[waldojim]

While everyone today focuses on new toys to tinker with, how many like to tinker with the old gear?

Today I propose a challenge for our members, as I know we all like challenges.

Find your oldest gear. See what you can, or can't convince it to do!

I am working on a couple different projects, and will post more details when one. For now, I want you guys to remember the days that tweaking meant more than just selecting a few bus options in your BIOS, and see if you can convince your oldest machines to perform well above expectations.

[Evildave]

Already did: Turned my old EEE Box into a linux file/video server + wireless bridge. Works fine, eats relatively few watts to do it.

Does the job admirably. Linux is an excellent 'tweak' compared to what was pre-configured on it, which would trip the 'recovery' partition into action if I tried to remove the trialware antivirus that was bundled with it, and put windoze + trialware office + trialware antivirus back + a bunch of other useless crap back, along with re-formatting the rest of the drive. There might've been a bad sector on there somewhere, but I don't really care, given that what it's doing now consumes just a small fraction of that the 'recovery' partition did.

Once the 'recovery' partition and windoze partition were gone, and replaced with Linux, it runs great! And it didn't have one speck of bundleware crap left running at all, which was even better. It does have libreoffice and a few odds and ends on it, but I didn't feel motivated to change that. It's not like they consume tens of gigabytes, like a gimped version of M$ Orifice does.

Plenty of hard disk space (150GB) and RAM (1GB) to spare (both of which seemed quite limited under windoze). So I can give it more odd jobs, if I think of any.

Didn't have to futz with a single damned thing inside the teensy little box to make it way happier, even if I did screw up by letting it upgrade to Ubuntu 12.1 with 'Unity' and borked Gnome 2 'classic mode'. It's not like I switch the monitor over to that yuck-fest very often. I'll probably tinker with some other, less overzealous version of linux one of these days when I feel motivated. Just a shell to telnet into from the lan would be fine for me.

If there's a way to 'tweak' it, I'd probably go for LESS speed (and power consumption), rather than 'more'. Squeeze a few extra watts out of it, even if it is consuming substantially less than my other, older UPS does, with nothing plugged in (it has a big, full-time transformer with different windings to handle brownouts, etc., and that adds some inefficiency).

[coastie65]

Tweak this :

[waldojim]

OK Coastie, that is a tad older than I was thinking. Interesting pic though, shows how far along computers have come for certain.

[Evildave]

http://www.ese.upenn.../eniacproj.html

[LiveBrianD]

lol... Unfortunately, I don't have any older stuff around. Dang... I knew I should've kept that 478 mobo and Pentium 4 CPU when I built this machine!

[coastie65]

waldojim, on 08 February 2012 - 09:48 AM, said:

OK Coastie, that is a tad older than I was thinking. Interesting pic though, shows how far along computers have come for certain.

And to think. that thing probably had a whopping 64k of memory.............maybe.

[waldojim]

For what it is worth, I am currently working with a 486 DX2 66 - 40MB of ram (trying to get it to swallow 64MB). ATI Mach 32 video card (VLB), Promise hardware accellerated IDE controller (VLB), and Creative Sound Blaster audio. Hard drive details will come later.

[Evildave]

It stored data in twenty, ten digit, decimal accumulators. So a hundred bytes' worth of mutable internal storage, if you converted it to BCD.

You could feed punched cards through it. So, however many punched cards you could push into it was how much external storage it had.

It was initially programmed with switches and cables, so you could 'interpret' that as ROM storage, but it's still a really small amount of storage.

It was vastly improved later on with 100 'words' of core memory, and I'll assume a 'word' mapped to what one of those ten digit accumulators could manage to hold, so about 500 bytes' worth of 'RAM' at that point to write a program with.

The ENIAC on a chip project that I previously linked was about 200x faster than the original.
http://www.upenn.edu...v12/4/chip.html

Though the JAVA app is a lot faster than the original, too, even being interpreted. Sorta like running Windoze 98 in a virtual machine. Snappy fast. BTW, another way to get that 'classic' speed-up without cooking the old hardware.
http://home.arcor.de/-ph/eniac/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

[snorg]

AMD K6 overdrive chip.

I had a 486, I put in AMD K6 overdrive CPU which made for a higher CPU clock speed than the motherboard was supposed to allow. Clock speed was 200MHz overdrive CPU made it 400MHz, or something like that I cant remember.

It was a cheap and effective way to get a big boost.

This post has been edited by snorg: 09 February 2012 - 12:07 AM

[coastie65]

Evildave, on 08 February 2012 - 06:18 PM, said:

It stored data in twenty, ten digit, decimal accumulators. So a hundred bytes' worth of mutable internal storage, if you converted it to BCD.

You could feed punched cards through it. So, however many punched cards you could push into it was how much external storage it had.

It was initially programmed with switches and cables, so you could 'interpret' that as ROM storage, but it's still a really small amount of storage.

It was vastly improved later on with 100 'words' of core memory, and I'll assume a 'word' mapped to what one of those ten digit accumulators could manage to hold, so about 500 bytes' worth of 'RAM' at that point to write a program with.

The ENIAC on a chip project that I previously linked was about 200x faster than the original.
http://www.upenn.edu...v12/4/chip.html

Though the JAVA app is a lot faster than the original, too, even being interpreted. Sorta like running Windoze 98 in a virtual machine. Snappy fast. BTW, another way to get that 'classic' speed-up without cooking the old hardware.
http://home.arcor.de/-ph/eniac/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

I didn't come into that stuff until Mid '69, after I got out of the service and went to work for GE in their Numerical Equipment Control Division ( Machine Tool Controls ). Some of those things were pretty sizable to be sure, but nothing like that pic. Those usually used big reels of Magenetic Tape for storage. The smaller ones used punched cards and punched tape.

[waldojim]

snorg, on 09 February 2012 - 12:03 AM, said:

AMD K6 overdrive chip.

I had a 486, I put in AMD K6 overdrive CPU which made for a higher CPU clock speed than the motherboard was supposed to allow. Clock speed was 200MHz overdrive CPU made it 400MHz, or something like that I cant remember.

It was a cheap and effective way to get a big boost.

The most I have seen on the 486 boards was something like 150Mhz (50Mhz bus with 3x multiplier). I know they made p5/K5 overdrive chips, never saw a K6 though. I used to own one of the AMD's that allowed for 150Mhz, sadly, I have no idea where it is right now. I am stuck working with an Intel DX2 66, and it won't run above 80Mhz... Of course, it could be other stresses in the system, but I will figure all that out later.

[waldojim]

This topic may need renamed....

Anyhow - interesting new issue of sorts.

I have been trying to get a few applications installed on the 486 to start getting some form of benchmarks ready to go. In the process, I need to install Windows 3.11. The issue comes in with a mouse of all things. Todays mice all come with USB connectivity (PS/2 through adapter only). The 486 doesn't natively support either connection type. I actually have to use an adapter from ps/2 to 9pin Dsub (aka - the COM port). Also on this note worth mentioning - I had to do the same with a keyboard - find a PS/2 NATIVE board to convert. I think this is quite interesting, as the USB and PS/2 keyboards sit on the shelf right next to each other consisting of almost entirely the same parts.

I am not sure why converting from USB to DIN or DSUB is impossible, just an interesting note to all those out there who may be interested in similar attempts.

[coastie65]

waldojim, on 09 February 2012 - 11:38 PM, said:

This topic may need renamed....

Anyhow - interesting new issue of sorts.

I have been trying to get a few applications installed on the 486 to start getting some form of benchmarks ready to go. In the process, I need to install Windows 3.11. The issue comes in with a mouse of all things. Todays mice all come with USB connectivity (PS/2 through adapter only). The 486 doesn't natively support either connection type. I actually have to use an adapter from ps/2 to 9pin Dsub (aka - the COM port). Also on this note worth mentioning - I had to do the same with a keyboard - find a PS/2 NATIVE board to convert. I think this is quite interesting, as the USB and PS/2 keyboards sit on the shelf right next to each other consisting of almost entirely the same parts.

I am not sure why converting from USB to DIN or DSUB is impossible, just an interesting note to all those out there who may be interested in similar attempts.

Probably in the wiring and circuitry. My Commodore 128 uses DIN ( Serial ) connections for everything. Does have an RS-232 port for a printer or whatever. I did get a mouse for that thing, but rarely used it as I was mostly gaming, so used a joystick which has a different type of connector.

This post has been edited by coastie65: 10 February 2012 - 07:07 AM

[waldojim]

Well, I spent the last two hours tweaking DOS. Apparently, I haven't lost my touch!

Right now, with CDROM, Sound Blaster, Mouse Drivers, and even Smart Drive, I have 614KB conventional memory free. For what it is worth, it takes some convincing to get the drivers into the UMB's.

Still, right now, Wallenstein 3d, Doom 2, and Cyber Empires all work like new. Will be getting into the more demanding games later, Quake was not exactly nice to PC's.

After I get baselines, I am going to see what I can squeeze out of the machine.

This post has been edited by waldojim: 10 February 2012 - 11:58 AM

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 09 February 2012 - 11:38 PM, said:

This topic may need renamed....

Anyhow - interesting new issue of sorts.

I have been trying to get a few applications installed on the 486 to start getting some form of benchmarks ready to go. In the process, I need to install Windows 3.11. The issue comes in with a mouse of all things. Todays mice all come with USB connectivity (PS/2 through adapter only). The 486 doesn't natively support either connection type. I actually have to use an adapter from ps/2 to 9pin Dsub (aka - the COM port). Also on this note worth mentioning - I had to do the same with a keyboard - find a PS/2 NATIVE board to convert. I think this is quite interesting, as the USB and PS/2 keyboards sit on the shelf right next to each other consisting of almost entirely the same parts.

I am not sure why converting from USB to DIN or DSUB is impossible, just an interesting note to all those out there who may be interested in similar attempts.

Can you get a usb PCI card and install that? Or is it impossible to get Windows 3.1 to work with it? Maybe you can at least get a PS/2 PCI card? I doubt USB to DIN or COM is impossible; there's just no demand for such. Why, in a modern era where mice and keyboards are almost always USB, would you want to use a 486, which of course lacks that or even PS/2? Well, I mean, why would most people do that?

[LiveBrianD]

You know, I wonder - how much can you get a 486 to do with Windows 2000 and a LOT of patience? I knew a guy with a 133MHz Pentium, 64MB RAM, a 4MB SiS PCI graphics card, ISA audio and networking (10mbps!), and a 3GB Quantum Fireball hard drive (5400RPM or something probably). I installed Windows 2000 on it, and certainly, it can be used to surf the modern web. Well, sorta. Firefox was a complete dog on it (3.6 or something at the time), the older versions of IE that w2k has don't render things properly, and it froze up when we tried to play a simple adobe flash game on it. A single-core Atom netbook is downright fast compared to it.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 10 February 2012 - 03:34 PM, said:

Can you get a usb PCI card and install that? Or is it impossible to get Windows 3.1 to work with it? Maybe you can at least get a PS/2 PCI card? I doubt USB to DIN or COM is impossible; there's just no demand for such. Why, in a modern era where mice and keyboards are almost always USB, would you want to use a 486, which of course lacks that or even PS/2? Well, I mean, why would most people do that?

That is actually an EASY answer.

Wing Commander: Privateer

I have been trying many, many different virtual machines to get DOS running on various Linux and Windows boxes. Be it DOS Box, Qemu, VMWare, Virtual Box, or anything else you can think of. SB16 emulation is BROKEN. I get about 1 second of good audio followed by static.

I also tried running DOS natively via bootable USB. This does work to a limited degree, until you need DMA support. DMA support was an ISA trait that carried over into the PCI era. That no longer exists - and DMA is needed for proper DOS sound support.

So, for games like Privateer, Righteous Fire, Wing Commander II, Quake, and many, many others, I need a REAL DOS machine. Something that doesn't need 100% perfect emulation, because the hardware is there.

EDIT: Oh yes, and for what it is worth, PCI was only available to VERY few 486 boards - none of those boards had BOTH VLB and PCI. Mine has VLB.

This post has been edited by waldojim: 10 February 2012 - 04:46 PM

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 10 February 2012 - 03:38 PM, said:

You know, I wonder - how much can you get a 486 to do with Windows 2000 and a LOT of patience? I knew a guy with a 133MHz Pentium, 64MB RAM, a 4MB SiS PCI graphics card, ISA audio and networking (10mbps!), and a 3GB Quantum Fireball hard drive (5400RPM or something probably). I installed Windows 2000 on it, and certainly, it can be used to surf the modern web. Well, sorta. Firefox was a complete dog on it (3.6 or something at the time), the older versions of IE that w2k has don't render things properly, and it froze up when we tried to play a simple adobe flash game on it. A single-core Atom netbook is downright fast compared to it.

Windows 2000 will not boot on a 486. I remember trying this MANY years back. There is a very specific instruction that it looks for, and 486's do not support it. A 486 running a 5x86 chip, or Intel Overdrive will support Windows 2000, but right now, I have neither. I wish I could find my AMD 5x86 upgrade chip though, as I could get this board to run at 150Mhz then!

I do have a SBC (single board computer) with a Pentium 233MMX on it, 64MB ram, CF support, networking, and ISA video card support... I just haven't tinkered much with it, due to the core design of that board.

I also have Windows 2000 running on an AMD Athlon - XP 3200+ right now. Complete with Nvidia 5700LE Optima, and 2GB of 500Mhz ram. With FF 3.6 on there, it is downright SNAPPY. I have actually been quite impressed with how it handles current loads.

The last machine I have (still haven't decided how to handle it), is an AMD K6-2 450 with 640MB PC 133 SDram and an AGP Voodoo 3 2000. I intend to run Windows 98SE on here, with all the 3dfx tools in place to tear through the good ol' Glide based games like Quake 2 and 3, Half life (original), Need for Speed 3, etc.

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 10 February 2012 - 04:56 PM, said:

Windows 2000 will not boot on a 486. I remember trying this MANY years back. There is a very specific instruction that it looks for, and 486's do not support it. A 486 running a 5x86 chip, or Intel Overdrive will support Windows 2000, but right now, I have neither. I wish I could find my AMD 5x86 upgrade chip though, as I could get this board to run at 150Mhz then!

I do have a SBC (single board computer) with a Pentium 233MMX on it, 64MB ram, CF support, networking, and ISA video card support... I just haven't tinkered much with it, due to the core design of that board.

I also have Windows 2000 running on an AMD Athlon - XP 3200+ right now. Complete with Nvidia 5700LE Optima, and 2GB of 500Mhz ram. With FF 3.6 on there, it is downright SNAPPY. I have actually been quite impressed with how it handles current loads.

The last machine I have (still haven't decided how to handle it), is an AMD K6-2 450 with 640MB PC 133 SDram and an AGP Voodoo 3 2000. I intend to run Windows 98SE on here, with all the 3dfx tools in place to tear through the good ol' Glide based games like Quake 2 and 3, Half life (original), Need for Speed 3, etc.

Why don't you try Windows 7 on that athlon machine? I think it can probably handle it decently. By the way, Need for Speed Hot Persuit 3 runs just fine on a modern machine that's 32-bit (I use 32-bit XP to play it sometimes, under vmware).