Author Archives: Michal Necasek

Tahiti + Rio = Monterey

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Michal Necasek

The talk is, of course, about Turtle Beach sound cards. I finally got hold of a 1994 Turtle Beach Rio daughterboard which came mounted on an ISA sound card. On closer inspection the card turned out to be a Turtle … Continue reading →

Posted in MIDI, Sound, Wave Blaster | 22 Comments

Mystery NetBurst

Posted on November 28, 2016 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago, a mysterious CPU showed up at the OS/2 Museum: It is a Socket 775 CPU with a Pentium 4 label and the following markings: 3.73 GHZ/1M/1066/A4. In other words, 3.73 GHz clock speed, 1 MB L2 cache, … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, Pentium 4 | 34 Comments

Alt Insanity

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Michal Necasek

Several times, a question came up how to synthesize keyboard input to a remote system given a text string. The remote system is typically but not necessarily a VM. That sounds like something which should be trivial, yet it is anything but. … Continue reading →

Posted in Virtualization, Windows | 14 Comments

Capacitors, Ugh

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Michal Necasek

So I’m looking at an ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe board that stopped working some time ago and I had no time to figure out why. The board is from early 2008, not exactly vintage hardware, or at least not just yet. It … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware | 10 Comments

Fun with AGP

Posted on October 28, 2016 by Michal Necasek

Several months ago, I retook possession of a PC which I had built back in 2003 (I think—it’s been a while). It is based on an Intel D865PERL (Rock Lake) board and a Northwood 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with hyper-threading (HT). … Continue reading →

Posted in AGP, Pentium 4 | 27 Comments

More on DXP44Q

Posted on October 26, 2016 by Michal Necasek

While pondering the DXP44Q mystery again, I realized that one of my sound cards most likely could be equipped with a DXP44Q. Here’s the card: It’s a pretty standard Sound Blaster clone. Note that the OPTi 924 chips is only … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, Sound | 4 Comments

Intel OverDrive Part III: Pentium II OverDrive

Posted on October 16, 2016 by Michal Necasek

Pentium II OverDrive The Pentium II OverDrive, released in August 1998, was the swan song of the OverDrive product line. It is suitable for Socket 8 systems as an upgrade of 150-200 MHz Pentium Pro processors. Only one model was sold with … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, Pentium II, Pentium Pro | 22 Comments

Bad NTAS ISO

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Michal Necasek

This might save someone a bit of head scratching… Several times, I tried to install Windows NT Advanced Server (NT 3.1 server) straight from CD-ROM (well, ISO) into a clean VM. The installation failed every time, asking for a nonexistent … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, NT | 33 Comments

More on CF Cards

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Michal Necasek

This is a follow-up to an earlier post. Some interesting information turned up in reader comments and elsewhere. To recap, certain operating systems (notably Windows) behave unreasonably when using and especially when installed on CF drives that report themselves as … Continue reading →

Posted in CompactFlash, Storage | 8 Comments

Removable CF Card, or Not

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Michal Necasek

This is from the “learn something new every day” category. I’ve been using CompactFlash cards together with IDE adapters for several years now. It’s a terrific way to manage storage for vintage PCs. CF cards are cheap, fast, (relatively) capacious, … Continue reading →

Posted in CompactFlash, Storage, ThinkPad | 19 Comments