Replaced the broken off cap on this FX-5200, cleaned the cooler, added new thermal paste and checked if it posts.
Set up an W98SE AGP test bench to check some graphics cards for Retromonkey, and chose the games and the cards I'll be testing.
If I already have a W98 test bench, tested my new Audigy 2 ZS. Also started the graphics card test.

Not strictly but the could apply to older notebook/laptops.

My HP/Compaq CQ62 desktop set up was over heating in the warmer weather here. I suspect part of the reason for the over heating was trying to charge a completely dead battery pack. Because this system doesn't need battery pack I pulled the dead one out and dissected it, remove the cells and the small circuit board and sensors.

Once I had it apart I decide to make a fan holder out of it with a pentium 1 era SOYO 12 volt cpu fan. This fits into the battery pack nicely after some cutting if the plastic. I drilled holes in the bottom cover for the fan to draw fresh air in. I attached stainless steel mesh from an old Honda motorcycle , which I stripped many many years ago, air box with black silicon sealant. This will stop insects and other items from being sucked in. Drill holes in the top half of the battery pack were I knew they meet up the latch openings in the CQ62 where the battery pack will attach and lock in to place.

Searched through my wall wart box for a suitable 12v DC power supply. Used a bit of 32 thou lock wire bent in two and soldered to the black cpu fan lead and inserted it into the center of the psu connector with some insulation around it so there is no direct short with the other connector. Grabbed a eyelet connect from my electrical connector box which was a bit smaller than the outside of the psus outer contact. Cut most of the eyelet part off leaving a 5mm x 3mm tap I could solder the Red lead from the cpu fan.Also spread out the circular bit so it fitted on the outside of thge psu connector nice and tight. Got a piece of soft rubber clear tubing and fitted this around the outside of this.

Connected the psu to the cpu fan connector I'd just made to see if it functioned correctly. It did. Applied black silicon sealant to keep the fan in place, made a cut out for the psu connector in the bottom half of the battery pack and then seal the two halves together with black silicon sealant. Wrapped masking tap around the battery pack halves to keep them nice and tight against each other then left the unit out in the sun on the fence railing for a few hours. Removed the masking tape then retested the unit. Fan is working fine-Good. Now I can fit the unit to my CQ62 desktop set up, plug the psu into a spare electricle socket, turn it on and have extra cooling of I need it.

Edit 25--2021: Tested the unit today and there is quite a reduction in on my CQ62 desktop setup.

Today I upgraded the CPU in my Socket AM2+ Hackintosh. Replaced the installed AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ with an AMD Phenom X4 9650.

Also swapped the graphics card, replacing a Radeon HD 5450 with a recently purchased Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. The card seems to be working great, passes 3DMark in Windows etc, but a few issues in Mac OS X 10.6 with weird occasional graphics glitches & occasional slight freezes. I think I have an idea what may be causing that, so should be an easy fix once I work on it some more this week.

The new CPU is being cooled by a cheap Chinese-made cooler, the cheapest I could find in it's form factor when I bought it about a year or so ago. I bought this cooler as a novelty just to see how bad it could be - the fan connector only has 3 pins, thus it runs at full speed constantly. The heatsink is extremely flimsy, built out of layers of thin flexible metal, of which the top layer fell off! You think this is going to suck right? Well so did I and noise aside, it actually does a decent job. At load I was only reaching temps of about 54 degrees, quite impressive.

Started to switch out the sound config on the Via C3 Machine.

This config is Keropi MQ MPU401 with Dreamblaster X2
EWS64s with 16mb Ram
AWE32 CT3900 with 8mb ram and Trust Korg Wavetable module.

I really need to pick up a nice external mixer instead of using the line in's!

After buying some midi couplers, I managed to get my RPi 4B to act like an MT-32 using MT-32Pi. I don’t have a DAC or some kind of MIDI input, so I’m not going to be doing things simply, but this let me spend $8 to use my UM-ONE-MKII. Some day I will grab a mixer to get everything working with no real issue.

BetaC wrote on 2021-01-24, 01:26:

After buying some midi couplers, I managed to get my RPi 4B to act like an MT-32 using MT-32Pi. I don’t have a DAC or some kind of MIDI input, so I’m not going to be doing things simply, but this let me spend $8 to use my UM-ONE-MKII. Some day I will grab a mixer to get everything working with no real issue.

I was not aware of this, going to look into it now.
Cheers.

Duouk2000 wrote on 2021-01-24, 01:56:

BetaC wrote on 2021-01-24, 01:26:

After buying some midi couplers, I managed to get my RPi 4B to act like an MT-32 using MT-32Pi. I don’t have a DAC or some kind of MIDI input, so I’m not going to be doing things simply, but this let me spend $8 to use my UM-ONE-MKII. Some day I will grab a mixer to get everything working with no real issue.

I was not aware of this, going to look into it now.
Cheers.

It’s legitimately cool, I just need to eventually get a screen for full effect, and the aforementioned DAC

Cleaned the Jetway 386/486 hybrid board that had corrosion from the leaking battery and hit a snag or three: the IC socket for the EPROM is totally gone on one end, the SN74F245N IC is rusted and probably won't work, and the first 8-bit ISA slot has missing coating from after scrubbing the corrosion off.

Not a big loss since I'm getting a new IC socket for the EPROM, a 512Kb (64Kx8) EPROM for the MR BIOS and the regular AMI BIOS, new 8 bit ISA slots, and will order the SN74F245N chip along with the IC socket.

fool wrote on 2021-01-23, 13:47:

Today I replaced FW82439TX chip to Gigabyte GA-586T2 motherboard. Old chip had a lifted corner what occured as memory fault. Fortunately 3 pads were torn off from the BGA - not from the motherboard.
NOS chip from AliExpress. Baked it for couple of hours @80-100°C. Table stove as bottom heater. Slowly increased temperature on heating gun until chip temperature was about 200(ish).

I had absolutely no clue wheter it was soldered or not. Under microscope it looked OK and it does POST! Next - beer.

That's impressive, good work! Was the chip actually NOS or was it reclaimed and reballed? Not that it matters as long as it works.
-----

As for me, I'm currently attempting a SelfScan on a old (yayy, no F3 rubbish) 5400.4 Seagate laptop drive that has a few reallocated sectors but is otherwise healthy.

Played Quake on HP Infinium oscilloscope. It is built for that, what else?
It was tempting to install a Voodoo I but I could hold myself. (In that case I would have to use external monitor.)

fool wrote on 2021-01-24, 14:43:

Played Quake on HP Infinium oscilloscope. It is built for that, what else?
It was tempting to install a Voodoo I but I could hold myself. (In that case I would have to use external monitor.)

🤣. That's genius 😀

How's the frame rate on the scope playing Quake?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-24, 16:08:

How's the frame rate on the scope playing Quake?

I didn't look but it's good. It was the first game I could find on that occasion.
That thing has AMD K6/200 + CHIPS video (T65550?) + 32MB RAM. I replaced mainboard (standard babyAT) because the original had a flat Dallas RTC.

Just benchmarked all of the CF, SD and Micro SD cards in my box of spares.....

Write performance on the lot of them sucks, as a ratio of read performance, apart from an older Sandisk Extreme IV card which almost has equal write performance as it does read.

Have been setting up a couple of CF cards for my 286 benchmark shootout, as well as a recently rebuilt 486 PVI-SP3, and I wanted to go CF for both of them. Copying several dozen gigabytes (of relatively small DOS game files) onto flash media sucks, even with some of those later cards.

I'll probably go with one of the later Kingston 266x or Sandisk Ultra CF cards from the right side of the chart for the 286 (both are 16GB), and get a 64GB Sandisk Extreme for the 486. Not for the performance in their intended systems, but my own sanity when setting them up or restoring them.

fool wrote on 2021-01-24, 16:23:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-24, 16:08:

How's the frame rate on the scope playing Quake?

I didn't look but it's good. It was the first game I could find on that occasion.
That thing has AMD K6/200 + CHIPS video (T65550?) + 32MB RAM. I replaced mainboard (standard babyAT) because the original had a flat Dallas RTC.

That's really cool. It's also fun that HP used standard pc components for making that line of oscilloscopes.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-01-24, 06:03:

Cleaned the Jetway 386/486 hybrid board that had corrosion from the leaking battery and hit a snag or three: the IC socket for the EPROM is totally gone on one end, the SN74F245N IC is rusted and probably won't work, and the first 8-bit ISA slot has missing coating from after scrubbing the corrosion off.

Not a big loss since I'm getting a new IC socket for the EPROM, a 512Kb (64Kx8) EPROM for the MR BIOS and the regular AMI BIOS, new 8 bit ISA slots, and will order the SN74F245N chip along with the IC socket.

A hybrid board - do you have a picture of it?

Picture of the board.

This is the before picture.

During the weekend I have built the Retrobright indoor box with UV LED strip, hydrogen peroxide, aluminum foil and the plastic box.

So I deyellowed my Packard Bell's P60 front case. It works fantastic. Photo below shows clearly a comparison of before and after.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-01-24, 23:26:

https://i.imgur.com/6n2CTUol.jpg […]
Show full quote

Picture of the board.

This is the before picture.

That's awesome - I'm looking for something like that that will take a 386 but also have VLB. What kind of board is that, exactly?

seleryba wrote on 2021-01-24, 23:43:

During the weekend I have built the Retrobright indoor box with UV LED strip, hydrogen peroxide, aluminum foil and the plastic box.

So I deyellowed my Packard Bell's P60 front case. It works fantastic. Photo below shows clearly a comparison of before and after.

7A732A46-6D11-45D0-928A-02C072BFAA62.jpeg

I'm using the hair bleach, saran wrap, and put it outside (Saturday morning was sunny, but +5 only) method to de-orange an old XT tower case - it is 90% effective. I missed a spot here and there, so it's in my basement with just the top strip of the case under wraps. I've also got a floppy face, a pair of old Creative Labs speakers, and a VERY yellowed MS mouse, the latter of which has succumb to marbling, all in the basement. It will work without sunlight, it just takes FOREVER. Still, the mouse looks better than the piece of cheese that I purchased.

I've tried your method before in my Uni's bio lab on a Gravis gamepad. Came out pretty nice actually 😉

Over the weekend I put together a 486 SCSI system:

DX2/66, 32 Mb RAM, 256k cache, 1.08 gb Quantum drive. In this picture, AHA 1542CF, and a 16550 dual COM card (from an NCR POS - I had to set the jumpers properly as they were set for addresses for COM 3 and 4 and IRQ 3 and 12, respectively). The CDROM is a Pioneer 32x SCSI.

This case had a P166 in it, but it seemed visually closer to something that might house a late 386 or early 486, so I pulled everything out and put this together in its place.

The board came bundled with a Token Ring LAN card (pretty useless, but it's in there), and a TEKRAM IDE/FDC cache controller, which I could not get to work. It's going in there anyhow because I have no use for either of them anywhere else, and I wanted the "one card in every expansion slot" just like old XTs. Theres a Trident 9400CXi with 2Mb , a CT2230, and a high speed LPT card set to ECP mode as I will be using an external ZIP drive on it.

Friday night:

Played this with my son for an hour or so (Stunts) - he loves it. He's not old enough to understand drinking and driving, but when he's old enough to, I will tell him that this is the only permissible form 😉

I took my front panel apart to insert a 7 segment display, and there was a hole, but the front cover had the black sticker/vinyl cover going over it. Exacto-knifed it off

and put the display in there:

Normally I have a red gel that I put in to change the colour of the LEDs, but all I had was this deep green plastic from my Sonata's digital clock (replaced with one from an Elantra - long story but 4 OEM Sonata clocks were NFG at the wreckers - seems it was a design flaw, I've got ones out of Ponys that still work to this day) and it was the perfect height so I snipped some off to length:

I put some clear glue on the LED itself (it's pretty tight in there) and this is what I got:

With Turbo off:

with Turbo on:

Overall I'd say 8/10, I could have been a bit more careful with cutting the vinyl, and the display itself is off on a slight angle due to the reset switch embossment hitting the PCB (I couldn't clip off more without damaging traces)

The IBM badge case is off a defunct server thrown out at work.

Next up - wait for the retrobriting to be done on the 5.25, hook up the speaker, bring out the NCR 17 inch and film it for my channel.

I have so much raw content 🤣... need to sit down and edit it!

It's a J-Mark OPTI-495SX 3/486WB (or Jetway).

I was the only bidder on this board and it's coming along well. Just waiting for some parts to come in the mail so I can replace those items and get it to work. I haven't tested it since the IC socket for the EPROM BIOS is gone (the left side had rusted out and the right side is still good), but the BIOS chip looks good and no signs of rust.