Time for a RAM testing marathon! We could make a game of it! Tally up the passing / failing types, see which chips are the worst / best! Plus that RAM tester is just gosh darn cool. :0
Ugh, why? I have a bunch of old RAM, testing it was no fun, took hours, and was just repetitive as hell and took most of a day to do. But now I have a grocery bag full of tested working ram. Best part of it was finding 60ns 32mb 72pin modules in there, 4of them and working, that was some super expensive stuff back in the day, probably still is. Fun running a 486 with 128mb - have 64mb in it now just for brag factor lol.
@@noth606 Then just don't watch! Some of us don't have a 'bag-o-chips', thus hard to justify getting the chip tester. So it'd be neat to live vicariously thru his effort. 🙂
Rooting through old hardware is fun to watch. There is so much out there to experience. However, like you said, most of it was boring, low end stuff. I think a RAM-test extravaganza would be fun to watch as well!
Well, 486 motherboards with SRAM cache are fun, to rip out those RAMs to use as VIC-20 expansion memory. Naturally not for the speed but because they are often 32kx8 chips. And DRAM cards can be fun if you want to upgrade a REU to 512K.
board at 31:05 is probably a cpu/controller board for a Tektronix high end dye sublimation printer. looks as if it has an SCSI port on the back. As well as maybe a parallel port? all those ROMS are probably a Postscript implementation. SIMM sockets also make me think that.
In the early 90s I ran a two node RemoteAccess BSS with FrontDoor on a 386SX 25MHz board with 4MB of RAM. Everything ran under DesqView and there was even spare memory for a disk cache using Norton Cache. Because the machine had a generous amount of storage, I also ran Netware Lite on it in order to connect over coax Ethernet. Thanks for revitalizing those memories!
Hi Adrian !! I had mentioned that this Dallas clock chip has a battery embedded and its possible to replace it… just carefully cut the plastic case (top) or tear down the package by opening the bottom…
This! I was almost shouting angrily while the Yamaha OPL chip is clearly to be seen on the board right of the large mixer chip. That is pretty much as good as most SB16 cards with real OPL.
Those "manuals" with the product key came with the computer that already had the OS installed. If I remember correctly, for a while during the 90s, MS insisted on those silly booklets. I just tore off the front page and archived that. But in 97-98 the OEM machines had the Windows product key on stickers instead.
In the mid-1990s, I worked for a company that developed computer-based training programs and we used Broadway Real Magic MPEG playback cards. The Real Magic card utilized a loopback cable. The cable was connected to the video card monitor cable connector and the other end was plugged into the DIN connector. The monitor was then connected to the Real Magic card. The reason why we went with the Real Magic card versus straight computer playback of MPEG video is the card allowed for smoother video playback as you noted but more importantly allowed for time-location tracking. Using exact frame-location of the video playback, the program-developer, meaning yours truly, could select specific frames and sections of the video for playback. These were used for feedback. If a student clicked on the wrong answer during the module test, that portion of the video, linked and marked by the timecode, would then play again before continuing on to the next question. HA, HA! I see you found a complete kit for the newer or older Hollywood card instead of the Broadway unless they were two different products from the same period.
@@ryanvoots9827 Yes, indeed. Initially, we used the laser disc system before the Broadway cards were available. It's a good thing because those players were discontinued anyway, and were very expensive as well. The alternative was AVI but that was too slow and required the CPU and very slow video cards used in the day, which I think were those awful Trident or S3 cards! The Broadway cards were a very popular option with the customers and eventually we only supported those and gave up the AVI option for customers.
brings me back to the old days, each company had its own solution to the problem, hardware that didn't work together because of irq or dma conflicts, ten floppies just to get software installed, getting stuff that was not "as advertised". Thanks Adrian, from Hong Kong!
It's been a while since we have seen Adrian bust out the memory tester and tell stories. Would be great to watch a test/sort video for all of that memory!
Wow! A GN reference! Wasn’t expecting that. And the importance of Ensoniq (to the retro community) is that they were the engineers who made the C64 SID.
Indeed, they really brought their big-synth experience down into the SID and helped make it what it was :D Though apparently it was originally going to have even more voices, but Commodore’s strict Christmas deadline made them limit it to 3. It’s already so amazing with 3 voices, so imagining a world where it had 6 or 8 out of the box is pretty intense!
The Sigma Designs RealMagic cards were also really useful if you wanted clean NTSC video playback from a PC. They were used by a number of AMV tech people in order to play back the videos for conventions and the like, without having to worry about playback issues. In the box with all the cables, the svideo to composite adapter is a specific pinout for these cards, and differs from what you would get with some VGA cards that had similar adapters. It made it frustrating when you collected these cards, ensuring you had the adapters. The RCA jack on the card is digital audio, not video.
The AMD29000 is a bit slice microprocessor, It ran at up to 10MHz IIRC - I designed a maths co-processor VME rack card for matrix operations (add, multiply) around one for my MSc Dissertation in 1990. The ROM chips hold the microcode which is why there’s so many of them
@@boardernut I’m referring to the 29k series bit slice architecture, not the 2900. I used the AM29325, AM29331, AM29332 and AM29334. I constructed a matrix ALU board with these components that plugged into a VMEBus rack. The primary processor (a 68030) wrote two matrices to a shared memory area, the board performed an operation in the background (add, subtract or multiply) and then wrote the result to the same area before triggering a bus interrupt to indicate that the result was available. Designed to accelerate 3D graphics calculations in 1990.
@@philh9421 that is very interesting to me, I kind of joined too late to the RISC era, although I was lucky enough to be at the right place for a few years, unfortunately for me I also saw them first hand fade very quickly. At the TELCO I worked for I had time in my hands to play with sun ultra 2 , HP9000-712 , Alpha stations and with was already obsolete VAXstations 4000/60 (not risc tho), I did a lot of csh programming, pure nostalgia now
The AMD K6-II really brings back memories. The first PC I ever built back in 1997 when I was 10 used the 400MHz version of that CPU. I built the PC all by myself. Good times.
That was my 2nd CPU! Wait no, it was a K6-3... My first was a Cyrix MII (PR 233) I forget it's real clock, I upgraded to the K6-3 400 a few years later. I loved the socket 7 days. I eventually blew up the AMD trying to overclock it and had to switch to an old pentium 90. 3 cpu's from many generations all on the same board.
Ensoniq's 1370 is a very DOS compatible sound card, even it's in PCI. Creative rebranded them to SB PCI64 and PCI128 and Ensoniq's AUDIOPCI DOS drivers were used as the basis for the Live! and Audigy excellent DOS drivers.
Part of this looked like a walk through the hardware in my 1990's computer systems. I had the various AMD accelerated chips, those Trident video cards, probably a couple of the sound cards, and the weird adapters. Lost a lot of my old parts in a house fire.
28:44 - sometimes it's worth checking the underside of the motherboards, there might be a sticker or a silkscreen marking that help you identify it. Lately I'm into motherboards that have both AT and ATX PSU sockets, it's a fasticanting idea. I think the cache that goes in a slot is called Cache on a Stick. I gasped when you opened the Slot1 CPU box, I love the Slot1 form factor, because the first PC that my brother bought/built had a Slot1 Celeron inside :) This whole episode is like christmas!
I need to get a better board for my slot 1 machine, it only has PCI and is quite slow. I have a 600mhz Piii in it and it gets beast by a slot 1 compaq i have with a 500mhz Piii. It's out of an HP and has the AGP bus taken up by a slow onboard chip. I'm Thinking an Asus P3B-F if i can find one.
My first 3D accelerator was an AGP Diamond Viper V550, which used the nVidia TNT1, in a PII-450 machine. It was a beast at Half-Life, but Unreal was a bit buggy for a while because the engine wasn't originally created with nVidia GPUs in mind. That machine also had a Sound Blaster PCI128, which I'm pretty sure was pretty much just a rebadged Ensoniq design. I have a strong feeling that Creative bought Ensoniq as a way to get into the PCI sound card market.
I loved my slow Trident with that colorful Bios boot screen, my very first PC, 286 instead of XT and color monitor instead of typical amber as I convinced parents to get 286 color at the expense of smaller HDD (got massive 40MB). Of course I upgraded through S3 Virge, Cirrus-Logic and some weak 3d-capable S3, drooling over first nvidia and 3dfx cards. I remember I had some very early ATI Radeon, poorly performing in 3d. Computers were so exciting back then.
I didn't find this video boring. I learned a lot watching it. I'm 62 now and never had a chance to be around computers. To see each board separately. And see how they work was very interesting to me. It would be awesome to see you show a parts list of what we need to build a computer and how to put it together and test it like here in this video. It wouldn't be for you guys and gals who know. But I could learn a lot from it.
The Advansys SCSI card is cool. I used to have a very similar one, probably still do have it somewhere. This model ABP-970 IIRC is also compatible with PowerPC Macs, if you flash its BIOS with a MAc-compatible firmware. Advansys were even better performing than Adaptec of the time, unfortunately they were a small company and eventually Adaptec bought them.
Perhaps the ISA bus on that 386 board was running at 10 MHz (FSB/4), vs. 8.33 on the Slot-1 board (on PCI motherboards, the ISA clock is usually PCI/4, and PCI is 33.3 unless overclocked). That would explain the faster performance of the ISA VGA card. Fun fact: when I was playing around with overclocking a Pentium MMX, at 83 MHz FSB (41.7 PCI, 10.4 ISA) it was actually a 3COM ISA NIC that made it unstable -- the PCI cards were fine! With the NIC removed it would boot but would eventually fail Prime95. It was rock-solid at 75 MHz though, which at 3.5x multiplier brought a 233MMX to 262.
That reference to Linux drivers on that 1996 Advansys SCSI card would have to be one of the earliest (if not the earliest) inclusion of Linux drivers on a commercial product that I've seen. Linux in 1996 was super niche geekware.
our 1995 (passive)isdn card had linux drivers. driver support for linux in 1995-1998 was actually better than say in '01-'03, somehow magically. probably due to that companies weren't trying to hide what they were doing in software vs. in hardware. voodoo had linux drivers too(well, glide lib).
The Ensoniq 1370 card was the first general purpose PCI sound card. As far as DOS compatibility goes, early steppings of the K6 processor had hang issues with some specific DOS setups. AMD updated the processor and fixed the issue early on. Defective chips could be returned to AMD for a replacement. Sometimes it's not the sound card :)
Some of that laptop memory can also be used in older printers that served on networks I had a phaser 5400 from Xerox that use this stuff. Combined with a bank of 500 sheet paper trees, that thing was a beast
Oh yeah, I used to service printers for a few years and forgot about the laptop SIMM in there. My office used to have a bunch of laserjet 4's, 5si, 4000's, all networked and some local, I loved working on them, especially the older ones. unfortunately we got moved over to a half dozen large central printers and we didn't get to service them anymore. That job went from awesome to a dead bore in the span of 10y due to outsourcing all the printing and PC hardware to leases.
My Dad got a RealMagic DVD card back in the late 90s and installed it in his Pentium 166 computer, and we were allll blown away by how incredible First Contact looked! Yes, we got the same DVD! I actually have the cards with me, and I've wanted to try them out, but never actively gone to check if the software is available. I really should check. The whole kit was an amazing product, really!
The Creative dxr2 board was a rebadged ReelMagic, I believe. I got one of those in a DVD upgrade kit with a Matsushita 2X DVD-ROM. With the composite output cable, that was my sole DVD player for years - until it got replaced with a Sony PlayStation 2. :-)
If I remember my 3dfx history, the first Voodoo setups they sold actually went into arcade cabinets - before the consumer release in 1996! I read an internal document claiming to offer custom 1, 2, and 3 TMU configurations as well as SLI, all using the 1st-gen frame buffer and texture mapping chips that ended up on the original consumer Voodoo card. Oh, and the 1st-gen TMU/FBI chips actually supported up to 4MB of RAM per chip - so what we think of as a Voodoo2 SLI setup with a total of two FBI's, four TMU's, and 24MB of total RAM - that was all possible back in 1995 with the original 1st-gen 3dfx hardware, provided you were an arcade manufacturer with sufficiently deep pockets of course. You could even have six TMU's in theory! Granted, the 1st-gen chips ran ~50MHz so not as fast as true Voodoo2 SLI but still WILDLY impressive for 1995!! Now I'm not familiar enough with arcade hardware to know whether 3dfx actually built anything that complex with the 1st-gen hardware, but they certainly advertised it to the arcade companies!
That's cool to know but I wonder if anyone would know what to do with 24 MB of VRAM in 1995. On the other hand, now we have games with no attempt of optimization that will gobble up 16 GB of VRAM. Oh how things have changed.
The adaptec AHA 131u2 is an ultra-II SCSI card, basically one of their "server grade" cards (hence the cache memory on it)... very nice, not cheap card back in the day. (That's from memory, but that card is pretty powerful).
The Tektronix board looks like the control board to one of their printers like the phaser series. The centronics connector is a good indicator, but I am not sure.
What a nice little nostalgia trip - I worked for a PC manufacturer in the late 90s/ early 00s and recognised a lot of these! You can test the dvd decoders w/o the breakout cable, you just need to swap the VGA cable from the monitor when you start the playback 👍
There are 2 additional possibilities, why the trident might be slow: There's a Waitstate and / or 8/16-Bit-jumper set wrong. Or the ISA-implementation on this newer board might not work particularly great together with this graphics chip.
I'm just in the second minute of the video, but man that's a treasure chest of boards just in the value of the memory chips and all. That box at one time was probably full of extremely valuable cards and motherboards, and today is going to possibly help be the missing link to old systems that need chips from there! Really nice of your friend to let you take that box of stuff he'll probably never use off his hands. I have 2 or 3 boxes like that in storage as well, one day I'll go through it and see what I have, it'll mostly be pc parts, I wasn't into Mac back in the day, nor am I today!
That Adaptec AAA-131U2 is a SCSI Hardware RAID card, and the RAM is there for caching reads and writes. That was an *expensive* card back in the day! Hardware RAID + Cache = $$$$$$ There is a version of that card that also has a battery on it so that if the power went out, the RAID array could be rebuilt using the cached writes so that data was not lost. I would say that based upon the cards in your collection, the SCSI and network cards were pulled from a Novell Netware network system with a fairly high end Novell Server.
AM29000 is an AMD RISC processor, often used in printers... They were famous for their phaser line of solid ink(wax i think) printers, i think the printer business is now sold to Xerox... Check the chip around the db25 and centronics connector, they might be SCSI chips for external HDD to store more fonts.
Later boards used a PCI to ISA bridge as things on the board moved to LPC. This often broke older ISA cards and Ive had it stop ISA post cards working. The large Adaptec carc is a RAID card, check to see if it has a Dell, HP or Compaq P/N
Thanks for this exxxtreme episode. It reminded me of a couple of PC cards that I also owned in the 90's. And that you needed to pay for HQ sound in a PC of that time.
"Hey Adrian, just wanted to let you know that the SL3CD part you found in the old computer is a Pentium III processor with a clock speed of 500 MHz and 512 KB of L2 cache. Keep up the great work on your channel, always love seeing these retro tech finds!"
Adrian, those cheap Trident cards can be improved somewhat for DOS gaming performance by loading a VESA 2.0 framebuffer into high memory in your config.sys (or autoexec.bat I don't recall which, it's been over 30 years now) as the card only supported VESA 1.2 in hardware. I found it gave a good 10-20% performance boost in Doom and Wolf3D, as well as some Origin games. (NOT Wing commander, sadly). But it helps. At the time that card was popular for cheap clones, (1990-1995) 3D accelleration was all but unknown, and fast 2D cards extremely expensive. I remember yearning for a Matrox card around that time. ;-) EDIT: To add to the nostalgia for me, said Trident card was running in a PC that used the very same AMD 386DX-40 you have there! It's only a few hundred miles down the coast from Vancouver to Portland, could my old first PC have travelled that far?
Legacy tech user here just to let you know that the Dallas RTC circuit has a hidden battery inside it's IC housing. The way i see it was intended for users to buy another computer when it so called died on them, like can't boot or saved bios settings if i remember back then, unless replaced by a computer geek or another motherboard replacement quick fix. A Real Frankenstein clock creation.
Oooh... I love those "big LED" ethernet cards... back when I was playing with stuff like that, nobody had an outside-of-work use for Ethernet, so I had "hundreds" for pretty close to zero cost. Nice SCSI card.... Linux drivers in 1996 NINETY SIX!!!!! Wowzers! I went Linux about 2 years later and drivers for anything were rarer than a very rare thing.
Don't knock those Trident and S3 cards too much. They were great for us Linux users, back in the bad old days of early XFree86 (lack of) compatibility and having to craft up and X86Config file and monitor timings and modelines and... (insert screaming into the void sound) Yeah the performance wasn't great, but then again we weren't really playing games on our Linux boxen (except maybe the occasional netrek match, which these handled with no issues.) But they performed reasonably well for most stuff, and most importantly were pretty easy to set up ("easy" being a relative term, we're talking about cooking up XF86Config modelines with the proper monitor timings and all that) and had great compatibility. Also back in those days alot of hardware would complain loudly and refuse to boot if a video card wasn't present, so these were great to stick into machines that normally ran headless. Same applies for those NE2000 ethernet cards. They were the go-to card for getting a Linux box on the network, because they were pretty easy to configure and they Just Worked(tm) and the Linux NE2K driver was stable and performed decently.
Some of that double height "SDRam" might actually be EDO or FP DRAM DIMMs (3.3V or 5V). IBM and Apple used the 5V DIMMS extensively in mid 90s PPC computers and workstations. The 3.3V EDO DIMMS were sometimes used on early Pentium 1 systems.
I definitely loved this video. I saw some items that I actually used in my first PC build (Asus AT/ATX MOBO, AMD K6 2 350, 3Dfx Voodoo (3000) AGP card). Thanks for the memories.
The 25,000 issue could also just be a "standard" of 2D for these cards, with the real differences simply being 3D related. Like polygons per second, fill rate etc. Also, that Vibra 16 does have a genuine Yamaha OPL chip on the board, so it's all cool for DOS games. I imagine you spotted that by now, but just in case.
For DOS games with software rendering: A S3 Virge PCI card on a Pentium 200 already does 25000 chars/ms on LandMark test. It supports up to 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color on windows. It is free from BGA chips. The no-return point for sophistication IMHO seems to be when video chips started to be BGA, and started to have a limited life.
@@evapowah Maybe there is a limitation in the software measurement. Besides, when the S3 Virge came out, people wanted to push graphics pixels. 25k chars/sec is plenty for any text mode
42:00 Those Lot 1 CPU are actually not build to ease the handling of the processors ... but because they could not (yet) include enough cache on to the die but had to put the bigger cache in to a separate chip... That's why they came as a package on a circuit board .. called a "Slot 1" cpu. ;) Later on, caches got fully integrated into cpu dies so the extra PCB was no longer necessary. ;)
I find it interesting looking at some of these old cards and realizing that in some cases the entire card has been shrunken down into one chip or even one function of a chip on a modern motherboard.
The controller on those Ethernet cards at 7-8 minutes is a knock-off of the National Semiconductor DP83901. That was the follow-on to the DP8390 which was the most bog-standard chip of the day. You should certainly be able to get a generic driver to work there. Also: The AM29000 was a high end RISC processor when it was released, but it was quickly eclipsed along with Motorola's MC88000 and plenty of other chips. The 29000 eventually ended up in places like printer controllers, and the cache circuitry of the 88000 was combined with the IBM RS/6000 processor core to create the PowerPC line.
Regarding the ram, do a timelapse recording of testing and sorting the modules, showing the boxes where the working modules get put into, the tester, and a dead-parts box for the rejects.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 OH MY GOD, you have replied to me! UA-cam sucks when it has to deliver notifications! Altough I can't be a Patreon subscriber, I support the idea of that live stream. Thank you for getting in touch with me here, your videos are a must when I'm having any meals all day long ♥
I had a friend who worked for IBM back in the mid to late 90's and he says they used to have a massive printshop with massive printers that would use those truck sized spools of paper with insane pages per minute and they had several binding options available. All printing for the company was done in house including documentation booklets for products which explains why it all looked so uniform, and sort of cheap since it wasn't outsourced to a publisher. He said that any employee could submit print jobs this way, using an in-house driver installed on company computers and it would be shipped to wherever you were located in the US (maybe the world). Training manuals, HR booklets, meeting brochures etc were all done this way.
It was really fun to see you show and talk about the Diamond Riva 128 card, because I have that exact card in a drawer, saved from an old machine I encoutered at a site doing work.
@27:03 That is an Acer AP5C motherboard, 4 pin connector in the corner is for CPU fan power. We had some of those where I used to work back in the Windows 95 era. Supports like a 133Mhz P1 processor. I think that jumper is for the keyboard lock = KLock. Yes a barrel style lock / switch that prevented keyboard input if I remember correctly, @28:02 That looks like / similar to a DFI P5B motherboard. Will probably take one of those K6 350MHZ processors.
That Elsa with s3 savage4 pro chip is a good card , supports meTal API, hi-res texture in some games ,Unreal for example...Almost as good as Voodoo 3 ,although slower
*Never* connect power to that Molex connector, Acer/ALi/AOPEN (All of them are Acer brands) mainboards used it to power the CPU *fan* for APM control. It's a male connector (pins tell the gender, not the housing) but back then most fans were wired to a short male-female extension cable to keep the molex power connector available for other devices so it was not a problem.
That old S3 GPU brings back memories. My first ever own PC (not the first PC I've ever used, but the first one that was mine) had a 4MB Trio3D AGP card. Not a good 3D card but worked well for DOS and some lighter Windows games. Also, from what I remember, the mainboard in that system also had an ATX plug in addition to AT (case was AT though).
Adaptec high end SCSI cards had cache, bus mastering in older ones, and a TON of other great high end features. Adaptec was the SCSI card for servers and the one to beat in the early - late 90s.
Adrian, your camera kept focusing on the hardware in the foreground instead of the monitor when you were testing the hardware. Whenever you do any testing I count on being able to see all the data on the screen, glitches and all. Your testing and diagnostic videos are the most interesting to me, so please do what can to get your camera to behave properly.
The "SDRAM" module on the Adaptec card is a write cache. Probably got a battery connector on it somewhere. That SCSI/Sound Card may not actually be bootable, the combo of SCSI and Sound makes me think it's probably one of the cards that shipped with the early commodity CD-R drives.
A DVD-decoder! When DVD came out, I bought a drive and such a decoder. On Win98. First DVD I ever watched: A Bug's Life. Being used to fuzzy VHS I, was simply blown away by the clarity and sharpness. A real holy-shit-do-you-see-that moment, I still remember today.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
If you ever make a third channel it needs to be called Adrian's Digital Basement Exxtreme. 😆
fun fact: he has a 3rd channel but only posts once in a while through patreon and they never go public, only for patrons.
I'd rather like to see his Analogue Attic 👍
Adrians Onlyfans channel :D
@@StenEriksson I think he's cute too
Beyond Adrian's Digital Basement
Time for a RAM testing marathon! We could make a game of it! Tally up the passing / failing types, see which chips are the worst / best! Plus that RAM tester is just gosh darn cool. :0
Ugh, why? I have a bunch of old RAM, testing it was no fun, took hours, and was just repetitive as hell and took most of a day to do. But now I have a grocery bag full of tested working ram. Best part of it was finding 60ns 32mb 72pin modules in there, 4of them and working, that was some super expensive stuff back in the day, probably still is. Fun running a 486 with 128mb - have 64mb in it now just for brag factor lol.
@@noth606 Then just don't watch! Some of us don't have a 'bag-o-chips', thus hard to justify getting the chip tester. So it'd be neat to live vicariously thru his effort. 🙂
I'm totally down for some RAM testing!
This would be cool! Live stream!
I'd watch!
Rooting through old hardware is fun to watch. There is so much out there to experience. However, like you said, most of it was boring, low end stuff. I think a RAM-test extravaganza would be fun to watch as well!
Agreed
Well, 486 motherboards with SRAM cache are fun, to rip out those RAMs to use as VIC-20 expansion memory. Naturally not for the speed but because they are often 32kx8 chips. And DRAM cards can be fun if you want to upgrade a REU to 512K.
board at 31:05 is probably a cpu/controller board for a Tektronix high end dye sublimation printer. looks as if it has an SCSI port on the back. As well as maybe a parallel port? all those ROMS are probably a Postscript implementation. SIMM sockets also make me think that.
KLOCK is probably the Keyboard LOCK connector. What a collection of hardware! Keep up the great videos, Adrian!
16 megabyte of sdram man those cards were beasts of graphics cards you should get yourself one while there still out there🤣
“I’m going to have to speed this up or the video’s going to go long.”
Don’t threaten me with a good time. 😂🍿
“Klock” is probably “keyboard lock” - the little ring-shaped keys that locks out keyboard input when the key is removed, introduced by the IBM AT
Just livestream it. You can chat with viewers while doing boring stuff. That’s exactly why live-streaming is perfect.
Play some cool music and chat while testing ram
Yes! Came for this comment. Live stream it please! :D
In the early 90s I ran a two node RemoteAccess BSS with FrontDoor on a 386SX 25MHz board with 4MB of RAM. Everything ran under DesqView and there was even spare memory for a disk cache using Norton Cache. Because the machine had a generous amount of storage, I also ran Netware Lite on it in order to connect over coax Ethernet. Thanks for revitalizing those memories!
Hi Adrian !!
I had mentioned that this Dallas clock chip has a battery embedded and its possible to replace it… just carefully cut the plastic case (top) or tear down the package by opening the bottom…
Seeing the colors of the bios screen on the 386 board (at approx 1h12m) triggered some memories of building my first PC around '89/'90.
I thought this was just a great video. It captured the excitement we all feel with encounters with new hardware!
That Vibra card is actually one of the better Vibras... there's a real OPL3 chip on it unlike the later ones when they switched to CQM!
was screaming at the screen when he never noticed it, glad someone else did
One of the better Vibras... that's like having one of the better diseases.
The Vibra gave me flashbacks to LGR messing with that Quantex 486 and the Vibra utterly mangling/freaking out on Jill of the Jungle
This! I was almost shouting angrily while the Yamaha OPL chip is clearly to be seen on the board right of the large mixer chip. That is pretty much as good as most SB16 cards with real OPL.
@@TheGrunt76 Agree, there's nothing really wrong with this one! Even if it says Vibra on it!
Those "manuals" with the product key came with the computer that already had the OS installed. If I remember correctly, for a while during the 90s, MS insisted on those silly booklets. I just tore off the front page and archived that. But in 97-98 the OEM machines had the Windows product key on stickers instead.
In the mid-1990s, I worked for a company that developed computer-based training programs and we used Broadway Real Magic MPEG playback cards. The Real Magic card utilized a loopback cable. The cable was connected to the video card monitor cable connector and the other end was plugged into the DIN connector. The monitor was then connected to the Real Magic card.
The reason why we went with the Real Magic card versus straight computer playback of MPEG video is the card allowed for smoother video playback as you noted but more importantly allowed for time-location tracking. Using exact frame-location of the video playback, the program-developer, meaning yours truly, could select specific frames and sections of the video for playback. These were used for feedback. If a student clicked on the wrong answer during the module test, that portion of the video, linked and marked by the timecode, would then play again before continuing on to the next question.
HA, HA! I see you found a complete kit for the newer or older Hollywood card instead of the Broadway unless they were two different products from the same period.
So a pot like how dragons lair used the laser discs back in the day?
@@ryanvoots9827 Yes, indeed.
Initially, we used the laser disc system before the Broadway cards were available. It's a good thing because those players were discontinued anyway, and were very expensive as well.
The alternative was AVI but that was too slow and required the CPU and very slow video cards used in the day, which I think were those awful Trident or S3 cards!
The Broadway cards were a very popular option with the customers and eventually we only supported those and gave up the AVI option for customers.
For anyone 45+ this is not a mystery, its nostalgia ♥
36+ as well., my first machine I have seen opened was 1990 😂😂
55+ it starts moving from nostalgia to a mystery due to a failing memory. "0_o"
36 here, this video brings so much memories
31 here and still remember some of these from my childhood :D
42+. 486 we still ♥U!
brings me back to the old days, each company had its own solution to the problem, hardware that didn't work together because of irq or dma conflicts, ten floppies just to get software installed, getting stuff that was not "as advertised". Thanks Adrian, from Hong Kong!
A chill ram testing stream would be a good opportunity to just sit and have a meandering conversation about whatever. You should consider it.
I would definitely tune in to that stream!
It's been a while since we have seen Adrian bust out the memory tester and tell stories. Would be great to watch a test/sort video for all of that memory!
Wow! A GN reference! Wasn’t expecting that.
And the importance of Ensoniq (to the retro community) is that they were the engineers who made the C64 SID.
Indeed, they really brought their big-synth experience down into the SID and helped make it what it was :D
Though apparently it was originally going to have even more voices, but Commodore’s strict Christmas deadline made them limit it to 3. It’s already so amazing with 3 voices, so imagining a world where it had 6 or 8 out of the box is pretty intense!
@@kaitlyn__L They founded Ensoniq and developed keyboard synths _after_ leaving Commodore/MOS.
The Sigma Designs RealMagic cards were also really useful if you wanted clean NTSC video playback from a PC. They were used by a number of AMV tech people in order to play back the videos for conventions and the like, without having to worry about playback issues.
In the box with all the cables, the svideo to composite adapter is a specific pinout for these cards, and differs from what you would get with some VGA cards that had similar adapters. It made it frustrating when you collected these cards, ensuring you had the adapters. The RCA jack on the card is digital audio, not video.
The AMD29000 is a bit slice microprocessor, It ran at up to 10MHz IIRC - I designed a maths co-processor VME rack card for matrix operations (add, multiply) around one for my MSc Dissertation in 1990. The ROM chips hold the microcode which is why there’s so many of them
Yup, by far the most interesting board in the bunch, it would be real fun and challenge to bring that one to life!
no, you are refering to the Am2900 series, otoh the 29k in that board is a completely different animal, it's a much modern 32bit RISC processor
@@boardernut I’m referring to the 29k series bit slice architecture, not the 2900. I used the AM29325, AM29331, AM29332 and AM29334. I constructed a matrix ALU board with these components that plugged into a VMEBus rack. The primary processor (a 68030) wrote two matrices to a shared memory area, the board performed an operation in the background (add, subtract or multiply) and then wrote the result to the same area before triggering a bus interrupt to indicate that the result was available. Designed to accelerate 3D graphics calculations in 1990.
@@philh9421 that is very interesting to me, I kind of joined too late to the RISC era, although I was lucky enough to be at the right place for a few years, unfortunately for me I also saw them first hand fade very quickly. At the TELCO I worked for I had time in my hands to play with sun ultra 2 , HP9000-712 , Alpha stations and with was already obsolete VAXstations 4000/60 (not risc tho), I did a lot of csh programming, pure nostalgia now
The AMD K6-II really brings back memories. The first PC I ever built back in 1997 when I was 10 used the 400MHz version of that CPU. I built the PC all by myself. Good times.
That was my 2nd CPU! Wait no, it was a K6-3...
My first was a Cyrix MII (PR 233) I forget it's real clock, I upgraded to the K6-3 400 a few years later.
I loved the socket 7 days. I eventually blew up the AMD trying to overclock it and had to switch to an old pentium 90.
3 cpu's from many generations all on the same board.
@@volvo09 I loved the Socket 7 too.
Ensoniq's 1370 is a very DOS compatible sound card, even it's in PCI. Creative rebranded them to SB PCI64 and PCI128 and Ensoniq's AUDIOPCI DOS drivers were used as the basis for the Live! and Audigy excellent DOS drivers.
Part of this looked like a walk through the hardware in my 1990's computer systems. I had the various AMD accelerated chips, those Trident video cards, probably a couple of the sound cards, and the weird adapters. Lost a lot of my old parts in a house fire.
17:45 those combined SCSI and sound cards were usually for CD-ROMs and CD writers. Not sure if they'd work with a regular old hard drive.
28:44 - sometimes it's worth checking the underside of the motherboards, there might be a sticker or a silkscreen marking that help you identify it. Lately I'm into motherboards that have both AT and ATX PSU sockets, it's a fasticanting idea. I think the cache that goes in a slot is called Cache on a Stick.
I gasped when you opened the Slot1 CPU box, I love the Slot1 form factor, because the first PC that my brother bought/built had a Slot1 Celeron inside :) This whole episode is like christmas!
I need to get a better board for my slot 1 machine, it only has PCI and is quite slow. I have a 600mhz Piii in it and it gets beast by a slot 1 compaq i have with a 500mhz Piii. It's out of an HP and has the AGP bus taken up by a slow onboard chip. I'm Thinking an Asus P3B-F if i can find one.
@@EvilTurkeySlices The chipset has a lot to do with the speed of those Slot 1 boards. I always tried to get a Intel 440 BX board if possible.
@@TheLionAndTheLamb777 the one I have is a 440bx.
28:32 There is a white sticker on the black 16-Bit ISA/AT connector (at the edge of the motherboard).
My first 3D accelerator was an AGP Diamond Viper V550, which used the nVidia TNT1, in a PII-450 machine. It was a beast at Half-Life, but Unreal was a bit buggy for a while because the engine wasn't originally created with nVidia GPUs in mind.
That machine also had a Sound Blaster PCI128, which I'm pretty sure was pretty much just a rebadged Ensoniq design. I have a strong feeling that Creative bought Ensoniq as a way to get into the PCI sound card market.
The first versions of Unreal were a pain in OpenGL and even DX.
Glide was the prefered render.
I loved my slow Trident with that colorful Bios boot screen, my very first PC, 286 instead of XT and color monitor instead of typical amber as I convinced parents to get 286 color at the expense of smaller HDD (got massive 40MB). Of course I upgraded through S3 Virge, Cirrus-Logic and some weak 3d-capable S3, drooling over first nvidia and 3dfx cards. I remember I had some very early ATI Radeon, poorly performing in 3d. Computers were so exciting back then.
I didn't find this video boring. I learned a lot watching it. I'm 62 now and never had a chance to be around computers. To see each board separately. And see how they work was very interesting to me. It would be awesome to see you show a parts list of what we need to build a computer and how to put it together and test it like here in this video. It wouldn't be for you guys and gals who know. But I could learn a lot from it.
The Advansys SCSI card is cool. I used to have a very similar one, probably still do have it somewhere. This model ABP-970 IIRC is also compatible with PowerPC Macs, if you flash its BIOS with a MAc-compatible firmware. Advansys were even better performing than Adaptec of the time, unfortunately they were a small company and eventually Adaptec bought them.
Perhaps the ISA bus on that 386 board was running at 10 MHz (FSB/4), vs. 8.33 on the Slot-1 board (on PCI motherboards, the ISA clock is usually PCI/4, and PCI is 33.3 unless overclocked). That would explain the faster performance of the ISA VGA card.
Fun fact: when I was playing around with overclocking a Pentium MMX, at 83 MHz FSB (41.7 PCI, 10.4 ISA) it was actually a 3COM ISA NIC that made it unstable -- the PCI cards were fine! With the NIC removed it would boot but would eventually fail Prime95. It was rock-solid at 75 MHz though, which at 3.5x multiplier brought a 233MMX to 262.
I think the talking is the best part. Your knowledge is extensive and helps newbie like me to know what to look for.
That reference to Linux drivers on that 1996 Advansys SCSI card would have to be one of the earliest (if not the earliest) inclusion of Linux drivers on a commercial product that I've seen. Linux in 1996 was super niche geekware.
our 1995 (passive)isdn card had linux drivers. driver support for linux in 1995-1998 was actually better than say in '01-'03, somehow magically. probably due to that companies weren't trying to hide what they were doing in software vs. in hardware.
voodoo had linux drivers too(well, glide lib).
It’s no surprise it’s on a SCSI controller haha
The Ensoniq 1370 card was the first general purpose PCI sound card. As far as DOS compatibility goes, early steppings of the K6 processor had hang issues with some specific DOS setups. AMD updated the processor and fixed the issue early on. Defective chips could be returned to AMD for a replacement. Sometimes it's not the sound card :)
Some of that laptop memory can also be used in older printers that served on networks I had a phaser 5400 from Xerox that use this stuff. Combined with a bank of 500 sheet paper trees, that thing was a beast
Oh yeah, I used to service printers for a few years and forgot about the laptop SIMM in there.
My office used to have a bunch of laserjet 4's, 5si, 4000's, all networked and some local, I loved working on them, especially the older ones. unfortunately we got moved over to a half dozen large central printers and we didn't get to service them anymore.
That job went from awesome to a dead bore in the span of 10y due to outsourcing all the printing and PC hardware to leases.
AdrianXX'xxs DigitalX BaseXXment is the best channel!
My Dad got a RealMagic DVD card back in the late 90s and installed it in his Pentium 166 computer, and we were allll blown away by how incredible First Contact looked! Yes, we got the same DVD!
I actually have the cards with me, and I've wanted to try them out, but never actively gone to check if the software is available. I really should check. The whole kit was an amazing product, really!
The Creative dxr2 board was a rebadged ReelMagic, I believe. I got one of those in a DVD upgrade kit with a Matsushita 2X DVD-ROM. With the composite output cable, that was my sole DVD player for years - until it got replaced with a Sony PlayStation 2. :-)
If I remember my 3dfx history, the first Voodoo setups they sold actually went into arcade cabinets - before the consumer release in 1996! I read an internal document claiming to offer custom 1, 2, and 3 TMU configurations as well as SLI, all using the 1st-gen frame buffer and texture mapping chips that ended up on the original consumer Voodoo card. Oh, and the 1st-gen TMU/FBI chips actually supported up to 4MB of RAM per chip - so what we think of as a Voodoo2 SLI setup with a total of two FBI's, four TMU's, and 24MB of total RAM - that was all possible back in 1995 with the original 1st-gen 3dfx hardware, provided you were an arcade manufacturer with sufficiently deep pockets of course. You could even have six TMU's in theory! Granted, the 1st-gen chips ran ~50MHz so not as fast as true Voodoo2 SLI but still WILDLY impressive for 1995!! Now I'm not familiar enough with arcade hardware to know whether 3dfx actually built anything that complex with the 1st-gen hardware, but they certainly advertised it to the arcade companies!
That's cool to know but I wonder if anyone would know what to do with 24 MB of VRAM in 1995. On the other hand, now we have games with no attempt of optimization that will gobble up 16 GB of VRAM. Oh how things have changed.
Just seeing the thumbnail of this video brought back the SMELL of a few computer surplus stores, I used to visit.
The adaptec AHA 131u2 is an ultra-II SCSI card, basically one of their "server grade" cards (hence the cache memory on it)... very nice, not cheap card back in the day. (That's from memory, but that card is pretty powerful).
I would like to have a it ☺
It's a RAID controller.
The network cards are NCR 92C901 10base2 cards.
Really enjoyed simply 'spending the afternoon' with you as you went through the box of parts. Great video!
The Tektronix board looks like the control board to one of their printers like the phaser series. The centronics connector is a good indicator, but I am not sure.
What a nice little nostalgia trip - I worked for a PC manufacturer in the late 90s/ early 00s and recognised a lot of these! You can test the dvd decoders w/o the breakout cable, you just need to swap the VGA cable from the monitor when you start the playback 👍
Adrian, the man of culture, watching Gamer's Nexus and doubling bits in dance parties ;)
There are 2 additional possibilities, why the trident might be slow: There's a Waitstate and / or 8/16-Bit-jumper set wrong. Or the ISA-implementation on this newer board might not work particularly great together with this graphics chip.
I'm just in the second minute of the video, but man that's a treasure chest of boards just in the value of the memory chips and all. That box at one time was probably full of extremely valuable cards and motherboards, and today is going to possibly help be the missing link to old systems that need chips from there! Really nice of your friend to let you take that box of stuff he'll probably never use off his hands. I have 2 or 3 boxes like that in storage as well, one day I'll go through it and see what I have, it'll mostly be pc parts, I wasn't into Mac back in the day, nor am I today!
That Adaptec AAA-131U2 is a SCSI Hardware RAID card, and the RAM is there for caching reads and writes. That was an *expensive* card back in the day! Hardware RAID + Cache = $$$$$$ There is a version of that card that also has a battery on it so that if the power went out, the RAID array could be rebuilt using the cached writes so that data was not lost. I would say that based upon the cards in your collection, the SCSI and network cards were pulled from a Novell Netware network system with a fairly high end Novell Server.
That's probably where the taller RAM sticks came from too.
AM29000 is an AMD RISC processor, often used in printers... They were famous for their phaser line of solid ink(wax i think) printers, i think the printer business is now sold to Xerox...
Check the chip around the db25 and centronics connector, they might be SCSI chips for external HDD to store more fonts.
These are fun to watch - its like dumping out a bunch of lego and building something lol
I'm here for the full ram testing video. I was very disappointed that it wasn't included here. :(
Later boards used a PCI to ISA bridge as things on the board moved to LPC. This often broke older ISA cards and Ive had it stop ISA post cards working. The large Adaptec carc is a RAID card, check to see if it has a Dell, HP or Compaq P/N
I can't tell you how many days I spent trying to get games working with those changes.
@@kjrchannel1480 later boards also changed the ISA bus clock too, personally had this cause issues with NICs and an ESS Audiodrive
Thanks for this exxxtreme episode. It reminded me of a couple of PC cards that I also owned in the 90's. And that you needed to pay for HQ sound in a PC of that time.
"Hey Adrian, just wanted to let you know that the SL3CD part you found in the old computer is a Pentium III processor with a clock speed of 500 MHz and 512 KB of L2 cache. Keep up the great work on your channel, always love seeing these retro tech finds!"
Some nice stuff in that box. That big ram bag was hilarious :)
The Vibra 16 at 15:20 has an OPL chip on it @Adrian's Digital Basement ][
Adrian, those cheap Trident cards can be improved somewhat for DOS gaming performance by loading a VESA 2.0 framebuffer into high memory in your config.sys (or autoexec.bat I don't recall which, it's been over 30 years now) as the card only supported VESA 1.2 in hardware. I found it gave a good 10-20% performance boost in Doom and Wolf3D, as well as some Origin games. (NOT Wing commander, sadly). But it helps. At the time that card was popular for cheap clones, (1990-1995) 3D accelleration was all but unknown, and fast 2D cards extremely expensive. I remember yearning for a Matrox card around that time. ;-) EDIT: To add to the nostalgia for me, said Trident card was running in a PC that used the very same AMD 386DX-40 you have there! It's only a few hundred miles down the coast from Vancouver to Portland, could my old first PC have travelled that far?
Legacy tech user here just to let you know that the Dallas RTC circuit has a hidden battery inside it's IC housing. The way i see it was intended for users to buy another computer when it so called died on them, like can't boot or saved bios settings if i remember back then, unless replaced by a computer geek or another motherboard replacement quick fix. A Real Frankenstein clock creation.
"Grab bag" is nearly an anagram of "garbage".
Oooh... I love those "big LED" ethernet cards... back when I was playing with stuff like that, nobody had an outside-of-work use for Ethernet, so I had "hundreds" for pretty close to zero cost.
Nice SCSI card.... Linux drivers in 1996 NINETY SIX!!!!! Wowzers! I went Linux about 2 years later and drivers for anything were rarer than a very rare thing.
Don't knock those Trident and S3 cards too much. They were great for us Linux users, back in the bad old days of early XFree86 (lack of) compatibility and having to craft up and X86Config file and monitor timings and modelines and... (insert screaming into the void sound) Yeah the performance wasn't great, but then again we weren't really playing games on our Linux boxen (except maybe the occasional netrek match, which these handled with no issues.) But they performed reasonably well for most stuff, and most importantly were pretty easy to set up ("easy" being a relative term, we're talking about cooking up XF86Config modelines with the proper monitor timings and all that) and had great compatibility. Also back in those days alot of hardware would complain loudly and refuse to boot if a video card wasn't present, so these were great to stick into machines that normally ran headless. Same applies for those NE2000 ethernet cards. They were the go-to card for getting a Linux box on the network, because they were pretty easy to configure and they Just Worked(tm) and the Linux NE2K driver was stable and performed decently.
I want to see you test all of those memory modules! Some of those memory modules are super valuable and rare.
So much nostalgic fun! Thanks Adrian!
The Aztech and the Vibra16 cards actually have real OPL2 chips on them. You can clearly see them in the video.
Some of that double height "SDRam" might actually be EDO or FP DRAM DIMMs (3.3V or 5V). IBM and Apple used the 5V DIMMS extensively in mid 90s PPC computers and workstations. The 3.3V EDO DIMMS were sometimes used on early Pentium 1 systems.
I definitely loved this video. I saw some items that I actually used in my first PC build (Asus AT/ATX MOBO, AMD K6 2 350, 3Dfx Voodoo (3000) AGP card). Thanks for the memories.
The 25,000 issue could also just be a "standard" of 2D for these cards, with the real differences simply being 3D related. Like polygons per second, fill rate etc.
Also, that Vibra 16 does have a genuine Yamaha OPL chip on the board, so it's all cool for DOS games. I imagine you spotted that by now, but just in case.
For DOS games with software rendering: A S3 Virge PCI card on a Pentium 200 already does 25000 chars/ms on LandMark test. It supports up to 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color on windows. It is free from BGA chips. The no-return point for sophistication IMHO seems to be when video chips started to be BGA, and started to have a limited life.
@@evapowah Maybe there is a limitation in the software measurement. Besides, when the S3 Virge came out, people wanted to push graphics pixels. 25k chars/sec is plenty for any text mode
42:00 Those Lot 1 CPU are actually not build to ease the handling of the processors ... but because they could not (yet) include enough cache on to the die but had to put the bigger cache in to a separate chip...
That's why they came as a package on a circuit board .. called a "Slot 1" cpu. ;)
Later on, caches got fully integrated into cpu dies so the extra PCB was no longer necessary. ;)
Yeah, really enjoyed this kind of long video. Would like to see the ram testing. Keep it up👍
WOW, that is a huge amount of Ram. It is fun watching you go through all those card's..
I find it interesting looking at some of these old cards and realizing that in some cases the entire card has been shrunken down into one chip or even one function of a chip on a modern motherboard.
The controller on those Ethernet cards at 7-8 minutes is a knock-off of the National Semiconductor DP83901. That was the follow-on to the DP8390 which was the most bog-standard chip of the day. You should certainly be able to get a generic driver to work there.
Also: The AM29000 was a high end RISC processor when it was released, but it was quickly eclipsed along with Motorola's MC88000 and plenty of other chips. The 29000 eventually ended up in places like printer controllers, and the cache circuitry of the 88000 was combined with the IBM RS/6000 processor core to create the PowerPC line.
KLOCK with a "K" can mean "keyboard lock".
I always enjoy a treasure trove video like this. Too bad Rammy went to the bar tonight.
Interesting haul. Hope we can see much of this back in circulation for others to use.
Regarding the ram, do a timelapse recording of testing and sorting the modules, showing the boxes where the working modules get put into, the tester, and a dead-parts box for the rejects.
I wanna see you trying all those RAM modules! Don't let this idea go unused! ^^
I'm thinking a Patreon live stream may be the way to go with that one --- hehe. Definitely a live stream.
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 OH MY GOD, you have replied to me! UA-cam sucks when it has to deliver notifications! Altough I can't be a Patreon subscriber, I support the idea of that live stream. Thank you for getting in touch with me here, your videos are a must when I'm having any meals all day long ♥
I had a friend who worked for IBM back in the mid to late 90's and he says they used to have a massive printshop with massive printers that would use those truck sized spools of paper with insane pages per minute and they had several binding options available. All printing for the company was done in house including documentation booklets for products which explains why it all looked so uniform, and sort of cheap since it wasn't outsourced to a publisher. He said that any employee could submit print jobs this way, using an in-house driver installed on company computers and it would be shipped to wherever you were located in the US (maybe the world). Training manuals, HR booklets, meeting brochures etc were all done this way.
COAST - cache on a Stick. This box is like time-travel. The AMD K6-2 300 is a overclocking wonder. I had mine running at 400mhz
I gotta say, the extreme card portion of the video was extremely fun. Worked extremely well in context lol
It was really fun to see you show and talk about the Diamond Riva 128 card, because I have that exact card in a drawer, saved from an old machine I encoutered at a site doing work.
@27:03 That is an Acer AP5C motherboard, 4 pin connector in the corner is for CPU fan power. We had some of those where I used to work back in the Windows 95 era. Supports like a 133Mhz P1 processor. I think that jumper is for the keyboard lock = KLock. Yes a barrel style lock / switch that prevented keyboard input if I remember correctly,
@28:02 That looks like / similar to a DFI P5B motherboard. Will probably take one of those K6 350MHZ processors.
I like the longer videos like this. It's like watching a movie.
So much fun going through a box of parts.. Wish someone would drop a box of that at my place.. lol
That Elsa with s3 savage4 pro chip is a good card , supports meTal API, hi-res texture in some games ,Unreal for example...Almost as good as Voodoo 3 ,although slower
I'd enjoy a Ram Test'othon. I enjoy the commentary that goes along with you doing this type of testing!
*Never* connect power to that Molex connector, Acer/ALi/AOPEN (All of them are Acer brands) mainboards used it to power the CPU *fan* for APM control.
It's a male connector (pins tell the gender, not the housing) but back then most fans were wired to a short male-female extension cable to keep the molex power connector available for other devices so it was not a problem.
That seems like important information that should be on the silkscreen
A Live Stream testing those ram sticks, while answering some viewer questions might be cool 🙂
That old S3 GPU brings back memories. My first ever own PC (not the first PC I've ever used, but the first one that was mine) had a 4MB Trio3D AGP card. Not a good 3D card but worked well for DOS and some lighter Windows games.
Also, from what I remember, the mainboard in that system also had an ATX plug in addition to AT (case was AT though).
I like your cap removal method. And enjoyed watching your procedure.
Adaptec high end SCSI cards had cache, bus mastering in older ones, and a TON of other great high end features. Adaptec was the SCSI card for servers and the one to beat in the early - late 90s.
The sound card with SCSI is non-bootable. It was mainly for SCSI CD-ROMs at the time, but disks are supported. Just no BIOS feature.
"Maybe I can do it as a livestream! Nah, that would be super boring." That is indeed how livestreams work!
Adrian, your camera kept focusing on the hardware in the foreground instead of the monitor when you were testing the hardware. Whenever you do any testing I count on being able to see all the data on the screen, glitches and all. Your testing and diagnostic videos are the most interesting to me, so please do what can to get your camera to behave properly.
The AGP card probably only takes advantage of the extra speed for 3D stuff.
31:39 That’s not Analog Devices, but Advanced Micro Devices. It’s an AMD 32-bit RISC microprocessor.
The "SDRAM" module on the Adaptec card is a write cache. Probably got a battery connector on it somewhere.
That SCSI/Sound Card may not actually be bootable, the combo of SCSI and Sound makes me think it's probably one of the cards that shipped with the early commodity CD-R drives.
A DVD-decoder! When DVD came out, I bought a drive and such a decoder. On Win98. First DVD I ever watched: A Bug's Life. Being used to fuzzy VHS I, was simply blown away by the clarity and sharpness. A real holy-shit-do-you-see-that moment, I still remember today.
11:00 in that brings back childhood. It was used in packard bells for years.