Deksor wrote:

There's no room underneath, it's a desktop tower and the plate where the board sits on can't be removed ...

Right, but there are spacers between the plate and the board surely? I'd expect to be able to fit two flatcables in that space between plate and board easily.

It still means I have to remove everything from that case 🤣

There might be a spacer near the cache preventing from doing that though I'll check that tomorrow

By the way, I plan to replace the sound card with another one. Since the CD-Rom is plugged rigth on it, it's preferable to wait for the new sound card before ^^ (especially because it's way longer so it won't fit in the current spot)

Washing an AcerEntra 2968 computer today - Arrived extremely dirty and dusty:

Specs:
Pentium 200 (not MMX)
Acer (ALI) socket 7 motherboard
32meg RAM (original configuration 16meg)
Acer s3 virge 2meg
2Gig hard drive
16speed CD-ROM
Realtek 8029 PCI ethernet
Acer MP32 modem/crystal CX4237B ISA sound card

I will be replacing the Acer s3 virge with a Diamond Multimedia Virge DX/4meg, because the Acer s3 virge has bad memory/chip. It is a pity as the rest of the machine works pretty much perfectly.

But lots of work to do, cleaning casing and washing boards

Got my Packard Bell desktop decked out with 512KB L2 cache and 2MB of video memory. The 1024x768 @ 16-bit color doesn't work at all with my NEC MultiSync LCD1530V, but, that's no big deal and the memory upgrade did help get it to 16-bit color with the 1024x768 resolution.

I finally managed to get my Tandy 1000 TL/2 to boot from SCSI using my Trantor T128 and a Seagate ST157N-1. I have spent the past two days working on this, and it turns out I just needed to FDISK the drive. Unfortunately, FDISK sees it as an 18 MB drive instead of 45 MB, so I'm going to need to look into this further.

Probably a BIOS limit for SCSI drives. Glad you got the system to boot from the drive, though.

Funny how completely unrelated hardware sometimes shows identical issues. Last night was corroded contact night. I had a pile of I/O controllers and an unresponsive motherboard to test. Nothing worked first time and every single one had at least one contact issue.

The board (the last of my Morse 486 ISA boards, and only one not just to work or instantly blow a tantalum cap) turned out to have issues with the LIF CPU socket. Jiggling around the CPU got it to start booting, a bit more movement & pressure got it doing so reliably. First (lightly) corroded contacts.

Then the most interesting I/O controller - a Longshine LGS-6633 rev b1. ISA IDE+FDD+SCSI controller. First up it didn't get detected at all - corroded ISA contacts - then it didn't detect the FDD - corroded 34p contacts. Eventually I managed to get it booting from floppy. Then moved on to IDE. Same story, absolutely no detection at first, then detection *something* was there but not able to use it, even after entering correct CHS in BIOS. Oh well, goes beck onto the 'to do' pile.

Afterwards three more normal, simple ISA I/O controllers with either ISA, 34p and/or 40p connectors needing TLC. They all did work fine eventually, but this was more effort required than in ages. The weird thing is they came from three different sources and each of them was in a box with other hardware with no corrosion issues. Just pure coincidence I suppose.

Fortunately the last bit of testing went smoother: Soundblaster 16 CT1750 and AWE64 CT4520 did what they were supposed to as soon as I hooked them up (and ran CTCM.EXE in the case of the CT4520). All in all a satisfying evening, and one to remind me to check even better for dodgy connectors in future.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Probably a BIOS limit for SCSI drives. Glad you got the system to boot from the drive, though.

We'll see! I'm going to experiment some more today. 😀 My understanding is that with the firmware on the controller, it should be able to handle approximately 1 GB hard drives. (And it was 45 MB before I repartitioned and reformatted.) But at least I know it's possible to make it work. So yay more fun and experimenting today. 😀

Wired up some ATX PSU adapter cables for old Dell motherboards

I'm still tweaking my Pentium 233 MMX - ran into an odd issue with Little Big Adventure where it crashed so I figured it might be the graphics card (S3 Trio V64 1MB). Then remembered I still had a Matrox Mystique new in the box I bought over 10 years ago for like €5 on some flea market. I thought it would make a great upgrade - 2MB means I can get higher resolutions in Windows as well and up to 32bit (16bit max before). It didn't fix the game crashing but it still is an interesting upgrade.

EDIT: well it gets better - I forgot about the three games included: Mech Warrior 2, Scorched and Destruction Derby 2. I tested MW2 and it runs beautifully.

I performed my first CRT monitor repair today and it went very well! My IBM 5153 developed a discoloration on the right side of the display. Thankfully, this is a well documented issue so it was easy to figure out how to repair it. I just had to replace 6 capacitors.

If you want more details and maybe a gallery with pictures, I posted about it here:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?514 … 0280#post560280

This was actually a lot of fun. Nothing like breathing new life into a 36 year old piece of hardware. Some day I'll probably have to replace all the other caps since they're almost all the same brand and type, but for now it works perfectly. I can finally let me daughter get back into playing her favorite games. 😁

red_avatar wrote:

I'm still tweaking my Pentium 233 MMX - ran into an odd issue with Little Big Adventure where it crashed so I figured it might be the graphics card (S3 Trio V64 1MB). Then remembered I still had a Matrox Mystique new in the box I bought over 10 years ago for like €5 on some flea market. I thought it would make a great upgrade - 2MB means I can get higher resolutions in Windows as well and up to 32bit (16bit max before). It didn't fix the game crashing but it still is an interesting upgrade.

EDIT: well it gets better - I forgot about the three games included: Mech Warrior 2, Scorched and Destruction Derby 2. I tested MW2 and it runs beautifully.

LBA may have issues with 200+ MHz CPUs?

appiah4 wrote:

red_avatar wrote:

I'm still tweaking my Pentium 233 MMX - ran into an odd issue with Little Big Adventure where it crashed so I figured it might be the graphics card (S3 Trio V64 1MB). Then remembered I still had a Matrox Mystique new in the box I bought over 10 years ago for like €5 on some flea market. I thought it would make a great upgrade - 2MB means I can get higher resolutions in Windows as well and up to 32bit (16bit max before). It didn't fix the game crashing but it still is an interesting upgrade.

EDIT: well it gets better - I forgot about the three games included: Mech Warrior 2, Scorched and Destruction Derby 2. I tested MW2 and it runs beautifully.

LBA may have issues with 200+ MHz CPUs?

Hmm I hadn't thought about speed being a potential issue. I reinstalled it completely but not it crashes in a different spot - it's tied to the sound card but yeah it may be the CPU causing it.

Updating stuff about vintage computing on my blog....
And. If Playstation3 is considered retro gaming these days, then I have been gaming 1,5 hours with my girlfriend.

After fiddling with the Negative LOD Bias level in the ATI Tray Tools, I have finally broken the psychological barrier of 13.000 3DMarks in 3DMark 2003 -stock settings- with the overclocked X1950 Pro. By a short margin, but I made it. This overclocked Tualatin rocks!

Breakdown:

Repairing a Packard Bell 800AU today.

Specs:
Pentium 3 Coppermine - 800mhz
MS-6168 V2 motherboard
128meg (shipped size 64meg, but upgraded)
Onboard Voodoo 3-2000 8meg graphics.
20gig hard drive
PCI modem (winmodem anyone)
1.44meg floppy drive
CD-RW drive.

Repairs done:

* The entire case/motherboard/cards washed/dried completely. Was extremely dusty and dirty.
* Inspected PSU, has the normal arrangement of extremely dodgy capacitors, but they looked ok, so I just oiled the fan (it was rattling and noisy on original testing.
* Replaced 2 faulty capacitors on the motherboard, the big ones next to the power connector. Replaced a 10V 1500uF capacitor with nichicon 10V 2200uF capacitor, and 6.3V 2700uF capacitor with nichicon 6.3V 3300uF capacitor.
* Popped off the old heatsink and fan off the voodoo 3 chip ... they always go. Put a slightly larger passive heatsink on it ... going to see if it runs ok like this.
* The maxtor 20gig hard drive, it would have been cool to keep this, but being a maxtor drive, it is both noisy and dying, so I just can't use it 🙁

Repairs to be done.
* Will put in a seagate 250gig hard drive, as the only quiet drives I have that are large enough. Otherwise I'd have to put in a smaller quantum drive, and they all sound as bad as the maxtor.
* Glue new heatsink onto the voodoo 3 chip, once I have tested that the one I have selected will work ok.
* Put everything into case.
* Change the 2x64meg SDRAM chips with a single 128meg SDRAM chip. I can use the smaller ram chips on pentium motherboards!

@looking4awayout

Windows 3.x window border and start menu ... Which OS is that ? Is this Chicago ?

It's Windows XP with Stardock Windowblinds to use the 3.x UI. To me, this is the way Windows should have evolved, as I never liked the 9x UI per se, except for the Start menu.

Failed 5 install attempts of Win95OSR2.5 and then Win98SE on an XPS R450. Don't quite know what's going on yet, thought it might be RAM but no, could be the GeForce 4 in it, but hmmm. Ran out of time.

Found a cheapish video card for one of my Power Computing Mac clones, I'm trying to narrow down my best period machines so I can get rid of some of the others. I went from "why can't I find anything I'm looking for" to "how did I end up with all this stuff" in less than a year.

Still holes in my collection, even though my ambitions are not that high (not trying to get one of everything, just some representative periods).

(Finally) cleaned a 386 system I traded a while ago. Barrel battery but no visible damage! The system won't post though 🙁

I took pictures but my phone decided to not store them except a few.

I am looking for documentation on the motherboard, I have two average-quality pictures to help.

Markings on the board:
- Legato warranty sticker;
- 3SUID-1.1 (Or 3SU1D-1.1)

CPU is an AMD Am386SX/SXL-25. Chipset is SiS/UMC combination.