RandomStranger wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/reZpyx9m.jpg

I was planning to use a voodoo with a 4MB Matrox Millennium, but the cards are too long for this one. I'm thinking that maybe a Mystique or a 2MB Millennium would work (my G450 is short enough).

I talked to a seller and it seems even the 2MB Millennium is still about 10mm too long. The 2MB Mystique seems shorter, so I have to find one of those.

Also, can anyone say anything good about the Astec PSU brand in general?
I'm keeping an eye on a SA202-3545-2288A. The 200W power output seems ideal for a Pentium (1), but I can't find any reliable info about it.

Yes I've had trouble fitting a Voodoo with a Millennium - one of them will hit the cooler on both of my Socket 7 machines. The Mystique is shorter and just fits.

As my Tandy build slowly comes together, I decided to remove the back cladding to get at the mess of dust I suspected hanging out there. I was not disappointed.

While I was at it, I decided to replace the annoyingly loud stock fan in the Tandy's massive 67 watt power supply with a much quieter model. All that I had on hand were illuminated fans and while I cringed at the thought, the end result is actually not as bad as I expected. 😁

I think that I might leave it like that. 😀

Thallanor wrote:

I think that I might leave it like that. 😀

The blue fan looks awesome in that system. I have something similar brewing, but not quite ready yet.

Also...

I rescued a stray cat last night that I have been building trust with over the last few months. At one point I thought she might be pregnant, but the foster care person she went to was 99% sure she was not. Being overly cautious I went into the woods today, where I saw her emerge from off and on, looking for a litter of kittens. Found nothing, but I did run into something else...

I'm thinking a recap and some super glue and she'll be good as new. 🤣

RandomStranger wrote:

Also, can anyone say anything good about the Astec PSU brand in general?
I'm keeping an eye on a SA202-3545-2288A. The 200W power output seems ideal for a Pentium (1), but I can't find any reliable info about it.

Astec power supplies are well designed and use good quality components (usually 100% japanese capacitors).

liqmat wrote:

The blue fan looks awesome in that system. I have something similar brewing, but not quite ready yet.

Thanks! I think that it looks good because the glow is coming from inside the computer, not right flush against the back of it. It's cheesy as hell, but I've even considered something similar now to glow through the front drive bays. 😀 I'm curious what you're working on!

liqmat wrote:

I'm thinking a recap and some super glue and she'll be good as new. 🤣

You should then sell it online at a fair market price and wait for the ensuing bitching and moaning.

Thallanor wrote:

You should then sell it online at a fair market price and wait for the ensuing bitching and moaning.

The cat or the monitor? 🤣

RandomStranger wrote:

Also, can anyone say anything good about the Astec PSU brand in general?
I'm keeping an eye on a SA202-3545-2288A. The 200W power output seems ideal for a Pentium (1), but I can't find any reliable info about it.

They're pretty decent. Lots of OEMs used them back in the 90s (I've had a few Gateways with them). Just beware the non-standard ATX mounting holes that a lot of them have.

cyclone3d wrote:

Thallanor wrote:

You should then sell it online at a fair market price and wait for the ensuing bitching and moaning.

The cat or the monitor? 🤣

liqmat wrote:

I'm thinking a recap and some super glue and she'll be good as new. 🤣

Did I say that? I meant some super glue to recap the kitty. 🤣

liqmat wrote:

...
I rescued a stray cat last night that I have been building trust with over the last few months...

Thumbs up! Love hearing stories like this. 😎

liqmat wrote:

off_grid_NEC.jpg

What kind of NEC is this. Multisync?

MMaximus wrote:

What kind of NEC is this. Multisync?

Have no clue. Wasn't about to dig that thing out. It probably has been buried in 6-8ft of snow since December.

I've been working on my Tualatin 1.4 machine tonight as i've been determined to get this finished and the sound was the last thing to sort. Happy with how it turned out so far but i need to do a bit more work on it.

Managed to get 3 cards working together to give a nice range of different midi options.

Diamond Monster MX300 with a Turtle Beach HOMAC board installed 240 3 7 300
AWE32 CT3980 2MB, Yamaha DB50XG, OPL3 220 5 1 330
Terratec EWS64 XL with 16mb RAM 320

Currently everything goes through the MX300

AWE32 Line Out --> MX300 Line IN
EWS64 Line Out Internal Header --> MX300 AUX IN

Seems to work really well like this in Windows - I've only got the SAM Chip Active on the EWS64, Everything else is disabled.

Not tackled DOS yet, Not sure how i will get the EWS64 working in DOS like it does in windows.

Attempting to downgrade the LCD panel and video card in the Thinkpad 760ED I bought a long while back. It came with an XGA (1024x768) panel in it and the video card does some absolutely horrible screen scaling which still leaves black borders... just ugly all around.

On a whim, I figured that maybe I'd try swapping in SVGA (800x600) hardware from a 760EL which is otherwise a very similar Thinkpad model. Picked up the appropriate video board, system board and LCD panel from a 760EL. As far as I know from the few posts I've been able to find on the topic, these all should be interchangeable between these models as long as you swap the video board and the LCD panel... that is, you cannot just swap the panel. And indeed, the physical shape of the connector seems to have been designed differently for the XGA and SVGA LCD panels probably to prevent someone from doing just that.

Well... this does not bode well. Bleh. That looks like the panel is damaged? It doesn't look anything like what I've read from the one or two other people who've shared their experiences attempting to do what I'm doing and had described what happened when e.g. the video card and LCD panel are not compatible or something.

EDIT: Reviewing the few bookmarked posts I was able to find on this topic, it seems that it is possible that at least one of the posts I read suggesting that only the video card + LCD panel replacement was needed was actually incorrect and that the motherboard also should be replaced with the SVGA model one as well. Luckily I did get one of this as well so will try that tomorrow.

I am currently singing "It's a miracle! a mirrrracle!" because I was finally able to boot my A2000 and run stuff for the first time in months.

During the last episode of this saga, after putting much work into getting the system to power on without a blinking power LED, the GVP A3001 decided it was going to stop recognizing the IDE drive. So my next plan of attack was to grab a cheap PCI 50-pin SCSI interface and try to figure out why the Amiga was also not booting from its old Barracuda SCSI drive attached to the GVP HC+8.

I got such a card, attached the 'cuda to a PC and dumped the whole disk. Turns out this was actually a 4.3GB, but only 2GB was allocated. And the disk geometry in the RDB was awfully strange, it was setup with 424 cylinders, 1 head, and over 9000 sectors. I found this puzzling but when I mounted the disk image in WinUAE it booted fine. Whereas the A2000 would show a bunch of disk activity and then just freeze at a black screen.

I tried mucking about with jumpers on the A3001, taking RAM out and putting it in. No change.

I found the manual for the 'cuda online and skimmed through it. I saw something about the drive "remembering" the geometry it's formatted with. So I was thinking, maybe if I reformat I can change the geometry? And then write a new disk image from MakeHDF? So I was fiddling around in the adaptec BIOS utility and selected the format option. Bad move, as that appears to have bricked the drive.

Tried the IDE again just for the heck of it. It decided to recognize the drive again, booted once, and then froze. After that it would only start booting and then say "DH0 is not a DOS disk." I was about ready to kill it all with fire by that point and gave up.

Later I had another idea. I read somewhere that the poor compatibility of the GVP A3001 IDE interface is because of timing problems. So I thought, maybe I can underclock the card and that will affect the IDE timing? I popped out the 50MHz crystal and put in a 24MHz one. That didn't fix the problem. I was checking to see if my ROM programmer supports 16-bit ROMs which I had never messed with before, because I was thinking about burning an Amiga diagnostic ROM I saw online. Then while I was putting some junk away I saw the Quantum LPS270. This was the first HDD I used in the Amiga 2000, before the 'cuda. I believed it to be dead but figured I'd connect it to the Adaptec PCI card and try to dump some sectors. Well, I dumped the entire thing, without any clunking. Wasn't this dead? I think I may have mixed it up in my brain with another SCSI Quantum drive from an old Mac which died.

I put the LPS270 in the Amiga and lo and behold, a workbench screen! What do I do now?!?!? I found the "memcheck" utility which was already on there and ran it. No errors. OK, so next I tried enabling the RAM on the HC+8, but that still doesn't work. Just leads to a blinking power LED. I disabled that again, and reinstalled the 32-bit RAM for the A3001. Booted and ran memcheck again, no errors. Then I ran AIBB. Turns out that by playing with jumpers earlier I had gotten the card into some half speed mode. The '030 was at 12MHz and the '882 at 24MHz. After that I reinstalled the 50MHz crystal, ran memcheck, ran AIBB, now at 25/50MHz. The documentation I found online for the A3001 jumper settings isn't entirely accurate, aside from the half clock mode, JP5 on the RAM32 board apparently determines whether the memory is mapped at 2MB or 32MB.

TLDR, it works (for now...)

Tried to figure out what could be the cause why my P3 1200/256/100 suddenly gets "recognized" as 305MHz (87x3.5).
It's really strange to me. BIOS is some Award, but it is strange... MODBIN hangs when trying to see BIOS options.
CPU-Z ids the CPU correctly, but I am not sure whether it actually runs at 1200/100, as the computer became considerably slower.
Even more strange, when I tried to fix the FSB timing in BIOS to 1200/100 instead of auto, POST displayed 705MHz (201x3.5).
Needed to clear CMOS to make the computer not hang after POST.

Any idea what could be wrong?

liqmat wrote:

I'm thinking a recap and some super glue and she'll be good as new. 🤣

off_grid_NEC.jpg

1. Get old monitor
2. Crack open CRT tube and remove all phosphor, gun, and grille elements
3. Install fish, fish accessories
4. Complete decoration of your After Dark emulator

Note, the After Dark emulator can optionally be used as both entertainment and food source if you prefer cats to fish.

The 8-bit Guy gutted an iMac G3 and used it as a cat house. Or a 1954 Super Zenith as a fish tank (Grumpy Old Men).

So.

Like, a couple of weeks ago, I had to rush through a pickup, because I had a doctor's appointment.

On the way I out I grabbed a kind of generic joystick box that had a Win98 sticker on it, so, you know, I figured, it's retro, it doesn't weigh much, and it fits in the car, why not. Didn't even open it. Wasn't making animal noises, had the right weight, fine.

Finally opened it tonight.

Huh:

HP 41c software packs. I posted this partly because people have mentioned calculators recently. Not really my bag (baby), but it's definitely retro!

Kind of still scratching my head on this one.

Edit: Oh and the "Oki" printer I thought I had is a Star Micronics Gemini 10, which I can't get out of it's box. I hope I don't have to cut it open. Can't find what it's stuck on. Looks minty, though.

TheMobRules wrote:

RandomStranger wrote:

Also, can anyone say anything good about the Astec PSU brand in general?
I'm keeping an eye on a SA202-3545-2288A. The 200W power output seems ideal for a Pentium (1), but I can't find any reliable info about it.

Astec power supplies are well designed and use good quality components (usually 100% japanese capacitors).

moawkwrd wrote:

They're pretty decent. Lots of OEMs used them back in the 90s (I've had a few Gateways with them). Just beware the non-standard ATX mounting holes that a lot of them have.

Thank you both. This one seems standard to me:

So I have a winner.

Bancho wrote:

Currently everything goes through the MX300

AWE32 Line Out --> MX300 Line IN
EWS64 Line Out Internal Header --> MX300 AUX IN

Beautiful looking build and love the sound options 😎 Have you tried a mixer instead of passing through line ins of other cards? I didn't know myself after investing in my little passive Rolls - so easy, particularly if you start using MIDI from one and FX from another.