on the card (0 ohm resistor bridging R168 on the card, modded BIOS) but whilst that did allow the machine to POST (and indeed boot to XP), it wasn't stable at all!

Going to have to re-run the tests on either my PIII rig or the Athlon XP when it arrives.

EDIT: Card is definitely fine though. The K6-III system is currently running benchmarks on a loop without any issue (well other than being dog-slow!). I guess it must be the chipset of this Shuttle :(
 
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hohum said:
Ah, not powering up at all is strange! Shall have to wait and see then...
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It was, incredibly so. If I powered on the system with the card just lifted out of the pins, then pushed it in and did a soft-reset then I could boot fine, but oddities in the BIOS like detecting the CD-ROM as "H" (not drive letter, the name of the CD-ROM drive was simply "H"). It was fine then in 2D or software rendering modes, but as soon as a D3D or OGL game/program was launched the app itself would crash/freeze/display nothing. I could always CTR-ALT-DEL back to Windows though. Didn't make any difference if I used EnTnL or not, or if I used any of the 3 driver revisions I had (didn't try anything older than 2.0 as I wanted to get EnTnL working).

The second I did the hardware mod for AGP 4x, then it would power-on/POST just fine, but regardless of the mod or the additional BIOS mod needed for actual AGP 4x compatibility, still no hardware 3D on the Shuttle.

K6-III is happily running EnTnL (kinda pointless due to CPU performance, but it proves it works) with the latest BETA driver 2.0.22.0033.
 
@Firestar_3x Yeah for the most part, but I struggled with my board until I found that archive link (Shuttle HOT-687Z). Probably easier to find stuff on the website that's post-2000 though.
 
Another sound card today. I already have one of these but because its actually a really good card with the Crystal/Dream Synth for General Midi and its really quiet for a ALS100 chip card, i now have a spare!

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Heres what the synth sounds like

 
My favorite soundcard of all time turned up today:

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Finding one boxed with the card and massive cable took ages, imported this one from the USA in the end.

Also looking forward to testing the midi out with the SoundCanvas.
 
hohum said:
@paradigm Do you think it might be related to AGP voltage in some way? Such as the card is a bit flaky with the P4's 1.5v, but works fine on the K6's 3.3v?

Also just spotted this, not sure if anyone here is still after one but it seems a reasonable price to me: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Creative...ound-Card-512kbyte-RAM-wavetable/324192810306
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This guy has so much interesting stuff for sale I often watch it and consider lowballing with the "make offer" I wonder if he does deals or is quite strict on pricing. Some of those iffy looking 486 boards he has have been on my watchlist for months and not sold.

@paradigm this is my board:



Running with an athlon xp 2800+ and 768mb of ram + 9600 pro 256mb and xp sp3/4(I downloaded the pack that @hohum suggested)
 
LewisRaz said:
@paradigm this is my board:



Running with an athlon xp 2800+ and 768mb of ram + 9600 pro 256mb and xp sp3/4(I downloaded the pack that @hohum suggested)
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Ah so same but older (non official 400fsb) version. Have you tried any overclocking, and are you GPU or CPU bound in that setup? I want to guess you’d be GPU bound, but not sure!

As I say, I’ve got a good selection of cards, but don’t want to waste a powerful card somewhere it won’t get utilised, but at the same time don’t want to underutilise the CPU!
 
I looked at my ebay feedback and my first listings were athlon 2800+, abit nf7-s and geforce 6800ultra. I know that my gpu history went geforce 4 - fx 5200 - ati 9200se - 9800pro (I ordered a 9700pro and a 9700 pro box arrived opened with a 9800pro inside... from ucuk competitor).

Im not convinced the 9600pro is pushing the cpu to its limit and back in the day I had much better GPUs on it!

I really have not messed with overclocking it yet for a few reasons. Firstly the initial faffing with drivers just to get 3dmark to work/score well. Secondly the psu dishing out only 4.5-4.6v on the 5v rail and thirdly... Lack of motivation :P
 
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