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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
  
| I recieved that SD2IEC and I have been messing around with it for a couple of days. Running the filebrowser and launching stuff directly from it. No complaints, and it even looks awesomme attached on the computer. I really like this little device for what it is. And it was a bit cheaper than the ones with a long cable. Shure they look like a miniature kind of floppy drive, on the other hand, they look a bit wrong being so small and all that. I think this looks way better. I tested with a 16gb Class10 microsd card in a converter. Did not work. Though a 8gb Class4 normal size works. And yes... Took some pictures of the device attached on the computer.
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UMC U5S
Posts: 54
| even a non-OEM 9800GTX is $10
hell, a quadro FX 4800 is $20 on eGay |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | I think the K6 video is done, so uploading should start tomorrow. Ended up just biting the bullet and running with what I had as things became somewhat unpredictable, as the video will show. Looks like an improved version of the Terratec demo will be the second upload.
Sound card still not here - not a surprise as it's from outside of the UK. I have another board coming from the same part of the world;
A probable replacement for my SCC-1 as I only keep that around for compatibility reasons, I never really liked the Roland sound set that much. I've heard the sound from this and it almost reminds me of something halfway between the GUS and S-2000's MIDI, doesn't seem to have a reverb unit.
You'd never know sound cards were one of my favorite things about old machines, would you?
Also... I have decided to bite the bullet... ready?
This will replace the K6 for the time being, though I will likely look into getting a K6 board that actually works in the future. I love the P2 the most of the two, but I still love the K6 too and would like to have one that works, it is wasted in the current board so I will just shelve the parts for now and try again another time, but for now it's Pentium II time.
No VGA card yet, Matrox boards aren't usually too expensive though, might actually change from the original spec list and go dual monitor as I often found myself needing more desktop space and wanting to watch two applications at once. I'd still go Matrox as their multi monitor support for Windows GUI applications was by far the best at that time and can do some useful tricks which other cards cannot. Obviously, I shall post whichever card I get, probably next month when I can actually buy things again, bank is busted for now.
In other news, I am polishing up my original P60 and plan to sell it at some point in the future. Had enough people ask for it that I feel selecting one at this point would cause an argument, so eBay it is. Anything I make on it will go towards restoring the Pentium II. This should allow me to work on music and such much easier than I can currently as the K5 does well, but is on the slow side for more complex songs, other than that I only have >1GHz machines which are too fast and seem to introduce timing problems. The Pentium II is the sweet spot where I can still run outdated 16-Bit utilities that I need at the same time as everything else without having to worry about things being too fast, too slow or incompatible all together.
Edited by DXZeff 2017-06-01 10:39 PM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| #DXZeff:
Funny.... You have bought a Slot1 P-II bundle, and I have just set my P2B-S + P-II-350 up for sale.
In the process of slimming down my collection, in order to get room for C64 stuff. (Hooked on C64 now)
As much as I love PC's, there is something magical about C64's and other old 80's machines.
So I guess I am going to aim at 80's stuff from now on.
Anyway... Congrats on all those nice items. Looks like fun to play with. Especially that soundcard.
EDIT:
I bought a new PLA chip for my C64. It began to make some funky glitches and the C64 diagnostic software
reported some timing error and some U5 error. After some reading, I found that typing "poke 1,63" and
the machine freezing, meant that the CPU was bad and not freezing meant that the PLA is bad.
So I ordered that PLA and a socket to make it a tiny bit more professional. Hope I do not screw up soldering.
Edited by Brostenen 2017-06-01 11:31 PM
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UMC U5S
Posts: 54
| At what point are you going to lose the "magic" of using a C64? Using flash drives to avoid loading the game from the awful cassette deck or from using the fragile commodore FDD kills the only excitement of just trying to get the game to work. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| 486u - 2017-06-03 4:54 AM
At what point are you going to lose the "magic" of using a C64? Using flash drives to avoid loading the game from the awful cassette deck or from using the fragile commodore FDD kills the only excitement of just trying to get the game to work.
I can not speak for anyone other than me. The magic is in the game it self on a real C64. SD cards does not prohibit me from having a nostalgia trip. And I save money. Floppy and casette are not a thing for me because of the price/reliability. One floppy disk are like 150kb and I can get one 2gb card for the price of 5 floppy disks. The SD card drive are cheaper to get than a floppy drive in mint condition.
As I said. The magic is not in the storage media. It is in the machine it self with the games being played on it.
Magic differs from person to person. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | I'm a purist myself and whilst it pains me to do such things, I'm not about to get too upset about using flash memory. As long as the machine itself is the real deal it's fine, as the tapes/disks/cards or whatever are only there to get the software loaded, they have little to nothing to do with actually running it.
Real SID - Check,
Real 6502 - Check
Real video circuitry and a CRT to use it with - Check
Whatever, I'm good with that. I also use EverDrive carts with consoles for similar reasons, cartridges are often far too expensive now and I'll only buy them if I really, really want the game. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| DXZeff - 2017-06-03 2:08 PM
I'm a purist myself and whilst it pains me to do such things, I'm not about to get too upset about using flash memory. As long as the machine itself is the real deal it's fine, as the tapes/disks/cards or whatever are only there to get the software loaded, they have little to nothing to do with actually running it.
Real SID - Check,
Real 6502 - Check
Real video circuitry and a CRT to use it with - Check
Whatever, I'm good with that. I also use EverDrive carts with consoles for similar reasons, cartridges are often far too expensive now and I'll only buy them if I really, really want the game.
Speaking of cartridges... There is a product called easyflash ;-)
EDIT:
Or smartphone casette interface for use instead of casette tapes. The thing is just as slow as a real casette deck, and there is an Android app, wich looks like a casette deck, with the correct buttons. It is working with the play/stop/pause fuction that headset's are relying upon. The SD2IEC and the MP32C64 interface are both as slow as real floppy's and casette's. So the retro feel of waiting for something to load, are still preserved.
Edited by Brostenen 2017-06-03 8:52 PM
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | Legend QDI. Nice. What speed is the PII? I think if I was concerned with dual monitor setup, and wasn't interested in using a Geforce solution like a cheap 6200 or Geforce 4 MX card, I'd probably choose the G400 Max for a PII. Seems like a good card for gaming as well as dual monitor.
I also bit a bullet and picked up a Foxconn AM2 board with the nforce 590 sli chipset and the fastest K8 based Athlon 64 made, the X2 6400+. This will also be a good comparison of K8 vs K10, 939 vs AM2, that sort of stuff. I don't know yet if I will run some old school SLI on this board or not.
EverDrive FTW baby! The guy that invented that is a total genius and deserves to be Elon Musk rich from it.
I can always tell when you are uploading a video Paul. The forum gets slllloooowwww 
Edited by waybacktech 2017-06-04 12:51 AM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | @Brostenen; Saw those carts around before now, they look neat enough.
With tapes, I've loaded things from a PC's line-out to the C64 before now. Not entirely reliably due to my crappy wiring, but it served its purpose.
@WaybackTech; That board is pretty much the same model I had before, likewise the CPU is 450MHz. Turns out they're not so easy to find around here at that speed and there are a few mis-labeled Pentium 3's out there. I was looking at the G400 cards, I've used them before and they never yielded any problems, so it is quite likely that this is what I will use. Game-wise they hold up as I always used the P2 for GDI, DirectDraw or superfast DOS stuff, so never really missed the faster 3D capabilities other cards might have offered - and that was with a G100.
SLI eh? I never got into that whole thing. I guess now it's fun to mess with, but as I've only really owned one PCI-E system I never had a chance to mess with such things. That system only just came out of use as my main machine and it supports CrossFire, but I could never justify the cost and needed nVidia cards anyway due to problems with ATI and OpenGL that hung around far too long. What always got me is that sure, you could SLI some cards and have more power, but usually current generation mid-range cards could play everything in their league - so a DX10 card would be good for 99% of the DX10 era. By the time you start really being able to use that extra SLI power the games have moved on to DirectX 11 anyway, which said SLI setup doesn't support, so if you want to play with all the bells and whistles you'd have to upgrade the cards anyway, rendering the advantages of the multiple card setup questionable if worth anything at all.
By now I guess there's nothing to stop me getting a couple of old CrossFire capable cards and testing it out just to see how it actually handles. I don't have to rely on the Pentium D anymore, so there's not so much of a requirement to keep the configuration the way it was, though I would always restore it to that eventually. No such thing will happen until I replace the water pump though, amazed it lasted as long as it did to be honest.
EverDrive, has to be one of the best gaming purchases I ever made. As I said, if I like the game enough I will still grab a legit copy of it, but I don't feel guilty otherwise as the cartridges aren't sold new anymore. Plus it gains access to things that were never flashed to cartridges. The only thing which is missing is SuperFX support on the SNES version, but I have heard a version was being worked on that added this. There weren't many FX games anyway and there aren't many I wish to own, so chasing down the real cartridges for those isn't such a big deal anyway.
Supposedly the whole block goes slow when I upload, regardless of which line I use.
Edited by DXZeff 2017-06-04 10:54 AM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | I have installed and tested the Maui card; https://www.mediafire.com/?9o45z49tirm376t
Currently fails to load in DOS but because of their random nature I think that's down to the SIMMs I installed, I don't remember if they worked properly before and supposedly I don't need them to use the stock sounds, so I'll just remove them for now. Haven't gotten much done otherwise, haven't been sleeping well, seems to be leveling itself out again now though so I can actually concentrate instead of feeling like I'm on the verge of passing out all the time. Happens every so often, so nothing really alarming there. The Maui card though, yeah, seems like a good fit for the P66 in place of the SCC-1. Otherwise I need to change some of my wiring, there are like four devices in there which all have to connect to that one PAS16.
Edited by DXZeff 2017-06-06 8:19 AM
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Intel P5
Posts: 85
Location: UK | On the subject of soundcards, I have a Ensoniq Soundscape VIVO90 ISA card that I picked up early last year from a car boot sale for 50p. Is this thing any good? was thinking of putting it in my UMC 486 SX 40 machine, the system has 95 OSR2 on it at the moment, anyone know if drivers are built in for the ensoniq? If not anyone got 'em? |
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UMC U5S
Posts: 54
| OEM card
All the effects are pre-processed and stored alongside the samples in the wavetable which is a kinda shit way to do it.
http://files.mpoli.fi/hardware/SOUND/OTHER/SC600W95.ZIP |
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Intel P5
Posts: 85
Location: UK | OK thanks.
Decided against messing with the 486 & Ensoniq but have saved the drivers you linked for a later time. And instead pulled out my PII system. It's one of the few OEM machines I own, a Toshiba Equium 7100s. A very neat and small BX based platform, comes apart in a very ingenious way, it's a very user friendly little box. Mine has a 350 MHz CPU, RAGE Pro with 8 MB(Turbo!! lol), Creative SB16 sound. It's one of those machines that just works flawlessly, no compatibility issues or driver weirdness. The Rage isn't the best (as we all know) but it does well enough for a system of this speed and the 2D image is excellent, near as good as Matrox.
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | Never used a VIVO, but I'd imagine it was kinda like an ISA version of the SB128 in principal.
My Pentium II board is here. The seller had another one listed which came with a video card and, err, think they messed up, because the one I ordered wasn't. I now have a free Rage IIC to add to my collection, guess it doesn't hurt to have another spare and it might be useful down the line for something else I am considering doing.
Still recovering from the lack of sleep - my eyes are still really black - but I'll post back later if I get around to testing it. It's possible I might just pass out again though, not arguing with it if my body wants to sleep as I've no obligation to be anywhere and being tired sucks. Feel OK right now though, just kind odd, as is to be expected.
Edited by DXZeff 2017-06-06 4:32 PM
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Intel P5
Posts: 85
Location: UK | I used to have a lot of sleep issues,night terrors for years, it's horrid, they said it was PTSD. Thankfully mine mostly passed with old age! Now I have issues with staying awake. Not that I miss much anyway  Well it's only work right? Right!?
Edited by CyrixInstead 2017-06-06 5:29 PM
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UMC U5S
Posts: 54
| Bought a whole bunch of new things because I got my tax returns
- Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold
- Compaq Presario 500MHz K7 OEM machine
- VIA P4PA Socket 478 motherboard still in the box
- PSU for the fucked 130W 486DX2 the Syba adapter destroyed
- Asus LGA775 Motherboard
- Core 2 Quad Q9550
- Quadro FX 4800
- AT case to complete my socket 7 baby-AT build (not one of the fleabag $150 AT case sellers on eBay, found this one buried)
Gonna be an exciting day when this shit starts showing up. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | @CyrixInstead; For me it's just that I've never been good at going to sleep. It has improved over the years, I used to do three days awake and a whole day asleep and there was nothing I could do. Now I do sleep pretty much every day and people say you sleep more as you age, so it will probably get better... Then pass a tipping point and, knowing my luck, see me become horribly narcoleptic or something, grandpa Simpson style. I quite like being asleep because I'm able to remember my dreams and on some occasions, less and less as time goes on, even realize I'm dreaming and change things.
@486u; Neat, I'm glad you've found a replacement for the broken 486 PSU too, I hate when a machine has to be shelved because the parts cannot be found, so I hope that works out for you.
----------------------------------------
Haven't gotten around to testing the P2 board, but it's put aside ready for it and I know where my RAM for it is, so maybe tomorrow if I don't end up with any obligations. I decided to just be lazy today and laid around for the most part, but I did fix the Maui and its wiring. It was the RAM I had installed, as suspected, but it does work without it so replacing those SIMMs isn't high on my priorities list and I'll likely just wait for some left-overs from somewhere else to appear. As for the wiring, the WinTV passes through the Maui and that goes out to a cable which connects to the PAS16's AUX header, leaving the Line-In free. The case I used came new, but with the PS/2 hole already open on the back, something the Abit PS5 board doesn't have, so I just fed it into that hole. Probably add a rubber gromit to make it look tidier and adhesive hook it around neatly inside the case later on. For now I'll just tie it in place with garden wire using the ventilation holes.
I also made some last minute touch-ups to my Banjo Kazooie videos, nothing major, just spelling corrections to a few text-overs and a few missing clips I wanted to insert. Kinda sad to see there are only about 10 parts left to go, I've had so much fun with that, even just with the editing.
Edited by DXZeff 2017-06-06 10:38 PM
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | I've been around RageIIc's but never considered them worthy of anything I would use them for. I've got 1 or 2 still, maybe I will test one out just to see how much they really suck, or be shocked at their wicked performance...
I bought a 3D printer kit.. should come in handy for things. Now I just need to get a scanner of some sort and I should be set. Besides using it for modeling, computer wise I think it will come in handy to make brackets to hold
these heavy video cards, not to mention cooling ducts, hold down brackets for heat sinks, IDK what all I could think of but I think the $170 for the kit will be well worth it. |
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UMC U5S
Posts: 54
| I know someone who bought one of those. It was shimmed together because certain parts didn't fit together properly until, ironically, he used the printer to print the correctly sized parts. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Bought this today.....
It has all the cables, the powersupply, mouse, two "the arcade" joysticks, a full box of disks,
original manuals and an extra external floppy drive. Really looking forward to play some games on it.
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | @WaybackTech; Never used a Rage IIC for anything outside of simple Windows applications, so I don't really know how well they work outside of that. I seem to think the DVD acceleration was OK on a low-end P2 but it was so long ago I'd not take that as a given.
I don't doubt I'll get a 3D printer eventually, once the list of things that would be useful to print becomes long enough to motivate me into parting with the initial cost. Suppose it could pay for itself eventually.
@486u; Maybe it was like those old Meccano sets that included deliberate errors to teach your kids to be better engineers when they grow up?
@Brostenen; Never used a 600, but a part of me still misses my 500. I do have an Atari ST, but I never really use it that much, keep meaning to give sequencing a go with it as they have MIDI sockets on the side and were quite common in the Eurodance world for a while.
Edited by DXZeff 2017-06-07 10:00 PM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| 486u - 2017-06-06 11:07 PM
Bought a whole bunch of new things because I got my tax returns
- Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold
- Compaq Presario 500MHz K7 OEM machine
- VIA P4PA Socket 478 motherboard still in the box
- PSU for the fucked 130W 486DX2 the Syba adapter destroyed
- Asus LGA775 Motherboard
- Core 2 Quad Q9550
- Quadro FX 4800
- AT case to complete my socket 7 baby-AT build (not one of the fleabag $150 AT case sellers on eBay, found this one buried)
Gonna be an exciting day when this shit starts showing up.
Sweet... Some of those are nice parts.
I have 3 AWE64-Gold's and I love them for what they are. Namely a decent card with really low line noise.
There are better cards, yet the Gold are still one of the best non-opl ISA cards.
(well... In my book anyway)
Edited by Brostenen 2017-06-07 10:36 PM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| #DXZeff:
You can look at the 600, as an 500+ without numeric keypad, with PCMCIA and integrated HDD controller instead.
Same amount of mem, same chipset and so on. People here, ask the same for an 600, as they ask for an 500
with Kickstart 1.3 and OCS. Sometimes even more (25+ percent) for an 500 with less stuff on the side.
EDIT:
Atari. Ay!! Hmmm... Try connecting an MT32 (if you have one) and play some old Sierra or Lucas art games.
They should be MT32 compatible out of the box, on an Atari machine.
Edited by Brostenen 2017-06-07 10:42 PM
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Chips 386
Posts: 28
Location: Wigan, UK | Just got my FireGL X2-256T in the mail, and it works perfectly! Currently playing around with it in my dual K7, so far everything seems to be performing so much better than with the HD3650. It's more-or-less a Radeon 9800XT, which are pretty expensive these days. Has a very beefy cooler too. Not bad for £15, at all.
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