jheronimus wrote:

386 PCChips M321

Like every M321 I've ever seen, the tag RAM is not socketed, so while it has open cache sockets the maximum cache is 128K unless you replace it, which I suppose isn't THAT hard if you're decent with desoldering/soldering. Not sure why they didn't socket it if part of the marketability was otherwise how it was upgradeable.

Received the GameBoy DMG-01 PLAY IT LOUD bundle I won on eBay.

I need to buy AA batteries for the system and the game light plus units. The system was advertised as fully functional and all of the games work (tested on my GameBoy Color).

Soon the 3 DMG-01 that are untested, as-is will arrive and I'll be posting a video on YouTube of the 4 systems along with the internal cleaning, diagnostics, and mods (backlight with bivert with a new glass screen cover or plastic).

dionb wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Looks pretty good. How much was it? Minimum battery damage is better than major battery damage. Why motherboard companies used Ni-Cd batteries instead of Lithium batteries is beyond me.

Same reason RBMK reactors had a positive void coefficient and moderator rod tips of pure graphite: price. And to be honest, these batteries only started failing long after the boards' economic and design lifespan had passed. Still doesn't make it good engineering, less good news when you see old boards rotten away by it, but we're the ones going far, far out of spec here by keeping >25yo low-end systems running 😉

And some of these batteries even today work fine without spillage.

And if there were no overclocker idiot named Dyatlov who ordered to pull the reserve control rods out of the core, it would probably just have died down of poisoning instead of happily blowing up, and nobody except the experts would know about its positive void coefficient.
http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr7 … 9pdf/Malko1.pdf

imi wrote:

I have a really hard time trying to find stuff locally, so I usually pay more for shipping alone than some of the finds in here […]
Show full quote

I have a really hard time trying to find stuff locally, so I usually pay more for shipping alone than some of the finds in here 🙁
local thrift stores seem to only sell clothes and decorations and barely any electronics at all and if they do than only newer "useful" computers, seems like most of the really good stuff just gets thrown away nowadays, I feel like I started with collecting retro hardware about 5-10 years too late, luckily I already have some good parts at home from past times.

anyways picked these up yesterday:

gpus01.jpg

gpus02.jpg

2x ET4000AX (already had one of these at home, but more is better 😀 )
OTI077 with an odd mix of memory chips
a card that was listed as serial/parallel controller turned out to be a Tamarack TD3088A2
and an old intel network card, I have a bunch of ISA network cards already, but none from intel so a welcome addition.
paid 25€ for the lot of cards

Those are actually great thrift store finds. In my area finding computers parts at all is uncommon, let alone such old ones. If I do find retro hardware, then it's usually late 90's and early 00's low end stuff, joysticks, network cards. I recognize that thrift stores these days are more into selling used clothing, (nasty) old furniture and books than anything else.

SpectriaForce wrote:

imi wrote:

I have a really hard time trying to find stuff locally, so I usually pay more for shipping alone than some of the finds in here 🙁
local thrift stores seem to only sell clothes and decorations and barely any electronics at all and if they do than only newer "useful" computers, seems like most of the really good stuff just gets thrown away nowadays, I feel like I started with collecting retro hardware about 5-10 years too late, luckily I already have some good parts at home from past times.

Those are actually great thrift store finds. In my area finding computers parts at all is uncommon, let alone such old ones. If I do find retro hardware, then it's usually late 90's and early 00's low end stuff, joysticks, network cards. I recognize that thrift stores these days are more into selling used clothing, (nasty) old furniture and books than anything else.

Big problem here too (Slovakia Central Europe)
Thinking about making a webpage or at least a Facebook group to exchange/buy/sell/give pc parts and other old electronics. I dont want to make a business around it, only to help collectors.

SpectriaForce wrote:

Those are actually great thrift store finds. In my area finding computers parts at all is uncommon, let alone such old ones. If I do find retro hardware, then it's usually late 90's and early 00's low end stuff, joysticks, network cards. I recognize that thrift stores these days are more into selling used clothing, (nasty) old furniture and books than anything else.

oh those weren't from a thrift store but the local classifieds, occassionaly something does pop up there and I'm happy to save it from getting thrown away.

respect2759 wrote:

Big problem here too (Slovakia Central Europe)
Thinking about making a webpage or at least a Facebook group to exchange/buy/sell/give pc parts and other old electronics. I dont want to make a business around it, only to help collectors.

yeah that would be nice.
unfortunately the things that get sold for "collectors" around here are way too expensive 🙁

some more "modern" stuff I picked up from a box full of random hardware recently:

the 9800pro was one of the main reasons for picking it up, but the 9500 is really nice too and has an ati silencer on it 😀

Well, it's getting more and more difficult to find great retro hardware stuff locally nowadays, but... i'm happy enough with things that i've found recently.

nVidia GeForce FX5900XT (Gigabyte GV-N59X128D)

Bought as non-working card (dude that sold me this card literally for couple of pennies said that there was just no image, but POST-beep was as it was fine and good), and decided to give it a shot.
Turnes out this card was working, and that dude probably had some sort of PSU problems. 😊

nVidia GeForce FX5200 Ultra (MSI MS8923)

Unlike standard FX5200, this thing is not quite common.

nVidia GeForce FX5700LE (ASUS V9570GE/TD)

So-called "Gaming Edition" card by ASUS. I remember there was a lot of cards from this series (e.g. GeForce 6200, 6600, etc.)

ATi Mach64 VT4 (ATi Video Xpression+)

As far as i remember - this card was last ATi 2D-only.

ATi Radeon 9100 (Club3D AR2L)

Cute low-profile beauty. Enough said. 😀

Creative Sound Blaster 16 Value CT2770

Another SB16 in my collection, but i don't had this edition.

Philips Rhythmic Edge PSC705

I know that Phillips are pros in terms of sound, but i never knew that they had their own sound cards. Gotta read more about that thingy. 😀

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 SB0240

Good and reliable card, perfect for Win98-XP builds.

Some unknown Socket 3 mobo

Some generic chinese stuff, i presume. But there's CR2032 socket, which is awesome.

Got this Matrox PG-1281 graphics card today. I belive that VIDEO OUT is for CGA monitor, but don't know what is EGA IN for? There is also a short article about this card dated from 1987.

Probably an addon-board for specific use-cases like CAD, like ATI's 8514 Ultra, which relies on a present VGA core for everything else.

Turbo -> wrote:

Got this Matrox PG-1281 graphics card today. I belive that VIDEO OUT is for CGA monitor, but don't know what is EGA IN for? There is also a short article about this card dated from 1987.

Thats a TIGA-card - _very_ nice! But useless without specific drivers? Here example what you can do with such card:

Re: EIZO MD-B12 TIGA TMS34010

Maybe yours can operate as stand alone-card?

Great find the TIGA card! Will be amazing for AutoCAD rendering on a 386.

Also my 1993 collection is growing. The Viper VLB I bought earlier now has a PCI brother:

I am sure the OTI087X will be just as bad as the Weitek 5286 in VGA mode. However, can't wait to test in in Windows.

Turbo -> wrote:

Got this Matrox PG-1281 graphics card today. I belive that VIDEO OUT is for CGA monitor, but don't know what is EGA IN for? There is also a short article about this card dated from 1987.

That 1281 really is interesting. I have a SM-1024 which is on a similar 1281 PCB. Same shade of green, although different arrangement of components and is 2 PCB's sandwiched together taking up 2 slots (and is TMS320 rather than TMS34010). Yours seems to be one slot, uses TMS34010, and has a daughter card? Weird...

ISA based 3D accelerators?

The PG-1281 I have is a PG-1281CV model, uses TMS34010 and has a completely different PCB (seems much later, darker shade of green) and I think can be used as a stand alone card, but yours and my SM-1024 (from 1987), I'm pretty sure, are pass-thru. EGA (other than PGC and the 8541) was the TOTL then which I guess most users would have had when spending $3000+ on this thing.

I have two PG-1281CV's from 1990, and 1992 respectively. Both identical cards so they must have been on market for a number of years with little to no change. I contacted Matrox UK about these cards a few years ago, but wasn't able to talk to anyone who had even heard of them 😲 .

Pretty sure the drivers are still on Matrox ftp (see page 1 of linked thread). I have them somewhere but my 486 (only computer I have with ISA) packed up before getting a chance to get them working 🙁.

Matrox is pretty good about leaving their old drivers up in the FTP area for cards few people there even know about. Some update patches for their video editing cards (Mac RTMAC for one) are missing I think.

Received the 3 GameBoy DMG-01s that were advertised as not working and couldn't power on.

I looked at the battery terminals and they had corrosion and rust on there. I inserted fresh AA batteries, turned the batteries around, and the systems sprang to life, which is a good sign. The bad? The one unit has vertical lines, I can fix that, no problem. The other one has horizontal line issues, I can attempt to fix that without issues, and the other one has both vertical and horizontal line issues. When the time comes, I'll be replacing the battery terminals, clean and retrobright the cases, and modify them with the backlight + bivert. I am currently posting a video on YouTube and I'll be posting it in a bit once it uploads.

Scored these today. Not quite 486 goodies but still. First desktop grade quad core Intel ever produced: Q6600. And the rest of the bunch, Including a server grade Constellation hdd, 16GB Ram, an intel Nic and a nice ThermalTake power supply.

stege wrote:

First desktop grade quad core Intel ever produced: Q6600.

First quad from Intel wasn't Q6600, but QX6700 😉

Srandista wrote:

stege wrote:

First desktop grade quad core Intel ever produced: Q6600.

First quad from Intel wasn't Q6600, but QX6700 😉

yep 😎
Socket 775 @ 2006.11 - Core 2 Extreme QX6700, Geforce 8800 GTX, Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty

Picked up something big this morning:

That's an IBM 3270AT - in pretty much mint external condition. The 3270AT is a weird beast, basically a bog-standard early IBM AT with some decidedly non-standard I/O. It's desgined to act as an intelligent terminal for an AS/400 mainframe. That's why it comes with full Model F 122 'Battleship' keyboard. Also an original IBM smoky perspex ProPrinter stand (unfortunately without printer).

Inside:

That's one fully loaded AT - and all of it factory default.

Slots 1+2+3: "PC3270 Display Adapter" video card for the AS/400 terminal stuff. Can emulate CGA and MDA, but better character ROM (sans serif) and do lots of panning/windowing stuff in hardware.
Slot 4: 128kB RAM; the motherboard has 512kB, so this loads it out to 640kB.
Slot 5: Serial+parallel card.
Slot 8: MFM HDD/Floppy controller

Slots 6 and 7 are the fancy ones though, you hook the keyboard up to card 6, part of the stuff is looped through to the DIN keyboard connector but all the extra function things are handled by this card. And then there's card 7, the Host Connect Card, which is somewhere between a NIC and an AS/400-on-a-card. This is how you connect to the mainframe.

Apart from that there's a huge full-height MFM HDD in there (size/brand unknown at present), the original DS/DD 5.25" FDD and a new DS/HD drive on top.

The keyboard is of course the Battleship and the monitor is a 5272. I intend to make an adapter for the Battleship with a Teensy USB gadget. The latter... interesting screen, but looks like non-standard pinout (DE9 connector like MDA/CGA/EGA, but pin 3 missing). Haven't had any luck so far pulling up specs/pinout for it. If I could somehow feed it EGA, it would be a glorious thing 😀

Back:

Probably not readable, but this system was delivered on September 24, 1986, and serviced by the original seller until 1989. From what I gathered from the seller, he was the second owner and didn't have a clue about the AS/400 stuff, he just had it as a conversation piece and something to play old CGA DOS games on. He stopped using it years ago and just left it on the coffee table. His wife wanted to clear stuff up and was aware these things command quite a premium 2nd hand, so they put it up for sale. I had to bid pretty high and send a nice mail to get the chance to pick it up. Unfortunately when they wanted to show it working, things went pear-shaped. Turns out there were shorts galore, and one of the tantalum caps decided to blow while we were looking. Still, external non-leaking battery, so no damage other than bad caps. And it not working knocked a lot off the price 😜

Srandista wrote:

stege wrote:

First desktop grade quad core Intel ever produced: Q6600.

First quad from Intel wasn't Q6600, but QX6700 😉

As (maybe) interesting side note... a seller in The Netherlands is sitting on a pile of 394 pieces of Q6600 and offers them at the moment (june 2019) for euro 3,50:
https://tinyurl.com/y5bdsjjq

First Tseng card to my collection is on the road, an ET6000 I think the images were not the best quality, found it on marketplace wanted to download the photo but after buying it he removed from listings. The guy has a bunch of older cards, for example Radeon 7000, Radeon 9600XT Radeon 9550, Quadros, also some IDE controllers, mid 2000s boards etc. Everything for 5-10EURO/piece 😎