Tried to repair this Asus A7N8X-X motherboard.

Initially the board wouldn't stay powered on. It would power off automatically after a few seconds. Some of the 3300uF caps were bulging, so I removed and tested them. They were all bad.

Replacing them with new caps has now led to the board staying on, but still won't POST. Further testing revealed there is a short. I keep getting a 30 ohm resistance on all the caps I replaced, along with another of other components in and around that area (MOSFETs, inductors, SMD caps, etc.). So I proceeded to undo my recapping to see I'd maybe caused the short.

But even after removing all the replaced caps, the short remains.

Further testing and tracing led me to the underside of the nForce2 400 chip. One 'edge' of those caps shows the 30 ohm short, some of them 15 ohms, and some not shorted.

Now I'm wondering if the issue is the main nForce chip itself, unless I can find something else in the mean time.

Last fall I bought an assortment of old stuff that was quite a haul, and I've been working my way through it. It included two Socket 370 boards; one had a bad BIOS flash and the other needed new capacitors. After fixing both, I wanted to try to use one of the Tualatin CPUs that were included. I found a Lin Lin adapter on Ebay for a non ridiculous price, but it had a missing pin (even though it was NOS and had never been opened so it was a factory defect) so I sent it back for credit. I then decided to try one of those PCB Tualatin adapters, so I bought one and only today did I give it a shot. I have no idea if either of these CPUs are any good (they were going to be scrapped so they weren't stored carefully - most have been okay, but the Palomino Socket A was dead) since the boards don't natively support Tualatins, so I picked one, did my best to follow the instructions, and I gave it a try. The resulting CPU will not POST in either of the boards, and at this point it seems like a lost cause. I can't be sure if I did something wrong, or if the CPU was dead before I started, or if neither board can POST with a Tualatin without BIOS support. I think I'm going to buy one of his CPUs that has the modification already done and see how that turns out.

I recently picked up one of those Covox/Disney Sound Source replicas. At first I was really disappointed with it. I was getting a lot of static and humming from it, which I hadn't heard on any similar devices reviewed on YouTube. However, I read that these types of audio problems can be due to ground loops, so I bought I cheap ground loop isolator off Amazon for $10. That did the trick, so now I have a nice option for Covox/DSS sound!

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-09-02, 04:20:

I recently picked up one of those Covox/Disney Sound Source replicas. At first I was really disappointed with it. I was getting a lot of static and humming from it, which I hadn't heard on any similar devices reviewed on YouTube. However, I read that these types of audio problems can be due to ground loops, so I bought I cheap ground loop isolator off Amazon for $10. That did the trick, so now I have a nice option for Covox/DSS sound!

I've thought about buying one, but I was unsure if they were legit.

Joakim wrote on 2023-09-02, 06:09:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-09-02, 04:20:

I recently picked up one of those Covox/Disney Sound Source replicas. At first I was really disappointed with it. I was getting a lot of static and humming from it, which I hadn't heard on any similar devices reviewed on YouTube. However, I read that these types of audio problems can be due to ground loops, so I bought I cheap ground loop isolator off Amazon for $10. That did the trick, so now I have a nice option for Covox/DSS sound!

I've thought about buying one, but I was unsure if they were legit.

It's not even a subtle difference. I wasn't expecting CD quality sound or anything like that. I'm also fine with a little bit of noise and static, as this is a very simple device and I'm using it for playing DOS games. However, it went from unusable to really good! All it took was a cheap cable.

A colleague at work mentioned enjoying playing Tekken on the PlayStation 1 in its day. We both run Linux Mint, and he asked if there was a similar game available in Linux. I said I didn't think so, but he could try a PS1 emulator.

I thought I'd better try it out myself, in case he needed some pointers. I checked out the two emulators available in the repository, namely PCSXR (which seems to be dormant now), and the multi-system emulator Mednafen.

PCSXR gave black screens up until the test game (Frogger) was ready to play, but otherwise seemed an easy set-up. I thought I'd try Mednafen, though, and that worked fine after a little configuration. And a BIOS file. It was mute until I selected SDL as the sound driver.

It's likely that Mednafen is an old version, and as I mentioned, PCSXR is now dormant it seems, but a fork of the project called PCSX-Redux is still active. To get that on Linux Mint, though, I'd need to compile it myself, and I'm not a particularly technical Linux user.

More simply, I'll test Mednafen with a USB gamepad, so my fingers aren't in such a twist.

(Technically, this was last weekend, but I may do a little more messing about with it this weekend, so...)

lel, transplanted ssd with time pc restore image from socket 462 to socket 939 neo2 platinum with opteron 180. it works with no note hanging when using soundcanvas midi. i think the pci 128 soundcard is good for these systems. also now using startech ide sata controller. previously aureal or sb live kept giving me issues. had to manually force irq to 7 for soundcard legacy, 939 is a system irq hog. opteron 180 rips through disk defrag and gives nice disk speeds
nice to experiment but i'll stick to 462 and sintech ide2sd card adapter which is *very very* stable no conflicts and no noticeable lag when refreshing device manager

Installing a GUS PNP I got from friend. Heard it's a mess to set up so might be one of those gifts you regret receiving... 😉

Joakim wrote on 2023-09-02, 20:05:

Installing a GUS PNP I got from friend. Heard it's a mess to set up so might be one of those gifts you regret receiving... 😉

Installing it isn't so bad. But trying to get games to work after the fact...

I have this thing.

And to make it do things i need a thingey or two.
I found this website https://dosreloaded.de/forum/thread/5353-fast … ine-pro-thread/ where is a a pinout of one of the things i need... So i got some scrap things made one.

Now i need the software wich is some kind of hard to find...

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-09-02, 20:40:

Joakim wrote on 2023-09-02, 20:05:

Installing a GUS PNP I got from friend. Heard it's a mess to set up so might be one of those gifts you regret receiving... 😉

Installing it isn't so bad. But trying to get games to work after the fact...

I actually managed to get sound out of jazz jackrabbit. Then I typed 'win' in dos, rebooted and the card did not want to initialize. I laughed to myself and cursed the plug and pray god. Gonna try again tomorrow 😀

Today I almost didn't go to the monthly vintage market. It was heavily raining in the morning and last month almost no one was there to sell. Then I decided to check and in the worst case I had a walk. It was surprisingly big despite the weather. I got a bottle of wine, 1kg of dry smoked sausage and 2kg of cheese. Also a box of 5,25" floppies and an ASUS branded FX5600.

Very dirty, probably got some water (not just now because of the rain). I don't know where it was stored, but I picked a grain of barley out of the heatsink. The fan doesn't run free if I spin with my finger. I'd give it a 10% chance that it works.

I finished recapping the secondary of Enermax eg365ax-ve(g) and put it back together. I also started to finalize some of my vintage Socket A era water cooling stuff, so they can be installed in my sA project. Water blocks had gotten a little greenish brown and stained, so I gave them some polishing paste and scrubbing all over. They look better than in 2001 when I got these 😁

I finally finished checking a few Slot1 P-III.
One had a broken cap, soldered a new one: success!

Another needs a reflow, pressing on the core makes it go to C0 C1... after a while it gets hot enough to complete a POST.
No idea how to do a reflow on this though.

Two others are dead, nothing worked and even pressing like crazy on the core didn't yield.
Next move is to check even more and desolder cache chips.

Today i was sorting my mainboard collection.
I came across these boards wich i totally forgot that i own.

They are interesting because of the weirdo CPU socket and fancy colours used for the slots / PCB ...
I even saved the sourrounding parts like ports and IO shields.
But its Pentium 4 / Celeron. Im not sure if i will ever build a system out of them, but they are nice to look at...
I think i will put them back into storage where they can live another 10 years 😁

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-03, 19:39:

Today i was sorting my mainboard collection.
I came across these boards wich i totally forgot that i own.

Familiar experience 😀
"Oh, I had a socket 478 with 1GB or Rdram?" - 🤣
That's what happened to me a few months ago, after buying 2x512MB or Rdram (the other one was 4x256).

Replaced a damaged IDE connector on this Synergy ViperMax (Gravis UltraSound Extreme).

Wouldn't replacing only the plastic part be easier and faster?
I often harvest those from dead boards in case I need a replacement.

I tried removing the plastic housing from a parallel IDE male connector with a set of pliers and ended up destroying it in the process. What kind of voodoo magic allows you to remove yours?

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-09-04, 07:56:

I tried removing the plastic housing from a parallel IDE male connector with a set of pliers and ended up destroying it in the process. What kind of voodoo magic allows you to remove yours?

A pocket knife and/or a flat-head screwdriver. You can push it between the PCB and the plastic and lift it off.