Re: Asus P5A - PS/2 mouse port not working

Posted on 2020-11-28, 12:30

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I replaced the caps and inductors near the USB port with some that I salvaged from the USB circuitry of a dead Mobo so the values should be more or less similar. R12 was mechanically damaged and when I desoldered it, the solder pad came off so I had no chance to solder in a replacement. Since R11 …

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Re: My Dual Socket XP Build

Posted on 2020-11-27, 15:24

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I used to work for the IT department of a printing plant a few years ago. I have never seen computers collecting more dust and dirt than those near the printing presses... So yeah, I can relate. Those HP machines are nice and sturdy and all, but why would you want to run one of them for several …

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Re: Good OS selectors ?

Posted on 2020-11-27, 08:45

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

XFDisk has a simple but functional boot manager, too. It will allow you to create multiple primary partitions on one disk, and upon boot, it will set the primary partition that you want to boot from as active, making the others "invisible". This way you can have one partition for pure DOS, one for …

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Re: Asus P5A - PS/2 mouse port not working

Posted on 2020-11-27, 08:15

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thank you for your input, guys! I finally found some time to have a closer look at the board again and discovered that there are some damaged SMD parts that I didn't notice before. Measuring the voltages, it turned out that the PS/2 port voltage varies between +1.5V and +3.5V depending on the …

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Re: How does one setup booting from LAN exactly?

Posted on 2020-11-26, 07:32

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Back in the day when I was still working for a computer repair and BTO shop, we used PXE boot quite heavily. Number one use case was backup/restore. We used the Personal Backup Appliance (PBA) for that, it was really handy. Basically it's a virtual appliance that can be fired up on any VMware host …

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Asus P5A - PS/2 mouse port not working

Posted on 2020-11-25, 08:23

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yesterday I went ahead and installed Windows 98 on a machine built around my newly acquired Asus P5A. BIOS version is 1011.005 (Beta). During setup I recognized that the PS/2 mouse was not working but I wasn't too worried and used the keyboard to navigate the setup. But even after the installation …

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Booting FreeDOS from a vinyl record (YouTube video)

Posted on 2020-11-23, 20:32

by

by gex85

in Milliways

in Milliways

Today I came across this video I thought I'd share. This guy is really taking it to the next level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqz65_YfcJg Here's the blog post about the project: http://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/vinyl-boot/ Pretty impressive.

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Re: Do I really need a floppy drive?

Posted on 2020-11-23, 07:50

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I use regular 3.5" floppy drives in every machine up to P4 / Athlon XP. They come in handy when flashing the BIOS, for diagnostics or transferring drivers to a newly installed OS and for these use cases I find them to be relatively hassle-free. So I do use them on a regular basis. I have a USB …

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Re: Help on choosing a graphics card

Posted on 2020-11-22, 16:31

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by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Both the Voodoo 4 and GeForce 3 are ridiculously overpriced on eBay and similar platforms. Performance-wise you wouldn't be happy with a Voodoo 4 anyway, and there is no official XP driver support. I'd recommend a GF 4 Ti 4200 which is readily available at a reasonable price point. My personal …

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Re: argh cannot get this socket 7 to boot MS-5169 ver 4.0

Posted on 2020-11-22, 16:23

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Don't know If you already found my thread from July: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75313 I ended up replacing the MOSFET and brought the board back to life. The thread contains instructions on how to measure the voltage. In case you need to make a similar repair, make sure to use a new CPU …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2020-11-21, 20:57

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Maybe later tonight I'll upgrade it to the latest beta BIOS and play around with a K6-2+ CPU a bit. Quick follow-up: As expected, the BIOS version 1011.005 (latest beta) detects the K6-2+ 550 without issues. I already knew that this CPU can be clocked to 600 MHz (6.0 x 100), even without rising the …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2020-11-21, 17:04

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Today I received the ASUS P5A that I bought earlier this week: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=17341&p=912177#p912177 It turned out to be in fact a revision 1.03, so there shouldn't be any issues with the K6-2+ CPUs. Although it looks like it has been tossed around quite a bit (several …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-11-19, 21:00

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Nice, thanks for pointing that out. I still have a few K6-2+ 550 MHz CPUs sitting in the drawer (all of them overclock to 600 MHz without issues), so that should be a nice fit!

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-11-19, 16:32

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was casually browsing the local classifieds site today when I came across an ad with a title similar to "PC and a lot of various PC and laptop parts". The whole pile for 10€, but located a two hours drive south from my place. Looked into it, saw the first picture, immediately asked the seller …

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Re: Socket A Motherboards That Have 12V-Centric VRMs?

Posted on 2020-11-18, 18:15

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

When it comes to dual CPU Socket A motherboards, you can list the Asus A7M266-D as well. It has not only the 12V connector, but also the ATX-Aux power connector (6 pins: 3x Ground, 2x +3.3V, 1x +5V). (I happen to own this board, but unfortunately it doesn't POST, probably needs to be recapped, some …

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Re: New sound card(s) project(s): Vortex2 Tribute

Posted on 2020-11-16, 12:43

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

In fact, existing cards offer a nice variety of higher end options: SQ2500, SuperQuad, Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio, etc. And all of them are available and not so expensive , so I don't see a reason for a new card replicating the existing set of features. That's why I'm thinking about niche …

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Re: Tualatin BIOS update for Tyan S1834D (Tiger 133)

Posted on 2020-11-16, 10:40

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I added microcodes (up to 6B1) with CBROM utility. I tried to use Award BIOS Editor, but it caused BIOS checksum error displayed on the screen and the board refused to boot. I am still getting exactly the same message on boot (PENTIUM III 1400MHz (215x6.5)). I don't know if I did it properly, i …

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Re: Tualatin BIOS update for Tyan S1834D (Tiger 133)

Posted on 2020-11-14, 08:33

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Some useful tools and microcodes can be found on www.rom.by (you might want to use Google Translate...). Additionally, I found the Award BIOS Editor to work very well for this purpose. I can post some more detailed instructions later... Once you have figured out the process it becomes really easy.

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2020-11-10, 16:17

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yesterday I finally got around to test some stuff that I received over the past few weeks: A Siemens Nixdorf D1064 Slot 1 motherboard, two S3 PCI video cards and the miro HiScore 3D Voodoo card. All of them do work fine. Yay :smile: Along the way I decided to try Win 98 on a SATA disk using a …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-11-09, 08:26

by

by gex85

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Wow, I really appreciate it. I've never given a second thought on ZM-80 with slot1 CPU. This really is something! https://pc.zoznam.sk/cpu-intel-pentium-2-400-mhz-slot-verzia-chladene-zalman-om-zm80c-hp I found a page with some of the missing photos. Thanks! Ah, good to see the other pictures are …

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