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Harris 286
Posts: 15
Location: Sunny Blackpool | Just picked up the beginnings of my 10 gigabit networking project. At the moment I'm only moving two servers to 10GbE (using SFP+ DACs) so I went for a Dell PowerConnect 5524 - 24 Gig-E, 2x SFP+ - it was only 80 pounds.
These servers are my Hyper-V host (HP DL380 G7, 2 X5670s, 72GB RAM and 4 1TB 10K SATA drives in Raid10) and my file server (generic 4u chassis with 20 drive bays, 8 in use, 8x2TB in RAID5 (yuck, I know) with a Core2Quad at present)
The ultimate end-game is to move to fiber throughout as it's surprisingly cheap - a pre-terminated 100ft fiber cable is 15 quid and the transceivers are around 13 quid.
Pictures and benchmarks to follow on Tuesday / Wednesday when it all shows up.
Edited by edneil 2018-09-14 10:50 AM
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Chips 386
Posts: 37
| I'm facing a real life stuff / tasks for quite a long days, even may say they are taking my whole time, right up to my neck. And because of that, sadly, I cannot spend a time on the forum nor on the hobby (..I'm sharing with the forum dwellers).
It's still great to know the forum is alive (and quite well). That's a really positive thing.
Brief /cheers, (even if I'm not an established visitor here, obviously). |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
 
Location: Hull, UK | Also been busy with other things lately, but still finding time to do stuff. The rats do take up time however, a few hours of every day that I'd probably only have wasted otherwise;
Meanwhile I changed the CD drive in the P66 and moved the CDR100 out into an external caddy, this configuration might not stay depending on how things work out;
Meant to post these a while back, just some artwork from that Dragon 2K pirate disc;
The last one is the menu background, I should have recovered enough of this disc to actually run the menu at some point though it really isn't all that interesting. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| #DXZeff
Yeah. Rats take up a lot of time. I once, many years ago, had a rat my self. In order to socialize it, I had it living on my pocket during school time. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | At this stage I'm only bothering to socialize one of them and will be trying to find them a new home eventually, with more rats, that they can go to. The gray one is cool, she runs up my arm and sits on my shoulder, but the black one is just miserable. She was fine early on, by far the braver of the two and used to beat the gray one every time they had a light scrap, but then something spooked her and she just cowered in the corner screaming, staring at something I can't see near the keyboard stand, she kept doing it. Whenever she has an episode like that she will go off her food for a few hours and just sit there, so the gray one gets bored and I have to try my best to keep her company, she'll just ignore the black one and won't even sleep in the same place as her when this is going on. I think they'd benefit from having other rats around, the black one because it might boost her confidence, the gray one because it's a waste for her to be stressed by the black one all the time and she gets lonely.
I have had a vet check it out and they can't find anything wrong, said it's just something she's obviously going to do and that there's not much I can do about it, though on the up-side it doesn't seem to be anything I did and anyway, she's not usually bothered by me being around the cage so it's obviously something else, so at least I don't have that worry stressing me out any more. We did hope she would improve but it's been a over a week and things are no better, if anything they're worse because the gray one is getting depressed from having no other rat to play with, she tries to play with the black one but the black one just cries and they're both being continually disturbed, because when the black one is moping it will hoard the food and just sit in the bed, it will then crap in the bed and stink up the cage which bothers the gray one even more and means I have to keep cleaning and replacing things more often than I should.
If I could, I'd just keep the gray one and dump the black one on someone else, but they don't do well on their own, so as it is I'm just ignoring the black one because I honestly can't be bothered, she's got food, she's got water, she's got a place to hide, sucks to be her if she can't be bothered with anything else, means treats are now half-price and I can just leave the cage door open when the gray one is out because the black one will never try to escape. By contrast the gray one is a likable menace and will not only come out to explore if I leave the door open, but has also been seen to mess with the catches in an attempt to open said doors. Not too worried about her figuring it out as she'd just come to me if it did open anyway.
But yeah, it's bothering me, I'd get a couple more and start introducing them if I had the space, just to try and offset this issue, but I don't have the room so the best thing for them is going to be to find someone else who already has rats to look after them. Sucks, I'll miss the gray one a lot, but after trying what I can and giving it serious thought, it really does seem like the best thing I can do for the rats themselves, I don't want them to be miserable after all and there really isn't anything else I can do. One of the people I talked to suggested 'forcing' the black one to socialize, but I don't think this is retaliate' stuff is gonna go out of the window and she'll be pinned on her back before she knows what's what, so I'm not wasting my time on that idea because it will help nobody, neither me nor the rats. The gray one bites but that's different, it's not an attack, she's just curious and this seems to be their way of figuring out the world, it doesn't hurt and stops quickly once she realizes my finger, ear or nose doesn't taste good, I don't mind.
So as I said, I'll look after them for now as best I can and maybe start trying to find somewhere else next month. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| #DXZeff
I really like, that you worry for them. Shure they are just small animals, yet they still are animals. Not like you are doing all them extreme things, that you sometimes see peple do with their pets. You know. Those that puts their animals high up in the same league as that of humans. Need to treat the animals well, just dont overdoo. Hope you know what I am trying to say here. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Moving the danish keycaps from the dead a500 keyboard, to a working a500 keyboard, that was originally with German layout. And then updating my blog about the reastauration of the Amiga500 Revision 5 machine. |
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Harris 286
Posts: 15
Location: Sunny Blackpool | I finally got the 10GbE project completed. Along the way I've decided that Supermicro's X9 boards are not great: so many expansion cards simply do not work with them. Adaptec 5 series RAID controllers cause endless reboot loops in the controller BIOS, HP NC523SFP 10GbE NICs cause the boards to hang at the BIOS and some NVIDIA GPUs just do not get detected at all. Very frustrating.
I'm running a HP NC522SFP in my DL380 G7, which is hooked up using a DAC to a Dell PowerConnect 5224. The other SFP+ port on the switch goes to my file server with the above mentioned problematic Supermicro X9SCA-F motherboard, which too has an HP NC522SFP.
Out of the box I'm seeing about 1.9GBit/s using iperf, which is not overly impressive. I think some significant tweaking is required.
In [arguably more interesting] retro computing news, I've dug out my 286 and 386 systems - both came from solicitors and both are decidedly boring machines. The 286 does have a Seagate MFM (?? I don't know much about these _old_ systems!) hard disk - It's an ST-251-1 drive with matching (unidentified) controller card, which I haven't been able to get working yet - but I think it's just my inexperience with this stuff. The 386 system was in active use until 2006 or so! It ran Windows 3.1 and Lotus 1-2-3. I will probably throw some pictures up in the Discord in the hopes somebody will be able to tell me what the heck I'm looking at! |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | The X10SAE has still been pretty much trouble free so far. One thing to keep in mind is that the X9SCA PCI-E slots are, as far as I remember, sometimes larger than the actual number of lanes they connect to, so that could be part of the issue.
Meanwhile one of those Socket 8 to Slot 1 adapters I was on about a few days ago is on eBay for stupidly high money, but it's there in case you've ever looked at your Pentium II and thought 'Yeah, I like it, but it'd be a lot better if it was kinda shit.'. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | Got some nice stuff as an early birthday present to myself. Firstly this thing, watched it for a while and figured I may as well play with a DX-50 for a while, this can live in place of the VI9 as that thing is flogged out, probably will move it on when I'm done with it as its novelty will likely be limited;
Took a gamble on an untested lot, not likely to use all of these whatsoever if they work, but the X5 chips I had weren't replaced and these are ADZ ones, meaning cooler running and 160MHz pretty much guaranteed if needed;
Whilst the listing does not specify the board models, I can identify them by sight due to too many hours spent with 486 hardware, so clockwise from top left is - QDI V4P895P3, a Cirrus VGA card that has been pillaged for parts and will probably just go in a drawer once it gets here, MSI MS-4144 (a great board, had one, miss it), a DEC board I don't care about, some memory that might work or not as it looks a bit beaten up, Octek Hippo 15 (does not feature DCA), ECS UM8810PAIO (one currently listed for almost as much as this lot cost). Odds are that some spare boards, if they work, will be traded or sold at a later time as I doubt I'd ever use all of them.
Lots of hope that the MS-4144 works, this is a later revision than the one I had and supports more CPUs than that one did, I think they also fixed a cache problem that the older board could exhibit in rare circumstances. Very fast motherboard, with a 120MHz 486 this would be able to catch my P66 up quite convincingly if it worked, but as this revision supports the X5 it should be capable of catching a P75 quite easily. Really hope this one works even though the P66 has taken the place of the system I had with one of these in, this is the one out of the lot that I really want.
Figured it was time to replace my old keyring, this contains a genuine 486 die and the other side features the 486 logo;
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | On a little bit of a 486 kick eh? Interesting external battery going on on that first one. The MB lot has a nice selection of PCI 486 mobo's. Should be good boards. Never hurts to have spares if nothing else. The DX-50 should be able to O/C to 60/66 if you felt so inclined to try, mine do anyway. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Today is our 5 year day together. So we went to a nice french inspired restaurant. It was really great.
My woman had clams, salmon and chokolade mouse. I had shrimp salad, steak and nougat pie. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | Both the untested lot and the working DX-50 are here. Of course the DX-50 works as that was sold as tested and working by a seller I know to be reliable, meanwhile the untested lot needed some coaxing but 4/4 of the boards I tested do work, the MS-4144 has a defective Keyboard Controller chip though, it gets really hot and I can't pass POST due to said controller which is even reported by the BIOS, I have ordered a DIP40 socket and a new Amikey 2 chip to try and get it back in full running order, otherwise it seems to work fine and it is a later revision which can boot the '586' chips without issue, it also appears to have slightly better EDO support.
Meanwhile I am considering using the ECS one in place of the Aquarius in my POD provided the benchmarks check out fine, much as I do like the Aquarius this appears to be a better board on the same 888 chipset with some less common features for a 486; It has a functional PNP BIOS implemented, it supports damn near every CPU even offering less common voltages, it has a full screen POST logo (Highscreen), it has fully working EDO support, it supports large caches, it has automatic HDD detection - basically it's like a Socket 5 board as far as features go, the only problem is the CMD0640 controller but it has a jumper to disable this, then again the better PCI implementation may allow for Windows 95 with the SPEA cards more reliably which would negate the problem.
In theory this board should be able to run a 66MHz bus due to using the same clock generator setup as most other 888 boards, such as the Aquarius and BioStar ones.
Of course I might just give the job to the MS-4144 if I can get it working, because unless MSI ruined something in this revision, it was a faster board and unless ECS did something clever with the 888 on their board, I think the SiS 490 is pretty much always faster, though it does have a less fleshed out PCI implementation.
For anyone wondering the Octek is another UMC 888 based board.
Edited by DXZeff 2018-09-29 9:47 PM
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | Last gen 486 boards are very nice with all the bells and whistles. A handful of 486 boards I had which did not work I heated up the board and removed their ZIF sockets as those can be plugged into LIF socket boards.
As for this side of the pond....
The Viper SE with PowerVR 9100 chip is working flawlessly. I was a little worried about the bios having had it's sticker removed and exposing the glass. The card comes with 2MB of ram, so with the additional 8 sockets, it would top out at 6MB if 512K chips were used but cards I have seen with their memory installed were of the 256K variant which would be 4MB. Either way I don't think there is a real need to upgrade the memory on the card as 2MB is sufficient to enable high colors / res and refreshes in Windows.
Purchases these past 2 weeks have been some SATA to SAS adapters, Radeon 2400 and 2600 AGP both for pretty cheap figured they would be good cards for comparisons and besides a few music cd's I also bought an N64 complete with a couple games ( not sports games either! ) for $35 and will get an Everdrive for it after i confirm everything actually works.
Future purchases are a possible Ryzen 2700x build in a few weeks, live stream the build if I decide to pop on everything, looking at doing a full AMD build as in also going with a Vega 64 card instead of Nvidia. I was going to fill the board wtih 32GB of ram but ram compatibility issues with Ryzen have steered me to ram that is recommended and of course costs a bit more for the high speed stuff that I want to get the most out of Ryzen. Overclocking is apparently also a waste of time on these chips, however I will be getting the best board, ASUS ROG Crosshair VII just because I might as well spend the extra $30 over the other 2 choices iwas looking at from Asrock and Gigabyte, but who knows, I may find out something compelling enough to make me go with a cheaper board. I was convinced the 2600x was a better chip after seeing the benchmarks on Youtube, and a $130 cheaper, until I found the 2700X cheaper at ebay than newegg ( $40 cheaper ) and if I live stream I'd live to have the extra couple cores for OBS so I'll stick with the 2700x I think.
I also found an Asrock full ATX Socket 775 board with AGP and PCI-E supporting 1066fsb quad core chips that I thought might be fun to mess with so that is another thumb tacked item.
So that's about all I got for now. Working on the Cyrix 586/120 at the moment. Found out the Foxconn / Alienware 590sli AM2 board I am using for the 6400+ does not with with K10 chips despite "updating" the bios with the foxconn bios. Alienware bios images from that era seem to not exist anymore. Anyway the previous owner of the board already had upgraded to the same revision of the Alienware bios. So I guess that board is just of an early revision that does not work with K10 at all. Disappointed a bit given I wanted to compared the 2 cores on the same platform but that's fine the system was never built to be a K10 anyway.
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | The local copier man used to swear by PowerVR and held onto it way longer than he really should. It was an interesting API in its own right.
Sorry I missed your livestream last week, I was asleep at the time and have been busy otherwise with boring real world crap.
The KBC on the MS-4144 has been replaced and it works, though the included cache chips are also dead. Still, nice to have another one running at last, always missed the one that DX4 was in, the board can also run the X5 with some undocumented settings. |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Not computer related. This weekend, I found a the last pieces of Transformers toys that my parents had kept since I was a child. So I cleaned them and now it is my son's turn to try and wear them out. I know that at least one of them are collectable, yet they are no near perfect in condition. He will get them, in the state that I left them in. And the fun can continue. There are three normal sized ones, one that are supposed to be a kind of "key" and then four miniature ones. As far as I remember, they are all original 90's transformer toys. My god... He will be a happy little man.
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Transformers-04.jpg (368KB - 448 downloads)
Transformers-05.jpg (517KB - 464 downloads)
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | My internet was screwed up this weekend so I couldn't stream. I will be upgrading the internet quite heavily ( 400mb/s ) this week hopefully. If I don't get above the base package speed of 100mb/s then I will drop back to that and save that extra $20. I am on 1gb network so should be interesting to see how this all ends up working.
Something interesting must have happened to that board to fry the KBC and cache chips. As long as it works that's all that really matters. I intend to set something up with the Intel DX4-100 chip
I was using the PowerVR card all weekend in the 586-120 and had no problems, found out that there are clock speed settings in the driver as well, default was set to 42Mhz so I bumped it up to the max of 50Mhz. I don't know why you would not want the card running at full speed but ya still a neat option that you don't see on cards from that era. Drivers are standard Weitek and not Diamond, at least that is all I could find at the moment so IDK if that is what Diamond shipped with the card or if they did have their own driver with "in control tools". The driver has some other options regarding pci performance and color depth beyond the basic slider in Windows for bit color.
The 586-120 was also treated to a CT3600 SB32 card that I think after gaming on it for awhile is really a pretty decent card that Creative made. It is basically just a SB16 with the EMU8000 from the Awe32 slapped on it, but I did not notice the noise and hiss from the card that is usually heard on SB16's and Awe64 cards. I could not get the SB32 drivers for DOS working with the card, but I had no problem under windows 95 and so far every DOS game I have tried detected the card perfectly while running under 95. I also tried the SB16 DOS drivers with the same result so I am not sure but it might be this motherboard and the PNP implementation or maybe the card just does not work under DOS which I kinda find hard to believe, but so far this is the only motherboard I have used the card with so I guess anything is possible at the moment but at least the card works because it was sold as parts/repair.
I also built my original K5-133 setup that I had back in 1997 with a couple minimal upgrades and am using an 8GB CF card with it. I am not happy at all with the AWE64 looking SB16 card I threw in there, it distorts heavily above about half volumes which is not very loud at all so I will switch that out, probably throw that crap card away as I would never use it again with that garbled distortion mess. |
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | This is the video scaler I was looking at getting. I am wondering if you have any thoughts on it Hightreason - https://www.ebay.com/itm/EXTRON-SYSTEM-7SC-SEVEN-INPUT-CONFIGURABLE-... |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | It turns out the floppy controller is also a bit wacky on the board, it may be possible to track down and fix the issue but as I don't use floppies it isn't likely to be. I have an Intel DX4 but find running an AMD X5 at 120MHz seems to yield the best balance - it's a little faster than running at 133MHz but it's still slow enough that it feels like a 'real' 486.
Had a few Creative cards go that way, usually seems to be capacitors drying out.
Approve of the K5, naturally.
Unfortunately I have little input to give on the scaler aside from it looking like serious hardware. I just use some dinky little Gefen thing that doesn't like certain modes. It does at least look to be priced reasonably (presumably you wouldn't have to pay $70 in postage over there) so it's not a huge loss if it doesn't work out. |
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | The shipping for the scaler for me is a couple dollars more than his asking price. I like the front ports which would make it very easy to connect just about any vintage piece of equipment into it but I need to do some research on it to make sure it will do what it seems like it does. Heck someone even put PC and Laptop on the buttons so it should have already been doing what I need it to do. The output is what I am concerned with even though it looks like a VGA port on the back, it says RGB so IDK about that one. The cables might be the deal breaker if I have to convert some crap to VGA.
I fixed the sound card. It is a CT2970 and is an HP oem card with a front audio header. The jumpers to disable front audio were missing so I put a couple on there and bam. The audio was garbled because i was plugged into the line out port as the speakers port was silent. I am not sure why the volume control was present on the line out but I had that problem on the CT3600 as well with garbled audio cause I plugged into the line out on it as well. Anyway sounds just fine now. Another little note to file in the memory there. I didn't realize front audio headers were being used on ISA sound cards but obviously creative did for HP in this case.
Edited by waybacktech 2018-10-10 2:08 AM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| I worked some more, on my Amiga500 refurbishment project. This time I finished the Floppy disk drive part of the machine. I had to do a couple of tricks, and now it has a working drive. Finished it off, by updating my blog about this project. One thing that strikes me, is how long it takes to do this kind of work, when it is on the absolute lowest budget possible. |
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IDT WinChip
Posts: 237
Location: USA | Today's vintage computer porn consists of this little gem that was dropped off at work today along with a Phemon X4 based Pavilion ( probably was the system bought after this compaq )
Compaq Deskpro 6000.
This is when computers were still being built to a pretty decent standard.
I am quite certain the monitor was indeed purchased and used with this system because Windows ME ( I know, funny for a Pentium Pro to be running ) did not detect a new monitor attached when I turned it on the first time.
48MB of ram is installed. Pentium Pro 200/256K, Matrox Millennium with I am guessing 2MB or ram since it only runs 16 bit color at 1024x768, ESS1868 sound card, USB card of some description ( hidden behind video card ) and a whopping 2GB hard drive, looks like a Western Digital drive from the looks of the back side, but not totally sure until I pull the drive. Ohh and a dial up modem of some sort. This does have onboard ethernet as well. Built like a brick shit house. Proprietary power supply dumping out 200W.
Looked to me the system was reinstalled back in 2002 and was in use till 2004 for the most part with a couple files dated for 2009 even and this is why I believe this was being used till they bought the Vista era Phenom based HP box also dropped off ( not an interesting variant either, very basic black system )
I am sure this Deskpro 6000 was not close to the side of cheap especially with the purchase of the Diamond pro monitor as well which still displays beautifully. The model number of "6200/4200" means P6 200 4.2Gb HD. Shown in windows the C drive is 2GB so maybe this was partitioned wrong when it was reinstalled is my guess.
Has a "configured by Vanguard for JCPenny's" sticker on side of case with a warranty start date of 10/1997 ( noticed this after taking pictures while cleaning system ) I think this being a computer used at JC Penny's is why the hard drive was reinstalled in 2002. Perhaps this also explains the 2GB hard drive, but I think it was just partitioned wrong. I will find out later on when I feel like investigating.
Jan 1998 infoworld ad of monitor, "reduced" to $699. Says monitor can do up to 1600x1200 which is damn impressive for a 17" CRT. - https://books.google.com/books?id=4VEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=m...
July 1997 PC Mag ad listing this Compaq Deskpro 6000/4200/pds system at a "price drop" of $3200 - https://books.google.com/books?id=4VEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=m...
Definitely a live stream worthy box down the road. 4K pictures included.
   
   
  
Edited by waybacktech 2018-10-11 8:59 PM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| Did a rebuild of the clips, that keeps the keyboard in place, on my Amiga500 refurbish project. Cutting up a plastic lid, glueing them in place with super glue, and using "cement" made from ABS plastic dissolved in acetone to strengthen the new keyboard clips/holder's. Then updating my blog about the progress. |
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Fujitsu 186
Posts: 6
| @waybacktech: It always amused me when a client was still using what seemed like a "old" computer back in.. that by today's standards.. is now "achaint"
Haven't really bagged any new toys at the moment.. BUUUUuuut.. I did mange to get at least one of my dual socket 462 Athlon MPX chipset boards working.. (WWwwoooo! Yeah..) I haven't encountered any of the major show stoppers that RobWolf mentioned in his video about the platform.. Yet.. But as one point he raised.. The chipset will not even kick into life with more than 3GBs worth of ram fitted (I would have thought, at least the ungrateful little shit should could do was POST with 4GBs worth of 266 DDR bufferd ECC memory I splashed out on fitted.. But no.. I could have been drowning my sorrows in cheep booze with that fucking money by now.. But oh well)
I'm also pissing around with another system for the Amthlon Amiga emulator (it's a very quick low level emulator that runs on top of LoOoOooooOoonix) It's been an utter bastard of 'ed bashing trial and error.. But at least I've now it it running the emulator and Amiga OS 3.9.. I'm still having issues with the emulator randomly resetting though, when trying to do certain things.. But it's going to require some more trial n error and ripping some more clumps of hair out of my scalp yet.. I suppose.. before I even start to make anything that looks like "progress"
I really would like a "real-deal" 68k machine.. But even a basket case A500 is out of my price range at the moment.
Edited by UserH 2018-10-13 3:39 AM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 671
| @UserH
Were do you live? Because if you are located in America, then I can understand the insane Amiga prices. Shure they are not cheap here in scandinavia eighter. Yet they are affordable to an extend. Somewhat in the price range of an V3-3500 and an AWE64-Gold for an tricked out Amiga500. (Scandoubler, mem-upgrade and accelerator) Or the same for an stock non recapped Amiga1200.
Amithlon? Hmmm... You can go for an RaspberryPI as it has a complete Amiga system (emulation) as a standalone system/image. Else, go for one of those Armiga systems. Yet they are low in stock and they have stopped production. You can still find them on Amibay and eBay or other places. All in all, they are just the same as an RaspberryPI solution. Just without physical disk drive.
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Recently Played/Bought/Messed with
