Had to drive all the way across the country for this small country though but it was worth it:

1984 vintage Olivetti M24. In extremely good external condition. And booting. With RTC still OK according to post 😲

8086-8
RAM apparently maxed to 640k
HDD present (most likely an ST-225)

I was looking for another working ST-506 drive, a monochrome monitor and had been fascinated reading about stamasd's adventures with ROM images in an XT. All pricey and/or hard to come by. And then I saw this. Amazingly it had been available on the local craigslist-variant for two months for a very low price with clear photographs and description, but absolutely no interest (despite people normally descending on any <Pentium stuff like a pack of rabid wolves). The only drawback: despite being famed for being one of the most PC compatible of the early clones in terms of software, hardware is a different story entirely. Particularly the keyboard, with both a different pinout and protocol to either PC, XT or AT. And guess what the seller didn't have...

Still, it seems to work, the machine is exceptionally well-documented, and there's something of a community for these things (and I have an Italian friend who is also marginally into vintage hw and can help with translation if needed) so I'll either source a keyboard or figure out some kind of converter soon enough 😀

My Dreamblaster X2 arrives today. Is it considered retro? 😀

Not exactly my definition of retro but still a wonderful piece of hardware.

@dionb: That Olivetti looks suspiciously clean and almost new from the oustide. You sure there's not some kind of a RetroPi inside pretending to be an ancient Olivetti? 😁

blurks wrote:

@dionb: That Olivetti looks suspiciously clean and almost new from the oustide. You sure there's not some kind of a RetroPi inside pretending to be an ancient Olivetti? 😁

If it is, it's incredibly well-disguised:

Just as improbably clean inside as it is outside. That battery has to go though - although given the motherboard is upside-down, it might not kill the board if it started seriously leaking.
There is dust, OLD dust everywhere that has significant airflow, just very, very small amounts of it. It's as if this machine was used in some kind of clean room or something...

Did encounter one bit of hardware I'd never even heard of before:

Inputs:
- floppy edge connector (from the B position on the cable to the regular FDD
- Molex power

Outputs:
- two 34p flatcables, one with a single pair of edge/pin connectors, the other going to a DC37 external floppy connector.
- Mini-Molex power, with a short cable leading to another Molex male connector, powering the HDD.

It looks like some kind of FDD multiplexer or switch, but there are no identifying brands/names/numbers on it to help search. I can understand wanting to use an external FDD, but given the other cable didn't have anything connected (and didn't look like it ever had) I don't see why this setup was chosen instead of just using a single cable connecting from the B position to the external connector. Anyone have an idea?

Other interesting discovery: this machine is a 1984 design, but built in August 1987. That explains the full loadout of 640k and 20MB HDD (NEC, not Seagate as it turns out). It also means this wasn't a really old, really high-end machine, but a quite low-end option by the time it was shipped.

Absolutely beautiful condition. I would have driven far for that as well.

P.S. - Does it not have graphics capabilities? Skeletor should be on the screen my friend. 😀

dionb wrote:

Had to drive all the way across the country for this small country though but it was worth it: […]
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Had to drive all the way across the country for this small country though but it was worth it:

1984 vintage Olivetti M24. In extremely good external condition. And booting. With RTC still OK according to post 😲

8086-8
RAM apparently maxed to 640k
HDD present (most likely an ST-225)

I was looking for another working ST-506 drive, a monochrome monitor and had been fascinated reading about stamasd's adventures with ROM images in an XT. All pricey and/or hard to come by. And then I saw this. Amazingly it had been available on the local craigslist-variant for two months for a very low price with clear photographs and description, but absolutely no interest (despite people normally descending on any <Pentium stuff like a pack of rabid wolves). The only drawback: despite being famed for being one of the most PC compatible of the early clones in terms of software, hardware is a different story entirely. Particularly the keyboard, with both a different pinout and protocol to either PC, XT or AT. And guess what the seller didn't have...

Still, it seems to work, the machine is exceptionally well-documented, and there's something of a community for these things (and I have an Italian friend who is also marginally into vintage hw and can help with translation if needed) so I'll either source a keyboard or figure out some kind of converter soon enough 😀

Nice find - I have one myself (and another one with just the case) - posted it a while ago in the same thread: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

^^ man, that thing looks mint. I really like the grey case with matching monitor & black drives - pure class.

My money is on a external floppy adapter. some external drives pull power from the big d-37 connector. So there needs to be some way to inject power into that cable.

Yet another mysterious Yamaha CD-ROM, sealed this time:

I'm not sure what it contains besides the Midradio browser plugin...

Yesterday i was lucky to pickup a lot of hardware 😀

My brain just exploded from envy..

Aztech Sound Galaxy BX showed up today in nice condition.

@Bancho - green one! that gotta be some early revision. Nice!

Picked this up a few days ago:

It's an Iiyama Visionmaster 455. Spotless condition and from what I gather low usage. Still getting used to the OSD.

I had sort of written off getting a CRT monitor again because I had sort of settled on LCDs being good enough. That said, its crazy how much better CRTs scale with lower resolutions. 800x600 looks fantastic on this thing.

For lower resolutions, CRTs are pretty awesome, especially a Trinitron/Diamondtron screen.
I used to have the earlier model, the Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 - awesome monitor but it was heavy my desk was bowed in the middle from it. That weighs somewhere around 30kgs if I remember correctly?

m1chelsen wrote:

Yesterday i was lucky to pickup a lot of hardware :) […]
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Yesterday i was lucky to pickup a lot of hardware 😀

You could make furniture out of that, like the person did with Fedex boxes. Any highlights so far?

An AT system, containing this Socket 3 Motherboard!

VLB + PCI, Dallas RTC is socketed! AMD DX100 underneath the cooler.

Right now I cannot get it to post. Get 2 beeps and no video signal. Tried several video cards. Could anyone help me identify this board for a manual? I cannot find any ID numbers

Today i went to the local fleamarket and this is what i got:

ATI Rage 3D Pro Turbo:

Normally i'm not interested in AGP cards but for 1.50$ you can't complain.

Yamaha OPL3-SA (MF718) sound card:

I initially passed on this one because it looked like a crappy budget no-name OEM sound card. But after a quick check on the internet i saw these were actually pretty good cards made by Yamaha that have proper OPL3 FM synthesis and feature a waveblaster header. So i had to come back and get it. I'm curious whether this is going to sound better than my Vibra 16S which are known to be a bit noisy.

A couple of AMD CPUs:

Was looking for exactly a K6-II 400AFR on eBay last week and in my excitement from finding one in the wild i didn't notice that it had about 7 bent pins and 2 missing ones - CRAP. Once i got home i straightened the pins out with fine tweezers. Checking the datasheet, one of them is a No-Connect (phew) and the other is one of a few VCC2 pins so it should be able to boot.

And it did boot - motherboard says it's an AMD (Unknown) with a clock speed of PR♠ 🙄 (probably needs a BIOS update). The computer hangs at "Checking NVRAM" now, but it did so even after i put back the Pentium that was in there, so it's probably an unrelated issue. Do any of you think the missing VCC pin is going to cause problems? Also the motherboard supports a minimum Vcore of 2.5V instead of the 2.2V the K6-II is designed for but it boots so... it's probably fine? I'd love to get a trash CPU like this to work again.

Nprod wrote:

T

DSCF2882.JPG

And it did boot - motherboard says it's an AMD (Unknown) with a clock speed of PR♠ 🙄 (probably needs a BIOS update). The computer hangs at "Checking NVRAM" now, but it did so even after i put back the Pentium that was in there, so it's probably an unrelated issue. Do any of you think the missing VCC pin is going to cause problems? Also the motherboard supports a minimum Vcore of 2.5V instead of the 2.2V the K6-II is designed for but it boots so... it's probably fine? I'd love to get a trash CPU like this to work again.

Which board do you have? Chances are it has undocumented jumper settings so it could go lower on the CPU voltage.

I wouldn't recommend running a K6-II at 2.5v though.
If your board really cannot go lower then 2.5v, and if your board uses a linear voltage regulator, the voltage regulator may overheat.

K6-II/400 isn't really a rare or hard to find CPU though, so it's at least somewhat expendable. I'm not sure how hard this stuff is to come by these days.

It's a PCChips M571 and it really can't go below 2.5V, at least my revision which is 3.2. The 3.2A and 7.0 ones can do it. The motherboard is pretty well documented. I doubt the regulator would overheat as it's designed to go that low. Rather it's the CPU that should run hotter as i'd essentially be "overclocking" it. So unless the regulator cant do CPUs with ~30W TDP it would be ok. I could look for an AHX variant that's meant for 2.4V, but their power consumption is also in the 25-30W range. If it runs too hot maybe a slight underclock would balance things out? They're not hard to come by, but when you look for a very specific model your option is usually eBay where the prices are heavily inflated.