Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-11-03, 20:10:

Wow, that's unfortunate - I wonder what speed it was going at?
Long ago my little brother playing Red Alert 2 for long enough lead to the CD exploding in the drive 😀

it was a generic DVD-RW drive running at standard speed in my thinkcentre e72 win10 main pc
PLDS DVD-RW DH16ACSH

Found a 14" crt and a set of genius speakers at the local scrap heap today. Weird place to find old electronics, but the owner told me he's starting to collect and recycle electronics as well. Usually I go there once every two or three months to deliver scrap and bad car parts / batteries and wiring that piles up in the garage, but I guess now I'll have to visit more often.

Here they are - pretty bad shape. They've been out in the rain for god knows how long.

Took it apart and cleaned it. It had dried up mud on the electronics board, but I didn't spot any signs of damage. Tried turning it on - the indicator light would turn green when I powered on the PC, but no image and the tube made a scary crackling noise. I turned it off and used a long screwdriver grounded with a thick car battery cable to discharge the tube and flyback transformer. (don't try this at home, I'm an idiot and lost my CRT discharge tool). Then I removed the suction cup looking thing that goes into the tube and cleaned both the hole it goes into and the exposed part of the wire which was blackened and covered in what looks like soot.

It works!!! Kind of scary to turn these things on without the rear cover, but I wanted to do adjustments if needed. Two of the buttons weren't working, so I had to pull the board out completely to get to them. I sprayed all of them with a bit of contact cleaner and compressed air, and resembled. Now all buttons work perfectly.

It cleaned up really nicely too!

I recapped one of the floppy drives for the IBM PS/2 Model 80 i picked a couple of months ago. Both a Mitsubishi and an ALPS drive came with the machine, but the Mitsubishi was first up for service. These machines will not boot without first being configured with an reference disk. Anyway I changed the proposed caps from the guide on "Ardent Tool of Capitalism" but no dice. I could hear it seeking for a second when starting the machine but i got no further than that. I also tried several floppies in case they were corrupt, but it made no difference. As a final attempt before sending the piece of &#%@ drive to Valhalla I changed the caps on the motor drive (even thou they looked perfect compared to the ones on the signal side), and of course the drive now works perfectly!

The next project will be to get a SCSI-emulator of some sort like the BlueSCSI, RaSCSI or SCSI2SD working since I dont have a HDD. I have a feeling that will be easier said than done.

I bought a Radeon X800 Pro that ended up being defective (completely dead). A visual inspection showed a single capacitor missing near the PCI-e edge connector, which looked like an easy repair. After looking at the card under a microscope however, I kept finding more and more broken or missing components all across the board.

I found and replaced what I think was all of the damage, also checking various traces that appeared to be damaged, but I wasn't able to revive it. The damage to this card was significant, and it's condition is overall extremely poor.

Can't save them all.

More pictures of the damage.

That's a shame, it looks like a few of the PCI-e traces are scratched up or damaged as well as those components, I've got an X1950AGP in a similar state that came from a recycler / gold scrap lot. I haven't tried powering that up yet.

Today I was trying to make a flat flex cable that has contacts facing up on one end and down on the other. I didn't want to wait for them from China and I've got several cables that have both ends facing the same way. The solution turned out to be pretty cool literally. Heating the flat flex cable just destroyed it - it's 0.5mm pitch and the pins ended up all over the place. So instead, I got two cables and soldered them together using low-melt solder at like 140C instead of the usual 250+C. That stopped the cable from melting and the low melt solder is adhering the pins nicely.
Trying to troubleshoot why my GuS isn't making MIDI in games I was trying another one of my Advantech SBCs but it needed a new LCD adapter - I got 5x of them from JLCPCB for like £12 along with another design which is more than I'll ever really need. Those connect a parallel LCD via flat flex cable (and adapters sometimes) to the Advantech LCD connector, but the one that worked on my PCM-4825 did not work on my PCA-6145. It would display but it was just beeping? Then it locked up.
I should really check the pinouts of connectors before I power things up! 😁 I found the PCA-6145's 44-pin LCD connector has keyboard signals (??) where I'd put a ground pad and that was pulling one of the keyboard signals to ground and just messing everything up. The PCB looks far less nice than the unmodified design but at this rate every one of my Single Board Computers will be able to easily have an LCD natively connected to it.

Fixed up this other Radeon X800 Pro successfully. It might not be visible from the photos, but there was a lot of cleaning to be done. I also soaked the heatsink in vinegar and scrubbed it, applied new thermal paste and pads, and revived the scratchy fan with a few drops of oil.

Spent some time this evening tinkering with my 386 DX-40 and 486 DX/2-66 systems, still trying to figure out sound card options for these respective systems.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-11-05, 02:42:

Fixed up this other Radeon X800 Pro successfully. It might not be visible from the photos, but there was a lot of cleaning to be done. I also soaked the heatsink in vinegar and scrubbed it, applied new thermal paste and pads, and revived the scratchy fan with a few drops of oil.

20221104_043234_resize_4.jpg

That's a lovely restoration/cleaning. Looks almost brand new in that second pic.

I went back poking at the Vectra, installing some game demos, testing the limits of the on-board Matrox G200. It's a lot more disappointing than expected. I hear people saying it's the first half way decent gaming GPU from Matrox. I guess it's better than a Trio3D, it runs Quake 3 Arena at 17-18fps on default settings. On the other hand a lot of games won't start or freeze in 3D accelerated mode and Powerslide looks like this:

According to youtube, this -or at least discrete variants of this (1) (2) (3)- should perform much better. Even if it's slower than the discrete variants, it should at least run/display games correctly, is it not? Maybe the issue lies elsewhere? Or did I just pick an unlucky batch of games to test?

Edit:
Might be an issue of driver version? Booted into Windows 2k. Quake 3 is a little bit faster, ~21fps, Carmageddon 2 demo this time works and runs decently, Powerslide however does not launch. Returns to castle Wolfenstein also runs alright. About as slow as expected.

Tried to repair a Toshiba 6x CD-ROM today.

It seems to suffer from slipping the gears when trying to open the unit and consequently won't open.

Disassembled it to the point picture, cleared it up, reassembled but still have the same issue. I'm going to try disassembling again, but there is a lot of finnicky plastic so I'm a bit concerned about disassembling the motor and gear assembly.

Anyone else have tips on trying to repair a drive like this? Is it worth attempting or should I just opt for a different drive?

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-11-05, 18:34:

I went back poking at the Vectra, installing some game demos, testing the limits of the on-board Matrox G200. It's a lot more disappointing than expected. I hear people saying it's the first half way decent gaming GPU from Matrox. I guess it's better than a Trio3D, it runs Quake 3 Arena at 17-18fps on default settings. On the other hand a lot of games won't start or freeze in 3D accelerated mode and Powerslide looks like this:

I didn't have good results in OpenGL games until I used the g200icd.dll ICD from the XP driver. See here:

DirectX and OpenGL problems with my Matrox G200?

You also need to be aware that it does not support multitexturing at all, and still display bright or messed up textures in games like Unreal, unless it is disabled.

Replaced the 8 SDRAM ICs on Voodoo3 3000 with brand new ICs from USA seller on ebay and jailbars is gone! Now I can go on and test it but no windows 98se disc yet. Where to get one?

Cheers,

5 cpus I tested actually work.
From a left for dead batch of 20+ it's good.
I still hate socket A though, I hate it like Dr. Cox hated Dr. Kelso.

The cloud infrastructure directly above my house dumped a ton of snow on us today, so I stayed inside and did cozy computer stuff. My greatest accomplishment? Why, the yearly backup of my 486, of course! An up-to-date copy of both hard drives--that's 1.1GB of DOS gaming goodness--now safely resides on my file server.

It sure took a while (my my, is DOS networking ever slow!), but all I have to do now is blast off to the planet Tuul in my Bean w/ Bacon Megarocket and mow down some nasty goblins, baby!

Cloud delivery, what will they think of next, hopefully they will progress from various forms of H2O to beer at least soon.

it used to be yellow.

InWin A500 *Heart*

In recent month I didn't write about the monthly vintage market. I went to all of them, but they were pretty boring regarding vintage electronics. Today however I got to pick up something.

An ABIT Media XP 5.25" front panel. A little dirty and I don't have an ABIT *T MAX series mainboard, but the USB connectors seem to be standard so probably the card reader and USB ports work with non-compatible boards and I hope that at least the mic and headphone jacks can be used with a modded cable. The S/P DIF output and the IR receiver are probably out of the question without a compatible board. Not that I found it's remote controller. Otherwise it's a little dirty, but looks to be undamaged.

Off-topic purchases

The water bottle is similar to one I already had, but twice as big. I use them when hiking, and I'll probably use this bigger one in the gym too. The shakers I used until now always leak and the plastic bottles I was using in the past often broke. The little one I had already proven itself.

The brush is retro related, I picked it up from the same place to clean retro hardware.

The business card holder is to hold cards. The right size for personal ID card, driving license, credit/debit cards and others of similar size.

The plates are some very heavy stuff. Sadly there weren't a full set, so I picked one each. Will be good for serving snacks when I have guests over.

As for these pictures ,they are printed on iron plates. I like these vintage/vintage inspired pinup images. I already had some decorating my kitchen. I think I'll make get something fixed to the wall having some neodymium magnets to make it easier to switch them. I thought that maybe the bathing girl should be in the bathroom, but I'm concerned it'd start to rust in the humid air.

It was only after I purchased that I noticed the cowgirl is a horsegirl, but I don't mind, it still looks good.

Revived an ASUS P5PE-VM. Turns out some of the MOSFETs got hot and desoldered themselves. A few hours later they started working.

Now, to rebuild that period correct Raidmax/Rhino RX-500Y PSU, and I might be on track for a nice retro build w/ a Pentium Dual-Core E2xxx 😀