Last purchase for this year. I promise. Really.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-03-10, 16:47:

Last purchase for this year. I promise. Really.

Yeah, I believe you.

I said the same thing almost every day last year. Sometimes multiple times a day. This year I resolved not to lie to myself - and, so far, have spent much less on things I'll never use 😀

Seeing stuff cheap is my weakness, even at the grocery store, donuts 50% off, that means they're half the calories right?

Current most tempting thing is a PC Chips weird old pentium board, can't actually get a firm ID from Ultimate Retro, that is sitting in a town some ways away, that some of my relatives live in, and they keep asking us to visit.... so I'm not sure how long I'll hold out if I end up in the same city and it's still available.. though it's not super cheap. I am not short of pentium boards, but I only have intel chipset pentium boards and this is an opti... but I don't have a use case or spare useable case....

Not helping is that I have a weird fascination for PC Chips boards because somehow they like me, it's like kinship, hey yes I am also a strange collection of faulty low spec parts hanging together with the thinnest shreds of sanity.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-10, 17:43:

Seeing stuff cheap is my weakness, even at the grocery store, donuts 50% off, that means they're half the calories right?

Current most tempting thing is a PC Chips weird old pentium board, can't actually get a firm ID from Ultimate Retro, that is sitting in a town some ways away, that some of my relatives live in, and they keep asking us to visit.... so I'm not sure how long I'll hold out if I end up in the same city and it's still available.. though it's not super cheap. I am not short of pentium boards, but I only have intel chipset pentium boards and this is an opti... but I don't have a use case or spare useable case....

Not helping is that I have a weird fascination for PC Chips boards because somehow they like me, it's like kinship, hey yes I am also a strange collection of faulty low spec parts hanging together with the thinnest shreds of sanity.

🤣 🤣

I love it and I can totally relate.

You would probably appreciate this thread I made a while back about a really really interesting PC Chips board I came across.

Ahh, PCChips... you never cease to amaze me.

Still makes me shake my head to this day. I just can't understand it... 🤣

Hah, I just dug one of those out at the end of Jan Re: Flying Dutchmen, White Whales, the ghost HW that eludes you, lost & found. but mine is missing a BIOS .. and I'm always short of EEPROMs so don't know when it will get one. I am not sure if I have a PCI SiS 6326, but if I do I will see what happens on mine.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-10, 17:43:

Seeing stuff cheap is my weakness, even at the grocery store, donuts 50% off, that means they're half the calories right?

Current most tempting thing is a PC Chips weird old pentium board, can't actually get a firm ID from Ultimate Retro, that is sitting in a town some ways away, that some of my relatives live in, and they keep asking us to visit.... so I'm not sure how long I'll hold out if I end up in the same city and it's still available.. though it's not super cheap. I am not short of pentium boards, but I only have intel chipset pentium boards and this is an opti... but I don't have a use case or spare useable case....

Not helping is that I have a weird fascination for PC Chips boards because somehow they like me, it's like kinship, hey yes I am also a strange collection of faulty low spec parts hanging together with the thinnest shreds of sanity.

🤣.

I don't have PC Chips MBs myself, but I admit that there is something fascinating in those with the fake cache shenanigans and all that jazz. And I'd really like to have one!

In all seriousness, I think those kind of boards represent a time period in computing history, where PC prices (and at the same time manufacturer margins) were crashing down so fast and strong, that some low end manufacturers like PC Chips decided to play scammy games just to stay in the business.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-10, 18:28:

Hah, I just dug one of those out at the end of Jan Re: Flying Dutchmen, White Whales, the ghost HW that eludes you, lost & found. but mine is missing a BIOS .. and I'm always short of EEPROMs so don't know when it will get one. I am not sure if I have a PCI SiS 6326, but if I do I will see what happens on mine.

Not sure if the BIOS version is related at all to the 6326 quirks, but if you want me to dump the BIOS on mine some time just let me know.

I'm amazed these things don't have leaky caps. I guess they are just old enough that there was still some stock available of cheap caps that weren't plague ridden.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-03-09, 19:25:

RetroPC_King wrote on 2023-03-09, 18:27:

Today I got those for free! -A4TECH KB-26 Multimedia PS/2 keyboard -a PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse to USB adapter -a Audio CD cable - […]
Show full quote

Today I got those for free!
-A4TECH KB-26 Multimedia PS/2 keyboard
-a PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse to USB adapter
-a Audio CD cable
-a Delux ATX-400W P4 400W PSU
-Forsa NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 256MB 128BIT AGP 8X video card
-LG HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4521B 16x DVD-ROM/52x32x52x CD-RW combo IDE drive
-Kingmax 256MB DDR400 PC3200 Super RAM
-Kingmax 512MB DDR400 PC3200 TinyBGA
-possibly dead (?) MSI KT4AV MS-6712 VER:10A motherboard with a AMD Sempron 2600+ SDA2600DUT3D 1.83GHz CPU (Thoroughbred-B core) with Speeze EEA73B4 CPU cooler (unfortunately without I/O Shield)
-floppy drive cable

Any opinions?

FX5500 and FX5600 are both legit scams of a card. They are both OC'd FX5200s. To call them DX9 class cards is ridiculous. Good for 9x though.

This is not entirely true. The FX 5600 has silicon z-compression that the FX 5200 does not. This can be somewhat compensated for with faster memory, which is why a 5200 Ultra can sometimes benchmark higher than a 5600. Don't even get me started on the 64-bit variants; complete garbage.

The whole FX line would have been better off if the 5200 didn't exist, if the 5600 then became the 5200, and the rest of the model range was shifted down a category. Despite being a capable card for (much) older titles, it was very disappointing to see the 5200 benchmark so much lower than the GeForce 4 series.

Received a Sony Walkman WM-FX40 from shopgoodwill.com

The tape drive works great and so does the radio. The headphone jack, not so much. I ended up soldering a temporary speaker to the jack whilst feeding the wires through the bad jack and it works great. My plans are to replace the busted jack with a new one (I ordered some on Amazon), modify the case a bit, and install speakers on the inside so the unit can have integrated speakers, which will be perfect for going to the drive-in movie theatre so we don't waste the car battery and build an external battery compartment that's rechargeable via USB and using a Li-Po batter that can last a good amount of time with proper ventilation so it doesn't overheat and burst into flames.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-03-10, 16:47:

Last purchase for this year. I promise. Really.
DSC_3050.JPG

Sure, the year is nearly over.

January, "Last purchase of the Chinese year" March "Last purchase of the fiscal year" early April "Last purchase of the Hindu year" August "Last purchase of the Hebrew year" .... 🤣

Oh I picked up a little black box yesterday, some coax and RCA connectors on it, showing you how to hook it up between VCRs and saying "Warning, not to be used for copyrighted material" winkwink on it. Hoping it makes "backing up" my favorite movies on VHS tape to digital a bit easier.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-12, 14:41:

January, "Last purchase of the Chinese year" March "Last purchase of the fiscal year" early April "Last purchase of the Hindu year" August "Last purchase of the Hebrew year" .... 🤣

And it is better to buy it now if available, because next year you might not find the item anymore or prices increase 🤣

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-03-12, 14:48:

And it is better to buy it now if available, because next year you might not find the item anymore or prices increase 🤣

THIS ! A 1000 times proven so far....
If you really want your particular/researched spare part, now is always the time, within reason of course.

But personally I think I've reached a point where I now have whatever retro parts I'll ever need.
And if something breaks later on, I can still build a slightly different version if I don't have an identical 'slot-in' part.

As my main reason for getting into this whole hoarding bonanza was originally to play games on older (hardware sensitivte) OS, after discovering some of my favorite games behaved differently/glitching on newer OS. Which I did not like.

PS: though it still itches in my purchase finger, whenever I see a quality/rare retro item cheaply for sale - wanting to 'rescue' it 🤣

CoffeeOne wrote on 2023-03-12, 09:08:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-03-10, 16:47:

Last purchase for this year. I promise. Really.
DSC_3050.JPG

Sure, the year is nearly over.

Maybe I've regenerate a kidney by Christmas.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-03-12, 15:25:

CoffeeOne wrote on 2023-03-12, 09:08:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-03-10, 16:47:

Last purchase for this year. I promise. Really.
DSC_3050.JPG

Sure, the year is nearly over.

Maybe I've regenerate a kidney by Christmas.

You have better chances with a pearl generating factory.
I'd buy a share - 🤣

Picked up some hardware I definitely don't need, though not all of it is necessarily retro.

• MSI GeForce 210 512MB DDR3
• ATI Radeon 9250 256 MB DDR1
• SiS 6326 8MB
• nVidia Quadro FX 580 512MB
• Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM

• AOpen Cobra AW840
• Creative Labs Sound Blaster CT4790
• Creative Sound Blaster Live SB0220
• Creative Labs CT4740

acl wrote on 2023-03-10, 16:25:

Wow ! What a keyboard ! Is that a wheel on the left side ? […]
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RetroPC_King wrote on 2023-03-09, 18:27:

Today I got those for free! -A4TECH KB-26 Multimedia PS/2 keyboard -a PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse to USB adapter -a Audio CD cable - […]
Show full quote

Today I got those for free!
-A4TECH KB-26 Multimedia PS/2 keyboard
-a PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse to USB adapter
-a Audio CD cable
-a Delux ATX-400W P4 400W PSU
-Forsa NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 256MB 128BIT AGP 8X video card
-LG HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4521B 16x DVD-ROM/52x32x52x CD-RW combo IDE drive
-Kingmax 256MB DDR400 PC3200 Super RAM
-Kingmax 512MB DDR400 PC3200 TinyBGA
-possibly dead (?) MSI KT4AV MS-6712 VER:10A motherboard with a AMD Sempron 2600+ SDA2600DUT3D 1.83GHz CPU (Thoroughbred-B core) with Speeze EEA73B4 CPU cooler (unfortunately without I/O Shield)
-floppy drive cable

Any opinions?

Wow ! What a keyboard !
Is that a wheel on the left side ?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-03-09, 19:25:

RetroPC_King wrote on 2023-03-09, 18:27:

Today I got those for free! -A4TECH KB-26 Multimedia PS/2 keyboard -a PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse to USB adapter -a Audio CD cable - […]
Show full quote

Today I got those for free!
-A4TECH KB-26 Multimedia PS/2 keyboard
-a PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse to USB adapter
-a Audio CD cable
-a Delux ATX-400W P4 400W PSU
-Forsa NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 256MB 128BIT AGP 8X video card
-LG HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4521B 16x DVD-ROM/52x32x52x CD-RW combo IDE drive
-Kingmax 256MB DDR400 PC3200 Super RAM
-Kingmax 512MB DDR400 PC3200 TinyBGA
-possibly dead (?) MSI KT4AV MS-6712 VER:10A motherboard with a AMD Sempron 2600+ SDA2600DUT3D 1.83GHz CPU (Thoroughbred-B core) with Speeze EEA73B4 CPU cooler (unfortunately without I/O Shield)
-floppy drive cable

Any opinions?

FX5500 and FX5600 are both legit scams of a card. They are both OC'd FX5200s. To call them DX9 class cards is ridiculous. Good for 9x though.

Oh !
I hope RetroPC_King will not take it personally. The last time i said something similar about the Radeon 9250 he bought.
😅

Well. I was probably a bit too harsh in my last post about the Radeon.
I don't really hate Radeon 9250. I just consider the naming to be deceiving.
Just like with the FX5500... being a slightly higher clocked FX5200.
Renaming and repacking of previously released cards is a bad practice from manufacturers.
That does not mean that the cards are bad on the technical point of view.
(I Actually like the FX5500, even if it's a rebranded 5200, and its performances are ... what they are)

Yes. That was a wheel on that keyboard. Also I know about the Radeon 9250 and FX 5500 what it was, but I prefer to use it anyway. Also the coming-soon ASUS K8U-X build will have that FX5500 as a GPU instead of the ATI Radeon 9200SE 128MB from ASUS that I planned initially to build with it.
And that ATI Radeon 9250 I will use it in my GIGABYTE GA-7VT600P-RZ build with a AMD Sempron 2400+.

I still prefer NVIDIA over any ATI variant in any 9x retro build that will be playing anything in 16-bit. ATI's dithering is garbage; sadly. Otherwise I would use ATI more liberally.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-13, 07:22:

I still prefer NVIDIA over any ATI variant in any 9x retro build that will be playing anything in 16-bit. ATI's dithering is garbage; sadly. Otherwise I would use ATI more liberally.

Which is odd, since there was a good number of years where ATI had the superior image quality for 32bit due to nVidia having fucking garbage texture compression which led to crazy banding of colours. Its odd that the reverse was true for 16bit but I guess it was mostly because texture compression likely wasn't required for 16bit.

Turtle Beach (Voyetra) Montego II - Aureal Vortex 2 A3D 2.0