Something Random

[CougTek]

Just saw that video about an historical figure of almost 300 years ago :

From ~6 minutes in the video until the end, am I the only one to see similarities with a famous modern figure?

Regarding your election and the result that will be marked as the end of modern democracies and the beginning of the era of autocrats, I offer you a famous quote : "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

The Orange Deplorable had 74.7M votes in 2024 and 74.2M votes in 2020. The Democrates had over 81M votes in 2020, while barely more than 71M in 2024. Your democracy will end because 10M people decided to sit this one out. They won't have another chance to cast a meaningful vote in 4 years. The Orange personality cult will gerrymander the electoral maps enough to make it all but impossible for them to lose before the next cycle. Within a decade, you'll be like Russia.

 

[sedrosken]

That DCP-L2640DW printer does support duplex printing. It's a very handy feature, if the driver supports it.

I'm aware! It works fine on my Win11 and Linux boxen. The drivers I'm stuck using under Windows 95/98 don't seem to want to do it, though. If anyone happens to know of a PCL6 driver for Win95 that does do this, I'd be interested to know, and even more interested to find out if it uses 586 instructions (my 95 box is a 486 Blue Lightning).

 

[Mercutio]

sed, How often are you printing from your retroPCs?!?

The Orange Deplorable had 74.7M votes in 2024 and 74.2M votes in 2020. The Democrates had over 81M votes in 2020, while barely more than 71M in 2024. Your democracy will end because 10M people decided to sit this one out.

There's some curious voter behavior that in every one of the "battleground states." There was a significant undervote on the Presidential ticket while votes were recorded for the US Senate. In other words, voters went to the polls and cast a ballot for US Senate but not for President. Now, we just had four years of fascists crying that Trump was cheated in 2020, but it strikes me that one or two people working for the election tallying machines (Diebold et al) might be in a position to push out an update to do such a thing.
They can blame "a software bug" if they're caught, but also "Oh well, it's too late and it's clear that Trump had the will of the people on his side."

We are well and truly fucked and there's no will or spine to do a single thing about it. My queer, trans and female friends are going to kiss their rights goodbye and there's literally nothing that can be done.

 

[sedrosken]

sed, How often are you printing from your retroPCs?!?

Not terribly often, but more than you'd think. I do occasionally print out documentation or reference guides for things as it's more convenient than struggling through scrolling in a PDF on my laptop or a tablet. I'm aware that it's not terribly environmentally conscious, so I try to keep it to things I know I'm going to need somewhat often and keep my printings in a binder.

We are well and truly fucked and there's no will or spine to do a single thing about it. My queer, trans and female friends are going to kiss their rights goodbye and there's literally nothing that can be done.

Those voting trends are interesting, but I actually kind of buy them. I'm not saying it's impossible or even improbable that they were tampered with, but if they weren't, it also wouldn't surprise me that much. Between the truncated campaign and circumstances around her shift to the candidacy, there was definitely a fair bit of resentment in my circles for Harris as being an ineffectual continuation of Biden who was even more open to being bought out by the corpos (there was talk that she would get rid of Lina Khan, for example). Not to mention all the people who voted (or rather didn't vote at all) their conscience for Harris being just as bad with her policy on the Gaza war as Biden is. They just neglected to consider that, you know... Trump would be unequivocally worse.

When the Trumpers inevitably get hurt by his policies too (it's already started RE: the Pennsylvania companies buying stock with their christmas bonus money) I know their knee-jerk is going to be to blame Biden, but when some do start to wise up and be like "This isn't what I voted for" I'll be the first to remind them that, yes, yes it is. You made your bed, now you get to lay in it. You just better hope we can still swap the bedding out in 2028.

 

[sedrosken]

Speaking of retro builds, I've got a couple projects coming down the pipe -- I'm rebuilding my old Pentium Pro system, for one, and I'm still kind of in the planning phase. I have a couple of video cards in mind -- I have a Permedia 2V that would go nicely in it, but I'm wondering how its OpenGL support is going to be. This is a time in which that was still really spotty, case in point the Matrox G200 that I'm planning to use in the other build. A known quantity is the TNT2 M64 I also have earmarked for it, but I'm kind of left feeling that's a really uninspired choice. I'll use it if I have to, but I'll be wishing the Permedia worked out the whole time.

I pulled an ISA Sound Blaster 16 out of my parts bin, this one is a CT2940, one of the later cost-reduced PnP models with the CT1978 CQM FM synthesis chip that's known for being kind of a poor OPL clone. It mostly seems to just be missing a lot of low-pass filtering -- it gets very gritty and tinny when a real OPL implementation wouldn't. There are some games where that's actually kind of what you want, and honestly, the PPro will be running Windows NT 4.0 anyway, so it's not going to be a multimedia powerhouse no matter what I do. I'm just throwing this at it so hopefully I can just use the built-in Windows drivers for it.

If that doesn't work -- not outside the realm of possibility, it's an untested card and seems to have taken a couple dings in its life -- I have an Ensoniq AudioPCI that will also do Fine™. That's actually a card that came with this machine when it was brand new -- I think this is the card I pulled when I was salvaging the motherboard from its original ruined OEM case. Like I said, NT4 isn't going to be a multimedia experience, this will mostly just be for the various dings and chord error sounds it'll make in use. NIC will be a bog-standard Intel PRO/100B.

The other build I have coming and, frankly, one I'm more excited for as I haven't messed with that platform in a very long time, is Socket 7. Just vanilla Socket 7, mind, it's coming with a Pentium MMX 233. The board is an EPoX baby AT design with an Apollo VPX chipset, meaning that cacheable RAM is heavily dependent on how much L2 cache is present. This example has 512K so I can cache up to 128MB, but I'm going with 64 anyway, at least for right now. I might try and run the system bus at 75MHz for an overclock on both the CPU (to ~262MHz, pretty doable according to online sources) and the PCI bus (37.5MHz, nothing crazy, I just don't want to move the divider to 2/5 and underclock it to 30) as well as the RAM, but we'll see how it goes. I don't have a very high opinion of VIA chipsets on a good day. If I hadn't been given this board for free I'd likely have pursued a 430TX or ALi Aladdin chipset board.

I'm probably going to run 98lite on it as it's fast enough and has enough RAM to benefit from 98's genuine technical improvements over 95 (VMM32 and VCACHE are marginally smarter, audio-mixing, WDM drivers, etc) but it's not so much so that I feel like leaving the regular Internet Explorer shell in place is a great idea.

I considered several options for graphics. Originally I wanted an S3 Trio64 or ViRGE for their near-flawless DOS compatibility, but the games that have issues on later cards I have a whole-ass entire other machine for, so I don't need to be 100% compatible with games from 1990. I have a Matrox Millennium II that I almost went with as it has a razor sharp, very vibrant VGA output and it's scarily quick under DOS, but I kind of wanted to dabble with what period 3D games would feel like on there, so I eventually decided to track down a PCI Matrox Millennium G200. I don't expect games like Unreal to be smooth on here by any means, but it should be fun to see just how bad it actually is, and the G200 should at least manage to render an accurate image, something the much simpler 3D core in the Millennium II can't do.

To be clear, I mostly just want to play late DOS SVGA titles and Windows 2D games on here, like Diablo, Starcraft, Age of Empires II, Fallout 1 and 2, etc. Stuff that struggles on the 486 but feels rather pitifully easy for my Geode box, for example. Later 2D games and 3D games in general on here are more for the novelty factor than anything, as I don't expect amazing performance. Something I also want to do with this box is investigate how badly XP runs on hardware barely meeting the minimum requirements, and how much worse it gets as you upgrade the service pack level.

I'm going to try my Audician32 (YMF719) card here. It always exhibited weird behavioral problems in my Blue Lightning, but for a while it worked fine in my original 486 build, so I figure it warrants a shot before I go and find something else. If that doesn't work out I'll be likely keeping an eye out for one of the rare AWE32s with a real OPL core, or just settle for something cheap and reasonably compatible like an ESS AudioDrive or such. I've not had amazingly good luck with Yamaha sound cards, which is frustrating as I want to like them, but I just never have a good time using them. I'll be using my strange, weird "PRO/100 ISA" here that doesn't actually have an Intel controller at all. It doesn't have much support outside of contemporary Windows and DOS, as Linux has no idea what it is. I figure 70ish mbits out of ISA and keeping the PCI bus uncongested will help what little performance there is to eke out of it.

 

[Chewy509]

The other build I have coming and, frankly, one I'm more excited for as I haven't messed with that platform in a very long time, is Socket 7. Just vanilla Socket 7, mind, it's coming with a Pentium MMX 233. The board is an EPoX baby AT design with an Apollo VPX chipset, meaning that cacheable RAM is heavily dependent on how much L2 cache is present. This example has 512K so I can cache up to 128MB, but I'm going with 64 anyway, at least for right now. I might try and run the system bus at 75MHz for an overclock on both the CPU (to ~262MHz, pretty doable according to online sources) and the PCI bus (37.5MHz, nothing crazy, I just don't want to move the divider to 2/5 and underclock it to 30) as well as the RAM, but we'll see how it goes. I don't have a very high opinion of VIA chipsets on a good day. If I hadn't been given this board for free I'd likely have pursued a 430TX or ALi Aladdin chipset board.

Back in the day, I had my P233MMX running at 266MHz with no issues, and was able to get it to 300MHz with a beefier HSF. This was on a Tekram i430TX motherboard with 256MB RAM (SDRAM) installed. When I sold it, it had an SB Live! for audio, Matrox Mystique 220 graphics card, 2x Creative Voodoo II 12MB in SLI, an LS120 drive, CD-RW drive and a 2GB 7200rpm HDD. This was on Windows NT4 and Redhat Linux.

That was replaced with my dual Opteron 242 system on a Tyan K8W motherboard. In the end that one had 2GB RAM, NV FX5600 AGP, and 4x 18GB Seagate 15K U320 SCSI in RAID0, and a VXA-1 tape drive... This one over the course of its life run Windows XP x64 and Solaris 10. Unfortunately the AMD-8151 AGP chipset on this board had issues with the AGP-PCIe bridge chips used on some cards at this time, so you had to ensure the Graphics card was a true AGP card, and not one that used the bridge chip. (For the NVIDIA side, pretty much all 6000 series used PCIe-AGP bridge chips except the one 6800Ultra model that was IIRC a rebadged Quadro card. For ATI, that ruled out all X series and later cards).

 

[sedrosken]

Back in the day, I had my P233MMX running at 266MHz with no issues, and was able to get it to 300MHz with a beefier HSF. This was on a Tekram i430TX motherboard with 256MB RAM (SDRAM) installed. When I sold it, it had an SB Live! for audio, Matrox Mystique 220 graphics card, 2x Creative Voodoo II 12MB in SLI, an LS120 drive, CD-RW drive and a 2GB 7200rpm HDD. This was on Windows NT4 and Redhat Linux.

The trouble with i430TX is that, IIRC no matter what it can't cache more than 64MB of RAM. Period. That's it. That's all you get -- anything after is uncached and thus rather slow. And I believe protected-mode OSes fill the memory map top-down, or at least Windows 9x certainly does, meaning that only the last quarter of RAM is operating as intended. It's frankly a worse kneecapping than i815E only supporting up to 512MB of RAM when i440BX would run 768MB. Though I suppose if the alternative is swapping to disk...

The PIIX3 also has a frankly moribund IDE controller for its time -- even the Apollo VPX supports Ultra-DMA 33 mode through the 82C586B southbridge, the PIIX3 used for the i430TX and the i440FX tops out at multi-word DMA mode 2 which tops out at 16.7MB/s. Then again, period hard drives would have struggled to saturate even a third of that, so it likely wasn't as much of a limit at the time.

The Mystique is the more consumer-oriented version of the Millennium, right? Did you ever run any Matrox 3D games on it? I hear its port of MechWarrior 2 was very good.

I have to wonder if you got any benefit out of that second Voodoo2 at all, given how even my Pentium Pro overclocked to 233 bottlenecked my single one when I had it. And the SB Live is an interesting choice given it does all of its sound processing in software on the CPU, and an MMX even at 266 doesn't have a ton of power to spare. Did you ever encounter another LS-120 drive in the wild? My uncle used a Zip drive in those days because he could usually rely on having some way of getting his disks into another computer.

That was replaced with my dual Opteron 242 system on a Tyan K8W motherboard. In the end that one had 2GB RAM, NV FX5600 AGP, and 4x 18GB Seagate 15K U320 SCSI in RAID0, and a VXA-1 tape drive... This one over the course of its life run Windows XP x64 and Solaris 10. Unfortunately the AMD-8151 AGP chipset on this board had issues with the AGP-PCIe bridge chips used on some cards at this time, so you had to ensure the Graphics card was a true AGP card, and not one that used the bridge chip. (For the NVIDIA side, pretty much all 6000 series used PCIe-AGP bridge chips except the one 6800Ultra model that was IIRC a rebadged Quadro card. For ATI, that ruled out all X series and later cards).

XP x64, huh? So you mean Windows Server 2003 Workstation? No, seriously, it's NT 5.2 and tops out at SP2 like Server 2003. It's kind of a frankenstein OS. I have to wonder why you bothered with x64 when you didn't run more than 4GB of RAM -- I hear XP x64 wasn't the most pleasant or polished experience.

That's a hell of a bug to be bit by that late in AGP's lifespan, too. That said, I'm pretty sure it's most of the GF6 line and first-generation Radeon X-series that are native AGP aside from a few latecomers. It's the GF7 line and second-generation X1000-series that were, with rare exception, all bridged, and frankly if you had a 6800 Ultra you had no reason to upgrade as nothing could really perform well enough to outrun it with any kind of stability on AGP. I have good reason to believe that those bridged cards worked only rarely on anything other than an Intel chipset and the very latest Socket 939 chipsets from the early release era of the Athlon 64 x2 before those all got shunted over to Socket AM2 boards with PCI-Express support.

 

[sdbardwick]

Thought the 430TX generally used PIIX4, which supported UDMA 33. TX was a crappy chipset compared to the competitors as the time though. IIRC I was mostly running EpoX motherboards in that era, probably with VIA (or maybe SiS) chipsets.
EDIT: After using Tannin's Red Hill Guide as a memory aid, I remember also using FIC boards back in that era. A FIC PA2005 was the last socket 7 board I retired.

 

[sedrosken]

Hm. On looking it up, you're right. PIIX3 was used for 430HX and 430VX, though. Interesting that 430TX uses the same southbridge as 440LX/BX.

I hear VIA was a bit iffy even in that era, whereas ALi and SiS were a little slow but quite stable. Not as stable as the Intel offering, but they also weren't as deliberately hobbled as the Intel offering, though.

I wish I could find a good FIC, but in a pinch, I can count on EPoX to have implemented the Apollo VPX faithfully enough. I think I've gotten a pretty fine-tuned sense over the years for when instability is from the hardware and when it's just Windows 98 being Windows 98.

 

[Mercutio]

The Mystique is the more consumer-oriented version of the Millennium, right? Did you ever run any Matrox 3D games on it? I hear its port of MechWarrior 2 was very good.

It was. At the time, the big selling point for me was that Matrox offered excellent drivers, including full Linux support in the mid 90s and had first-class RAMDACs for driving high resolution analog displays at insane refresh rates. Getting a 4 or 8MB video card was pretty decent in 1996-ish, but to have one that could sustain 1600x1200@100Hz was a whole other thing.

I do not remember a Mechwarrior 2 port specifically for Matrox hardware, nor any other game titles and believe me that as big of a fan of Battletech as I am and as many generations of Matrox hardware as have passed through my hands (I have a Matrox card installed in a contemporary PC in my home right now, even), I would've had it had I been aware of it. I did have the GLide-specific version but as I recall I liked playing the DOS version at up to 1280x1024 vs the more limited Win32 version that topped out at 800x600 without 3D hardware or 1024x768 with.

As a retro-computing aside, my beloved SyncMaster 213T, which as far as I know is the largest 4x3 LCD monitor (for mass use, anyway) that was made at ~22 inches, has finally started to die. It developed a column of dead pixels a couple months ago and I'm definitely bummed out about it. I use that monitor for my retro PC, which mostly exists to screw around with DOS/Win9x/NT4 when I need it, but I've also used it for playing around with emulation systems as well. That monitor is ancient, but it beats keeping a 21" CRT around. I just hope it doesn't get any worse since there's pretty much no hope of finding a replacement panel for it.

My retro system is an i865. It has a SCSI controller and ironically it's also home to my BD/HDDVD drive, for no other reason than I didn't want to toss.

LS120 drives were not terribly common but they definitely weren't unusual in their day. There were precursor WORM formats, though the Iomega guys definitely had better consumer marketing. I've seen a ZIP disk in use as recently as 2021, even. I can think of at least a half dozen weird cartridge drives just from Syquest, although the oldest one i ever personally saw in use was a 15MB device. A lot of times they were some VIP's backup since they could be addressed like floppies and didn't require understanding or fuss like tape.

 

[Chewy509]

The Tekram i430TX motherboard I had certainly had the PIIX4 southbridge, as I could get UDMA33 working under Linux just fine, but the NT4 driver had an issue when attempting to enable UDMA33 with some Seagate drives (like the one I had), so under Linux I had UDMA33, but under NT4 I had to use PIO/MW DMA.

I purchased both Voodoo II's at the same time from an auction warehouse for $10 ea, very late in the game (IIRC around 1998-99, as the TNT was out at the time), so the cost didn't both me at the time, but having SLI did help in Quake and Quake 2, and MechWarrior 2. Going from 320x200 to 1024x768 in Quake and Quake 2 was mind blowing when enabling glide. I also was able to get Quake 3 running under Linux at around 20-25fps with SLI.

For the Matrox, I only had one of the tomb-raider games that had the patches for it, but I do remember one of the original Mystique boxsets coming with MW2, but at the time I wanted the '220' version which lacked the games bundle. Going from a Trident card to the Mystique was also a huge jump in visual quality on the CRT as well, I don't think this is something a lot of people really appreciated at the time, IDK, but the Mystique certainly gave a clear image.

 

[Chewy509]

XP x64, huh? So you mean Windows Server 2003 Workstation? No, seriously, it's NT 5.2 and tops out at SP2 like Server 2003. It's kind of a frankenstein OS. I have to wonder why you bothered with x64 when you didn't run more than 4GB of RAM -- I hear XP x64 wasn't the most pleasant or polished experience.

I had no issues with XP x64, since the underlying hardware was all fairly stock standard, eg, the AMD-8000 series chipset, Adaptec U320 SCSI RAID, ATI 9600XT (replaced with the NV FX5600). My printer at the time supported PCL natively, so just used one of the generic HP PCL drivers.

I run XP x64 because I could. I was cool, I was geeky... I drooled over Alpha (too hard to get in AU), and needed 64bit. And damn-it, I had dual 64bit CPUs, so was going to run a real 64bit OS. (most of my friends at the time had Northwood P4's, and mine blew theirs away in performance).

The only issue I had some some bespoke software that made assumptions on paths, but in general had very few problems. The entire Quake series (1 -> 4) had no issues, UT99 and UT2003 no issues, Battlefield 2, no issues. All the software development stuff I was doing was no issues either.

I also run FreeBSD (64bit), Linux (can't remember the distro, but it was Arch like before Arch existed) and also Solaris 10. (This was the machine I did my S10 cert's on, as the hardware was nearly identical to the Ultra 40 with the main exception being some of the things the BIOS supported).

 

[Mercutio]

XP 64 was just mildly annoying for having crummy driver availability. I was big on advocating for Windows Server 2003 or SBS for getting a better overall high end desktop experience at the time. It was objectively faster and more or less everything you'd actually want to use with it was available via PAE anyway.

One of my early-career (intern) jobs was handling the digital side of Honeywell Universal System process control implementations, which at that time largely had to interface with existing analog control systems. x86 wasn't considered reliable enough, so our standard was to use NT4/Alpha (if the client was already big on DEC hardware), UltraSparc for Sun client sites or Motorola StarMax PPC workstations, simply because those things were the cheapest of the three. My favorite part of the job was dealing with the PHBs who were signing off on these $15k systems that they would call "not real computers" because they didn't run Excel, because most of what I was doing was building the inputs to feed in to data sources that could be collected on graphs across the control stations and then on to managerial spreadsheets. None of the analog guys understood what I was doing so they just left me alone to play with the pretty workstations.

Really wish I'd gotten hired there after I finished college.

 

[sedrosken]

Gotta say, I just wish I still had a PCI Banshee. That was the card that felt the most “right” in my PPro build. But that ended up going back to the guy who I got it from as it was his childhood card. They’re stupid money now.