Been up to a bit of retro in the midst of some chaos at home.
All of my "work" was done on a test bench setup of an MSI 440LX-based motherboard, 64MB PC100 RAM and Socket 370 Celeron 533, hooked up to a 20GB IDE drive. Current AGP card is a Leadtek GF4 Ti4200. Audio card is a Yamaha XWave, seems OK but the drivers might be causing some lag under Windows. Mostly interested in it for the SB-LINK header on it, and possible use under DOS.

- Test setup
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First little project was to try and get a Voodoo 1 up and running. Unfortunately I think having had a Voodoo 2 installed previously has made the settings unworkable for the Voodoo 1. On top of that I noticed that my prized V1, a Canopus Pure 3D, has bent pins on the TMU due to impact damage, and in the course of straightening them out two of them came loose

so that's another repair job. Thankfully I have more V1s to test so I will have to shift the project to another setup.

- Pure 3D
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Seeing as Half-Life wouldn't initialise with the Voodoo 1/3dfx Mini-GL driver, I decided to play it using the Ti4200. It ran very, very poorly indeed. The last time I played H-L was with a PII-300, IIRC 128MB RAM and V2 SLI and it was pretty smooth - so it suggests that this Celeron CPU is really struggling, unless it needs more RAM? After a bit of a Half-Life slideshow, I shifted my focus to Microsoft Hellbender, with a Logitech WingMan Extreme 3D - nice joystick, however the stick twist function appears to be broken. Put in half an hour just now, but it crashed upon saving ... maybe it doesn't like the large hard disk

- Wingman Extreme
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- Hellbender
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Finally, decided to try and make more use of the Amstrad PC1512, and to write the system floppy images to actual 5.25" disks. Hooked up a 360k 5.25" drive to the test setup, copied the floppy images to the hard drive using a USB stick (one of the niceties of Win98), and restarted in DOS mode. Things were going well ... until the floppy ran out of space, and I realised that I've opened a fresh pack of C64/Apple II floppies ... grrrrr.

- 5.25" drive
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Other breakthrough was finding my box of SCSI drives

now I have to retrieve the SCSI cables from an off-site location.

- SCSI drives
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Oh, and I started to clean up an Amiga 500 I bought for fairly cheap ... will need a separate thread for that when I get the time!