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Post by evildragon on Sept 27, 2007 1:46:31 GMT -5
386 do not have USB, and there are no way to add USB cards to them (ISA USB cards are a thing that has been invented, but not released to mortals like us). Also, most USB adapter "thingies" are "Wintendo-only(tm)", and since i play with Linux, they're mostly useless for me. Better i should buy a switch and a lot of patch cords  I was talking about the machine with the Radeon. Surely the Radeon don't support the 386 either.  Some Linksys USB NIC's do support Linux, check an HCL for your distro. |
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Post by paulpsomiadis on Sept 27, 2007 4:29:40 GMT -5
LOL @tom's last post! ;D Also, I was Googling around and found a page full of old patched BIOS files... Maybe you can upgrade some of those PC-CR@P mainboards...  web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htmevildragon - I don't think he'll be using a Radeon in a 386 anytime soon, it's ISA only. But @tom also has an old Pentium System... |
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Sept 27, 2007 16:43:02 GMT -5
That machine is dead  Also, as i've noticed earlier, i use Linux, and most USB netcards don't work there (this includes almost ALL USB DSL modems, that appear like simple netcards with odd drivers). BTW: what was the uber-l33t-killer videocard that you can slap on a 386? I've read on some old posts that was an ATi Mach-something... Experiment #1 gazillon: Saki and the Radeon(tm): it works! But it's plain useless: there are no more color bleeding on DVD playback, but the Pentium MMX is too slow to feed data to the card (is either that, or my Kaffeine/xinelib/Radeon X.Org driver build does not support hardware MPEG2 decompression, aka DXVA/XvMC/whatever is called this crap on X11), so i just went back to the SiS 6326 (because of that, and also my monitor did not handled the high refresh rate that it outputs when i'm using my 1024x768 framebuffer console, for some reason the 6326 runs at the correct rate ;D) |
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Post by paulpsomiadis on Sept 27, 2007 18:07:40 GMT -5
ATI Mach 4MB was the tops for 386. I managed to snag the 2MB version.  There is also a nutter on eBay selling the 4MB version for something like $150...  ...yeah, him and what army? |
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Post by evildragon on Sept 27, 2007 21:14:54 GMT -5
That machine is dead Also, as i've noticed earlier, i use Linux, and most USB netcards don't work there (this includes almost ALL USB DSL modems, that appear like simple netcards with odd drivers). BTW: what was the uber-l33t-killer videocard that you can slap on a 386? I've read on some old posts that was an ATi Mach-something... some linksys USB NIC's work on linux. don't know which ones off hand... |
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Sept 29, 2007 22:27:52 GMT -5
I hate Fridays (because you don't want to see car crashes as bottlenecks on rush hours), but i love friday nights, because it's the perfect time to do some nice experiments on your classic boxes: The Quantum HD decided to work this week, so i managed to test some OLD games that i had lying around in my backups.. Time to play for Marika ;D PHOTO TIME(tm)! - MicroMan Crazy Computers, volume 1 demo ( yank it here! Look for MICRO1.ZIP), coded with WAP (Windows Animation Package), one of many "killer" sprite libraries back in 1995. It runs nicely on this box, but it chokes when you shoot, and if you raise the speed, the game runs faster, but the menus don't work! (oh, and the rest of Windows GUI too!). I got this nice game back in my times on highschool, in one of my cleanup rounds on the computer lab. Those old mechanic keyboards are perfect to killing that stupid zombie bots:  BTW: that game still exists, and it's still sharewareNow testing some more sophisticated: MONOLITH Compound 3D, an EARLY 1995 3D engine for Win32 (i got this one from a Spanish shareware magazine CDROM from 1995, back when you were able to cram thousands of cool shareware apps into a shiny 650MB CDROM): Looks like Doom, but for Win32, and nicer Try it out! (look for WINRAGE.ZIP)  BTW: for some weird reason, in my Core 2 Duo it's SLOWER to boot from this screen than my 386 Can you spell ZERO FRAMES PER SECOND? Marika does...  That's when everything is maxed out. If i reduce size to 320x200, and disable high detail, i can reach 5 FPS, maybe 6 (even using WinG!):  Now, compare these scores with the ones from my C2D system: Windows XP (Look, Ma' No Stinkin' WinG!)  (looks AWESOME on widescreen! And it does not need my Radeon X1400 at all) Sooo fast... maybe TOO fast, because it's almost unusable at such speeds (seems that noone needed VSync/auto frame rate in 1995) Linux (there is no way to use WinG here, but Wine GDI emulation adds a noticeable hit to framerate, making it somewhat usable)  Obvioulsy, the Oak OTI-077 VGA is a piece of crap for gaming of any kind. After running this beast, you will need to REBOOT, or else...  NO, that's not a Vista BSOD! Colorize your BSODs here! I can remember the dark ages with WinMe... golden times of pain ;D A reboot later: PLACAMASTER, my license plate generator, a VB6 app:  Took a while to load, but works quite nicely there... Now make some pirate fake vanity plates there, and fool your friends! BONUS SHOTS:AcerMate 333s BIOS SETUP screen:  More Win95 oddities (after 4 BSODs and a Explorer crash)  Marika's desktop, in HD! Oh, there is my Quantum HD on SCSI Interrogator, for some odd reason it worked fine this week...  Damn, i love Fridays again DELL update: If you're planning to buy an Inspiron laptop, whatever you do, DON'T EVER ORDER THE 85W/h (high-capacity) BATTERY! EVUR! They die in less than one year: mine just dropped below 50% of its capacity in just 9 months of life, creating a nasty orange blinking battery LED on every boot/AC-adapter connection that you can't disable, and a battery that never ends charging. The replacement costs $180, and it's the same shitty battery! Mine was made by Sanyo in Japan, so they replaced explosive batteries with bricks Yep, that was a HUGE ripoff... |
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Post by jlf65 on Oct 1, 2007 0:28:45 GMT -5
Nice Twin Spica wallpaper. I really liked that anime. The rest of the system looks good too. ;D
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Oct 6, 2007 16:35:22 GMT -5
Welcome to another Service Night(tm)!, sponsored by Acer, IBM and Avex Group
Experiments for this session: - Asumi (the IBM box):After donating her PSU to the 386 (now Marika), it finally got a new PSU from a spare case that i got from the junkyard. Now, just for fun, let's compile a Linux kernel!  You know that your computer is a Piece-of-Crap(TM) if it fails to build a Linux kernel (like the first batch of PIII-1100s). Luckily for me, Asumi is not one of these, those extra 32 megs of RAM are a huge boost for compile times: it now takes 30 minutes to burn a fresh 2.2.27 monolithic bzImage (monolithic = no modules, everything is on a single image) - Marika, the 386 box:Experiment #NaN: Office 97! M$ says that you may not run O97 on anything less than a 386DX with 8 megs of RAM, but M$ also speaks too much crap, so let's go! This is not the first attempt to run O97 there, an earlier attempt a long time ago failed with the installer crashing on the beginning of file copy operation. But now, since the Quantum HD decided to work for good, we're now bloody rich on HD ;D This version is Office 97 Professional SR-2 P.E.(*), from MSDN Subscriptions. - Everything seems to be going OK:   ... and after 1 hour of trashing ... SUCCESS!  No reboot needed! Office tried to delete my MSO4.2 setup, but i declined the offer in the case of a failure, so let's continue... - First test: Everyone that installs Office run Word as the first thing after the install ends   OH, NO! IT'S THE GAY CLIPPO!!! HE'S BACK, AND IN 2-D!!!  Fortunately for us, he dissapears after hitting ESC on that bubble... Word runs fine, but it's slow when you're typing due to the spell checker. Be a man, type freely! Spell checkers are for cowards  Translation: "Suck my balls, Bill!", my answer to "You will NOT run my Office product on a non-Windows-logo 386SX machine!"- Next test: Excel! It loads FASTER than Excel 5.0?!?!?  Excel Saga EP14 was being broadcasted on Animax at the time of this test, so the first Excel test is pretty obvious:  Unlike Excel, this Excel will not eat your dog at dinner ;D BTW: "Word Saga", "PowerPoint Saga" and "Outlook Saga" were considered too, but having a girl called Word or Outlook are not best-seller ideas, so they were binned ;D- We will not stop at PowerPoint, but it's 5X faster than PPT2.1 (the one that is part of MSO4.2). We're talkin' about 32 bit code, ladies and gentleman. Raw 32-bit power! For now, let's import an old slideshow that i made for my Industrial Psychology class a long ago:  - Look out! It's Outlook!!! And it WORKS? Yes, with 6 megs of RAM is not Initial D's Takumi Fuyuwara, but it does the job.  5 minutes later, the gay clip strikes again, and a lot of sample items appear on each Outlook function:  Marika can serve as a nice (HUGE) PDA: it takes only 15 seconds to add a calendar entry, and i have scheduled my Mythical Detective Loki recordings there:  Great, another planner that i will not use  - Access can grant access to your data: here is running the sample "Northwind Traders" DB/app that comes bundled (Spanish translation team decided that "Neptuno" (Neptune) sounds better than "Viento del Norte" (Northwind), for some odd reason):   As usual, it runs faster than expected: not Speed Racer, but also not Snail Racer. - BONUS: Since i had a FULL Office CD from MSDN, mine came with Bookshelf for Office, a "shareware" version of a handy dictionary. Surprisingly, it runs pretty fast! Feels like its light GUI:   Experiment result: COMPLETE SUCCESS!!!Just after that, i blowed away MSO4.2 from my 500MB HD, since i no longer needed it, because MSO97 is damn faster, and due to the SR-2 being integrated, it should be rock solid. Ah, no BSODs were captured on this experiment. This is a Good Thing(TM). In resume: If you're bloody rich on HD, install MSO97, but make sure to install the shared files (PhotoEDitor, DAO, OrgChart, and such crap) on the large HD! M$ did wanted you to pay Intel for a new Pentium box back in 1997, but MSO97 were already optimized for the 386... /(*)Plastic Case Missing Edition: i yanked that CD from my Database/Networking lab at the university and made a *cough*backup*cough*. So it's not your normal crappy pirate Office CD that you get for 10 cents on the nearest flea market, but a "golden developer release" edition |
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Oct 12, 2007 21:56:28 GMT -5
Bad news: Marika's soul was killed by Office 97 (as in Twin Spica, where the real Marika dies, and it's cloned, resulting in a very different Marika): the machine was unbootable this week due to an death screen related with "not enough memory to load some obscure VxD".... Seems that O97 enlarged the registry or something beyond the limits of our limited RAM. That's what i call a TOTAL MELTDOWN! No DOS bootdisk helped to make the system bootable again, so we needed to take the death pill: format and reinstall! Time for data recovery: Saki to the rescue! (fortunately for us, the partition was intact). Some pics of the BEST 540M HD EVER MADE: the IBM DALA-3540 (the original DeskStar), with a single platter, and the world's smallest circuit board EVER BUILT INTO AN HD (for comparison, Maxtor, Conner and SeaCrap PCBs of 1995 were HUGE, filling the entire bottom of the HD):    Win95 setup: BOOORING! But this time, no weird switches, no hangs, no nada! It was a simple no-worries setup, and it was finished after two hours (the original one required almost 6 hours!)   After reinstalling the drives and some core patches/programs, it was the time for more experiments. HINT: if you're installing a Crystal CX4237-based soundcard on a AcerMate 333s, take cwbsetup.inf and REMOVE the install of the SRS 3D applet, otherwise, your sound card will be a zombie, where you can't control the volume, and the SRS thing will make your soundcard to sound like liquid poop.* LAME on a 386? Lame...  * Everyone's favorite task manager, now running on a 386! Sysinternals Process Explorer runs, but you will need a version from the v10.x branch (the v11.x branch will not run!), the Winsock2 update, and steroids for your box: this thing eats all your CPU time while you're on the task list window! Minimize it, and it will reduce from 100% CPU to 10-20%.    Since i had my MSDN Subscriptions Win95 CD, i also had access to Plus! Say hello to aliased fonts (oh, wait! i need an ATI Mach for that), hi-color icons (again, i need an ATI Mach for that too), and some other useless stuff (who needs DriveSpace when you have a SCSI card?)  3D Pinball, from Plus!: after a slow load, surprisingly it runs at full speed! (after some minor choking with SFX when starting a new game, but they go away after a while). And it looks nice on a non-ATI Mach card:  FYI: The Quantum HD was missing for this week, but some scratch-tick-scratch can be heard when you're doing something... This new Marika is running FASTER! Well, that confirms the myth of those self-destructing Win95 installs... the latest one lasted 2 years, and died on their anniversary! (first installed: 10/10/2005, died, formatted and resurrected: 10/10/2007!) Now, it's time for: THE HORROR TALE OF THE WEEK!TM(sponsored by Samsung HDs and Hitachi explosive spindle/VCM combo driver chips!)I got a Samsung Voyager 3 HD (VG34323A, 4.3gig) for repair (the drive was pulled from a dead Pentium II). When i plugged the drive, some smoke was being released from a red spot on the spindle/VCM combo driver chip, and quickly i unplugged it! This was the result: (the combo chip was a Hitachi HA-series)  Since i had another spare VG34323A (that one had only one useable GB), i swapped boards and Flash ROMs (almost all Voyagers and early SpinPoints use socketed PLCC 27F1024 Flash ROMs from ST or AMD), plugged the drive, and... [glow=red,2,300] FIREWORKS![/glow] And lots of smoke! It was another Hitachi combo chip that was fried this time, now with a BIGGER hole, and another spot that was ready to boom if i had not unplugged the drive after the initial show...  This was the result of the entire carnage:  After that, the drives were brutally disassemblied with a screwdriver, a kitchen knife and a shoe after that Sorry, i didn't take pictures of that... It was a very sad moment, but i've discovered that the suicide HD had a Nidec spindle motor, MADE IN CHINA!!! (the good one had a JVC spindle). Was that the cause of all this carnage? The suicide HD also had suffered a head crash too, so the platters were badly scratched Next week menu: NOTHING? Classes will start on Monday, so experiments may be on hold for a while Note for myself: rip an disk image from Marika's HD and burn onto a CD for faster disaster recovery. Also, do the same with Saki's boot/system HD, and burn onto an HQ DVD
Bad news also for PROJECT Spica: Project MIZUHO-5 was closed, because Dear Boys raws were impossible to download, and anyway, someone did the audio dub project before me, and with H264 raws! Hail to Megaupload Premium!
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Post by GiGaBiTe on Oct 14, 2007 4:07:44 GMT -5
Lol, this is like the longest thread on this forum. Anyways, I gots me a new 20G Maxtor (looks like a quantum, wtf?) and a 512M stick of PC133 for my server bringing it up to 1536M (yay for MySQL and apache!)
After much testing on the RAM (memtest for 2 days in row), the RAM passed even though it was wofat brand. The 20G miraculously had no bad sectors or sectors about to go bad after I gave it the 48 hour torture test.
Next thing I need to get is an E6750, another motherboard and 2 GB more RAM so i can upgrade my computer and swap out my athlon 64 3700 for my current E6420 for a faster Gmod server.
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Oct 14, 2007 9:02:24 GMT -5
Lol, this is like the longest thread on this forum. Anyways, I gots me a new 20G Maxtor (looks like a quantum, wtf?) and a 512M stick of PC133 for my server bringing it up to 1536M (yay for MySQL and apache!) After much testing on the RAM (memtest for 2 days in row), the RAM passed even though it was wofat brand. The 20G miraculously had no bad sectors or sectors about to go bad after I gave it the 48 hour torture test. If your MaxCrap looks like a Quantum (shiny cover, "Maxtor" printed over the cover in black letters, or in a small-ish label), it's because IT'S A QUANTUM! The last models of Quantum were released as Maxtors (Fireball Plus VQ => DiamondMax D740X, Fireball lct40 => DiamondMax D540X, and the Atlas still had Quantum branding for a while until the Atlas III) No-name RAM rarely fails... unless you have bought from some obscure retailer, or due to ESD (cheapo sticks are extremely sensitive to ESD)... I had used all kinds of RAM, and never had one stick fail, from good brands (Apacer, IBM), and from no-name brands (things with chips from RAMS, Siemtek, and some other random crap). However, when talking about motherboards... PC133? Had you to sell your house or one of your kidneys for get it? PC133 RAM is EXTREMELY RARE to find in the wild over here, so it likes to go way too expensive... |
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Oct 15, 2007 15:55:23 GMT -5
I'm having an extremely bad luck with hard drives this year: just after reloading Win95 on Marika (the 386), now it was time to Saki to experience a hard drive failure! After the "Momentus disaster", now the system drive of Saki (remember? my recording box), an Samsung SV0432A (Voyager 6, 4.3GB), dated from mid-1998, developed bad sectors! Yes, a Samsung HD is now failing just below my eyes!Everything started this Friday, after a scheduled Mythical Detective Loki recording... i left the system turned ON for the weekend (because i was not at my base at the hour of the recording). When i was back today, i've discovered a frozen system, with lots of " hda: UnrecoverableError" and " hda: AddressMarkNotFound" errors... I quickly pulled the Knoppix CD, and started to do a fsck for bad blocks, and... the horror! This time was not "tic-tic-scratch", but "tic-scrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaatch". Fortunately, only a small spot of the drive seemed to be affected (so the system can still be used while i manage to find a sane drive, and to rescue the system/daemon/service settings if i need to do a fresh Knoppix install), and, oddly enough, there were no error or abnormal values logged into drive S.M.A.R.T. data! Damn! First MaxCrap, then SeaCrap, and now my dear Samsungs? I WANT A SSD DRIVE NOW!!! Now i need to get a new 4GB drive... or a bigger one (a friend promised to give me a 20-gig IBM DeathStar, but i don't want too much space for a OS drive)... Yes, everything looks like the anime  (if you didn't remember, in Steel Angel Kurumi, Saki got two almost-fatal beatings by Karinka... but in this case, Karinka was replaced with my extremely bad luck with hard drives). What drive will be next? My 160GB TravelStar? Or my brand-new 60Gb SpinPoint? And i HATE to make backups...As for the Momentus: i've donated it today to the lab, in "exchange" for the SV4012H (that it's sane, alongside that funky SV2042H, that is still sane too, despite being a buggy drive) My next PC will have a SSD, even if i have to sell my ass for it ;D |
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Post by paulpsomiadis on Oct 16, 2007 9:45:01 GMT -5
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Post by Tom Maneiro on Oct 17, 2007 10:09:59 GMT -5
This is planned: although CF cards are rare here, the next update to Saki and Marika will be CF drives (a 4 GB for Saki, and a "perfect-fit" 512MB for Marika). Obviously, this bans MicroDrives from my whitelist. Just fsck'ed the SV0432A - there were a bunch of bad blocks near the beginning of the drive, but fortunately, they were being used by useless log files (and a couple of files used by stuff that i should have removed a long time ago, like a Galician spell checker), so no harm was done to the system. And since i live in the state of Venezuela that produces the 100% of the aluminium of the country, it should not be too hard to assembly a custom heatsink... but i may need a new case, because the actual one is too crammed (fact: the SV4012H is NOT FIXED TO THE CASE! It's resting on it's anti-ESD clamshell, but it should be running pretty fresh there, since the case has no cover). Oh, add a better PSU for the checklist! It seems that Puerto Ordaz is the worst place in the world to have a computer without a uber-l33t cooling system EDIT: Just got a loaned drive for Saki: yet another Samsung, a 8GB Voyager 8/9 (SV0842D). Here is a sample.... The one that i got is from very early January 2000! And yes, it was recovered from the university junkyard, like every free (as in beer) drive ;D EDIT2: Bad luck always have ssome good luck as companion: the SSF2 manual is finally here, after 3 long months in the mail. I can guess that Royal Mail (UK mail) and IPOSTEL (Venezuelan mail) services can be trusted... but can i trust in USPS? (everybody says that USPS (U.S. Postal service) is a piece of crap, so it must be true). Now, time to blast some lamers over here with those killer combos |
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Post by paulpsomiadis on Oct 18, 2007 4:43:34 GMT -5
'Bout bloody time the manual got there! Glad it did though! |
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Also, as i've noticed earlier, i use Linux, and most USB netcards don't work there (this includes almost ALL USB DSL modems, that appear like simple netcards with odd drivers). BTW: what was the uber-l33t-killer videocard that you can slap on a 386? I've read on some old posts that was an ATi Mach-something...
(if you didn't remember, in Steel Angel Kurumi, Saki got two almost-fatal beatings by Karinka... but in this case, Karinka was replaced with my extremely bad luck with hard drives). What drive will be next? My 160GB TravelStar? Or my brand-new 60Gb SpinPoint? And i HATE to make backups...