Also, here's a glimpse at my rotoscoping process... #LUNARK #pixelart

Chunky, but 60 fps 3d possible with colors and transparency on bare metal Megadrive #SGDK #BlastEm

Fascinating. youtu.be/4oZlt9Dl43I?...

I was switching between Famicom & PCE/TG16 games and was annoyed at how PCE screens were shifted to the left compared to Fami. So I did some measurements: the Fami's active pixels start ~7.6us after the end of HSync while the PCE's can be 7.0us (early) or 8.47us (late), but never the same as Fami :/

VLB VGA card #4 arrived. Trident 9440. With jumper set to <= 33 MHz, DOOM and Quake froze at launch, sadly. I jumpered to > 33, and everything was stable. My motherboard has some really tight settings from using the Cirrus Logic, so I may relax those and jumper back to <= 33 at next opportunity.

Ridley, Kraid, and Mother Brain Life Support slow down! But why? Let's do a performance dive to answer this question and also find out why scrolling seems to lag when Samus is flipping through the air... but in reality does not! Part 2 of Metroid Lag - youtu.be/1oCE-hYT3LY

Turns out Sound Blaster Re:imagine is sadly what we kinda knew it would be.

Happy birthday to the MOS 6502! It was 50 years ago today that people were able to buy their first samples of the chip from a jar in a hotel room at WESCON. Here's my oldest 6502 from the 52nd week of 1975. Still works perfectly!

Found this while cleaning out the basement at a family member’s house. Any of my computer buddies here on bsky use one before?

So it turns out I may need to replace this RAM and possibly another chip on the opposite side of the PCB. And boy, does the “I don’t have the equipment for this” feeling hit hard.

Well, it is time for that once every five years cleaning, I suppose.

Do flux pens “expire,” really? ..y… yes.

Guess who ordered an entire set of surface mount caps only to realize he used the wrong measurements... Well... I guess I will try that again. Might as well include some new flux, desoldering braid, and other items in the order this time.

I think I may have reached the point in life when I need a microscope for fine soldering work. If you have any recommendations, lemme know.

Wait, what?

Oh yeah. No microscope used. Take that. Image artifacting after maybe 8 tests, though. Fan sounds like it is destroying itself, and there are capacitors hanging off the card, but you know… (I guess I need a 1500uf with… something voltage rating. Or a full recap. Need a decoder for that writing)

One day you just mind your business. Next day… you acquire an engraving tool and grind down RAM on an AGP video card.

Gosh. First fully 3D FPS. Never thought about it, but yeah... I guess it was.

Ever noticed that Metroid is rather laggy? Even just moving around the map can cause the frame rate to drop. Why? Let's find out! New Behind the Code dives into the Main Game Loop, builds a performance analysis tool, and gets down to business. youtu.be/3G6vkRz-_0I

Let's try this... what is this? Let's try this GeForce FX5200 out. Oh no! The fan isn't spinning! Wait... this is a GeForce FX5200.

Thrilling performance! 3.5/5 capacitors! Would benchmark again!

Ever noticed that Metroid is rather laggy? Even just moving around the map can cause the frame rate to drop. Why? Let's find out! New Behind the Code dives into the Main Game Loop, builds a performance analysis tool, and gets down to business. youtu.be/3G6vkRz-_0I

Time for a cooling system refresh.

come see me at Open Sauce this weekend in San Mateo! i will have the MOnSter 6502 on display! this is the world's largest 6502 microprocessor, built out of discrete transistors. it will be set up at CuriousMarc's booth.

I feel like I have transitioned from "should I own a PicoGUS?" to "I don't own a PicoGUS yet? Am I even... a PERSON?"

I’m tellin’ ya - I should start making repair videos again. <ahem> So the +5V rail is smooth at power up now on the EISA board. No POST codes on the analyzer card. It draws 28w and does nothing. 486DX runs warm. All other chips seem cool. Dunno.

“Ahh. Did you get some acoustical foam for noise canceling in your car?” Me: “You mean for my 486 build so as to reduce higher-pitched echos from hard drive whine and a power supply contained inside your typical early-mid 90s metal box? Then yes. Yes, I did.”

Anyone else benchmarking VLB + S3 driver performance under Windows 3.11 using the Sierra installer today? Anyone…?

Update! With alt CDROM AND PSU in place... issues continued. So I moved the (og) CDROM drive off the EIDE VLB controller and connected it to the sound card. Enabled sound card's IDE port (1e8, IRQ 12), swapped in original PSU, put the CDROM DRV above the EIDE DRV in CONFIG.SYS... works so far.

486Dx2-66 is having odd freezes at power-up POST with all components installed. Sometimes boot. Sometimes no. Unplug just the power from CD-ROM drive? Boots every time. Hmm. HMM…

This brings nostalgia and tears of frustration. The MPC era of Windows 3.1…

That EISA board? Finally took some time to look at it. Found something.

So ... install a FAT32 compatible (Win9x) DOS and then put Windows 3.11 on top of that OR go legitimate DOS 6.22 and do multiple 2GB partitions?

Fired up the Pentium MMX 200 with 24 MB of RAM and a Voodoo 2 just to give it a challenge. Oof.

Hey - Spinning Rust! Welcome to the dance!

VLB IDE with cache options? Hmm. HMM…. Maybe I should benchmark this thing.

Sometimes you gotta just run something on a machine before you continue with hardware/software configuration. How about some… Jazz?

Which of these two sound cards should go in the 486DX2-66?

Cleaned read/write head area. Drive works now. Also… Yeah… Needed it.

This floppy disk drive: 1: Throws general errors 2: Throws sector errors 3: Turned to the Dark Side

"Are WE modding BIOSes!?" Yes. Yes, we are.

486DX2-66 is back up and running after mobo battery replacement. Seems to take all the performance settings for RAM and wait states that I throw at it. Bought the Diamond Stealth 24 VLB new back in the day! (But ran it on an SX-33 that I ALSO still have…)

As mentioned - EISA board comes out of reset, but nothing happens. OSC and CLK look good. (Excuse my sloppy ground clip). BIOS DUMPED! First time using the TL866. Neat.

Now this 486 board is interesting. Pine Pt-430. It has a daughterboard that supplies 3.3v… (but this one is uhh… supplying less than that) Reset held low. May convert it back to a 5V processor and ditch that daughterboard for diag purposes.

Back to the EISA board AND… rats. Nothing to go on. Reseated BIOS, keyboard controller (both got deoxit-ed). Reseated Dallas SRAM. Haven’t messed with Dallas RTC (likely dead battery).

Cut the battery out years ago. Finally upgraded past “I’ll just redo all my bios settings whenever I power up the machine.”

The functional 486DX2-66 gets a battery upgrade today.

This 16-bit ISA VGA card is called Trident because it takes THREE TIMES AS LONG to do things. Just kidding (Oak Technology has entered the chat). Benchmarking DOOM on a 486SX-33 with this guy and seeing what I can squeeze from it.

PC analyzer card on the way. Could pull a PC speaker out of another machine, but ehhh... Have several mobos w/ Dallas chips, so I might @necroware.bsky.social the heck out of them all while I am at it. Multiple retro PC projects going on right now. Maybe I'll post a photo a day for a little while.

EISA board! Doesn’t really turn on… but there it is!