A little bit of late night power supply replacement. Using a SFF Enhance 200w ATX power supply to replace the innards of my Amiga 2000 power supply. It has -5VDC, so that's good. Plent of room to spare inside, and cost me nothing since I took it out of a Shuttle XPC that I had a spare chassis for. It tested out good with low ripple within ATX specifications under load, so I should get quite a few years out of it. I had already been using the power supply on the test bench to power the A2000, so I know it works great. 😀

Upgraded the HDD in my OG Xbox to a 200GB Maxtor in place of the 80GB Maxtor (will upgrade to a 1TB HDD soon once I start working again and other things).

imi wrote on 2020-08-31, 02:50:

good job on getting the cpu working, but I seriously doubt that ^^ […]
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waterbeesje wrote on 2020-08-30, 21:39:

Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 (blows away any GF2MX)

good job on getting the cpu working, but I seriously doubt that ^^

I vividly remember upgrading from my TNT2 ultra that I paid way too much money for to a cheap GeForce2 MX back in the day :p
and any benchmarks I can find show a nice performance increase too.

It does blow away the GF2MX... as long as it is a GeForce 3 or GeForce 4. :p

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-29, 16:46:

Got the USB keyboard KB_RESET working on my A2000 with a jumper to Gary pin #5. Made it easily reversible with a mini grabber in […]
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Got the USB keyboard KB_RESET working on my A2000 with a jumper to Gary pin #5. Made it easily reversible with a mini grabber instead of soldering to the chip.

Nice. Good job. By the way. Have you solved the issue with the #-sign on the USB keyboard?

I have tested with kickstart 1.2 + 1.3 + 3.1.4.
And I have used Workbench versions that correspond to those roms. Same issue with all, and I am using an Logitech K120 (Danish layout) for this. So it might endeed be the adaptors firmware.

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-31, 04:23:

A little bit of late night power supply replacement. Using a SFF Enhance 200w ATX power supply to replace the innards of my Amig […]
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A little bit of late night power supply replacement. Using a SFF Enhance 200w ATX power supply to replace the innards of my Amiga 2000 power supply. It has -5VDC, so that's good. Plent of room to spare inside, and cost me nothing since I took it out of a Shuttle XPC that I had a spare chassis for. It tested out good with low ripple within ATX specifications under load, so I should get quite a few years out of it. I had already been using the power supply on the test bench to power the A2000, so I know it works great. 😀

Nice. I have done something a bit the same, just with my external PSU that I use for my 500's and 600. It is much better to just get a modern one and build into the original housing when we are dealing with Amiga's.

brostenen wrote on 2020-08-31, 08:55:

Nice. Good job. By the way. Have you solved the issue with the #-sign on the USB keyboard? […]
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wiretap wrote on 2020-08-29, 16:46:

Got the USB keyboard KB_RESET working on my A2000 with a jumper to Gary pin #5. Made it easily reversible with a mini grabber in […]
Show full quote

Got the USB keyboard KB_RESET working on my A2000 with a jumper to Gary pin #5. Made it easily reversible with a mini grabber instead of soldering to the chip.

Nice. Good job. By the way. Have you solved the issue with the #-sign on the USB keyboard?

I have tested with kickstart 1.2 + 1.3 + 3.1.4.
And I have used Workbench versions that correspond to those roms. Same issue with all, and I am using an Logitech K120 (Danish layout) for this. So it might endeed be the adaptors firmware.

I'm using 2.04 Kickstart and WB, same issue. I messaged the vendor to see if there's a resolution. I believe it is a firmware issue on the USB keyboard adapter. I think they may have compiled the firmware for GB key layouts.

Today I finally got my 386SX board working 😀
Weird blue stuff removed:

PC actually booting at last. I think it was failing to boot the whole time because I had the RAM in the wrong slots. And tried some bad RAM in those slots.

I've had this board for 6 months now for the specific goal of having a 16-bit PC, either a 286 (still haven't got a working one) or a 386SX. Since I wasn't able to get this board working, I bought a 386SX ISA SBC instead, which works fine, but now this one works I have to consider which of the two I want to keep 😀
Having ISA slots is certainly convenient...

I wonder if I should add this board's ROM to the 386 motherboard BIOS thread?

Additionally, I was wasting my time on this yesterday, but I put together the PIC16F628A PS/2 to Serial mouse converter from this post: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Now it's all soldered up on a perf-board, although somehow I still managed to wire up the PIC's power backwards. Then I made a 3d printed case for it. All nice and easy to use, without risk of shorting now:

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-31, 11:49:

I'm using 2.04 Kickstart and WB, same issue. I messaged the vendor to see if there's a resolution. I believe it is a firmware issue on the USB keyboard adapter. I think they may have compiled the firmware for GB key layouts.

Hmmm.... I have googled this issue, however I have not found any talk about this issue anywere in the net. Perhaps I have not done the propper search.

I took the plunge and placed a bid on a motherboard. Nervous about this! In a few days my journey into madness may begin if I win.

Fun times!!! what motherboard did you get?

Embrace the madness it's fun

brostenen wrote on 2020-09-01, 11:15:

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-31, 11:49:

I'm using 2.04 Kickstart and WB, same issue. I messaged the vendor to see if there's a resolution. I believe it is a firmware issue on the USB keyboard adapter. I think they may have compiled the firmware for GB key layouts.

Hmmm.... I have googled this issue, however I have not found any talk about this issue anywere in the net. Perhaps I have not done the propper search.

I'm only speculating, based on using a US keyboard with a GB key layout in my Amiga 500 on accident one time. It exhibited similar behavior with the # sign not working. Since my A2000 is using a US keyboard layout in a US version of workbench, still the # sign not working, that pretty much leaves the USB adapter as the culprit.

wiretap wrote on 2020-09-01, 16:24:

brostenen wrote on 2020-09-01, 11:15:

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-31, 11:49:

I'm using 2.04 Kickstart and WB, same issue. I messaged the vendor to see if there's a resolution. I believe it is a firmware issue on the USB keyboard adapter. I think they may have compiled the firmware for GB key layouts.

Hmmm.... I have googled this issue, however I have not found any talk about this issue anywere in the net. Perhaps I have not done the propper search.

I'm only speculating, based on using a US keyboard with a GB key layout in my Amiga 500 on accident one time. It exhibited similar behavior with the # sign not working. Since my A2000 is using a US keyboard layout in a US version of workbench, still the # sign not working, that pretty much leaves the USB adapter as the culprit.

Will you drop an update, if you solve the issue? 😀

So, got myself a Roland A-880 from Japan. Wanted to plug it in and... damn, forgot about the 100V thing. I'd sort of hoped for a voltage switch, but no such luck. So plan B- Open it up and hook up the coils in series instead of parallel. But nope, not a dual coil :'(

Pulling up the service notes, there were two part numbers for the transformers. So started googling 22450550 transformer #550D. Grumbling about not finding anything my colleague asks what DC voltage it runs on internally. 5V. So he suggested using USB. At first I just laughed, but seeing that it only drew 5W at 100V, it won't draw over 1A at 5V (probably quite a bit less given the combination of a transformer dropping to 10VAC and a simple linear regulator with big heatsink to drop that to 5V), and I happen to have a 2600mA USB charger in an extension cord right next to my 19" table rack...

So I looked for some suitable points to feed in 5V. The regulator would have been the obvious place, but it was a bit fiddly. There are (labeled) GND spots all over the place but less Vcc. Eventually the earliest was the legs of a filter cap connecting big GND and Vcc planes.

Biggest challenge was fitting the cable through the case passthrough, the USB power cable was thicker than the old 100V cable. But with a bit of persuasion and a bit of filing it went in.

Here it is:

And when I flicked the switch these LEDs greeted me:

Success 😀

Nice job with getting it working.

Finally got my old 1996 Pentium 200 system back on line. I had to put a new Dallas clock chip which I already mentioned a few pages back, and replaced the graphics card so I could get it to post.

I used to have a Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM. I tried some new PCI cards using older chips that I got from Newegg. But none of them will post. And I think it's because of how old this motherboard is. Something about it being 3volt or "Universal PCI"? I'm not fully up on it but, I do remember having a problem with it back in 2001 when I tried to get a new cleaner sounding PCI sound card that could take my Sound Canvas SC-55 daughter-board. It wouldn't work and it didn't even power up. Back and fourth with Turtle Beach support was no help. I did eventually get it work in a Pentium 4 system I got a year later though.

Anyway, after I got it to post, I plugged all the drives in and forgot that I had in the past disabled the SCSI drive. So when it booted up, I couldn't get Win 95 to startup without all sorts of drama. (I boot it to dos 7 first and then launch the desired windows version from the command line.) As it turns out, I had Windows95 installed on the drive E which used to be on the failing SCSI drive but I had since moved it to a new 18 GB IDE drive that was to be the new "E" drive. And since this is Windows 95a I had to partition that new drive into several 2 GB drives. I had drive letters from "C" to "U". Once I remembered to disable the SCSI drive it dropped three partitions and booted up. You see, the way I had tweaked Windows 95 was to have my desktop on drive G the start menu was on Drive "P", etc. it was a mess back then and still a mess. Most of my Windows 95 programs were spread out on drives "F", "H", "I", "J", etc. I had a whole partition "K" dedicated to holding Visual Studio SDKs. But with the old SCSI drive plugged in, it threw it all off. If there is one thing I wish the old dos/win could have done was let us assign the hard drive partition letters.

Since all the Win31 programs remained on C and D that was about all I could do. I could also boot into DOS 6.2 if I wished and run a different configuration of Win3.1. but with with dos 6.2 FAT16(without the X) I wouldn't be able to see any drive letter after "I". Like I said, it was a mess. A weird mess.

Anyway, I was happy to see I could actually play back my old music composition that I had done for the Sound Canvas. I used to do a lot of music in those days when I was working on my Engineering degree (mid to late 90's). I would submit my stuff to the old Sound Canvas Users Group, which sadly doesn't exist anymore. Good times though!

steevf wrote on 2020-09-02, 01:44:

Anyway, I was happy to see I could actually play back my old music composition that I had done for the Sound Canvas. I used to do a lot of music in those days when I was working on my Engineering degree (mid to late 90's). I would submit my stuff to the old Sound Canvas Users Group, which sadly doesn't exist anymore. Good times though!

How, if I might ask, do you create music on older Windows 98 computers?

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-09-02, 05:37:

How, if I might ask, do you create music on older Windows 98 computers?

The software I used was called "Cakewalk Pro Audio 9".

I installed several win98 games to my Win ME PC. At first, almos none worked, not even Quake 2, but I downgraded the nVidia drivers (using a geforce2 MX400 here) to version 3 or something really old and many games started working fine. The only ones I am having a hard time with are:

- NFS2SE: It starts fine, but on the race the colors get all hippie. Lots of yellows, magenta, greens and such, but the general shape of game objects is there and the game can be played. Menu works and looks fine though.
- PoD: Had to apply the Pentium 4 patch for it to work at all, but if I use the MMX version, then menu image is distorted and the DirectX version plays fine but audio gets cut every few seconds.

I tried using dgvoodoo 1.31 with both, but it crashes the same with both, no clue why.

Games that worked fine either using opengl or direct3d were: Half-life and its add-ons blue-shift and opposing force, Unreal and its expansion, Quake 2 and 3, NFS3, Demolition Racer, Lego Racers, Tomb Raider 3, Monkey Island 3 and 4, Grim Fandango, Hexen 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Found a 12VDC fan to put in my A2000 power supply rebuild (blowing in to draw in cool air), and also epoxied all the legs on my front panel so they don't break off again.. cleaned it up and it looks great. 😀 Now to build the TerribleFire TF534 40MHz..

steevf wrote on 2020-09-02, 05:58:

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-09-02, 05:37:

How, if I might ask, do you create music on older Windows 98 computers?

The software I used was called "Cakewalk Pro Audio 9".

Do you need any external keyboards or such for the software to work?

Today I (almost) finished the "all things dual" build. Of course it should also dual boot (Win 98SE + Win 2000).
Win 98 is still a bit unruly, as soon as I install a sound card, the onboard IDE controller starts acting up, but Win 2000 works like a charm. I hope that I find some time to take pictures tomorrow.