If you want cheap Pentium or PII stuff, look for laptops with TFT screens. There's plenty of them out there that barely get any bids at all, and you can pick them up dirt cheap. I got a dual-scan IBM Thinkpad 380E for £15 that literally needed a 99p CMOS battery and a Windows installation, that was it - it was complete bar the fact it was never specced with a CD drive. I think my Thinkpad 600 was £12 originally, and that just needed a couple of keyboard keys, a charger and a CMOS battery - it even came with Windows still installed. Granted, you're not going to get 3D accelerators in these older laptops.. but those with TFTs are still good ways to play 2D games, as long as you can live with the sometimes patchy Soundblaster support. And these prices include P&P, and are eBay prices...

Skyscraper wrote:

This board looks nice but I guess its not very fast 😀

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-486-motherb … OwAAOSwAYtWKRxV

Bah... Don't believe the naysayers. That board is plenty fast for practical use. You're talking about a board that will take from a 486SX/25 up to a 5x86/133 (AMD or Cyrix) or Pentium Overdrive. I don't care if the memory controller isn't the fastest out there, if someone can't find a sweet spot of performance with that range of CPU's for a 486 era machine, then they're being too picky. Think of all the generic 486 boards that came out back then with all the lack luster performance. I'd take a good FIC IO2 or PIO3 board any day without regrets just as soon as I'd take an ASUS PVI-486SP3 or other quality board.

Dreamer_of_the_past wrote:

Artex wrote:

Sometimes I wonder if it's VOGONS that drives the market. 😀

As a matter of fact it does since the top 4 highest bidders on the Ad Lib are members of Vogons 😊

Amen.

I didn't actually buy but got these for free from my friend. Aureal Vortex 2 PCI sound card and Maxtor Fireball 3 40gb HDD for my PII-450 project. I'm not sure if these work but we'll see soon enough.

Pentium M unopened, they had a bunch of these and Xeon processors, only buy this one, I regret not having buy 2 of them so I can try one in a P4 mobo.

brostenen wrote:

Hope they work.

Same here 😀

kanecvr wrote:

A lot of goodies (mostly Voodoo cards, creative sound cards and Matrox cards) is leaving for me today and should arrive on Monday. They're being sent by my friend at the recycling center. Here are some pics - most of the stuff is identified and labeled. Click for bigger pictures!

Can barely wait 😀

My brain just exploded.

Checkout this Apple II plus clone I just got for free yesterday!

At first I thought this thing was an authentic Apple II plus because I was unfamiliar with Apple II machines and all the variants and badges etc but on closer inspection it turned out to be a Golden II from Taiwan! 🤣 Unfortunately it doesn't actually power on or anything. It had a large mouse nest in it and was totally disgusting everywhere, it was coated in years of dirt and it even looks as though it has been painted mint with a brush by the previous owner. 🤣 I'm probably going to sand and repaint it (probably mint because then it will continue to stand out from ordinary Apple II machines) even though it is currently non-functional and keep it as an oddity to go in my computer collection, after all it's these quirky machines that make great conversation pieces with other collectors. 😁

Below is a picture of the (totally legit) Apple II plus badge. 🤣

Notice on the below image that the top of the board says Golden II in very oriental font and the power connector is different from a real apple, it would seem all these clone boards are similar and use slightly different arrangements of the components from a real apple. As such nothing really fits into the case quite right.

Notice the PSU it wedged in there weirdly, I fully took apart the machine and put it back together and only then did I notice almost none of the components actually line up with the holes on the bottom plate. Even the keyboard doesn't really fit in there nicely.

retrofanatic wrote:

l.neidlinger wrote:

Bought these at a local PC shop that has been around forever for a song.

Very nice Packard you got there. The first thing I would do is back up the entire hard drive in case something happens to the original installation files especially if you can't find info on it on the web.

I opened the CD ROM drive and the original PB system restore disk plopped out. Perfect shape with no scratches. I made an image of it.

Is there a Z-80 chip installed on the motherboard? Some Apple clones managed to sneak into countries that actually bother to enforce their intellectual property laws by shipping with a Z-80 chip on board and empty sockets for a 6502 and a set of pirated Apple ROMS. They got them through customs as CP/M machines, which is what they really were until the 6502 and Apple ROMS were installed. If they were ever questioned about the empty sockets, they could just say they were for possible future expansion or for testing and diagnostic purposes at the factory and nobody would be any wiser. It was actually rather clever how they managed to pull that off.

I managed to pick up a Franklin Ace 1200 a while back because it was relatively cheap and because I didn't have a clone system yet. I have stacks of IIe and IIc machines, but no II+'s or clones apart from the Franklin now.

Nope I don't see any Z80 chips but the MOS 6502 is in plain sight. 🤣 It's a shame it doesn't work I was really psyched to have an Apple II clone but I guess I have the Apple IIc computers I could use. 😜

That's pretty cool though, I didn't know about that. I don't know how they got this thing into the country, I mean it's even labeled as an Apple II +. 🤣

Have you checked the PSU to see if there's any dead caps or any obvious issues in there?

King_Corduroy wrote:

Unfortunately it doesn't actually power on or anything. It had a large mouse nest in it and was totally disgusting everywhere, it was coated in years of dirt and it even looks as though it has been painted mint with a brush by the previous owner.

And I thought Skyscraper's spider was amusing - that's hilarious!

Lukeno94 wrote:

Have you checked the PSU to see if there's any dead caps or any obvious issues in there?

No I'll get to it later, but at the moment I have so many irons in the fire I have to throw it on the side for now. 🤣

Pentium III-800, Cyrix 5x86-100GP and a free haul: Tekram 430TX board (only 256Kb cache, but otherwise perfect ATX S7 stuff), P233MMX, 3 S3s, two SDRAM sticks, a SCSI scanned card (can this be used with other stuff like ZIP drives?), i810 expansion bracket (you never know when these little things will get useful) and a 3.5" cage for my testbench.

Got myself a real AT keyboard for the sweet price of zero dollars 😉 at least my keyboard works 🤣

Found a new local thrift store today that apparently regularly gets in older computer stuff

The PB is an interesting beast and someone upgraded it with an Intel Overdrive 100mhz. its funny cause the case sticker claims it came with a Intel 486SX2-50...yes, SX. I'm guessing that's a misprint. The other case unfortunately just had some boring socket 7 board with boring expansion cards.

also, not exactly retro but high end AGP stuff is getting pricey/scarce.

soviet conscript wrote:

The PB is an interesting beast and someone upgraded it with an Intel Overdrive 100mhz. its funny cause the case sticker claims it came with a Intel 486SX2-50...yes, SX. I'm guessing that's a misprint.

Nope http://www.comparativadigital.com/micro.php?id_micro=137

interesting.

guess I should of researched more. first couple sources I read didn't mention a 50mhz sx and one even specifically claimed no SX chip was made @ 50mhz. I never heard of them before.

It's a 2/50 so 25mz x 2 not straight 50mhz. So those sources are correct. Just typing 486sx 2-50 would have bought up that page. A case of Intel making the most of a faulty cpu yield and not surprising PB bought them.