Played around some more with my new 286 build. Found the info about the pins/jumpers/switches settings for the motherboard and managed to connect up the Power LED, Reset Button, Turbo Button & Turbo LED. That's all working nicely now, able to Turbo switch between 6MHz & 12MHz with ease and the old Boulderdash clone "Felix" is now playable when set to 6MHz... the game is still crap though, too hard. 🤣

Also installed GEM Desktop 3.13 and that's about as far as I've gotten, as I can't seem to get the computer to recognise there is a mouse plugged in. It doesn't seem to recognise the COM ports on both I/O cards I have.

ODwilly wrote:

Finally sending out some packages tomorrow and starting on some retro projects long neglected. Thank you medical leave! and unexpected health issues+insurance.

Medical leave? Hope you're alright

I inherited an Avermedia C985 Live Gamer HD, which works quite nicely with my win98 rig through DVI. 320x200 and bios/text mode capture no problems. Gotta love DVI!

Win 98 looks beautiful in 1920x1080 😜

Now I'm researching what VGA to HDMI scaling device I will need when I get an older socket 3 rig running. Seems like quite the topic.

Well it is not too retro but i cleaned and retrobrighted one Microsoft Basic Keyboard 1.0a, it is a nice keyboard to use on Windows XP builds but works great with any OS.
Here it is cleaned but yellowed, the camera don't do any justice but check the dot key on the numpad(i really dont know why this key isn't yellowed) and compare to the rest of the keyboard.

and here it is after retrobright, again the camera white balance is a mess but now compare to the dot key that wasn't yellowed.

My ASUS P4P800-VM just stopped working, the standby led was quite dim so i reflowed the solder of some fets and some power related components and baaam, i broughht it back to life.

Playing on the Amiga for the first time in 4 years 😀

Assembled most of my 486 build. Still some little things to work out, but have been able to verify that everything at least works (big sigh of relief 😀 almost everything was obtained from different places/sellers).

Worked on putting together a Slot 1 PIII-600 rig. Waiting for some jumper wires so I don't have to destroy the original wiring in the case for the LEDs and switches. Case is from a Dell XPS T450.

Also got my Slot 1 PIII-550 CPU working. Turns out it was just the connection that was dirty.

Tested another Slot 1 board to make sure it POSTs before I stick it up for sale on eBay.

Working on cleaning and re-assembling my Optiplex GX110 build. Now I am well and totally lost on how to configure the thing. Feel free to advise me here.

Just paired a 3,4GHz Prescott (SL7PP) with an Asrock P4i65G. Despite using a stock cooler (copper center), it is actually running quite cool. I am honestly pleasantly surprised! 😎

BSA Starfire wrote:

Playing on the Amiga for the first time in 4 years 😀

Which game did you play?
My favorite gem is MajorMotion... hilarious classic.

Re-checked a GA486VS which would not work correctly "all of a sudden".
I tried the 25mhz bus speed(ala 75mhz for the cpu) and increased the ISA divider but all of this didn't help with system stability. With a bit of hesitation I removed the cache and inserted some new srams... same deal, crash in Doom & DoomII when changing planes.
After some back and forth I unplugged the CF card reader and connected a real hard drive... and voila it worked.
I had a similar problem on the P60 although I'm not sure if that one wasn't caused because of too tight of a cache setting.
Being not able to take advantage of CF cards is kinda annoying - any ideas?

The board is most likely never totally stable, even though it ran Quake, Winbench and Sandra burn in without hiccups. Maybe the 12ns srams will be of an aid... we'll see. Speedsys is always locking up.
Ultimate Doom demo4(E4M2) runs at a quite respectable ~36+ frames and Quake demo delievers ~14+ frames.

Deksor wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Upgraded the AWE64 Value in my MMX PC to 32MB of RAM. […]
Show full quote

Upgraded the AWE64 Value in my MMX PC to 32MB of RAM.

That SLI deserves a better machine than a pentium MMX. Even one voodoo 2 deserves better than this (even though you get some more frames per second with a v2 in comparison to a v1)

I realize its a bit overkill but I have no V1 and no other computer to use the second V2 in so its a merry SLI config that's just there for 1024x768 capability. Not ideal but oh well..

CPU will be a K6-2 soon so that might make it look more sensible. Slightly.. 😀

Reassembled the cleaned Olivetti M24. Replaced the battery with some leads to which I can later connect a battery. It's only used for keeping date and time so not really needed...

The harddrive would not spin up, so I decided to wiggle the Interruptor a but. You know, this one:

And it worked! The harddrive spins up again, even boots into DOS 3.3 with Norton Utilities, Word Perfect and more. No original Olivetti software to be found though 🙁 There was a music/midi program on there which I had never seen before, I need to secure it somehow for the archives. Also explains the removed card (there is a expansion card bracket missing). Was probably a nice old sound card or midi interface...

BSA Starfire wrote:

Playing on the Amiga for the first time in 4 years 😀

Sweet.... I have many favorites. Pinball fantasies, Stuntcar racer, Lotus-II and the list goes on and on.
What Amiga model do you have?

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Reassebled the cleaned Olivetti M24.

Well done sir. Glad to hear that another classic machine are saved.

Installed Windows 3.1 on my 286. I only did it just to see how it performs at 12MHz & 1MB RAM and I'm quite surprised that it's not totally horrible, this is certainly quite usable to launch the odd program or 2.

Installed win98 on my "new" Tecra 8100 (s3 gfx + ymf7xx). Works ok, DOS window does not always pick up the legacy sound.

Found a thing, which I have no idea what it is or haven't seen in ages.

Edit: it was for the Last Word game which unfortunately, the buzzer stopped working on account of corrosion and dead circuitry.

brostenen wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Reassebled the cleaned Olivetti M24.

Well done sir. Glad to hear that another classic machine are saved.

Well, I still have to clean the monitor and keyboard. Some keys are not always registering, so it will take some time. The machine was in a smokers home for all it's life. Everything is really nasty.

After a long hiatus due to frustration and getting acquainted with some new modern hardware, I reassessed that damn IIcx.

-It still won't boot off SCSI again for me regardless of external peripherals, but now the hard drive light's gone back to being solid instead of occasionally blinking.
-Cleaned the floppy drive YET AGAIN, it's thankfully still good at reading disks. Mostly. Hard to tell how many of these old floppies are corrupt beyond repair and how much of the error lies in the drive's head alignment, but it'll likely save me a bunch of cash. Already put off replacing the 6500's FDD long enough due to being reluctant to spend money as of late. However, I still need to figure out why the drive tries to bring the disk carriage down early, before the floppy's cleared the case slot and gets hung up on it. That causes read errors sometimes. It's as if the arm that pulls the floppy in by one of the notches (left side) doesn't do a consistent job.
-I found out that this seemingly standalone pair of DIMMs was actually a proper quad for a full bank of RAM, but alas, like the half-height, supposedly 4 MB SIMMs, these ones will also just give me nothing but Chimes of Death when loaded into Bank A. Loading the one good bank of 4x1 MB SIMMs into Bank A and either of the other sets of DIMMs into Bank B still results in only 4 MB of RAM.
-There's a certain sort of irony about how the disks I've found that supposedly have disk repair utilities on them are in need of repair themselves.
-I'm quickly getting the vibe that I'd be better off emulating the IIcx in Basilisk II at this rate. Hell, if I knew it supported SCSI passthrough sooner, I would've yanked the Adaptec 2906 out of my MDD G4 and put it in my P4EE retrogaming PC build alongside the 80 MB HDD, though my lack of longer 50-pin SCSI cables to go with it is going to be a problem in terms of clean internal mounting.

brostenen wrote:

BSA Starfire wrote:

Playing on the Amiga for the first time in 4 years 😀

Sweet.... I have many favorites. Pinball fantasies, Stuntcar racer, Lotus-II and the list goes on and on.
What Amiga model do you have?

I'm glad there's a bit of Amiga action going on 😀

I've been playing Prince of Persia which actually holds up really nicely.

You may laugh, but I never knew you could save the game until recently, so I may finally finish it!

A lot of love for the Amiga here.

I was fighting the Amiga's corner when a lot of my friends had PCs.

I was secretly jealous, but fast forward 20+ years later, my Amiga 1200 is running with an ACA 1221 upgrade, CF Drive as a HDD, 64 MB RAM, Gotek Floppy drive and real-time clock.

And I also have a P90, PIII 1Ghz, Celeron 1.3 Ghz and AMD X64 machine all working for nostalgia purposes.

On Saturday 30th, here in Swindon, UK is the 'South West Amiga Group Meet #5'. Where lots of Amiga enthusiasts gather to eat breakfast and droll about Amiga machinery.