Desoldered a Dallas RTC, got careless and impatient. Got the chip off, but had two pins rammed in my finger. 😒 😵

I got up to this, this weekend:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _emulator_in_a/

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _w_80col_video/

bp

Getting extremely frustrated trying to get a Aztech Sound Galaxy Nova 16 Extra II to run along side a Awe64 Gold. I had to leave it as it was boiling my piss!

wiretap wrote:

Today I came across a co-workers post on Facebook where he was giving away two sets of Logitech Z-5500 speakers.. he's going to give me a set tomorrow at work. Then I said "If you have any older computer equipment, I'm interested as well". Then he said that he has a ton of old computers, parts, and games he was just going to throw away since it is taking up way too much space in his closets and attic.. So, I have some mystery crates arriving soon. 😁

Lucky b*stard. I envy you. :]

chkdsk out

HP Pavilion 8480z ATX case
Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D 380W ATX power supply
Arctic 92mm fan
Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L LGA775 ATX motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz quad core processor
ThermalTake Contac 12 cooler
8GB DDR2 RAM
3.5" floppy drive
DVD/RW SATA drive
3.5" USB 2.0 + USB 3.0 front panel combo
Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1600HLFS 160GB 10,000RPM SATA HD
Toshiba 128GB 2.5" SATA SSD
Windows XP Professional
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit dual boot
AMD RADEON HD6570 1GB PCIe video card
Onboard gigabit ethernet
Onboard audio
Creative SoundBlaster Live! PCI sound card
Sony ENX-26 Gigapocket PCI TV tuner
USB 3.0 PCIe card

Minor damage on top corner

Had to cut off some of this rear plastic covering so it wasn't blocking the power connector

The guts!

Guts part II

BIOS screen

Windows XP desktop

Programs and games galore

System info + Speccy

Windows 7 desktop

System info + Speccy

As ugly as it is, works like a charm.

^ Looks like the MS AV on that XP box is up to date (if it wasn't the notification icon would be orange/red if I recall). I thought MS cut off all updates including definitions years ago for the XP version of that.

aweing at this rage128pro trilinear

gca wrote:

^ Looks like the MS AV on that XP box is up to date (if it wasn't the notification icon would be orange/red if I recall). I thought MS cut off all updates including definitions years ago for the XP version of that.

You can install them manually. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/9716 … for-microsoft-s

blakespot wrote:

I got up to this, this weekend: […]
Show full quote

I got up to this, this weekend:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _emulator_in_a/

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _w_80col_video/

bp

mmmm... 500XJ... one of my all time favorite joysticks.

Spent all weekend recording video for a Youtube demo of the Cardinal SNAPplus card on my recent Pentium 100 build.

Also, painted a metal computer case, but the color wasn't quite what I was expecting. My wife commented the color has a 1980s "Golden Girls" set prop look to it. Ok, that's it, the paint stripper is coming out. You win some, you lose some.

Did some benchmarks last night on my Windows 98SE machine, and now, Windows 98SE won't even shut down (attempted to clear the IRQ conflicts to no avail, as well as removing the 128MB RAM stick). The motherboard is a DFI KM266Pro-MLV Rev. B, and I'm going to "re-install" Windows again and see if that helps.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Did some benchmarks last night on my Windows 98SE machine, and now, Windows 98SE won't even shut down (attempted to clear the IRQ conflicts to no avail, as well as removing the 128MB RAM stick). The motherboard is a DFI KM266Pro-MLV Rev. B, and I'm going to "re-install" Windows again and see if that helps.

It's not that NVidia driver shutdown issue is it?

The driver version is 81.98 that I installed (used 71.84 before and it did shutdown with that version). I re-installed the 71.84 driver, going to restart the computer, and do a shutdown test and see what happens.

I also get a Windows Protect Error. Restart your computer message.

Fixed it. It was a bad driver (installed the 71.84 version and it now shuts down without issues), and I also reinstalled the 128MB RAM stick back in and it now has 384MB (368MB + 16MB Shared RAM <-- on-board video cannot be disabled unless I insert an AGP video card).

My SATA adapter arrived today and I hoped to install a SATA HDD to test before the small SSD arrives later this week.

Unfortunately, because the HDD is 500 GB and it's going into my old 486/Pentium Overdrive Packard Bell, it's flaking out.

No worries. I was going to use the Ontrack software to get it to work with the BIOS. Unfortunately, I've since been struggling to get the damn FDD to work. Ugh.

So a good news/bad news kind of evening.

You can tell it's a boring evening when I also received in the mail my Oxo electronics cleaning brush and I've just been pulling out one card after another and have been dusting them and putting them back into their bags, and then moving on to old computers and blowing out with compressed air and then touching up with the brush. 😀

Blake, what's that stand over the 520? Would love to find one for my 1040.

blakespot wrote:

I got up to this, this weekend: […]
Show full quote

I got up to this, this weekend:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _emulator_in_a/

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _w_80col_video/

bp

Oh the joys of early 00's hardware...

Been building my not so totally old stuff into systems someone wants to use for charity. No idea what OS they intend to use, but so as to be sure everything works - and to be able to show that's the case, have installed Lubuntu onto them. Once it's installed, it's plain sailing. But until then rather less so.

The first system is based on an Asrock AliveNF6G-VSTA with an A64 X2 4000+ and 4GB of DDR2 in it. No speed demon, but basically still serviceable for any modern OS and non-gaming, non-HPC use you'd want to throw at it. Should be a breeze, right? Well, first I had physical issues in the case I chose for it - the board is rather wide and the case very compact, so the space for an optical drive was limited. Even though I try to avoid optical if at all possible, playing DVDs is a use case for this kind of system. And of course, none of my DVD drives - not even a very short Samsung one - fit. A CDRW didn't really seem suitable. So had to disassemble the system and build it into the other, larger case. Then came the software install. The board has 4 SATA ports, but Linux didn' like them. Whether it was the motherboard BIOS or a compatibility issue I don't know, but even though I could detect and partition the SATA drive, and it was available as an option for installing the bootloader, the Lubuntu installer stubbonly refused to list it as a possible install target. In the end I just gave up and grabbed my newest PATA drive. At 320GB it was actually larger and newer than the 80GB SATA drive anyway. That workde fine.

Second system was older, an MSI 645E Max2 SiS645DX based board. I wanted so use it with my fastest So478 CPU, a P4 3.06/533 Northwood, but even though the FSB was supported, it wasn't in the QVL and the board refused to boot with it. So had to drop down to 2.56/533, which worked fine. Here the software issues were with booting. This board had USB boot as an option, but stubbornly refused to actually boot from any bootable USB stick. In the end, I downloaded the image on the Athlon64 X2 system and used its DVDRW to burn a disc. Good test: works fine. And the MSI 645E happily booted from it.

Will be glad to get this junk out of the way. Compared to my modern PCs (C2D to i7, all with SSDs) they are slooow, and compared to my old <=P3 DOS & Win98SE systems they are also slow as hell, particularly the P4. Maybe tomorrow I can actually have some fun on my old stuff instead of just testing & installing. But I'm also expecting new old hardware, so probably not yet. Self-inflicted frustration 😉

Not really retro activity, but working on old hardware -

I had to borrow the PSU from a Socket 478 Pentium 4 3.0GHz system I have. Once I'd finished with the PSU and returned it, I decided to do some slight maintenance on the old Pentium 4 system. It has Windows 7 running from a 20GB IDE HDD, but I'd completely forgotten that this PC also had a 40GB IDE HDD installed but not connected.

I connected up the 40GB drive and discovered a working install of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I don't even remember installing that on this PC, but it all seems to work well with the Nvidia drivers installed for the GeForce FX 5700VE 256MB AGP Card. This PC only has 1GB RAM installed and Ubuntu runs a lot better on it than Windows 7 so I might make that the default OS, rather than setting it up as yet another Windows XP system, as I'm not really interested in gaming on this thing.

Other old hardware stuff I got up to - I managed to collect together enough spare parts to put together another Socket AM2 system. Nothing fancy, just a bog standard AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ with 2GB RAM. With the addition of a spare Radeon HD 5450 card, it might make a nice spare HTPC.

DaveJustDave wrote:

Blake, what's that stand over the 520? Would love to find one for my 1040.

blakespot wrote:

I got up to this, this weekend: […]
Show full quote

I got up to this, this weekend:

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _emulator_in_a/

and

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … _w_80col_video/

bp

He posted about it here:

http://www.bytecellar.com/2007/02/13/got_my_micro_ma/

I got the SOJ cache for my Siemens Nixdorf:

Re: (Solved) What kind of cache memory is this?

While I was there I put in a CPU cooler and hooked up my CF drive (power wise) - Issues with that though.

I also got a large box of 360k diskettes (looks like a lot of C64 titles) and two unopened boxes of said 360k diskettes. There's at least 100 in the bag. A coworker gave them to me along with three IDE drives - 30, 60, and 80 gig. A little too new for me to be honest but they'll find a home in something.

I have been mostly pulling my hair out today as I continue to try getting a floppy drive to work in my old Packard Bell PB440. After disassembling it almost entirely and reassembling it, I'm still at square one. This particular PC might be a lost cause as nothing seems to get the built-in FDC or an ISA FDC to work. It's as if there is simply something BIOS-level or something (I have no idea at this point) that is preventing any sort of FDD to work in this system.

I decided to move on to a PC Chips M919 v3.2-based build with a 486/66. The system generally runs well and I am running MS-DOS 7.10 so that I can access the full 6.2 GB of the HDD installed. I ordered a SATA-to-IDE adaptor that arrived today, but I'm striking out completely today. The smallest SATA drive I have, for testing, is 500 GB. I didn't expect to be able to use all of that, even with a drive overlay, but I cannot even get the system to boot at this stage, with it hanging after detecting the boot hard drive and then I suspect attempting to access the SATA drive through the adaptor. I've tried master/slave, running each on their own (primary and secondary) and all sorts of combinations. Nothing seems to work. If I select None, the Ontrack Disk Manager will boot from floppy, but then just hang on loading, with the 3.5" disk just spinning forever. Worse yet, in anticipation of it working, I ordered a 64 GB SSD from Amazon, and at this point, I'm suspecting that it is just a waste. At least it was only $25, but still.

A pretty disheartening day, all said. A lot of time spent working on this and while it was fun at first, the more I could see it simply wasn't coming together, the more and more depressing it got. This is about it for the hardware I have, and so I don't really have other motherboards, etc. that I can experiment with other combinations and I just cannot really afford to purchase more. I've been going in over my head the past few weeks and think I just need to clean up and pack up a lot of this and take a break.