some retro hardware stuff

[6638c9b852c7eOlfred]

There are inexpensive multimeters which can also measure capacity. But in most cases you have to take them out to check them. And at that point you can just straight up replace them anyway because they ain't getting better overtime.
But at least you can check if they were the culprit.

[6638c9b852e6bHikari]

http://retrocomputingforum.com/

[6638c9b853008voodoo47]

woah, the intel download center is a ghost town, everything but the very latest stuff is completely dead. did someone nuke it from orbit while I wasn't looking?

[6638c9b8531a5Olfred]

You want drivers from intel? Good luck.
At some point someone decided to update their driver support website and it was  a complete disaster. And after that it didn't get better.
Even if you know exactly what hardware you have, you can't find a driver, or get thousand results with no way of getting it ordered in a way that you actually get the drivers for what you have.
And even the software download driver thing from intel is an equal mess.
Whoever is in charge of handling the driver support at intel should be replaced with someone who knows what he is doing.

I have more luck getting the drivers from microsoft than directly from intel, which is really sad.

[6638c9b853314voodoo47]

yeah, no chance. fortunately, HP still has them, though they are a bit out of date - I usually try to get the latest drivers for the chipset and gpu, but I guess I'll have to stick with the brand ones this time. ah well, pretty sure I won't miss anything important.

the HP download pages also kind of suck - what's up with big companies not being able to put together a website usable by human beings, anyway?

[6638c9b853753Olfred]

what's up with big companies not being able to put together a website usable by human beings, anyway?

I don't get it either. What's even more horrible is when they have a really good working website where you can easily find and get everything you need. And then someone decides to make an update for a new "modern and sleek" design which changes the website to a slideshow fuckfest without any usabilty at all.

A good example how to properly do it, just take a look at nvidia. They have the same driver download page since seemingly forever. But it works, is easy to use, and you can still get shitold drivers from them.

[6638c9b853b4evoodoo47]

this is a Quantum 3D Obsidian 100DB-4440, a twin card, quad pcb, 800*600 and multitexturing capable Voodoo1 running in SLI, 20MB total

and this is half of that on ebay now.

[6638c9b854103sarge945]

I don't get it either. What's even more horrible is when they have a really good working website where you can easily find and get everything you need. And then someone decides to make an update for a new "modern and sleek" design which changes the website to a slideshow fuckfest without any usabilty at all.

A good example how to properly do it, just take a look at nvidia. They have the same driver download page since seemingly forever. But it works, is easy to use, and you can still get shitold drivers from them.

Yes. Just look at any website for any open source project. Plain HTML, no giant borders, no big useless toolbars that require you to open a hamburger menu to do basic tasks, no making my PC fan run fast because it needs 14mb of JavaScript to render a parallax background image.

Modern web design really sucks and imo the majority of ui/ux designers have no idea what they are doing (and should potentially be fired)

[6638c9b85428cvoodoo47]

new custom pcb voodoo5 6000, pci-e power connector, 256mb ram (64 per chip). now that is friggin' awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aMiEszQBik
will set you back some $1500, according to the video. that's basically free - I'll probably wait a bit to see whether the modder is planning to add dvi/hdmi, and then grab one.

[6638c9b854550Jules]

I guess I might share some of my own experiences with older hardware, even though I don't have as much knowledge as some of you guys do.

Having always been a laptop guy myself, I decided to buy an old IBM laptop from twenty years ago for a bargain price to do some retro '90s/early 2000s PC gaming. It's a Thinkpad T41 model, one of the last ones IBM produced and (to my knowledge) a fairly high-end model for the era. I must say I've been pretty impressed by its performance - it's got 1.5 GB of RAM (quite a lot for a 2003 laptop), an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 video card and a 1.4 GHz Pentium M processor.

It was somewhat dusty and with a noisy fan when I received it, but that's nothing some basic cleaning and some oil in the fan wouldn't fix. After that, I went on to install Windows XP on it from a bootable USB. Using old hardware definitely sure gives you some perspective. Sure, it's officially "dated" stuff, but it still does most of what I really expect from a computer twenty years on.  It helps, of course, that I grew up on Windows 98/XP, so everything about its UI and general design feels really familiar and efficient to me. It doesn't run the latest games (of course...), but I can't say I really care about that.

It's been a while since I've last used a computer with a 4:3 display. I was a bit disoriented at first, being so used to have so much horizontal space on a modern computer, but I've got to admit I kind of like it. I quite like the compactness of it.

I've already installed some old games on it. That is to say, Half-Life and the LGS games with NewDark for a start. Which reminds me of how easy it is to run Dark Engine games with all the patches developed by the community over the years. I still remember first playing those games by installing the CD versions. Now that's something I'm not too nostalgic about...

It might sound silly, but it feels nice to play twenty years old games on a twenty years old computer/OS. It's just a subjective feeling, but heh - we all need a hobby, I suppose.

[6638c9b85465cvoodoo47]

yes. yes we do.

really nice specs. what's the res on the screen? perhaps one of those fairly odd 1400x1050 screens?

[6638c9b8548d8Jules]

voodoo47That would definitely have been interesting, I've never seen such a resolution before. As for this computer however, it's just a very ordinary 1024x768 display.

Though this reminds me of another laptop from around the same years that I should still have somewhere with a somewhat less common 1280x1024 resolution. Every other old laptop I've used always had either a standard 1024x768 or 800x600 display.

[6638c9b8549e9voodoo47]

I actually had one of those 1400x1050 laptops for repairs back in the day. Half-Life looked great.

[6638c9b854c67Jules]

While I'm at it, I might as well mention that I already own another laptop from the Thinkpad series I mentioned above. It's a Thinkpad 310 ED from 1997, running Windows 98 SE. In spite of being 26 years old, it's in very well-kept condition and might almost pass as being new. Hardware-wise, it has a 133 MHz Pentium MMX processor, 64 MB of RAM and a nice crisp 800x600 display. The hard-drive can hold about 3 GB of data, which is actually more than enough for running old software from that era. Late '90s 3D games are a no-go for the most part, but it makes for a very nice PC for old DOS games, since until Windows 98 you could still get a genuine DOS implementation rather than an emulated one.

Being a laptop from a time when USBs had yet to become a thing, it can be a bit annoying to trasfer data to it. The only ways are to either use CDs (but the drive can only read CD-ROMs, so it's not a very good way to transfer little amounts of miscellaneous stuff you might have gotten off the Internet the way you'd do with a USB) or to use one of the two PCI slots to use a SD card reader, the latter of which is clearly the best option. Unfortunately, the one I previously had seems not to work any longer so until I buy a new one, I pretty much cannot trasfer any data to it.

I was lucky to have gotten this for a mere 50 euros some time ago. It doesn't seem to have been a widely-produced model and the ones I've found on eBay right now are sold for about ten times that amount.

[6638c9b854d84voodoo47]

should be trivial to replace the original hdd with a sdcard or ssd, this makes any machine run much nicer, old or new.

[6638c9b854eb8Jules]

Interesting, I've never thought of that...for that matter, I didn't even know you could do such a thing. I might just try it out sometime.

Oh, and as for your mention of that 1440x1050 resolution before...it turns out that the T43 model that came out shortly after the one I own did, in fact, have such a resolution. So you had almost guessed right!

[6638c9b854ff5voodoo47]

almost.

anyway, it's pretty much "if a hdd interface exists, then an adapter board to msata or sd card exists too". even those crazy old proprietary macs have them available, though they are not exactly cheap. but old ide interfaces are ok (even the more obscure ones like zif), couple of bucks and you are sailing. no more crunching noises and potential failures (wouldn't trust a two decade old mechanical drive too much).