Whatchu Workin' On?

IamnottheNSA said:
I was working on getting Windows 98 to run on a modern machine. No VM, on bare metal.
There it is.
View attachment 5602042
Installing and running it on anything newer than a Socket 775 machine is pretty tricky and requires a fairly specific hardware and software combination. It took me awhile to get it right, but eventually I was successful.
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How compatible is it? Weren't games and software notoriously picky about hardware back then?
 
Lone Wandering Courier said:
Honestly, that's pretty badass. At one point I considered doing this, but I decided that it wasn't really worth it and that it was cheaper to just build a retro pc for that sort of thing (even though early 2000s hardware has gone up in price but I did secure a decent deal a long time ago).
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Yeah, part of the reason I did this was so that I won't have to build a second computer for something like this. I'd say the trickiest past of the build was finding a modern motherboard with CSM and an option to choose primary GPU output. It seems that at least Gigabyte motherboards still have these options, even on their most modern mobos.
The second-trickiest part was having to patch VMM32.VXD (or else it won't boot if your system has more than 1GB of RAM) right in the middle of the install - once it finished the first phase of the installation (when it prompts you to reboot the machine), before continuing with the installation I booted back to my main OS, launched Win98 in VirtualBox, applied the RAM patch there, extracted the patched files from it and copied them to SYSTEM folder on the HDD where I was installing Win98, then proceeded with the installation.
Judge Dredd said:
How compatible is it? Weren't games and software notoriously picky about hardware back then?
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Pretty good actually. The video card that I chose (GeForce 7800 GTX PCIe) supports all the DOS graphics modes and is a massive overkill for every game that came out for Win98.
Also, since nothing on the motherboard worked out of the box due to lack of drivers (except for PS/2 combo port), I had to double down on the controller cards, effectively re-creating all the functionality of the motherboard chipset - a PCIe USB 2.0 card (these are comparatively rare, but they do exist, I found that cards with a VIA VT6212L chipset work best), a networking card (RTL8111C chipset), a Serial and Parallel Port controller (which I mainly use for my OPL2LPT) and a USB sound card with a Line-In and a USB Audio 1.0 support (this one works even in DOS games launched from Win98! No OPL2 sound though, which is why I use OPL2LPT and then stereo mix the sound outputs together).
This was enough for just about everything I threw at it - from Wolfentstein 3D to Morrowind, everything worked perfectly.
 
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IamnottheNSA said:
Pretty good actually. The video card that I chose (GeForce 7800 GTX PCIe) supports all the DOS graphics modes and is a massive overkill for every game that came out for Win98.
Also, since nothing on the motherboard worked out of the box due to lack of drivers (except for PS/2 combo port), I had to double down on the controller cards, effectively re-creating all the functionality of the motherboard chipset - a PCIe USB 2.0 card (these are comparatively rare, but they do exist, I found that cards with a VIA VT6212L chipset work best), a networking card (RTL8111C chipset), a Serial and Parallel Port controller (which I mainly use for my OPL2LPT) and a USB sound card with a Line-In and a USB Audio 1.0 support (this one works even in DOS games launched from Win98! No OPL2 sound though, which is why I use OPL2LPT and then stereo mix the sound outputs together).
This was enough for just about everything I threw at it - from Wolfentstein 3D to Morrowind, everything worked perfectly.
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You didn't have to buy an IDE controller? I recall seeing a modern 98 build where the user did end up buying an ide controller. I don't recall if it was another intel core 9th gen or a ryzen build though. Also, I believe there are riser boards that can fit inside a normal atx case that would allow you to use a pci sound card and some pci sound cards do work well for dos games. Some of the ones with a yamaha chip even support EAX and aureal 3d audio.
 
Lone Wandering Courier said:
You didn't have to buy an IDE controller?
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I considered doing that at first, but then I found a Generic SATA AHCI driver for Win9x, and it worked with my onboard SATA controller just fine.
Also, strictly speaking, you don't need any HDD controller drivers for Win9x to start and work. But in that case it would be using Safe Mode drivers, and they are pretty slow, so I would recommend installing the AHCI driver as soon as possible.
Lone Wandering Courier said:
Also, I believe there are riser boards that can fit inside a normal atx case that would allow you to use a pci sound card and some pci sound cards do work well for dos games. Some of the ones with a yamaha chip even support EAX and aureal 3d audio.
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As for why I chose USB sound card specifically - there are 3 reasons:
1. This was the only way to get digital sounds in DOS games. Literally nothing else worked. Either Intel got rid of some of the crucial instructions that made the old DOS drivers work somewhere down the line, or maybe something else happened, but digital sound in DOS simply was not happening until I used a USB sound card.
2. I wanted for it to work across all the different OSes I already had installed (Windows 7 and Xubuntu 22.04), so that I don't have to plug and unplug cables constantly. This is something only USB sound cards can do (and C-Media CMI8738-based cards, but these aren't all that great in the first place).
3. The USB sound card had the least amount of trouble working with Mypal on Win98 - whenever I tried to play a youtube video, other cards were either not playing any sound at all, were producing horrible noise or even bluescreening.
All in all, USB sound, while nothing amazing, was the safest, least troublesome option.
 
Software testing and development sounds so boring (and I mainly just want to get paid but I don't have the patience) but I do really want to develop a videogame. My digital art skills are non-existent though.

It's also kind of scary for a developer that you can just paste shit on ChatGPT and it will fix any issues and even commentate the code better than like 90% of developers do.
 
Working on a uhf rfid tag impersonator. The command decoder is finished and works very well, but the response encoder is still in development. It's based on an 8bit pic and a rfic and draws only 20mA.
 
For my PC project, I just picked up a 4tb WD gold HDD, which with the gift card I got for Christmas, was less than $70.
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Figured it was a really good deal for a server grade HDD. And I really don't plan on filling 4tb any time soon. It's pretty fast so it'll work for gaming that's a generation behind just fine.
 
seri0us said:
They will be inevitably, but my kike in Moloch the CPU and GPU you're planning on building with are literally latest generation.
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Well the CPU is Intel 12th gen... which considering how 13th and 14th are going, might as well be brand new lol. But yes the card is gonna be a 40 series. Just the ram is DDR4. Currently I have a micron 32gb kit sitting at home at 3200mhz frequency. Not bad, but it's a choke point. Not to mention the board is mid at best, gotta be careful with voltage
 
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  1. Getting a virtual hard drive image for 98SE to run some 90's-era software that simply doesn't work past XP.
  2. Dual-boot my main game machine because Steam has my back against the wall.
  3. Setting up my Pi to do something productive, which means getting a custom case for it and 4 HAT attachments.
  4. Studying my ass off for the professional degree I need but really do not want to get. I'm so done, so absolutely motherfucking done with studying and tests I could scream.
 
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I recently started working on web services using Go for fun, and wow it's so damn easy. After having to work with Rust for the past few months, I forgot how enjoyable programming can be lol. Go has built-in FastCGI support, so I'm also going to start doing some stuff with it for my personal Nginx servers.

I hadn't used Go in a long time, but I'm quickly getting the hang of it again. Writing it makes the C programmer in me happy.
 
I made a standalone CLI client for SneedChat using raw WebSockets. I still need to work on links, text formatting, edits, etc. but it works fine otherwise. The source is 100% public domain, so please feel free to do whatever you like with it.

Please excuse the double post. I can't think of a better place to post this and I'm wary of advertising in other threads.
 
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Well, got my i12700k, as well as the fans and cooler now. It has a iGPU in the core. Physically it'll be ready for bootup VERY soon. Just have to snag a screen. As for the GPU, I think I'll save for a 4070 super. Might get a 4060, but since it's able to boot, I'll be able to wait for better if I choose it so
 
putting finishing touches on the file bunker. I think I went a bit overboard. What do you fill 42TB with? I copied all media and game installers I had on my other systems to it and barely managed to make one drive tick from 0% to 1%.

My first hard drive had ~200MB capacity and, adjusting for inflation and all, cost about 200 bucks more than one of the 18 tb drives. The funny thing is when I got it it also was massive compared to others and it felt quite similar, capacity-wise. "What will I ever fill this with" was a thought I had then, too. What could you even *do* with a 200 mb HDD now? There are pdfs and executables that would not fit

That old drive was loud, clonking and clicking all of the time, and sounding like a chainsaw when the platter was spinning. That was always a background noise where computers where. The average life expectancy of spinning rust was about 3-5 years until something mechanical failed. People only look at the capacity but we also came a long way in actuators, small motors and bearings since then. Without that progress these drives would not be possible.

That 18 TB drive with it's 1% of data has two actuators and besides a faint clicking that sounds like somebody typing in the other room or maybe rain outside is completely silent. Its sort of a pleasant sound actually that's also easy to ignore. In the old system it's in it maxes out at around 280 mb/s. It could read my old drive's worth of data and then some in one second and this isn't even anything special.

Time to download everything there is I guess.
 
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AmpleApricots said:
putting finishing touches on the file bunker. I think I went a bit overboard. What do you fill 42TB with? I copied all media and game installers I had on my other systems to it and barely managed to make one drive tick from 0% to 1%.

My first hard drive had ~200MB capacity and, adjusting for inflation and all, cost about 200 bucks more than one of the 18 tb drives. The funny thing is when I got it it also was massive compared to others and it felt quite similar, capacity-wise. "What will I ever fill this with" was a thought I had then, too. What could you even *do* with a 200 mb HDD now? There are pdfs and executables that would not fit

That old drive was loud, clonking and clicking all of the time, and sounding like a chainsaw when the platter was spinning. That was always a background noise where computers where. The average life expectancy of spinning rust was about 3-5 years until something mechanical failed. People only look at the capacity but we also came a long way in actuators, small motors and bearings since then. Without that progress these drives would not be possible.

That 18 TB drive with it's 1% of data has two actuators and besides a faint clicking that sounds like somebody typing in the other room or maybe rain outside is completely silent. Its sort of a pleasant sound actually that's also easy to ignore. In the old system it's in it maxes out at around 280 mb/s. It could read my old drive's worth of data and then some in one second and this isn't even anything special.

Time to download everything there is I guess.
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How much of the file bunker is redundancy
 
Working on setting up Ultimate Voice Remover while looking around if anyone's developed an actual UI for so-vits 5.0 that isn't docker faggotry where I get to deal with arcane image unpacking/packing bullshit to get ROCm going for what amounts to a webpage to run pycode (don't shill nvidia to me either, I'm not made of cash and I like having my mesa drivers). Seriously never going to understand what the MAL community's thing with docker is about, it's far more of a pain in the ass than just lobbing everything in a folder and downloading a few .whl's if they're not the right version.
 
seri0us said:
How much of the file bunker is redundancy
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36TB are redundant, the rest is "scratch space" and temporary mirror of other systems. I could've gone smaller there but it was literally not worth it.

It's not a RAID system, the 36TB are mirrored to drives that are strictly backup and offline outside of backup times.
 
Well I have everything but the graphics card and wifi chip for my rig. At this point it has:
  1. As Rock micro ATX board
  2. 1000 watt psu
  3. A I12700k
  4. Atx case
  5. 1tb m.2
  6. 500 gig boot ssd
I just got to put it together now
 
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