Retr0brighted my Amiga 1000. Thoroughly cleaned the top case, front panel, and all keyboard plastics (scrubbed, then put through dishwasher,) then retr0brighted the top case. The attempt on the keyboard top case was uneven, I'll have to try again. And my solution wasn't very strong - the main Amiga case is definitely not "yellowed" any more, but it's still a little off-color.

Anonymous Freak wrote:

Retr0brighted my Amiga 1000. Thoroughly cleaned the top case, front panel, and all keyboard plastics (scrubbed, then put through dishwasher,) then retr0brighted the top case. The attempt on the keyboard top case was uneven, I'll have to try again. And my solution wasn't very strong - the main Amiga case is definitely not "yellowed" any more, but it's still a little off-color.

do you reseal after doing a retrobrite? if so, what do you use, a varathane or something? i find if you dont seal things yellow up very quick again 🙁

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Been playing around with this lovely graphics card. At first glance it appears to be a 8800 GTX, but this is actually a Dell 880 […]
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Been playing around with this lovely graphics card. At first glance it appears to be a 8800 GTX, but this is actually a Dell 8800 Ultra. It works great, handles most XP era games at 1600 x 1200 with 4x AA and 16x AF just fine. Does run a bit hot, I guess the paste could get replaced, but at the moment I see no reason to do so.

Oh, that 8800 looks gorgeous. Love the cooler on it.

BloodyCactus wrote:

do you reseal after doing a retrobrite? if so, what do you use, a varathane or something? i find if you dont seal things yellow up very quick again 🙁

Nothing yet - I think I'll do another round of brighting before I seal it.

The Tyan got a speed bump from 400MHz to 600MHz!

played some flashback. did not realise you could do soundblaster for sfx and mt32 for music!

Quite busy lately, but yesterday I picked up my new Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 from the post office, so that was priority yesterday evening. It works great and it's fast too. Really happy to have a decent VLB 486 board. Just waiting for some EEPROM chips to arrive to upgrade the BIOS.

Pulled out a couple of old macs. Setup a G4 Digital Audio to act as a fileserver with all of my ripped installers, etc. Got my Performa 631CD setup nicely as a productivity station (WP, Spreadsheets, Database stuff mostly). It connects over ethernet to the G4 via Appleshare and everything works beautifully.

Gave myself a small CRT upgrade. Replaced my Gateway EV700 with a Viewsonic A75f. Both are 17" class, but the A75f is completely flat. I had the Viewsonic since new, but it was buried in storage until a couple of days ago. Pulled it out, cleaned it up and tried it out. So far, it still works great with nice brightness and colors. the only concern is a section of the VGA cable that I wrapped in electrical tape because it was chewed part way through by a cat years ago.

My school's parent-teacher conferences were yesterday and today, which meant a 4-day weekend for the students. So I could mess with my new 486 a little more.

Previously I had been transferring programs/games to the machine using floppies written by a USB floppy drive connected to my Android phone. It worked, but there was no real way to transfer file larger than 1.44MB. So I dug out an old Dell Latitude and hooked it to the 486 with a serial cable, and now using File Maven to transfer stuff between the two. It's really slow at 115200 baud (around 0.8MB a minute) but it's better than nothing. At least now I know the approximate pain of downloading software from a BBS of the time..

The next thing I'm going to get is probably an ISA Ethernet card which will make transfers way quicker. I was looking at the ones on the VOGONS wiki, especially the Intel one, but does anyone have any better suggestions?

I have my drives removable. Either using CF or SD adapters, or SATA drives with SATA to IDE bridges. Drive bay devices are plentiful. Shut down the PC, pull out the drive, put it in a card reader and load games. Especially once you use larger drives, like 80 GB with lots of DOS games, everything else is just too slow.

ElementalChaos wrote:

It's really slow at 115200 baud (around 0.8MB a minute) but it's better than nothing. At least now I know the approximate pain of downloading software from a BBS of the time..

hehehe nice! But still modems only went as far as half that speed in their best version 😉

Watching paint dry.

(repairing a keyboard membrane)

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I have my drives removable. Either using CF or SD adapters, or SATA drives with SATA to IDE bridges. Drive bay devices are plentiful. Shut down the PC, pull out the drive, put it in a card reader and load games. Especially once you use larger drives, like 80 GB with lots of DOS games, everything else is just too slow.

Yup. I also pass the devices through to VirtualBox to allow me to use floppy image files for booting and installation. That way, I don't have to care about perishable media.

ElementalChaos wrote:

Previously I had been transferring programs/games to the machine using floppies written by a USB floppy drive connected to my Android phone. It worked, but there was no real way to transfer file larger than 1.44MB. So I dug out an old Dell Latitude and hooked it to the 486 with a serial cable, and now using File Maven to transfer stuff between the two. It's really slow at 115200 baud (around 0.8MB a minute) but it's better than nothing. At least now I know the approximate pain of downloading software from a BBS of the time..

The next thing I'm going to get is probably an ISA Ethernet card which will make transfers way quicker. I was looking at the ones on the VOGONS wiki, especially the Intel one, but does anyone have any better suggestions?

Cool. 115.2k is a lot faster than an analog modem. Back in the day we would leave the computer downloading while we would do other things; slow didn't bother us....too much. I'm using my 14.4k and 33.6k modem transfer files to my old PC using a shell account and Z-modem. I still need to set up a personal BBS and give myself "elite" access, but I'm still looking for a copy of PCBoard.

I don't get the full retro feels I don't hear that modem training sound. I guess I'm a modem masochist. 😁

jarreboum wrote:

Watching paint dry.

(repairing a keyboard membrane)

welp, it's dead, Jim.

If anyone has a spare IBM M2 they're willing to part with, I'm interested. It doesn't have to be in pristine condition, it may even miss keys and springs, I have plenty of those now. As long as the membrane is healthy I'm a taker.

ISA Ethernet? I have a 3Com 3C509 and it works great.

yep, 3C509 works beautifully in 16bit ISA slot + packet driver for mtp! ftp works fine with it.

I used to use SMC EtherEZ cards back in the day. Resources were programmable with a DOS utility and they were very reliable.

ElementalChaos wrote:

It's really slow at 115200 baud (around 0.8MB a minute) but it's better than nothing. At least now I know the approximate pain of downloading software from a BBS of the time..

I remember downloading from the Microsoft BBS (among others) at 2400 baud. I could set up a download session, go out clubbing and get home the next day, with the download still going 😀 That was when I had stable connections of course, some dropped after an hour or two. Over an hour to download a single floppy. Those were the days when you had to be a programmer to get the best out of a system 😀