I love seeing the beige. Keep it coming 😁 <3

Two PowerMac G4. At least one has a Zip drive.
Now I have to understand what to do with them. 😀

Listen to the bong chime sound, have goose bumps and then nothing. 😉

Play Mac versions of certain games for comparison?
Multi player since you got two of them. Apple Talk?

Banshee and Diamond V2:

I hadn't planned to do much more treasure hunting, but when an estate sale practically falls in my lap, how could I resist? 😀

In one of the pics advertising the sale I could see 2 beige boxes... turns out there were a few more than that. There are 3 fully AT cases and 1 that seems like a hybrid AT/ATX. The other 2 are just ATX. These are my first AT cases, so I'm really excited to build in those. I won't be able to pull them all apart right away and I haven't had a chance to test anything, but I did snoop enough to figure out that I've got a two socket 7, two Slot 1, one socket 478, and this:

From what I can tell it looks to be a PCChips M407. I could see the battery was leaking, so the first thing I did was take it out of the case and de-solder it. Luckily it looks like there is almost no damage to the board. The thru-hole looks a bit rough, but not too bad. There's some pins at the top left that seem to have something to do with an "external battery". I haven't looked into it but I'm hoping there's an easy way to attach something so I don't need to find a surface mount replacement.

The Retro Web says it supports 33 and 66MHz processors, but there's a 50MHz DX2 plugged in. And the clock generator is 25MHz, which lines up, but the colour of the solder points on the back of the board are different, so it seems like an after-market mod. This is my first 486 board, so I'm really excited to see if I can get it up and running.

These were also a part of the system. An ATI VGA Wonder XL, which is my first ISA video card, so that should be fun to check out.

Also a Media Vision Thunder Board. It looks like the volume wheel has come off, so I'll be curious to see if I can find a replacement.

Anyway, I'll try to go through all the other towers over the next number of days.

Yay, interesting stuffs... you might be able to match that volume wheel in a junk AM radio or alarm clock. The fitting was kinda standardish for edge wheel volume pots and tuning caps on small appliances thru 60s, 70s, 80s.

Or some old Walkman / portable cassette player.

Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the advice!

danieljm wrote on 2023-03-26, 20:41:

I hadn't planned to do much more treasure hunting,

ah indeed, some of the best finds are when we are not treasure hunting 😀

Gigabyte ga-5ax Rev 5.2, K6-2/500MHz, some ram, HDD, FDD, CD, video and some other parts (full PC without case and PSU) for 5 euro, sold as "untested", all parts work 😀

I got this jumper configurable ES1688F card today. It has the proper jumper settings printed on the back side, which is handy:

This turned up today, nothing amazing, a Quadro 280 pci.
This is in my p233mmx as an upgrade over the s3 virge dx I had in it. which after googling was probably slower then the sis video card it came with.

DundyTheCroc wrote on 2023-03-27, 11:02:

Gigabyte ga-5ax Rev 5.2, K6-2/500MHz, some ram, HDD, FDD, CD, video and some other parts (full PC without case and PSU) for 5 euro, sold as "untested", all parts work 😀

Unbelievably lucky find...... a working GA-5AX rev. 5.2 alone costs €100+ 🤑

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2023-03-27, 17:23:

I got this jumper configurable ES1688F card today. It has the proper jumper settings printed on the back side, which is handy:

Nice, it's got the quad core gameport digitiser. ..... (Just the NE558 quad timer instead of dual 556 or something generates the ramps for the low speed A/D conversion to read joystick position etc, "How much of 5V is across that pot, 47 bits worth, okay, I'll tell the CPU it's about yay much then...." )

What is going on with the prices of these things now? I happened to snag this Vortex 2 on eBay for $30 shipped just a few days ago, but I'm seeing them go for over $100 regularly now... there's one up right now that is going to sell for at least $200.

Meatball wrote on 2023-03-28, 00:50:

What is going on with the prices of these things now? I happened to snag this Vortex 2 on eBay for $30 shipped just a few days ago, but I'm seeing them go for over $100 regularly now... there's one up right now that is going to sell for at least $200.

Yeah, I've noticed that too.

AU88030 cards were very common just 4-5 years ago. Now they are very hard to come by, and unlikely to be cheap.

They do make great retro cards though, since they have wavetable headers and with the right drivers work well in DOS and Windows 9x. About the only thing they are really lacking is decent FM music output, which most people wouldn't be using if they are able to use wavetable MIDI of some kind. Add in the fact that Aureal was in many ways the 3dfx of PC audio (A3D 2.0 for example), and you have something fairly desirable. Some of them even have SPDIF output so you can get a clean digital signal out of them.

A Sound Blaster live can do some of these things too, and for a tiny fraction of the cost, but... eh... they just don't have the same appeal in my opinion. The first component I ever bought on ebay was a Vortex 2 SQ2500 after they were already hard to find at retail back in 2000 or so. Got it for $50. I have managed to find more of them since then, but I wish I knew whatever happened to that first one. 🙁

Fast forward 23 years and I kinda wish I'd paid the extra money and bought one in a retail box. I have some other boxes for items my brother and I bought from that same time period (Voodoo 3 2000, Tyan and Soyo motherboard boxes, etc.), so most likely would have kept the SQ2500 box too.

Didn't buy this today but just happened to check prices and availability. The Zalmann USA store has it in stock for $32. https://zalmanusa.com/products/cnps9900-max

Hi, new member here, so I came across a listing for a bunch of FX 5500 cards:

the Chaintech card looked odd to me since it has a molex connector, these cards don't need external power and high end cards don't use cheap rams,
then I checked the Chaintech website and looked through their Fx series cards and couldn't find anything similar to this.
I contacted the seller and asked him if the card still is available and he said card shows artifacts and he was going to scrap it.

I bought it and it was actually a XGI Volari V5 card:

it works but there are vertical lines all over the screen. after cleaning and inspecting, I found 2 knocked off caps and a ram chip was cracked.

It didn't look this bad before I start poking it with tweezers, 🤣.
now waiting for the replacement ram chip.

Meatball wrote on 2023-03-28, 00:50:

What is going on with the prices of these things now? I happened to snag this Vortex 2 on eBay for $30 shipped just a few days ago, but I'm seeing them go for over $100 regularly now... there's one up right now that is going to sell for at least $200.

What?🧐 I recently bought five of them NOS in bulk packaging for 75€ shipped.🤷‍♂️ Since when are they in such high demand?

Karbist wrote on 2023-03-28, 09:05:

Hi, new member here, so I came across a listing for a bunch of FX 5500 cards: 1.jpg […]
Show full quote

Hi, new member here, so I came across a listing for a bunch of FX 5500 cards:
1.jpg

the Chaintech card looked odd to me since it had a molex connector, these cards don't need external power and high end cards don't use cheap rams,
then I checked the Chaintech website and looked through their Fx series cards and couldn't find anything similar to this.
I contacted the seller and asked him if the card still is available and he said card shows artifacts and he was going to scrap it.

I bought it and it was actually a XGI Volari V5 card:
2.jpg

it works but there are vertical lines all over the screen. after cleaning and inspecting, i found 2 knocked of caps and a ram chip was cracked.
3.jpg

It didn't look this bad before I start poking it with tweezers, 🤣.
now waiting for the replacement ram chip.

Oh, that's nice! Especially since its new owner apparently knows how to repair it.😃👍