BeOS Ramblings

Last post, all of a few hours ago, I forgot to mention that I was ordering from a retailer who happens to have the HQ and domestic distribution warehouse a five minute drive away. So I have the Noctua. But when the rattling returned, it became clear that it was the PSU fan. So I have a new PSU also The old PSU was not ATX form factor. The new one is, and shares one single screw position in common - top left corner. Lets hope that holds it in... It's also fixed cable (which I should be used to), and baffling when you haven't built your own PC in a decade or more; and mostly serviced HP SFFs in a previous job for most of that decade. Why are there so many cables? What do most of them do? Why is the CPU power cable twice the size (turns out it slides apart, so can be used)? Why does a modern system need 3 Molex connectors?  Its working, and the PC is vastly quieter. I'll replace it with a modular if I ever feel like burning even more money - the insane cable loom tucks above t...

My €99 second hand (well, €50+€49 shipping) Matrox G550 arrived last week finally. The original purchase receipt in the box was from 2008 - who was buying those in 2008, other than BeOS users? And it was from Germany, where there were a lot of those around; so I wouldn't be madly surprised to know that its already lived a life without its 3D kit ever being used. It works, and well - as I'd expect with a Rudolf Cornelissen driver. Haven't dug up a second VGA monitor to try dual-heading, but I imagine that'll work too. BeRometer now has close to, or top level results in every category - from just about in terms of graphics performance (the RIVA TNT2 that had R5 drivers is probably just as fast or faster, for instance) to absolutely ridiculous (disk speed, pure compute speed) where it's often 5x the fastest recorded. We're comparing to 1999s top end hardware here, so mid-range late 2005 should be expected to be about that much faster; and of course an SSD and a dif...

I've not been able to run the dc7600 surprisingly fast BeOS R5 machine since May, but I have now located one part for it, and ordered another. At some point I shoved an IDE DVD-RW (with Lightscribe, for those that remember that) in to a drawer on the basis that its unlikely I'd find another one easily. which turned out to be true. I assumed I had dumped it some time ago - but it seems I dumped my spare SATA DVD-RW on the basis that I now have a spare BD-RE drive. I did want to get that drive working in R5, for the hell of it, but as the SATA controller is in single channel IDE emulation mode for my boot disk, this isn't going to happen anyway; so this should give me writing ability. As even my R5 laptop has a DVD-RW drive, I do use this as a media transfer method quite a bit. I've also ordered a Matrox G550 PCI-E card - probably the best option, as tracking down the few GeForce cards that are supported by the BeOS drivers, and are also PCI-E, is proving impossible. Its ...

After one failed attempt to get it in to the country - eBay had neglected to include my eircode, and despite them being entirely optional for domestic deliveries, it seems PosteItaliane won't send to Ireland with them - I now have an Audigy 2 (SB0240) providing me with decent sound. It has no front panel audio connector - the case has the HDA standard one, but this has neither it nor the older one - and I'm not sure I want to go to the hassle of hacking one together. Time to try find the SB0250 Audigy Dive somewhere, and hope the Haiku driver (for this is what's being used, even on R5) supports it.

So the Intel 1000 card is marginally too new to work, the Realtek 1000 PCI card has a known PCI ID bug that identifies it as an 8129  that I'm not even going to test the BeOS 8169 driver for, and the 10/100 Realtek cards are all newer, cost reduced chips and not "real" 8139s either. So instead I tried another identical Broadcom card - with identical problems So instead instead I reset the BIOS settings to default (except for then reinstated the SATA controller changes); and got a fully working network card again. Seperate to that, looking at the SATA settings, its clear that it will only emulate one IDE controller if using the combined mode as I am now. I do think that I'm now stuck using one SATA port and one port on the IDE controller; meaning I need to find an IDE DVD burner (something I had tens of in the past) and not try my SATA BD-RE drive.

Some slow messing around with this machine has got me a bit further along: * USB and storage working with USB.patches and the usb_scsi driver * An Audigy2 has been ordered from eBay * HLT is now enabled, so the processor fans are not running at full speed - but as I've no audio yet, I don't yet know if I need to do any of the workarounds require to stop it messing up audio So the PC is working, or will be, to a usable standard. But I decided to run BeRometer, and found out that the perception that its working fairly quickly is likely due to the lack of seek time on the SSD - its actually hideously slow. Copying a 608MB file from one partition on the disk to another took slightly over 8 minutes - and while this isn't an ideal disk I/O test, there's not a lot of others you can do. So sub 1MB/sec throughput on a SATA150 controller (the limiting factor in hardware here - the SSD is SATA600). But low throughput has to be expected, as when BeOS R5 came out, ATA33 was the newe...