Hell yeah
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oh I covetā¦
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Do we have an old hardware thread?
The solution to installing MacOS9 on the HDD-less Quicksilver PowerMac turned out to be burning the installer image to a DVD-R instead of a CD-R. Who knew? Not any LLM I asked, I tell you that much. Only a lone soul in a ancient forum posted.
Also, the Pentium II MMX powered machine I got to play DOS games can not be speed adjusted in BIOS or with tools like setmul to match slower CPUs for speed sensitive games. Well, you can cripple it to the point of an early 386 by disabling the L1 cache, but thatās less useful. Apparently the multiplier setting magic only works with Cyrix 6x86 CPUs. Sounds wild. Almost as wild as Pentium IIs just being vertically pluggable modules like RAM sticks. Frigging computer wouldnāt even boot at all until I realized the CPU became loose during shipping. Oh, itās also passively cooled only. So I could just get a slower one to switch it out, but even the slowest isnāt slow enough for some of the games I want to play.
Also, buying an ISA sound card was quite unnecessary as I found out that there are integrated ISA sound cards and I have one. Also, Ati Rage cards seem to have trouble displaying old game display modes. So I will have two graphic cards, a PCI one for 3D and an ISA one for 2D games. Sounds wild too.
Or how about a PC monitor with a max resolution of 640x480? Actually Iām not sure if it even does lower resolutions.
Anyway, Iām using slowdos and will try Moslo as well, letās see how it goes. The benchmarks seem promising. Maybe I shouldāve just gotten a 486 at this point. I can also see why people invented DOSBox and donāt fiddle with old hardware. Did you know that thereās a dedicated ISA card that has a gameport with a speed-dial? Hope I wonāt need one to use my Thrustmaster FCS and WCS II and RCS. And FLCS and TQS if I ever get those.
What elseā¦ I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get a USB stick readable in DOS 6.22. Not so easy to get DOS to boot from an IDE to SD card adapter, but I can just boot from a floppy and then some config.sys and autoexec.bat lines access the disk just fine.
I kind of wish Microsoft wouldnāt have abandoned the command line, but I guess Linux made up for it.
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my gaming desktop switched itself off twice today while i was playing dark souls remastered. it seemed like the power button didnāt work until i unplugged the power supply and plugged it back in again, both times? is this obviously symptomatic of any particular part starting to fail?
It sounds like a power supply overcurrent protection breaker is tripping. It could be the PSU itself starting to fail, or the motherboard starting to fail in such a way that it draws too much power.
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itās always the PSU 
though actually what youāre describing sounds like it could be symptomatic of the board struggling to post for another reason in case your temps or overclock are chafing against its age. if not that itās definitely the PSU
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nice, i wanted an excuse to go to microcenter anyway
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this is never not a mistake
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nobody sells the 30tb seagate drive anymore
Anybody else watch Miyconst vids? Iām continually amazed at his dedication to the very weird Chinese X99 motherboards and old Xeons.
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woefully over optimistic framing imo ā at least 3 generations behind Apple on single core and canāt even touch their Pro/Max configurations on multi core. not much to look at here after all
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first time in a decade theyāve been able to ship a new architecture from their own fab on a theoretically competitive node and they made the M2 Mid
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interesting times
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yeah NTsync getting merged is cool
also microsoft switching to SPIR-V
I think gaming / rendering / shader backends are going to be functionally all pretty portable by the end of the decade
and like, if you run Crossover or a Steam Deck every day right now the way many people do, MoltenVK and VKD3D and all the other middleware listed here is already way more mature than it was a decade ago and involves a lot less transpiling than it ever did.
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the eagle has landed baby!!!
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I do think itās possible to be a lot more complimentary to these if you acknowledge what theyāre really competing against: the Snapdragon laptop chips that run ARM Windows.
the thing is, though, those donāt sell in any significant amount (theyāre barely real consumer products and not reference implementations at this point, the Windows install base being what it is), so no one wants a comparison to those; they, too, can be made to bench somewhat better than a base M3/M4/M5 on multi-core if you squint at them right. but thatās still very unexciting because a) the last generation of Intel chips that they got TSMC to make are already quite competitive with ARM on battery life, b) they are still nowhere near M3 Max and up performance, and c) they are way more expensive than a secondhand M2 Pro is right now (source: I retained one from my last job and didnāt think Iād have this much trouble reselling it), like 2-3x as much, because most people who want Windows products donāt want boutique, energy-efficient Windows products.
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Turns out having two graphics cards in a computer in the mid nineties may be more of a pain than I expected. Not sure why I expected otherwise. Either way the 2D card didnāt fix my DOS game not playing issue, not sure if itās because I got a PCI instead of ISA card to go with the AGP one I already have, but those are just a tad to expensive for me to bother.
On a more positive note, I found a Dell Optiplex opened laying on the side of the road half covered in snow, and after picking up the parts and putting it back rogether I am happy to report that it works just fine. Perfectly suited to play all the physical Windows XP games I bought for no good reason.
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