TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[stinger608]

Well, here is an odd issue I haven't yet quite figured out:
That ole Alienware system that I posted here: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/tpus-nostalgic-hardware-club.108251/page-170#post-3436422

Has an odd problem. I loaded some older games on it; F.E.A.R., Doom, Doom 2, NFS Porsche Unleashed, and NASCAR: Sim Racing. Well, Nascar and Fear have to have the disks in to run...........All fine and dandy. Insert the first disc and away it goes. Play for awhile and all is good........Right up until I eject the disk. Every time I eject the disk the system locks up!
Running Windows XP with all the updates that were available. The optical drive is an ole IDE drive. Not sure if its something funky with the drive or what. It reads just fine, installs everything just fine, and can play music disks fine. Playing music disks and installing games doesn't cause the problem just after a game is installed and I have to put in the first disk to run the older games.

Just wondering if anyone else has run into this in the past and fixed the problem.

 

[Trekkie4]

*sigh* I give up, I really REALLY do! Finally got to boot up Win98 yesterday, just so I would get stuck with weird soundcard issue - damn thing kept telling me that it has a problem & not enough IRQ resources to assign... Long story short, I've swapped the sound card for other, Yamaha one. Then everything worked OK until I loaded Diamond Dial-Up modem drivers, for some reason they've been messing with the serial mouse which I was using (on both COM1 and COM2 ports) so I had to find another version. Eventually I DID get it to work properly, until I loaded one of the games, it seems that 3dfx Voodoo card inside decided to drop dead (to be honest, it kinda WAS acting funny last time I've checked it, but it /was/ showing signs of life), and to make matters even worse, it damaged my lovely & trusty CRT monitor from the pic This CRT was/is the original thing which came with original Pentium 2 machine, back in October 1998. So now I have a working Celeron system without the working Voodoo card, and I also have a damaged CRT, which might (or might not) have been damaged by the Voodoo, I honestly don't know. From the experience, I don't think it's a serious damage (most likely voltage regulator) but still now I have to pay for the repairs ... there's no way I'm scrapping this one, there's too many memories holding onto it!

Anyhow, enjoy these pics... Might be a while before I decide to resume & finish what I started (that other machine, Duron 750 with Evil Kyro card), there's just too much work & frankly speaking, I'm running low on patience! Damn you retrograde Mercury!

 

[debs3759]

Almost got the whole gang together.

View attachment 73993 (Click to expand)

Not pictured are four other VooDoo 3s, two 3000s and two 3500s. They are in storage still it would seem.

I'm about to say goodbye to a lot of these. Need the money more than the nostalgia right now. If anyone would be interested in re-homing a few of these cards please let me know.

I might be interested in some. I have about a dozen 3dfx cards, with another 20 coming soon from a scrapper in NL who saves interesting cards (and CPUs). Got about 400-500 graphics cards in all, including a box full of VLB cards and several vintage professional cards I had never heard of before I was offered them.

Message me with details of what you have (I can't recognise everything from the photo) and what you want for them.

 

[MaxiPro800]

I just found a picture of my main system...and it ain't pretty at all.

 

[AhokZYashA]

my office is having a datacenter cleanup and moving,

i found some old and not so old hardware around,
like some DDR2 FBDIMMs, 7U server with intel itanium in it, some FC 15k HDDs, and much more,
pics incoming probably on friday

 

[jboydgolfer]

not too old, but still......
i still have the "do not disturb " door knob hangar for the /alpha dogs card
apparentlyt this "physX" thing is gonna be big O_O i think they used the older name for it tho,,,ageia? or whatever it was.

i just realized the 8800 didnt have the "lock down" hook properly cut in the factory you can tell this puppy was barely used ...sorry theyre SO blurry

 

[Trekkie4]

Not too old indeed, but very nice piece of hardware IMHO Heck, I'm still using this thing to play GTA V...

 

[vigia]

My old trusty cyrix and FPU.

 

[JunkBear]

FPU = FaP unit ?

 

[dorsetknob]

FPU = FaP unit ?

Probably means Floating point unit ie Maths co processor

back in the Day sometime last century CPU's did not have a integrated Maths co Processor
Intel started incoperating co processor into the DX486 Line
before that the SX386 had a seperate socket and you could add a separate co processor as an upgrade

 

[JunkBear]

Probably means Floating point unit ie Maths co processor

back in the Day sometime last century CPU's did not have a integrated Maths co Processor
Intel started incoperating co processor into the DX486 Line
before that the SX386 had a seperate socket and you could add a separate co processor as an upgrade

Yup back in the day my first computer was a 200MMX

 

[dorsetknob]

Yup back in the day my first computer was a 200MMX

mine was a 12Mhz 80286 ( Tandon ) but it did have a isa VGA graphics card full colour and not a cheepo CGA

 

[vigia]

mine was a 12Mhz 80286 ( Tandon ) but it did have a isa VGA graphics card full colour and not a cheepo CGA

Well, i got the cheapo CGA, but i never feel the urge to upgrade it, because of my Monochromatic monitor. My first games on that where almost all with ASCII graphics

 

[Norton]

mine was a 12Mhz 80286 ( Tandon ) but it did have a isa VGA graphics card full colour and not a cheepo CGA

Same here. Was quite a treat moving up to a 386 with DOS 6.2 after that!

 

[dorsetknob]

Missed out on the 386 went straight to a 486DX2 66Mhz
and from a 14" monitor to a MASSIVE 17"

 

[Maban]

Got rid of a bunch of old stuff today but held onto these for now. I'll probably end up tossing some of the crappier RAM.

Pentium 2, Pentium 3, X850XT PE, Celeron in a slotket, SDR, DDR, and some Netgear GbE card. I think the bottom three SDR sticks are registered.

 

[uuuaaaaaa]

Got rid of a bunch of old stuff today but held onto these for now. I'll probably end up tossing some of the crappier RAM.

Pentium 2, Pentium 3, X850XT PE, Celeron in a slotket, SDR, DDR, and some Netgear GbE card. I think the bottom three SDR sticks are registered.

View attachment 74084

Gotta love that X850XT PE, the best AGP chip ever build the R481!

 

[Trekkie4]

I always loved the fact how Pentium 2 cartridges were extremely sturdy & well made, with several locks, protected contacts & better mounting solution, while its successor Pentium 3 had nothing but the two of those side wings, extension of the heatsink itself & completely exposed Slot1 interface! Talk about evolution & learning from the previous mistakes...

 

[vigia]

I always loved the fact how Pentium 2 cartridges were extremely sturdy & well made, with several locks, protected contacts & better mounting solution, while its successor Pentium 3 had nothing but the two of those side wings, extension of the heatsink itself & completely exposed Slot1 interface! Talk about evolution & learning from the previous mistakes...

After some heavy use, with the heat the plastic giveup a little, so if you removed the cpu for maintenance, sometimes you find yourself fighting to plug it back, so i think they see that. Some of them slide with some pressure on the 2 rails that even without the locks they dont come off.

 

[Trekkie4]

After some heavy use, with the heat the plastic giveup a little, so if you removed the cpu for maintenance, sometimes you find yourself fighting to plug it back, so i think they see that. Some of them slide with some pressure on the 2 rails that even without the locks they dont come off.

IDK, I've had mine since '98 and never ran into that kind of problem. And I DID have to take it off, when I serviced the mobo (speaking of which, I'd have to do it again, because damn caps bulged & leaked on several places, probably due to crappy PSU)

 

[vigia]

IDK, I've had mine since '98 and never ran into that kind of problem. And I DID have to take it off, when I serviced the mobo (speaking of which, I'd have to do it again, because damn caps bulged & leaked on several places, probably due to crappy PSU)

That's what i like it from those, the energy consumption, I still have one P3 533Mhz running with a cheap power supply, the only thing a have done is to replace the fan of the power supply twice, and the hard drive because of capacity, that deployment was in a hurry until i buy a firewall, a that was in 2001.

 

[Trekkie4]

Yeah, those Slot-1 systems have really been reliable & long-lasting Back in 2012, 2013 I've had a cascade cap failure, all across the board. After so much use & abuse, no wonder! But yes, I actually paid to have the board professionally serviced & restored, it cost me a lot of money but it was worth it, considering the amount of memories & nostalgia. Now the system DOES boot up & it works, but some of the caps are bulging again & on the edge of shutting down the board, like it did the last time, so I'll have to recap it again & stop using it altogether. (for the sake of preserving the system in running condition)

 

[Trekkie4]

Here are couple of shots, I didn't have the time to strip it apart & inspect every component individually, but what I did notice is that it only has one SCSI drive, not 2. Maybe the owner had 2 partitions & assumed that he's running 2 physical drives?

Can someone please tell me what is that thing, a small add-on card with lots of caps just above the CPU socket?



On a side note, that Super Socket7 mobo looks identical (at least the board layout does) to a Pentium 2 board from couple of months ago.

http://postimg.org/image/ga0rmktqv/

Well, I hate to quote myself for the sake of correcting my own mistakes, but the guy who sold this system to me WAS indeed right and I was wrong. There /was/ a 2nd HDD after all, buried deep underneath all the cables & stuff inside this thing! Finally took it apart & modified a bit, so now the system actually boots up & has better cable management. Also, I've moved both HDDs next to each other, inside the appropriate HDD mounting frame rather than using converted 5.25" ODD bay. Anyhow, more pics coming up soon, but for now enjoy these ones here:



Despite the extra cables & more components (due to additional CD-ROM unit) the entire area looks so much better with the HDDs on the right IMHO

 

[vigia]

Well, I hate to quote myself for the sake of correcting my own mistakes, but the guy who sold this system to me WAS indeed right and I was wrong. There /was/ a 2nd HDD after all, buried deep underneath all the cables & stuff inside this thing! Finally took it apart & modified a bit, so now the system actually boots up & has better cable management. Also, I've moved both HDDs next to each other, inside the appropriate HDD mounting frame rather than using converted 5.25" ODD bay. Anyhow, more pics coming up soon, but for now enjoy these ones here:



Despite the extra cables & more components (due to additional CD-ROM unit) the entire area looks so much better with the HDDs on the right IMHO

The addon is a voltaje regulator for the cpu. If you look there was a space for a second socket, if they have used it, you only change the addon for a more powerful unit to feed the 2 cpu.

 

[Trekkie4]

Thanks, but I got that later on, someone here explained it to me

It was the 1st time I got to see this kind of layout, I'm not used to working on server and/or industrial stuff, just the regular AT & ATX boards... Which kinda sucks really, because now I have extremely heavy & fully working Pentium Pro machine and I don't know what to do with it! It's too slow for any kind of (retro) gaming and too customized, too original to be upgraded to anything better which would fit standard AT machines from that time period. But it does have interesting choice of hardware, I can tell you that, as I never owner Pro machine before, or even a system with two SCSI drives.