Built myself a 486

[zzip]

10 hours ago, eightbit said:

 

Is there a version of Winamp for Windows 3.1? I am using DOS MPXPlay (which is awesome by the way) and it is touted as a lightweight DOS MP3 player. The documentation for it says that you need a DX-4 100 in order to play back MP3. The documentation is absolutely correct as I tried playing MP3's play using the DX-2 66 previously and it was not pretty

 

I have the DX-4 100 clocked using 33Mhz bus with a 3x multiplier in order to keep the VLB cards happy on the bus. I have had zero issues with them so I am not going to try a 2x multiplier on a 50mhz bus although this board does support it. I hear problems arise with VLB cards with the higher than 33mhz bus and I'd rather not rock the boat so to speak.

I'm guessing  the CPU load is due to decompression?  Can it play other formats on a lesser CPU?

[eightbit]

27 minutes ago, zzip said:

I'm guessing  the CPU load is due to decompression?  Can it play other formats on a lesser CPU?

 

Indeed. MP2 is fine. It is absolutely the decompression.

[Keatah]

On 3/15/2022 at 11:06 PM, eightbit said:

Why do I have this feeling I am going to become some sort of VLB video card collector?

If you're really really gonna do that - just go after singular apex examples of the major chips and their architectures. Tried it the other way, collecting cards for cards' sake, and ended up with boxes of e-waste.

[eightbit]

2 hours ago, Keatah said:

If you're really really gonna do that - just go after singular apex examples of the major chips and their architectures. Tried it the other way, collecting cards for cards' sake, and ended up with boxes of e-waste.

 

I never call any of it "e-waste"

 

I would love to go for apex examples. Problem is that I do not have apex funds...lol!

 

What I am doing is finding cards that are dirt cheap ($20-$30 range) and buying and trying them. Not looking for the same chip over and over however, but unique examples. It's good to have working cards in any case as I will find use for them eventually I am sure. Certainly not going to ever scrap any of these. 

[eightbit]

16 hours ago, wierd_w said:

I have done some initial testing with win32s on win3.11 as concerns WinAmp.

 

While older versions "start", they cannot actually PLAY my test MP3.  It could be that my MP3 is too modern though. (too hgh bitrate)

 

I will try a lower bitrate one, and see if it still balks.

 

Edit: Nope. Fairly sure it is trying to call directsound libraries, and cant actually find/use them in 3.x.  Just use winplay3.

 

I tested WinPlay3 and it does work, but not efficiently. The settings have to be dumbed down in order to reliably play a 192 kbps MP3 file. And that is on a DX-4 100 machine. It's cool and fun to be able to actually play MP3's in Windows 3.1 for the novelty, but MPXPlay in DOS is just so much more efficient. It chews up these MP3 files with no issue. You can bounce around an entire library with ease and no skips or slowdown whatsoever and it supports the long filenames of the MP3 files too.

 

http://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/

 

I'll stick to DOS MP3 playback. Not that you can't play MP3's on like everything nowadays..lol. But, if you haven't tried this DOS player you should. It is a killer DOS app in my book.

 

[+OLD CS1]

I figured it out: one of you guys is Kitboga.

 

 

Also, I turned up an Evergreen and a Kingston over-drive CPU.  Pretty certain they still work.  You guys are putting in the bug in me to build a system.  Really have no time for that kind of fun.

[Keatah]

21 hours ago, eightbit said:

I never call any of it "e-waste"

I always call it e-waste, because that's what it is. On occasion (for the longest time) I've put boxes of this stuff out curbside, days before the dustcart swings by. And it always disappears prior. I think there's this weird guy that comes by and collects it in the early morning or something. For all I know they get sold on ebay or traded.

 

21 hours ago, eightbit said:

I would love to go for apex examples. Problem is that I do not have apex funds...lol!

I get that. At the same time I found it cheaper to save up for a certain example rather than buy 4 or 5 random specimens. But whatever floats the boat.

[Keatah]

15 hours ago, eightbit said:

http://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/

Yikes! What do I download to play on a standard Windows 3.1 & DOS 6.20 system?

[eightbit]

14 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Yikes! What do I download to play on a standard Windows 3.1 & DOS 6.20 system?

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mpxplay/MPXP166G.ZIP?download

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

You guys are putting in the bug in me to build a system.

DO IT!

 

To help get U started.. http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/amd5x86.htm

evergreen586.pdf tc100a1.pdf

 

 

[eightbit]

3 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Also, I turned up an Evergreen and a Kingston over-drive CPU.  Pretty certain they still work.  You guys are putting in the bug in me to build a system.  Really have no time for that kind of fun.

 

That's really cool man. My company made one of these too called the PNY Quickchip 133. A few years back I cleaned out one of our labs and found one of these boxed, but they wouldn't let me have it and it along with a bunch of other old hardware was carted away into the abyss. Wish I had that chip...

 

 

[eightbit]

I just realized that this Asus board of mine needs a BIOS update. I have been testing things with a 512MB CF card and today I went to use a 1GB card in the machine. The BIOS sees it as 977MB so that is fine, but fdisk sees 504MB.

 

And I now realize why. There are no LBA settings in the BIOS. Those were added in a later BIOS revision. I have that revision but I do not have a programmer or a bank 512 Kbit (64K x8) 28-pin EPROM.

 

Is there anyone here who has a spare EPROM and a programmer? I can send you the BIOS file to flash and I'll cover the shipping cost (obviously), cost of the EPROM and throw a couple of bucks your way for your trouble. If you have a programmer and no EPROM, I can buy one of those and have it shipped to you to program it as well.

 

If you can help out, please let me know. Thanks!

 

 

Edited March 20, 2022 by eightbit

[eightbit]

Thanks to Keatah I am going to get that BIOS updated! Well, I hope. We'll see if it works when it arrives. I hope so as it adds some good things such as the LBA support that I need now as well as Am5x86 support that may be useful in the future if I decide to go that route. Much appreciated Keatah!

 

On another note, scored this Mach32 today for a great deal. I know there are issues with some DOS games with this card but I am curious about its overall performance. Not too much can be found online about the VLB version and I have always been a fan of ATI's products, so I figured why not. This is the 2MB retail version with the good RAMDAC. Anybody have this?

 

Also, I always see a "feature connector" on these cards. What (if anything) ever utilized it?

 

[Keatah]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_connector

It was essentially a backside local bus on the video card. Directly to the video memory. Much faster than ISA or VLB and even PCI. Approaching 200MB/sec bandwidth. So performance was between PCI and AGP. Things like MPEG decoder cards, tuners, or digitizer/capture cards, or video overlay cards used this. VR1 headset and 3DO Blaster (3DO on a 2 ISA card set) and secondary specialty hi-res boards also used it, like the EIZO TIGA based on the TMS34010. I'm sure there were ultra high-end video production stuff and CAD/CAM boards that used it. There was rumor of some sort of 3D add-on for the connector, but I never heard of it personally. Think pre-pre-SLI.

 

While available on almost every videocard of the era. Manufacturers ended up liking to do their own MPEG decoders and on-board tuners. Think Voodoo 3 3500 and ATi All-In-Wonder and whatever else was just prior to those.

 

Anyways, all of this.. this stuff.. was too expensive for me back then. So never got hands-on experience with the connector. I was struggling to upgrade from 4MB to 8MB RAM!

[wierd_w]

11 hours ago, eightbit said:

Thanks to Keatah I am going to get that BIOS updated! Well, I hope. We'll see if it works when it arrives. I hope so as it adds some good things such as the LBA support that I need now as well as Am5x86 support that may be useful in the future if I decide to go that route. Much appreciated Keatah!

 

On another note, scored this Mach32 today for a great deal. I know there are issues with some DOS games with this card but I am curious about its overall performance. Not too much can be found online about the VLB version and I have always been a fan of ATI's products, so I figured why not. This is the 2MB retail version with the good RAMDAC. Anybody have this?

 

Also, I always see a "feature connector" on these cards. What (if anything) ever utilized it?

 

 

Once, LOOONG ago, I scored myself a VFX-1 headset.  (sadly, no longer have it.)

 

The interface board for the VFX-1 used an IDC header cable to connect with the vesa feature connector of your video card, and is how it tapped into the video signal to generate the stereoscopic view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear

 

Here you can see the  VIP card, with the mated pair connector, which you connect to the vesa feature connector on the video card.

 

 

 

I hope this answers your question.

 

[eightbit]

You know, playing around with some old games and software today and really having fun with this machine I realized something that was just so obvious. The EASE of getting old software to this.

 

It may not be much of a thought to most people using old PC's, but man to me that is just huge. As most of you know me and know that I have grown up and worked with a plethora of vintage computers (Amiga, ST, Mac, Apple, etc) and the one NOT fun thing for me in some cases with some machines was figuring out how to get software to said machine.

 

Using emulators with a HDD image in order to copy programs to it and then bring it back to the host machine (Amiga, looking at you) was the most non-fun exercise of the process to me. The vintage Mac computers were even more of a PITA doing this....so much so that I had resorted to burning garbage CD-ROM's with random junk just to get it into those machines. 

 

But, because the FAT file system has been a standard in the MS-DOS/Windows world forever it is just so simple. Pop the CF out, stick it in the Windows 10 machine, copy stuff and bring it back. To the Atari ST's benefit the process was the same which is why I really enjoyed tinkering with random programs and games there as well. 

 

I dunno, maybe people enjoy that software challenge, but not me. I have bigger fish to fry in terms of getting hardware to do what I want without having an issue getting a piece of software over to the machine. The ease of reading the hard drive (in this case CF card) combined with a Gotek and the ease of using disk images is really where I want to be when it comes to software sharing with modern computers. 

 

Wish all old computers were this way! Logically I know that is not entirely possible (although there are some great devices out there that help!) but it is certainly refreshing not to be concerned at least in that area.

 

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by eightbit

[wierd_w]

As concerns old apple devices, there are a number of ways to get data in and out of them relatively painlessly.  One is to attach an avante' (or other brand) localtalk bridge directly to a localtalk adapter, then plug it into your local LAN. (then either run the appletalk daemon for linux, or set up a win2k box with Services for Macintosh).  That way you can use a bog standard fileshare with them.

 

There is some great utility in using an SDCard or CF card as the HDD, especially if it is easily removed (such as poking out the front, or out the back), since it is easily attached to a modern computer and meddled with, however, that has issue when you have installed Doublespace/Drivespace on the volume. (Modern machines have no idea how to handle a compressed volume file.)

 

 

[Keatah]

Back in the early days, to a kid, transferring software and data from one platform like Apple II to an IBM-PC was an exercise in mysticism. Complexity and confusion where everywhere. So as time went on, more tools on both sides were developed. And each was godsend. Each provided better and better functionality. And they even became complimentary.

 

At first they were magical. But the good ones became commonplace enough, established enough, that we take it all for granted now. It's so easy. Just about every micro has some sort of Flash memory adapter/reader nowadays.

 

The way the PC's standards have evolved makes it all very easy. And there's 20 or more different ways of doing it. Even the Apple II has multiple methods.

 

Over the years I found it interesting to learn the various methods, from simple file copying to a disk/SD up to convoluted disk image creation with DoubleSpace partitions and shifting drive letters. It's all fun stuff. Good to know.

 

Hell! Even vintage ZIP drives work here. One on a Win11 PC, another as a GUEST on the 486.

Edited March 22, 2022 by Keatah

[wierd_w]

For drivespace afflicted computers, I find a good old fashioned laplink cable, and a suitably old laptop (with a real parallel port) is still very workable as a solution for file transfers.

 

FastLynx (FX.EXE) is very robust in that regard.  The serial cable route can even self-bootstrap getting the client to the destination without need of a working diskette drive. It just needs CTTY to be present in the dos deployment.

[zzip]

9 hours ago, eightbit said:

You know, playing around with some old games and software today and really having fun with this machine I realized something that was just so obvious. The EASE of getting old software to this.

 

It may not be much of a thought to most people using old PC's, but man to me that is just huge. As most of you know me and know that I have grown up and worked with a plethora of vintage computers (Amiga, ST, Mac, Apple, etc) and the one NOT fun thing for me in some cases with some machines was figuring out how to get software to said machine.

 

Using emulators with a HDD image in order to copy programs to it and then bring it back to the host machine (Amiga, looking at you) was the most non-fun exercise of the process to me. The vintage Mac computers were even more of a PITA doing this....so much so that I had resorted to burning garbage CD-ROM's with random junk just to get it into those machines. 

 

But, because the FAT file system has been a standard in the MS-DOS/Windows world forever it is just so simple. Pop the CF out, stick it in the Windows 10 machine, copy stuff and bring it back. To the Atari ST's benefit the process was the same which is why I really enjoyed tinkering with random programs and games there as well. 

 

I dunno, maybe people enjoy that software challenge, but not me. I have bigger fish to fry in terms of getting hardware to do what I want without having an issue getting a piece of software over to the machine. The ease of reading the hard drive (in this case CF card) combined with a Gotek and the ease of using disk images is really where I want to be when it comes to software sharing with modern computers. 

 

Wish all old computers were this way! Logically I know that is not entirely possible (although there are some great devices out there that help!) but it is certainly refreshing not to be concerned at least in that area.

It's only easy because you have the CF option now.   It was not easy back then!

 

Back when I got my first 486, I was faced with the challenge of moving the contents of ST harddrive over to PC.    Since ST had SCSI and my PC only had IDE I essentially had two options,  either copy it all to disk 720K at a time, or serial null modem link.    Well ST serial port is limited to 19,200 so that option was not very fast but still more convenient than all that disk swapping.   Took a fairly long time to copy it all.

[eightbit]

3 minutes ago, zzip said:

It's only easy because you have the CF option now.   It was not easy back then!

 

Back when I got my first 486, I was faced with the challenge of moving the contents of ST harddrive over to PC.    Since ST had SCSI and my PC only had IDE I essentially had two options,  either copy it all to disk 720K at a time, or serial null modem link.    Well ST serial port is limited to 19,200 so that option was not very fast but still more convenient than all that disk swapping.   Took a fairly long time to copy it all.

 

 

I hear that. I do have my old yellow Laplink cable here that I used back in those days too. Admittedly I never had an ST back in those days that had a hard drive so I cannot speak to that experience, but I did work in the field migrating data nd hard drives to hundreds (or probably more like thousands) of customer machines in those days. 

 

But I agree, CF option makes life a whole lot easier

[Keatah]

In the early days. I used a makeshift serial cable & null-modem cable made from wires wire-wrapped-with-tweezers and stuffed into the DB25/DB9 serial port connectors. Or a poor man's POTS simulator with two modems, resistor, capacitor and a battery. These allowed for transfers between the PC <-> Apple II <-> Amiga. It worked and was essentially free because I got the wires from the dumpster.

 

Later on when moving from PC to PC I used ZIP drives a lot. The 100MB capacity fit the datasets' size pretty well. I'm not sure why I *got* a ZIP drive in the first place, other than it being pretty cool. And maybe to off-load infrequently used data like JPEGs and MP3s. Loved stacking 65 floppies next to one ZIP disk as a comparison. These and the LS-120 were pretty much soft-hard disks, flexible semi-rigid media.

 

I had an early quite disastrous go with CD-R/W. The box art touted RANDOM ACCESS as a bullet point. And so that's what I used it for. But it was anything but. The filesystem seemed to get tangled up with itself easily, and every time a file got changed, the access time got longer and longer. As if each changed re-wrote half the disc or got punched down a rabbit hole - requiring compete reorganization of so-called "tracks" being simulated in a single serial spiral of traditional CDs. What a flunky I was!

 

Tried even the early external IEEE-1394 drives. The interface/connection was not quite plug'n'play, seemed tacky about making a connection and recognizing a drive. Not all interface cards worked. And the drives were sealed inside a plastic enclosure that had zero ventilation, damn thing overheated and exploded all my data off the disk. Had to volunteer for rape training by a data recovery company. So never again. How was I supposed to know the drive would overheat? Automatically assumed that Western Digital wouldn't be stupid enough to sell an untested product. But. NO! Western Digital went ahead, made something, and just sold it without regard to see if it would work. I would learn these 60GB drives/enclosures had a 100% fail rate. They replaced it with an 80GB that ran even hotter in a case that also had no fan. It had a mounting/slot for one. Were they too fucking to cheap to install one? Guess so.

 

Later on I would make generous use of their warranty for other drives. Timing it so that I got higher capacity replacements as they "ran out" of reserves. Get them bastards back!

 

Eventually USB 2.0 came around and the removable drive matured. And that's all I use nowadays. For the past 20-some years.

[zzip]

36 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I had an early quite disastrous go with CD-R/W. The box art touted RANDOM ACCESS as a bullet point. And so that's what I used it for. But it was anything but. The filesystem seemed to get tangled up with itself easily, and every time a file got changed, the access time got longer and longer. As if each changed re-wrote half the disc or got punched down a rabbit hole - requiring compete reorganization of so-called "tracks" being simulated in a single serial spiral of traditional CDs. What a flunky I was!

Maybe it meant random access for reads?     There's a certain type of CD filesystem designed for more random access, but I forget the name.  The common CD-ROM ISO9660 was not good for that.    I remember early CD-writers would warn you to not let the write buffer empty or your CD-ROM would be ruined.   Guess it had to be written linearly and timing was important.  Though you could do 'sessions' that allowed you to append more data later.

[wierd_w]

technically, there was a standard called DVD-RAM.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM

 

What you are describing sounds more like multisession. 

https://www.gburner.com/online-help/what-is-multisession-disc.htm

 

With a multisession disc, the computer has to read all the sessions, with their TOCs, then interpret the filesystem virtually.  This takes lots of read time, is slow and laborious, and as you noted, prone to going FUBAR.

 

 

 

[Keatah]

8 minutes ago, zzip said:

Maybe it meant random access for reads?

The way the box was it said you could use it like a hard drive. Implied both random read/write. There were no sessions here. For all intents and purposes it seemed like a 0.25 speed USB drive.