My non-x86 side got very happy today:

A Sun Sparcstation 20 with a separate SCSI CDRom drive in a 'lunchbox' (slightly newer than the SS20, that styling fits an Ultra 2), a Type 5 keyboard and (ball) mouse, and a spare TurboGX framebuffer.

Then looking inside:

A single MBUS CPU module, an SM61 (60MHz CPU, 50MHz bus) by the look of it, and a fairly miserly 2x 32MB DSIMMs for 64MB of RAM (these things max out at 512MB and Solaris 9 is SLOOOOW under 192MB). If I want to seriously use it, that needs addressing. Finally another TGX framebuffer and a combined Sun SCSI & Ethernet card (not sure why, it's the same SE-SCSI and 10MbE as the thing has onboard), and two SCA SCSI HDDs (1.05GB and 4.2GB). Oh and, the plastic Sun used realy, REALLY didn't age well. Basically anything I touch disintegrates 😒

So, grabbed the relevant cables and my Sun TFT and booted:

Good news: the basic hardware works, with CPU, RAM, HDDs and (after a bit of probing) CDRom all being detected.
Bad news: the inevitable aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa MAC and "The IDPROM contents are invalid". Yep, after a quarter of a century the RTC is dead.

Oh well, I know the drill by now: look for a new NVRAM RTC module or get out that dremel... 😉

I remember using that model of Sparcstation when I worked for SUN. Very slow when doing anything remotely taxing (even opening staroffice took an age) from what I can remember. They were being used well past the time they should have been retired back in the early/mid 2000s. Mind you, the boxes we had were poverty spec which would explain a lot.

Sparc boxes never had the sort of snappy UI experience you had with SGI, Apple or MS, they were heavily optimized for background tasks. That said, as you mention, they tended to be very minimally equipped when it came to RAM, and no system ever felt good thrashing to HDD because common tasks had to run out of swapfile.

15 years ago I had one of these which I upgraded just past 200MB. It made a massive difference - although in retrospect I should have kept it on Solaris 7 or 8. 9 is all very flashy, but it only marginally supported the hardware I had and introduced a lot of overhead. Once RAM was no longer an issue, the CPUs became a huge bottleneck. This time I intend to try Solaris 7, or NetBSD. And just for the sake of it, if I'm happy with Solaris 7 I'll see if I can find a SunPC 486-on-an-SBus-card adapter. But first I need a new NVRAM and some more RAM.

Cool, nice to see this! I also have a SS10 with dual SM81 and a 3D Framebuffer - not touched sice around 15 years....

Cool stuff indeed. Don't those CPUs massively overheat a poor little SS10?

Just found 4x 64MB DSIMMs on an auction site. Did a lowball offer that was accepted right away. Also found both of my preferred electronics vendors stock new M48T08 NVRAM/RTC modules, so will add one to my next order of stuff.

dionb wrote:

Cool stuff indeed. Don't those CPUs massively overheat a poor little SS10?

Yes, the SM81 are not intended for usage in SS10/SS20. A sparcserver had been thrown away in my former company and I picked the 4 CPUs from it. To use them I bought a SS10 and put 2 of them in. It had been running in my office 24/7 for many years without crashing 😎 Now the SS10 is in my basement storage since many years, together with a 14" 13W3 SUN monitor.

Also interesting scrap lot today...selection:

Creative GB0050 Geforce2MX PCI (!)
GF 6800 GT AGP
Hercules S3 Savage 3D AGP
ATI MACH32 VLB

Chips F82C9001 Frame grabber card - seems to be similar to a Creative Video Blaster?

Asrock K8Uprade-NF3
https://www.asrock.com/MB/NVIDIA/K8Upgrade-NF … sp?cat=Download
Running after fixing a loose SMD cap on the back. Was wondering about the 2nd AGP slot, but its for a CPU-upgrade!

dionb wrote:

A Sun Sparcstation 20 with a separate SCSI CDRom drive in a 'lunchbox' (slightly newer than the SS20, that styling fits an Ultra 2), a Type 5 keyboard and (ball) mouse, and a spare TurboGX framebuffer.

Sparc 5 is Faster than a Sparc 20.
Maybe an Ultra-1 ?

Real late 1990's stuff.

Put both Framebuffers in Spac-20 and reboot with "Boot -R" for Dual display support.

Interesting. I bought an HP LaserJet 2200dn printer for a good price. However, it needs cleaning and possibly toner. It has an 802.11b Wi-Fi card installed and it supports Windows 9x and NT4-XP, and other systems (if it does) via Parallel or USB. I'm planning on making an old laptop into a print server that'll run Linux for the LaserJet, DeskJet, and PSC printers in the near future.

I've never seen the point in having a dedicated print server for a private household except boosting your electricity bill.

This was before my dad got a new printer and I was bored AF. Used it for deploying drivers to every Windows OS, AirPrint for the iPad, and Cloud Printing from my Android devices to the printer(s) remotely. I also did a scanner server just for fun.

Got these cards at the thrift a few days ago, for €1 each.

• An ASUS V9280 GeForce 4Ti 128MB, working but the fan was broken so I just mounted this spare CPU fan, going to have to see what to do about it for a permanent fix
• A GeForce FX5200 128MB, that seems to sadly not work, not a great card but it'd be nice for the collection if it'd worked
• Creative Soundblaster Audigy 1394, missing its IO Shield, will probably sacrifice a VIA PCI USB card for its IO Shield, which will be modded for use on this card

Image removed for copyright reasons.

Today I made a 300km round trip to get this one and it wasn't cheap too 🤣

Sellers photo:

Will post my photo in a dedicated CRT thread when I get to it...

It's Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 930SB. Picture quality is amazing even after 15 years. I already own a 22" 2070SB so this is a smaller brother. Now find me a 17" 730SB model 😉

Taking somewhat of a break from the hardware hobby right now, but I couldn't resist two of these Aopen MP965s for ten bucks each:

They have Socket P Core 2 Duos, 1GB DDR2 each (will be maxing both out with 4GB ASAP), Intel GMA X3100 with 256MB shared Vram, 120GB HDDs, HDA audio (5.1 analog out, S/PDIF, or line+mic in selectable), firewire, 4 USB ports, gigabit ethernet, VGA+DVI & composite/component/s-video via dongle. Not bad!

The left one is an MP965-D with a 1.86GHz CPU & CD-RW drive (2008 seems awefully late for a CD-only drive but that's how they came!), the right one is an MP965-DR with a 2GHz chip and a DVD+/-RW.

One came with XBMC loaded (pictured) and the other had WinXP with some digital signage control software that I would have loved to grab copies of. Unfortunately that HDD died almost immediately the first time I booted it up. Oh well.

(Incidentally, the keyboard is a $3.99 thrift store find that ended up needing a total teardown & isopropyl toothbrush scrub. Was worth it though, it's a fully mechanical with Cherry Blue clone switches (Kalih blues) & RGB backlighting. It even has an Attract Mode. That's a story for another thread eventually.)

They're some kind of milled aluminum shell with plastic top & bottom panels. If you think they look a lot like contemporary Mac Minis, well, yes, that's exactly what they look like:

Planning to use one for a RetroArch or Lakka box on my big CRT via its component video jack. Not sure about the other yet.

so my viewsonic p817 was giving me grief.

picked this one up as a replacement.

viewsonic pf815. i like it. 😁

Bought these last week.

Addtech 4GLX3, Diamond Speedstar (Tsenglabs ET4000AX), EFA 4DMU-HL3S. All were under $40 each! Had to visually search for the Addtech board for configuration settings; it's very similar to the Computrend MS4123 which uses the Contaq chipset as does the Addtech, but the cache sockets are horizontal, not vertical.

Got a NOS PR440FX today. Mounted it in a NOS server case from 1998. It's so nice working with new, clean parts where everything goes together exactly the way it's supposed to.

nice!

mmmm NT4 server

A Canadian seller over @ VCF was offering up a pair of these new old stock Teac FF-3010/700 floppy/tape combo drives. Decided I had to have one before they disappeared. Probably wont use the tape drive portion, but this will look cool in my upcoming Socket 8 build.