Yesterday decided to play some Monkey Island on my 486 rig and even at Win95 boot got some Explorer errors and even blue screens. After some research found that CPU is heated over 90 deg C.
So, I fit some old north bridge heatsink and temps fell to 45 deg C after an hour of Doom. Looks like the CPU is degraded and going to die soon.

Real or faux cache? Looks like a PC Chips M912 v1.4 or 1.7

Hope the CPU doesn't go out on you.

In any event, I fixed the two Magnetic Peripherals Inc floppy drives by oiling the spindle motors and greased the rails with White Lithium Grease along with moving the heads back and forth to make it move more freely. Formatted a diskette, made it bootable (sys.com A: and copied the command.com file), rebooted, and it boots from the drive.

I can finally copy the important files to the diskettes and copy them to my PPro 200 system once I install the 360KB drive I bought a while back with the XT-FDC BIOS on an ISA NIC, copy the files to a 1.44MB diskette, and copy that to my laptop or burn a CD and copy the files from there.

PC Chips M912 v1.7 with real cache, hope heatsink will give it some more life.

Excellent. If the temps creep up a bit, feel free to add a fan as well since some CPUs require a fan (AMD always required one and Intel didn't, but I usually added a fan on an Intel CPU).

Played a bunch of old games on my Pentium 1 this weekend after fixing it up. The details on the issue can be found here... Pentium CPU issue

But I played some street fighter alpha , Tomb Raider 1 and 3, Fallout 1 and FX Fighter. I also streamed some TR 3 .

Successfully tried another MIDI output recepie. This time in Win XP.
Win XP + COM Port + HOSA DBK-103 cable + Roland Serial driver (attached).

There is also a driver for Win 9x

My gameport to midi cable arrived in the mail so I finally set up MUNT and coolsoft midi mapper on my Win10 machine. I was using the normal munt app and I am amazed at how cool this is.

I had some problems trying to get some games that expect LAPC-I to work so next I will try the Falcosoft midi with munt vsti and a few more plugins if I can find them... PMs are welcome 😉

I won't make any changes to the current setup until I play through Monkey Island again, as is tradition.

Does anyone know if it's possible to run Beneath a Steel Sky in Roland mode while keeping digital speech playing or is this a ScummVM only perk? (edit: not possible :€ )

appiah4 wrote on 2021-02-27, 21:08:

Set up a Pimiga microsd to use with my spare Pi3B, and I must say I am having as much fun with it as I normally have on a real Amiga.. It's a truly fantastic emulation effort.

There are now a PI-400 specific edition of PiMiga. 😉

Retro related activity -

I recently purchased a crappy cheap external power supply with a molex connector from eBay, to attach an IDE CD-ROM drive externally. It was as expected - pretty dreadful and introduced interference to the video signal, so I had no intention of using it long-term and opted for a low-wattage small form factor ATX PSU instead.

But I thought I'd keep the cheap power supply for testing purposes and today I was going to use it to test an IDE to CF adapter. Didn't get that far though, flicked the power switch and POP! Opened it up/ripped it apart and was greeted by a burnt voltage regulator and scorch marks all over. Nasty cheap junk.

I got new solder tin today, and did a couple of hours of soldering on my SixtyClone. It is beginning to take shape. Only missing a few components before I need to check overall continuity and do a smoke test without chips installed.

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-02, 21:57:

I got new solder tin today, and did a couple of hours of soldering on my SixtyClone. It is beginning to take shape. Only missing a few components before I need to check overall continuity and do a smoke test without chips installed.

SixtyClone-2-March.jpg

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the SixtyClone a clone of?

debs3759 wrote on 2021-03-03, 00:05:

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-02, 21:57:

I got new solder tin today, and did a couple of hours of soldering on my SixtyClone. It is beginning to take shape. Only missing a few components before I need to check overall continuity and do a smoke test without chips installed.

SixtyClone-2-March.jpg

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the SixtyClone a clone of?

It is a clone of the Commodore64. 😀

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-03, 00:43:

It is a clone of the Commodore64. 😀

Looks pretty sweet - I'm being lazy and not googling it but does this motherboard add anything that the original doesn't? Like allow you to use a modern PSU, better video output, etc? Or is it just a 1:1 replacement that you'd use if your existing board died?

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-02, 11:16:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-02-27, 21:08:

Set up a Pimiga microsd to use with my spare Pi3B, and I must say I am having as much fun with it as I normally have on a real Amiga.. It's a truly fantastic emulation effort.

There are now a PI-400 specific edition of PiMiga. 😉

Ahh.. I have about 4 Pi3Bs, two of which are idle, but no 4s. One of them was my Flex/Kodi box until I got an AndroidTV box, the other was set up identically for my dad until he decided to get a 3B+ for no good reason. So now one of them is a PiMiga and the other is a Retropie. Ran out of HDMI ports on the TV though :lol

Cleaned corrosion off of the DFI MF-100 RAM expansion RTC Serial parallel GamePort card (Varta battery of DooM).

badmojo wrote on 2021-03-03, 02:19:

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-03, 00:43:

It is a clone of the Commodore64. 😀

Looks pretty sweet - I'm being lazy and not googling it but does this motherboard add anything that the original doesn't? Like allow you to use a modern PSU, better video output, etc? Or is it just a 1:1 replacement that you'd use if your existing board died?

It is a near 1:1 clone of the original revision that it is based on. That means everything that works on the 1986 board, will work on this one. Basically as real a Commodore64 as you can get, just not build by Commodore. There are just one minor issue with early 250466 SixtyClones, and that is one of the cartridge pins are grounded by mistake. It results in some cartridges not working at all. The fix is easy, as I just have to cut one trace somewere on the backside.

Regarding modern PSU's, then I can just use the one that I have. It is a modern switching PSU, made for original C64's.

Better video, well.... The plan is to use an RF modulator replacement. It is a modern tiny board, that just passes S-Video and Composit through. The original modulators are a major signal degrader. I can however buy two different solutions. One being an Component mod and the other being an HDMI mod. Though with the signal quality that my original Breadbin 250407 (YouTube), with original RF modulator and quality S-Video cable gives, then they are kind of waste of money. Especially when I use my RetroTink and the VIC-II is Revision-5.

Basically, it is just a replacement that can be used to build a brand new C64 with as well. There are tons of replacement chips, made with modern tech, and new ones are in the making as well. There are mighty fine and decent SID replacements, 1:1 PLA replacements, and so on. A few people are working on doing a VIC-II in FPGA, and have a working prototype ready. It will work just as the original, in regards to video signal, however it add's VGA and HDMI out as well. Then there are someone working on doing the CIA chip in FPGA as well. For the Ram part and the scroller bug, then there are S-Ram raplacements in a dropin solution.

I will say that the state of the C64 these days, are wonderfull and awesomme. Most issues are being eliminated, and when they are, then it will be the worlds best vintage 8bit platform. I know that The8bit guy is working with people on an ultimate 8bit machine. However that is a modern platform and not a vintage platform. Imagine what the state of the Atari 8bit line would be today, if all that work was put into those machines.

Sorry for my long post. I am just psyched by the thought that I might actually have build a working computer by hand in the old school way.
Tests will my multimeter will reveal if I have done any serious mistakes.

Thanks for all of the details @brostenen, sounds great and I agree that the C64 is amazing with what they've created and still working on - I didn't realise that a VIC-II clone is happening, how excellent.

badmojo wrote on 2021-03-03, 11:03:

Thanks for all of the details @brostenen, sounds great and I agree that the C64 is amazing with what they've created and still working on - I didn't realise that a VIC-II clone is happening, how excellent.

VIC-II FPGA (YouTube)
CIA Replacements (YouTube)

They are all in prototype stage, yet looking promising at this point. There are even the Mechboard, that is a mechanical keyboard replacement, and you can buy newly made Model-C cases that are created with the exact same molds that Commodore used in the first Model-C case revision.

I am just wondering.... How far can a clone be taken, and still be as close to the original as possible?
Using as modern as possible tech, you might be able to get a brand new C64 in 2040.
(the downside is that you need to build it)

brostenen wrote on 2021-03-03, 10:20:

Better video, well.... The plan is to use an RF modulator replacement. It is a modern tiny board, that just passes S-Video and Composit through. The original modulators are a major signal degrader. I can however buy two different solutions. One being an Component mod and the other being an HDMI mod. Though with the signal quality that my original Breadbin 250407 (YouTube), with original RF modulator and quality S-Video cable gives, then they are kind of waste of money. Especially when I use my RetroTink and the VIC-II is Revision-5.

So, you sent me a lot of links yesterday to start my endeavours into getting my newly arrived C64 working, thanks, and from the schematics of the C64, it seems that at least the S-Video signals (Luminace/COLOR) are output directly from the VIC? All though passing through the RF modulator, I would find it plausible, that the modulator could be bypassed with the signals?

My new maps(to the OldUnreal and Quake 1 & 2 & 3) and voxels and a game in The Game Factory 1996.

https://twitter.com/duke_unreal/status/136647 … 5318397956?s=19

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