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c0burn posted:I mean you're not wrong. I have a stupid op 98 system with a socket 939 CPU. Have you also bodged in an SSD? I imagine that'd do wonders for a lot of things that were slow back then.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:02
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TheMadMilkman posted:I’m pretty space limited, so I don’t have anything out on display. Just imagine an under-stairs closet full of beige boxes. This is why I've been trying to build a Pentium Pro machine with SCSI. Key word is "trying". 
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Mar 15, 2023 14:21
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Just found a Philips CM8833 in the local tip. Gonna let it dry for a day or two and fingers crossed ...
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Mar 15, 2023 15:52
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Computer viking posted:Have you also bodged in an SSD? I imagine that'd do wonders for a lot of things that were slow back then. Yeah the board is nforce3 so has native chipset drivers for 98/ME. it works fine. Limited to 128gb (which is fine)
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Mar 15, 2023 15:53
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c0burn posted:Yeah the board is nforce3 so has native chipset drivers for 98/ME. it works fine. Limited to 128gb (which is fine) Native SATA? Such luxuries. 
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Mar 15, 2023 19:29
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Computer viking posted:Native SATA? Such luxuries. It's an ECS nforce3-a939. Lovely shade of purple
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Mar 15, 2023 19:47
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I remember talking a member of my WoW guild through installing the drivers for an nforce board in the mid to late 2000s because his new PC wasn't working properly without them. What were those called anyway, 4 in 1 or something weird? I had one of those boards but it might've suffered bad cap death.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:05
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Rexxed posted:I remember talking a member of my WoW guild through installing the drivers for an nforce board in the mid to late 2000s because his new PC wasn't working properly without them. What were those called anyway, 4 in 1 or something weird? I had one of those boards but it might've suffered bad cap death. The 4in1 was Via chipsets. Dreadful things
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Mar 15, 2023 21:08
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c0burn posted:The 4in1 was Via chipsets. Dreadful things Oh I'm confusing the two, then. Yes, it was a VIA with the 4in1 driver pack.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:33
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98 doesn’t support TRIM so that makes solid state drives slow down eventually I’m not actually sure if it’s a practical issue for most use cases though. Tiny Timbs has a new favorite as of 22:31 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 22:25
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Rexxed posted:Oh I'm confusing the two, then. Yes, it was a VIA with the 4in1 driver pack. Oh god I had one of those Socket A VIA motherboards, an Athlon Thunderbird 750MHz, two IDE drives, a SoundBlaster Live! and a GeForce 2MX. Something about that combo was entirely unstable no matter what I did. I ended up using a Voodoo 3 instead just because it actually worked with that card.
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Mar 15, 2023 22:45
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In 2008 my daily driver for an unfortunate amount of time was an underpowered desktop that relied on integrated S3 video. I don't recall the CPU or socket, but it was a recycled machine with a Windows 2000 MAR license. It was less slightly less painful to run in Linux but that is just a matter of degree.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:10
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Computer viking posted:Oh god I had one of those Socket A VIA motherboards, an Athlon Thunderbird 750MHz, two IDE drives, a SoundBlaster Live! and a GeForce 2MX. Something about that combo was entirely unstable no matter what I did. I ended up using a Voodoo 3 instead just because it actually worked with that card. My retro rig has the same chipset (though a Thoroughbred 1733MHz overclocked to 1820, an ISA Sound Blaster AWE64, both IDE and SATA drives, and a GeForce FX 5900) and it has been rock solid for three years under XP and DOS and stable enough under 98. They're fine unless you gently caress up your driver installation, change your hardware frequently (a no-no in Windows 9x), or get got by the drive-by malware that was all over the internet back in the day and could instantly pwn a 9x setup due to its complete lack of any security at all. I had another VIA/Athlon back in the day that was an unstable turkey but I chalk that up to having been an idiot teenager who downloaded  from sketchy websites and didn't know anything about system administration.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:26
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The monitor found at the local tip works, gently caress yeah! It's a little blurrry, probably need to tweak the focus pot, and the whole thing needs cleaning including all the scratchy pots.Tiny Timbs posted:98 doesn’t support TRIM so that makes solid state drives slow down eventually My understanding is that modern ssd's can do some sort of self trim. And Sata3 works on Sata1, most of the time.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:29
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A friend once gave me a bunch of worn-out, ex-corporate SATA SSDs from the, uhh, Vista? era. Did that support TRIM? Because the worst of the bunch struggled to sustain 30MB/s before a secure erase. But even if performance degraded to that point on a win98 build it probably wouldn't be the end of the world?
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Mar 15, 2023 23:37
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Woolie Wool posted:My retro rig has the same chipset (though a Thoroughbred 1733MHz overclocked to 1820, an ISA Sound Blaster AWE64, both IDE and SATA drives, and a GeForce FX 5900) and it has been rock solid for three years under XP and DOS and stable enough under 98. They're fine unless you gently caress up your driver installation, change your hardware frequently (a no-no in Windows 9x), or get got by the drive-by malware that was all over the internet back in the day and could instantly pwn a 9x setup due to its complete lack of any security at all. I had another VIA/Athlon back in the day that was an unstable turkey but I chalk that up to having been an idiot teenager who downloaded Nah, there was genuinely some issue with the KT133a, IDE, and the PCI bus. Looking around it sounds like it was specific to the earlier versions, though?
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Mar 16, 2023 00:24
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an actual frog posted:A friend once gave me a bunch of worn-out, ex-corporate SATA SSDs from the, uhh, Vista? era. Did that support TRIM? Because the worst of the bunch struggled to sustain 30MB/s before a secure erase. But even if performance degraded to that point on a win98 build it probably wouldn't be the end of the world? 7 was the first to do it iirc
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Mar 16, 2023 00:26
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Computer viking posted:Nah, there was genuinely some issue with the KT133a, IDE, and the PCI bus. Looking around it sounds like it was specific to the earlier versions, though? Another difference perhaps was that I also installed a BIOS mod to unlock higher frequency CPUs.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:26
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I do love how much stuff is still up 20+ years later. https://www.realworldtech.com/via-soundblaster-2/ Not conclusive, but he's talking about the same weird SB Live! + (specific version of) Via chipset bug, so at least I'm not entirely making this up.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:29
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So it seems to be specific to the SoundBlaster Live (and maybe Audigy)? That would explain why I don't have any problems as I use an ISA sound card (indeed I bought my KT133A board specifically so I could use an ISA sound card). "686" appears on my BIOS screen at startup so I'm guessing I use the southbridge type that is supposed to be problematic. I do not use my boot IDE hard drive as a master; it's on primary slave so a CF card with DOS can override it, and the secondary master hosts my optical drive (my two 500GB SATA drives are not bootable, they are for bulk storage).
Woolie Wool has a new favorite as of 00:36 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 00:32
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I had an Epox P4 board with a VIA chipset that ate poo poo on the regular until I pulled out the SB Audigy card. After that it was just a general underperformer rather than frequently unstable.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:36
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I had a dual P3 MSI mobo with a VIA 694a chipset and that loving thing was the buggiest POS I ever built - on paper it was great, 4X AGP, true 133 FSB support, etc. - but it would bluescreen about 10% of the time you were hitting the disk drive hard and doing anything graphics-intensive. I tried at least 4 different BIOS’s, about ten variants of 4-in-1 drivers, switched all my PCI cards around multiple times, used both Nvidia and AMD(and even a Voodoo 3 for a short time), tried both 98SE and ME, dual booted with Win2K then later XP. Nothing overclocked, and I was running sedate P-III 733’s, not the bleeding-edge 1 ghz+ P3’s. Nope, always crashed. gently caress Via forever. The message boards were full of people with similar issues.
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Mar 16, 2023 02:44
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an actual frog posted:That's a fun find and I completely agree with Colin here. The mundane, cheap, low-spec, everyday computers of our past are worth preserving and enjoying. RMC's trash-to-treasure series on that manky old packard bell, likewise; We didn't all rock fast pentiums with voodoo IIs back in the day My favourite retro system, the one I seem to have the most fun with, is a NEC PowerMate 466D, a 486DX-66 based desktop from about 1995. It was already obsolete when it was brand new but it runs most early 90s DOS stuff perfectly.
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Mar 16, 2023 04:31
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JnnyThndrs posted:I had a dual P3 MSI mobo with a VIA 694a chipset and that loving thing was the buggiest POS I ever built - on paper it was great, 4X AGP, true 133 FSB support, etc. - but it would bluescreen about 10% of the time you were hitting the disk drive hard and doing anything graphics-intensive. I tried at least 4 different BIOS’s, about ten variants of 4-in-1 drivers, switched all my PCI cards around multiple times, used both Nvidia and AMD(and even a Voodoo 3 for a short time), tried both 98SE and ME, dual booted with Win2K then later XP. Nothing overclocked, and I was running sedate P-III 733’s, not the bleeding-edge 1 ghz+ P3’s. It honestly wouldn't survive me if there was some major QC issues and the ones that were good (like mine) ended up on eBay and the ones that were defective ended up in landfills. All I know is that my KT133A is a great computer even if it's quite a bit slower than an nForce 2 with the same CPU. It plays everything from around 1990 to around 2005 and doesn't give me any problems. 
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Mar 16, 2023 04:58
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I can never think about VIA and S3 without thinking of "graphics decelerator."
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Mar 16, 2023 07:25
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Mar 20, 2023 03:00
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Mar 20, 2023 03:25
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Everything old is new again
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Mar 20, 2023 03:48
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Casually taking my phone from 90% charge to 15% charge in an instant to light a cig
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Mar 20, 2023 14:14
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Harness the power of the Samsung Galaxy Note.
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Mar 20, 2023 14:24
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Adam Scott looking good.
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Mar 20, 2023 18:53
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I had totally forgotten the era of the AMI WinBIOS. In fact, I'm not 100% sure I ever had a primary system that used one, but I ran into one the other day after coaxing a motherboard to life by so much jumper experimentation. Like this one. I still think the Award BIOS was more straightforward, but if it works it works.
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Mar 22, 2023 09:22
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Killer robot posted:I still think the Award BIOS was more straightforward, but if it works it works. I kind of miss the days of simple text-mode BIOS menus. Fully graphical UEFI menus just seem so wasteful by comparison.
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Mar 22, 2023 10:12
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Bargearse posted:I kind of miss the days of simple text-mode BIOS menus. Fully graphical UEFI menus just seem so wasteful by comparison. Every single UEFI BIOS menu has a laggy unresponsive mouse, and likes to not register double-clicks 1 time out of 10. They waste screen space with logos and stupid flame decals, and are pain to use in general.
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Mar 22, 2023 12:20
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I thought I raised my bid on a VIC 20 from 61 to 75 € but apparently I now have a winning bid of 61 € on one VIC 20 and a winning bid of 75 on another. I am not good at computre.
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Mar 22, 2023 12:28
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I thought I raised my bid on a VIC 20 from 61 to 75 € but apparently I now have a winning bid of 61 € on one VIC 20 and a winning bid of 75 on another. Just combine them and you'll have a working commodore 64!* i do not think it actually works this way
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Mar 22, 2023 12:37
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Arivia posted:Just combine them and you'll have a working commodore 64!* Well unless someone out-bids me, I think I'll have one nice-looking working VIC 20, at least. I guess there's exactly one game I'd like to play on it.
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Mar 22, 2023 12:49
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Sweevo posted:Every single UEFI BIOS menu has a laggy unresponsive mouse, and likes to not register double-clicks 1 time out of 10. They waste screen space with logos and stupid flame decals, and are pain to use in general. and has seconds more of flashing time to potentially brick due to power loss during updating.
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Mar 22, 2023 13:10
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Do those minimize icons collapse the windows? 
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Mar 22, 2023 13:18
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I thought I raised my bid on a VIC 20 from 61 to 75 € but apparently I now have a winning bid of 61 € on one VIC 20 and a winning bid of 75 on another. Seriospost, look into a C64/Vic20 Saver and recapping. Old power bricks fail by supplying to high voltage, and that can fry the chips on the board. A saver stops this from happening. Other things you can do is replace the PSU with a modern one, or at least check that it supplies 5V and not more to the board. Old Commodores are known for having bad capacitors that can destroy the board. Less dangerous than a failing PSU.
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