Muppets4 wrote:

a Crystal chip from Packard Bell. Both ISA bus.

That's Aztech OEM card. It's similar to AZT1605 I38-MMSN822.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I would guess that the cover somehow puts pressure on the floppy drive, preventing it from working correctly. This might be the […]
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amadeus777999 wrote:

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Removing the cover is enough.

Such a fiddle-fiddely issue sucks as the machine feels incomplete without a working disk drive. Any tips - should I try a zip drive as a substitute? I thought about a floppy emulator but the buttons wouldn't be reachable due to the depth of the opening in the chassis.

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I would guess that the cover somehow puts pressure on the floppy drive, preventing it from working correctly. This might be the cover hitting the drive in some way, or maybe deforming the chassis when it is on the case?

You could try loosening the screws holding the drive a bit and then putting the cover on.

Also, did you try without the heavy monitor sitting on the case with the cover on?

Fortunately it was a bit more trivial...
since it was aeons I had a normal case I put it together wrongly, not letting the front nudges hook into the chassis... all good now albeit the slot for the floppy still seems a hair too small to guarantee problem free ejection with a substitute drive.

Bought this IBM Personal Computer 300GL for 10 EUR. I would probably pass it, since it is not my particular year of interest, but through closer inspection of other sellers photos of it's internals, I saw a little pearl sparkling inside - A CT3600 Creative sound card. Now that is worth buying, I said to myself.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Muppets4 wrote:

a Crystal chip from Packard Bell. Both ISA bus.

That's Aztech OEM card. It's similar to AZT1605 I38-MMSN822.

Thanks

Turbo -> wrote:

Bought this IBM Personal Computer 300GL for 10 EUR. I would probably pass it, since it is not my particular year of interest, but through closer inspection of other sellers photos of it's internals, I saw a little pearl sparkling inside - A CT3600 Creative sound card. Now that is worth buying, I said to myself.

That's one nice looking machine.
Regarding the soundcard, do you have large enough modules for the biggest configuration?

Muppets4 wrote:

Just arrived in the mail: two sound cards […]
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Just arrived in the mail: two sound cards

One AWE64 CT4500 and a Crystal chip from Packard Bell. Both ISA bus.

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That first one is an Aztech board.

More good luck out in thrift shops! Got a MIDISPORT 4x4 for $4 at a Goodwill (same one I got my PVM at... good luck there I guess), so I can finally ditch the cluttered mess of UM-1s I have and run everything that isn't USB MIDI through a single source 😀

Sweet MIDI setup. Speaking of retro hardware purchases, I purchased an Evergreen 586 on Amazon.

Here are a couple of the goodies I have gotten lately... I could probably fill a few pages of posts if I posted everything.. so maybe I will just list some fo the other stuff and if people want pictures then I will post them.

First up is a soundcard that came with a QDSP based wavetable daughtercard. The sound card has a CX4237B-X03 chipset.
The one ROM is 8M-bit and the other is 1M-bit. I looked up the datasheets. Anybody have a clue why there are two different sized ROMs?

And got this for $10 + shipping - sellers pic. It is a Prometeia phase change CPU cooler. Always wanted a phase change unit. Anybody think that this would be good to push a K6-2+ or K6-3+ to 720Mhz?
I will just have to make a mounting bracket, CPU socket shim, and come up with some way to insulate the back of the motherboard, etc.
Wondering if it has had the R404a refrigerant mod done on it which was a popular mod to have done in order to increase the cooling capacity.
Full review of one of these can be seen here:
http://www.dwpg.com/cooling/phase-change-cool … percooling.html

Some other things I have picked up lately.
Roland SC-55 GS with 1.20 firmware... got it for cheap and it is in excellent condition.
Roland SC-155
SC8500 sound card (Crystal / Dream chipsets with 72-pin SIMM slot)
Tseng ET4000/W32 VLB video card
Intel chipset based 486 PCI/ISA/VLB motherboard.

This will soon come to me:

Also managed to make an absolute score on a high end MIDI patchbay with SMPTE on Ebay. It's complete with all cables, manuals, software CD and box and cost me 80 bucks shipped when similar units have BINs of 120 bucks excluding shipping.

amadeus777999 wrote:

Turbo -> wrote:

Bought this IBM Personal Computer 300GL for 10 EUR. I would probably pass it, since it is not my particular year of interest, but through closer inspection of other sellers photos of it's internals, I saw a little pearl sparkling inside - A CT3600 Creative sound card. Now that is worth buying, I said to myself.

That's one nice looking machine.
Regarding the soundcard, do you have large enough modules for the biggest configuration?

I don't know... I don't think this particular computer is frendly for bigger cards. The photo doesn't show it clearly, but the slot 1 CPU bracket is too close to ISA slots. In fact, the sound card was touching the slot 1 bracket when installed, and was actually bend a little. So I had to take off the cpu and that slot bracket on the right, to successfully remove the sound card.

Recieved these two things. HDD shock absorber and Amiga Boot Selector...
The shock absorber is to lower the resonanse of fast spinning SCSI harddrives, like that of 10.000 to 15.000 rpm.

Just bought three of these RAM heatspreaders for my Tualatin:

Not exactly "retro" per se but considering the computer that is going to use these... I suppose they can do more good than harm since the RAM is running overclocked.

I have a few of those myself and they are pretty darn cool for SD-RAM and DDR memory. Then along came DDR2 that has heatspreaders integrated. Wish they did the same with M.2 and mSATA SSD drives.

You don't need heatspreaders even for overclocked SDRAM.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

You don't need heatspreaders even for overclocked SDRAM.

Yeah I don't recall any memory before DDR2 running warm actually.

Well, I had a coupon from EBay that I could spend in electronics and so, why not using it for that purpose. 😜
Although they aren't RDRAM like hot, my sticks do get warm to the touch. The heatspreaders at least will help them running cooler, which is always good.

Found a boxed "Game Wizard" Voodoo 2 card for the iMac, been looking for one of these for a while. Excited to finally try one out. 😀

That's rather interesting to see something like that. Will there be a video about this in the future?

bjwil1991 wrote:

That's rather interesting to see something like that. Will there be a video about this in the future?

there is a video in the works, yes 😉