2600XT is a nice card for AGP 😀

I used a bunch of them in PCIe for our office PCs because they were available with dual DVI ports and passively cooled.

Ah sorry I was thinking of the 2400XT

Yesterday I pulled out of the storage my Amiga 1200... wanted to test it with my newest acquisition - CRT TV Sony Trinitron 21". After initial "too big screen" and a bit of flickering of 50hz display I kinda got used to it 🤣 Might still get a 14" Trinitron as the pixels are quite visible from where I sit. But Commodore 1084 is just too small. Will decide when I put everything in my to-be retro room.

Today I finally upgraded WHDload 16.4 to latest 18.5. Just realised the 16.4 was released back in 2005 🤣

Now I'm running some demos 😁

Photos:

I added FSB speed select jumpers to my Acorp/Red Fox LX6AP2 LE2 motherboard, also gave it the original Red Fox BIOS and have a nice boot logo 🤣. I only have one slot1 CPU, which is a 350MHz PII for 100MHz FSB, I hoped that I could get working 100MHz but 75MHz is the highest the board goes and is completely stable at, anything higher is no POST though I have not exhaustively tested it (i.e using PC133 memory and video cards that do not mind overclocked PCI/AGP). Overall I'm pretty happy with the outcome, beats stock 66MHz that I was locked to before ~

your CPU is underclocked by 3MHz!

Let's see - I got my Thinkpad X31 (recently acquired on eBay) cleaned up and ready for some oldschool XP goodness.

(In case you are wondering about the specs: Pentium M Banias 1.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, 16MB Radeon M6, 12" XGA screen, AD1981 AC97 sound chip, 128GB mSATA-to-IDE SSD, native USB2, and Windows XP SP3)

Here it is before the cleanup, with only 512MB of RAM, a 40GB mechanical drive and an entire HDD filled with the previous owner's financial records. Yeah, that got wiped ASAP (and please, kids, DBAN your stuff before you put it on fleabay.

Part of the upgrade process involves pulling the heatsink off, cleaning the internals, and replacing that cooked thermal compound. Well, my Arctic MX4 is not here, but I do have this Arctic Silver 5 available...

That dualband a/b/g wireless card will need to be replaced with an Atheros a/g/n card (Unex DNMA-92), pretty sure I'll see an 1802 unauthorized device MiniPCI error on boot . I'll also need to run an extra cable
for its BMDC (bluetooth modem daughtercard). Man, the oldschool wifi setups with distinct bluetooth and Wifi radios...

One definite thing to do is pull that skanky old 4200 rpm drive and replace them with a small mSATA SSD. These Vesky 128GBs are only 25 USD and is more than fast enough for those oldschool ICH4 based Pentium-M machines. And no, I only formatted it for 80GB capacity (which is more than enough for an old utility machine - probably will not go beyond 30% capacity anyways). XP doesn't do trim so the unused space is for wear leveling. The new RAM is added along with a new RTC battery and a better caddy.

And here's 20 minutes with a magic eraser to get rid of some scratches/wear on the chassis itself.

Well, let's see what sort of mayhem awaits our new companion. Quake 3 Arena/OpenArena?

It certainly looks brand-new. But Quake 3 doesn't stress it enough. Something more...challenging, perhaps?

Robot factory time! One of my favorite levels in UT2004SE, and even with 32 bots the little Banias machine with the gimped Radeon can still do 22 fps on normal detail levels.

Well, okay. Let's see it do some Deathmatches. TokaraForest runs at around 30 fps, which is great for a machine of that vintage. Even my Powerbook G4/15/1.52GHz can manage slightly less than those numbers on the Mac port of UT2004SE.

I have a ThinkPad R40 that needs a new hard drive as it's starting to go (bad sectors) and a DVD burner as the one that is installed doesn't have a bezel on it (slot loading). I managed to rip the heatsink fan wiring connector on the motherboard, but I soldered it back on and it still works. Bought it back in 2016 and the system would not POST due to RAM issues (guessed the bad RAM chip and it booted right up), and I also bought a good, used display assembly as the one that was installed got water damage after leaving the Windex on for a long time. I still have the display and the wireless card does connect to my wireless network without issues (ABG) and I've yet to find an AGN mini PCI wireless card for the laptop and I am planning on upgrading the HDD from 20GB to 128GB (mSATA SSD to IDE) so that I can archive as many audio cassettes on my laptop as I want so that I can burn CDs that'll be used for iTunes so that my parents can have more music on their iPods to listen to.

ragefury32 wrote:

Let's see - I got my Thinkpad X31 (recently acquired on eBay) cleaned up and ready for some oldschool XP goodness. […]
Show full quote

Let's see - I got my Thinkpad X31 (recently acquired on eBay) cleaned up and ready for some oldschool XP goodness.

(In case you are wondering about the specs: Pentium M Banias 1.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, 16MB Radeon M6, 12" XGA screen, AD1981 AC97 sound chip, 128GB mSATA-to-IDE SSD, native USB2, and Windows XP SP3)

Here it is before the cleanup, with only 512MB of RAM, a 40GB mechanical drive and an entire HDD filled with the previous owner's financial records. Yeah, that got wiped ASAP (and please, kids, DBAN your stuff before you put it on fleabay.

Part of the upgrade process involves pulling the heatsink off, cleaning the internals, and replacing that cooked thermal compound. Well, my Arctic MX4 is not here, but I do have this Arctic Silver 5 available...

That dualband a/b/g wireless card will need to be replaced with an a/g/n card. Also need to run an extra cable
for its new BMDC (bluetooth modem daughtercard). Man, the oldschool wifi setups with distinct bluetooth and Wfi radios...

One definite thing to do is pull those skanky old 4200 rpm drives and replace them with a small mSATA SSD. These Vesky 128GBs are only 25 USD and is more than fast enough for those oldschool ICH4 based Pentium-M machines. And no, I only formatted it for 80GB capacity (which is more than enough for an old utility machine - probably will not go beyond 30% capacity anyways). XP doesn't do trim so the unused space is for wear leveling. The new RAM is added along with a new RTC battery and a better caddy.

And here's 20 minutes with a magic eraser to get rid of some scratches/wear on the chassis itself.

Well, let's see what sort of mayhem awaits our new companion. Quake 3 Arena/OpenArena?

It certainly looks brand-new. But Quake 3 doesn't stress it enough. Something more...challenging, perhaps?

Robot factory time! One of my favorite levels in UT2004SE, and even with 32 bots the little Banias machine with the gimped Radeon can still do 22 fps on normal detail levels.

Well, okay. Let's see it do some Deathmatches. TokaraForest runs at around 30 fps, which is great for a machine of that vintage. Even my Powerbook G4/15/1.52GHz can manage slightly less than those numbers on the Mac port of UT2004SE.

Now that's an excellent repair! I will definitely give a look for the mSATA you used there... That's a good price for a 128GB SSD.

I received a Labway YMF71x card with QS1000 on it and transplanted the chips to a new card that wasn't all rusty and dirty.

The Audician32 card I bought years ago is now complete ~

Tiido wrote:

I hoped that I could get working 100MHz but 75MHz is the highest the board goes and is completely stable at, anything higher is no POST

440LX chipset might struggle @ 100MHz FSB, but 83MHz should be a piece of cake for it, what PLL model does it use?

Soon, I will be doing three different things:

1) Building a logic board for my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus to allow the system to have it where the PC speaker can be connected to both a speaker and the Tandy sound card or sound card with a toggle switch to enable or disable the PC speaker and I might do another switch to enable/disable the PC speaker line to the sound card as well/Tandy sound card.
2) Repair an Original Xbox 1.6b with 5 new caps as those 5 are swollen and need to be replaced.
3) Building a logic board for my novelty AM radio to have media control for my smartphone and tablet, including using the radio as a speakerphone (will need to connect a headphone jack on the side and insert the mic into the jack or use a speaker to do that, and so I can play FM stations from the Samsung Galaxy Tab 6A and my S7 Edge phone.

SSTV2 wrote:

Tiido wrote:

I hoped that I could get working 100MHz but 75MHz is the highest the board goes and is completely stable at, anything higher is no POST

440LX chipset might struggle @ 100MHz FSB, but 83MHz should be a piece of cake for it, what PLL model does it use?

When I used an Radeon 9200 instead of the Banshee I actually could get the machine to boot at 83MHz but it wasn't stable. There's two 83MHz options, one that freezes at RAM count and other than freezes when boot process begins, difference is in PCI/AGP divider it seems. There's two 75MHz settings too and only one of them works, other won't post and difference is also PCI/AGP divider. PLL is ICS9148BF-04

Spent a bit of time bodging a Dell stand onto this low-rent Acer monitor, to make a pretty tidy little 16x9 portrait display.

Why would I want to do this? Well,

Hell yes!

There are still a couple kinks to work out - I still haven't figured out how to make it scale to full screen (i.e. using a non-integer scale multiple), and DOSBox is a little bit glitchy running in full screen on Windows with display rotation set in the drivers. Also, a 2005-ish TN panel isn't the nicest thing to use in portrait orientation due to the viewing angle limits. But as a proof of concept, I'd say this is pretty neat!

Incidentally, if you're wondering whether arcade-style vertical shooters are gonna be happening on this setup, well, arcade-style vertical shooters are gonna be happening. It'd be rude not to.

After the paint job on the bottom plate of my Colani tower i want to complete this old 1995 tower step by step.

okay that Colani tower is super cool.. any more pictures please?

Here's the Dell Dimension XPS T500 I finally got to fixing up.

https://imgur.com/a/XVlkOKi

Made a PC Speaker board, which didn't work for some reason, but I did manage to wire the PC speaker to the 4 pin header I bought along with the components and started to make my media control board for the novelty AM radio.

I will do the Original Xbox 1.6b recap today after the thrifting adventures and t-stat replacements on both my car and my mom's van.

oeuvre wrote:

okay that Colani tower is super cool.. any more pictures please?

Here's the Dell Dimension XPS T500 I finally got to fixing up.

https://imgur.com/a/XVlkOKi

You're missing a CPU duct to complete your restoration.

Mine I tested a 320 series 120GB Intel SSD with marvell chipset sata to Ide bridge chipset sold by startech. Expensive startech but worth it, bought pair of bridge boards. Detected and reported as such on my D815EEA2 intel board. Need to dig out my floppy drive and prepare the ssd as bootable dos to test.

Cheers, Jason

Finally have my Seagate ST-238R running!
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Realized that it is not possible to get this running on a MFM controller. Low-level format was possible with SSTOR, but I was not able to read any data afterwards.

So I used a Seagate ST11R 8-bit RLL controller with build-in BIOS. With the BIOS-Routine I was able to low-level format the disk with 0 bad sectors! I like that the BIOS shows me the installed disk at startup. But its incredible slow compared to a MFM-drive on a 16-bit controller...

Unfortunately I erased all data that has been on the disk potentially during my experiments on the MFM controller. Always curious to find some "lost" drivers/software on such disks. But it is unlikely anyway to read anything on a differnt controller then the one it was formatted with.

I macgyvered up a power adapter adapter for a Dell Latitude XPi laptop - it didn't fit my other Dell chargers and I didn't feel like buying a new power adapter just to test the laptop, so a connector from my parts bin and some thermoplastic makes a secure fitting adapter:

Tiido wrote:

When I used an Radeon 9200 instead of the Banshee I actually could get the machine to boot at 83MHz but it wasn't stable. There's two 83MHz options, one that freezes at RAM count and other than freezes when boot process begins, difference is in PCI/AGP divider it seems. There's two 75MHz settings too and only one of them works, other won't post and difference is also PCI/AGP divider. PLL is ICS9148BF-04

440LX won't work with non 1/2 FSB PCI bus dividers, intel chipsets doesn't support asynchronous PCI bus mode, unfortunately. If AGP card checks out, then most likely some device on the PCI bus causes system instability as 41.7MHz freq. is way over the specs for it.