Not my own pic, but I just recently scored a Chaintech 6ITM with a Pentium Pro 200Mhz/512kb + unknown (probably 64MB) amount of EDO RAM.

Excuse the crappy pic, grabbed it from the listing.

Now to contemplate what I'm gonna build with this thing.

The very first computer I used as a wee toddler (with grandad's supervision of course!) was a Tandy CoCo.

Now, 25 years later, I have one of my own.

This is all from last Saturday, at a flea market I've never been before. Nothing amazing but not bad either.

Amazingly I found the fake cache 486 board inside a trashed Dell Optiplex case I spotted lying on the sidewalk. As the old saying goes, the best things in life are free. 😵

I don't find anything decent at local used store very often, but sometimes about once every few months.. I find gems.

Today, found this for $9.99 + sales tax:

-I THINK- this is a KYRO I core PowerVR AGP card, I'm not sure but I do believe it is. Which because the store had a "every other item is half off", well.. that made the next item half off. The capacitors look to be a little domed, I might have to re-cap this at some point if it doesn't work right off. Hopefully maybe it will.

Original sticker was $5.99, but with half off I was only charged $2.99 + tax:

Diamond Stealth 3000 3D PCI card. Complete with memory expansion board. I'm tickled to have this one. 😀

EDIT: Popped the heatsink off, yep deffinetely a KYRO I card, yay!

just going to point this out, but you have bad caps on that 3d prophet 4000xt. The 3 green ones are about ready to pop.

luckybob wrote:

just going to point this out, but you have bad caps on that 3d prophet 4000xt. The 3 green ones are about ready to pop.

Actually they're just domed a little bit, they're not burst and they're not leaking yet. I have an AthlonXP motherboard with caps domed just like this and it works 100% perfectly in all respects without problems, even overclocked significantly. I won't know for a while yet how this thing performs but if it works like it is then I won't bother with it. Just because some caps are domed a little doesn't always mean they're bad. Sometimes they are, I may be looking at re-capping this thing, we'll see with time.

Replace those caps. Well worth it 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Replace those caps. Well worth it 😀

I'm thinking about it. I'm still re-building my retro computing area at our new home after the move here, so we'll see. Even after buying caps for it and the original price, it should be a decent find 😀

EDIT: I stuck em both in a coppermine system and the KYRO I comes up and shows POST even with the "domed" capacitors, works just great.

EDIT: even runs phil's dos benchmark suite without problems, I probably won't be recapping it after all.

It works for now but domed caps are definitely a sign of impending failure. It probably won't fail outright, just eventually get more and more unstable.
Or they might go BANG then stop working 😀 That tends to be much less common with electrolytics though.

Not only that but you could be doing damage to other components in your system due to ripple currents caused by the faulty caps.

Got these 3 Pentium 4 motherboards. The large AOpen has SIS chipset, the other ones are Intel.

I got them for 99 cent each, but postage was $15 a pop and it appears the seller paid $21 which is odd, seeing the seller used an eBay satchel and each box only weighs a Kg. Has AusPost increased prices on 3Kg Satchels?

Also the AOpen board (Intel chipset) doesn't post. Shame as this was the one I wanted to use for my Voodoo 2 benchmarking marathon 🙁

"Adventurous packing". Bubble wrap and stuck in a satchel :thumbdn:

Some images:

With the Abit I Expected some fancy looking BIOS, but nope, looks pretty standard. There was a BIOS password but I CMOS cleared it.

Non POSTing AOpen Intel chipset board :upset:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I got them for 99 cent each, but postage was $15 a pop and it appears the seller paid $21 which is odd, seeing the seller used an eBay satchel and each box only weighs a Kg. Has AusPost increased prices on 3Kg Satchels?

No mate you just live in the middle of nowhere 🤣 I got charged noticeably more than I usually do when sending those ISA cards to you.

So these satchels are only flat rate to cities, not "everywhere?" That's annoying.

The boards are cheap, but with postage you're looking at $60 and that's really pushing it...

At least you only need so many boards I guess 😀

Some boards are cheaper to send from the UK 😢

Phil if you are so interested in Pentium 4 boards i can send a couple with cpu's to you in exchange of a piece of Roland gear... 😈

carlostex wrote:

Phil if you are so interested in Pentium 4 boards i can send a couple with cpu's to you in exchange of a piece of Roland gear... 😈

Now you tell me? After I ordered all the P4 CPUs 🤣

New cards in my collection:

Triplex Millennium Silver Ti 4200 (nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4200) - nice silver coated card

Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT (PowerVR Kyro I)

Matrox Millennium G200 PCI

S3 DeltaChrome S8 Pro

Infotronic HS Quasar D

Intergraph Intense3D 100 (Rendition Verite V1000-E)

Quantum3D Obsidian2 S-12 PCI (3dfx Voodoo II 12 MB)

3dfx Voodoo 4 4500 PCI - got it for 10 eur

Appian Jeronimo Pro (Dual 3DLabs Permedia 2)

easy_john wrote:

Roland MT-32. Upgraded to "Quasimidi". http://kawai.spb.ru/photo/d/122355-2/Roland_MT32_f.JPG. Additional 4 outputs "effect-free […]
Show full quote

Roland MT-32. Upgraded to "Quasimidi".
.
Additional 4 outputs "effect-free" (no reverb?)
.
Inside. Additional board, different roms:
.
Outputs board and battery under it.
. .
Boot messages:
.

There a hard to find any information about this upgrade. If someone know detail about changes - please write to me.

Did you learn something about it?

Stojke wrote:

easy_john wrote:

Roland MT-32. Upgraded to "Quasimidi".
There a hard to find any information about this upgrade. If someone know detail about changes - please write to me.

Did you learn something about it?

Right now I'm trying start it to work. There some problems right now, loopback test is ok but analog outputs is wrong.
On this week I receive rom with default mt32 firmware and test if it will work ok.

easy_john wrote:

On this week

It's 'This week' 😢

DonutKing wrote:

It works for now but domed caps are definitely a sign of impending failure. It probably won't fail outright, just eventually get more and more unstable.
Or they might go BANG then stop working 😀 That tends to be much less common with electrolytics though.

Not only that but you could be doing damage to other components in your system due to ripple currents caused by the faulty caps.

Well I'm not very good at soldering, so typically I'm of the "If it works, don't fix it" crowd with retro hardware, I'd probably do more damage than fix it.

easy_john wrote:

Stojke wrote:

easy_john wrote:

Roland MT-32. Upgraded to "Quasimidi".
There a hard to find any information about this upgrade. If someone know detail about changes - please write to me.

Did you learn something about it?

Right now I'm trying start it to work. There some problems right now, loopback test is ok but analog outputs is wrong.
On this week I receive rom with default mt32 firmware and test if it will work ok.

Cool. Good luck 😀