Backed up a previous owners 2gb dos drive with games etc from the ga-5ax build. Really noisy drive. Looks like they had awe32 installed, dir /w awe32 folders. Only have pci cards, want to finally figure out dos. The previous owner has tonnes of saved games for sshock etc.

Today i started to put back together some cases i took apart to sun bright and clean.

This Medion MT4 turned out great. Just the mainboard needs recapping now.

Fun Fact: Blue Power Button: P3/500MHz | Light green Power button : P2/350MHz | Red Power Button : P3/667MHz

The 40x speed drive is the one the system shipped with in 1999, and the other recorder is about 2 years newer, and i think it was sold at the same store as the main PC.

The system came with one 14,5gb HDD from the factory. I have another identical drive... so why not install both 😁

This system also turned out pretty nice.
The case is pretty smooth and round. So i decided i use a Toshiba DVD drive wich is also simple and has some round shapes.
I think it will fit the build pretty well.

In preperation for the special Mainboard i fitted a special power supply with special connectors... Very special.

Let's see:

- sold an ASUS A7N8X-VM/400 that I had flashed a Chaintech CT-7NIF2 BIOS on, along with a 80GB HDD preloaded w/ 98SE.

- not sure if this counts that much as retro, but since it was modded already, I replaced the dusty Lite-On DVD drive on a painted Xbox 360 with a LG drive, and swapped the absolutely maddening pair of Delta fans for a pair of Nidecs, which my ears thank me for. Photo of the system below (although this was before the DVD swap)

- also while at consoles, took the time to fix some AV settings on the Aladdin XT chipped OG Xbox I had posted a few pages back - below are some photos of it closed up as well as painted front and bottom.

Finally got around to bringing out the old Tandy TSR-80 Model 1 from the attic, even has the Expansion Interface along with 32K additional RAM as well as the monitor, dual floppy, datasette and tons of floppy discs, datasettes, manuals and stuff. Plugged everything in and it still works, even got to play a bit Lunar Lander, my favorite game when I was little and my father let me play on it.

Father must have upgraded the Expansion Interface to hold 32K RAM as it has the model number of a 0K model (26-1140)

Neil Armstrong would be proud:

Here's the boot-up into Lunar Lander:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEZS6soTHcE

Today I finished up the repair and rebuild of my SNI PCD-4H/SX (486SX25, 4MB RAM) where a PS/2 port was broken. (Can a PS/2 Keyboard be incompatible with a computer or is something just broken?)
The replacement parts came today and of course I soldered in two new PS/2 ports right after opening the package as well as replaced the green fuse behind the ports. I must have triggered it when I was debugging the ports 😅

I put it together with a real 520MB HDD for now because the BIOS does not support auto detection and I have to figure out the C/H/S of my CF first

I then mixed and matched case parts because I like a different front way better than the one this SNI came with but the new front does not fit the OG case. For the back plate that did not fit I will print one with my 3d Printer. As you see there is one slot missing in the plate for the ISA-Cards in the middle. I will use it for a card that does not have external connections.

For the front panel I will try DerBaum’s UV-treat soon. In the meantime I printed a different plate for the logo. Because the old logo is a large PCD-5H which does not match what’s in there (yes I am particular that way). I think it fits well. Especially with the finish a PEI print-plate creates that matches the surface structure of the front panel exactly

Pretty happy how it turned out and the new backplate will make it complete. 😀

got sblink working using rainbow coloured breadboard connectors on my 440bx + ymf744 using this guide: https://youtu.be/_hg_wUcdC4s?si=1Wn2OGKotqNlGnsh
pain in the ass irq conflicts, NEC usb 2.0 card is a huge hog. set resources 5 + 7 as legacy and got it working. proceeded to setupds in ms-dos mode and 16-bit/8-bit and FM are all working 😁
now i should buy an ESS 1868f ISA card but still strying out PCI...

Testing a system from e-waste. This system was originally requested by an engineer friend who needed a vintage motherboard with ISA and PCI slots for their product testing. However, his boss later decided to terminate the product line so it's sitting in my room now. I'll see if it works......

• MB: Gigabyte GA-6VX7-4X Rev. 5.0 (note; see below)
• CPU: P3 1GHz (SL5DV)
• RAM: 3 x 128MB SDRAM
• GPU: Gigabyte GA-622-32C (TNT2 M64)
• HDD: Hitachi HDS728080PLAT20 82.3GB 7200rpm PATA
• ODD1: AOpen DVD-9632 (suction-type) DVD-ROM
• ODD2: Acer 1208A-124 CD-RW
• PSU: 250W ATX

The testing had a bumpy start: Before turning it on I searched Gigabyte's site for "Gigabyte GA-6VX7-4X Rev. 5.0" with no result; GA-6VX7-4X has only rev. 1.2, and the MB has a different layout compared with photos I found online -- the on-board sound chip Creative CT5880 in particular. GA-6VX7-4X has no such chip and provided no driver by Gigabyte.

The PSU is almost dead so I had to use one of my spare to fire it up, yet it didn't POST and gave me two different error codes. Spent several hours to confirm one SDRAM strip was dead.

Even after successful POST the system was unstable; sometimes it gave me video memory error. The AGP port was fine; turned out the GA-622-32C needed some "pressing" on its chips, possibly due to faulty solder contacts after 22 years (warranty stickers dated September 2001). POST showed BIOS to be "GA-6VX7-4X-A / GA-6VX7-4X-AP F3" so the MB is actually GA-6VX7-4X-AP Rev. 5.0; Gigabyte's manual has no "AP" printed on it.

The two ODD were both dead: DVD could be turned on but couldn't read any disc; the CD-RW couldn't even power on.

Well, at least the MB, CPU, HDD and FDD are fine, but I have to find a replacement heatsink first: its plastic "spring" snapped when I unlocked it in order to clean the old and hardened thermal paste, and the fan was long dead as well.

Today I made some real progress with my MS-6168 motherboard which would not power on after I bought it from a scrap lot and recapped it. I made the mistake of not testing it first and not recording my progress a few years back so it's interesting to pick it back up and figure out what I was doing.

Maybe it had one visibly blown MOSFET running the CPU power section because I'd swapped that out but it still wouldn't power - pulled the other MOSFET, which tested as two resistors so that's fautly too. It has a high-side and low-side MOSFET, run by the SC1153CSW controller chip. From checking with my thermal camera, I knew that at least one MOSFET got really hot with no CPU fitted.
Decided to replace with new-old-stock original parts from a UK seller and these new MOSFETs test okay so I fitted them.
Ran the board for a bit and initially it was giving "--" or "8C" which means nothing on my tester card, I was worried that maybe the northbridge was damaged or something else broken.
Power consumption with the new MOSFETs fitted is ~13w using the PicoPSU and the bench power supply, so I can easily see if there's anything crazy going on with power draw.

The board has sat for several years though so I thought I'd try reseating the CPU card and setting the multiplier right for the CPU. There we go, now it boots up to "D3" - very curious that it does not beep at all, even with the separate speaker fitted. I bet I broke a trace around there someplace.

But with RAM fitted, the board now POSTs and there's output on the screen which has no errors, so the following parts are working:
Northbridge - great, there were some scratches on it from where the heatsink was removed so I was worried. Heatsink is now re-fitted.
Voodoo 3 - working and the fan works properly, power consumption seems to be normal
Voodoo 3 memory - good so far, no noise on the display
CPU & Slot 1 socket - good, the socket did need contact cleaner sprayed in it to work properly. Just testing with a P2-350 for now but would like to run a coppermine CPU on this board once it's working. In fact that's why I have 2x MS6168 boards, one is a V1 and can only do katmai at best, but this board when it works should support coppermine as it's a V2.
Memory - also good, counted up to 128MB

Then I decided to re-check the thermal camera to see what's going on - one of the MOSFETs is running at 120C while the other is cold - finally I'm using my thermal camera for the job it's intended for. It let me to zero-in on where the faulty components were visually.

That's bad though so I shut it down and I pulled off the MOSFETs to re-test them, they're both fine so lets look at the controller next. The SC1153CSW gives a good reading of mega-ohms between ground and DH - driver output for the high-side MOSFET, when it's running the DH pin shows something like 4.5v. Checking the DL - driver output for the low-side MOSFET, that reads 22ohms from it to ground / source. When running, the DL pin reads 0.05v

With the SC1153CSW removed the 20 ohms short is gone but very curiously, the corresponding pins on the DC/DC controller also do not read as short once it's removed from the board. So I don't know for sure whether it's a shorted component or a short somewhere else on the board.

Checking my good MS-6168, the low side MOSFET's Gate leg does read mega-ohms to ground / source.
I really hope the new SC1153CSW chip fixes this!!

Slightly used.

I tested this PC with this power supply... and it worked 😁
Amazing that it survived without any airflow.
Now its getting a nice bath...

DerBaum wrote on 2023-09-27, 21:59:

Slightly used. 2023-09-27 20.43.30.jpg2023-09-27 20.49.07.jpg […]
Show full quote

Slightly used.
2023-09-27 20.43.30.jpg2023-09-27 20.49.07.jpg

I tested this PC with this power supply... and it worked 😁
Amazing that it survived without any airflow.
Now its getting a nice bath...

This actually doesn't surprise me. I used to work in a heavy duty garage. I'd open up cases and it would be like the motherboard grew fur. It's surprising how resilient computers can be. We had more problems with laptops that sat in a salesman's office all day compared to the shop PCs.

Trying to figure out how to boot from a PCMCIA card with a CF card installed on Pentium laptops (FMA7600). They both have the option, but they don't boot from it unless I insert a boot diskette with the PCMCIA drivers and UNATA loaded with the msdos.sys file copied from the CF card to the floppy diskette.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2023-09-28, 00:33:

Trying to figure out how to boot from a PCMCIA card with a CF card installed on Pentium laptops (FMA7600). They both have the option, but they don't boot from it unless I insert a boot diskette with the PCMCIA drivers and UNATA loaded with the msdos.sys file copied from the CF card to the floppy diskette.

I'm not aware of any laptop that is capable of booting from a PCMCIA card. Maybe you can make a small partition on the internal hard disk and bootstrap to it instead with something like GRUB4DOS?

Anyone want to try out restored image on their system for review?
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2 … &menustate=60,0
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2 … &menustate=60,0
Leonard Nemoy would approve 😁
https://youtu.be/lLW3dQXO8wg?si=6Ti-r2ylk600ROma

Today i modified my v3 3000 by adding a 50mm fan to the heatsink using 2 tiewraps. Its a fan from Noiseblocker, which will do Just fine.

Modified the BIOS for my MS-6191 mATX Slot-A board to see if I could get it to overclock.

Option is now there, and underclocking to 90MHz FSB works fine (underclocking the 900MHz CPU to 810MHz), but something in the machine either doesn't like the bus speeds at 120MHz FSB (the next option up from 100MHz), or the PCI/AGP being out of spec to 40/80MHz is breaking the system, or simply the CPU can't do 1080MHz.

Not much else I can try unfortunately.

paradigital wrote on 2023-09-28, 11:13:

Modified the BIOS for my MS-6191 mATX Slot-A board to see if I could get it to overclock.

Option is now there, and underclocking to 90MHz FSB works fine (underclocking the 900MHz CPU to 810MHz), but something in the machine either doesn't like the bus speeds at 120MHz FSB (the next option up from 100MHz), or the PCI/AGP being out of spec to 40/80MHz is breaking the system, or simply the CPU can't do 1080MHz.

Not much else I can try unfortunately.

Never had much Slot A hands-on myself, but remember much forum talk back in the day about the L2 cache maybe being restrictive, and some people were doing mods to switch ratio on the CPU modules.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-09-28, 12:42:

paradigital wrote on 2023-09-28, 11:13:

Modified the BIOS for my MS-6191 mATX Slot-A board to see if I could get it to overclock.

Option is now there, and underclocking to 90MHz FSB works fine (underclocking the 900MHz CPU to 810MHz), but something in the machine either doesn't like the bus speeds at 120MHz FSB (the next option up from 100MHz), or the PCI/AGP being out of spec to 40/80MHz is breaking the system, or simply the CPU can't do 1080MHz.

Not much else I can try unfortunately.

Never had much Slot A hands-on myself, but remember much forum talk back in the day about the L2 cache maybe being restrictive, and some people were doing mods to switch ratio on the CPU modules.

I was under the impression that was for the Orion and Pluto CPUs that had external L2 cache. The Thunderbird CPUs have on-die cache, even in SLOT-A form.

paradigital wrote on 2023-09-28, 12:45:

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-09-28, 12:42:

paradigital wrote on 2023-09-28, 11:13:

Modified the BIOS for my MS-6191 mATX Slot-A board to see if I could get it to overclock.

Option is now there, and underclocking to 90MHz FSB works fine (underclocking the 900MHz CPU to 810MHz), but something in the machine either doesn't like the bus speeds at 120MHz FSB (the next option up from 100MHz), or the PCI/AGP being out of spec to 40/80MHz is breaking the system, or simply the CPU can't do 1080MHz.

Not much else I can try unfortunately.

Never had much Slot A hands-on myself, but remember much forum talk back in the day about the L2 cache maybe being restrictive, and some people were doing mods to switch ratio on the CPU modules.

I was under the impression that was for the Orion and Pluto CPUs that had external L2 cache. The Thunderbird CPUs have on-die cache, even in SLOT-A form.

Yes true, easy way to tell is if it's 256kb it's full speed on die, if 512, it's chips onboard. I was refreshing my memory on the sitch and realised that a 900mhz part is using the lowest ratio on discrete chips anyway and there's nothing to gain. Also I believe it was considered that 115Mhz was the top of the "safe" range to push slot A northbridges to, that they were highly likely to go flakey above that. Extreme measures like extra cooling and cranking the I/O voltages were used to get them a bit higher though.

There are some good slot A guides still online at ocinside.de ... https://www.ocinside.de/workshop_en/amd_slot_a_oc/

I tested a Pcchips m765vmrt at slot 1 and socket 370 motherboard. Appears working, but sadly it is an earlier revision without coppermine support. So katmai 600b max..

Had loads of fun with a 423/SDRAM mobo - a MSI 845 Pro.

Started from scratch with a 80GB Maxtor 6Y080P0, a Samsung SH-S162 DVD-RW, GF4 MX440 64MB Golden PCB and a RTL8169C 1000M LAN card.

Got 2K installed, nVidia 71.89 for the GPU and whatever I found that could run the PCI LAN card, and this is the final result. A few games still need some attention (NFS5 crashes by hanging at the splash screen, Ford Racing 2 runs slightly choppy) but so far I'm very happy how it turned out. Maybe up the RAM a lil' bit (256MB seems to be barely enough for it) but that's it besides those two things.