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Home / WebSurfer Areas / WebSurfer Technical Stuff Finished WS hack.... One WS hack in the books.

Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) my nickname is lame. O.K. Picked up this morning from CompUSA in Norfolk, VA. They had three left. 49.95, No TOS. I hooked WS up to both a VGA monitor and my TV, VGA display is good, TV is a little fuzzy. Sys'ed a 8.4 Gig Western Digital, copied 98SE and 98 Lite to the drive, as well as the Video, Sound and my USB NIC's drivers. Attached an old ISA IDE controller card after disabling the ISA printer ports and Comm ports. Cut off an old HD power cord, stripped back the WS's main power cord yellow, red one black lead. Attached old HD power cord straight to stripped sections. Secured temporarily with Electricians tape. Ran an IDE cable, put box back together with exception of the cover. Dropped another 32 meg Dimm in place of the empty port. It did recognize and boot fine with 48 megs ram total. It booted right to C: as it should abd the 98 install went fine. Typical install. After install Video was deteced as generic PCI @16 colors. Downloaded video driver fixed that. The Cyber2000 video drivers puts an icon on the taskbar to configure large icons and fonts. CONFIGURE THEM. This made all the difference in the world. Display is actually O.K. now on my 35" T.V. I checked the system icon in the control panel, three unknown devices, PCI bridge and two others completely unknown. I select the first unknown device and install the sound card drivers. It seems to like it. After reboot still no sound....? I take the second unknown device and apply the sound drivers to it... Seems to like it as well. After reboot, the windows sound is heard! So there should be (for 98 SE) two unknown devices deteced that are audio devices. And the one PCI bridge that I haven't done anything with yet. My NIC installed flawlessly and got its DHCP address and hit the internet well. Next I applied 98 Lite, well in this case Chubby. Stripped down whatever 98 Chubby strips down. Now for some real world testing. I have installed Several MP3 players with uniformly bad results. All run poorly with huge pauses. Winamp seemed to suck the least... Alright, booted into progman as a shell. MP3's still suck. Will do more testing Friday night. Al 04-28-2000 02:53:28

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) hardware1 MP3 needs linux or DOS. Windos SUCKS for MP3 on this. 04-28-2000 03:42:19

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) stepson Profile Who's USB Nic did you use? Just curious 04-28-2000 06:10:49

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) Eradan How is the sound quality ..... not the mp3's .... the actual sound quality ?? Eradan 04-28-2000 10:34:47

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) chadg I need a copy of the price print out from the compusa store before they took it off there web site. If any one has this please e-mail to chadg@customnet.net thanks!!! 04-28-2000 10:41:50

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) my+nickname+is+lame. The windows sound quality is good. Anything that is not as cpu intensive as winamp sounds great actually. I have the WS plugged into my recievr and surround sound system and it thumps greatly. Hell I'm deaf in one ear and it sounded good to me. I have also noted that small MP3's play well. All my Jeff Foxworthy and Jerky boys bits (@1 minute each) sound good and no skipping at all. Its just LARGE files that skip. I don't remember what brand of USB NIC I got, it was from buy.com for 30 bucks and free shipping... Also I have tried streaming MP3's over the network and playing them locally off the HD, both have the same poor skipping quality. I plan on two things this afternoon, first I'm going to try to overclock this chip to 233... theres a thred here somewhere that describes how.... Then I'm going to drop another 32 megs of dimm in it, that'll be 64 total. Then I'm going a hunting for a slimmer, more efficient MP3 player. Perhaps an older DOS MP3 player designed for 486's...? If that doesn't help, I'll drop RedHat 6.2 on it, just got my CD in the mail today and I do need to see that new idiot proof installer everyone is yapping about anyway... regards, Al 04-28-2000 10:57:32

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) my nickname is lame. Quick update, with the USB NIC disconnected.... MP3's play fine locally. No skipping at all... GREAT Sound on the surround sound system. regards, Al 04-28-2000 13:23:46

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) Rick Yeah, that's the problem with USB. It takes up CPU resources. I would like to get the on-board IDE going and put in a PCI NIC, but I have no means of doing SMD stuff. --Rick 04-28-2000 14:53:40

RE:Finished WS hack.... (modified 0 times) Rick I'm interested to see if you can get it to work well with the USB attached. WinAmp has some settings you can play with. Under Plugins->input->Nullsoft Mpeg audio decoder plug-in. Under the Decoder tab, try increasing the File buffering, lowering the Quality, and/or lowering the decoder mode. Also check the size of your windows swap file while winamp is playing, I'd like to know how much extra memory is needed. --Rick 04-28-2000 17:22:39

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