Looking good but also lookin like it could use a rinse. Just drop the whole thing into a sink filled with water and dish soap, stir a bunch, agitate some more, and then drain, shake a bunch and let it sit in a sunny room for a week. It'll be good as new*!!! 😀

Long live the days of Doom on 486s w/ friends over dialup!!!!!!!

*at your own risk heh heh. I do this with cards and mobos all the time though.

swaaye wrote:

Looking good but also lookin like it could use a rinse. Just drop the whole thing into a sink filled with water and dish soap, stir a bunch, agitate some more, and then drain, shake a bunch and let it sit in a sunny room for a week. It'll be good as new*!!! 😀

Hehe, not a bad idea <G>! 😀 As I'm sure you prolly figured out: it's a combination of South Florida weather (where I used to live, lots of dust and humidity), as well as years of the nicotine habit <G>.

swaaye wrote:

Long live the days of Doom on 486s w/ friends over dialup!!!!!!!

Man, those were the days 😀 My DOOMin' buddy and I each had two phone lines (one for business/data, and the other for home/voice). We used to have a ball almost every Friday/Saturday night modem DOOMing. We would connect DOOM (as well as Duke 3D) on one of our phone lines, and then voice-connect on the other using speaker phones... hehe, just like having two-way radios while we were DOOMing 😀 Can't remember how much of our lives were wasted DOOMing like this 😀

swaaye wrote:

*at your own risk heh heh. I do this with cards and mobos all the time though.

A short story: I'm a PC tech by trade. One of my customers in Miami had a laptop that his secretary used, and he called me one day saying that the laptop died.

After he brought it over and I cracked it open, the prognosis: Large coffee with cream and sugar <LOL>! I *REALLY* thought that the laptop was a gonner, and as a completely last-ditch effort, removed the mobo (and everything else that I could disassemble out of the little case), and then washed everything under running water in the bathtub.

Then gave the components a good rubbing-alcohol bath, allowed three weeks to dry sitting by a fan, re-assembled it... and low and behold... booted on the first try 😀 Heh, (blowing my own horn here) although I consider myself a fairly good tech, I was quite proud of myself <G> 😀

Yup there's nothing like resurrecting hardware that was believed to be history. I've built up a nice retro collection doing just that. 😉

Nice, a DX4 runnning on a 50 MHz bus!
Care to post some benchmark results?
Speedsys and PCPBench scores would be very much appreciated. 😉

Got a job for me? 😀

What is that large card with the fan on it?

swaaye wrote:

Yup there's nothing like resurrecting hardware that was believed to be history. I've built up a nice retro collection doing just that. 😉

My friends have always said that I was nutz... 'all of your antique computers, Rich!'. I simply reply, 'Man! That's my old 486, she's an old woman, and still running... cut 'er some slack!' <G> 😀

I love old retro PC hardware 😀 Had an operational 286 for many years after it was obolete. Still have that mobo and case packed safely away, but I'd guarantee 100% that I could throw it together, and it'd prolly boot on the first try 😀

Hehe, back in 2000 I tried an experiemnt: At that time, the 286 had been boxed up for several years (since about 1997). I unpacked it, 'bench-rigged' it up, and it bootup the first time... *AND* was Y2K compatable, as the date and time in BIOS were still correct 😀

Anyhoo, I get sentimental about (my) old PC hardware... fondly rembering the days of 1200 baud access, dialing up the local BBS's down in Miami 😀 Also used to work at Milgo (later known as Racal-Milgo, and then later simply as Racal) back at the beggining of 1980. Man! Talk about some old stuff (now that I think about it)... 14-inch (?) floppy drives, 8-meg (?) drum drives, and 300 baud modems that used to go for around US$5,000 a pop <G>!

5u3 wrote:

Nice, a DX4 runnning on a 50 MHz bus!
Care to post some benchmark results?
Speedsys and PCPBench scores would be very much appreciated. 😉

I would, but as of about two weeks ago it's currently boxed up to make a bit of room for a new PC that I'm building for myself. Hehe, if you surf here -> http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/Weeds_Backwood … s_Homestead.htm you'll see that my current residence is a bit cramped (to say the least <LOL>!), and I had to break down the 486 to give myself a bit more room. But... I'll try those benchmarks ASAP, I'm quite curious myself how my old box would rank 😀

MartinC wrote:

Got a job for me? 😀

Hehe, I wish... but work has been extremely slow for me (the flailing economy, plus the area in which I currently have lived since 2005 (see link above)).

MartinC wrote:

What is that large card with the fan on it?

You answered your own question <G>, a fan card. It's a full-length card with two fans on it (one blows one way, the other blows the other way). That, in combination with the CPU fan, and a case fan that you can't see in the pics (it's hiding behind the case's front trim plate), always kept things nice 'n' cool for all of the stuff I had installed in the box 😀

P.S. Second pic from the top on that web page: Connected to the Internet at 33k (using the 'Trumpet' Winsock dialer, and surfing to 'Cafe Tropico', using Windows 3.11 with Netscape 3.x 😀 I took that pic after moving out here in the woods of Crystal River (2005) and after initially setting up the 486... 'twas simply bragging about my old 486 at the time, to online folks that I knew over at Cafe Tropico <G> 😀

Third pic from the top: Norton Commander v5.0 😀 I've been an NC user since v1.0, an *STILL* use it today under WinDoZe XPee 😀

Fourth pic from the top: NeoSoft's Quick Menu for DOS... the best damn menu system for DOS ever created! 😀 Years before (8088/8086/286 days) I've previously used 'Point and Shoot' (who the heck was that developed/published by? I can't remember...), but several years later migrated to NeoSoft's Quick Menu.

Seventh pic from the top: Bottom periphial is my tape drive. I always thought that the glow from that little red LED was sooooo cool looking... Yes, I'm easily amused <LOL>!

First pic on that page (taken in Miami, before I moved to Crystal River in 2005): To the right you'll see my (still operational) Panasonic KXP2123 dot-matrix printer, as well as (directly to the left of the printer, the recatngular black thing) my old 'Master Pilot' programmable game controller 😀

Speaker phone to the left of all of the CD clutter is the one that I used to use for my afore-mentioned DOOM games 😀

Top-right of that pic: one of my numerous PC game posters... hehe, remember the addon for Falcon 3.0, "Mig 29"? 😀

P.P.S. Two more pics for ya (taken in Miami): http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/weeds_computer_room_1.jpg and http://www.cmoo.com/snor/weeds/weeds_computer_room_2_3.jpg .

rfnagel wrote:

swaaye wrote:

NeoSoft's Quick Menu for DOS... the best damn menu system for DOS ever created! 😀

Yep. I still have my license for it. QuikMenu ruled!

valnar wrote:

Yep. I still have my license for it. QuikMenu ruled!

It surely did 😀 I've been a user of QM since v2.0 (I forget which year that was release?). I also helped beta-test QM for Windows (got a free copy of the final for my efforts), but the Windows version never 'felt' the same as the good old DOS version.

I always wondered how white plastic would burn like that..do you know if it had anything to do with the environment?

DO you still use the machine for anything?

MartinC wrote:

I always wondered how white plastic would burn like that..do you know if it had anything to do with the environment?

I'd say the breakdown was like this <G>:

Miami dust and humidity - 40%
Nicotine - 40%
White plastic that naturally yellows with age - 20%

🤣!

MartinC wrote:

DO you still use the machine for anything?

Up until about two months ago, that PC was my primary MIDI composition machine. That is, until this modern PC that I've recently built up (which has a Sound Blaster Live). I also used it for games and demos that were problematic on any of my (slightly) newer PCs (a P233MMX and an AMD500). A few games/demos that come to mind that had problems with those PCs were the old Monopoly for DOS, and some of the old Triton and Future Crew demos (even though the P233MMX had an SB16 as well as an SBPro card installed in it).

After building up my new(er) XP maching, and then subsequently discovering DOSBox, most everything I have will run just fine. That is, except for one that I'm trying to troubleshoot/figure out... Tetris Classic for Windows (it likes to find an MPU-401 at port address 330, which the SBLive under XPee (WDM drivers at; on mine at least; DF20-DF3F) doesn't support <aarrgghh>, or even a plain-jane OPL2/3).

@All, BTW, I don't suppose that anyone would know of a Windows XP driver of sorts that would 'emulate' an MPU-401 at port address 330? Something that would show up in the device manager as such (MPU-401, port address 300, 310, 320, or 330... doesn't matter), and redirect everything directly to the the SBLive's MIDI section, or simply the Windows MIDI mapper? Drives me nutz, as the old Tetris Classic for Windows needs this, and is completely soundless without it (TCW uses MIDI for it's sound effects as well).

P.S. TCW uses the real old (the first 16-bit Windows incarnations, I think) Miles Sound Drivers: filenames are AILADLIB.DLL/AILCANVS.DLL/AILSBFM.DLL/MIDPAK.AD/etc... The AILCANVS.DLL driver file I can hack to support 300/310/320/330, but if there is no MPU-401 device named as such at one of those addresses in the Device Manager, you're SOL 🙁