Damaniel wrote:

Yesterday I set my 3 retro PCs back up again (a 486, a Pentium MMX and a Pentium 3 system) after having used the space to refurbish an Amiga 2000 that I picked up for cheap a few months ago. Everything is set up to share a common keyboard (AT-style), mouse (Microsoft mouse with both serial and PS/2 support), speakers and monitor - I couldn't get a standard KVM to work right due to all the different ports and connectors, so I'm using old-fashioned switch boxes to make it all work.

That is a very nice box (the one on the desk with LCD display) you have. Also, could you share some details on your switch box? How did you do it?

As for me, I have picked up custom-made accumulator (6V, 80mAh, 2 pins, 28mm length) to replace the one that leaked on the AT board (wrote about it earlier last month), soldered it in and played with the computer for a while. Seems to be working great. Now it is time to assemble the whole thing and put some games in! Wubba lubba dub dub!

dionb wrote:

the_ultra_code wrote:

Oh, that reminds me. I forgot to mention that I tried using two different ATX PSUs (the one I initially used, an EVGA 430W 80+ White ATX PSU, as well as a Corsair 550W 80+ Bronze ATX PSU, and both times the same behavior was exhibited.

I neither have nor ever used an AT PSU before, and this motherboard doen't have an AT power plug, either, only ATX. :\

Hmm... there are a few (very few) early ATX boards that absolutely need -5V to boot and those new PSUs don't have it. Bit of a long shot but worth looking into if you:?'ve ruled out the obvious.

*shrug*

Sure, why not? Any suggestions as to how to search for such ATX PSUs with a -5V rail?

Actually, this StarTech ATX PSU should do the trick, no?
https://www.startech.com/Computer-Parts/PSUs/ … ply~ATXPOWER300

the_ultra_code wrote:

dionb wrote:

the_ultra_code wrote:

Oh, that reminds me. I forgot to mention that I tried using two different ATX PSUs (the one I initially used, an EVGA 430W 80+ White ATX PSU, as well as a Corsair 550W 80+ Bronze ATX PSU, and both times the same behavior was exhibited.

I neither have nor ever used an AT PSU before, and this motherboard doen't have an AT power plug, either, only ATX. :\

Hmm... there are a few (very few) early ATX boards that absolutely need -5V to boot and those new PSUs don't have it. Bit of a long shot but worth looking into if you:?'ve ruled out the obvious.

*shrug*

Sure, why not? Any suggestions as to how to search for such ATX PSUs with a -5V rail?

Look for any 2nd hand from before ~2002.

Or buy an adapter to get 5V with the current PSUs, search eBay for atx "-5v"
(note that you need those inverted commas to get sensible results)

Actually, this StarTech ATX PSU should do the trick, no?
https://www.startech.com/Computer-Parts/PSUs/ … ply~ATXPOWER300

Yep, that has -5V and nice beefy 3.3V and 5V lines. If (big question) it's reliable and actually can deliver those specs it should be ideal for retro stuff, albeit at a stiff price for a noname low-end thing. An ATX-to-ATX adapter with -5V converter would be cheaper...

dionb wrote:

Actually, this StarTech ATX PSU should do the trick, no?
https://www.startech.com/Computer-Parts/PSUs/ … ply~ATXPOWER300

Yep, that has -5V and nice beefy 3.3V and 5V lines. If (big question) it's reliable and actually can deliver those specs it should be ideal for retro stuff, albeit at a stiff price for a noname low-end thing. An ATX-to-ATX adapter with -5V converter would be cheaper...

That's why you go on Amazon and pay $20 less. 😀

I'll try out the StarTech solution (I mean, it's not like at least a quarter of the parts I have used in both my Pentium 3 and 4 machines are StarTech 🤣); I prefer new vs. old, and purpose-built over adapted, but that's just me. 😀

But I'll keep that pre-2002 rule in mind for PSUs if I plan to do anymore Pentium-and-before builds in the future. You can find plenty of great deals on ebay for great parts. I think today, though, I'm too lazy to do the ebay search. 😀

Thanks!

Damaniel wrote:

Yes, it's evil hard - like I said, it's an early prototype and I was just playing around with ball physics. The plan is to use a more 'normal' level as a first level and progress to harder stages later.

As for the MOVEIT issue, the problem was git and line endings. DOS is really picky and git really wants people using Unix-style line endings. I didn't notice it because cloning works fine, but grabbing the ZIP file doesn't. I fixed the repo so both the cloned version and ZIP file should work correctly now.

Speaking of, I compiled the Damanoid, and MOVEIT games in DOSBox 0.74 successfully. Tetris-clone played without issues and the music and sfx are amazing on there.

However, Locgaed doesn't play nicely, but compiled successfully (I know it's a sprite sheet editor) and I believe it's because of a video issue in DOSBox 0.74 or I just need to change the video mode from VGA to CGA.

appiah4 wrote:

brostenen wrote:

The keyboard is dead. 🙁 Tested it with systest. So now I have to get another one.
I might find another Amiga in bad shape, and see if I can put together one complete system.

Can you detail 'dead'? It may be a lot of things, some of which are actually fixable on an A500..

1/3 of the keys are working fine. 1/3 is all dead. The last keys will activate a lot of keys at the same time. As an example. Then if I press caps-lock, then every single key on the same horisontal row, will activate. I have tested it with the tool called "systest". It is not odd/even-cia, as there is no difference when I swap then around.

EDIT:
I might have sourced a replacement keyboard with danish layout, and an RF shield. Else, I need to look for a german one and just swapp keycaps.

brostenen wrote:

Shure you can find Amiga's that are cheaper than ready build 386/486 machines. It is the big box ones, that are the expensive on […]
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Shure you can find Amiga's that are cheaper than ready build 386/486 machines. It is the big box ones, that are the expensive ones. On the other hand. If you want an 486 on the best VLB board, with the fastest VLB VGA card, the best VLB controller, AWE64-Gold and Gravis ultrasound. Well... Then be prepared to spend Amiga-4000 kind of money. Even more expensive, would be to buy the best parts for a K6-3-550+ machine with Voodoo5 and all the other good things. All in all... Amiga's are not really that expensive. It is the good hardware that are really expensive. And then of course, there is the rare models like the Commodore Amiga-4000-Tower. Around 200 machines build. They are like in the league of Voodoo5-6000 range of pricetag.

As I said. Amiga500 OCS model's can be bought for anything between 78 and 150 US Dollars (excluding shipping) and a ready build 486dx2-66 can be bought for anything between 120 and 312 US Dollars (excluding shipping). Shure you need to buy that monitor extra for both machines, yet the Amiga500 comes with keyboard build in and comes with a mouse as standard. And there are still being produced brand new hardware for Amiga500's and there is both a new plastic case production run in the making and there is an Amiga500 motherboard replica in the works. (as well as an Amiga4000 motherboard project)

EDIT:
I did some reserach on 1991/93's money in todays currency. (inflation and stuff). Back when the Amiga3000-UX was first introduced, it was sold at a price tag of roughly 8000 US Dollars in todays money. The 4000 was sold at 2800 US Dollars in todays money.

Your A500 prices definitely aren't coming from US eBay, because $100-150 for a basic system BEFORE SHIPPING is the lower bound, and they go for around $200-250 easily. Perhaps it would be possible on a VCF consignment table, but I'm not holding my breath on that.

It's because of this that I'm starting to think that the big box Amigas like the A2000 can actually be cheaper here in the US, if found locally so you don't have to pay for shipping on a steel-cased desktop. The trick is that while the Amiga never had PC/Mac levels of adoption at home here, the Video Toaster made it a fairly common workstation setup, so you have to check the same places you might find old Sony PVM/BVM monitors at.

In turn, the A1200 doesn't have anywhere near the proliferation here that it does over in Europe, so the prices aren't that much cheaper than an A4000, especially if you want to add a 68040 accelerator (and let's not get started on 68060/PowerPC). Maybe the trick is to actually import from eBay UK or some other European marketplace.

I never looked much into 486 builds, but that's not a market I've looked into much. Modern builds of DOSBox would handle anything I'd run on a system that old and then some, and I have my Pentium 4 EE box with a fully-functional ISA slot in case I want to run some kind of sound or peripheral card that DOSBox doesn't currently emulate. I'd also probably be quite underwhelmed by a 486DX2-66 if it winds up getting framedrops in Doom, Rise of the Triad, Descent, etc.

I am well aware of the effects inflation has on perceived pricing, though. If anything, we still pay far less for those systems today than when they were new, but the value proposition has skewed from "top-of-the-line" to "hopelessly obsolete" for most users. You could build a modest modern gaming PC for the price of a typical A4000, one that could easily outrun the A4000 in WinUAE a million times over and not require you to buy specific keyboards, mice and monitors.

But in turn, being able to use a keyboard with the correct layout, circumventing any emulation quirks, being able to actually read genuine Amiga floppies (something no PC or Mac can do without very specialized floppy controller hardware), being able to use real Zorro II/III cards (I'm waiting on an Emplant so I can test LocalTalk over serial between the A4000 and my Power Mac 9600, among other things utilizing RS-422), all that stuff is what makes the difference for most of us on a forum like this.

Yeah. They are insanely expensive in the US. And those are mostly NTSC models. What you want, are the PAL models, then you have this issue of scandoubler that you need to purchase or get an SCART to HDMI converter that actually works.

As an example. Then there is an Amiga500 for sale locally. The price are 600 Danish Kroners. That is 93/94 US Dollars.
https://www.dba.dk/amiga-500-andet-god-1mb/id-1045807878/
It comes with two joysticks, power supply and a mouse. Fair condition. Only negative thing, is that the case have
been fixed after a gotek has been installed previously. I have no clue on what shipping will be from DK to US.

Tested the IIyama 510pro and unfortunately... the red gun seems to be off/dying - black has a red tint.

Soldering and testing this evening. Not happy with results.

Only one out of three boards I re-capped is working, and of course it's the least interesting of the three (a Compaq/HP 'Garcia' i815 A-stepping uATX thing with no ISA and very little to recommend it other than the fact it works). The MSI MS-6198, Via ApolloPro133A uATX with AGP 4x, PCI and ISA, and support for 1GB of RAM was the board I really wanted to get running. Six new caps later and it's still not responding at all. Only thing left to try is to re-flash the BIOS, so will do that tomorrow or the day after. And thanks to a soldered PLCC32 EEPROM the Gigabyte Via PLE133T Tualatin-ready board doesn't even have that option (no, I'm not going to de-solder a PLCC32, then flash then re-solder it (or solder on a socket if I can find one) unless I *REALLY* want to save an exceptional board). So removed the new caps again and binned it.

Also mixed bag with GPUs. Good news is that my recently acquired Radeon 9600 All-In-Wonder works flawlessly (at least with VGA & video out, didn't test the 'in' bit), and not too concerned about a bog-standard Gf4MX being dead, but the 9800Pro I was looking forward to using seems to have problems with the DAC (speckles/blocks of odd colour depending on video mode):

If it's the DAC, it might be fine using DVI, so will check that soon.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Damaniel wrote:

Yes, it's evil hard - like I said, it's an early prototype and I was just playing around with ball physics. The plan is to use a more 'normal' level as a first level and progress to harder stages later.

As for the MOVEIT issue, the problem was git and line endings. DOS is really picky and git really wants people using Unix-style line endings. I didn't notice it because cloning works fine, but grabbing the ZIP file doesn't. I fixed the repo so both the cloned version and ZIP file should work correctly now.

Speaking of, I compiled the Damanoid, and MOVEIT games in DOSBox 0.74 successfully. Tetris-clone played without issues and the music and sfx are amazing on there.

However, Locgaed doesn't play nicely, but compiled successfully (I know it's a sprite sheet editor) and I believe it's because of a video issue in DOSBox 0.74 or I just need to change the video mode from VGA to CGA.

RE: LOCGAED - Another bug - an overly aggressive .gitignore was actually keeping essential files out of the repo. Fixed now. This is why it's useful to have other people checking these things for me. 😀

For retro activities today, I spent some time playing around with telnet BBSes on my 486. Later, I'm going to set up some additional development applications (MASM and Turbo C++) and Norton Commander on there too. Someday I'm going to sit down and become better acquainted with x86 assembly language so I can expand on the CGA library that I'm using.

brostenen wrote:

1/3 of the keys are working fine. 1/3 is all dead. The last keys will activate a lot of keys at the same time. As an example. Then if I press caps-lock, then every single key on the same horisontal row, will activate. I have tested it with the tool called "systest". It is not odd/even-cia, as there is no difference when I swap then around.

EDIT:
I might have sourced a replacement keyboard with danish layout, and an RF shield. Else, I need to look for a german one and just swapp keycaps.

Sounds like a membrane issue, you probably don't need a whole new keyboard swap for this, though it's not bad to get a whole keyboard to be safe and for spares..

appiah4 wrote:

brostenen wrote:

1/3 of the keys are working fine. 1/3 is all dead. The last keys will activate a lot of keys at the same time. As an example. Then if I press caps-lock, then every single key on the same horisontal row, will activate. I have tested it with the tool called "systest". It is not odd/even-cia, as there is no difference when I swap then around.

EDIT:
I might have sourced a replacement keyboard with danish layout, and an RF shield. Else, I need to look for a german one and just swapp keycaps.

Sounds like a membrane issue, you probably don't need a whole new keyboard swap for this, though it's not bad to get a whole keyboard to be safe and for spares..

Possibly the membrane. I have no means of testing at all, if it is the membran, pcb or both.
I have found a fellow Amiga user, that have spare keyboards and a spare shield. At the moment, I am in the process of negotiating a trade. The matrix/keyboard pcb that are on my current dead keyboard, have a crusty connector to the membrane. So if he agree to let a complete keyboard go, then I will replace the red led, and he will be getting my old parts as a bonus. He is much interrested in different small parts.

For me.... I been playing with acetone. 😈
Today I started to weld the broken top part of the case. I am lucky, that it is only small pieces of a half to one millimeter that are missing. The job seems straight forward to fix. For this job, I am using pure acetone and a tiny brush with natural hair. The way I am working, is to moist the cracked surface, wait a tiny bit untill the plastic is beginning to dissolv,, and then press the parts together untill it feel like it is bunding. Then it let it sit and harden. I have done two out of three spots, were the case have been broken. When it is hardened, I will use the old broken trapdoor cover, to make small rods to reinforce the case from the backside, and make shure it will be able to take stress in the long run. I will make ABS/acetone paste as well, using the same plastic, dissolved to a paste in acetone. To make a kind of plastic cement.

What I did not know, is that the type of plastic that Commodore used, becomes a kind of raspberry-jam-pink'ish color, when exposed to acetone. This means that I have to do a paintjob on the case. This is not a problem as such, as I have thought about spraypainting, if something goes wrong. The pink'ish color are only cosmetic anyway. The good part, is that the structure of the case have been fixed.

As this is the first time that I do this at all, then of course the job is not perfect. It is misaligned by a tiny bit, though it is acceptable, when taking in, that I did it without any alignment tools or anything like that. To me, it looks ok and passable. Case-work not done yet, though I am getting there.

I've been out of the retro game for a while due to real life taking over but I found some time today to open a sealed copy of Microsoft Works for Windows (3.1) that I've had stashed for a few years and install it on my 486SX 33.

This software got me through high school / uni so there are a lot of fond (and not so fond) memories attached - I recall for example my sister typing out a 2000 word + assignment and then calling me in when the dot-matrix printer wouldn't grind in to action. The first thing to do of course was to reboot the PC but no auto-save in those days and she hadn't saved her work - I was in big trouble and had to type it all out again. Seems a little unfair now that I think of it 😒

The welding of the case are complete... Not the best job. It is after all, my first time doing this.

I added some reinforcement rods on the back. The material that I used, was small pieces of the trapdoor cover. Wich were broken years ago, and only been held in place with tape. No loss, as a replacement can be found on eBay for next to nothing.

Made a silly meme.

brostenen wrote:

Possibly the membrane. I have no means of testing at all, if it is the membran, pcb or both. I have found a fellow Amiga user, t […]
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appiah4 wrote:

brostenen wrote:

1/3 of the keys are working fine. 1/3 is all dead. The last keys will activate a lot of keys at the same time. As an example. Then if I press caps-lock, then every single key on the same horisontal row, will activate. I have tested it with the tool called "systest". It is not odd/even-cia, as there is no difference when I swap then around.

EDIT:
I might have sourced a replacement keyboard with danish layout, and an RF shield. Else, I need to look for a german one and just swapp keycaps.

Sounds like a membrane issue, you probably don't need a whole new keyboard swap for this, though it's not bad to get a whole keyboard to be safe and for spares..

Possibly the membrane. I have no means of testing at all, if it is the membran, pcb or both.
I have found a fellow Amiga user, that have spare keyboards and a spare shield. At the moment, I am in the process of negotiating a trade. The matrix/keyboard pcb that are on my current dead keyboard, have a crusty connector to the membrane. So if he agree to let a complete keyboard go, then I will replace the red led, and he will be getting my old parts as a bonus. He is much interrested in different small parts.

For me.... I been playing with acetone. 😈
Today I started to weld the broken top part of the case. I am lucky, that it is only small pieces of a half to one millimeter that are missing. The job seems straight forward to fix. For this job, I am using pure acetone and a tiny brush with natural hair. The way I am working, is to moist the cracked surface, wait a tiny bit untill the plastic is beginning to dissolv,, and then press the parts together untill it feel like it is bunding. Then it let it sit and harden. I have done two out of three spots, were the case have been broken. When it is hardened, I will use the old broken trapdoor cover, to make small rods to reinforce the case from the backside, and make shure it will be able to take stress in the long run. I will make ABS/acetone paste as well, using the same plastic, dissolved to a paste in acetone. To make a kind of plastic cement.

What I did not know, is that the type of plastic that Commodore used, becomes a kind of raspberry-jam-pink'ish color, when exposed to acetone. This means that I have to do a paintjob on the case. This is not a problem as such, as I have thought about spraypainting, if something goes wrong. The pink'ish color are only cosmetic anyway. The good part, is that the structure of the case have been fixed.

As this is the first time that I do this at all, then of course the job is not perfect. It is misaligned by a tiny bit, though it is acceptable, when taking in, that I did it without any alignment tools or anything like that. To me, it looks ok and passable. Case-work not done yet, though I am getting there.

Acetone-Welding-01.jpg

Acetone-Welding-02.jpg

Acetone-Welding-03.jpg

Acetone and plastics is a big no no you should have used plastic cement easily found in most scale model / hobby shops.

appiah4 wrote:

Acetone and plastics is a big no no you should have used plastic cement easily found in most scale model / hobby shops.

Why? It is working like a charm. It is the same compound, found in the glue that you use for plastic model building.
Just checked to see if there was beginning to show any damage on the outer surface, other than the pink'ish colour.
And everything seems like it is ok. The part that I have fused and the rods are feeling rock hard now.

Going to paint it anyway. I just have not found any colour that I like yet. Thinking about warm orange, earthtoned brown or
some other kind of 70's palette of cosy colour.

brostenen wrote:

Why? It is working like a charm. It is the same compound, found in the glue that you use for plastic model building. Just checke […]
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appiah4 wrote:

Acetone and plastics is a big no no you should have used plastic cement easily found in most scale model / hobby shops.

Why? It is working like a charm. It is the same compound, found in the glue that you use for plastic model building.
Just checked to see if there was beginning to show any damage on the outer surface, other than the pink'ish colour.
And everything seems like it is ok. The part that I have fused and the rods are feeling rock hard now.

Going to paint it anyway. I just have not found any colour that I like yet. Thinking about warm orange, earthtoned brown or
some other kind of 70's palette of cosy colour.

Pure acetone and diluted acetone found in plastic cement are not the same thing, that's like cleaning your electronics with pure acetic acid because vinegar cleans rust well 😀