Robin4 wrote on 2020-01-31, 03:30:

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Few minutes ago, i was soldering on a older revision 3 xt-ide 8 bit controller card. The pcbs i purchased a few years ago, but after problems with my weller wsd-81 soldering station i quit for a while.
1 week ago i purchased a cheapass soldering station which performance a lot better then the weller one.. (dont know whats its wrong with the wsd-81 base) maybe going to sell it and look for an other option.

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Today i also repaired a 1.2MB floppy drive controller board. I needed 2 new electrolic capacitors.

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Also being busy with a socket 5 motherboard that iam going to use in a oldskool pentium non mmx 133mhz build. The RTC still seems to work. But have to replace the simm sockets. Simm socket 1 is damaged, wasnt possible to repair the connecting pin. Also the other sockets are in a state thats better to replace them as well.. Now waiting when the new simm 72 pin sockets will arrive here.

Officially the board will support till pentium 100Mhz because the multiplier seems to be fixed on 1.5.. With an cpu vrm upgrade socket it is possible to run a 133 Mhz processor on this board. Higher the board wont recognize.

Regarding Weller stations:

I have Weller station too, but now junk because of very very cheap design in the handle, The vital connections to connect heater wires made connection by pressed in connector pins in Bakelite piece. If the screw posts fails in the blue handle (strips easily), then heater barrel's mounting metal plate will wobble, which will put stress on these pins and bakelite wears out and now no longer kept in connection. Results in dead soldering station. Handles is expensive as hell (over 100 each and parts) and I paid 100 new for whole kit ready to roll in 1990. I will no longer promote the Weller I also have adjustable Weller station still working but not good for heavy tasks. I have since knew there is much much better designs out there now. The BEST ever is Hakko or JBC, or Clones that uses T12 series cartridges with replaceable tip cartridges, heat up in seconds due to direct heat inside the cartridge very close to tip, response time to demand is quick and there are clones of these out there. Ditto to clones of JBC as well same concept. Check them out. Being tip cartridges, they are made to be swapped all the time in seconds. Do not invest in indirect heated designs, will not keep up with demand instant you touch a heavy metal with those.

If you choose carefully, a station can allow you to have different handles, for very tiny work, and heavy work by changing handles, and if you pay more for 2 station, even more nice if you are working with electronics all the time. Invest in good hot air station, Quick is good choice here.

Cheers,

ElBrunzy wrote on 2020-02-02, 00:13:

here is a picture of my sega megadrive edit to have it stereo output. This will be my 500th's post, it's a retro-activity, although I'm now not so sure the megadrive really need an stereo output.

The Mega Drive model 1 didn't have stereo audio pins in its multi-out port, but had a front 3.5mm stereo jack. While you can pipe that to the TV, the impedance level is different, so you won't get the best quality sound out of it. Pulling the audio signals from earlier in the amplifier chain is the solution, if you don't mind boring holes in the back of the system for the connectors. The Mega Drive 2 has stereo pins in its multi-out, but the tragedy is, most available A/V cables for the MD2 are wired wrong, and have LEFT and MONO. The only fix for those cables is to snip the end off, and rewire a new end, as there are only three pins in the original connector, and you can't move the wrong one to the right position. Well, you can, but that's like saying you can convert a gasoline car to run on diesel.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-02-02, 18:34:

In general, a nice board. If i'm correct, it has 10MHz 286 and 6MHz 287 (N80L286-10/S and 2C87 -6 respectively), 1MB onboard memory and 4 SIMM slots. (with pins, instead of socket)

You mean SIPP memory.

clueless1 wrote on 2020-02-02, 11:37:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-02-02, 07:33:

clueless1 wrote on 2020-02-01, 23:36:

Any indication from the POST screen if it's an actual Diamond card? Sometimes the VGA BIOS shows some text just prior to the motherboard BIOS. You can also use some DOS utilities to see if they see a Diamond brand in the VGA. My Stealth 3D 2000 Pro has a different layout then yours. And it's also one of the few cards of its time that has VBE2.0 built in (though SciTech Display Doctor still improves performance).

Yes right before the POST I get a very normal Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro splash screen informinh me 4MB of VRAM was found. It is strange, I will make a video..

Here's what mine looks like:
s3-dx.jpg

Not quite the same but also very similar.. Yours is probably a different revision? Mine is a Rev: B

Checked the alignment of the Epson SD-800 dual floppy drive using ImageDIsk 1.18 utility and cleaned the 1.44MB drive using the utility and cleaning kit I bought recently. Going to need a 5.25" FDD cleaning kit to clean the 1.2MB drive and clean a 1.2MB diskette that errors out at sector 70 head 0/1 when attempting to back up my Civ I Disk 2 as an IMG file, which did go all the way through before, but I think the 1.2MB drive needs a good cleaning of the heads and cleaning of the diskette with Q tips and Isopropyl alcohol.

Disruptor wrote on 2020-02-03, 03:17:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-02-02, 18:34:

In general, a nice board. If i'm correct, it has 10MHz 286 and 6MHz 287 (N80L286-10/S and 2C87 -6 respectively), 1MB onboard memory and 4 SIMM slots. (with pins, instead of socket)

You mean SIPP memory.

You are correct! Thank you!

Well, I will just say what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks. It all started when I discovered a few Retro PC YouTube channels about three weeks ago and binged their videos.

Now I have two Toshiba T4850CT laptops (486dx 75.) I bought the second “for parts as-is”, for parts, but after a little TLC it runs better than the original one I bought.

I dug a few old Desktop PCs our of the article and got them back up and running:
1) A Commodore 128, with a 1084 monitor, pi1541, 1571, and a Commodore4Ever v2.3 WiFi modem. Yes I’ve been dialing up Commodore Graphics BBSs.
2) A Pentium D based PC running Windows Vista, Ubuntu 8, and MacOS (used to be a Hackintosh,) triple-boot. The challenger with these was finding a way to get files on to them (the floppy drives on both are dead). I had to resort to using a Null model Serial cable and Hyperterminal, until I found MA401 PCMCIA driver (which of course went over the serial cable).
2) A Pentium III 450 running Windows 98, and I did a fresh install on to an old 30GB drive of Windows 98SE. I also just upgraded it to a PIII 733.

I’m not sure why I enjoy working with this old hardware so much.

I think I resolved the issue with my Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 PRO (Virge/DX). Upon closer inspection, Pin 54 (PD24) was bent and making contact with Pin 53 (PD22), I separated them and although I haven't tested the card I think that was the issue.

I also removed the 1MB upgrade from an S3 Trio64 I will gift a friend and installed it on a Macronix MX86200FC which I think really deserves the upgrade a lot more anyway.

Finally, I removed the 128KB L2 cache from a 486-UL1 motherboard I hade (that I never had much luck with) and installed it onto a Biostar MB-8433UUD-A. I need to desolder the Dallas Clock on that board and replace it with a socket sometime; I really want to build an AMD or Cyrix 5x86 system with it.

From -> To

Today I received a new membrane for the keyboard on my Amiga 1200, so I fitted that to replace the old damaged one. A nice quick 10 minute job and now a fully functional Amiga 1200!

The other day I setup TinyLauncher on this Amiga so I've been playing around with it further today and playing a few games. Nice and quick and easy to navigate my games collection & launch games with a joystick. Just need to sort out the Game artwork now to make it look even cooler, but otherwise I'm happy with it!

A little side project in preparation:

Trying yet another batch of memory sticks for the T3200SX which is notorious for not accepting anything, really..., without modification. I have tried numerous sticks and many have shown to create parity errors along the way, although they make the machine boot up fine. This goes for unmodified and modified sticks.

First of all, after getting out the plasma luggable it wouldnt boot.... 🤷🏻 After several attempts I opened it and took a look at the already present RAM sticks (2x 1MB). After careful inspection I found out that one of the sticks had one ceramic capacitor missing... (C2 was missing, I have replaced it with a look-alike that I desoldered from broken RAM and just slapped on there). Resistance measured afterwards was identical to the surrounding ones, So I guess it's fine...

Don't even ask me how this is possible... They dont overheat, they dont start flying off so there's only the option that I must have been careless the last time I had it open and scratched it off with something myself... I cannot remember anything of the like.... 🤷
I also put some solder on C1 as it was barely making connection.

Now off to the main event...., or so I thought...: Of course the modules turned out to be not compatible 😦
Boot beeps and Parity and Verify errors galore....
So I went to work and modified them....

CAS line/trace going to pin28 has been intercepted and relayed to pin2.
Pin28 is now dormant. Soldering onto traces is challenging if your iron is way too big for the job, so it's a little messy this time, as the finer iron is lend to someone 😀

[..>..]

After dinner... The reboot in question....
Success!
Still in winter time...
1MB onboard + 6x1MB
The question is whether the ram completes the Windows 3.11 parity- and memtest stresstest.
Finally a set of sticks that actually doesnt show any parity errors along the line after modification, albeit booting fine
This machine is so finicky

PS: Which it did.
PPS: I also shrinktubed the wires after successful testing, just if you were wondering.

Uh. Wow. That looks dodgy as heck, but it works! Can you explain the bodge wie again that you installed?

Received an RGB Scart cable today for my Amiga 1200. Glad to be finally rid of composite video, the Amiga looks fantastic via RGB!

Also today, as this Amiga didn't come with any HDD caddy, I decided to reposition the CF card inside to sit nice and snug just above the unused RF output unit instead. The bottom of the IDE-CF adapter is insulated, so no worries about any shorts. Looks neater and allows for better airflow in the case.

Received an set up my HP LP2065 display today.
So far I am quite pleased with the image quality at low resolutions like 1024x768.
My unit was manufactured in 2008, >30k hours total and >10k backlight hours, which means that it has seen quite a bit of use. The backlight is a bit more dim than I expected, but by turning brightness and contrast up to 100 it becomes perfectly acceptable.
It cost me just over 30€ shipped, so I am really happy with it.
As long as I don't have enough space for my 19" Trinitron CRT (just can't beat Trinitrons for retro computing imho) on my main desk, this dispay will probably make for a good alternative.
Maybe I'll get a Dell 2001FP or 2007FP next. Then compare it with the HP, the winner may stay on the main desk, the other one goes to the workshop (wall-mounted).

Addendum picture to above, in case somebody wants to mod 3-chipped parity memory for the T3200(SX) as well.

Resurrected my iMac G4 this evening. I got it for free as it supposedly wasn't booting, but it booted the first time I tried. Once. All time&date settings lost of course - yep, dead PRAM battery, which on a Mac doesn't only store settings but also provides Vsb for soft power-on. A new lithium battery solved that, and I upgraded to 1GB RAM while I was at it - quite relieved that my non-Mac 512MB SO-DIMM and 512MB regular DIMM were both accepted without complaint. Now to find a way to get this thing working on a WiFi network with WPA (as the 1st gen Airport in it doesn't support that)...

If you can't upgrade the wireless card in the iMac what about using a WiFi to Ethernet bridge ?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-02-06, 21:00:

If you can't upgrade the wireless card in the iMac what about using a WiFi to Ethernet bridge ?

That's an option, as is using a Powerline adapter - but I prefer the challenge of getting WiFi working natively. I've tried quite a few USB dongles already, many of which were supposed to be MacOS-compatible. I suspect that my running 10.3 is part of the problem, there seems to be a lot more options with 10.4, and now I have 1GB of RAM, Tiger should run nicely.

Today I booted up one of my Windows boxes, and discovered for absolutely no reason it had shuffled all my desktop icons around. AGAIN. It didn't even "arrange" them, it just randomly scattered them to different parts of the screen in nonsensical blocks.

😠

How do I tell Windows (98~XP~7) "don't ever rearrange my icons, even if you think the resolution's changed or a monitor's been added to or removed from the multi-monitor setup, because it probably hasn't anyway you wanky turdmuffin?"