Jankily driving my vintage computers with new USB devices

Github

 

Using a Raspberry Pi, one or two Arduinos, and possibly a cannibalized PS2 mouse, you can create a device that translates modern USB inputs to PS2 input for a vintage device.

This project is basically a very janky version of USB4VC. USB4VC is a much more polished, well-engineered and maintained product. I built JankPiPS2 before I knew about USB4VC. I am putting it on GitHub in case someone may find it useful.

In the current incarnation there are two Arduinos, although you could probably just use one. One Arduino uses the ps2dev library to emulate a keyboard. The other controls a mouse.

I couldn't get the Arduino to emulate a mouse, so instead, I cannibalized a PS/2 roller mouse. There were two clicky buttons which would click if I brought them up to +5v, and the two quadrature encoders used for rolling. The encoders have four pins: GND, +5V, A and B. A and B would cycle as the ball rolls around. So I brought X-A, X-B, Y-A, Y-B, L and R to pins 4,5,6,7,8 and 9. The Arduino cycles the encoders to simulate movement and clicks the buttons. I actually works great and is much easier than emulating PS/2, BUT it is slightly slower than emulation - it has to "roll" the ball!

If you'd rather have serial mouse input, I have found that USB-Mouse-to-Serial works very well.

So this is about $20 worth of parts not including the Raspberry Pi. If you are very frugal this is probably the cheapest way to connect nested USB inputs to a vintage machine.

 

Keyboard-driving Arduino on the left with pins 2 and 3 driving PS/2 data. Raspberry Pi, hub pictured. Mouse-driving electronics in a little box behind the hub.

Mouse-driving Arduino soldered to the zombie mouse's encoders and clickers.

 

 

Love191.Live - Streaming Loveline episodes 24/7

 This is a simple internet radio station using Icecast and liquid soap (internet radio streaming tools)

 

https://love191.live/

World Records for Overclocking Obscure Hardware Combinations

 
I gathered four LGA775 mobo's - 3 from Craigslist and 1 from eBay. I also gathered a few CPU's from my local PC recycler (RE-PC in Seattle) and eBay. All of these parts are dirt cheap so I won't be heartbroken if they die.

For my GPU I pulled my 3080 out of my daily gaming rig. So I set out to get world records with the oldest CPUs that would run Windows 10 and a modern GPU.

My first rig was an Intel confidential / engineering sample QX6700. I put this under a modern Zalmann cooler - one of the only ones I could find with LGA775. For some reason this CPU would not go above 3.2ghz. I am pretty sure it was the CPU and not the mobo - no matter what FSB or multiplier I gave it, it wouldn't top 3.2ghz.

I paired this with 8gb of DDR2-800 ram and hilariously, an NVMe drive on the other PCIe slot.

I got a TimeSpy overall score of 4661. The graphics scores were fine but the CPU scores were understandably abysmal. But this is the world record for the combination of QX6700 + RTX 3080 - because nobody has submitted benchmarks for this combo.

dylanrush`s 3DMark - Time Spy score: 4661 marks with a GeForce RTX 3080 (320bit)

At almost 20 years old, the QX6700 was very snappy, especially with a modern SSD. I really think it would perform fine for a person just doing office work and internet browsing.  

 

The Pentium D 805 was my first real overclocking chip. Unfortunately I couldn't get this to properly boot into Windows 10. So I put it away for another day. I also had a Pentium D 945. As far as I know, this is the oldest chip that will possibly boot into Windows 10.

I put this chip between a ASUS P5W Deluxe (Intel 975X chipset) and a new Raidmax 240mm AIO cooler. The GPU was again my 3080. This time around I procured some 1066mhz DDR2 RAM from Corsair.

With voltages in the rather extreme range (1.65v CPU, I think 1.7v FSB and 1.5v NB), I was able to get the CPU up to 4.9 ghz (!), stable enough to run a benchmark.

Time Spy didn't run on this chip - probably lacking some instructions. Fire Strike did, though. I have the lowest Fire Strike benchmark ever submitted for a 3080. But again I have the world record, this time for the combination of Pentium D 945 + RTX 3080. I truly think I may be the first person to ever combine this CPU and GPU. I also might be running the fastest Pentium D in the world right now.
 

 

Two Compasses That Always Point To Each Other

 A wedding gift for my brother and his bride to be.

When sitting still it's a normal compass. When it's tapped or moved, it will get its position with GPS, send this to a server, and get back three bearings: the direction towards your house, the direction towards the companion compass, and magnetic north. Hold the compass so that magnetic north is under the red arrow and start walking where you need to go.

Based on the SparkFun asset tracker board

Restoring a 1997 IBM Aptiva

I found an IBM Aptiva 2127-E26 on Craigslist. It had a ton of charm so I decided to purchase it and restore it.

The original specs were:

• AMD K6 233mhz
• 256mb RAM (beefy for the time - this was likely upgraded later)
• 6GB HDD
• Crystal 4237 audio
  
• ATI Rage II+
• Windows 2000 was once installed, but it had been wiped. Windows 95 was the original OS.
  

It came in a quite vintage and unique 90's case.

A beige CD-RW/DVD drive is shown here which is obviously not stock. The original CD drive did not want to read some of the disks I had burned, so I replaced it with this. Unfortunately this drive quit as well so I've since replaced it again.

While the exterior is beautiful, the case is removed in a rather violent way by grabbing the front and yanking it off. This seems to have killed the original IDE hard drive and a bargain bin replacement.

Front case removed

So I replaced the hard drive with a IDE to SD card adapter. This thing is great. You can swap out the SD card in the back, if you want to make backups, transfer files quickly or swap out operating systems. Using a design I found on Thingiverse, I 3D printed a bracket for it that works really well.

I also added this nice 3COM NIC from the late 90's.

I have a few computers in my office and they're all hooked up to a 4-way HDMI/USB switch. Ideally I'd be able to use this machine with the switch, so I wouldn't have to pull out a new keyboard, mouse and monitor every time I wanted to play retro games.

Adding the PC to the huddle

 

My KVM switch with an audio switch alongside

 

So I set about trying to get this old hardware working with my modern input and output. This was the most challenging part of the project.

The first challenge was the display, which was VGA only. I tried several cheap VGA to HDMI adapters all covered in this Vogons post with mixed and disappointing results. When in DOS mode, the VGA signal is 70hz, and all of the adapters I tried just tried to output 70hz to HDMI, which was not supported by my monitor.

I also snagged a Matrox G450 as a period-correct adapter with DVI input. Sadly the G450 had problems with EDID with my monitor when using DVI, but I decided to keep it anyway and to keep pursuing VGA.

Matrox G450

 I finally landed on the Extron RGB-HDMI 300-A which almost did the job out of the box.

The one issue I had was again EDID. The Extron will pass this through HDMI by default which of course led to a broken 640x480 display in Windows. The Extron can also emulate EDID if you disable HDMI data, but the emulated 1920x1080 EDID wasn't honored by Windows - the best I could do was 1024x768. So I severed the EDID pins (#15 and #11) on my VGA cable and finally Windows stopped caring about what my monitor "supported". I was able to set a 1920x1080 resolution in Windows and now the whole thing works great.

VGA cable with the EDID pins severed

Now on to the input. My KVM acts as a USB hub. I wouldn't be able to use the generic USB to PS2 adapters because I only have one USB connection coming from my USB KVM switch. 

This computer does have USB ports, which work when you're logged on to Windows, but the BIOS does not support HID devices, and I doubt DOS would either. I didn't want to have to grab another keyboard and mouse to use outside of Windows 98.

So I used an Arduino Uno with a Sainsmart USB Host shield to connect my keyboard and mouse. I used the ps2dev library to emulate the PS2 keyboard using GPIO pins. I tried doing this with the mouse but was unsuccessful. So I bought a TTL to RS232 adapter and use that to emulate a serial mouse.

My very rough Arduino sketch is here.

It took awhile to make this reliable but it works quite well now, with not too much lag.

The custom adapter with serial output for the mouse, and PS2 output for the keyboard. The top shield is just an Arduino proto shield so I could solder the PS2 and serial connections.

USB input on the middle shield

 

I named this PC "Little Blue" - after IBM's now sort of antiquated nickname of "Big Blue"

The bad ass boot logo

Yes, it can browse the web using RetroZilla

Old school Roller Coaster Tycoon

Running OpenMW On Period Hardware

 My favorite video game of all time is Morrowind. OpenMW is an awesome port of the old game. I wanted to get OpenMW to run on my 2002 gaming PC build just to see if I could.

My legacy gaming PC has the following specs, which would have been very typical for a PC gamer around the time Morrowind came out.

- Athlon XP-M overclocked to 2.4 ghz
- Radeon 9550XL
- 2GB DDR400 dual channel RAM

I've found out that this is an incredibly difficult processor to target because it lacks SSE2 instructions. SSE2 happens to haphazardly be built into many binaries because it's assumed to exist on all modern hardware, and has since the Pentium 4. SSE2 instructions have notably snuck their way into firefox, which makes that browser impossible to build for my machine.

My processor is also 32 bit. OpenMW has a 32 bit (aka x86). While OpenMW has 32 bit builds for Windows, but they contain SSE2. Actually building the x86 version yourself is not really supported. Furthermore, the whole Windows toolchain is based on the latest Visual Studio, which does not allow you to forego SSE2. 

Linux x86 binaries are no longer provided by the OpenMW team. Downloading the last x86 build, version 0.45, results in a segfault - probably due to missing SSE2 instructions again.

So I had to build OpenMW myself. I found a Gentoo package for OpenMW which would compile everything I needed. I decided to give Gentoo a shot because it might also let me compile my own compatible web browsers. This ended up being a very long process, as gentoo users are familiar with. I had to build and configure the whole operating from scratch, starting with the kernel.

I started up an i686 build of Gentoo in a virtual machine on my modern PC to be copied over to the old box after all the setup was complete. Compiling everything on the Athlon would likely take weeks. 

After walking through the Gentoo installation manual I had a working terminal in 32 bits, but there were many snags on the way to a full desktop environment (xfce4).

The first snag was rustc. There are several packages which depend on rust. Rustc is a self-compiling compiler, which means it has to be bootstrapped. The rust compiler targeted for i686 contains SSE2 instructions, as described in gentoo bug 741708, which means that my Athlon could never bootstrap. I wanted to treat my VM like the physical machine so as not to run into any problems in the future, so I decided to compile rustc myself elsewhere then sideload the compatible binary.

My config.toml looks like this, which allows rustc to target either i586 or i686. In the end I ended up targeting i686 anyway (I think i586 broke librsvg) but it's good to have the i586 support. And this is compiled to match my instruction set.

changelog-seen = 2
[llvm]
cflags = "-march=\"athlon-4\" -m32"
cxxflags = "-march=\"athlon-4\" -m32"
ldflags = "-lz"
[build]
host = ["i586-unknown-linux-gnu", "i686-unknown-linux-gnu"] extended = true
configure-args = ['--build=i586-unknown-linux-gnu', '--prefix=/opt']
[install]
prefix = "/mnt/disk2/rust/install/opt"
[rust]
[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
[dist]

I also had to avoid spidermonkey, which is not only a gargantuan thing to compile, but seemed to crash during compilation whether I used my sideloaded rustc or the one from dev-lang/rust-bin (I'm not even sure if rust caused the problem, but I had no interest in compiling spidermonkey. This reddit post helped me replace it with a more lightweight library (duktape)).

I also had to patch Qt5 to make it compatible with non-SSE2.

Eventually I was able to build xfce4 and OpenMW, and I was able to get in the OpenMW launch in my x86 VM:

This gave me hope that I could transfer the OS over to my old computer and get playing. Astonishingly, all I had to do was create a tarball of the root on my VM, and then extract that tarball to a new partition on my old PC. I just had to update the fstab and network config, run update-grub, and the operating system born in a VM was not running on a physical machine.

xfce didn't quite work though. The window manager crashes, so you lose window borders and close buttons. Luckily this didn't stop me from launching a terminal and eventually launching OpenMW.

I wasn't able to start the game from the main menu, but I could start the game from a random cell, which allowed me to start a new game from there.

 

 

Water was completely transparent.

 

It ran at about 2 FPS at 800x600. For comparison, the original Morrowind binary runs at around 30 FPS at around 1024x768. So not surprisingly, either OpenMW is just not optimized for my ancient hardware, or I could have some problem with my drivers.

More PC building shenanigans

Delidding my main gaming PC 

Delidding my i7-4790k brought temps when gaming from 85C to around 70C.

Unfortunately with air cooling, I couldn't get it above 1.35 volts without reaching a thermal limit. But, I am stable at 1.285 volts, 4.8 ghz, which is a very good overclock for this chip (20%). About 7 years on, there is still plenty life in my Haswell for modern gaming. My 1080ti is dying (it's down to one HDMI port so VR is becoming difficult) but I may just upgrade to a modern graphics card and keep this beautiful processor.

The processor and the tools for the job

Using an OwlTree vice, pried the integrated heat sink off of the processor

The processor with the crappy "toothpaste" thermal grease

I applied way too much liquid metal the first time around. It should not look like this! I put it in my PC and it did not boot up.

So I took it out and removed most of the liquid metal. There should be a very thin layer. Unlike traditional thermal paste, you want to spread evenly, but you don't have to worry too much about bubbles forming.

2002-2003 Build Functional Web Browsing

The hardest thing about using the Athlon XP processor is not just that it's 32 bit, but it lacks support for the SSE2 instruction set. This means most programs compiled after say 2008 are not going to work on it, even if they are 32 bit. I believe Microsoft even dropped support for disabling SSE2 in Visual Studio after a certain point, so it may not be possible to recompile many of these programs even if the source code is available.

If you want to get on the web, you have a few options:

1. Use an old version of FireFox

2. Use an off-brand browser. 

PaleMoon did have a non-SSE2 fork running for awhile, but I think this was discontinued around 2017. If you keep Googling non-SSE2 browsers, don't be mislead by anyone recommending PaleMoon.

K-Meleon for Windows works pretty well. It's not as good as Firefox, but is hypothetically more secure because it's actively maintained.

Few versions of Linux will work on an Athlon XP. LXLE does not install, likely because of the SSE2 problem. MX Linux does! I'm new to this distro but it's Debian based and works rather well.

On MX Linux, I was able to install NetSurf, which is still maintained yet a fairly old school browser. I was also able to run K-Meleon through Wine and browse the web just fine. With a modern operating system and an up-to-date browser, I'm actually able to use this ~18 year old computer for most tasks. I really hope this software continues to be maintained.

NetSurf and K-Meleon running in MX Linux

The case, with a new Athlon XP badge