Yesterday I decided to power up the second 386 i bought this weekend and I was greeted with an exploding tantalum cap. Now I need to find someone who can fix this for me 😠
First time this happened to me so I thought like WTF was that!!!!

xjas wrote:

1996-97 is when the full-on progress rush started and it was already losing steam by 2004. It was a really intense few years. I think that's why so many of us fixate on those years as a high point in computing.

1985 was the high point of computing, for me, with the release of the Amiga 1000. At no other point in my geek life have I had butterflies in my stomach over first hearing and seeing a machine like the A1000. I think I watched the Boing! demo for like an hour. It was such a massive step forward. Now those silly Atari ST folks thought they had a comparable machine, but we all know the truth to that. 🤣 (kidding... no 1980s BBS flame war please haha)

Jay Miner was a superhero to me in my teenage years.

I finished the restauration of my compaq slt/286 today.
Has a modded Dallas RTC, SD Card to IDE interface in the battery bay etc. Also some really badly needed cleaning.

mcobit wrote:

I finished the restauration of my compaq slt/286 today.
Has a modded Dallas RTC, SD Card to IDE interface in the battery bay etc. Also some really badly needed cleaning.

Nice! I have a similar system with a mono LCD. Is yours EGA mono?

It has a monochrome screen but was afaik the first laptop with a vga adapter. On the backside vga port it produces 256 color vga.

mcobit wrote:

It has a monochrome screen but was afaik the first laptop with a vga adapter. On the backside vga port it produces 256 color vga.

I was just curious how your mono LCD screen displays graphic modes. Mine is EGA and the system represents colors with patterns.

appiah4 wrote:

It regulates everything starting with the CPU down. PAL and NTSC units have different CPU speeds, just like the C64.

CPU speed is affected on base 68000 systems (A1000, A500, A2000, A600), but I don't see my A4000's A3640 CPU board budging one iota from 25 MHz on switching modes - in part because it's supposed to use an external clock anyway. There are jumpers for this right on the A4000 motherboard (J100 and J104).

Just about anything with a 68030 or 68040 has its own clock separate from the rest of the system, really, so those jumpers need to be set accordingly. I'm not even sure Revision B A4000s ever shipped with a CPU card that would necessitate using the internal CPU clock, as the soldered 68EC030 was mostly a thing on the Revision D A4000cr board.

That's also why I'm thinking the custom chipset would be the thing to look into here, and in the case of an AGA system like the A4000, there aren't region-specific Alice chips like there used to be for the OCS/ECS Agnus. It'd have to function with both oscillator crystals in mind, and somehow be switchable entirely at the software level. That's why I wanted to know how the crystal timing regulates the chipset at a low level.

EDIT: I did some more digging around and found out that this really isn't just an Amiga thing, but happens to pretty much everything that gets underclocked in PAL territories, like most 3rd-and-4th-gen consoles. It's just that most region switching mechanisms usually get the refresh timing so close that CRTs don't care too much about the difference, but rescaling devices tend to freak out.
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=78339
https://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5744.0

Merovign wrote:

The drive is interesting (for me, because I never used to work with SCSI). It's kind of a 3/4 height 3.5" HD. […]
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The drive is interesting (for me, because I never used to work with SCSI). It's kind of a 3/4 height 3.5" HD.

711HD1.jpg

711HD2.jpg

711hd3.jpg

One of those Seagate Barracuda 4 GB SCSI hard drives... I got one of those in my Amiga 2000, actually. It clearly wasn't stock.

It takes a few seconds to spin up, and it's LOUD. Sounds like a jet engine spooling up! Also clicks every time there's actual disk activity, as the heads are doing their thing. You'll know a computer's on if it has one of those things installed.

It's easy to take modern HDD silence for granted, isn't it?

Skyscraper wrote:

I refuse to call this a "modern activity"! […]
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I refuse to call this a "modern activity"!

I'm tinkering with an Asus Striker Extreme nForce 680i motherboard + Q6600 bundle I bought on Ebay.

A few pictues showing the sellers awesome packaging skills...

Asus Striker Extreme bundle from Ebay.jpg

Asus Striker Extreme bundle from Ebay 2.jpg

Asus Striker Extreme bundle from Ebay 3.jpg

Yea the board was just thrown into that box with a few pieces of paper on top... Awesome packaging.

Well of course the board diddn't work... The Northbridge and Southbridge were overheating because the heatpipe cooling had gotten dislodged, it wouldn't even POST. After repasting and reinstalling the motherboard cooling the motherboard came to life but it's just as retardedly lousy as my P5N32-E SLI, I should have known as they are 99% identical. Active cooling is needed on the chipset heatsinks even at stock or the board will pretty much overheat and lock up just idling in the BIOS at default settings with a quad core CPU...

Most memory modules wouldn't work at all regardless of memory voltage and the two Corsair XMS2 1GB 800MHz CL 5,5,5,15 sticks that did somewhat work wasn't stable at the default 800 MHz with the Q6600 at stock. I had to use unlinked mode with the memory at 700 MHz to be able to run Frybench... Any overclocking using more than 295 MHz FSB wouldn't even load Windows 10. All in all pretty much exactly what I have come to expect when it comes to Asus nForce 680i offerings in combination with quad core CPUs.

I have now dug up two Crucial Ballistix Tracer Micron D9 1GB sticks and even if they diddn't even POST at the defualt 1.85V = 1.92V upping the voltage to 2.05V = 2.11V actually made them both POST and be stable at 800 MHz 5.5,5,18, progress I guess.

The plan is to replace the Asus P5N32-E SLI in my year 2006 QX6700 + 8800 GTX SLI build as this board is more "correct" in an "over the top build". Not beeing able to overclock using FSB is a non issue but I need to find 4x1GB or 2x2GB memory the board accepts and that will probably take some trial and error as this board seems even more picky when it comes to memory compared to my P5N32-E SLI.

Intel nForce boards are absolute crap no matter what. Two dead 680i boards (both EVGA), a dead 780I (MSI P5N Diamond), and a dying 750i in my main (ASUS P5N-D, and it can only get my QX9650 up to 3.5GHz, the voltage control sucks, and it's starting to have intermittent posting issues) have taught me this lesson well.

Don't waste your money. I've heard their AMD counterparts are much better though. If you must get an ASUS with solid state caps as they seem to be somewhat slightly better than average.

liqmat wrote:

I was just curious how your mono LCD screen displays graphic modes. Mine is EGA and the system represents colors with patterns.

Ok, It is a 640x480 screen and also displays patterns for colors I think. Looks like it if you look at it closely.

brostenen wrote:

Here in Denmark, they add something to the rubbing alcohol, that makes one sick if one drinks the 97/98 percent proof rubbing alcohol. It leaves a kind of sticky resedue, and is perfect to clean keyboard springs in. I think it will prevent more rust from forming. So I have used it to clean the springs.

I trust you didn't buy something like "Mentholated rubbing compound", so what you're describing is something ethanol-based where they've "denatured" it. Here in Canada, it varies from brand to brand, so I just had to find a pharmacy chain that made theirs with 99% isopropyl alcohol.

However, if you're of legal drinking age, there's actually a pretty easy way to specifically ask for pure alcohol (within the limits of the chemistry between alcohol and atmospheric moisture): Drop by your local seller of alcoholic beverages and pick up a bottle of "rectified spirit".

Rectified spirit, also known as neutral spirits, rectified alcohol, or ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin[1] is highly concentrated ethanol which has been purified by means of repeated distillation, a process that is called rectification. In some countries (e.g. India), denatured alcohol or denatured rectified spirit may commonly be available as "rectified spirit", but it is poisonous and ingestion can be fatal.

In its undiluted form, it contains at least 95% alcohol by volume (ABV) (190 US proof) in the United States, or at least 96% ABV in the European Union,[1] respectively. The purity of rectified spirit has a practical limit of 97.2% ABV (95.6% by mass)[2] when produced using conventional distillation processes, because a mixture of ethanol and water becomes a minimum-boiling azeotrope at this concentration.

The stuff is normally intended for making mixed drinks, medicinal tinctures, and certain kinds of cooking.

The other option I've heard of is that some of the products in automotive supply shops are apparently pure isopropyl alcohol. (I think it was some kind of line cleaner.)

Damaniel wrote:

I don't have binaries but I can throw some together. Otherwise, if you have DOSBox and Turbo Pascal installed, then running make.bat from the MOVEIT directory should work.

Have you looked into how much work it would take to support Free Pascal? I always like to support open-source compilers and Free Pascal currently supports both DPMI and real-mode DOS targets. (The DPMI target can be DOS-hosted or cross-compiling while the real-mode target must be cross-compiling)

(They're also working on support for Win16 but their Win9x support bit-rotted and was dropped for want of a maintainer for non-Unicode Wn32 support, so you'd need to install a 2.4 or maybe 2.6 release if you want to target Win9x.)

Damaniel wrote:

I use version 7. I haven't tried using any older versions so I don't know if they'll work.

All the more reason to consider supporting Free Pascal. Last I checked, the newest version available in the Embarcadero museum was 5.5 and I don't like to implicitly encourage people to violate the letter of copyright law by posting projects that rely on "abandonware" compilers. (Plus, the oldest thing I personally have in my collection is the copy of Borland Delphi 1 included on my Delphi 2 CD for Win16 compatibility.)

Damaniel wrote:

RE: LOCGAED - Another bug - an overly aggressive .gitignore was actually keeping essential files out of the repo. Fixed now. This is why it's useful to have other people checking these things for me.

We all make mistakes like that from time to time. For more modern stuff, it's usually my CI testing that catches that.

I've been meaning to look into stacking Sikuli on top of DOSBox on top of Xvfb to unit-test the retro ideas I've been planning.

Accidentally ghosting over my Games partition instead of my boot partition on my 98 Machine...and crying.

Shagittarius wrote:

Accidentally ghosting over my Games partition instead of my boot partition on my 98 Machine...and crying.

Okay, I just got the nice WD Blue Caviar 500GB IDE hard drive that I was planning to use with my fat PS2.

I get it out of the packaging, hook it up to my PC with a StarTech IDE-to-USB adapter, wipe the drive, and all is good.

I give it a quick dusting, and then go to get my PS2. I pop the hard drive/network adapter off of it, go to connect it to the hard drive and... uh oh:

Looks like my drive doesn't fit. 🙁

Keeping the drive, though, since it's perfectly fine.

Any one have any suggestions on nice 500GB IDE hard drives that work with the fat PS2's hard drive adapter, though? Would really like to have a nice, large disk to use those disk-backup solutions for the PS2 with.

Edit: It looks like any drive with only four pairs of jumper pins will work, as that is the number that the official Sony PS2 hard drive has, no?

Edit: Also, in your guys' opinions, would I really need a 500GB hard drive? 😀

Murugan wrote:

Yesterday I decided to power up the second 386 i bought this weekend and I was greeted with an exploding tantalum cap. Now I need to find someone who can fix this for me 😠
First time this happened to me so I thought like WTF was that!!!!

Ha! I have two of those, an SX and a DX. I can do it, I just haven't (bothered to) looked up the values. Mind you that might not be the only thing wrong, though IIRC one of them actually got to the BIOS before it popped.

Spent a few hours over the course of last days searching around some dubious "abandonware" sites for a version of Targhan that would run on Hercules graphics card. I distinctly remembered I used to play it on my old Herc machine as a kid and even though I have legally acquired Silmarils Collection from DotEmu, that version did not work on my Hercules Tandon AT. Managed to find one, French version, but not a problem, as I actually speak French.

Played it a bit, tears of nostalgia rolling down my cheeks, happy panda. And then it turns out there is copy protection that kicks in once you pass a certain part (tree dwarves village, for those who remember). So I spent another couple hours looking for Targhan manual, in French (managed to find English pretty fast, took me longer to track the original one). I do not feel guilty at all - I have paid for the game, all I am trying to do is run it on the vintage hardware. Finally, I have gone through dwarf village again (poor dwarves 😢 ) and replied to copy protection and passed that bit. Proof below:

OldCat wrote:

[...]

When I was a student at the Technical University of Łódź (pronounced "Woodge") in 2001 we've been calculating air viscosity and other variables for fluid mechanics on Amstrad-Schneider CPC 6128 in a lab. So, yes, you could make really old hardware useful. But I wouldn't really say it is/was a common thing.

If you have to, you can do work on incredibly ancient stuff indeed. Slightly off-topic, but things have changed a lot in Łódź in that case - I was there (the city, not the uni admittedly) two years ago and things were decidedly modern and/or hip. Great bars with an incredible assortment of local craft beers too 😉

Back on-topic, I seem to have been suffering from a hardware ghost...

A few months back I bought some big lots of 'junk' cards. That way I obtained three SCSI controllers. I was also getting irritated by IDE HDD BIOS size limits in my older systems, so decided to go SCSI. So ordered some cables and terminators and set about finding a drive. The first drive I found was an old 9.1GB Seagate Cheetah. No matter which combination of controllers, cables or converters (50p to 68p as only one of the controllers had a 68p connector) I tried, nothing worked - although the controllers' BIOS did initialize correctly. So drive probably dead. But I'd only know that for sure once I had something working. So obtained two more 36GB Cheetah 10ks. Same story: despite trying every combination of three controllers, three drives and four cables (two with built-in terminators, two needing external ones), nothing worked. So I either had three dead drives, three dead controllers or four dead cables. None of which sounded particularly likely, but given the controllers did initialize, I suspected the drives most.

This week I got a known-good SCSI CD-Rom drive. Absolutely nothing special, just a device I could trust. And sure enough, it was detected and worked right away.
Then I added one of the hard drives. It was also detected and worked right away.
I tried the other two. Same story: it all worked.
Then I removed the CDRom and it *still* all worked, connected via exactly the same cable to exactly the same controller (incidentally in exactly the same motherboard with exactly the same PSU).
And prceded to do so on all three controllers and all cables & stuff.

So I have three perfectly good HDDs, three good controllers, four good cables. And absolutely no clue why it wasn't working before 😮

I am tinkering with my old socket 478 motherboard MS9047C+ on which I installed the slowest CPU (1,4Gz) and slowest SDRAM It would accept (32Mb - a very picky board I must say, because It refused to work with it least 15 SDRAMS). On it I installed MS Dos 6.22 and now I'm trying some CPU speed independent DOS games 😀

Merovign wrote:

Murugan wrote:

Yesterday I decided to power up the second 386 i bought this weekend and I was greeted with an exploding tantalum cap. Now I need to find someone who can fix this for me 😠
First time this happened to me so I thought like WTF was that!!!!

Ha! I have two of those, an SX and a DX. I can do it, I just haven't (bothered to) looked up the values. Mind you that might not be the only thing wrong, though IIRC one of them actually got to the BIOS before it popped.

I'll send you a message soon 😀
This one exploded as soon as I turned on the PSU. Only did a visual check of the board and PSU since I don't have the experience nor the equipment to do it.

Turbo -> wrote:

I am tinkering with my old socket 478 motherboard MS9047C+ on which I installed the slowest CPU (1,4Gz) and slowest SDRAM It would accept (32Mb - a very picky board I must say, because It refused to work with it last 15 SDRAMS). On it I installed MS Dos 6.22 and now I'm trying some CPU speed independent DOS games 😀

recap that board, all those problems will go away.

mcobit wrote:

I finished the restauration of my compaq slt/286 today.
Has a modded Dallas RTC, SD Card to IDE interface in the battery bay etc. Also some really badly needed cleaning.

That looks great. I still have my SLT 286 to clean and restore. I don't have a PSU to test it, so I don't know if it works 😖
I also have a LTE 386 and an LTE Lite 386 in the same situation as my 286 SLT. Compaq used to make different connectors for all their PSUs.
Always heard that the capacitors on old SLTs and LTEs are leaking and should be replaced, did you have to do that on yours?

the_ultra_code wrote:

Okay, I just got the nice WD Blue Caviar 500GB IDE hard drive that I was planning to use with my fat PS2. […]
Show full quote

Okay, I just got the nice WD Blue Caviar 500GB IDE hard drive that I was planning to use with my fat PS2.

I get it out of the packaging, hook it up to my PC with a StarTech IDE-to-USB adapter, wipe the drive, and all is good.

I give it a quick dusting, and then go to get my PS2. I pop the hard drive/network adapter off of it, go to connect it to the hard drive and... uh oh:

Looks like my drive doesn't fit. 🙁

Keeping the drive, though, since it's perfectly fine.

Any one have any suggestions on nice 500GB IDE hard drives that work with the fat PS2's hard drive adapter, though? Would really like to have a nice, large disk to use those disk-backup solutions for the PS2 with.

Edit: It looks like any drive with only four pairs of jumper pins will work, as that is the number that the official Sony PS2 hard drive has, no?

Edit: Also, in your guys' opinions, would I really need a 500GB hard drive? 😀

I had the same problem, so I disassembled my PS2 network adapter and now I can pull the connectors to make them fit in any hard drive. Just be careful when connecting/disconnecting the network adapter with the hard drive to the console, I don't want to be held responsible for any damage.