TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[freeagent]

Raptors were fast as feck back in the day before ssds. Nothing was faster, they were the king. No one was running 20K server drives because they didn’t exist lol. 10k maybe, but they were server stuff that didn’t run on a desktop without expensive cards. Raptors/X/Velociraptors were the pinnacle hdd for desktop use in their time am I wrong? The 150s weren’t too bad for heat if you had a fan on them. I had a few of them squished into those old tin cans with a fan that you got with your stacker. My fan was a little better though.. Anyways, I suppose it doesn’t matter much now, but they kicked the snot out of everything that I remember being relevant back then. I didn’t have a Velociraptor though, I wanted one but they were as much as an ssd.. back then I would rather have less space and waaay more speed for the price. A windows install wasn’t 40GB, and games weren’t 100GB so you could make do with a few spinners for your stuff.

 

[Keullo-e]

That depends and we've had that discussion. Unless you need real mode DOS within Windows, ME is entirely superior.

Well, not gonna argue this time

I would, if those flower styled chinese coolers wouldn't be almost long since extinct in my country. Ever since Deepcool became a thing, I don't think I've seen any of those Zalman clones sold anymore.

Onwards with my ABIT - somehow I "cracked the DaVinci code" as to why Geforce cards didn't work - a combo of running In Order Queue Depth on 1 (which made the system run like pure turd, and that was absolutely visible in Ford Racing 2 for example.), plus chipset voltage set to 3.3 which it didn't like as it was a bit (no pun intended) too low for its own taste. Upped the IOQD to 8 and NB voltage to 3.4V (a "safety measure" as I am not very keen on running it at 3.5 - 3.4 would be what I consider a 10% voltage margin.) and it seems to run absolutely gorgeous thanks to the golden PCB'd MX440SE 64MB I have in there.

Damn, that sucks. Have you removed the shim from the GPU?

Raptors were fast as feck back in the day before ssds. Nothing was faster, they were the king. No one was running 20K server drives because they didn’t exist lol. 10k maybe, but they were server stuff that didn’t run on a desktop without expensive cards. Raptors/X/Velociraptors were the pinnacle hdd for desktop use in their time am I wrong? The 150s weren’t too bad for heat if you had a fan on them. I had a few of them squished into those old tin cans with a fan that you got with your stacker. My fan was a little better though.. Anyways, I suppose it doesn’t matter much now, but they kicked the snot out of everything that I remember being relevant back then. I didn’t have a Velociraptor though, I wanted one but they were as much as an ssd.. back then I would rather have less space and waaay more speed for the price. A windows install wasn’t 40GB, and games weren’t 100GB so you could make do with a few spinners for your stuff.

Wut, does 20k drives exist? I know that 15k does, but..

 

[freeagent]

know that 15k does, but..

No but someone mentioned it earlier

 

[MaxiPro800]

Damn, that sucks. Have you removed the shim from the GPU?

Nope. Being my only 9700 Pro I'm not taking the risk of damaging the only card I have, and for what it's worth, the shim might actually keep my heatsink even so it makes perfect contact with the die. I applied MX4 and am gonna plop it into my K7N2 Delta ILSR and test it out, temps and all. Ford Racing 3 seems like it would be a good contender for it IMO, graphics cranked up to the max possible of course, and audio backed up by a Audigy 2 ZS.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Well, not gonna argue this time

Everyone has their preferences and Win98SE is a favorite for many, but on merits ME does better. However I respect your opinion.

Wut, does 20k drives exist?

No but someone mentioned it earlier

I think 20kRPM drives were prototyped by IBM(back when they had a HDD business) but never put to production.

SCSI 15kRPM drives however were the only thing the beat out Raptors until SAS.

 

[Greenslade]

To the person who asked has anyone heard of
Gary Arlen Kildall (/ˈkɪldˌɔːl/; May 19, 1942 – July 11, 1994) was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur.I had never heard of him but i am new to this Retro PC,s stuff.Reading about him on Wikapeda he sounded like an intresting person.

 

[Trekkie4]

So, guys... I don't get to share something so cool and/or potentially useful with you very often.

I guess you could call it a science experiment if you want to. Or pure retro madness ... the choice is yours! Anyhow, I retrofitted a "new" LG CD-ROM drive onto the old (vintage?) 8X GoldStar from around 1993, which obviously wasn't working & couldn't be fixed. At least not to my knowledge ... I've tried just about everything! It is a perfect unit for 386, 486, 5x86 or whatever you guys may have.

So, this here was the donor unit. Just your standard 52X CD drive, manufactured on Dec 2001 - nothing vintage or exciting about it I'm afraid:


The next step was taking LG apart & making sure that it's actually compatible with GoldStar. Because as you already know, both GoldStar and LG are essentially the same company, true but these things are approx. 10 years apart. And therefore (as you may have already guessed) there was a LOT of revision updates throughout those 10 years. Primarily using SMD LED instead of the old-fashioned, square one.


From the outside it looks square, yes - but that is just a plastic diffuser. Therefore, to hook up an old-fashioned LED I had to make some sort of socket or adapter. Such as 12V motor connector from an old VHS VCR for example which worked beautifully.


Unfortunately, it didn't hold for long. Wires got torn off and PCB pads lifted. I even tried using nylon zipties but alas still nothing ... there was just not enough clearance inside and the tray mech would interfere with the wires.


Long story short, it took me a while but eventually I've decided to take entirely different route instead. LED was now mounted in a different way, and wires routed around the microswitch to prevent any issues.


Which (believe it or not) actually worked out ... and so I ended up with this:


At first glance, old-school CD-ROM drive, which is obviously just a cover up for the real technology, inside. Unfortunately, the system will still recognize the modern 52X LG drive and not GoldStar, but apart from that it now looks like a whole different drive, far more suitable for an older system.

So there you have it guys. If you happen to have an old, non-working GoldStar and you want to make it work again just do the same thing. Because (if not anything else), at least I proved that it is possible to make it work

 

[QuietBob]

I think 20kRPM drives were prototyped by IBM(back when they had a HDD business) but never put to production.
SCSI 15kRPM drives however were the only thing the beat out Raptors until SAS.

Personally, I haven't heard of 20K drives even being prototyped. They would have been very hard to engineer, for most likely marginal gains in performance. Even the latest 15K units weren't significantly faster than the 10K drives.

However, if any company was actually involved in this kind of research, it would likely have been Seagate. They were the first to introduce a 10K HDD in 1997 - the Cheetah 9 ST19101 (9 GB, 22 MB/s), and had the first 15K HDD in 2000 - the Cheetah X15 ST318451 (18 GB, 64 MB/s).

 

[Mr.Scott]

I have a working 9 gig Cheetah here somewhere.
Probably in with the slot A stuff.
I will have to look now.

 

[Greenslade]

So, guys... I don't get to share something so cool and/or potentially useful with you very often.

I guess you could call it a science experiment if you want to. Or pure retro madness ... the choice is yours! Anyhow, I retrofitted a "new" LG CD-ROM drive onto the old (vintage?) 8X GoldStar from around 1993, which obviously wasn't working & couldn't be fixed. At least not to my knowledge ... I've tried just about everything! It is a perfect unit for 386, 486, 5x86 or whatever you guys may have.

So, this here was the donor unit. Just your standard 52X CD drive, manufactured on Dec 2001 - nothing vintage or exciting about it I'm afraid:


The next step was taking LG apart & making sure that it's actually compatible with GoldStar. Because as you already know, both GoldStar and LG are essentially the same company, true but these things are approx. 10 years apart. And therefore (as you may have already guessed) there was a LOT of revision updates throughout those 10 years. Primarily using SMD LED instead of the old-fashioned, square one.


From the outside it looks square, yes - but that is just a plastic diffuser. Therefore, to hook up an old-fashioned LED I had to make some sort of socket or adapter. Such as 12V motor connector from an old VHS VCR for example which worked beautifully.


Unfortunately, it didn't hold for long. Wires got torn off and PCB pads lifted. I even tried using nylon zipties but alas still nothing ... there was just not enough clearance inside and the tray mech would interfere with the wires.


Long story short, it took me a while but eventually I've decided to take entirely different route instead. LED was now mounted in a different way, and wires routed around the microswitch to prevent any issues.


Which (believe it or not) actually worked out ... and so I ended up with this:


At first glance, old-school CD-ROM drive, which is obviously just a cover up for the real technology, inside. Unfortunately, the system will still recognize the modern 52X LG drive and not GoldStar, but apart from that it now looks like a whole different drive, far more suitable for an older system.

So there you have it guys. If you happen to have an old, non-working GoldStar and you want to make it work again just do the same thing. Because (if not anything else), at least I proved that it is possible to make it work

It seems a lot of work to just put it in an old case. And when does something became vintage?

 

[Keullo-e]

Nope. Being my only 9700 Pro I'm not taking the risk of damaging the only card I have, and for what it's worth, the shim might actually keep my heatsink even so it makes perfect contact with the die. I applied MX4 and am gonna plop it into my K7N2 Delta ILSR and test it out, temps and all. Ford Racing 3 seems like it would be a good contender for it IMO, graphics cranked up to the max possible of course, and audio backed up by a Audigy 2 ZS.

Is the die on the same level as the shim? They were known of having their shims slightly higher..

IIRC R600 and Tahiti had the same issue.

 

[Greenslade]

Another good video from Phil *720p monitor*

How many of you use one for your Retro gaming?Very few on eBay.

 

[Keullo-e]

Another good video from Phil *720p monitor*

How many of you use one for your Retro gaming?Very few on eBay.

1080p on every screen which are on daily usage. I do have one 1050p in storage which needs recapping though..

 

[onemanhitsquad]

dug out another dually... sealed ...packaging was so cool I never used it!

Sapphire HD4850 X2 2008

 

[Keullo-e]

dug out another dually... sealed ...packaging was so cool I never used it!

Sapphire HD4850 X2 2008

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Heh, I miss the sexy chicks in GPU boxes. Though this is still my favourite, Asus 9800 XT box:

 

[MaxiPro800]

Is the die on the same level as the shim? They were known of having their shims slightly higher..

IIRC R600 and Tahiti had the same issue.

IIRC it is on the 9700 Pro, or at least that's how my eyes perceived it when I installed the Deepcool V50 HsF.

As for newer cards, the only ones I have are both Pitcairn, one Pro and one XT (former is a R7 265 DirectCU II and the other is a HD7870 from Gigabyte)

 

[QuietBob]

dug out another dually... sealed ...packaging was so cool I never used it!

Sapphire HD4850 X2 2008

View attachment 249191View attachment 249192View attachment 249193

Wonder what free game they put on that CD-ROM. Pokemon Ruby?

 

[onemanhitsquad]

Wonder what free game they put on that CD-ROM. Pokemon Ruby?

Haha...got me wondering

 

[MachineLearning]

My brother had an old TI-84 from who knows where (probably "borrowed" from a school ). And of course, it can be overclocked...

This is at stock speeds, as you can see the CPU hovers around 15.085MHz. At TI-83 game compatibility speeds it operates around 6MHz. This is dead-on average - the CPU may run at +/-20% the set clock speed, which for the TI-84 Plus was 15MHz. That variance is due to these two resistors, R07D and R08D. The former adjusts the fast frequency, and the latter adjusts both slow and fast frequencies. It's not recommended to touch R08D because it's more likely to make the calculator unstable in games which use this slower clock speed.

PCB Wk47/2005. This model was introduced in 2004, so this is relatively early-on. The CPU is a Zilog Z80, as I said @ 6/15MHz. The flash is a product of Fujitsu and AMD's joint venture Spansion, back when AMD made DRAM, and long before the Radeon rebranded Patriot / Dataram modules.

The limitation for these calculators is not typically the CPU, it's the flash. If the CPU operates too quickly (generally >23MHz), the flash feeds it incorrect data, as it's only specced to keep up until around ~20MHz. TI was conservative on the CPU clock side (highest stock I read about is around 17MHz). But you may push it higher, if you dare. I was conservative and wanted to bring it to the 20MHz zone. And to add heatsinks, of course...

Snip goes the foam, and I pried some of that plastic support on the backing with pliers to make room...

Pencil time

R07D Initial value: ~ 1.17mOhm
Final value: ~ 0.72mOhm

Messy, but...?

~ 33% overclock. Nice I noticed at the time of editing ( a few hours after-mod) that the clock speed has increased to 20.250MHz, likely due to temperature / battery voltage shift. These RC's are inaccurate, so I'm learning

Good resources here and here. The program for testing the CPU speed is here.

83+ and others

Spansion flash NAND Datasheet

 

[looniam]

Pencil time

R07D Initial value: ~ 1.17mOhm
Final value: ~ 0.72mOhm


Messy, but...?

i don't care.

~ 33% overclock. Nice

Good resources here and here. The program for testing the CPU speed is here.

fantastic and amazing job.

thanks.

 

[Audioave10]

dug out another dually... sealed ...packaging was so cool I never used it!

Sapphire HD4850 X2 2008

View attachment 249191View attachment 249192View attachment 249193

I just love those old Eye-Candy boxes...Nice Card!

 

[QuietBob]

My brother had an old TI-84 from who knows where (probably "borrowed" from a school ). And of course, it can be overclocked...

A really interesting experiment. IMO what makes an enthusiast is not the hardware they own, but rather what they can accomplish with it. Well done!

 

[Keullo-e]

I haven't got ever a scientific calculator, but it's interesting what you can do with those

 

[Audioave10]

A Tech closet is dangerous as you pile up boxes and containers as I appear to have found something. I think its new!

 

[Greenslade]

That depends and we've had that discussion. Unless you need real mode DOS within Windows, ME is entirely superior.

I put a comment on Phil s 98se video, asking when he will do one on Windows ME.This is his reply *Not sure I will

I see no advantage over 98 and the next best thing is XP.* No thumb,s up from him either. I did say i enjoyed his informative videos.It seems you are in the minority there ,with you likeing cassettes over vinyl to.