What retro things have you done today?

Soldato
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Nooo my SATA DVD drive seems to have died, or at least is struggling to read anything. I might attempt a repair as it seems mechanically to be fine but it just sounds like every disk it is trying to read is scratched and covered in crap. Its only a couple of years old!
 
Caporegime
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So I bought this as I've never played with Slot-A. Managed to get it for £29 which I'm pretty sure I can flip it on for should I end up doing so. It also came with 128MB of PC100 in addition to the I/O shield, so not too bad for £29.

I likely won't keep it for long as my Slot-1 machine is FAR quicker with it's Tualatin (1.4GHz Tualatin is still en route, delivery looks to be Monday), but I want to at least give it a go.
 
Soldato
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Seems a reasonable buy!

I have been benchmarking my P 120 vs my 486 results. Now its obvious it would be much better but it was more so than I was expecting. I think this is likely going to be the end for my 486 playing and ill sell the spare motherboards and VLB parts and put the BAC one into storage.

Considering grabbing a P166 as they are peanuts and it will max out this board. No mmx support unfortunately.

The final spec of the machine would look like:
P 166
64mb EDO
S3 virge/dx 2mb
Voodoo 1
Awe32
2gb CF.
 
Caporegime
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I’d probably sell the Voodoo 1 and aim to replace it with a Voodoo 2. My Voodoo 1 is a bit, lacklustre. The Voodoo 2 seems to have greater compatibility in addition to being a really good performer.
 
Soldato
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So I bought this as I've never played with Slot-A.

I had the same model of board. It was always super super stable with my 800mhz Athlon. The athlons were better than the same speed Coppermine CPUs but have trouble with agp x4 I think...

When I sold my 800Mhz 6191 bundle fire £45 I kept getting messages saying the CPU was worth more than that alone..... But no one was actually buying it. £29 sends good for the board and CPU!
 
Soldato
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I’d probably sell the Voodoo 1 and aim to replace it with a Voodoo 2. My Voodoo 1 is a bit, lacklustre. The Voodoo 2 seems to have greater compatibility in addition to being a really good performer.
I might swing that way if I got into MMX cpus. With this one the V1 is just a bit of a luxury toy. Going to be CPU bound anyway.

So far I have tried on the V1:
GTA (Runs great and is levels above the software version)
GLQuake ....
G-Police - I am slightly below minimum cpu but tried it anyway - performance not good enough to play but not far off it.

I still have dungeon keeper, tomb raider and micro machines V3 to try from my owned games collection. All should work although DK might get choppy.
 
Caporegime
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It’s not overclocked is it? Only time I’ve had Windows Protection Error it has been down to FSB being too high (and thus PCI/AGP/ISA/IDE out of spec) or has been resolved with a boost in vcore.

Is the PSU good? Strong 5v and 12v rails that are in tolerance voltage range?
 
Soldato
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It's not overclocked no. I seem to get it fairly regularly with SIS chipsets on Windows 98! The BIOS settings haven't changed since I was running W98 with no issues.

Actually the CPU is 2.8 and not the 2.4 I was using last time and the CF card and adapter might be different.

The power supply is modern and I've swapped out a slower GPU which does not need Molex power and still got issues :(

Might just build a proper W98 PC (or play games on the 486 I build literally just this week!)
 
Soldato
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III remember the other SIS board havingdhaving problems with its usb controller on W98 so I disabled the usb controller and removed the usb files from the chipset installer and it's working fine now. I don't need USB anyway as the mouse and keyboard are PS/2 and I've just copied files directly onto the CF card.

I also swapped out the CPU to the 2.4 so maybe it was that!
 
Caporegime
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Tualatin 1.4GHz arrived, just about to try firing it up and see if it'll clock.

Also received a GeForce4 that I'm sure @Firestar_3x will approve of:

leadtek-gf4-ti4800se-1.jpg


leadtek-gf4-ti4800se-2.jpg
 
Don
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Spalding, Lincolnshire
Weird that I had a leadtek winfast A280 but it only had one fan on it!

Poverty spec version :D

A280 LE

https://www.hardwarereview.net/Reviews/Leadtek A280/WinfastA280MyVIVO.htm
http://old.vgamuseum.info/zaatharen...corporation/1145-nvidia-geforce4-ti-4200.html


EDIT:
Find it strange that the A250 was the Ti4400 and the A280 was the Ti4200, had to double take your card to figure what it actually was!

Believe that was because the A280 was the AGP 8x version of the 4200 aka the Ti4800?
 
Last edited:
Caporegime
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@paradigm, amazing, looks in good condition too, i seem to remember mine had some stupid filters before the fans.

Find it strange that the A250 was the Ti4400 and the A280 was the Ti4200, had to double take your card to figure what it actually was!
This had some cruddy foam filters, but they were falling apart so they are now gone!

This is a 4800-SE, so I "think" more like a Ti4400 with AGP 8x. Need to check clockspeeds.
 
Soldato
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Lots of solid games there. I've always preferred Worms 2 as it was such a step up and let you customise the weapons so you could have each Uzi bullet do 50 damage etc! Network Q Rally was also a lot of fun especially the level that had an enormous jump.
 
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