Bancho wrote:

Tested out my Expert Data Opti 495SLC board today now that i managed to get a VGA card for it.
I got everything plugged in powered on the system and nothing. I had read about this board being funny with VLB cards. After a bit of reading i had to change a jumper position, powered it on a Bingo the machine posted!
Going to sit down with it tonight and get it mounted in a case and Dos installed on it.

VGA VLB cards with the ET4000AX chipset have given me trouble with that board, but I’ve never seen a Cirrus based card cause trouble anywhere - great choice!

Bancho wrote:

Tested out my Expert Data Opti 495SLC board today now that i managed to get a VGA card for it. […]
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Tested out my Expert Data Opti 495SLC board today now that i managed to get a VGA card for it.

This is the card that arrived today. Its a VLB Cirrus Logic 4528 with 1mb on board.

I got everything plugged in powered on the system and nothing. I had read about this board being funny with VLB cards. After a bit of reading i had to change a jumper position, powered it on a Bingo the machine posted!

Going to sit down with it tonight and get it mounted in a case and Dos installed on it.

I bought that exact card, back in the mid 90's (1995) or an 5428, that looks exactly like that. And I still have the manual for the card for some really odd and strange reason. It is a good card, that are stable and just works. Sadly, with all Cirrus Logic VLB cards that I have tried, none of them will run perfectly on a LCD/TFT monitor. By that I mean that they make these vertical spaghetti lines that are grey or white. If you encounter this, and are annoyed by it, I strongly recommend an S3 VLB card instead. They only have faint to none of those lines.

Just finished cleaning this up:

Thinking of putting it in my latest build:

But I'm not sure, might end up in one of my other machines. 😕

I have been busy building my PIII-S 1.4GHz system which consists for the majority of parts that are new (and will finish it soon after some sleep and receiving a cable). I opened the new (old stock) power supply and identified some known bad capacitor brands (Teapo, Fuhjyyu and OST). I recently experienced a same model power supply from another case that EOL'ed itself with a loud bang after 5 minutes use. For me these were reasons to buy new Seasonic power supplies, the best affordable retro friendly one I could find is a model with 24A on +5V. One of my retro pc's already has an older Seasonic, now this Tualatin system has one and my soon to build PII DOS pc will also get one. I have three other pc's left that will eventually also get new Seasonic power supplies (but seem to be running stable for hours now with their 15+ years old units). Anyway, new PSU's are equipped with a 24-pin ATX connector, that doesn't fit on this particular Soltek motherboard, so now I need to buy an adapter cable (again). I had some luck too, because my Gainward 6600GT just fits inside the AGP slot thanks to a new capacitor under the slot that is just short enough (Soltek board is recapped), so yes capacitor dimensions do matter 😊 Apart from that everything went ok (installing CPU cooler and I/O shield is never easy for me but I'm getting experienced and have good tools these days 😀 ). I can't wait to see this baby running and will share some pictures when it's finished.

Vegge wrote:

Just finished cleaning this up: Thinking of putting it in my latest build: […]
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Just finished cleaning this up:
Thinking of putting it in my latest build:

IMG_0966s.jpg

But I'm not sure, might end up in one of my other machines. 😕

What is that black thing covering the AGP slot? GPU holder? Almost looks like a hard card.

I just catched something funny on the board I bought yesteryesterday :3

Board is from 2003, BIOS was written in 2002 but... the date of the BIOS string is 17 years after?? WTF??

BIOS engineers make typos too 😉

Upgraded my Windows 98SE machine's monitor from a 15" LCD to an 18" LCD display, and it's stuck at 640x480 resolution at 16-bit colors for no reason.

"Repaired" my Juko-ST board. Was totally dirty and covered with soil as I got it. With the Supersoft-ROM I figured out the RAM was not working.
Dont know why they are required, but after adding 4x HYB514526A (sockets were not populated as I got the board) it detects 512KB 😎

Played some Warcraft and DoomII on my fav. 486 board - the LS486E. Gfx is a Matrox and for Sound I finally got a Mozart which powered my first Pentium60 PC back in 95'.

In combination with a good CRT an enjoyable package.

Upgraded my Compaq EN SFF with 384MB RAM, a DVD-RW, an 80GB HDD, a Terratec i512 (FM801) sound card and a Matrox G450 PCI.

The Matrox G450 PCI is not playing ball, however. For whatever reason about 10 seconds after boot it just outputs vertical colored lines on one monitor, and loses sync with another monitor. This card was working fine with a GX110 last year so I don't think it's faulty, but I will retest it anyhow.

Anyway, out goes the Matrox G450 PCI, in comes the Radeon 9250 PCI. Now I have a great SFF retro Win9x PC.

Trying to figure out how the hell the Wyse 286 AT clone I've been working on keeps time. There is no battery anywhere on the board. When the computer is off, there is no voltage coming from the power supply through any of the leads. There is no battery and nothing remotely related to timekeeping inside the special power supply - opened it recently, looks in very good condition with no capacitors bulging etc but nothing out of the ordinary either. And yet with the system turned off, it keeps time and date for days in a row. And this system was made in the 1980s. Scratching my head.

Mounted the vga adaptor, internally on my Amiga500, in order not to have the cable going out of the case. Now it is a true internal scandoubler. I mounted it under the floppy drive, and in the back of the bottom part of the Amiga500 case. And there are space enough on the left of the adaptor, were I can add a switch for the Kickstart switcher that I have for it.

Rebuilt my Slot 1 system in a S370 one. It’s using an Asus TUSL2-C with a 1GHz Tualatin, 256 megs of RAM, a Voodoo 5 (AGP). Not sure such a machine warrants a separate post, as this build has been done a lot of times here. I’ll upgrade it to 1.4 GHz and 512 megs of RAM soon enough.

The build itself was really straightforward save for some weird Windows installation issues that I solved by reformatting the HDD. All in all this is a great system. This machine is meant for games I played the most in my childhood (roughly 1998-2003) and probably the only major game it won’t be able to run from that time is Morrowind.

Now the only issue is that this machine still can’t run Jedi Outcast for some reason. The load times are really long, the FPS are abysmal and most of the cinematics plain don’t work. Bear in mind that this game is based on Quake 3 engine, and Q3 ran fine even on a P3@500 MHz. I’m thinking this might be because I’m running the game via Daemon Tools and not off a real disk.

Today I got some of my 486 stuff set up and working at last. Specifically an MSI 4143 motherboard and the DataExpert 4044

DataExpert 4044 - I bought this broken but it seems to work with a couple of traces repaired, the correct jumpers set (no, do not use the not-present integrated QFP cpu...) and some trial and error with the memory slot to use.
Working with a system with no PS/2 mouse is weird for me, I'm still reading through the keyboard controller mod thread and beyond just the mouse, no integrated IDE/floppy. Thankfully I've got ISA cards for that, but it's a shame I don't have any VLB stuff - just ISA & PCI

It's so nice to find a seller on ebay that's honest about the condition. It still has all of its cache chips and no other missing parts beyond the chipped VLB port.

MSI MS-4143 - I posted about this one previously, its battery was beginning to corrode other parts of the board - that was fixed in time but I hadn't got around to testing it. I tested it the other night and two things went wrong:
1. The cheap ATX > AT adapter's power good switch had broken, causing the PSU to power up but not fully, which made me think there was a short / dead bios / CPU
2. When testing today, I forgot which way around the ISA / PCI post card goes in the socket - it turns out if you plug that in backwards, the system does not post and the postcard shows a strange LED pattern - oops! 😊
This is also the only board I've yet tested with a voltage regulator, so I can finally check out the AMD 486DX4 100 that my boss gave me years ago. It's been sitting on my desk in the office for years, left all over the place in that time and with no consideration for anti-static precautions - it actually works 😁

This motherboard, upon startup also demanded a ROM password, which I didn't know and shouldn't have been there since the board's battery had been removed. After a few minutes trying to guess it or look for an old backdoor password - I noticed the boot diagnostic screen displayed "Research Machines" alongside the other BIOS information. This means it came from a UK school and it makes sense that would have a default password, luckily just using the password "RM" bypassed it, excellent security 🤣

Trying to find something in my stock of spinning iron which will be compatible with an UMC ISA IDE controller in my 386.

stamasd wrote:

Trying to figure out how the hell the Wyse 286 AT clone I've been working on keeps time. There is no battery anywhere on the board. When the computer is off, there is no voltage coming from the power supply through any of the leads. There is no battery and nothing remotely related to timekeeping inside the special power supply - opened it recently, looks in very good condition with no capacitors bulging etc but nothing out of the ordinary either. And yet with the system turned off, it keeps time and date for days in a row. And this system was made in the 1980s. Scratching my head.

Could it be using a supercapacitor for it?

brostenen wrote:

I bought that exact card, back in the mid 90's (1995) or an 5428, that looks exactly like that. And I still have the manual for the card for some really odd and strange reason. It is a good card, that are stable and just works. Sadly, with all Cirrus Logic VLB cards that I have tried, none of them will run perfectly on a LCD/TFT monitor. By that I mean that they make these vertical spaghetti lines that are grey or white. If you encounter this, and are annoyed by it, I strongly recommend an S3 VLB card instead. They only have faint to none of those lines.

Any chance of a scan of the manual? Is it green with a parrot painting on the cover?

LHN91 wrote:

stamasd wrote:

Trying to figure out how the hell the Wyse 286 AT clone I've been working on keeps time. There is no battery anywhere on the board. When the computer is off, there is no voltage coming from the power supply through any of the leads. There is no battery and nothing remotely related to timekeeping inside the special power supply - opened it recently, looks in very good condition with no capacitors bulging etc but nothing out of the ordinary either. And yet with the system turned off, it keeps time and date for days in a row. And this system was made in the 1980s. Scratching my head.

Could it be using a supercapacitor for it?

Don't think there were supercapacitors around 30 years ago. Also, nothing really looks like one on this MB.
(edit) I may be wrong, seems like the first commercial supercapacitors appeared in the early 1980s.

appiah4 wrote:

brostenen wrote:

I bought that exact card, back in the mid 90's (1995) or an 5428, that looks exactly like that. And I still have the manual for the card for some really odd and strange reason. It is a good card, that are stable and just works. Sadly, with all Cirrus Logic VLB cards that I have tried, none of them will run perfectly on a LCD/TFT monitor. By that I mean that they make these vertical spaghetti lines that are grey or white. If you encounter this, and are annoyed by it, I strongly recommend an S3 VLB card instead. They only have faint to none of those lines.

Any chance of a scan of the manual? Is it green with a parrot painting on the cover?

It is just a tiny thin folder or pamplet if you will. None the less a manual. I will see if I can scan it.
Just have to figure out our Epson WorkForce WF-3725 multi-printer/scanner/fax/photocopy thingy.