My elder son is away with his grandparents so I actually had some time to do something again this evening.

- built the IBM PS/1 LPX motherboard (So1 LIF with IBM Blue Lightning DX2 - sadly not the DLC version, but nice nonetheless) I received in the post today into a generic LPX case.
- installed DOS 6.22 on a 512MB CF card
- discovered that LPX != LPX when it comes to risers and expansion cards. With the riser belonging to the board, cards are about 5mm too far 'in' the case to fit. Had to remove the back plate to get it in the slot. Time to find a riser that does fit the case and hope it fits the motherboard...
- messed around with my Aztech Waverider32+ again - still failed to get the "wave" bit working.
- fortunately I recently got my hands on an MT-32, so hooked that up for MIDI instead. It does work 😀

setup windows 2000 on the compaq

Soldered a XT CF Lite 4.1. Only the SMD CF bracket still needing soldering.

Started cleaning up my recent Dell Dimension XPS D333 acquisition. It is in truly miserable shape, with dust bunnies, dead insects and what seems to be a dead baby scorpion inside.

I started out by cleaning the expansion cards.

Do you have an air compressor?

Recieved these today for my Skt 370 build...

oeuvre wrote:

Do you have an air compressor?

Unfortunately, no. I have to resort to gloves, mask, water hose, soap, rags, wet wipes and magic erasers. Let's hope I don't catch the plague.. 😵

Ah, lame. At least they're easy machines to work on. Take apart everything and clean as much as you can.

Here's another ST32550W recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni7_tGadEpo

Today I ran Speedsys in one of my rigs in order to find out what FSB is on my Intel Pentium 100 MHZ. After confirming that the FSB is 66 MHZ I ordered a Overdrive MMX 166 MHZ to beef up my machine.

Gave a thought to laying out the tnt 1 and riva 128 that have been in their shipping boxes since last summer to record comparison footage. There are piles of video cards I want to video compare but it always turns banal after a few. The problem of how to benchmark unpredictably.

Whilst waiting for 150 of so updates to be installed on the Not so Retro / Main Rig decided to throw few more bits into the Millennium build...

2x NOS integral PC100 courtesy of Maplin shutting down for the grand sum of £4.00

Building the Millennium project into this old Fujitsu case I was throwing out at work

I think I must have offended one of the gods of SCSI...

I had an old Seagate Cheetah 9.1GB that wasn't being detected by my AHA-2940U2W. Probably a drive issue was my assumption, but neither controller nor cable were known-good, so postponed verdict until I could be sure.

Today was the day to find out.

3 drives:
Seagate ST39103LC Cheetah (80p SCA, U2W LVD) + generic SCA->68p or 50p + power converter
Seagate ST336607LW Cheetah(68p, U320 LVD)
Seagate ST336807LW Cheetak 10K.7 (68p, U320 LVD)

3 controllers:
Adaptec AHA-2940U2W/GE (50 and 68p, SE and U2W LVD) with two electrically separate connectors (one LVD, the other SE)
Adaptec AVA-1505 (50p SE, no BIOS)
Dawicontrol DC-97 (50p SE)

3 cables:
U320-LVD rated 68p cable with terminator (new)
U160-LVD and SE rated 68p cable with terminator (new)
50p cable with separate old terminator block.

Result: not one drive detected...

Given that the two controllers with BIOS boot fine and let me play around with settings and behaving as expected when doing so, I strongly suspect all three drives are dead. But until I get one drive working I still won't know for sure 😒

Adds an additional 420 MHz to my Athlon.

^ I see what you did there.

Recently, I upgraded my GX150's hard drive from a 40GB (4500RPM) Quantum Fireball to an 80GB (7200RPM) Seagate Barracuda drive. Yes, I know it's no SSD, but it's still a nice step up from the old one since it's quieter, bigger, and somewhat faster. The bulky midnight-grey Dell tower case insulated the wonderful noises of the Quantum Fireball so there was really no point in using it over a quieter drive.

I did have to partition it with the Windows ME version of FDISK since the 98SE version doesn't play nice with drives above 64GB in capacity, at least it's working well with my usual Windows 98SE and 2000 Professional dual-boot setup. Since the Windows 2000 partition had to be formatted as NTFS due to the well-known 32GB FAT32 partition size limit, Windows 98SE no longer sees the Windows 2000 partition, but that's OK because it doesn't need to, at least games that are stubborn enough to only accept D: as a CD drive can work now without no-CD cracks (for future-proofing).

It was keyboard cleaning and retrobrighting day today..

* Swapped the Prophet 4500 in my Aopen Tualatin build for a GF3 TI200. Next is a soundcard swap when I get a better one.
* Worked on my Frankenstein 5x86-P75 build (getting close to finishing it)
* Made a basic P3 system with a board-cpu-ram combo that was given to me. It's a MS-6147 with slot 1 P3 and 196MB RAM, no extra GPU or soundcard and 2 optical drives, W98SE. Vanilla as can be.

Got given an early socket A system.

Jetway 663AS Pro motherboard (supports Thunderbird Athlon with 100 and 133 MHz FSB, and early Duron)
512 MB PC100 SDRAM
20 GB hdd
CD-RW/DVD ROM
Card reader
FDD
3D Rage Pro AGP
D-Link DFE-530TX nic

I installed XP this afternoon. Will install SP3 and any other updates I can find tomorrow (morning if I get up early enough), and get it on the network. XP detected the nic, so that's going to be easy enough. Not sure yet exactly what CPU is in it.

Then got to copy DOS CD drivers to write to floppy for my Asus PVI-486SP3 based system, so I can install Win 95 (will initially install the retail upgrade, then later in the week will be setting up a dual boot system with WFW 3.11 and 95 OSR2.1 (I don't have a copy of OSR2.5 yet). Once I have 95 upgrade installed, I have a couple of tests to do on a Cyrix 5x86-133 for another collector. Then that is going back to Italy, and I will use an AMD 5x86-P75 to finish setting it up how I want it (it will mainly be used for testing my 486 collection).

Jetway 663AS? Nice KT133(A) board (depending on revision) but terrible caps. How are they looking on yours?

I haven't removed it from the case to look yet, I need to get the PVI-486SP3 system up and running first. Later in the week I will inspect it.

Today I installed Hercules Stingray 128 / 3D from the 3Dfx Voodoo Rush family and flashed a newer bios into it. Tried an absurd number of reference drivers and played the first level of Tomb Raider countless time trying to iron out the kinks. Getting that son-of-a-gun working properly was a CHORE. Finally the manufacturer's drivers which I happened to stumble upon were the best fit.