Finished building a C2D based system as a media centre for a friend. Wanted to put a C2Q in it, but the only one I had at hand turned out to be dead. Delivering it tomorrow (last day before England goes back into lockdown), but will find a Q6600 to upgrade it after lockdown. It has a GT 730 2GB for graphics and accelerating, and Win 7 Pro x64 as I just received 10 unused licenses today. Only got 500 GB drive space, but she'll be happy enough watching mkv files from Blu-Ray discs. If I can get a 1tb drive for under £15 shipped, I'll add that as an upgrade for her. Just got to dig out another 4GB ram tonight, as it only has 4GB in it at the moment.

Fired up the Amiga 1200 after years of neglect.

Still works like a charm!

Very nice! I wish I had an amiga because I have a handful of Amiga games id love to install.

creepingnet wrote on 2020-11-03, 18:23:

Also got a whopping long battery life out of it last night playing solitaire and surfing the web in LInks in graphics mode - almost 2 hours - not bad for a 30 year old laptop.

When I took my Armada 1750 to Korea last December, I got almost 2 hrs out of the battery. I got another Armada (faster, less broken screen) for a great deal recently, that one TOO gets around 1.5 - 2 hrs when playing Heroes Of Might and Magic II or Settlers II.

Thing came out in 1998...

Over lunch I pulled out the barrel battery out of a 386 SX-40 motherboard:

Showed 2.1 v but corrosion was starting. Board was completely corrosion free. I ran two wires for + and -, waiting for 3.6v Li-On cell batteries from eBay, and I didn't want to take the mobo out again. Also, whoever had it in there used the worst standoffs - they were cut, not in the right slots, screws were in strange places...

The board in question - such a small thing. I'll get specs later when I get it completed. I took out the failed MicroScience 44Mb MFM drive and the 1Mb RAM, and pulled a working 4Mb out of another machine (which is experiencing memory issues, 99% sure I have a bad SIMM) and also a WD Caviar 140 (42 Mb IDE drive) I had lying around. Seems about era correct for 1991-1992.

So I gave it a small video card! 512 kb, Realtek something or other - I've never seen one so small/integrated. Worked in Win 3.0 and 3.1

I gave it a half-height I/O card and for no reason other than it's half-height card lunch hour, a 2nd LPT port

DR DOS for the hell of it:

Looks decent in there:

I'll get to the rest later - the case needs some mad retrobrighting.

Back at it some more tonight with the NEC Versa P/75 - getting Windows 95 all sorted out....tuning Hardware Profiles (docked, undocked), gettingg the NIC working, getting it to switch from the ESS688 to the SoundBlaster when docked (the SB Pro 2.0 is in there so the 40EC can have Adlib/SB and the M/75 can have Adlib/SB w/o Windows).

Battling a headache, I was able to go into DO mode and I resuscitated three CDROM drives - One was a mechanical failure (something was stuck deep inside it), one was optics (alcohol to the lens fixed it) and one was another strange mechanical issue that is not 100% solved but I am getting closer.

I also realized that a new PC I procured has the Intel TX chipset, so I will very likely be swapping my VX into the lesser MMX (for PS/2 mouse support alone) - unfortunately the TX still doesn't read my 64Mb SDRAM as such, instead as a 32Mb. I'll be addressing a cooling fan issue that doesn't always spin up at startup which is much needed for my 15k RPM SCSI drive. Without it, I cannot run the computer with the case closed as it gets too hot.

1997 problems 😉

Today was a very good day.

My old 8088 motherboard that I've had since the 90s, has been dead for years. I kept it around and every couple of years I'd try to get it working again, to no avail. I got it out again recently and finally decided to try some extra steps the other day:

I resoldered a broken tantalum. I also removed a broken pin from a SIPP RAM socket and then resoldered a new pin onto the 256K SIPP memory chip that went in there.

I noticed the D8259AC-2 Programmable Interrupt Controller chip looked bad, with scorch marks on the pins. So I ordered a replacement chip on eBay, which arrived today.

So today I inserted the new D8259AC-2 and switched it on, still no POST. Then I spotted a mistake I'd made last time I worked on this board - 1 of the CPU pins was bent outside of the socket, so I corrected that.

I switched it back on and holy shit it POSTS! It's alive after all these years.

Going to have to do some more testing later, connecting some controller cards etc to it and see if everything is working as it should. But so far it's all very promising, even the repaired RAM chip seems to be working - not bad considering I'm an absolute soldering amateur!

EDIT: Got it to boot into DOS, but the keyboard isn't responding. It's a keyboard with an XT/AT switch so it should work fine, works on my XT, but whilst the lights on the keyboard do light up, nothing else is working on this motherboard.

I received an ECS Hires Denise and a 512KB trapdoor RAM (A501 is dead due to corrosion) for my rev5 A500. The Hires Denise wouldn't play with the original OCS 512KB Agnus in the rev5. While a 1MB Agnus is still in the mail on its way here, I couldn't really wait; screw it, moved the Gotek and the Vampire500V2+ to my other A500, a rev6a, because it already has the 8372A 1MB Agnus. Installed the trapdoor ram there, did the 1MB chip ram mod (changing JP2 to 1-2 and cutting JP7a). Now waiting for the Agnus (for which I don't really have a use atm, might as well keep it as a spare), a SD2IDE for the Vampire and an RTC chip for the trapdoor RAM. The original plan was to accelerate the rev5 as its board was recently recapped, now I guess I'll just keep it stock, Kickstart 1.2 and fully OCS, for the occasional classic floppy game...

Trying to stave off a headache due to the election crap by working on my NEC Versa P/75 - ran it off the battery the first time todya, not full run length, just for awhile. Still need to figure out the CMOS battery situation with it. Finally have it on Wifi Now (Orinoco Silver) - forgot the TCP/IP protocol for both network adapters. So tonight I'll be loading on missing software and games.

Got a Biostar MB-8433UUD-A v 3.1 board yesterday and decided to clean most of the corrosion off of the board. Needs a new resistor, some 30AWG wire, and a new Dallas RTC CMOS chip or solder a CR2032 battery holder by the PS/2 mouse port and use that, but I'll check to see if the battery on the Odin chip is dead first.

Fixed the hinges of my A22p by regreasing them and made a perfect machine by swapping in a body from an A22m.

Almost broke the LCD frame. Almost. *wipes sweat off my face*

I got XP running natively on a B450 board + a Ryzen 5 1600 with full USB support + AHCI and ACPI working.

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 05:48:

I got XP running natively on a B450 board + a Ryzen 5 1600 with full USB support + AHCI and ACPI working.

Nutty

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 05:48:

I got XP running natively on a B450 board + a Ryzen 5 1600 with full USB support + AHCI and ACPI working.

How does XP perform on that system?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:26:

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 05:48:

I got XP running natively on a B450 board + a Ryzen 5 1600 with full USB support + AHCI and ACPI working.

How does XP perform on that system?

It literally flies. Only bottleneck is the Zotac 9600GT I installed.

the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:00:

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 05:48:

I got XP running natively on a B450 board + a Ryzen 5 1600 with full USB support + AHCI and ACPI working.

Nutty

Thanks 😁

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:31:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:26:

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 05:48:

I got XP running natively on a B450 board + a Ryzen 5 1600 with full USB support + AHCI and ACPI working.

How does XP perform on that system?

It literally flies. Only bottleneck is the Zotac 9600GT I installed.

That's seriously awesome. What did you have to do to get drivers working?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:41:

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:31:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:26:

How does XP perform on that system?

It literally flies. Only bottleneck is the Zotac 9600GT I installed.

That's seriously awesome. What did you have to do to get drivers working?

Had to replace the acpi file that windows xp loads, had to grab a backported ahci driver and a backported usb 3 driver.

I'll post a pic later.

Here