Made some modifications to my IBM 5160 XT build in an ATX tower case. Swapped the original case power button, for a spare AT-style on/off switch.

Soldered and glued the power cables from the ATX to AT adapter onto the connectors and then attached the new switch to the case.

Some of these ATX to AT adapters have stupidly small cabling, it was a tight fit hence the use of the glue to keep the cables in place and not stress the solder when screwing the power switch in place.

I still need to create a proper backplace, just using a piece of card for the time being. It may look ugly, but it's doing the job.

Reassembled for now, the next stage is to clean this case up properly.

Now if only I could do something with the case's Power LED & Reset Switch it'd be almost perfect. But oh well. 🤣

I am slowly cleaning out my "collection" by throwing out non-working items and finding doubles to put up for sale. Today I went through all of my ~15 CD drives just to find half of them to be broken (either not reading any disks, not opening or spontaneously closing). Some findings:

- I was surprised to find 8x drives to be able to read CD-R disks. In my experience a drive has to be at least 16x or faster to be able to read CD-R, but I guess that depends on the brand of the disk. Older drives don't seem to like my Verbatim disks too much, but they worked with some no-name "VS" Russian-made disks all right. Haven't tested CD-RW though;

- as expected, the newer the drive, the more likely it is to be shit. Out of 8 drives I threw out, only 2 were slower than 40x (8x and 16x, respectively). NEC seems to be the worst brand, threw 3 out 4 I had;

- all drives seem to have just three jumper settings: master, slave and cable select. Pioneer 12x DR-444 drives also have "mode" and "win95" setting. I wonder what they do.

All in all I am happy to find that I can use slower drives with writable media. I really hate "modern" 52x drives: they are extremely noisy and they are an eye sore. I mean, the "52x" label screams "early 00s" to me and can easily ruin the otherwise period-correct Socket 7 build.

Predator99 wrote:

Just managed to repair my Commodore PC10-III Board (312628) from this lot :-) Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today […]
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Just managed to repair my Commodore PC10-III Board (312628) from this lot 😀
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

- installed a V20 and flashed both EPROMs - all were missing
- built a standard AT power adapter
- replaced a faulty RAM
- replaced faulty SN74S00N. Only had a HD74LS00P from a scrap controller, but seems to work
The replaced ICs were destroyed by the leaking battery...

_Very_ helpful was the Supersoft diagnostic ROM. The image "5150 or 5160 _ 27256 _ 32KB.BIN" worked...the default BIOS displayed nothing prior the repair...

The PC10-III. My first PC ever! One day I'll have it back!!!!

Today,since it's so warm outside, I only did some small things

* Preparing my next complete build: a Pentium 75. Just waiting for double sided thermal tape
* Cleaning a keyboard from the pile that I bought. It was REALLY dirty but a good scrub and dustoff gave me this:

Really love it! Think I might use this 😀 This is a Cherry keyboard but a very quick search doesn't give me much info.

Having fun with testing & booting old hardware.

Yesterday I picked up an MSI MS-6168 with a single (very) bad cap. It does something but clearly won't work until I get out my soldering iron. So moved on to the other one: a Tyan Tsunami ATX - i440BX with all that Tyan goodness. Except it wasn't - it was a Tulip OEM board with of all things an AMI WinBIOS 😦

It took a bit of digging to find a suitable replacement, and the Tulip OEM BIOS appears completely unique, so I uploaded both the replacements and the Tulip BIOS onto Vogonsdrivers, and sent a mail to a local Tulip users group with the OEM image.

Then to boot the stuff. The Tsunami was pretty straightforward, with options to boot from pretty much any device in existence (6 different choices for removable ATAPI alone) except USB. It was happy to work with my DVD drive and Gotek. Unfortunately HDD support was less happy - the old Tulip BIOS had the 8GB limit, the newer non-OEM ones fixed that but got stuck above 32GB. So then I decided to move testing over to the Tekram P5MVP3-A4 I was using in the system I'm building with my son. The board works fine, it works fine with CDs/DVDs - but booting from them? Forget it 😮 I tried pretty much every one I had, oddly enough the only one to work was my BeOS 1.1 installer disk. Great, but not what I needed right now (Knoppix). But floppy boot from the Gotek did work. Then the HDDs... this board is running a beta BIOS that delivers K6+ support (that works) and is supposed to let it support >137GB HDDs. Except it chokes on anything >1024 sectors, even the lowly Quantum Fireball I wanted to use. It detects it fine, just can't read from or write to anyhting above 1024. Ugh. Will fix that another day, for now downgraded to a slow noisy old 4.3GB Maxtor. Once my son gets frustrated with that we can practice HDD upgrades 😉

@dionb

I can't believe no one commented on your post from yesterday. I think it's soooo awesome you're building a S7 system with your son, and even more that he's so interested! Give him a 300a when he's ready to overclock!

slivercr wrote:

@dionb

I can't believe no one commented on your post from yesterday. I think it's soooo awesome you're building a S7 system with your son, and even more that he's so interested! Give him a 300a when he's ready to overclock!

That K6-3+ will also do 600MHz, so sort of have that covered already - in fact I chose this specific board because it does everything with jumpers, so I can hook those pins up to big switches and let him play with it 😉
(but getting a 300A is never a bad idea anyway, enough Slot1 boards lying around)

As for doing it with him - I just want to make sure my children understand a bit of what's going on under the hood of all those magic gadgets they use, and for educational purposes you want a modular system. Physically sticking cards into a box teaches you a lot more than using some all-in-one SoC that probably could run the kitchen sink too. So7 is a compromise between truly modular (486 or older) and usable performance in graphical applications. Like Worms, which he loves 😀

I saw these Y2K-fix cards on auction site recently and was intrigued. The ROM could be desoldered and replaced with a socket for any arbitrary thing. XTIDE, Etherboot, ROM BASIC, who knows. It seems that the Y2K patch itself is only 8KB or less, but the card is wired for a 27256.

After doing the recap of 3 motherboards and 2 graphic cards last weekend I tried my first retrobright action this weekend.
Good success on both. All boards are working fine and all but one of the 4 mice I retrobrighted came out really nice.
Only one mouse is still checkerd and will need a second application.
Pictures to be added soon.

I have assembled another PIII system:

It's a small case so all parts just fit inside (I've even used special round PATA and floppy cables).

Case + PSU: AOpen H300A + AOpen FSP145-60SA
Motherboard: QDI Advance 6T (recapped)
CPU: Intel Pentium III Coppermine SL4MB 800 MHz
CPU cooler: Pent Alpha heatsink + Noiseblocker BlackSilent XR-1 fan
RAM: 256 MB (2x 128 MB) PC133 SDRAM
Graphics card: Diablotek ATI Rage 128 Pro PCI
Sound: onboard
HDD: Transcend 32 GB SSD (unfortunately this one came without 3.5'' to 2.5'' module) + Digitus PATA-SATA adapter
FDD: 3.5’’ Panasonic JU-257A607PC
Optical: AOpen CRW4852

I've also equipped my GF4 Ti 4600 and Ti 4200 with new coolers:

That is a smart looking case!

Got in an annoying bidding war with someone who is probably another vogoner.. 🤣

Hi Skyscraper. Just been looking at that TMC PAT48SA board you got up and working. Have you got any documentation foe it? I've got one but not got it up and worki g yet.

ha0124 wrote:

Hi Skyscraper. Just been looking at that TMC PAT48SA board you got up and working. Have you got any documentation foe it? I've got one but not got it up and working yet.

Sorry I don't have any documentation for that board. I got it in a huge lot of systems and I only did some quick tests after removing the battery to see if the board worked.

It's probably not a hard motherboard to get working though. Have you tried installing a DX33 or DX/2-66*, 4x1MB SIMMs and a video card to see if it POSTs?

*Or other suitable 5V 486 CPU depending on the oscillator installed. Most often the FSB is half of the oscillator value but on some boards it's the same as the oscillator value. I don't have the board at hand (It's in a case in one of many piles of cases and I don't remember which one) so I can't check how it works on this board right now but if you post a high res picture of your board I'm sure we will figure it out.

During the weekend I disassembled three Siemens-Nixdorf laptops:

More details (and funky drawing) in this thread: Nixdorf-Siemens shuffle

Skyscraper wrote:

Sorry I don't have any documentation for that board. I got it in a huge lot of systems and I only did some quick tests after rem […]
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ha0124 wrote:

Hi Skyscraper. Just been looking at that TMC PAT48SA board you got up and working. Have you got any documentation foe it? I've got one but not got it up and working yet.

Sorry I don't have any documentation for that board. I got it in a huge lot of systems and I only did some quick tests after removing the battery to see if the board worked.

It's probably not a hard motherboard to get working though. Have you tried installing a DX33 or DX/2-66*, 4x1MB SIMMs and a video card to see if it POSTs?

*Or other suitable 5V 486 CPU depending on the oscillator installed. Most often the FSB is half of the oscillator value but on some boards it's the same as the oscillator value. I don't have the board at hand (It's in a case in one of many piles of cases and I don't remember which one) so I can't check how it works on this board right now but if you post a high res picture of your board I'm sure we will figure it out.

Cheers. I think it's more of a hardware issue and board has suffered more battery damage than your's has. Can you PM me? It's not letting me start a conversation as I'm new here.

ha0124 wrote:

Cheers. I think it's more of a hardware issue and board has suffered more battery damage than your's has. Can you PM me? It's not letting me start a conversation as I'm new here.

I suggest that you start a new thread (if you can otherwise I can help with that) so others also can contribute knowledge. Such thread should include a sharp high resolution picture of the motherboard in question and close up pictures showing the damage caused by the leaking battery. When it comes to motherboard repairs other members such as for example member feipoa have alot more experience than me.

The rules limiting what new members can do probably have to do with all the spam bots.

SpectriaForce wrote:

I have assembled another PIII system: […]
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I have assembled another PIII system:

I recognise that case. I used to have 3 identical computers that used it. Ex-office equipment. They were Compusys branded and used the Aopen MX3S motherboard. Exact same funny-shaped PSU (FSP145-60SA).

The problem I had with them was cooling. Putting in a bigger HDD, more memory, faster CPU and decent AGP video card caused overheating and system instability which I was never able to resolve. I ended up dismantling them and throwing out the cases.

The integrated audio on the MX3S motherboard was also terrible.

Edit: The original designation of this system appears to have been Aopen BS2050 (or BS3000?) (Scroll down this page)

Messed around with alternative BIOS images for my 286. Found 1 that came from a board with a similar chipset but whilst it would POST and let me enter the BIOS etc, it would freeze when trying to boot DOS from either HDD or Floppy. Shame really, as that BIOS was vastly superior to the limited AMI BIOS that's already on this.

Also ran a few comparison benchmarks on SysInfo 4.5 & Checkit, on my 8088, 286 & 386SX systems. As I already anticipated, my poor 386SX is severely hampered by it's crap onboard graphics with the 286 wiping the floor with it on that score. 🤣

It's nice to see the Aopen H340 case again, I think I had one a few years back but it was a more modern system than a P-III 😀
I thought the PSU was a bit noisy

Tonight I was checking over a Pine PT-311 motherboard with an Am386DX40 CPU on it - so far I've swapped out one cap that had some dirt on it (it tested fine once removed, though with high ESR), repaired one trace that appears to have been damaged from storage and changed the NiCad 3.6 barrel battery to a lithium coin cell holder - does anyone know whether that's safe to do?

I'm happy that the battery hadn't leaked yet, but I'd rather not keep it on there.

--------

Also tonight I spotted some slightly newer versions of the RM desktops that I used in school, seriously nostalgic, I'm tempted to buy one of them but they look kind of rusty from storage and I really do not need more projects right now.

http://aopen.jp/products/housing/h300.html
http://aopen.jp/products/housing/h340.html

The H340A is externally similar to the H300A but has more ventilation holes. It also comes with a beefier (200W) P4-capable PSU.

The FSP145-60SA PSU was produced in two variants. The version in the H300A is microATX and has a projection next to the cable exit. The other version is FlexATX and lacks this projection.

http://aopen.jp/products/power/fsp145-60sa.html