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DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616   Location: Hull, UK | This kind of thread is generally obligatory on boards like this. So, done anything interesting lately? Bought some shiny new gadgets, or dusty old boards? Started playing a game you've not had time to enjoy in a while or merely ogled at an application, maybe tampered with something in a configuration? Post about it here. Images and screenshots are of course welcome. As for me I've recently been playing Need for Speed III. Out of all the series, who knows how many there are now, none have ever felt the same as this one and I always come away feeling like I've had a good time when it's over. The difficulty in Class B cars is much higher than I remember it, both A and C are easier. It does, however, run strangely on my Athlon machine. If I use Direct3D it locks up and it also likes to drift to the right when playing regardless of which controller I use. I guess it's a testament to the sheer bollocks of the Athlon that I can ramp the resolution and visuals up something stupid whilst only drawing on the CPU in Software mode.  we do have a candidate for when I get that Voodoo 3 going in something though as it seems to have 3DFX support as well as Direct3D. I also bought parts I needed to do video capture with the Xeon. All this junk just to get a signal into the machine...  ...And it's still a bit shaky, still no audio. Can't flaw the Xeon itself though, that thing is awesome so far. Guess I'll have to look into getting another card in the future, I believe the newer models fixed this problem but I'm unsure of if it works at the lower resolutions. In short, seems I'll still be relying on the scaler more than I want to, but nothing is ever perfect. At that point, I'm sure this old card will still be useful somehow, just don't really know where yet. The parts I ordered are now useless for the task of capturing, but I have immediately found a use for those elsewhere, now I just need cables to implement my idea. They will, indirectly make capturing easier in the future along with general use of machines on each desk. Notably the switch box as it also switches DIN keyboards, so if I get an RS-232 switch box I can share the basic peripherals between multiple machines, useful in such a small house along with how many of my monitors didn't get here. I have also briefly looked into changing the forum's IMG tag, but it doesn't seem I can do so reliably. I guess we're stuck just having to edit it if the site you host images on doesn't provide that format of the tags. I'm claiming it's their fault as I've been on other boards that work this way. I've also dabbled with the new synth, mostly testing as it hasn't been working properly. I'll probably sell it off in a few months, don't expect more than one song to use it as it has a strong dislike of being connected to any of my gear and managed not only to repeatedly crash itself, but to also crash my Pentium. I didn't even know that was possible, guess I'll have to see what's going on with the MIDI ports in case it's firing weird voltages down the cable. They are supposed to be optically isolated. | ||
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| cj71984 |
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Fujitsu 186 Posts: 9  Location: long island ,NY ,USA | |||
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| DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616 Location: Hull, UK | The new coolers should make things much better than they were. It's an area where I have paranoia and tend to prefer vastly over cooling things wherever possible. There's something special about the Ti 4600, or I've always thought so. Back when it was the latest thing I really wanted one but couldn't afford one, I had to sit there and look on in envy as my friend ran a 4800 (non-SE) whilst I was stuck with the puny MX420 which was nothing more than a GeForce 2 under the hood, I didn't finally get hold of one until a few years ago and it's everything I always dreamed it would be. My 4600 is factory overclocked and has a larger cooler (Though oddly, I have a 4800SE with the ASUS cooler you used in the video) but I may have to modify it because the fan seems to be getting slower and adding oil isn't fixing it anymore. It's an ASUS V8460 Deluxe;  I can't remember the model number for my 4800SE but it's a pretty boring looking card and doesn't work properly anyway. Plus the 4600 is faster. While I'm here, I've ordered two cases, these;  One is for a mystery Pentium-class machine which needs a few other parts (notably a SCSI hard drive, I'll grab that shortly) and the second is for my K5. This suggests the mystery machine is not an AMD and being "Pentium-class" it's not an Intel. Further hints; It's not a Cyrix, we are far, /far off the beaten path here. One case might end up housing the Pentium 66 though as I'm going to move that to a case the motherboard actually fits in, could be anything, waiting until these get here to see how best go about this transition and which case to use for what hardware. Abit put that heatsink in a really awkward spot. | ||
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| DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616 Location: Hull, UK | Need to find drivers for this when it gets here, currently trying to get in touch with Hauppague, I know the file names so hopefully I can track them down.  Also got my hands on a rather SCSI hard drive;  | ||
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| DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616 Location: Hull, UK | My Pentium is now in its new case and another board is set to take its place in the old one. The K5 is also set to be rebuilt shortly with some changes to components, notably a Terratec sound card, the SB16 is going with the other machine I'm tampering with for its MKE interface and potential issues with drivers on an obscure platform. That aside I'm still up to no good;  Realized I needed a cable for the WinTV Cinema Pro card, I have also located the software and - real shock - Hauppauge actually replied to my support request but no longer have the files in their archive. If anyone comes here looking for the drivers for the Cinema Pro you can grab them here; https://www.mediafire.com/?7d6nblv0bnpm07w Also I've accuired a rather strange VGA card, I am not entirely sure what it does but love obscure hardware;  Comes with software, appears to have TV output but here's an extra socket I literally cannot guess at. Potential candidate to replace the broken one in my 386 which is currently relying on Rizla packets to stay alive and hasn't fared well since coming here, it's Hooker's old card so it figures that it is worn out. I plan to fix the old card as well eventually, likely passing it down to another machine which is currently very weak in the video department assuming this new one works out well in here or works the way I think it does. I also got my grubby hands on an ISA Host Adapter to replace the scrap one in my Pentium, I'm tired of the random "Floppy Disk(s) fail 40" messages and issues with COM2 now, and I can't seem to kick the old card into life. It always was shaky and will go on the spares pile. No point posting a picture of this one because I expect everyone around these parts knows what an ISA Multi I/O board looks like, they're pretty generic to be honest, the only feature that really varies is that this one has no game port, some did. Hopefully I can finally sit down, play some games and work on some video soon. I think I've found a temporary means of capturing with the Xeon until I get around to grabbing the updated StarTech board. I'll keep the old one for the Pentium D as I'd still like to use it as a secondary capture machine until it eventually gives up anyway, it'll come in handy when I get back to messing with my cartoon whilst lightening the load on the Athlon, I don't need audio for that so the lack of this feature is irrelevant there. Unsure if this post was more a blog or not. I have footage from working on the Pentium though, so I'll post that in the relevant thread in the coming days if all goes to plan. May double-post with a video from before YouTube just for the lulz of how awful everything used to look and sound. Edit: Helps if I remember to add the link I intended to add, doesn't it? Bah, too tired, think it's time to sleep. Edited by DXZeff 2016-11-22 12:03 AM | ||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669  | |||
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| Dinomite |
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 Fujitsu 186 Posts: 9 | |||
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| cj71984 |
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Fujitsu 186 Posts: 9 Location: long island ,NY ,USA | |||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | |||
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| Robman |
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Chips 386 Posts: 38 Location: Canada | |||
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| DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616 Location: Hull, UK | @Brostenen; The Audician? I was just looking at my one as a candidate in a machine which needs a CD interface, probably going to use the SB16/MKE instead though as I feel like using the Terratec in the K5, leaving the SB16 free for something else. They're good cards though, the Yamaha 719, certainly much better than some of the other clones out there. Is that going to be hooked up to the 719 then? @Dinomite; Certainly can't go wrong with modding a console to do more stuff without the need for unreliably optical discs. Of course, these ISOs are homebrew/backup images, as far as we know  @cj71984; Not the first time I've seen hidden ports like that and I'm sure I've seen another PB hiding USB ports. I wonder if they offered the same machine with the second port open and charged more for it. Can't guess at what the translation card was used for, but there seem to be a few of them out there. Google Drive doesn't appear to be forum friendly, I hear good things about Imgur but haven't used it myself, thinking I may start as people have complained about PostImg's ads attempting to do underhanded things. @Robman; As I have to glue heatsinks on more and more, I worry increasingly about the paste becoming ineffective in the future. Luckily I do only glue the corners and use regular paste in the middle. Some of the junk I ordered is here, but I still need a couple of things before I can do anything with it. I've also tried recording with my N64 but the StarTech wants none of it, going to see if I can use the Athlon as I'd expect older boards (That has a Bt878-based card) to be better at that anyway. For some reason I've really, really wanted to play Banjo Kazooie again just lately and I wanted to record it just for the hell of it. The strange video card is, as I suspected, a VGA card with TV out, including RGB. According to the manual it does some very interesting things, claims broadcast quality conversion and had a frame grabbing expansion board for external sources I'd like to track down at some stage. I need to get a 1.2M floppy drive going to read the disks, but that's a small obstacle that I'll get onto soon, probably when I'm less tired. Two of the disks aren't listed in the manual. I need to get my hands on an SD card reader as the one in my laptop has broken. Shouldn't exactly be hard, it's not like they're an uncommon format or anything. I do have old readers, but they top out with 1GB cards, so they're not really useful for the 8GB and 32GB ones I use in the cameras. Seems I also need to get hold of some fan screws as I've run out, I may just bulk order each common screw type as I'm tired of running out every few months and I'm sure I'll use them eventually. | ||
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| Robman |
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Chips 386 Posts: 38 Location: Canada | |||
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| Dinomite |
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Fujitsu 186 Posts: 9 | Just got a great deal with this:   Watara / Quickshot Supervision with manual and 7 games for 20 euro's and 6,95 euro shipping. If that aint a good deal, NOTHING is! Edited by Dinomite 2016-11-29 4:44 PM | ||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | |||
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| Nikolaos |
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Fujitsu 186 Posts: 7 | |||
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| Robman |
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Chips 386 Posts: 38 Location: Canada | Thanks for the input  Indeed I tried that too.. still nothing, same symptoms. As much as I never like to give up on hardware, I think the motherboard is shot. | ||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | |||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | |||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | |||
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| DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616 Location: Hull, UK | |||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | |||
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| DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616 Location: Hull, UK | I honestly don't remember what I did by this stage. My time playing with BIOSes was short lived, mostly involving enabling a PCI Divider on my MB-4DUPM and replacing the EPA logo on my 5AGM2 with a Fission symbol (U-02 Pollution Creator) for a laugh. TH99 often flat out doesn't have documentation for my stuff these days it seems, but that's probably because I keep dredging up increasingly obscure hardware that nobody else is likely to have a use for. Case and point, see attachment. This was captured with the card above, the Hauppauge. Pointless fact - either this model or the Celebrity was actually the first capture board I owned, I seem to think I had the Celebrity because I don't remember there being PnP capability, but I can't be certain as it was a long time ago now. I'm amazed at how much I remember regarding the oddities of the software and how the card works. I have been unable to record video though as I get an error message to the effect of "WARNING: No frames were captured, ensure Vertical Sync Interrupt Buffers are Enabled and Configured." when I try. I shall try to image the floppies at some point as they don't exist anywhere else that I can find, some are missing however. The internal audio header is also not working and the Line-In on my PAS16 is already in use, guess I could feed a wire back into the case from the rear jack to the mixer on the Scenic board as I have to feed things into there because that's already using the AUX header on the PAS. Whatever, if I do manage to capture some video I shall post it here in all it's grainy, washed-out 15fps glory. Two things I find amusing are that the S-Video adapter from my Intensity works on this card and the card can sync numerous modes which both the Intensity and StarTech cannot even lock onto, it also has better latency, umm, yeah. Field interpolation is garbage though by today's standards and it looks a tad weird if things move sideways, looks awful with it disabled. My last words on it for now are that if you ever wondered about the exclude command on EMM386 and the "None Cachable Block / Memory Hole" options in the BIOS were used for, well, now you know. Very tiring device to set up and use, completely worth it for the novelty if nothing else, though I really would like to capture with it. For the record, every slot is occupied in that system now, aside from the one PCI slot which shares with an ISA, so I can't populate it... Or can I? No, I can't think of anything to install in there now to be honest. Also, that ADDA video card is what I thought, it has a broadcast quality TV-Out circuit and can output Scart/RGB with some weird frame rate conversion. Have to wonder what it will do in obscure CGA modes. According to the manual, many expansions were available including a frame grabber, capable of VGA with a pass-thru among other things, which I'd like to track down some day. (WINTV01.png) Attachments ----------------  WINTV01.png (122KB - 988 downloads) | ||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | |||
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| DXZeff |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 616 Location: Hull, UK | |||
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| Brostenen |
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TM Crusoe Posts: 669 | I don't think the board it self came from you. It was only the bios code that you had modded, and then a fellow retro-friend in Romania burned that onto a blank chip. :-) So don't worry. It will run an Intel 486dx2 for half an hour and then it will get unstable and shut down. Yet it is set up as an 486dx2-80 right now, and I am really happy with this setup. I will be getting a VLB controller this week in the mail, and I have a couple of PCI vga cards (CL-5446, Trio64 and Virge-325) that I can use with the FIC. Now I need to source a VLB mobo, in order to build a VLB non-PCI system in the future. After all these builds of K6-II/III's and Pentium3's, I kind of like 386 and 486 class systems the best. True I love both a good P3/Voodoo3 and P3/TNT2 systems equally. And they are great fun, when gaming UT99. Overall, they are just not as fun as 486 systems. Yeah... The reason must be, that I used 286 to 486 machines in my teenage years. (89 to 95)  I am thinking in terms of a 486dx2-66 system with S3-805 VLB, VLB controller, 8mb Ram and SB16. Just as it was for a standard machine in 1994/95. Anyway.... Started to build a new computer, tearing "The FanBoy" apart. It was an Asus P5A, K6-II-500, 128mb, Asus TNT2-Pro, Asus SCSI controller, Asus ribbon cables and an AWE64-Gold. All that Asus stuff that it seemed fine to name it "The FanBoy", because this would have been what a real Asus/SS7-fanboy would have picked back in 1999. Now it is going to be a P-166 system. EDIT: This was "The FanBoy" machine... Edited by Brostenen 2016-12-06 12:02 AM | ||
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