Well, more dispatches from the war to teach old routers (Imagestream Transport/Portwell NAB-2050) new tricks - finally able to get it to work, and all it took was for me to reinstall Windows 98, and through a series of safe mode troubleshoots, disable 2 of the network ports and that useless unpopulated PS/2 mouse port. Turns out one of the NICs grabbed the IRQ used by the video card and another the DMA channel on the IDE...no wonder every time I tried to boot it it’ll lock up on normal mode until I discovered that whoopsie.

So, what can you do with an old Via ESP5000 (basically like an Epia-M but at half the clockspeed...?)

Well, you could keep out the Nazis...

You could filter out the Stroggos...

You could also run on top of large alien artifacts....

Or you can act the fool on top of tall buildings...

BTW, in case you are wondering, those numbers are done at 640x480@16bpp - single digits at UT99, 15 fps on Quake 2. I have no idea if it’s the 533 MHz Via Samuel 2 failing the integrated Trident CyberBlade i1, or the CyberBlade failing the Samuel 2. I am going to pick up some 400MHz DDR SODIMM modules and see if memory speed improvements will help. But either ways, I need a working audio card. The YMF744 from AOpen was...silent. Not sure if it’s the missing caps on the PCI riser, something wrong with the card, or the card was damaged by the broken t5720 board.

Playing around with my ELSA 3d Revelators.

Modified my newly acquired PB450 board with the 3.3V CPU support, except I don't have any spare DX4-100 chips that supports 3.3V CPUs.

EvieSigma wrote on 2020-05-10, 02:31:

Well, 1991 is when System 7 first came out in the form of System 7.0...but yeah, the fact that OS 9 worked at all in the late 90s/early 00s is kind of a miracle.

The real miracle was seeing Windows 3.11 being still used in a french airport. And guess what? Yes, you guessed it right. It crashed on them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-w … -paris-airport/

Pretty shocking.

Speaking of the demon (Windows), I am doing a Windows XP Pro VM for some retro gaming.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-05-10, 05:37:

The real miracle was seeing Windows 3.11 being still used in a french airport. And guess what? Yes, you guessed it right. It c […]
Show full quote

EvieSigma wrote on 2020-05-10, 02:31:

Well, 1991 is when System 7 first came out in the form of System 7.0...but yeah, the fact that OS 9 worked at all in the late 90s/early 00s is kind of a miracle.

The real miracle was seeing Windows 3.11 being still used in a french airport. And guess what? Yes, you guessed it right. It crashed on them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-w … -paris-airport/

Pretty shocking.

What is shocking about it? It appears to have worked quite well until then when maintained properly.....That is pretty dame good indeed considering the increase in air traffic over the time it was in service..

Plain old DOS is still used in places. Complex applications can be extremely expensive to rewrite.

computerguy08 wrote on 2020-05-09, 21:31:

I unsuccessfully tried to set up a LAN bridge adapter for my retro rigs with an OpenWrt router using relayd. No matter what I tried I couldn't get an internet connection on the LAN ports.

Just use a 100/10 switch between your old systems and internet router. KISS

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-10, 05:41:

Bruninho wrote on 2020-05-10, 05:37:

The real miracle was seeing Windows 3.11 being still used in a french airport. And guess what? Yes, you guessed it right. It c […]
Show full quote

EvieSigma wrote on 2020-05-10, 02:31:

Well, 1991 is when System 7 first came out in the form of System 7.0...but yeah, the fact that OS 9 worked at all in the late 90s/early 00s is kind of a miracle.

The real miracle was seeing Windows 3.11 being still used in a french airport. And guess what? Yes, you guessed it right. It crashed on them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-w … -paris-airport/

Pretty shocking.

What is shocking about it? It appears to have worked quite well until then when maintained properly.....That is pretty dame good indeed considering the increase in air traffic over the time it was in service..

This is exactly why I am shocked. That damn thing worked so well for them in 23 years. Hats off to Microsoft for the longevity of their OS, at least.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-05-10, 06:04:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-10, 05:41:

Bruninho wrote on 2020-05-10, 05:37:

The real miracle was seeing Windows 3.11 being still used in a french airport. And guess what? Yes, you guessed it right. It crashed on them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-w … -paris-airport/

Pretty shocking.

What is shocking about it? It appears to have worked quite well until then when maintained properly.....That is pretty dame good indeed considering the increase in air traffic over the time it was in service..

This is exactly why I am shocked. That damn thing worked so well for them in 23 years. Hats off to Microsoft for the longevity of their OS, at least.

The actual OS was Dos. Win3.1 was a graphical desktop environment sitting on top of it.

It's more complicated than that, but whatever.

Cleaned my Presario 5284 fully by disassembling basically everything including the PSU. And I somehow didn't kill it! Although somehow I was smart enough to set the clock multi jumper to 2.5 rather than 5.0.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-10, 06:12:

The actual OS was Dos. Win3.1 was a graphical desktop environment sitting on top of it.

Yes! I keep forgetting that.

Btw I am currently updating a XP VM. I might make a topic to talk about my VMs, instead of spreading it across the topics... That way I can share my experience with them and my findings. Pretty much like a topic on MSFN forums called "Running vanilla Windows 98 in 2020" from another user, except that I might not go "vanilla" exactly... ah, I will actually create the topic. It should be fun, I will not be running just Windows, but also a certain Linux distro and maybe OS/2 Warp 4 and for sure any old macOS (System 7? OS X 10.4 Tiger?)

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-10, 06:12:

The actual OS was Dos. Win3.1 was a graphical desktop environment sitting on top of it.

That is just as wrong as it is right. There's no definite definition of what makes an OS. Windows 3.x uses its own drivers for sound, graphics, input, etc., has it's own SDK and applications (which don't run in DOS), can interact with the hardware directly (32-bit disk access, WinG for hardware-accelerated graphics) and what not. It's quite a stretch to call it "just" a GUI or GDE.

If Windows was just a GUI, then MacOS 10/X is too by the same definition. Because below is Darvin, a fork of BSD UNIX taken from NeXT, which is the actual OS running.

I got started on recapping my MSI KT3 Ultra 2 motherboard. Desoldering went a lot easier than I thought with just a cheap soldering iron, a solder pump and some solder wick.

Finally rid of those bulging, leaking pesky Teapo caps. Next step will be installing shiny new caps and building a totally overkill Barton 2500+ Voodoo 3 3000 PC with this.

Today I cleaned up the free 386 board I got yesterday. The batteryleakage was not as bad as it looked. Most of the stuff were just parts of the batteryleads stuck in the dust on the board. Just a quick clean, some scraping, added solder to cleaned traces and shes up and running. 😀

And while I was at it I dug out another 386 I started on over a year ago. I had already cleaned it and removed the very corroded keyboardconnector. So I just took the connector of a donorboard and that too boots just fine. 386sx25 with math-co.

The free 486 board I got yesterday is a little worse. Needs a more thorough cleaning to see if it's fixable.

perhenden wrote on 2020-05-09, 19:57:

It's currently at MS-DOS 3.2, but this image can be booted in qemu, so now I can make it all good and perfect for my sweet Amstrad 😀

Sweet, I used to have a 1512. PCem has an Amstrad 1512 (& 1640) mode, which I found to be quite good at emulating the machine. The HD in mine died so I don't have a real image to boot with it, but all the floppies work (inc DOS Plus).

Vegge wrote on 2020-05-10, 13:07:

The free 486 board I got yesterday is a little worse. Needs a more thorough cleaning to see if it's fixable.
IMG_5468.JPG

Good work on those 386 boards !. This 486 looks too far gone to fix but maybe not. I have one that is similar and the corrosion spread under the kb controller and simm sockets so am not going to fix it since it only supports 5v 486.

astonsmith wrote on 2020-05-10, 14:58:

perhenden wrote on 2020-05-09, 19:57:

It's currently at MS-DOS 3.2, but this image can be booted in qemu, so now I can make it all good and perfect for my sweet Amstrad 😀

The HD in mine died so I don't have a real image to boot with it, but all the floppies work (inc DOS Plus).

I can recommend the XT-IDE CF card I bought on eBay, it just worked 😀
ISA CompactFlash Adapter  IDE for 8Bit PC, XT CF LITE 4.1,  XTIDE Bootable https://ebay.us/HoFWHj

Horun wrote on 2020-05-09, 20:01:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-05-09, 15:49:

For whatever reason, today I decided to test some broken hardware yet again and found that an Antec power supply I thought was good, is indeed bad and a couple floppy drives that threw errors everywhere, are indeed OK after testing them with another PS (they throw errors when used with the Antec PS).

I just received replacement caps for my 2004 Antec 480w, it has lower volts on the +5v (at ~4v) and +12v (~9v) rails than should be and two caps look a little bloated/leaky. Unfortunately the caps that arrived are 12.5mm and I thought ordered 10mm (originals are 10mm and very tight fit in the PSU) so not sure if I can recap with them without possibly piggy-backing two caps off the board near a coil and run wires instead of straight thru the mount holes. If you can hook an old broken HD to the Antec or use a PSU tester check the volts and I bet one or more are too low.

I looked online for the capacitors needed to recap my Antec 350W, and found this page where a guy recapped a PS exactly like mine: https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?p=89628

Unfortunately, that's a lot of caps, which would be pretty expensive to buy locally (a single one of the big capacitors may cost about 12 US dollars around here, and I'm talking about just replacements, they are not even Nichicon/Panasonic) so that would make the cost of recapping (fixing?) the PS way more than a new one. Maybe later I'll lookup into bringing all the capacitors from the US, that may be less expensive.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-05-10, 05:55:

computerguy08 wrote on 2020-05-09, 21:31:

I unsuccessfully tried to set up a LAN bridge adapter for my retro rigs with an OpenWrt router using relayd. No matter what I tried I couldn't get an internet connection on the LAN ports.

Just use a 100/10 switch between your old systems and internet router. KISS

I wish I could do that, but I can't physically get a RJ-45 cable there (it requires drilling in the ceiling, which I don't want to do).

Anyways, it works now. The only thing I needed was a little bit of patience. I forgot to remove the static IP setiings on my machine after i finished the setup.

I get about 10-15 Mbps, which is okay I guess, even for XP.