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TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

Retrorockit said:
Voodoo was King of the Hill in PCI video days. But when dedicated graphics slots came out their history of add on and SLI cards didn't prepare them to compete with ATI and Nvidia in the single GPU market. The 5500 was their only answer to the newer cards coming out. But it cost too much to produce to be competitive. Intel's anouncement of AGP 2.0 having a lower Voltage made it instantly obsolete. Voodoo pretty much invented 3D gaming, and the 5500 was the best they ever made. Any collector of Voodoo cards will want to have one.
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I respectfully disagree... By the time Voodoo5 came out, 3dfx was running behind its competition by a long shot. 32-bit color, texture compression, AGP 4x support, the list goes on & on. V5 had a "cool" factor, I'm not going to say otherwise, but unfortunately this cool factor wasn't enough to gain advantage over ATI & nVidia.

In my (personal) opinion, Voodoo2 was their best card... Not only it introduced the SLI feature (which wiped the floor with any other video card on the market), but it was the most powerful 3D accelerator available ... period! Which (and I'm sorry to say this) just wasn't the case with Voodoos 3, 4 & 5. V4 had potential to become something much more & better, but for some reason they completely gave it up & focused on Voodoo5.
 
As far as hard drives goes these are nostalgic, or at least sentimental. In 2009 WD Blacks had a wider range of talents, being 6-drive RAID certified by WD. For less than the price of an Intel X25-M I picked up four of the 640GB capacity. They were my main drives for 2.5 years existing in Matrix RAID 0/5 (ICH10R).

wd-black-2009.jpg


They reformed as a single RAID-5 volume after getting a new lead singer, a Crucial M4 SSD. Another 2.5 years goes by, my main machine becomes SSD-only, and the drives are split up to separate RAID-1's in other systems. They held mostly steam library and main drive backups just in case any one of them punched their instant retirement cards, however, they persisted until the end. Even watched me shuck a drive, their eventual replacement.

After The Long Walk outside the only HDD to remain are NAS drives.
 
Just a quick update... Removed the heatsink to wash out all the dust (which turned out to be fairly clean by the way) & also to remove TIM. Yes, I don't like having TIM on these older ceramic CPUs... Besides, they already got huge contact surface, so I don't see this being an issue.


The CPU is non-MMX Pentium, "133" (as someone kindly wrote across the entire chip :D)
 
Trekkie4 said:
Just a quick update... Removed the heatsink to wash out all the dust (which turned out to be fairly clean by the way) & also to remove TIM. Yes, I don't like having TIM on these older ceramic CPUs... Besides, they already got huge contact surface, so I don't see this being an issue.


The CPU is non-MMX Pentium, "133" (as someone kindly wrote across the entire chip :D)
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Writing on a chip with a sharpie?! Dear god, that previous owner should watch out to not get lynched by angry Gamers Nexus watchers... :D
 
Right?! Would you believe this isn't the 1st time for me to see something like this?! I've seen ppl writing on all sorts of chips ... AMD Socket A Athlons & Durons, Pentiums, even Celerons! I did my best to scrub it off, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere... And I really don't want to use anything aggressive & damage the CPU! As annoying as it looks, it seems to be working just fine so I want to keep it that way :)

I suppose I could take another P133 off another motherboard (got yet another Pentium 133 set inside one of the boxes) & replace it for this one, but that would be too extreme IMHO. Once I covered it back up with the heatsink, it looked as good as new ;)
 
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I've read that 3dfx never fully implemented AGP properly in their cards. They lacked sideband addressing, and AGP texturing (I think), so I originally thought it was just using an early implementation of AGP 1.0 that wasn't compatible with them. However, I recently learned that ALL 3dfx GPUs are internally PCI and simply bridged to AGP. It's no wonder they couldn't compete, given that the cards were crippled at the architecture level.
 
Red_Machine said:
I've read that 3dfx never fully implemented AGP properly in their cards. They lacked sideband addressing, and AGP texturing (I think), so I originally thought it was just using an early implementation of AGP 1.0 that wasn't compatible with them. However, I recently learned that ALL 3dfx GPUs are internally PCI and simply bridged to AGP. It's no wonder they couldn't compete, given that the cards were crippled at the architecture level.
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Most of that is a myth. You can not get the performance numbers those chips gave over a PCI implementation, even bridged to AGP.
 
lexluthermiester said:
@Disparia All SSD storage? That must be pricey..
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The Crucial M4 128GB x 3 bought back in 2012 are still kickin' and the rest have been spread out since then. All in all, it's only 1TB of SSD total in the house compared to 16TB of NAS HDD.
 
Captain's log, supplemental...

Pentium 133 is coming along better than expected :) Still have to deal with few tweaks & changes to the cable management, but otherwise I'm ready to fire it up & hope for the best! Here are couple of Before & After pics...

Before:



After:



Ah, yes, the good ol' times... Because nothing says "nostalgic" like the bundle of exposed live wires, carrying 230V AC voltage ;)
 
Trekkie4 said:
Captain's log, supplemental...

Pentium 133 is coming along better than expected :) Still have to deal with few tweaks & changes to the cable management, but otherwise I'm ready to fire it up & hope for the best! Here are couple of Before & After pics...

Before:



After:



Ah, yes, the good ol' times... Because nothing says "nostalgic" like the bundle of exposed live wires, carrying 230V AC voltage ;)
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I would recommend putting a better/bigger heatsink & fan on that chip. The OG P133's ran very hot. Better safe than sorry.
 
lexluthermiester said:
I would recommend putting a better/bigger heatsink & fan on that chip. The OG P133's ran very hot. Better safe than sorry.
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I considered to make a quick swap, using the fan/heatsink assembly from the other P133 set, but it would probably make marginal (if any) difference on the cooling performance so I gave it up & reverted back to the old one. if it was a standard, 3-pin connector which plugs into the motherboard, replacing it would be simple enough. As it is, I would need to pull out the molex connector & make a whole new cable management...


And yes, I know I could use any Socket 7/370/462 heatsink but really, I don't think it'll get that hot. If it survived for 22 years with this smaller one, I doubt it'll suddenly crash & burn now :)
 
Well, it seems I got other things to worry about... Finally booted up that P133 & found out that the Matrox Millennium video card doesn't work - just getting a black screen. Also, it would seem that the motherboard is incapable of detecting more than 49MB of RAM. Either that or something else is going on, because regardless of the RAM sticks, it doesn't want to detect 64MB.

So, in the end I pulled out the two EDO RAMs & settled for 32MB in total, along with that "VC962C", S3 Trio64V+ PCI video card which came bundled with the system in the first place. Not sure what else to do with it & how to proceed, as I can't imagine Trio64V+ providing 3D acceleration :P
 
Did you remove the old GPU drivers in Safe Mode? Does the Matrox work in Safe Mode? Safe Mode video resolution is the default for all GPUs.
 
Nope, you misunderstood me. I'm not getting ANY signal off Matrox, not even during POST, boot-up cycle... I already pulled it out & tried one more time (thinking it may be contact issue), but at this stage I'm pretty sure it's toasted :(

Edit
And I'm apparently also getting the hard drive issue, where the system is unable to detect more than 8GB of storage capacity. This one is related to the BIOS, I know (will have to flash the board), but there is also yet another issue with the SCSI CD drive... Even though BIOS successfully detected both the SCSI adapter & Teac CD-RW, the system is just not picking it up... Whenever I want to boot up "Banana" CD-ROM driver, it's telling me how "no CD-ROM devices had been found" ... any ideas?
 
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I think the Microsoft CD-ROM driver only works with IDE drives. You would at least needs SCSI interface drivers to get it to recognise it if it does support them.
 
Trekkie4 said:
Whenever I want to boot up "Banana" CD-ROM driver, it's telling me how "no CD-ROM devices had been found" ... any ideas?
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As in Booting to Dos ? (config .sys and Autoexec.bat = load driver's in config.sys
SCSI Device 1st then CD Rom).

edit
http://ask.microsemi.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/406/~/how-is-a-scsi-cd-rom-accessed-under-dos?

This information applies to the following Operating System(s):
- Microsoft DOS

In order to access a SCSI CD ROM under DOS, two drivers need to be loaded for Adaptec card in the Config.sys:
1. The ASPI DOS driver (ASPI manager, ie ASPIxxxDOS.sys) for the SCSI card
2. The DOS ASPI CD ROM driver (aspicd.sys)

A third file needs to be loaded: the Microsoft CD-ROM program (MSCDEX.EXE), manually from the DOS prompt or add to the Autoexec.bat file.

In the Adaptec web site, the DOS Configuration Utility does contain step by step instructions and the command lines needed to place in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files based on the particular Adaptec SCSI card being installed.

Notes:
1.) The DOS, ASPI driver for the card, will link the SCSI card into the DOS Operating System.
2.) The ASPICD.sys will link the CD-ROM device with the DOS ASPI driver.
3.) The Microsoft MSCDEX.EXE program loaded in the Autoexec.bat file will link the DOS ASPICD.sys driver and the DOS ASPI driver and then assign a logical drive letter to the CD-ROM.

Keep in mind that the switch "/d:mscd001: is not a drive letter designation of "d:", but a driver name designation of "mscd001" and must be the same for the ASPI CD-ROM driver in the config.sys file and mscdex.exe in the autoexec.bat file.
 
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All sorted out guys, thanks for the help...

Would you believe that majority of the problems I've had came from the BIOS? Not being able to detect larg(er) capacity drives, or even to properly "handshake" with SCSI controller card. And no, this one is not Adaptec - it's called Kouwell, KW-801something, and judging by Teac's online information it might have been bundled with their CD-RW right from the very beginning. By the way, SCSI still doesn't work under DOS, but I "cheated" & temporarily hooked up IDE CD-ROM drive, just so I could "XCOPY" the entire installation folder from a CD onto the hard drive. But once I made it to Win95, Teac drive appeared normally :)

So yes, regarding the BIOS flash... I had to go through several different versions, even models. The "Official" version does not support large capacity drives. Or even features such as "Passive Release", in fact it kinda resembles those older types from Socket 3 motherboards. You know, kinda like that 5x86 system from not so long ago. But I found another, updated version designed for another (and slightly newer) model, which seems to fit this one just fine. So far so good!
 
Trekkie4 said:
All sorted out guys, thanks for the help...

Would you believe that majority of the problems I've had came from the BIOS? Not being able to detect larg(er) capacity drives, or even to properly "handshake" with SCSI controller card. And no, this one is not Adaptec - it's called Kouwell, KW-801something, and judging by Teac's online information it might have been bundled with their CD-RW right from the very beginning. By the way, SCSI still doesn't work under DOS, but I "cheated" & temporarily hooked up IDE CD-ROM drive, just so I could "XCOPY" the entire installation folder from a CD onto the hard drive. But once I made it to Win95, Teac drive appeared normally :)

So yes, regarding the BIOS flash... I had to go through several different versions, even models. The "Official" version does not support large capacity drives. Or even features such as "Passive Release", in fact it kinda resembles those older types from Socket 3 motherboards. You know, kinda like that 5x86 system from not so long ago. But I found another, updated version designed for another (and slightly newer) model, which seems to fit this one just fine. So far so good!
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Sounds like jimmy-rig way of doing it, but you got there and that is what counts. Was going to give the same tip @dorsetknob did, but he beat me to the punch.
 
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lexluthermiester said:
Sound like jimmy-rig way of doing it, but you got there and that is what counts. Was going to give the same tip @dorsetknob did, but he beat me to the punch.
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Yeah, I know... I find it really weird that "A-Trend" never bothered to release updated version of ATC-1020! Fortunately for me, the ATC-1000+ BIOS seems to be compatible with 1020, and is (oddly enough) the only BIOS available to support "modern" features & large capacity hard drives.


I'll post another boot-up screen tomorrow, featuring the new BIOS signature. The one on the pic was still the old one... I also updated the cable management for the COM & LPT1 extensions, made it seem cleaner & hopefully more organized :)
 
Trekkie4 said:
Nope, you misunderstood me. I'm not getting ANY signal off Matrox, not even during POST, boot-up cycle... I already pulled it out & tried one more time (thinking it may be contact issue), but at this stage I'm pretty sure it's toasted :(


I did have an issue once where the BIOS video resolution wasn't supported by a slightly newer video card . I changed the resolution in the BIOS to one the card supported and it worked.
Not all BIOS allow that, and it's still an unresolved issue with many LGA775 Dells and GCN3 and up Radeons since the BIOS doesn't allow it. It was probably a 486 computer.
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This one most definitely does not allow changing the resolution ... I mean, this stuff is from 1995, 1996 which makes it 22yrs old now :)
 
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