I managed to revive a Commodore PC20-III motherboard from dead. Took lots of probing and prodding, but I managed to catch everything buggy. I had to change all of the RAM chips because all of them was damaged in quite weird fashion. When I fed them series of 0s, it gave back 0s. When I gave it series of 1s, it returned 1s. But when I tried 1010101010s, it always returned 1s. And by the way - all of them was soldered onboard. That was HUUUUGE pain in the butt...
Also I had to change one 74S08 logic chip which generates /RAS signals for the second half of bank of 256×4 DRAM chips which of course prevented the whole bank from being properly recognised. And finally the board POSTs with all 640K of RAM. I think I was never so happy 😁

Benchmarking the AlphaPC 164 system

OS: Windows 2000 Pro RC2. I was unable to install WinNT4.0 as it gives me a weird INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error during install in the same hardware configuration that W2k had no problem with.

Video card: Matrox G200 PCI. I have a PowerStorm 300 video card as well, but the NT drivers for this card when installed in W2k don't function correctly (no video after reboot) and there are no native W2k drivers since that OS was never officially released. Using the G200 as it's one of the few video cards that has drivers included in the RC2. I have a Permedia2 card as well,which would be another option to use if it weren't for the little detail that the card is dead. So I have to use the G200 as my only option. Other PCI cards that I tried do work but don't have drivers (Voodoo3, Voodoo Rush) so I would have no chance to have any acceleration at all. Others work partially (Matrox G450 gives corrupted colors and doesn't have drivers) or don't work at all (all Nvidia cards I tried).

But as it turns out, even though G200 has drivers, Quake2 can't use it accelerated; every time I try to set it to "native OpenGL" it automatically reverts to software mode.

So the best I could do is benchmark it in software mode.

The x86 binary of Quake2 (v.3.05) in software mode through the FX!32 binary translation software at 320x240 fullscreen is very, very slow. The timedemo of demo1.dm2 gave me 468.2seconds or 1.5FPS.

The Alpha native binary of Quake2 (v.3.17) in software mode at 320x240 fullscreen gives 31.3seconds or 22FPS, much better.

Same native binary at 640x480 software mode fullscreen gives 48.2s or 14.3FPS.

Still looking for a card that has native OpenGL support on Alpha Win2k RC2.

Skyscraper wrote:

Another post from me with borderline retro stuff. […]
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Another post from me with borderline retro stuff.

Earlier I posted a picture in the "bought stuff" thread showing a Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 that had gotten beat up in shipping because of shoddy packaging (to put it mildly).

A capacitor had gotten torn off and the heat pipe cooling was bent and skewed in all kind of ways and directions.

As I got a partial refund it's now time to test the motherboard to see if it's still working or if fighting for a return of the board and a full refund would have been a better option.

With the heat pipe cooling removed and with some of the dirt brushed off the board dosn't look that bad. The capacitor that got torn off dosn't look crucial.

Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 v1.0.jpg

I forgot to take a picture of the heat pipe cooling before I got it unbent and aligned but this is how it turned out. I also did a quick "Jörgen tuning" and removed some clutter.

Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 heat pipe cooling.jpg

Gigabyte thought it a good idea to glue this contraption to the back of the motherboard... It's in the way of the back plate for my CPU cooler... More "Jörgen tuning".

Gigabyte 965P-DQ6 Crazycool backplate.jpg

Without Gigabytes "Crazycool backplate" the pushpins holding down the north bridge heat sink part of the heat pipe cooling are too long... No worries I have ball bearings...

Two ball bearings.jpg

To be continued.

Great-looking motherboard, and I love to see all those SATA ports, really many! Nice to see it's working fine, after all, congratulations.

Yesterday's case repair turned out very nicely 😀 All the screw posts are solid and the crack marks are hard to see so no point painting it.

Pulled apart my C64c to install this hotness:

^^ that's right, 6581 (R4AR no less) & 8580, in the same machine.

Unfortunately I noticed it was a little grungy on the inside. Of course this "quick install" turned into a full-on 8-Bit-Guy style teardown and clean.

Blarglgrarg.

The metal shield also needs some dremelling, which will happen tomorrow since it's 2AM and my neighbors get mad if I use power tools during their magic sleepytime. Philistines.

Spent some time dusting off and bringing old(ish) Toshiba 3480CT back to life. Installed Windows XP from external DVD drive and as Dr Frankenstein once said, it's alive!

Also, already installed Pico-8 and it runs, albeit slowly. That is going to be a fun challenge to program that thing on less-than-minimum hardware!

Next steps are to install SP3, try to find working Focus Writer version (despite what many sites are saying, new versions are not compatible with Win XP), install Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex, try to get my iFeel MouseMan drivers and games working together and have a retro early WinXP station with force feedback.

If all goes nicely and I actually start using it more than occasionally, I might invest in SSD drive and a new battery. We'll see about that, though.

xjas wrote:

^^ that's right, 6581 (R4AR no less) & 8580, in the same machine.

Oooh la la that's a thing of beauty! The C64 just keeps on giving, so many great hobbyists out there working away. I've just ordered myself a RetroTink 2X and an S-video cable to try with mine - it looks pretty darn good currently via Composite and my trusty little Trinitron but that will die one day, so I'm hoping the RetroTink is the answer.

Lol^

I added a new fan to my Voodoo 3. Fortunately had two screws which just fit the heatsink spaces... at the right angle.

moawkwrd wrote:

Lol^ […]
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Lol^

I added a new fan to my Voodoo 3. Fortunately had two screws which just fit the heatsink spaces... at the right angle.

Did the same thing, too.

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/oid9Jrx.jpg […]
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To some eBay sellers, it is 😉
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Dell-Optiple … -4/152884766692

I wasn't really trying to document this as I went along, so pics are a bit sporadic, but here's the rest of this little project.

^^ My low-budget dremel made quick work of this metal shield, but the metal shield also made quick work of several cutting blades. 😜

The main reason for doing the mod: 😁

And all back together! The two RCA jacks output each SID individually; the switches control the operating modes of the SIDFX. I think the result looks pretty neat:

^^ The cleaning effort was well worth it too.

Haven't tried it yet as my PSU for this thing is REALLY sketchy. I'll be picking up a brand new one from a friend soon.

Gorgeous Commodore 64C, dude.

Speaking of retro activity, I cleaned the old thermal compound on the Intel Dual-Core CPU for the Dell "Red Plague" Inspiron 1525, as well as the heatsink for the CPU and GPU since it's been a while when it was cleaned last. Plugged in the charger, and it still works. I somehow misplaced one of the 1GB memory modules that was in there since I was testing out to see if I can put 3GB of RAM in my Presario C700 notebook, and it only has 1GB of RAM installed. Can't seem to upgrade the Lubuntu OS from 17.04 to 18.04 and the last time the laptop was used was somewhere last year.

Right now, I'm backing up my mom's files onto a flash drive, will copy the files to my ASUS laptop, install Windows 7 Pro on my mom's laptop, and that'll be the end of that. However, I'd like to put an SSD in it, but, the hard drive caddy design doesn't allow SSDs for some odd reason (tried that 3 years ago as well). Fortunately, it has a Dual Band wireless card inside that I put in 2 years ago when I was replacing the battery, keyboard (both were shot), and CPU from the dreaded Celeron Core-less processor (ran slow and XP was faster).

Decided to troubleshoot the 286 board I got yesterday. Though I could't really identify it (looks very similar to a 5170 board but not exactly) its beep coodes seemed Phoenix ones and it complained about various first 64k errors. Yes, I tried to rearrange the memory chips (36x41256) yesterday and I could change the code but didn't have the nerve to finish what I had started.

This morning I removed all the chips and started to populate what I thought to be Bank 0 with chips from my stock (untested, but hey, I couldn't do any better) and finish the last four pieces with ones from the original heap. 4 of them was apparently already replaced and I ended up finding 8 more faulty ones. I don't know what's with these old 120ns Samsungs...

Now it finally works! I got it to boot from floppy, now I'll have to find some setup program and make it use a PATA drive to finally start some real programs on it. It doesn't seem to get the idea of booting from SCSI like my (more modern tiny) XTs do. Not even with controllers with their own BIOS. So let's see the IDE route.

I got a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card working in my Libretto 100CT, which was sort of a roundabout affair since you do need to find a chipset-specific driver and have Win98SE reboot something like 10 times until everything is set up. Then I tried a PCMCIA SD-card adapter on my Tecra 510CDT, which got recognized as some sort of removeable HDD and worked off the bat. 🤣. Should have gotten one a long time ago 😮

henryVK wrote:

I got a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card working in my Libretto 100CT, which was sort of a roundabout affair since you do need to find a chipset-specific driver and have Win98SE reboot something like 10 times until everything is set up. Then I tried a PCMCIA SD-card adapter on my Tecra 510CDT, which got recognized as some sort of removeable HDD and worked off the bat. 🤣. Should have gotten one a long time ago 😮

That's interesting - which PCMCIA SD-card adapter did you use?
(I believe that linking to where you bought it might be frowned upon here, but if you could provide uniquely identifying name, that should be okay)

OldCat wrote:

That's interesting - which PCMCIA SD-card adapter did you use?
(I believe that linking to where you bought it might be frowned upon here, but if you could provide uniquely identifying name, that should be okay)

Good question! However, I can't find anything on the manufacturer, e-Data, on Google.
The card is simply described as a PCMCIA CF Type 1 to PC Card adapter:

But, yeah, it works quite well, is hot-swappable thanks to the PC Card standard and for file transfer it beats unscrewing the HDD caddy with it's proprietary Toshiba IDE connector!

Ultrax wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/oid9Jrx.jpg […]
Show full quote

To some eBay sellers, it is 😉
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Dell-Optiple … -4/152884766692

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIZbGSXeWWE

henryVK wrote:

Good question! However, I can't find anything on the manufacturer, e-Data, on Google. The card is simply described as a PCMCIA C […]
Show full quote

OldCat wrote:

That's interesting - which PCMCIA SD-card adapter did you use?
(I believe that linking to where you bought it might be frowned upon here, but if you could provide uniquely identifying name, that should be okay)

Good question! However, I can't find anything on the manufacturer, e-Data, on Google.
The card is simply described as a PCMCIA CF Type 1 to PC Card adapter:

pcmciaadapter.jpg

But, yeah, it works quite well, is hot-swappable thanks to the PC Card standard and for file transfer it beats unscrewing the HDD caddy with it's proprietary Toshiba IDE connector!

Yeah not SD but CF adapter. SD wasn't a thing until PCMCIA was well on the way out. CF adapters were plentiful and cheap because they don't have any electronics inside, they're basically just a physical connector converter and just leave all the work for the PCMCIA chipset in the machine.