Finally finished putting together a computer for late 90's games. Planning on building an MS-DOS machine next, with Windows 3.1 installed as well.

Ordered all the stuff that I need in order to replace the LCD on my luggable 5x86:

• 10.4" NEC NL6448AC33-18 LCD display
• LCD driver board
• Molex-to-5.5mm 12V DC adapter
• VGA 15-pin flat cable
• VGA 90° adapter

Too bad most of this stuff is coming from China, so it'll be a while before anything arrives. I have no experience with Far East hardware more sophisticated than heads for my razor, so it'll be interesting what the quality is like.

Screwed the case shut on my pentium II system, after verifying that CD audio was working fine. Intend to install NT4, then it will be *complete*. Played a little GTA London 1969 (3dfx, with CD music), and will be slowly working through Redguard.

Recapped a C64 and put it up for sale on a local trading site.

Started a 386 build in a case I recently traded. All good so far!

Motherboard is a PC Chips M-326 I bought years ago
CPU is an AMD Am386 DX 33MHz I bought last week
Memory is something I grabbed from the bin. Turned out to be 4x 1MB. This is apparently also all the 30 pin ram I have 🙁 I thought I had more...

Lost some time with a defective (must DDx) VGA card and this board hangs in POST if there is no interface card installed (or is this common in 386 systems?)

POST cards are a blessing!

This morning, I worked on my new old acquisions from this week,
Cleaned and PTFE lubricated Cherry G84-4100 keyboard (and found that not only it was made in my home country, Czech Republic, but assembled by some guy named "Šindel", as hand-signed on a sticker under a spacebar)
Then cleaned and lubricated an Alps/IBM FDD and BenQ CD-Rom (I struggle making it read disks though)
All of that while the faceplates of the FFD and CD-rom as well as of my old AT case are being retrobrighted in peroxide bath under UV lamp.

found this ad for partition magic 4 from 1998

and enjoy this

Searching for older graphics cards can be a tedious task, especially considering most of them seem to hide in a huge pile of modern PCI-Express garbage. To make life a bit easier I decided to work with a blacklist system and rule out specific terms I don't consider being worthy to even look at so this is my current setup for searching GPU's up until around ... 2004?

1-pcie -pci-e -pci-express -pciexpress -1030 -1050 -1060 -1070 -1080 -8800 -210 -260 -270 -290 -390 -430 -460 -480 -570 -580 -630 -710 -730 -750 -960 -970 -980 -gts -his -msi -eah -xfx -amd -vega -tesla -sapphire -titan -radeon -rtx -gtx -strix -firepro -hd -quadro -grid -zotac -club

Search results are already way better but with the usual space to improve. Need to incorporate the entire GF7 series and upwards as this modern GPU-generation shit still spams my results more than I want to.

Still working on trying to get the data of an old ST-251-1 MFM hdd.

At least i finally had time to get working on my Soyo SY-025J2 motherboard. Some time ago i soldered the missing voltage regulator so i could use 3V cpus. Plugged in my DX2-80 but found it trippling the clock. Stason only has Sy-25j/k/l jumper settings and mine is a bit different.
Found that this dx2 uses another pin for clkmul than most other cpus, so i did the job using this magic blue cable to get gnd... 😀

henryVK wrote:

Ordered all the stuff that I need in order to replace the LCD on my luggable 5x86: […]
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Ordered all the stuff that I need in order to replace the LCD on my luggable 5x86:

• 10.4" NEC NL6448AC33-18 LCD display
• LCD driver board
• Molex-to-5.5mm 12V DC adapter
• VGA 15-pin flat cable
• VGA 90° adapter

Out of curiosity, which luggable would that be? I seem to have missed it.

Replaced the left mouse button microswitches in all of my Microsoft Optical Wheelmouse mice. No more bounce-clicking or dead button issues.

I finally got to enjoy the desk I built for my 386s with some Monkey Island (a game I never played) - It took some effort to get the game on the SX; first I tried putting the CF card in, BIOS would not take to it correctly, but DOS would see it, however I could not copy files from it. I seem to recall that CF cards, in my experience, do not play well with WD Caviar drives, seemingly all the way back to an 85 MB drive... I took the CF card to my 233 MMX and copied the Monkey Island files to the internal IOMEGA ZIP, then had the fun time of getting the driver onto the 386 from a CDROM. I used my 486 to copy the DOS drivers (guest.exe) to a diskette, then fetched the external ZIP drive, and... ran out of space to install the drivers on the 85 Mb drive on the destination computer! Hah, so I had to make 4.5Mb available on the drive.

I was instantly thrown back to my pre-teens, program-shuffling and data managing a 42 Mb drive. Same problem, quarter-century later. As it stands, with two save files, I have 56kb free on the hard disk. Monkey Island sounds bloody amazing through the Radlib on my 5.1 setup (granted all mono) with the sub.

I went to take a picture of the setup with my camera just now and I dropped it. Fucked it right up. So, low res smartphone pic of setup:

Good weekend, folks.

McBierle wrote:

Still working on trying to get the data of an old ST-251-1 MFM hdd. […]
Show full quote

Still working on trying to get the data of an old ST-251-1 MFM hdd.

At least i finally had time to get working on my Soyo SY-025J2 motherboard. Some time ago i soldered the missing voltage regulator so i could use 3V cpus. Plugged in my DX2-80 but found it trippling the clock. Stason only has Sy-25j/k/l jumper settings and mine is a bit different.
Found that this dx2 uses another pin for clkmul than most other cpus, so i did the job using this magic blue cable to get gnd... 😀

WP_20190317_005.jpg

That's some good modding. I am no stranger to "omitted" upgrades on a low-spec'd board 😉

At least Stason had something for your board - I am still unable to find anything for my 3486 EISA board.

More diagnostic on the Vendex Turbo-888-XT. I might be in over my head on this one and this thread is probably not the place for all the questions I have posed. In a previous thread I was informed the dimming of the CRT during floppy (attempt to) seek was likely due to a failing PSU.

Edit: I am dumb. My spare PSU has the same pinout and works.

Is there a good way to diagnose a Floppy controller? I had corrosion on the pins which I cleaned up. As far as I can tell, the cable and header pins on the board are all clean now. The drive works in another PC and the dip switches appear correct, but the head never even budges when the LED is on. Also, the second drive will not light up after the first (do XT/XT clones even attempt to read the second drive after the first?)

OldCat wrote:

Out of curiosity, which luggable would that be? I seem to have missed it.

It's muh plucky little clone portable 😀

It doesn't really have a name yet.

Are there any naming conventions when it comes to "real" computers? Fictional computers seem to be overwhelmingly male or neutral, thought there are some "girls" like HAL's twin SAL from the space oddysee books.

blurks wrote:

Searching for older graphics cards can be a tedious task, especially considering most of them seem to hide in a huge pile of mod […]
Show full quote

Searching for older graphics cards can be a tedious task, especially considering most of them seem to hide in a huge pile of modern PCI-Express garbage. To make life a bit easier I decided to work with a blacklist system and rule out specific terms I don't consider being worthy to even look at so this is my current setup for searching GPU's up until around ... 2004?

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1-pcie -pci-e -pci-express -pciexpress -1030 -1050 -1060 -1070 -1080 -8800 -210 -260 -270 -290 -390 -430 -460 -480 -570 -580 -630 -710 -730 -750 -960 -970 -980 -gts -his -msi -eah -xfx -amd -vega -tesla -sapphire -titan -radeon -rtx -gtx -strix -firepro -hd -quadro -grid -zotac -club

Search results are already way better but with the usual space to improve. Need to incorporate the entire GF7 series and upwards as this modern GPU-generation shit still spams my results more than I want to.

With that query you will eventually miss out on some interesting AGP (and maybe a few PCI) graphics cards. On what website do you use this?

Btw, it sucks that ebay search doesn’t understand the difference between PCI and PCIe when I enter PCI.

I was bored yesterday so I took motherboard photos to make desktop backgrounds. Next time I need to clean the dust off better and get some focus stacking software.

I cleaned up a sweet IBM Model M that I recently found in my in-laws' basement. I'm super happy with how well this keyboard cleaned up. I've never owned a Model M before! 😁

Please pardon the placement of the Windex bottle. I didn't use it on the keyboard. I used warm soapy water, microfiber towels, q-tips, and a magic eraser. I didn't let any water get on the steel back plate.

Before shots:

Cleaning shots:

All cleaned up!