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Writeup: AOpen i945GMm-HL shenanigans

AOpen i945GMm-HL - The Retro Web

Welp. This board is weirder than I ever thought it'd be. Not the board in general, but the specific one I bought.

To begin, it turns out that my particular board, and likely many others of the same model, are OEM-customized boards that AOpen provided to a little company called RM Education. They make all-in-one PCs for the UK market.

...And they are using evaluation BIOSes (in other words, BIOS software that's normally only meant for prototyping and... well, evaluation) in their retail boards.

My specific board contains BIOS version R1.08, which is actually R1.02 apparently. There is evidence of an R1.07 existing as well from a reddit thread on the r/buildapc subreddit, but I doubt that it's been dumped anywhere.

Moving on to the original point of this writeup, I got this board because I wanted to build a system that pushed the 32-bit Core Duo T2700 as far as possible, meaning I needed a mobile-on-desktop board. AOpen built a reputation for doing this sorta stuff in the 2000s, so I went ahead and picked one of their boards for use (although I would've much preferred using the top of the line AOpen i975Xa-YDG instead if it were being sold anywhere. That's a VERY tasty looking board with its full size DIMM slots and SLI-compatible dual PCIe x16 slots and ability to crank the FSB all the way to 305MHz).

Slightly surprisingly, the Core Duo T2700 is quite the overclocker! It's able to push from 2.3GHz all the way up to 2.7GHz with some FSB overclocking using the SetFSB tool. It's multiplier-locked to a range from 6.0 to 14.0, so I can only push it through this means.

The board I'm using, the AOpen i945GMm-HL, supports running the FSB up to 195MHz. It's okay-ish in terms of stability, but crashes when running Aida64 benchmarks unless I loosen the memory timings from the 5-5-5-15 settings that it uses at 333MHz to 5-6-6-18, which is just the tiniest bit faster than its stock settings for 400MHz operation by SPD. With these settings, it's much more stable and is able to run the benchmarks, though unless I lower the FSB from 195MHz to 190, it will consistently crash Chrome when trying to play Youtube videos on integrated graphics. I'll likely experiment some to see if adding a card capable of handling the video playback in hardware helps.

For now, this is all for this blog post. I'll follow-up with more details as they come in reblogs. As follows are the specs of the system:

AOpen i945GMm-HL (OC'ed from 166MHz FSB to 195MHz, 190MHz for more stability)

Intel Core Duo T2700 @ 2.7GHz (OC'ed from 2.3GHz)

2x 2GB Crucial DDR2 SO-DIMMs @ 5-6-6-18 timings

Some random 40GB Hitachi hdd lol

Windows XP Pro SP3, fully updated via LegacyUpdate

Supermium Browser (fork of Google Chrome and the reason why I was able to test Youtube playback in the first place)

Coming up: Installing One-Core-API and Java 21 to play Minecraft 1.21 on a 32-bit system out of spite for Microsoft "dropping support" for 32-bit CPUs.

[digitalworldnext]

Digital World Next: Unveiling Digital Trends and Blogging Brilliance

Discover Digital Brilliance with Digital World Next 🌐

[goddesskylyn]

Hello, New to Tumblr Ask Me ANYTHING.

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Learn Ruby: Day 5

(16/02/2023)

Today I did the exercises and corrections from class 7 And I wanted to share this one here, because I had to use the hashes in the conditional and add them (without being able to create another variable) and I made a lot of mistakes until I went to correct it and I was like "is that all?" HEHEUEUE, who never?

At least that's something I recorded.

I wanted to share that after finishing this course, I'm going to start the odin project and you'll probably see more things around here about ruby ​​​​on rails , testing , making an api / crud and how to create gems. (a lot of things I know, but it will work ) .

And you, how are your studies?

I wish you reading this have a good day/night, drink water and breathe, live one day at a time!

[edwinkjayesh]

Music Player in 2023... Why Sony?

The convenience of Bluetooth streaming is great but it is constrained by how much data it can pump through its signal. Though portable music players are preferably used with wired headphones for maximal performance, wired cans have seemingly enjoyed a recent renaissance too.

Smartphones are great for convenience but they’re not necessarily great for sound. As they’re multi-taskers, able to perform a range of functions, that also means they are a product that’s a jack of all trades but master of a few. Support for higher quality music has become better in the portable space with what Qualcomm is doing with its Snapdragon Sound platform and Sony’s innovations with LDAC, but in terms of outright quality for music, you won’t find better than a portable player.

Sony’s announcement of a new and not too expensive Walkman is a sign that portable music players still have a function and a purpose, as well as reminding some they still exist. Most would assume that portable music players have (or are) going the way of the Dodo, slowly passing their way out of relevance. However, we’re still seeing specialists such as Astell & Kern launch new players every year, and just recently FiiO announced the M11S. While Apple killed off the iPod, the rest of the portable player market isn’t interested in joining the scrap heap just yet.

The NW-A306 has a battery life of up to 36 hours of continuous playback, a 3.6-inch display, and because it runs on Android, you can install your favorite streaming apps if you must, although that defeats the point of having all your music with you. You'll still need a computer to load your music onto the device, just like with the iPhone's Music app, but that somehow seems less annoying with a walkman than with a phone. It also has audiophile-level playback at up to 96KHz (more than double the sample rate of a CD), although that's probably not a difference you can hear.

But it's not all upside. For a start, you'll have to carry two devices if you still want to carry your phone. And it's possible that you kind of let your music library slip when streaming came along. I bought a used iPod a while back, and when I loaded up all my songs, there was no music from the last half-decade or so because I'd been streaming it all.

The convenience of Bluetooth streaming is great but it is constrained by how much data it can pump through its signal. Though portable music players are preferably used with wired headphones for maximal performance, wired cans have seemingly enjoyed a recent renaissance too.

In a wider sense, of this seems to have converged around a greater want for higher quality music on the go. We have for decades limited ourselves in this area as MP3 streaming and downloads were a step in the wrong direction, one that’s taken a long time to reverse. In people’s minds, the quality of what they’re listening doesn’t matter as much as having access to it. We have access to more music than we can fathom at the moment, the area that we need to beef up is the quality we listen at.

From DACs to headphone amplifiers and higher quality streaming services such as Tidal and Qobuz (we still wait for Spotify Hi-Fi to make its entrance), the issue of ‘quality’ is one of the frontiers that the music and audio industry is pushing towards. All these devices have the potential to make music sound better, so while my smartphone will still be my device of choice given how much it (rightly or wrongly) rules my day-to-day activities, when it comes to listening to music in its highest quality, I’ll be tuning in with my portable player to get the best experience possible.

On My View Point...

You may think that, there’s only a need of an audio enhancing software or a high end headphones. But on all every aspects, from nostalgic design, high end specs possible and even quality - Sony have managed to make it all happen in a capsule. And that’s it. For music lovers, this will be dream gadget for sure and so happy to see this upgrade on this formfactor which was really unexpected. And looking forward to have a glance of one of these in real. And that’s been it - Edwin K Jayesh

[themajortechie]

A call to help on repairing a one-of-a-kind prototype!

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[not-radioshack]

The S3 ViRGE Minecraft Thing

(Article originally posted on TheRetroWeb)

Have you ever wanted to play Minecraft? Have you ever wondered “how terrible can I make this experience”? No? Well too bad. You’ve clicked on this article and I’ve gone this far already, so let’s just keep going and see what happens.

A Little bit of history…

The S3 ViRGE, short for Video and Rendering Graphics Engine (alternately, Virtual Reality Graphics Engine), was first introduced in November of 1995, with an actual release date of early 1996. It was S3 Graphics’ very first 3D-capable graphics card, and it had the unfortunate luck of launching alongside… the 3Dfx Voodoo 1.

It became rather quickly apparent that the ViRGE was terribly insufficient in comparison to the Voodoo, and in fact even picked up the infamous moniker of “graphics decelerator”, which poked fun at its lackluster 3D performance.

The original ViRGE would be followed by the card that this article focuses on, the ViRGE/DX, just a little under a year later in the waning months of 1996.

The ViRGE/DX was a welcome improvement over the original release, lifting performance to more acceptable levels and improving software compatibility with better drivers. Mostly. And while native Direct3D performance was iffy at best and OpenGL support was nonexistent, S3 did have one last trick up their sleeves to keep the ViRGE line relevant: the S3D Toolkit.

Similar to 3Dfx’s Glide API, the S3D Toolkit was S3 Graphics’ proprietary low-level graphics API for the ViRGE. Unlike 3Dfx’s offering, however, S3D, much like the cards it was intended for, fell flat on its face. Only a small handful of games ever natively supported S3D acceleration, and by my own admission, I haven’t ever played any of them.

But wait, this article is about playing Minecraft on the ViRGE, isn’t it? The block game of all time is famously written in Java, and uses an OpenGL rendering pipeline. So, how can the S3 ViRGE, a card with no OpenGL support, possibly play Minecraft?

Wrappers!

This is where a little thing called “OpenGL wrappers” come in. Shipping in the form of plain OpenGL32.dll files (at least, on Windows) that you drop into a folder alongside whatever needs OpenGL acceleration, these wrappers provide a way to modify, or “wrap”, OpenGL API calls.

In our case, we are interested in the category of OpenGL wrappers that translate OpenGL API calls to that of other APIs. For a more modern equivalent of these wrappers, the Intel Arc line of graphics cards uses DXVK in order to translate older DirectX 9 calls to Vulkan, which is a natively-supported API.

For this experiment, we will be using a wrapper called “S3Mesa”, made by Brian Paul of the Mesa project. Though open-source, this wrapper never made it to a completed state, and is missing certain features such as texture transparency despite the ViRGE itself being supposedly capable of it. However, this does not affect gameplay much beyond aesthetics.

The S3Mesa wrapper, on a more technical note, translates OpenGL 1.1 calls to a mix of both S3D and DirectX API calls.

The System

At last, we arrive at the system hardware. As of writing, I am currently benchmarking a plethora of low-end (or otherwise infamous) cards for my “Ultra Nugget Graphics Card Roundup”, and so the system itself is likely a liiiiiittle bit overpowered for the lowly ViRGE/DX:

AMD Athlon XP (Palomino) @ 1.14GHz

Shuttle MK32 Socket A motherboard

256MB DDR-400

S3 ViRGE/DX (upgraded to 4MB of video memory)

Windows 98SE

Why Windows 98SE? Because S3 never released 3D-accelerated graphics drivers for non-Windows 9x operating systems in the consumer space.

For Minecraft itself, KernelEX 4.5.2 and Java 6 are installed as well, and an old version of the launcher dating back to early 2013 that I personally refer to as the “Minecraft 1.5 Launcher” is used for compatibility purposes. Also because no launcher that can work on Windows 98 is capable of logging into the authentication servers anymore.

Setting up the game

With Windows 98SE, KernelEX, and Java 6 installed (in that order, of course), we can turn our attention to the game itself. As mentioned before, no launcher to my knowledge that runs on Windows 98 is capable of logging into the auth servers. This results in two additional problems: starting the game itself and downloading game assets.

Using the 1.5 launcher solves this first issue by means of relying on a little thing called the lastlogin file. This is an old way that the launcher was able to allow players to keep playing offline when disconnected from the internet, but more importantly, unlike the modern launcher, it doesn’t expire. 🙂

And because of that, our login problem is solved by middle school me’s old .minecraft folder backup, from which I’ve extracted the lastlogin file for use in this experiment.

As for game assets, there is no longer any way to easily download the game files for use on Windows 98SE directly, and so I’ve instead pieced together a folder using that same backup. The most important thing is that instead there being a “versions” folder, there is now instead a “bin” folder, where both the natives and the game’s jarfile both reside.

Now that our .minecraft folder is acquired, take that thing and plot it right down into the Windows folder in Windows 98. Why? Because on Windows 98, the 1.5 launcher ignores the “application data” folder entirely. The launcher itself can go anywhere you’d like, so long as you’re using the .exe version and not the .jar version.

Finally, to wrap things up, place the OpenGL to S3D wrapper in the same location as the launcher exe. Make sure it’s called OpenGL32.dll!

The Game

You just lost it. 🙂

The S3 ViRGE, by my own testing, is capable of running any version of Minecraft from Classic up to and including Indev version in-20100110. However, it is EXTREMELY unstable, and has a tendency to crash mere seconds after loading into a world. This is on top of some minor rendering errors introduced by the aformentioned incomplete state of the S3Mesa wrapper. This video was recorded with Windows ME rather than Windows 98, but this does not impact anything regarding performance or compatibility (and in fact, at least from my own experience, the game is more stable under ME than 98).

Below are the desktop/game settings used in testing:

“Tiny” render distance

Desktop resolution: 640 x 480 (don’t fullscreen the game)

Bit depth: 16/24-bit color (32-bit can cause the ViRGE to run out of memory, and 16-bit can cause strange issues on Windows 98)

And last but not least, some gameplay. This came from some scrapped footage originally intended for my “UNGCR” video, and was only intended for personal reference in collecting performance numbers. As such, the audio is muted due to some copyrighted music blasting in the background.

Further reading/resources

Vogons Wrapper Project

Original video that this article is based on

VGA Legacy MKIII’s ViRGE/DX page

thanks for reading my walking natural disaster of an article kthxbaiiiiiiii

[loatronics]

Day 1

Hello, my name is Isabelle "Loariya-Fiaba" and I go by both Izzy and Loa (more leaning towards Loa), and I will be learning electrical engineering and robotics on my own.

I come from a Junior Web Developer background, which I have been working towards for the last 2 years. However, I had always had an underlining interest in learning about electronics and robots.

I had recently thought about how to start and how to achieve the utmost important task I want to complete: building my own robot. For the past few days, I have been researching by reading articles, watching videos, and more on this topic. By doing this, I have come to love the topic more and more, and made me excited to sit and learn finally.

The conclusion of today is I am in the process of working on creating a plan of what I need to learn, my goals and important things like what certifications would I need to complete to show my knowledge in the subject.

Thank you for reading,

Loa

[attention4tech]

Benefits of bot to businesses

Yes, AI bots can potentially increase business efficiency and profitability in various ways. AI bots are computer programs that use machine learning algorithms to perform tasks that would typically require human intervention. Here are some ways AI bots can increase business

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i jus wanna play rock paper scissors

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Internet & Tech Index:

continuously updated

* focuses on internet privacy & safety

** focuses on the slow web movement

Films -

Documentary -

The Social Dilemma**

The Great Hack*

Silicon Cowboys

Banking On Bitcoin

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

Terms and Conditions May Apply*

Dark Net (series)*

We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks*

Spycraft (series)*

Explained (series): S1E11 & S1E16 & S2E6

Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates

The Future Of (series)

Connected: The Hidden Science of Everything(series)

Take Your Pills XANAX*

Drama -

The Billion Dollar Code

Black Mirror

Black Mirror: BanderSnatch

The Imitation Game

Websites:

thesocialdilemma.com

__

started: 03 . 04 . 2023

[honey8oats]

I finally decided to take the leap and go back to school again. I’ve really felt as though I’m not living up to my full potential. Even with the management positions from the past. The current one that I am in still feels lacking, I know the challenge I need is out there, I just have to apply myself. I’m starting with an associate degree in cybersecurity. But I wholeheartedly intend to continue onto a bachelor in computer science or robotics engineering. I am already working on a Google data analytics and a COMPTIA + certificates.