What retro related thing have you done recently?

[Washerman]

FYI, received my 287fpu, and the doco above appears correct. The benchmark tools I have run report the FPU as running at 8MHZ.

Good stuff. Is your 286 a custom build or a pre-built machine?

[monaro327]

It's a Toshiba T3100e, not my video but the same laptop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no-SQOOcbdA

Lovely luggable but my issue with it is it has expandable memory (old 1meg standard) but the memory is proprietary, thus far impossible to find any.

[monaro327]

Just installed a sound blaster pro 2 ct1600 into my 486dx2 works perfectly so far. WIN!

[Washerman]

Awesome! Love the grounding strap too! Did you finally get WC up and running smoothly?

Funnily enough today I pulled a CT1600 out of my desktop 486, but just for the interim. Also fixed the speed display for a DX4/100...

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This link was helpful as my display is a generic one thankfully - http://www.amsky.com/~cirkuit/comptips/speddisp.html

[monaro327]

No luck with WC yet haven't really looked into it any further got caught up getting the SBPRO2 working. now I just need to source some little speakers as the cheap ear buds aren't comfortable.

Yep I always use and ANTI static strap for this old stuff. tend not to bother with newer stuff. I also have a big anti static mat I use for builds.

Love the DX4 I had one back in the day as my main PC for any years. Always impressed me as it managed to play many games that were Pentium only titles at what at the time I thought was acceptable levels.

In a sad turn of events the monitor in my Toshiba t3100 died. Trying to find a replacement might have found something on ebay.

[monaro327]

8meg of ram enough in everyones opinion for a 486dx2? or should I look at going to 16 or 32mb? I don't run windows just DOS 6.22.

[Washerman]

Hey monaro, I'd say 8MB should be enough for DOS and early DOS games, but with current availability of RAM, 16MB might be the go. With a couple of 64MB 486DX4 setups I'm kind of worried about having too much RAM! but there are workarounds.

Nice discussion about RAM in DOS on Vogons - http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=7 ... be690c64cb

[monaro327]

Well, I've bidded on a bulk lot of 8mb EDO sticks hope fully EDO ram works on in my board? Most 72pin boards should work with EDO ram? So I should be able to swap out the 8meg stick for 2 x 8meg sticks for 16meg. I wont be running Windows so this should be enough.

Also won a AMD 5x86 133mhz chip. Not really sure if i'll use this. I generally think anything that needs more grunt then a dx2 66mhz is probably better off on a Pentium anyway. But be interesting to see how it performs.

[Washerman]

I'm not sure that most 486 boards use EDO, I've generally only been able to use Fast Page RAM in my 486 boards. You'll have to check the specs of your motherboard on that one.

You're probably right with the AMD chip; I've also bought a 400MHz Socket 7 upgrade, and anything requiring that would be best off with PII/PIII levels of power! These days it's all for the novelty

[monaro327]

Yeah K6 stuff is pretty cheap unless it's the rarer k6+ cpus. A k6.3+ at 550/600mhz will hold it's own against the top Pentium 2's I had a k6.2+ back in the day and was very happy with it.

I'd like to track down a Cyrix 5x86 as apparently these are pinnacle of socket 3, but they seem to be around $80+ for a working example. Apparently their FPU performance is equal to a 100mhz Pentium on socket 3! I do find this hard to believe as the cyrix fpu performance on every socket 7 cpu is horrid. I remember back in the day my friend had a 400mhz? Cyrix M11 and it seemed to run half life slower then a Pentium 166mmx.

[monaro327]

Well, I won the ram see if any of it works. Also won a gravis joystick for Wing Commander.

[Washerman]

How did you go with the RAM and the Gravis?

[monaro327]

Ram hasn't arrived yet. Got the gravis but un tested thus far.

[Washerman]

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!

[avalanche]

Pow! You have my attention Storage man

[pfrcom]

Finally got my all-SCSI garage system sorted

This originally used an Asus P2-99B motherboard, which stopped working

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?p=17125276#post17125276

Then the 2GB Quantum Atlas mounted on the side turned up its toes as well

It's a pain to replace, needing the CD drives slid forward to access its screws, and to access the CD screws needs the centre drive cage removed

Anyway, here's the final outcome, now using a PC Partner 35-c871 i810 based board with a Pentium3-900

There's two drives underneath, as well as the two mounted sideways

The one in the middle is a double-height 4.5GB IBM DFHS

Now using an ATX power supply, with the case's Turbo button acting as power switch

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[avalanche]

Battleship of a case there champ. Wish mine were that good. Notice a x8 speed cd drive ?

[pfrcom]

Notice a x8 speed cd drive ?

CD drives are both Panasonic SCSIs - CR-508 reader and CW-7503 writer

Top one is CW-7503 with x8 write speed

As I recall, nomenclature was CD-ROM for a reader, CD-R for a writer, and CD-RW for a re-writer

Floppy's a Panasonic as well

SCSI adapter is an Asus PCI-SC875 using the LSI Logic (previously Symbios, originally NCR) SC875 chip

Unlike Adaptec, LSI Logic controllers can selectively spin up drives, so I don't have noise of all four going

[avalanche]

Yet to learn scsi myself Peter. Still better later than never.

Itching to hook these up. Have that ultimate old school music duke box.
NAKAMICHI MJ-5.16
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NAKAMICHI-MJ- ... XQuTNTMZZC

Board I have for this can run dual slot ones, cannot recall now model.........then just recently got a Socket A with scsi onboard too.

[BuuBox]

Got a 939 board off OCAU to have a play with (Asus M2N-MX SE Plus with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+).

Not retro, but 11 years old now so "old". :p I skipped the 754/939 era back in the day, going straight from 462 to 775. So this is out of interest more than anything else!