Netburst: Aiming for the Stars

smtkr wrote on 2023-11-11, 23:35:

My blue power LED is so bright it lights up my whole bedroom. I've given some serious consideration to putting an ugly piece of electrical tape over it. I think they needed to use a different diffuser.

They sell sticker kits for this purpose. They have tiny black dots of all different diameters for different size LEDs. Tape is probably cheaper but these are way less noticeable.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-11-12, 01:52:

Several things in my bedroom have green masking tape on them for that reason, can still see enough light through the tape to tell you it's operating but cuts down the retina sear or daylight at 2AM problem.

Hah I use green electrical tape too, with 2 or 3 layers it really nicely dims a blue LED and I find the colour pleasant. My Philips hue thing was terrible for this, really bright blue LEDs that light up my hallway at night so I took it apart and put tape on there. I can still see the LEDs but they're not lighting up a room anymore 😀

I'm frustrated with 3DFX cards right now, I got 2 out of 4 working, but the 2 not working have tough to solve faults. I'm trying to parse this schematic, seriously I can't believe I found a complete Voodoo 1 schematic, but it's a lot to take in.

Since I'm frustrated with them, I picked up another couple of projects to sort instead and the PS/2 mouse stuff is an ongoing project, there are lot of boards I'd like to enable mouse support on. A while back I got a Soyo 5TA2 (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/soyo-sy-5ta2) in a junk lot and it's a nice example of a socket 5/7 motherboard with DIP cache and has the footprint for a PS/2 mouse connector - mostly I find it interesting because it's my only 430FX chipset motherboard. But this model has no PS/2 support and the manual says you need the SY-5TD2 for that option, which isn't happening.
I should probably share some pictures of it because there's none on the retroweb but it looks like this minus the PS2 mouse connector: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/soyo-s … td2-maxdata-oem
I looked at it a while back and gave up because I couldn't get it working, using the PS2SUPPC to enable mouse at the BIOS level wouldn't work. On my board there was no 74F74 at U31, which is next to an unmarked jumper that just so happens to connect to IRQ12.
I tried adding the 74F74 ages ago but previously that resulted in the keyboard not working. Sometimes I could run ctmouse and it'd detect a mouse, but going into something that could use the mouse like EDIT would then result in the mouse and keyboard both no longer responding.

A few days back I found some pictures of an SY-5TD2 that had been sold recently and it was high enough resolution that I could see on the back of the board there was a cut trace that loops between two pins of where 74F74 goes, which must've been a manufacturing option since there were two solder-jumper type pads on the back of the board where that trace is to have the KBC in AT mode or PS2 mode. Those have a trace between them on mine.
Put the 5TD2 bios on this board 5TA2 since I know it'll enable PS/2 mouse support at the BIOS level.
I cut that trace and initially it looked promising, mouse detects but was very disappointed when going into EDIT and the same thing would happen, ah it was that unlabelled jumper to enable / disable PS2 mouse that hooks into IRQ12.
Now mouse support is fully working 😀

^^^ That's a great story! 👍

Cleaned up my desk 😅 and got my Athlon XP pushing some pixels

ubiq wrote on 2023-11-11, 21:17:

vsharun wrote on 2023-11-11, 09:56:

Wash/recap dead Epox EP-7KXA w/Athlon 650 Pluto Slot A (~$15 flea market) ovreclock (115x6.5 - max available) mem @153 sdram m […]
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Wash/recap dead Epox EP-7KXA w/Athlon 650 Pluto Slot A (~$15 flea market)
ovreclock (115x6.5 - max available) mem @153 sdram
memtest 12hrs test 8 (random numbers) - ok
another milestone (SlotA combo) - done
upd: 17 of 18 2200mkF capacitors was ok by multimeter (even leaky ones), but not for ESR tester: Vloss 20-35%, ESR - 1.5-2.7Ohm and around half of capacitance.
New one Sanyo are almost identical w/~3% tolerance on capacitance, 0.07Ohm ESR and 2.5% Vloss.

Very cool! Slot A is def on my list of platforms to check out eventually.

I need to get into recapping. Does anyone know if there's a newbs guide to figuring out what caps I need and the best way to get them? And what's the prevailing wisdom in terms of replacing all caps vs just visibly bad ones on say... a ca. 2004 ASUS Althlon XP mobo?

Hi,
Thank you. This is very first recap in my entire life in one post and picture.

First of all you need soldering iron of quality. Then you need flux, copper ribbon for solder pickup and solder itself, they often sold together as a soldering pack. ESR tester definitely is a must to check the quality of the capacitors you bought.
Then - master your desolder skill on motherboard you don't care from flea market: desoldering caps isn't that easy, but there's bunch of videos how to (without ton-of-money electric suction iron, but just in case - it definitely helps).
Soldering new ones is also not easy for novice, again youtube full of videos. Practice is the key.

My recap post is dedicated to my lovely wife, who helped me with desolder and then solder back new capacitors, she also helps with ESR testing old and new capacitors; second pair of hands definitely helps: one pair with iron, another pair pull old or push new caps.

More subnotebooks! Today I finished fixing my "new" Compaq Contura 430cx. It's really nice machine with the iDX4, but it misses a sound card.

Replaced the tired IBM harddrive with a CF, glued some small plastic parts and here it is running Windows 3.1 with COMPAQ goodies installed.

I wanted to install IBM OS/2 Warp 3 but sadly there aren't compatible drivers for my only PCMCIA cdrom drive (there is the no-cdrom setup but there are like 40 floppies.... I ain't gonna do it).

Building Open Watcom 2.x from source (On DOS).

The IDE Bin distribution for win16 so have a nasty bug, when you create a project and add source files... It crash.
From my understanding it could be because it's been cross compiled using Linux from CI or something like that.

Hope that will fix the issue.

Edit : etherdfs don't like when building that from a network share...
Retrying from a local drive...

vsharun wrote on 2023-11-12, 08:44:

Hi, Thank you. This is very first recap in my entire life in one post and picture. […]
Show full quote

ubiq wrote on 2023-11-11, 21:17:

vsharun wrote on 2023-11-11, 09:56:

Wash/recap dead Epox EP-7KXA w/Athlon 650 Pluto Slot A (~$15 flea market) ovreclock (115x6.5 - max available) mem @153 sdram m […]
Show full quote

Wash/recap dead Epox EP-7KXA w/Athlon 650 Pluto Slot A (~$15 flea market)
ovreclock (115x6.5 - max available) mem @153 sdram
memtest 12hrs test 8 (random numbers) - ok
another milestone (SlotA combo) - done
upd: 17 of 18 2200mkF capacitors was ok by multimeter (even leaky ones), but not for ESR tester: Vloss 20-35%, ESR - 1.5-2.7Ohm and around half of capacitance.
New one Sanyo are almost identical w/~3% tolerance on capacitance, 0.07Ohm ESR and 2.5% Vloss.

Very cool! Slot A is def on my list of platforms to check out eventually.

I need to get into recapping. Does anyone know if there's a newbs guide to figuring out what caps I need and the best way to get them? And what's the prevailing wisdom in terms of replacing all caps vs just visibly bad ones on say... a ca. 2004 ASUS Althlon XP mobo?

Hi,
Thank you. This is very first recap in my entire life in one post and picture.

First of all you need soldering iron of quality. Then you need flux, copper ribbon for solder pickup and solder itself, they often sold together as a soldering pack. ESR tester definitely is a must to check the quality of the capacitors you bought.
Then - master your desolder skill on motherboard you don't care from flea market: desoldering caps isn't that easy, but there's bunch of videos how to (without ton-of-money electric suction iron, but just in case - it definitely helps).
Soldering new ones is also not easy for novice, again youtube full of videos. Practice is the key.

My recap post is dedicated to my lovely wife, who helped me with desolder and then solder back new capacitors, she also helps with ESR testing old and new capacitors; second pair of hands definitely helps: one pair with iron, another pair pull old or push new caps.

Hah, 'grats the on the awesome wife!

I've been working on my soldering/desoldering skills, so I think I'm ready to tackle recap jobs. Think I just need to read up and learn myself a bit - I don't have an EE or CS or any sort of actual technical background, just some dude with a hobby so I'm starting from zero. My challenge is identifying what I've got and figuring out what I need to buy.

Lots of folks mentioning ESR and the fact that caps don't have to be visibly bulging/leaking to be bad. Any recs here for an ESR tester that would be appropriate for a beginner? A quick Amazon check shows they can get pricey and I'm not sure if the cheaper ones will suit.

Rav wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:41:

Building Open Watcom 2.x from source (On DOS).

What compiler do you use? Open Watcom 1.x?

smtkr wrote on 2023-11-11, 23:35:

My blue power LED is so bright it lights up my whole bedroom. I've given some serious consideration to putting an ugly piece of electrical tape over it. I think they needed to use a different diffuser.

Blue LED tricks mind thinking there is white light. Same issue with cameras.

I was so much appreciated when I started using HP 800 G3 Mini, the white LED is very faint. Internal LED is green but still dim enough. Other computer Z220 LED light is blue and too bright lights up my room. Problem is the LED is blue/red combination LED. Have to figure out what to modify the computer so I have soft green or yellow LED while keeping red. Red is for fault detection.

I recently bought a selenite tower with color changing base lamp. Slowly changes through R-G-B light, just right for mood light when getting ready for sleep, with other lamps turned off, love that selenite lamp so much. I'm thinking of finding another and modify one to exclude the blue.

Cheers,

uuuuhh. I have been very retro-busy the last month. Among other things, I've been establishing a new base of retro-computing repair&restoration operations.
identifying, classifying and arranging parts, pieces and materials.
then, cleaning, retrobrighting and testing various floppy and optical drives.
and some IDE HDDs are queued to check their statuses.

but yesterday I was repairing a 5 1/4 floppy I drive saved from being destroyed. It had received a strong hit, destroyed an resistors array, pop a capacitor and blocked the mechanics. I already repaired the mechanical part and it's going like silk. Now I must replace the resistor array, but I am not 100% sure of its value, although it seems to say 89x (the "x" is because the 3rd and maybe 4th numbers fall where it was broken) when measuring its remains it seems to be about 99 Kohm (100K?). The drive is a JV-475-3EAF model. In some images I have found of this and sister units (just small mechanical differences, the circuit seems the very same) it seems to read 8927 or 90xx (can't see the last 2 numbers). If anyone knows the real number, let me know.

smtkr wrote on 2023-11-11, 23:35:

My blue power LED is so bright it lights up my whole bedroom. I've given some serious consideration to putting an ugly piece of electrical tape over it. I think they needed to use a different diffuser.

Modern LEDs are much brighter than older ones, and nobody knows how to handle them properly. When I built my modern system, I added a 10k ohm resistor in series with the power LED. It's still brighter than I'd like, but it doesn't light up the room like a nightlight anymore. I would have changed the LED, but I didn't have a replacement for the odd rectangular hard drive activity LED (which also got a series resistor, but it didn't need such high resistance). I also had a set of computer speakers once with a diffused blue LED, and it was bright enough for an indicator at 100µA (and even when dimmed to extreme levels, that blue color is really distracting - it's such an unnatural color).

Another problem is using narrow-beam LEDs as indicators. You can tell them apart by the package being transparent (sometimes called "water-clear"). They're annoying because they blind you when you look straight at them, but they're barely visible off-axis.

ubiq wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:58:

Hah, 'grats the on the awesome wife! […]
Show full quote

vsharun wrote on 2023-11-12, 08:44:

Hi, Thank you. This is very first recap in my entire life in one post and picture. […]
Show full quote

ubiq wrote on 2023-11-11, 21:17:

Very cool! Slot A is def on my list of platforms to check out eventually.

I need to get into recapping. Does anyone know if there's a newbs guide to figuring out what caps I need and the best way to get them? And what's the prevailing wisdom in terms of replacing all caps vs just visibly bad ones on say... a ca. 2004 ASUS Althlon XP mobo?

Hi,
Thank you. This is very first recap in my entire life in one post and picture.

First of all you need soldering iron of quality. Then you need flux, copper ribbon for solder pickup and solder itself, they often sold together as a soldering pack. ESR tester definitely is a must to check the quality of the capacitors you bought.
Then - master your desolder skill on motherboard you don't care from flea market: desoldering caps isn't that easy, but there's bunch of videos how to (without ton-of-money electric suction iron, but just in case - it definitely helps).
Soldering new ones is also not easy for novice, again youtube full of videos. Practice is the key.

My recap post is dedicated to my lovely wife, who helped me with desolder and then solder back new capacitors, she also helps with ESR testing old and new capacitors; second pair of hands definitely helps: one pair with iron, another pair pull old or push new caps.

Hah, 'grats the on the awesome wife!

I've been working on my soldering/desoldering skills, so I think I'm ready to tackle recap jobs. Think I just need to read up and learn myself a bit - I don't have an EE or CS or any sort of actual technical background, just some dude with a hobby so I'm starting from zero. My challenge is identifying what I've got and figuring out what I need to buy.

Lots of folks mentioning ESR and the fact that caps don't have to be visibly bulging/leaking to be bad. Any recs here for an ESR tester that would be appropriate for a beginner? A quick Amazon check shows they can get pricey and I'm not sure if the cheaper ones will suit.

Thanks, passed your compliment, appreciated and smiling 😀

ESR tester - I bought GM328A with 3d printed hard case/adopted fw for ~$16 inc shipping from local guys. The tester itself (body) cost around $6+ s/h on Ali. Dunno if you appreciate buying from commies directly.

pan069 wrote on 2023-11-12, 22:32:

Rav wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:41:

Building Open Watcom 2.x from source (On DOS).

What compiler do you use? Open Watcom 1.x?

Using a base installation of Open Watcom 2 to compile the same version of Open Watcom 2.

I wanted to have an Open Watcom 2 built by Open Watcom 2 instead of by GCC or whatever CI use.

It failed to build in the 3 tentative I did (From the network it would have taken age, so at the end I moved it on my win95 partition as that later is Fat32 but eventually it make generic windows "unresponsive program" error. Sources files take in total ~300MB but it's composed of a lot of very small files, at the end unpacking the source locally on DOS did not work as it did fill "700MB" worth of fat16 partition after unpacking only 25% and that was all the free space)

Now I want to retry on DOS but I would need fat32 Support or some other way for the source to not eat all the free space. Maybe a 2GB Fat16 partition will have enough space.... Have to move partitions around to test that.

Rav wrote on 2023-11-13, 14:21:

Using a base installation of Open Watcom 2 to compile the same version of Open Watcom 2. […]
Show full quote

pan069 wrote on 2023-11-12, 22:32:

Rav wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:41:

Building Open Watcom 2.x from source (On DOS).

What compiler do you use? Open Watcom 1.x?

Using a base installation of Open Watcom 2 to compile the same version of Open Watcom 2.

I wanted to have an Open Watcom 2 built by Open Watcom 2 instead of by GCC or whatever CI use.

It failed to build in the 3 tentative I did (From the network it would have taken age, so at the end I moved it on my win95 partition as that later is Fat32 but eventually it make generic windows "unresponsive program" error. Sources files take in total ~300MB but it's composed of a lot of very small files, at the end unpacking the source locally on DOS did not work as it did fill "700MB" worth of fat16 partition after unpacking only 25% and that was all the free space)

Now I want to retry on DOS but I would need fat32 Support or some other way for the source to not eat all the free space. Maybe a 2GB Fat16 partition will have enough space.... Have to move partitions around to test that.

It's possible to make a 4GB FAT16 partition, but some legacy programs do not like this.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-13, 17:26:

Rav wrote on 2023-11-13, 14:21:

Using a base installation of Open Watcom 2 to compile the same version of Open Watcom 2. […]
Show full quote

pan069 wrote on 2023-11-12, 22:32:

What compiler do you use? Open Watcom 1.x?

Using a base installation of Open Watcom 2 to compile the same version of Open Watcom 2.

I wanted to have an Open Watcom 2 built by Open Watcom 2 instead of by GCC or whatever CI use.

It failed to build in the 3 tentative I did (From the network it would have taken age, so at the end I moved it on my win95 partition as that later is Fat32 but eventually it make generic windows "unresponsive program" error. Sources files take in total ~300MB but it's composed of a lot of very small files, at the end unpacking the source locally on DOS did not work as it did fill "700MB" worth of fat16 partition after unpacking only 25% and that was all the free space)

Now I want to retry on DOS but I would need fat32 Support or some other way for the source to not eat all the free space. Maybe a 2GB Fat16 partition will have enough space.... Have to move partitions around to test that.

It's possible to make a 4GB FAT16 partition, but some legacy programs do not like this.

That's good to know, I'm going to remember that.

But for that specific purpose I'm not sure it will do.. If I can't stuff 300mb worth of src into 2GB, i'm night now be able to stuff it into 4GB (if the only difference is clusters twice as big)

You can also setup multiple FAT16 partitions.

After a rather nasty morning, I dug this ole' Latitude CPx J650GT out of storage and get it up on 98SE.

The DVD-RW drive used in there is a LG I got out of an 2007-08 Acer 7720G.

Dremeled and stickered an E5450, prepared a BIOS with s771 microcode and built a rig with 16GB DDR3 around a GA-P45T-ES3G that had been sitting here for ages.
Prepared another BIOS for GA-G41M-Combo rev1.3 and stuck an E5430 in there with two 4GB DDR3 DIMMs.

These are the third and fourth s771-gone-775 Xeon builds here respectively, which I intend to keep around as spares. The other two, built around ASUS P5K and P5KC with 8GBs of DDR2, are offline daily drivers for all my music production needs, SSDs backed up in cold storage, and are still running strong after all these years. One of them runs Win7x64, the other Snow Leopard 10.6.8. It's always good to have spares; if I move to a newer platform I lose drivers or get software incompatibilities, especially on the Mac side, so I'm stuck with LGA775 era hardware which, for my setup, is the sweet spot. On the other hand, it's not that I don't enjoy the platform! It still does all I want it to do and more, can't complain 😀

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-11-13, 17:26:

It's possible to make a 4GB FAT16 partition, but some legacy programs do not like this.

I tested that.

Made a 4GB Fat16 partition directly from dos (Ranish can do it, including the formatting) for the games partition!

Thanks again for the tip, seam to work just fine.

As for the watcom shenanigans, the source did fit on a 2GB partition, but I still could not build it (not enough available memory blah blah). So I put that project on hold for now.