I just swapped two Socket 462 processors one Sempron from 1999 (I believe is from the first 1 GHz processors available for the 462) and a Palomino 1.67 GHz Athlon between an Asus VIA KM400 based board and a DFI KT400 board, the heatsinks in both of them were a pain to remove (This being my very very first time doing it, I was completely nervous oh god) and my plan was to upgrade the processor on the Asus board since that one is the first computer that I got and the one that made me to start collecting more and more, and guess it, it works like a champ!!
Also I made a machine just for playing music using a Trident video card and a Sound Blaster Live, runs on that DFI motherboard metioned earlier but I need to clean one of the three RAM modules in order to get one gig out of the 3 :3 and that computer replaces a Pentium II 400 that I still have, so I have 3 ATX (2 of them running XP and one running 98 just for games and compatibility), and 3 AT based machines (The P266 runs DOS, the 200 runs Windows 95 and the II runs Windows 2000 until sound and video cards were taken out to use in the new one owo )

On the ATX side it will be 4 machines but sadly my HP Vectra Pentium III machine just died, motherboard does not start anymore u.u

Got the Juko XT machine working better over the weekend - I'm almost ready to reassemble it now. One of the RAM parity chips was not properly plugged in with two of the pins bent out of shape. That's probably why parity checking was disabled on the dip switch panel. Someone seems to have been messing with those switches in any case because the motherboard is fitted with 640k RAM but it was only counting up to 512k when I started it at first. When I correctly set the switches though it counted up to 640k again.

I noticed that a spare Tseng ET4000 VGA card I have also uses the same RAM chips (although at a higher speed) so I might try to get the machine all the way up to 1MB - although I'm not sure how I would use that upper RAM on an XT. You can't load Himem.sys on an XT can you?

Machine runs DOS 3.1 at the moment but I'll probably upgrade it to 5 or 6 at some point. Not having niceties like the MS DOS editor gets a bit painful. The old 30MB MFM HD takes a little while to start up - probably needs to be formatted and I did get a few drive errors when copying files across but I'd like to back the thing up first as there are a few apps and games I do not have copies of on there.

The machine came with two 360k floppy drives. They were both filthy and unreliable so I stripped the one that was giving the most trouble (spindle wasn't spinning at all) and lubricated and cleaned it up - nothing to lose as the drive seemed to be dead. It worked perfectly after that - but I suspect that is because I tried it as drive a: after the cleanup and rebuild. The other drive started working reliably again after just using a 5.25" disk cleaner. Despite setting the dip switches for a dual drive setup neither drive seems to work properly as drive b:. Probably a bad cable - I'll try the spare I use in my other retro PC.

Also syschk detects the CPU as 5MHz - and the CPU actually has a big 12MHz sticker on top so it seems to default to turbo being off. Still runs Commander Keen and King's Quest pretty well.

Tried to desolder a few 41256 memory chips from a amiga a500 motherboard to expand my pc-1's memory to a full 640kb.
But i couldn't get the memory chips off without damaging them. So i guess i have to get new ones.

seob wrote:

Tried to desolder a few 41256 memory chips from a amiga a500 motherboard to expand my pc-1's memory to a full 640kb.
But i couldn't get the memory chips off without damaging them. So i guess i have to get new ones.

Poor A500. Far easier to buy some memory chips

http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-41256.h … ry=n&isrefine=y

Was starting to get sick of the Pentium 3 800mhz and it's janky Slocket adapter not POSTing reliably (doesn't have any form of retention mechanism on the adapter), so I pulled it out and replaced it with a proper Slot 1 P3 500mhz Coppermine I had laying about. Stable as can be now (both physically and operationally), but I miss the speed of the 800.

Played a bit of Unreal and NFS3 to celebrate!

Worked on my P166 system, swapping cards and changing setting's on it. Nearly finished.

As of now, it is housing:

- Shuttle HOT-555a Rev. 3,2.
- Pentium-166 non MMX.
- 64mb (2x32mb sticks) 72-Pin.
- Number Nine S3-Virge PCI.
- Adaptech 2940 Controller.
- AWE32 CT:3900.
- CD-Rom.
- 4,51 GB IBM DCHS-SCSI.
- Homemade ATX to AT psu Converter-Cable.
- 300watt ATX Power Supply.

Kind of like it so far, as the #9 has an awesomme VGA signal strength...

Using a 10+ year old computer to watch 20+ year old games played by 30+ year old people.

Umm... my newest machine is over 10 years old.

Spent hours trying to figure out why I couldn't enable all 256K of cache on my 386, only to realize that the tag was a 64K chip... Grr.

I installed those chips ages ago but only enabled one bank so I never caught the issue back then. I panicked when I flipped the jumper, thought one of the ICs had failed somewhere, glad it was just me not paying attention when I installed the chips or when working with them today. I also glued a small heatsink to the installed 486DLC-40 as I have never been a fan of how hot it runs - only double sided tape for now as I plan on installing an active heatsink. I expect an old NB cooler will do the job just fine and I am sure I have a few of those around somewhere.

Sold my IBM PS/ValuePoints today. And bought a SB16 PCI for my NetVista: the imbedded sound does not have MPU-401. I want to play WarLords II on it. 🤣

I will try to revive the Magnavox 486SX again tomorrow evening. In case it remains dead I will part it out / recycle it. 😠

Imperious wrote:

seob wrote:

Tried to desolder a few 41256 memory chips from a amiga a500 motherboard to expand my pc-1's memory to a full 640kb.
But i couldn't get the memory chips off without damaging them. So i guess i have to get new ones.

Poor A500. Far easier to buy some memory chips

http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-41256.h … ry=n&isrefine=y

It was a doner a500. I have a few spare.

After two or so weeks of trying I managed to get my DEC running WFG 3.11 connected to my network. I'll be honest old school networking sucks ass. It is unimaginably complicated.

Wait till you have to network DOS... Without cheating and using mTCP.

Ah, good old LAN Manager... Ah, good old LANTastic... Those were the days, it was so easy. Not.

So far as I remember anyway, I haven't actually had to do that in years. Will have to soon though as I have a DOS only system I would like to connect to the network. I suspect I will be able to make it easier using some kind of client and using a virtual server for said client on another machine. I think my server probably has enough balls left in it to emulate such an environment for that purpose.

Connecting WfW 3.11 to the network itself is easy - just install the 32-bit TCP/IP stack after the network drivers. It should just work, then.
Oh, if you mean connecting to a folder share on a modern version of Windows, then just forget it. You can't do it without dropping all things security in Windows 7+. Even Windows 9x shares the same issue, but on 98SE I know you can install an active directory update (DSCLIENT.EXE) which, coupled with a registry tweak, allows you to access Windows 7+ file shares, but it will add a weird delay to your boot time. Nowadays I just favour FTP.

Or use a cheap NAS. Readily available network shares over SMB and NFS (and FTP if you want) for all machines.

When setting up something like an ftp or s-ftp/ftp-s (whatever the hell people call a secure ftp somethin) I really favor the Ubuntu server edition. Installed as an samba server. It's really cool and really easy to set up.
Have had this running on an old Mac G4 a few years ago. Now it's running on an old P4-m laptop.

If all you want is to transfer a few files (and don't want a dedicated machine for that) you can just use Filezilla Server on Windows and only start the service on demand.

Imperious wrote:

http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-41256.h … ry=n&isrefine=y

Thanks for the link, sadly they aren't the ones i need. It has to be 150ns memory.

HighTreason wrote:

Wait till you have to network DOS... Without cheating and using mTCP.

So how is mTCP cheating? 😈

It is not MS style drive sharing but we already have a solution for that. I much prefer the older, Unix style of moving bits around. Which happens to work on the Internet all around the world, not just on a local area network.

For the first time in a while I installed PT-BR versions of Windows in a retro-machine (I usually keep them in english - it is easier to install unnoficial patches). Since this is a rebuild of my old machine, I also wanted it to be set up somewhat like the original machine, which dual-booted Windows 2k and 98SE for most of its life. Too bad the IGP (SiS 630) doesn't offer widescreen resolutions... I'll solve this with an AGP card once I decide which one to use: a Geforce4MX like the original, a Quadro4 980 XGL or a Matrox G550.

After looking at my new stuff today, I simply realised that the Cherry keyboard was dirty and not really nice.
Old dirt and old grease was on it and between the key's. So I took it apart and cleaned it the old fashion way.
Lot's of universal cleaning soap and lot's of really hot water and a used toothbrush for hard to get places.

Yeah.... 20 years of dirt, yuk....

I had a choice between soap's. So I went for the green one.

Keys taken off. Was really easy and I just let them soak for a half hour.
I used a lot of that green stuff.... And made the keys smell like a clean bathroom. 🤣

The top part of the keyboard "casing", was soaked in the clear type of soap.
This is just pure soap, no water. Not that healthy for my fingers I guess.

After cleaning and assembly, I only had to re-fit it with the key's.
They had to be dry at first, and I used cotton tips, to get the last drops of water out of them.

Finished, and clean... Smelling good too. 😀 I have a clean looking 20 year old keyboard now.
It even comes without the euro-sign. I like it.