Re: How to fix your dead on-board floppy controller

Posted on 2016-08-17, 12:30

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Er...why not just install a multi-I/O card with floppy and/or IDE connectors instead of throwing out the motherboard? These motherboards, and hardware of this age in general, have becoming collectable items. As collectable items, having a defective onboard floppy/serial/IDE port severely weakens …

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

Posted on 2016-08-11, 18:14

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Swapped out my 15+ year old Trust PS/2 Direct Access Keyboard for a somewhat newer and less used Cherry PS/2 RS 6000 M keyboard I got out of a stack of parts some time ago, as more and more of the keys on the Trust keyboard started to need really hard :dead: mashing down to actually register. This …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2016-08-10, 14:53

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by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

@chose007: I like that case. Looks like it could take a passive slot backplane + system on a card. Do you have a picture of the internals of the other side where the drives mount?

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Re: Era correct web hosting/design software.

Posted on 2016-08-10, 14:22

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a degree in information security among many other security certs and degrees and I work in the information security field and I'm more then aware of the risks involved. Not that new versions of windows and hosting apps are any better, jut less people out there that know how to exploit them. …

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

Posted on 2016-08-09, 16:44

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So the last few days I've been considering whether it's worth it to buy a PC-98 system (that's NEC's Japanese PC-9801 and PC-9821 systems, not the Microsoft standard). Some of those systems are quite impressive when it comes to the sound cards included as standard (FM sound + MIDI). Things that …

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Re: Era correct web hosting/design software.

Posted on 2016-08-09, 16:22

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The site itself will be a fun small project and will be a simple old html 1,2 or 3 site with lots of GIF's for icons and whatnot that would fit in with any other home ran site of the era. Thanks for any help! Are you planning to actually connect this machine to the internet? If so, older hosting …

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Re: How do ISA riser cards work, on classic/vintage PCs with available ISA slots?

Posted on 2016-08-09, 07:41

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by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

they just make the length of the bus longer. you can get like 20 slot backplanes on ebay. I dont know at what length you start getting reflections on the bus or that, but ISA is a slow bus. I've always wondered, what were those huge backplanes used for? Were there really systems that used all slots …

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Re: Does Windows 3.0 support ZIP drives

Posted on 2016-08-09, 07:35

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by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Windows 3.11, AFAIK, also does not have nor needs drivers for ZIP drives. Both 3.0 and 3.11 rely on DOS to access ZIP drives. Just install the DOS drivers and it will work on Windows 1/2/3/3.11. IIRC, there was a tool suite for both DOS and Windows (Iomega Tools?) included when we bought our first …

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Re: How to fix your dead on-board floppy controller

Posted on 2016-08-08, 19:37

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by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

This touches a nerve. I recently killed the floppy controller on a nice old mobo after pulling out and reseating the memory modules. There was no need to do this, I just wanted to see if a particular module worked (it did). But just doing this killed the floppy controller, probably due to flexing …

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Re: [SOLVED] How to make a MFM HDD image?

Posted on 2016-08-07, 21:12

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Although this is already marked as [SOLVED] I'd like to point out that FreeBSD still supports MFM drives (and loads of other older hardware) in its current releases: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/compatibility-drives.html Generally they are less aggressive than Linux …

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Re: Your first Digital (or film )) ) Camera...

Posted on 2016-08-07, 06:20

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by yawetaG

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Canon PowerShot A85...which failed with the "separating" CCD issue affecting those cameras - the solder used was bad quality, and after a few years the CCD would break away from the print. Showed up as rainbow colors on the display and tilting the camera in a certain way would resolve it for a while …

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Re: iBook Clamshell screw set wanted!

Posted on 2016-08-04, 10:15

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Aren't they just stainless steel Torx screws?

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Re: How to configure / use a serial mouse?

Posted on 2016-07-31, 18:52

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Are you trying Microsoft's mouse driver for one of their proprietary (IntelliPoint) serial mouses instead of the proper driver for your non-Microsoft serial mouse? Based on the error message I'd say so... Another possibility is that the mouse is finicky about your COM ports speed settings.

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Re: Reccommend me DVD playing software for Windows 95

Posted on 2016-07-31, 15:02

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I can confirm that Windows Media Player for Windows 98 mentions DVD playback in the help files, but it can't actually play back DVDs. Never managed to get it to work.

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Re: What type of computer case is this ?

Posted on 2016-07-31, 14:59

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by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Looking at the labels on the backplane, two LPT ports and four COM ports (half of which on an expansion card), LAN card, VGA. Based on the weird lip on the case, might it have been screwed to the bottom of a desk? Then I would think it was used in some professional environment where the drives, …

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Re: Pentium 2 PC for DOS games

Posted on 2016-07-31, 14:50

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

FaSMaN wrote: I agree with Jheronimus , lots of them have been patched. A SB 128 is still a PCI card, I highly recommend a 16-bit card, like a Sound Blaster 16. Any AudioPCI-based card will work fine with most DOS games under Windows 98SE.

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Re: Reccommend me DVD playing software for Windows 95

Posted on 2016-07-30, 19:02

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I am looking for several lightweight DVD softwares for my Pentium II 450 with 128MB ram. I test installed Win2k on it before and used VLC without trouble but I need something for Win95. It would be sweet if there is one to work on slower computers such as the Pentium 133... They had to have good …

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Re: Brexit???

Posted on 2016-06-26, 22:01

by

by yawetaG

in Milliways

in Milliways

Well, looks like Boris has decided that there won't be a Brexit after all: Boris Johnson says the UK will continue to "intensify" cooperation with the EU and tells his fellow Leave supporters they must accept the 52-48 referendum win was "not entirely overwhelming". The pro-Leave campaign head, says …

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Re: Sound Blaster CT4750 sounds like garbage in DOS games...

Posted on 2016-06-20, 12:31

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Anyway, outputting from the gameport or not, using the "general MIDI" option I don't hear any music. Have you tried the other 3.5 mm outputs on the soundcard? Also, try running a DOS game (e.g. SimCity 2000 MS-DOS*) directly from Windows 98 with MIDI enabled in the game settings. If that works, …

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Re: Retro Rig Photo Thread

Posted on 2016-06-16, 11:52

by

by yawetaG

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I had a look at the original card, and it is a STB Velocity 128 AGP (rev. B) with 4 MB RAM and only VGA-out (never do things from memory... 😵 ). Interestingly, it has a Gateway-badged BIOS chip (version 1.6, dated Oct. 28, 1997).

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