Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-10, 05:11:

LewisRaz wrote on 2023-04-09, 15:56:

Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale. […]
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Picked this up for £5 today at a car boot sale.

Seems to work just fine! Although it boots into a chinese install of windows XP SP2.

These small laptops dont have batteries or floppy/cd drives so installing windows 98se will be fun.

Pentioum 3 500mhz
320mb ram

Unsure yet on VGA but google says 4mb ATI of some sort
Audio is meant to be SB pro compatible.

Could make a nice dos/98 machine

It looks like the lid is also covered in that soft touch plastic material. Good luck getting that off. It's going to take a lot of rubbing alcohol and scrubbing, but it's possible.

Its just a matt plastic luckily! In very good condition overall besides some discolouring on the external screws.

Vynix wrote on 2023-04-09, 21:52:

Nabbed a rebadged Belkin FireWire to SCSI adapter and a set of SCSI cables with gold-plated connectors, apparently that was a thing? (edit: Mine is a Orange Micro model, which is apparently a rebadged Belkin F5U541, both of which you can find hardly anything about).

In total, it ran me only 45 euros or so, versus the 200+ euros that the few FireWire-SCSI adapters I can find seem to command (especially Ratoc FR1SXes!).

At least the Belkin F5U541 supports sync SCSI-2 with 10 MB/s. Not too bad.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-04-09, 18:46:

Was at the weekly Sunday car boot sale in my town and came home with this nice 939 machine.

that's a nice buy indeed! looks good too

even if you left specs as they are and just refreshed OS etc it would be great for all kinds of early mid-2000's action

if the side panel is no good will it just be extra air flow or will you try and rescue the panel?

Disruptor wrote on 2023-04-10, 07:34:

At least the Belkin F5U541 supports sync SCSI-2 with 10 MB/s. Not too bad.

That's interesting... The one I bought is a Orange Micro 70HTL00010 (aka "Orange Converter"), unlike the Belkin, it has a DB25 connector, I do wonder if it also supports the same thing, unless it's just the connector that changes.

At the very least the Belkin and the Orange Micro looks like they share the same case design, though I couldn't find much on mine.

I couldn't find all drivers for mine, but digging on the Orange Micro's website on archive.org, I found some drivers for MacOS 9, encoded in *.bin, allegedly there was some Windows drivers made for this converter but no trace of the Windows drivers anywhere.

I've not yet found the Belkin drivers..

gerry wrote on 2023-04-10, 18:21:

that's a nice buy indeed! looks good too

even if you left specs as they are and just refreshed OS etc it would be great for all kinds of early mid-2000's action

if the side panel is no good will it just be extra air flow or will you try and rescue the panel?

I might actually rebuild the sidepanel.

I have a JNC here that has a plexiglass sidepanel (except of a slightly better quality, from what I can tell) so I might try and see if the plexi pieces fit.
If they don't, I guess I'll look into a custom-made plexiglass and glue it down instead of screwing it.

As for its specs, I'll probably look into doing some changes:
- replace the 3000 w/ a 3200+ or a 3500+, whichever I can find around (I remember having a 3500+ though...)
- GPU wise it's a toss - not sure what to choose between 8600GT, Quadro FX3700 and the 9400GT - I plan on converting the 3700 to Geforce 8800/9800 though.
- find a good HDD to run on it - I think I have some Seagate drives - they're considerably faster than WDs of that era

A freak $35 deal led me to this beauty.

I'm interested to see how it compares with its VRAM brother, presuming it works. There's no difference (other than in DOOM) amongst the Mach32s, but I believe this to be a tad faster in DOS than the Graphics Pro Turbo...

WJG6260 wrote on 2023-04-10, 22:49:

A freak $35 deal led me to this beauty.

I'm interested to see how it compares with its VRAM brother, presuming it works. There's no difference (other than in DOOM) amongst the Mach32s, but I believe this to be a tad faster in DOS than the Graphics Pro Turbo...

Mach64DRAM_Seller.jpg

I've been wanting a VLB mach64 for ages .. you're so lucky!

Now you mention mach 64, last year I picked up 2 types of mach 64 cards 1mb and 2mb, both are PCI and also both are DRAM type to play with.

Cheers,

cyclone3d wrote on 2023-04-10, 23:05:

WJG6260 wrote on 2023-04-10, 22:49:

A freak $35 deal led me to this beauty.

I'm interested to see how it compares with its VRAM brother, presuming it works. There's no difference (other than in DOOM) amongst the Mach32s, but I believe this to be a tad faster in DOS than the Graphics Pro Turbo...

Mach64DRAM_Seller.jpg

I've been wanting a VLB mach64 for ages .. you're so lucky!

Thank you! 😀

I have no idea how I found this thing. I'm kind of in shock. eBay's mobile app has a decent feed and it just so happened to come through this time! Hopefully you're able to find one soon for a fair price. They are out there. I have seen them come and go, now and again.

Sending the Mach64 VLB vibes your way!

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-10, 23:12:

Now you mention mach 64, last year I picked up 2 types of mach 64 cards 1mb and 2mb, both are PCI and also both are DRAM type to play with.

Cheers,

Oh, awesome! I think you'll like them. The image quality is quite good on all Mach64s, and the speed is decent. They're fast in Windows 3.1 and 95, at least. DOS speed is about average, but in PCI and with DRAM, I'd say they'd be a good alternative to a Trio64, barring any interest in Commander Keen (the ATi-related bugs with which I suppose you can fix...). They're really well-made cards. ATi certainly had some nice products (and nice fonts in DOS)!

Although it requires an AGP slot, I've found the Trio 3D/2X to be a good card for DOS and Windows compatibility when paired with very early ATX boards.

Yesterday's find was a bunch of used floppy disks (mixed brands). Any opinions?

Just format them to see if they are still good and "rewrite" a magnetic track. These are becoming hard to find in good condition these days.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-04-10, 21:36:

I might actually rebuild the sidepanel. https://www.vogons.org/download/file.php?mode=view&id=162070 I have a JNC here that has […]
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I might actually rebuild the sidepanel.

I have a JNC here that has a plexiglass sidepanel (except of a slightly better quality, from what I can tell) so I might try and see if the plexi pieces fit.
If they don't, I guess I'll look into a custom-made plexiglass and glue it down instead of screwing it.

that will look good, gives me an idea with acrylic / polycarbonate materials too, something interesting about crating a custom panel or indeed a case

RetroPC_King wrote on 2023-04-11, 09:03:

Yesterday's find was a bunch of used floppy disks (mixed brands). Any opinions?

Inspect them visually to see if they are scratched or damaged. I've heard that it's better to format an unknown or older disk twice to ensure strong magnetic tracks. I don't know if this is placebo or a real thing.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-11, 13:20:

I've heard that it's better to format an unknown or older disk twice to ensure strong magnetic tracks. I don't know if this is placebo or a real thing.

In general - nonsense!
Though there still might be a grain of truth - Re: Super low-level Format for floppy

DOS is a huge pain in the ass sometimes when it comes to formatting disks that are in other formats. Sometimes I think it's because it does a seek when you insert, buffers root/FAT ?? Anyway, seems to have already decided disk is bad sometimes, wonder if it gets around it in single floppy system if you do "Format /u B:" then it asks you for B like it's a new disk.

I think it's because there may be neighboring tracks from an alternative format that align within the dead space where the had cannot reach. Maybe this is completely wrong, especially if the head is the same, even if the layout is different. That's how I always imagined it.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-11, 14:09:

I think it's because there may be neighboring tracks from an alternative format that align within the dead space where the had cannot reach. Maybe this is completely wrong, especially if the head is the same, even if the layout is different. That's how I always imagined it.

If the head can't reach somewhere, then whatever is there can't possibly cause problems.

A nice in box Sound Blaster Live! with boatloads of paperwork
2x Tualatin matching Pentium III-S 1.26GHz (I don't know why I bought these other than the price was right.)
1x Tualatin Celeron 1.40GHz (bought w/the P3's)
Pentium 4 Fan (already installed)
7950GT 256MB (for an upcoming Windows ME/Windows 2000 dual boot machine)

Meatball wrote on 2023-04-12, 21:25:

A nice in box Sound Blaster Live! with boatloads of paperwork 2x Tualatin matching Pentium III-S 1.26GHz (I don't know why I bou […]
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A nice in box Sound Blaster Live! with boatloads of paperwork
2x Tualatin matching Pentium III-S 1.26GHz (I don't know why I bought these other than the price was right.)
1x Tualatin Celeron 1.40GHz (bought w/the P3's)
Pentium 4 Fan (already installed)
7950GT 256MB (for an upcoming Windows ME/Windows 2000 dual boot machine)

Huh. Didn't know 7950GT had a 256MB version, I thought they were all 512s.

TIL. Seems like that would basically shoot the card in the foot for titles like Quake 4 and BF2