My latest voodoo projects

I have a couple of older thinkpads but not that old. I have one t22 and one Transnote still in the leather case. I do have a CF-25 toughbook pentium 1. I just picked it up. My son and me have a VS challenge this time home. Old pc apiece vs one another. lol

I do have a pentium with mmx tech dell down there I came across last night. If I recall the screen was broken on it when I got it so I salvaged one off of a TI extensa I was junking. The screen was the same size and the connections were the same but it is a different resolution panel and thus incompatible. Its also missing the mouse ball and hdd. There was also a kiwi opennote series pentium mmx 233 laptop with bad caps. Last I messed with it it would power on about 1 in 20 times and post but would freeze shortly after. I also have a mint condition micron p1 with a bad vrm board that does not receive power. That should be a fairly easy fix if i ever actually sit down and fix it. Oh and about 3 toshiba portege 320ct's a 460cdt and 2 other unknown toshibas. One is a sattlelite the other a sattlelite pro, Although physically they both look identical.

Another seagate failed on me today prematurely. That's 7 in total now so far with lifespans ranging from a month to 3 months. Thankfully This is the only seagate drive I own since I switched over to hitachi a while back who was unfortunately recently acquired by western digital.

Well I just found the last piece of the puzzle for my classic gaming laptop. The "Eye Bee M" screensaver It is a thinkpad 285ED I just got finished installing a new hard drive and cmos battery in.

At this point, we need photographs!

No pics on that link!

I got this particular thinkpad from my former boss. When we were cleaning out the old hardware. It had a dead hard drive and cmos battery. $5 on a cmos battery later and a spare vintage 1.3gb seagate marathon I just so happened to have lying around later and...





It looks and runs great. Whats nice about this particular thinkpad is the fact it has both an internal cdrom and floppy drive. Most thinkpads from this era only have a floppy drive; And if your lucky it is interchangeable with a cdrom module.

It's especially good at old dos games. I have run several EGA games on it without issue. (I will have to get some photos of those up as well as soon as I find the floppys I was using) What I like about the thinkpad vs other old pentium 1 laptops I have is the clarity of the display. On other older laptops I own the display is very washed out. I presume they were cheaper displays new. I know for a fact this thinkpad uses a samsung panel which for me is a plus since I have always liked samsung, hitachi and lg panels.

See if it runs Sierra's classic Championship Boxing! Though if memory serves that may have been just CGA . . .

I didn't even know shadowgate was a dos game, I had it for NES.

Now that the mouse problem is taken care of the next problem I have is shadowgate freezes everytime I try to save, It tells me to type a file name however I can not, nor can I back out of the save screen. It also seems to freeze at random points.

hmm...

Other classic games are running fine though including a hitch hikers guide to the galaxy and the crack of doom (an old lord of the rings game from the late 80's)

Thinkwiki has betrayed me. Although they claim this system supports type 2 and 3 cards it actually only accepts type 1

I am going to have to use an old type 1 wpc11 card provided the windows 98 drivers work on 95.

The good news with Shadowgate is that you can complete the game from beginning to end in about 20 minutes, if I'm remembering correctly. Of course, that requires remembering the sequence of steps to follow.

Nice work getting the old ThinkPad running.

Ironically, you probably cannot play any of the GOG versions of these classic games as they are tweaked to install in Windows!

The 1.3gb hdd is the real killer. I wonder what the max size is that the ide controller can address in this (I have a gut feeling its ATA 33 in the best case probably 66)

The good news is I might be able to get a 10 -20gb hdd in it.

If thinkwiki can be trusted the neomagic video chip has 2mb of video memory so that pretty much limits me to dos games as even most win 95 games seem to require 8mb or greater.

Iago wrote:Ironically, you probably cannot play any of the GOG versions of these classic games as they are tweaked to install in Windows!

You might be able too. It's is a single exe and they use dos box to emulate it. So you might be able to use winrar or 7zip to seperate them down to there original parts.

I started playing mass effect 3 today. It is better then the 2 that preceded it. Overall so far I give it an 8.5 out of 10. Its one of the few games out there that are probably worth the full price the dev charges. I was happy to see that EA did not sellout as they are infamous for with sequels.

I am still happily devoting endless hours to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It has gotten a lot of criticism for its generic fantasy setting (like Skyrim was groundbreaking in that regard) but for an action RPG, it gets something right that few other do: the action. I have never played an action RPG or regular RPG that has so many options for combat -- unlike most, not only is the combat not drudgery but you actually look forward to it. The number of options for builds and styles are enormous, and if for some reason you do not like where you are going you can cheaply buy back your skill points and rebuild from scratch. Not a great game, maybe, but great fun -- what more can you ask for in a game?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/feb/22/building-pc-self-built

Its nice to see another persons take on an omen i7 build, As mine is one of the only ones I have seen to date.

I had one of the first M:50s that came off the line in 2003 and that's the one I ended up returning. That thing got so freakin hot! Had the 3.0gHz desktop proc in it. I ended up buying the same lappie from Hypersonic. Which is just sitting there. I really should do something with it. My old F-Class is still sitting there too. Hasn't been upgraded since 2005. Can't put it away though, it's too pretty to look at. Any suggestions?

I am sure East will have some good board suggestions as he has been keeping up with them unlike me. The Hexx I just got is going to get a ATI graphic card upgrade (dual low profile in crossfire) but I am going to hold off on the board and CPU upgrade for now. I haven't been using it for anything that labor intensive.

The main problem is cooling is very limited in some of the older voodoo cases. I think I am familiar with the case but maybe post a pic or 2 just to be sure.

Personally I would try and stuff a socket 2011 board in it if you want it to be a performance pc. AMD has some good stuff too but intel is the way to go imo. The new intel architecture supports up to 64gb of ram if I remember correctly, Which may be necessary for windows 8 going on how bloated the new M$ operating systems are.

Other areas of concern would be the power supply clearance. (All of the good power supplys are eatx these days despite being marketed as atx) And graphics card clearance and cooling in the surrounding area of the case.

Other then that you should be able to stick anything atx in there provided you have enough of the proper case standoffs for the new mobo.

Thanks for your reply East. I'll tell ya, I was worried about thermals at first. But with all the great fans out now and CPU collers, I don't think it will be a problem because CPUs today seem to run a little cooler.

Last year around this time, my wife built me a PC because the Dell lappie I was using was on it's last legs. So we picked out the parts on Newegg and she got to work. Since I became disabled 4 years ago, I use a hospital tray on wheels to hold the PC, so I needed a smaller box, the F10 chassis would have been too big. We used a midtower Coolermaster case, the Sandy Bridge i5-2500k on a Z68 Asrock mobo, an OCZ Agility 3 SSD, a 1TB HDD, 8GB Patriot Gamer RAM and a 430w Asrock PSU running Windows 8 Home Premium 64bit. Found a great monitor that day as well, a 23" full HD Asus with HDMI in,etc. All that for $1000 with rebates (including the monitor).

Couldn't afford a GPU at the time so figured I would wait. Still don't have one, but haven't done any hardcore gaming. The HD3000 GPU on CPU actually kicks ass. Played a couple RPGs without any issues, including about a month of beta on Tera and a few days on Diablo 3, all settings maxed, no problem. I heard the HD4000 on the Ivy Bridge procs work as well as a middle of the road discrete GPUs. Oh well, perhaps I'll build a rig for Wendy in the old Voodoo chassis.

Bastage! How ya been?

That's the problem with the old Voodoo cases - beautiful, but antiquated to today's hardware. As I said somewhere here, gutted out my MESA case (formally, the RAGE F2 model) and would probably have to take up some extensive measurements to determine if it's worth putting anything in there worthwhile for today's games. Hate to get into this project and find out it's not feasible. Then, again, I have become a lappie fan and have all the power right now with my M18x, so not much of a need (and may never be)

May try an old OffRhod idea ---->>> do we hear, terrarium!!!!!!!

That obsolescence happened quickly -- I remember that I had Ryan checking into upgrading my RAGE SLi only a couple of years after I bought it, and there was already insufficient room for any newer hardware.

Seamaster wrote:Bastage! How ya been?

Seamaster, hanging in there pal! Just getting older, more feeble and way feistier! How's life?