I did spend yesterday afternoon trying to get my new Abit AB-PB4 socket 3 board to post. I did not have much luck. It seems I got 32MB EDO, an AMD 5x86-p75 that could be working and 256k cache that should be working for my money.

The board came with the CPU mounted 90 degrees wrong in the socket but there are no burn marks (or smell) on the board or CPU. No beep codes or anything other to help with identifying the issue. I have checked all jumper settings and they are correct. I have also tested the board with an AMD DX4 100 (no idea if it works) and it diddnt work but at least got hot when tested with the jumper settings for the 5x86-p75, with correct jumper settings for the AMD DX4 it only got slightly warm with a small heatsink mounted.

Its a shame that the board isnt working as my board is a later version than all other PB4s I have seen pictures of. Not a single tantalum China cracker, only electrolytic caps. I think its the BIOS or the VRM that is the culprit, there are no visable damage to the VRM area so I will try a new BIOS some time in the future when I have bought an EPROM flasher. There is also the small chance that both CPUs are dead but I do not have another 486 CPU to test with right now.

If you have a board with the same chipset you could try swapping their BIOS chips temporarily.
First though, I recommend trying an ISA VGA card and a 5 Volt CPU, I've had a few 486 boards with no apparent problem but rarely the PCI slots won't run a video card after a CPU has fried in the hands of previous owner. Also, 5 Volt processors draw power directly from the power supply and are generally less complicated, therefore they are much better for identifying problems with the chipset, BIOS, RAM or whatever else. I always have a 486DX-33 (And an SX-25 in the same bag) on hand just for this reason.

As for me today.
Seeing as my P60 isn't going to see much use and is crap in Windows anyway, I tore out its Serial card and re-installed it in my 286 along with setting up Interlink.

I also stole its 200 Watt PSU and donated it to my new Pentium OverKill* machine which previously had a 150 Watt supply and a bodge to the MHz display, this PSU has one of those 2-Pin 5V connectors for it. Discovered that the Intel EtherExpress Pro drivers for Windows 95 are rubbish.

* For some reason, the name "Pentium OverKill" came into my head and it has tickled me rather a lot. Intel should have released a sill model, like a 233MHz Pentium for 486 motherboards (which would be completely useless) with that name and red writing on the label instead of black/blue... Hell, I'd buy one.

I guess that name is better than the one I used yesterday, at least until I can come up with another generic feminine name for the system, which I would have had to already if I could make that Ethernet adapter work. Probably just steal the 3C905B from the P60, but I'm waiting as UPS tracking says the video card is nearly here.

HighTreason wrote:

If you have a board with the same chipset you could try swapping their BIOS chips temporarily.
First though, I recommend trying an ISA VGA card and a 5 Volt CPU, I've had a few 486 boards with no apparent problem but rarely the PCI slots won't run a video card after a CPU has fried in the hands of previous owner. Also, 5 Volt processors draw power directly from the power supply and are generally less complicated, therefore they are much better for identifying problems with the chipset, BIOS, RAM or whatever else. I always have a 486DX-33 (And an SX-25 in the same bag) on hand just for this reason.

I do not own another board with the same chipset sadly. I did try an ISA video card and I have my eyes on a 486 SX 25 that is currectly at ~1 euro bid + 1.5 euro shipping.

I will not give up, just let the board rest for a couple of weeks 😀

No work today and I do not have anything other planned so I can tinker with the toys the whole day long.

Todays object of interest isnt very retro but its at least rather old. Lets call it a backup project when my 486 plans diddnt pan out.

The Asus Commando P965 motherboard from late 2006. I bought this board untested with an unknown CPU some months ago, today I will test it. The CPU was coverd in paste, after some cleaning a Q6600 came to light. The CPU alone is already enough to cover the price I paid 😀

The board has some interesting features, perhaps thats why it was so late to the maket. Gigabytes competing flagship P965 board was released half a year earlier but that board dosnt have a shiny display... at the back...

I would be surprised if these caps leak.

Got the CPC6128 to work again! The floppy drive didn't work because of several (!) cracked solder joints on its control board. I only have a single floppy for it though, which had read errors (and visible scratches) on the B side. I managed to fix this by loading a file, holding down the Retry key with a screwdriver for several hours, then saving it again 🤣

Skyscraper wrote:

I would be surprised if these caps leak.

Probably won't leak but they can still go bad eventually 😉
Most polymer caps are rated for 2000 hours at 105°C.

jwt27 wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I would be surprised if these caps leak.

Probably won't leak but they can still go bad eventually 😉
Most polymer caps are rated for 2000 hours at 105°C.

Well those are for the not so hot running north bridge, they should survive for a long time yet 😀
"The 8-phase cap-less Power design" should with luck be able to feed the CPU with power "forever".

The Asus Commando works by the way. It diddnt want to power on at first and the small LCD display just said "CPU init". I changed video card, memory and CPU with no luck then I changed PSU and the board powered on instantly and it has been smooth sailing from there. At least some auctions with untested stuff turn out to be great deals.

jwt27 wrote:

Got the CPC6128 to work again! The floppy drive didn't work because of several (!) cracked solder joints on its control board. I […]
Show full quote

Got the CPC6128 to work again! The floppy drive didn't work because of several (!) cracked solder joints on its control board. I only have a single floppy for it though, which had read errors (and visible scratches) on the B side. I managed to fix this by loading a file, holding down the Retry key with a screwdriver for several hours, then saving it again 🤣

Skyscraper wrote:

I would be surprised if these caps leak.

Probably won't leak but they can still go bad eventually 😉
Most polymer caps are rated for 2000 hours at 105°C.

Have you yet hooked up a 5.5" floppy drive to it yet to make use of playing games from your images 😊 from your main pc? I did that.. I also soldered up three switches, one to use either 40/80 track, didn't really need it seeing as all discs are 160kb single sided. A switch for changing the drive letter on the fly! and a switch to change the side on which the disc is being read (again on the fly) ??? I did.. It was great. And a must for playing games from a media that is still available and a medium between both a modern PC and the Amstrad. I have seen websites with a 3" drive connected to a PC, but it looked a hell of a lot more complicated and less successful.

Blurredman wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

Got the CPC6128 to work again! The floppy drive didn't work because of several (!) cracked solder joints on its control board. I only have a single floppy for it though, which had read errors (and visible scratches) on the B side. I managed to fix this by loading a file, holding down the Retry key with a screwdriver for several hours, then saving it again 🤣

Have you yet hooked up a 5.5" floppy drive to it yet to make use of playing games from your images 😊 from your main pc? I did that.. I also soldered up three switches, one to use either 40/80 track, didn't really need it seeing as all discs are 160kb single sided. A switch for changing the drive letter on the fly! and a switch to change the side on which the disc is being read (again on the fly) ??? I did.. It was great. And a must for playing games from a media that is still available and a medium between both a modern PC and the Amstrad. I have seen websites with a 3" drive connected to a PC, but it looked a hell of a lot more complicated and less successful.

I've been meaning to do so, but I'd have to buy/make a cable for that first. I have the Schneider version with the centronics connectors, so can't use a normal floppy cable here 🙁

jwt27 wrote:

I've been meaning to do so, but I'd have to buy/make a cable for that first. I have the Schneider version with the centronics connectors, so can't use a normal floppy cable here 🙁

Ah yes, forgotten that the european had centronics.. All UK versions (bar a select few) have flat card connections directly into the board. I tehrefore could use out of the box a standard floppy cable but just move/remove the appropriate connections on the cable for ease and less clutter. Don't forget... The Ready signal has to be shorted as constantly on/ready!

My new video card arrived and I installed it...

RAM I am guessing. I don't think returning the board is worth it and I have neither the tools nor the skill to work on the chips... Suppose that as it doesn't work anyway I could just flux the hell out of it and try regardless.

Edit: I also learned the origins of my T3200SX! It has a label on the back which has a Carnaud Metal Box logo with Perry Wood written beneath. I assumed Perry Wood was a guy and that this was his machine at said company... My old house actually backed onto one of their factories. The Toshiba, however, is from Worcester, Worcestershire and what do I find, but this; http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/10356478. … ory_will_close/

My Toshiba, at some stage, may have been partly responsible for a tin that spaghetti, beans or cola I consumed was packaged in. Awesome!

Just playing around one of with my Acorn A4000s, 2megs of ram, 203meg hdd, trialing the software I got last week. The software only PCEm x86 emulator(the multi tasking MDA/CGA/EGA version) is quite interesting. About the speed of an XT Turbo. Really needs a 4meg system though as it takes up 960k.

I found my computer case from my childhood at the local thrift store last year. I have NEVER seen it on ebay, listed on the forums, or anywhere on the web. It uses specific drive rails for the three 3 1/2 drive bays. I have NEVER found them or any that would fit properly. I only have one pair for the floppy drive, but need four more to mount a hard drive and a ZIP 100/tape drive/whatever. I could just hack together a crappy system...but I found this fun stuff online. ThermoMORPH! It melts in hot water, is pliable for about a minute after you take it out and hardens to a hard plastic in about 5 minutes.

The two beige drive rails are the originals. I melted a big batch of the Thermomorph, pressed the drive rail into it to make a mold. I then melted the second batch and put it into the mold (right before it hardens, or it'll just melt together). Wallah! New drive rails! And they work better than the originals since they are slightly larger and fit nice and tight.

Took about 20 minutes total to get four extra drive rails and $15 for the Thermomorph with a lot left over for other projects around the house. Fun stuff to play with, I even made a skeleton and an octopus (from Penguins of Madagascar...DAVE) for one of my boys. 😎

Dogchain, that's pretty sweet. Would'a never thought of something like that.

Where did you find ThermoMORPH for only $15?

feipoa wrote:

Where did you find ThermoMORPH for only $15?

Someone on Amazon was selling it "used". Didn't seem used at all.

Private_Ops wrote:

Dogchain, that's pretty sweet. Would'a never thought of something like that.

+1

Yeah great idea indeed...I have to do the same for one of my old AT cases I have...same story for me..I only have 2 drive rails and need more because I want to fill all the drive bays.

Very nice solution. Thanks.

Sutekh94 wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

I've got OS/2 v3 Warp on one of my 486s on my home network. It's an interesting OS.

I've been messing around with OS/2 Warp 3 on one of my old laptops (my ThinkPad 755CD, to be precise) over the past week or so. It really is an interesting OS to play around with. I've mainly been trying to get some old OS/2 games working on it. 😎

Well, being that it is a bank holiday and therefore I have time off, I decided it might be fun to install OS/2 Warp 4 on my 486. It's very troublesome however. I am coming at OS/2 as a complete novice, I know nothing about it or how to use it other than the similarities with DOS. One of my big problems i've been overcoming is my stack of floppy discs that I use for anything and everything when I need them on the fly is starting to degrade it seems. At one point I could start the installation, but realising I had made an image of disk1.dsk (instead of disk1_cd.dsk indicating i wanted to use the CD for the installation files to be taken from) got me off at the wrong track. 😊

Then the disks that I was using were working fine, the suddenly they would go bad, sometimes allowing the prompt for the next disk (but to fail because the proper drivers hadn't even been installed yet). I'm getting a lot of general protection faults from my damn floppy disks.. 🤣 🤣 When making the images they seem to verify properly after the copy but sometimes don't work in the 486. 🙁

Unlike my vast array of unused, brand new (old stock) 5.25" floppies I have, I don't have any brand new 3.5" ones. 😢
I guess it's a sign that I desperately need to backup or image all my floppies that I have for IBM compatable machines, the BASIC interpretored machines and the Acorns too. 😢 My trusty Win98 startup floppy failed today too 🙁

***EDIT***

After 4 failed floppy discs and about 2 hours messing, re-imaging, re-starting the installation of the 486 macny times I managed to get the installation to the point where it takes from the CD so we'll see how that goes.. 😊

Today I discovered that the CPC's floppy drive connector is the same 36-pin centronics as on a printer cable. So, I made this:

No, don't ask; yes, I did have better things to do today... Oh well. The other side was a bit easier, since all pins are ground:

Not very pretty, but... it works! Though it won't read any of my floppies. I think I'd have to format them as SS/DD (160k)?
Also, the activity led on both drives is always on, and when the CPC is switched off, both drives keep on spinning. Is that supposed to happen?

Had a bit of insomnia last night.........did a lot of sound debugging on my 486......

Quick short rundown - 486 DX2/66, 64MB RAM, 8GB HDD w/DDO running MS-DOS 6.22/WFWG 3.11 with a multi-boot config...in an XT Clone chassis.Soundcard is a SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 (CT-1600, I'll be mentioning it a LOT here), and video is an S3 805 1MB VLB SVGA.

- Played some Monkey Island 2 for awhile, wanted to rebuild some of my lost savegames from the old 638MB HDD I had in there a few years ago (I have an 8GB in there now, and am planning to put a 20, 40, or 80GB in there eventually that I can multiboot to win/DOS, Win95/98, and Win2Kpro, but that's far off). Got to the part where Guybrush watches his parents sing and dance the bone song under the tree.

- Figured out why Monkey Island was sounding like someone was taking a heat gun to my sound card whilst playing, seems the "auto-detect" for which sound device you have in the 1st Edition VGA version of TSoMI. Wrote a batch file (MONKEY.BAT) to fix it so as to batch in the "a" command line parameter for "adlib" sound, that fixes the problem. Not sure what's going on with the SoundBlaster driver on this version of TSoMI but it's the same thing that happens with Ultima VI: THe False Prophet.

Now for some Ultima sound tweakage.....

- Speaking of, changed Ultima VI: The False Prophet over to Creative Music System and got the same result as TSoMI, so I switched that to adlib, fixed that issue.

- Got Ultima 7, Serpent's Isle, 8, and the Worlds of Ultima Titles going. All of those work fine with the SB Pro 2 setup as a SB Pro. I had U7 and Serpent on Adlib so no SFX, switched em' over to SoundBlaster Pro mode, now I get the sound effect.

- Akalabeth (Ultima Collection) was a different case, seems to auto-detect in setup.exe as a SoundBlaster 2.0 on IRQ5, address 220, DMA1, when it's IRQ7. Switched that over to SoundBlaster Pro on A=220, I=7, D=1, now I had digital sound, but no Midi, swapped the OPL3 setting over to SoundBlaster Pro and I got the Claire DeLune going in setup.....finally, I can play this with sound.

- For once I got Car & Driver working with the radio station, not sure if it's a Duplex problem or not with my old cards (Which is funny because they were newer, and a few plug N' play) but it seems I CAN get the radio stations working in the game using the SB Pro 2. I quite like the top station in the list, very fitting music when flying around the 3 stages of Philly in a Mercedes IMSA racer circa 1990 in a nice blocky 320X200 @256 colors.

Also spent some time trying out a few MiDi Sequencers. My MiDi setup involves running a Rock Band 3 Fender Mustang Pro guitar controller (it's actually a MIDI controller) into the SoundBlaster Pro 2 using a special adapter from the Creative SoundBlaster MIDI kit I have from like 1987 or so (came with Voyetra Sequencer Pro, which I also use).

Works okay in presto arranger but the Fender's string triggers are a tad....well....sensitive, might need to do some tweakage to get them to not be triggering on their own so much (bending the rods or using foam as some kind of stabilizer). This causes a lot of missed notes not heard during recording.

Got a GPF while running some "Pro" program I can't remember the name off the top of my head under Windows For Workgroups, probably related to the above MIDI controller triggering issue.

Cant get the Mustang going under Sequencer Pro in DOS, but I think more of that is just me not remembering the Hotkeys to enable it more than anything.

Either way, kind of cool to play arpeggiated patterns using the SoundBlaster hardware with an interface I'm familiar with.

jwt27 wrote:

Not very pretty, but... it works! Though it won't read any of my floppies. I think I'd have to format them as SS/DD (160k)?
Also, the activity led on both drives is always on, and when the CPC is switched off, both drives keep on spinning. Is that supposed to happen?

You can use 3.5" DD disks right out of the box with that solution. Programs for writing back images on a PC are readily available (i.e. OmniDisk or CPCDisk under Windows).
The CPC needs a Ready signal (Pin34 I think) on the floppy side, which might explain the activity LED being constantly on ... motor commands aren't seperated between drives I think (has easily been 6 years since I last used my 6128).