Well flashed my ESP8266 with a code that emulate a virtual modem, now i will get some logic level converter modules and a max232 module and build my on virtual modem for my 486.
Testing only the esp8266 it was great, workedwith every bbs that i tested, well i guess this is why the wifi232 creator isn't selling more his stuff, this is open source.
if anyone have interest its here the github from the author https://github.com/jsalin/esp8266_modem
now it should be possible to do with less than US$10.

Tried connecting the MO drive I got on the cheap to my Akai sampler, discovered the Akai simply couldn't see the drive or an inserted disk. The MO drive itself unfortunately also failed to see the inserted disk and I had to resort to the emergency eject hole to get the disk out 😵 Opened up the drive and it's just a internal MO drive in an enclosure, so I can still use the enclosure even if the drive itself is possibly dead.

Decided to continue work on my Epson AT-550 NLX system. Cleaned the CD lens with a cotton swab, and the slimline drive now reads disks, even though it's very finicky and sometimes refuses to read a disk. With the CD drive functional, I installed the drivers for my USB ZIP drive and backed up the most important files to ZIP-disk. Then I decided to install my Adaptec 1520B SCSI controller in the NLX system, to be able to check whether it was the MO drive that was really dead, or the Akai sampler being a bitch (they have a reputation... 🤣 ). This turned out to be waaaaay more complicated than expected, because I couldn't get the Adaptec sparrow.sys driver to install...instead it kept whining about installing a Iomega driver for a Jaz-adapter card. Finally figured out that that driver was a much newer version of the sparrow.sys driver, and installed it.

But after finally installing EZ-SCSI I got a very interesting surprise - I'll update the system thread with it - but to give a hint: the motherboard has a hidden integrated SCSI controller! 😲

Finally set up a spot in my office for retro gaming! Just need to add my stack of modules and a mixer and I should be good to go to swap out retro machines as I want to! Merry X-mas all!

Artex wrote:

Finally set up a spot in my office for retro gaming! Just need to add my stack of modules and a mixer and I should be good to go to swap out retro machines as I want to! Merry X-mas all!

Glorious! Say where did you get that desk? I like the simplicity

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Glorious! Say where did you get that desk? I like the simplicity

Thanks! Exactly what I was going for!

This is pieced together from IKEA. Linnmon + Adils using the desk configurator here: http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/categories/ … _your_own_desk/

Added LED Backlighting too!

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

cj_reha wrote:

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

Good god man.

Where do you get all this stuff? IIRC your around my age (18) so you can't have been at this too long

cj_reha wrote:

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

Good to see other no kill shelters.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

Good god man.

Where do you get all this stuff? IIRC your around my age (18) so you can't have been at this too long

I'm 15, been "collecting" since about age 10 when my dad dumped his old work PC in my room and let me play with it. Most of the older 386/486/Pentium stuff was cheap eBay finds, but recently I've had good luck at befriending local computer stores and thrift shops that now save old towers and parts for me. It helps a lot, I even saved a Gateway 2000 socket 4 machine from being scrapped at said computer store. 😁

liqmat wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

Good to see other no kill shelters.

🤣 🤣 yeah, most of the towers work but there are a few I need to get around to fixing/completing (not pictured is a dual Pentium 100 build which annoyingly has no onboard I/O 😠 ). Also when I have to grab a case blocked by the ones facing the exterior of the closet I have to take almost all of the towers out which will probably get annoying after a while 🤣

cj_reha wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

Good god man.

Where do you get all this stuff? IIRC your around my age (18) so you can't have been at this too long

I'm 15, been "collecting" since about age 10 when my dad dumped his old work PC in my room and let me play with it. Most of the older 386/486/Pentium stuff was cheap eBay finds, but recently I've had good luck at befriending local computer stores and thrift shops that now save old towers and parts for me. It helps a lot, I even saved a Gateway 2000 socket 4 machine from being scrapped at said computer store. 😁

The local thrift stores around here are run by charities. If they have something they usually let me know but nothing is saved for me.

The local scappers have contracts with our corrupt ass county (they ship them god knows where and there resold) and basically say "We would sell to you if we could but the county says no so GTFO"

I hate this state and its ass backwards recycling laws. As soon as I have a car I'm grabbing a skii mask and making night raids on drop off points. Nobodies is going to waste time in an underfunded state going after someone who stole near worthless scrap.

How many computers did you have at the two year point? Just so I know how I'm doing. Right now I have 13ish working machines and maybe 20 total.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

How many computers did you have at the two year point? Just so I know how I'm doing. Right now I have 13ish working machines and maybe 20 total.

2 year point I had maybe like 3. I just counted and I'm at 26, and 90 percent were accumulated within the last 2 years when I started actively asking around.

@artex

Spends hundreds on computers parts. Uses $5 folding chair.

luckybob wrote:

@artex […]
Show full quote

@artex

Spends hundreds on computers parts. Uses $5 folding chair.

As a 330LB man who has destroyed 3 recliners at home in the last 2 years, and broke 11 chairs in high school. I'm amazed this flimsy wooden chair has held up for almost a year now. It was my grandfathers kitchen chair before he passed.

cj_reha wrote:

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

What's that turntable in a mil spec case? 😳

Artex wrote:

Finally set up a spot in my office for retro gaming!

Looking good Artex! Those Roland monitors are fantastic.

My Christmas project has been building a DFI-CA61 based socket 370 machine with a pin modded 1.4 GHz Tualatin and a Geforce 2 Ultra in the mix. I had early success with getting it all booting and apparently recognizing the Tualatin, but it's not stable in Windows 98. I'm using PC133 RAM and I read that could be a potential issue - setting the BIOS (which I updated to the latest version) to fail safe defaults gets it stable enough to get to the desktop but somethings obviously not right.

I still have a few things to try but I already have a working PIII, so packing it all back into the shed also seems like a pretty good option at this point.

Dear lord, I wish I had the room for so much stuff. My family already thinks it's crazy to have turned one full room into a game room and that barely has enough space for two desks, my arcade and shelves with my games.

On to the topic:
I dug through my boxes of discarded hardware which I got from fixing PC's and managed to build quite a nice Windows XP machine:
i5 2500K (recovered from a motherboard that got bricked due to bad BIOS flash)
ASUS P8H67-M Evo motherboard (recovered from a PC that got replaced because it kept locking up - turns out the CPU fan was the cause)
8GB DDR3 1333
Saphire HD 4870

If you remember the HD 4870 it's an extremely hot GPU - and the one I had, got discarded due to overheating. I took it apart bit by bit (had like 40 screws) and discovered that the fan had been clogged by dirt and the GPU's thermal paste had turned dry and hard. I replaced it by Arctic Silver and now it runs at a "cool" 70°C again (for this card, that's pretty good).

So jealous of your mancaves.

gdjacobs wrote:

cj_reha wrote:

Coincidentally been organizing my room too. 😁

What's that turntable in a mil spec case? 😳

Oh, that's a turntable my dad gave to me. I can't find too much info on it, but it's stamped US ARMY and supposedly the model is "MX-39/TIQ-2"

It comes with some 33 rpm records that are huge, even larger than regular LP albums. It works fine, but I don't use it much because I'm not sure if I could get a replacement needle.

Did some more work on the ASRock K7S41GX mainboard. Updated the BIOS from 2.00 to 2.80, removed the 2x 256 MB PC2100 RAM modules and inserted a single 256 MB PC2700 module instead. 512 MB was a bit overkill and the PC2700 module is also faster, which is more important given only 64 KB L2 cache. Finally, added a DOM that has MS-DOS 6.22 incl. some games and tools on it. Connected to the +5V of the IR header, which no one ever needs anyway. So this board is now ready-to-go and only needs power, keyboard, and monitor to work. Quite cool. 😎