TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[dorsetknob]

*feet not for sale*

Glad to hear that
As i understood it Sasquatch body parts are protected by law

 

[Basard]

Nice! But variety is the spice of life!
Here's what I got in the Chinese food container in my desk.... quick, before I gotta go to work!

 

[dorsetknob]

That is PART of my socket 775 collection
then there is the mobile intel collection
the AMD desktop collection
The AMD Mobile collection
The miscellaneous collection (Slot1 P2 socket 370 386/7 486 P4 socket 478 )

is that not varied enough
you could help me extend collection by supplying I3's I5's I7's and Xeons + Itatiaums for free

 

[Fouquin]

But if you dont rip it apart, put it in a box, shake it, assemble it again in random order, you will never get a Frankenstein

Right CPU AMD DX5

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Yay Cirrus Logic! Love seeing their cards floating around. Them and Eizo are some of the lesser known IBM / Sun VGA companies.

 

[dorsetknob]

Yay Cirrus Logic! Love seeing their cards floating around.

Yeh got a few in the old parts bin PCI Bus D Sub 15 pin they still work 25+ Years on ( thats pre DVI by the way )

 

[Fouquin]

Yeh got a few in the old parts bin PCI Bus D Sub 15 pin they still work 25+ Years on ( thats pre DVI by the way )

You want to talk about pre-DVI? Alrighty.

Have some DB13W3.

 

[vigia]

You want to talk about pre-DVI? Alrighty.

Have some DB13W3.

The last CRT i used have that connector.

 

[-Gast-]

The last CRT i used have that connector.

I have a huge Sun-Monitor in the basement that uses that one. It was intended for CAD-Stuff.

 

[Trekkie4]

Floppy drive in Quebec are 5$ everywhere even when new. People try get rid of it.

Right, you can actually find floppies around here for even less, they usually go for 3, 4$ at most. The only problem is to actually find them, as ppl usually just throw them away, or are too far from where I live, so it's not worth traveling & spending cash on public transportation (which costs more than floppy itself)

But if you dont rip it apart, put it in a box, shake it, assemble it again in random order, you will never get a Frankenstein

Right CPU AMD DX5

View attachment 74240

View attachment 74241

Maybe I don't want a Frankenstein lol I like my systems as they are, in running (and mostly original) state Besides, this thing has so many random cables going from one end to another, so I'm honestly not looking forward to fully take it apart, as something like that would take ages! Don't worry, like I said - you'll be seeing more of Digital Celebris machine eventually, but for now I really should finish my other projects!

You receive the package of MrScott..... sounds really gay to me.

Wow, just wow! Your comment is wrong & inappropriate on so many different levels & ways.

On a side note, I do have one question for you guys - I have a previously mentioned (from couple of months ago) Diamond Monster Voodoo1 card here, which is causing problems. At first I thought that it was just Direct3D portion of the card, because Glide seemed to work fine, until I realized earlier today that both Direct3D and Glide DO seem to work, but there's a catch... You need to load the game DIRECTLY, as in without having the system to check & search for Voodoo card because if it does, it's just going to end up being stuck with black screen, in the "closed" position. In other words, the relay won't switch back to pass-through cable, it'll just show black screen because there's nothing to show, until you reboot the entire system. Meanwhile, if you load the game directly without searching for the card, it WILL work perfectly fine & without any problems. Tested under both Glide (Unreal) & DirectX (Indiana Jones & the Infernal Machine). This also happens upon calling for Voodoo control panel, in display settings and/or running DXDiag tool. Any idea & suggestion is more than welcome!

 

[Basard]

I'd give my first born, if I ever had one, for a Pentium Pro with 2MB cache.... Just to say I had one. lol

 

[vigia]

Right, you can actually find floppies around here for even less, they usually go for 3, 4$ at most. The only problem is to actually find them, as ppl usually just throw them away, or are too far from where I live, so it's not worth traveling & spending cash on public transportation (which costs more than floppy itself)



Maybe I don't want a Frankenstein lol I like my systems as they are, in running (and mostly original) state Besides, this thing has so many random cables going from one end to another, so I'm honestly not looking forward to fully take it apart, as something like that would take ages! Don't worry, like I said - you'll be seeing more of Digital Celebris machine eventually, but for now I really should finish my other projects!



Wow, just wow! Your comment is wrong & inappropriate on so many different levels & ways.

On a side note, I do have one question for you guys - I have a previously mentioned (from couple of months ago) Diamond Monster Voodoo1 card here, which is causing problems. At first I thought that it was just Direct3D portion of the card, because Glide seemed to work fine, until I realized earlier today that both Direct3D and Glide DO seem to work, but there's a catch... You need to load the game DIRECTLY, as in without having the system to check & search for Voodoo card because if it does, it's just going to end up being stuck with black screen, in the "closed" position. In other words, the relay won't switch back to pass-through cable, it'll just show black screen because there's nothing to show, until you reboot the entire system. Meanwhile, if you load the game directly without searching for the card, it WILL work perfectly fine & without any problems. Tested under both Glide (Unreal) & DirectX (Indiana Jones & the Infernal Machine). This also happens upon calling for Voodoo control panel, in display settings and/or running DXDiag tool. Any idea & suggestion is more than welcome!

Check your bios for something like video bios shadow, video cacheable, should be disabled. swap the order of the video cards.

 

[Trekkie4]

Check your bios for something like video bios shadow, video cacheable, should be disabled. swap the order of the video cards.

Thanks for the advice, but this is Voodoo we're talking about, these are not exactly "video cards" in traditional kind of way, they're not even recognized as such But sure, I can try... After all, got nothing to lose! What bothers me is that I've had the same problem on two different machines, which couldn't be more different - one was old Pentium MMX 233 (AT mobo) running Win95 and the other Celeron 466, ATX mobo running Win98. So I do think it's hardware fault, I just don't understand where & because of what (since the card DOES seem to be working under certain conditions)

Edit
Grand Theft Auto & Grand Theft Auto London are both up & running in Glide. Tested your suggestion @vigia but still getting the same annoying problem


Same with Unreal, took couple of pics during the castle flyby scene.

 

[PcFixer]

I got creative with all my old cpus.
Workin on one for amd and Intel only cpus.

 

[vigia]

Thanks for the advice, but this is Voodoo we're talking about, these are not exactly "video cards" in traditional kind of way, they're not even recognized as such But sure, I can try... After all, got nothing to lose! What bothers me is that I've had the same problem on two different machines, which couldn't be more different - one was old Pentium MMX 233 (AT mobo) running Win95 and the other Celeron 466, ATX mobo running Win98. So I do think it's hardware fault, I just don't understand where & because of what (since the card DOES seem to be working under certain conditions)

Edit
Grand Theft Auto & Grand Theft Auto London are both up & running in Glide. Tested your suggestion @vigia but still getting the same annoying problem

If you already tried another version of the driver, and another 2d card, and be sure that have the latest bios of your mobo, you can go to the device manager to see what resources you voodo is using, check the Interrupt request (IRQ) and see the other devices like soundcard to see with what is shared, plug and play normally takes care of that, but as you say earlier, the system dont know what is that device and ends sharing the same IRQ with 3 devices. Being a 3D accelerator it uses a lot of interrupts. You can disable the automatic setting for that device and change the IRQ manually so its no shared with anything else. For that to work you should have enabled plug and play in bios.

 

[Trekkie4]

Uhh, actually no, it doesn't. Vooodoo cards (at least Mk1 & Mk2) didn't use ANY IRQs, that's what made them stand out from the rest of the video cards. As for testing with different drivers & swapping the card for another one, I did try with yet another Voodoo1 (also Diamond Monster, although different revision number) and it was working perfectly OK. Well, the mode switching part at least, because the other card has one (or more?) corrupted VRAM chips. So I'm pretty sure that my problem has something to do with the actual card, hardware but I have no idea where to look. I considered baking the card in the oven, but I wouldn't want to damage it beyond repairs. It does seem to be working at the moment, despite getting stuck all the time between mode switching, so it's still better than nothing (tried to bake a Voodoo2 card once before & let's just say that things didn't quite work out as planned)

 

[vigia]

Uhh, actually no, it doesn't. Vooodoo cards (at least Mk1 & Mk2) didn't use ANY IRQs, that's what made them stand out from the rest of the video cards. As for testing with different drivers & swapping the card for another one, I did try with yet another Voodoo1 (also Diamond Monster, although different revision number) and it was working perfectly OK. Well, the mode switching part at least, because the other card has one (or more?) corrupted VRAM chips. So I'm pretty sure that my problem has something to do with the actual card, hardware but I have no idea where to look. I considered baking the card in the oven, but I wouldn't want to damage it beyond repairs. It does seem to be working at the moment, despite getting stuck all the time between mode switching, so it's still better than nothing (tried to bake a Voodoo2 card once before & let's just say that things didn't quite work out as planned)

It uses memory mapping, but all the devices share the pci bus, so the culprit could be anyone, you have other options like PCI mem burst and PCI mem buffer. how your internal cache works, writeback, writethru, disabled. Its a tricky card

 

[Trekkie4]

Okie dokie, I'll try messing around with BIOS settings & will let you know how it works

 

[vigia]

Okie dokie, I'll try messing around with BIOS settings & will let you know how it works

I do a sanity check, by default it uses IRQ 5, read the reference manual page 74. http://www.falconfly.de/reference.htm

 

[Trekkie4]

That's really interesting, I had no idea Voodoo cards used IRQs... It's even more interesting because IRQ5 in my case has been associated with the sound & VGA (AGP & PCI Slot #1). Right now I'm backing up the HDD so I can't really do anything until it's finished, but I'll definitely give it a try later on, in both BIOS and Win98!

Edit
OK, so I DID give it a try like I said aaand .... nothing, still having the same old problem I'm afraid. However, while messing around with IRQs, I did get to resolve another problem, related to LPT1 parallel port & sound card. So now both of them are actually working properly, without any conflicts.

Not only that, but I also re-installed Voodoo drivers, I swapped Diamond branded one for the latest, reference driver (from 3dfx) hoping it would resolve the problem. Like I pointed out before, it did not but this new driver came with very useful feature - to deactivate Direct3D acceleration, therefore DirectX support. Which I did, and guess what? No more getting stuck without the video signal! Voodoo now actually performs perfectly fine under both Glide and OpenGL, which wasn't the case earlier. Glide was technically working, but it would sometimes also hang while being inspected, detected by the game launcher for example and OpenGL was causing the same problem in almost every game. Deactivating Direct3D fixed it, so I guess the card is now as good as it gets. For all other apps that are running only in Direct3D mode, I'll just have to use ATI Rage Pro (4mb) which is more-less equal to the performance of the Voodoo1 card. Games like Tomb Raider, Midtown Madness, Indiana Jones & the Infernal machine, etc.

 

[Trekkie4]

And @vigia , just for you I took my Digital Celebris machine apart once again, just to show you the layout of the motherboard & its integrated sound system.

As you can tell, there are two expansions on the back of the case... These look like expansion cards, but in fact they're only headers connected to a small daughter board. They've made this far too complicated IMHO, but it's all modular & easy to replace if necessary. Or rather, it WOULD have been easy to replace back in a day, I doubt you could find spares nowdays...


These are the two daughter boards that I've just mentioned, they are connected via bunch of random cables to the main motherboard down below, near the internal speaker.


This is the actual sound component, on the mobo itself. I know it's hard to see anything with all these cables going around, but this is where all the audio cables lead to.


This system also has the front ports for the headphones and mic. Headphone jack seems to have a reduced volume output, so when you plug in the headphones it won't blow off your eardrums lol Both are pretty neat, especially for a system that's been made around 1995, 1996!


And this is what the system now looks like. Windows 95 (along with MS Plus! for Windows 95), Office 97 & several games which don't require 3D hardware acceleration to look awesome.

 

[vigia]

And @vigia , just for you I took my Digital Celebris machine apart once again, just to show you the layout of the motherboard & its integrated sound system.

As you can tell, there are two expansions on the back of the case... These look like expansion cards, but in fact they're only headers connected to a small daughter board. They've made this far too complicated IMHO, but it's all modular & easy to replace if necessary. Or rather, it WOULD have been easy to replace back in a day, I doubt you could find spares nowdays...

It seems that the ethernet is integrated then, one of the cables near the audio is for the midi port where you can connect a joystic, the quality of the motherboard is top notch.

 

[Trekkie4]

Yes, that's what I've been saying all along, everything is integrated! Which I find highly unusual for a system that old. And you're absolutely right, it's all top quality - not just the mobo itself. In fact, just the metal cover alone weights about the same as modern (and cheap) ATX case, made from flimsy pressed metal They sure don't make these like they used to...

 

[JunkBear]

One of the first XFX branded gpu.

 

[JunkBear]

The older computer I just built to play older and newer games and it's rocking flawlessly Windows 7 ultimate.

CASE: Aopen

PSU: Thermaltake TR2-430NP

FLOPPY: 3 1/2" Matsumita

OPTICAL: LG GH22NS50

HDD: WD 320gigs SATA-2 Blue

MOTHERBOARD: Aopen AX4SPE-UN skt478

CPU: Pentium 4 HT 3.0E (3.0 gigs / 1024k cache / 800mhz FSB) Prescott 90nm (Socket 478)

MEMORY: 3 gigs DDR-400

GPU: HIS HD 4670 IceQ AGP 8X Overclocked from company. The most powerful AGP they ever made and that can also bring the sound through HDMI port. http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/b146/his-hd-4670-iceq-native-hdmi

 

[Red_Machine]

Why would you use a DVI adapter when there's a VGA port on the card?