Mail Archives: djgpp/2013/10/10/18:00:10
> I was running on an MSI K9N-Neo F MS-7260 since (2007).
> It died. I think maybe chipset failed or the chipset's BGA
> unsoldered. I had two video cards have their BGA's unsolder,
> so I began to suspect a heat build-up issue in the case.
> The case doesn't have a case fan like newer cases...
Yes, BGA + ROHS soldering = sudden death of many HW, mostly happens on graphics cards and notebooks where failure is accelerated by excessive heating. Say thank you for all 'green' politics that enforced it in EU...
Reballing is possible but cost is high compared to price of the old HW, better to get another one...
> For the MSI to work with Win98/KernelEx/NUSB/SP3, I had to
> disable the onboard sound and ethernet and use 98/SE compatible
> cards. Originally, I used Tihiy's patched Nvidia drivers, but
> they didn't work with a newer card.
Sorry I'm not familiar with AMD CPUs and chipsets, I live many years with intel and I found that G31/P31/G41 + ICH7 is the latest trouble-less combination for Win98 where also SATA IDE mode emulation works with updated INF files so I can reach about 60MB/s and even more with SSD, really fast. And USB 2.0 works too. Win98 has probably problem with IRQ sharing so if you disable some HW it may helps to make another works...
You have EVGA Nvidia 7960GT 512MB, I belive that 79xx should be supported with unofficial driver but maybe 512MB on PCIE card is the issue so I rather preferred 256MB version (of 7900GT) which is not so spreaded.
> So, I used VBEMP, thereafter.
> Except for scrolling, VBEMP was pretty good. Unfortunately, it
> was "closed" source even though supposedly derived from "open"
> source ReactOS.
Yes, VBEMP as a last resort works well. I use it under WinNT 4.0 that has native support only for 6xxx and older. But then forget accelerated games and video, it's just for simple 2D work. If you have some special requirements mail Bearwindows, I was with him in touch by mail when testing NT driver and UniATA, he's kind person. I think he used some Windows DDK example as base of his driver...
> After a *bit* of work re-configuring VLocity, I'm quite happy
> with it for daily needs. It's the first distro since the mid
> 1990's that has ever supported *all* my hardware. I'm still
> not fond of the *nix commands and command-line and haven't
> quite figured out the directory structure yet...
Yeah, standard DOSer's issues under Linux :)
After some trials I settled with Debian Linux that seems not to be "Windowised" yet, it's reasonably configurable and lightweight, with wide package repository but it is too conservative about new HW support and too GNU purific to include some necessary firmwares etc. So I use newer personal-configured and compiled Kernel. I also use XFCE for Xorg (boot in console mode, run startx when necessary), before I used KDE but it became slow and bloated bastard worse than windows... I also managed to run DOSEMU, even with GMIDI on SB Audigy. But it's not 100% DOS, so need Dosbox for others and when I'm doing something with real HW I need real DOS of course. And Win98 was good as DOS multitasker that is not very restrictive as NTVDM but still allows me to read docs, search on internet, listen mp3s, etc. beside programming...
- Raw text -