PcBytes wrote on 2022-11-27, 12:47:

Socket3 wrote on 2022-11-27, 10:59:

I was looking through a lot of more modern machines I picked up for free from an institution. Mostly low end core 2 duo and AM2 […]
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I was looking through a lot of more modern machines I picked up for free from an institution. Mostly low end core 2 duo and AM2 machines - good source of disk drives and DDR2, the latter of which I oddly have very little of - and decided (out of boredom) to try and install windows 98 on one of them.

I picked out a Core 2 Duo e4400 with 2GB of DDR2 and a Gigabyte i945 mainboard. I took off half of the ram, put a PCI-E Geforce 6600GT in it and to my surprise, windows 98 SE installed and ran perfectly! I even managed to partition the SATA 160gb disk drive using win98's fdisk, despite it incorrectly reporting total disk size as 20gb instead of 160gb, by using the percentage trick. I wanted an 8gb partition for win98 and typed down 5% - and voila! Oh and I installed PATCHMEM at first boot to avoid the "out of memory" error.

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I did encounter an issue when installing the graphics card... I managed to install intel's chipset drivers and dx8 just fine, and when I got to the graphics driver (66.93 - earliest driver that supports the 6600gt) it somehow installed the 6600 along side the "standard graphics adapter" that installed with the OS, as such the 6600 driver was allocated no resources and showed up with an exclamation mark in device manager. I had to manually remove both drivers and restart the PC. After doing that, it detected the monitor but was still in 16 color mode. I switched to 16 bit 800x600, restarted and it everything worked as it should. The video card is even detected as PCI-E 16x in the nvidia control panel.

These kinds of builds are great for someone just getting into the hobby. A cheap or freebee PC like this, paired with a supported PCI sound card (in my case a Yamaha DS-XG) an a PCI-E card with windows 98 driers (Radeon x300/x600/x700/x800 and nvidia 6200/6600/6800) makes for an easy way of playing retro games on real hardware. It can of course even dual-boot windows XP.

Next up - clean up the garage!!!..... yeah...

Should I feel proud that I own a similar Delux case? 🤣

Granted, mine surprisingly came with a K8T800 Pro based Sempron machine, of all things that it could hide in it.

Well these are pretty common in our corner of the world. And those beige / clear blue atx cases ultra-pro sold back in the day. OLX is full of them.

HanSolo wrote on 2022-11-27, 11:27:

. […]
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MarkP wrote on 2022-11-26, 07:11:

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-11-26, 06:48:

You will need to do your own research to determine which particular brake cleaner products contain tetrachloroethylene, if you consider it's dangers worthy of avoidance.

People who value good health (of themselves, their families, and the environment) will tend to avoid the indiscriminate long term usage of tetrachloroethylene products, based upon scientific consensus, such as that I posted directly above in links.

I hope you haven't been unknowingly using tetrachloroethylene products all this time, Mark P. But it sounds as though I'm unlikely to convince you about anything at this stage, so my warnings about the substance are primarily for the community's sake.

You really really are on a different planet dude. Go hug a tree.

Most members here can make up there own own minds what to use to clean their computer related boards.

.

Not everybody is an expert on everything. And open forums are not only read by its members.
So I appreciate the warning about brake cleaners.

Read the Material Safety Date Sheet or warning on the back of the can before buying or using it then for Petes sake-common sense as it were

That is what the EXPERTS do and obviously not done by over sensitive tree huggers.

As I've mentioned before-Facts don't care about feelings....

dionb wrote on 2022-11-27, 13:02:

Ugh, not my best day today... […]
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Ugh, not my best day today...

Got a lot of 6 early VLB cards with obscure IIT/Xtec AGX016A chips on them. Reputedly slow XGA-clones, but actually support higher graphics modes with >1MB RAM, so interesting nonetheless - and 6 VLB cards that didn't cost me at least a single kidney isn't at all bad in any case. Assuming they work of course.

So I dusted off my VLB test bench (Cyrix 5x86-100 on a UMC-based board) and - nothing, not even with the original Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 in it. Bugger. Test system died on me. Tested my early PCI tet bench (Cyrix 5x86-100 on a UMC PCI-based board, for nice 1:1 comparisons) which fortunately did work without issues. Swapped out PSUs and RAM: nope, both work in the PCI set, not VLB. So swapped CPU. Good news: both CPUs still fine. Bad news: must be the motherboard then.

Worse news: broke the little plastic clips holding the heatsink onto one of the 5x86s while doing that. So now have a board to fix and a new clip to source or bodge. And I still don't know if these VLB cards do anything.

Fortunately I do have alternatives, another VLB-based 486 system running my old sound cards and a Pentium VLB system, but both are built into irritting AT minitowers with cables out the back that are hard to reach. Oh, and there's my Alaris Leopard 2, which is in a NOS case (generic, not IBM) in its original packaging at the back of the cupboard waiting for suitable display options. Come to think of it, that would be the ideal pairing with an early, oddball card. It would however require the card to run happily in 16b VLB mode. Oh well, time to get digging and testing.

Kind of a long shot but does happen. Did you check your bios battery? I've had a number of boards both old and newer that play dead when the bios battery is either miss or dead.

Did some cable management my XP machine following its upgrade, while reminding myself how much I do not enjoy cable management.

Finally got a working CRT monitor for my Pentium II PC 😁

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-11-27, 18:02:

[...]

Kind of a long shot but does happen. Did you check your bios battery? I've had a number of boards both old and newer that play dead when the bios battery is either miss or dead.

Tnx, but checked that already. Old Varta replaced long ago, have a 3-battery external pack attached now. Still gives 3.6V, tried a different one on the boards, but no luck.

Over the past week and a half I have been getting my Umax SuperMac C600 up and running, and I’m happy I did.

Now if only 5v 168-pin EDO wasn’t dumb expensive.

Nice setup, seems odd to see Mac OS on a Dell (monitor) 😀 It looks like the case may have been made by the same manufacturer as Dell's ATX systems from that era, lotsa plastic but really nicely made.

I've got this Thinkpad 240 laptop that I put back together from all the remaining parts and got it running with some repairs. But there are some parts missing, so far I've made the hinge covers just measuring some real ones and those fit really well - my FDM printer and PETG filament are letting things down and I may have to try out resin at this rate. But something I've not been able to make by eye is the hard drive caddy / cover. These are super rare for the Thinkpad 240 series now, since well, it's a special caddy connector for a 23 year old laptop.
Using my 3d scanner I've been able to copy the one I do have that isn't spare for this particular Thinkpad 240 - I have a 240, 240X and 240Z, only 2 full caddies with covers and they've got parts broken like the plastic mounting tabs. Now this full cover in CAD means I can print out more as needed. The test print fit beautifully and looks good for an FDM 3d print, it's really quite big in 3d print world but only a 2.5" drive.

This one was especially neat because the complex curve part just remains as a 3d scan while the flat part is all CAD shapes so they can be modified easily.

Now that I've got a working design, I can modify it to fit new stuff! So far here's my design to fit an mSATA SSD where the big old hard drive went:

I think another good one to have would be the compact flash to 50 pin adapter

Demetrio wrote on 2022-11-27, 19:23:

Finally got a working CRT monitor for my Pentium II PC 😁

Man, I love CRTs. Great space heaters in the harsh winters, beautiful black levels, crisp picture, and sharper than flat panel displays/TV sets. If I could get my PVM-1341's digital RGB working (possible misconfiguration inside for the intensity drive), I'll connect my systems that use CGA or EGA to the set in no time.

Demetrio wrote on 2022-11-27, 19:23:

Finally got a working CRT monitor for my Pentium II PC 😁

those speakers take me right back, I can hear need for speed wheel spin sound just looking at them 😀

Let's get this EME 279TD 'back on track'.

*puts on sunglasses .... YEAHHH!

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-11-27, 18:26:

Did some cable management my XP machine following its upgrade, while reminding myself how much I do not enjoy cable management.

You and me both. My Xp rig needs some serious cable management and I'm not well gifted in that area.

Testing out games on my upgraded XP machine ran into an issue when testing Far Cry. I started getting extremely loud coil whine from the system.

Naturally since I had just replaced the motherboard and CPU, I assumed that the new hardware was the culprit. I then spent several hours playing with BIOS settings changing voltages, power management options, turbo settings, etc. Nothing worked.

Finally realized the problem is just Far Cry. I didn't realize that the game doesn't have a frame limiter and it was rendering hundreds of frames per second and pushing the system to the limit.

Forcing vsync via the nVidia control panel solved the problem. No more coil whine.

Screw you, Far Cry. You wasted my evening.

Tested the stuff i got, most of these HDD was ded or with bad sectors... The 3Dfx cards dont have signal as well for some reason LMAO... But the MVP of this lot was that Western Digital 40MB, that just works, and even have DOS games inside... Did alot of cleaning on both the 3Dfx cards, and some of the HDDs... Did also isolate bad sectors, if the drive did have some in the mid or end of the platter, and they seems to work fine after that...

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-11-29, 00:38:

Testing out games on my upgraded XP machine ran into an issue when testing Far Cry. I started getting extremely loud coil whine […]
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Testing out games on my upgraded XP machine ran into an issue when testing Far Cry. I started getting extremely loud coil whine from the system.

Naturally since I had just replaced the motherboard and CPU, I assumed that the new hardware was the culprit. I then spent several hours playing with BIOS settings changing voltages, power management options, turbo settings, etc. Nothing worked.

Finally realized the problem is just Far Cry. I didn't realize that the game doesn't have a frame limiter and it was rendering hundreds of frames per second and pushing the system to the limit.

Forcing vsync via the nVidia control panel solved the problem. No more coil whine.

Screw you, Far Cry. You wasted my evening.

Nice looking system. What are the specs?
Last time I experienced coil whine, I was running AMD's 8350 😀. And it was Corsair's Gold certified PSU generating it .

I have an interesting question for all of you building early PCIe era systems. If you had choice and components, what would you build:
1) dual AGP/PCIe Intel (Asrock VIA PT880)
2) dual AGP/PCIe AMD64 (Asrock ALI/ULI)
3) Intel (Intel i965/975, P35/X38, P45/X48)
4) AMD64 (nforce4 or 5)

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-11-29, 00:38:

Finally realized the problem is just Far Cry. I didn't realize that the game doesn't have a frame limiter and it was rendering hundreds of frames per second and pushing the system to the limit.

The game does have its own v-sync, it just doesn't work.

Isn't coil whine wonderful?

After 3 damn frustrating days,I finished my latest buy from my regular e-waste supplier.
It is in very good shape. CMOS battery was empty so I replaced it with a 2x2032 coincell holder so that solved problem number one.
Problem 2: setup config error but this has to be done with a setup file/floppy which I didn't have. Gsetup kinda worked but kept giving me setup errors. Getting this on a 5 1/4 floppy was also an adventure which involved a P3 laptop to make a 3,5"floppy, several pc's to find one with a good working 5 1/4" drive and finding some healthy floppy disks.
At least the HD was recognised now but this gave me problem 3: HD error code (HD is a Seagate ST-225 BTW).
I wanted to see if I could revive it to look at all the stuff on that whopping 20mb! Using Spinrite to repair it was taking like a predicted 40 hours so I decided to try and format it with DOS 3.1 which somehow was not really working so I found a working version of DOS 5.0 on 5 1/4" disks. Format went like a breeze, no errors and the hard drive still felt and sounded happy.
Problem 4: the 3,5" drive was wonky so I wanted to replace it. For some reason, none of my spare drives were seen by the PC so I opened the original drive,cleaned the heads and regreased it.Bingo!!!
Problem 5: that pesky config error,having to press F1 all the time, had to go so I went on googling and found a thread on a French forum which lead me to HPmuseum, where after trying some different files,I found the right one I believed. Had to convert it using HxC floppy emulator software from Teledisk format to IMG file,then use my P3 laptop to write the IMG with Winimage to a 3,5" floppy and then fingers crossed....
Well it worked! Config error gone and I have some extra utilities to explore including speed change tool, a memorytool etc....
Today I hoped to finish the quest by adding a soundcard but.....problem ummm 6?!
I decided to use a Mozart OTI601 card but finding the correct driver and writing all the different ones I found on a floppy took over 1,5 hours 🙁
I kept getting 'No Mozart card found' ALL THE TIME. I even tried an identical one I but same thing. Reseated the first one and tried one of the many drivers again and......It works!
Tested SQ3 and now I'm going to put this PC from hell in a corner 🤣. I kinda got tired of this one pffff...

stef80 wrote on 2022-11-29, 09:54:

Nice looking system. What are the specs?

It's an i7-3770k with a GTX 980 Ti and 4 GB of DDR3 RAM.

I'm trying to get a reasonably fast XP machine while still maintaining hardware compatibility with 32-bit XP.

Sombrero wrote on 2022-11-29, 10:45:

The game does have its own v-sync, it just doesn't work.

That's what threw me off at first. It lists the v-sync in the graphics options, but apparently does nothing. 😒

Isn't coil whine wonderful?

Ugh. My least favorite computer noise.

Equipped the CT3620 with 2 x 1MiB Simms and enjoyed some DoomII.

Replaced the CD-ROM drive on my Pentium 133 build. The previous Toshiba 6x was making weird ticking noises, so I swapped in an 8x Mitsumi.

After hooking up the CD audio cable, tested it with the most period appropriate soundtrack I could find. 😁