VOGONS


Reply 7900 of 27188, by OldCat

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Continued testing T3200SX with various software from the DOS era. Flashback was alright, but doesn't look great on the plasma screen. Another World was a bit weird in orange, as it is opposite of game's normal blue hues. I also got a hold of the scan of instruction booklet for Heartlight PC, so I could pass the security check and play the game - as you can see below:

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Reply 7903 of 27188, by Tetrium

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derSammler wrote:

Just set up and tested an MSI MS5169 mainboard (SS7, Aladdin 5). Used 64 MB PC-100 and an AMD K6-2 350 MHz. Speed is impressive!

IMG_20180123_225639425.jpg

Wonder what figures I get when using an AMD K6-2 500 MHz, which I have lying around here as well.

I think this is a nice board!

I would've made a full system out of one that I gotten NIB, but alas it was my turn for the dreaded tab breaking when I tried to install a Cyrix MII 400 😵

It's got kinda a story attached to it. I was the only bidder but what later would reveal to be a shill bidder made my offer at its max..which happened to be just €15. I was kinda left with a bitter taste but from hindsight, this deal turned out to be pretty good, until I broke the tab and was unable to glue it back 😢

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 7905 of 27188, by Gered

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Cyrix200+ wrote:

Some Irish Whiskey, a 486, a Roland MT32, some more Irish Whiskey and a classic game!

Everything about this screams "awesome", haha. 😀

486DX2-66/16MB/S3 Trio32 VLB/SBPro2/GUS
P233 MMX/64MB/Voodoo2/Matrox/YMF719/GUS CD3
Duron 800/256MB/Savage4 Pro/SBLive (IN PROGRESS)
Toshiba 430CDT

Reply 7906 of 27188, by Mister Xiado

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bjwil1991 wrote:

Planning on rednecking or MacGyvering an A/V jack (either RCA or 35mm jack) for my C64 since the RF Modulator is failing (have to smack it with a screwdriver).

Why not simply use an s-video cable for it?

b_ldnt2.gif - Where it's always 1995.
Icons, wallpapers, and typical Oldternet nonsense.

Reply 7907 of 27188, by derSammler

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Fixed a Biostar M6VBE yesterday. Had some bad caps and a broken Slot 1 bracket. All fixed now. Quite a nice board with Apollo Pro+ chipset and ESS Solo-1 on-board.

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Now I'm working on fixing a Chaintech 5RSA2-D150, which has some serious problems with power supply.

Reply 7908 of 27188, by cyclone3d

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Spent a stupid amount of time straightening the pins on 2 Socket 478 P4 CPUs (2.8Ghz and 3.06Ghz w/HT)

Upgraded my Industrial Pentium 4 system from 2.4Ghz to 3.06Ghz with HT. I wasn't sure if it would take the 3.06 with HT or not as I couldn't find any documentation specifying what it actually supported and Axiomtek of course never responded to my email. Axiomtek of course also doesn't have ANY driver or BIOS or documentation downloads for this old of an SBC.

Now to see if the low profile copper heatsink with upgraded fan can actually handle the extra CPU power.... supposedly the Prescot CPUs ran a lot hotter than Northwood, but the reported temp in the BIOS looks fine, even after booting up, running a couple of quick tests and then checking the temp in the BIOS again. I'll do actually load testing later as I just wanted to see if it looked like everything was working as it should.

EDIT: The 3.06 HT I have is actually a Northwood, not a Prescot like I was originally thinking.. got mixed up looking at the huge list of Pentium 4 processors on the Wiki /EDIT

Upgraded from PC2100 to PC3200 RAM as well even though it can only run at PC2700 speeds but that was all I had.

Also replaced the dying CPU fan (sleeve bearing) with a much better ball bearing fan with shroud from a stock AMD CPU cooler. I had to use zip ties to attach it because I didn't have any bolts long enough that were the correct size and thread pitch. Zip tie going up through the bottom of the heatsink on each corner, hook another zip tie on top of each one to hold in place and then trim all the excess off.

Now I just need to install an SSD or 2, put Win98SE on one drive and XP on the other drive and test to see if the ISA implementation causes issues with speed sensitive sound cards. I'm going to need to order more IDE to SATA adapters.. I severely underestimated my need for them when I only ordered 3.

Oh yeah, I also converted a low profile DataPath Vision RGB E1 capture card to high profile with a bracket from a dead PCIe video card. Tested the capture card as well. Seems really nice.

Last edited by cyclone3d on 2018-01-31, 04:59. Edited 1 time in total.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 7909 of 27188, by oeuvre

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Added a 2nd 333MHz PII processor to the Intellistation. Finally getting NT4 to install on a 4.3GB IBM SCSI drive.

EDIT: Pictures!

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HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
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Reply 7910 of 27188, by Cyrix200+

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oeuvre wrote:

Added a 2nd 333MHz PII processor to the Intellistation. Finally getting NT4 to install on a 4.3GB IBM SCSI drive.

EDIT: Pictures!

Nice! No fans on the CPU's? Is that case fan enough? Would make for a nice & quiet system! Those small fans on Slot1/A CPU's are always noisy...

1982 to 2001

Reply 7911 of 27188, by oeuvre

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The processors are pretty bunched together so it doesn't leave any room for CPU fans on the heatsinks. So far it has been holding up well. The fan noise isn't bad ,especially cause I replaced the rear one with an Arctic fan. The biggest noise comes from the SCSI hard drive, of course!

HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
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Reply 7912 of 27188, by brostenen

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The internal DF0 floppy drive on my Amiga600, crapped out on me yesterday. I saw this comming in the last couple of weeks, and it did not want to write disks propperly. Yesterday it finally died. I tried to clean it with alcohol, yet that changed nothing, and after making two copies of disks more, it finally gave up and died. No smoke or anything. Just died.

As I have only one ekstra drive and it is an external one, I removed it from the external box, and began to install it in the miggy. Well... It would not fitt, so I had to cut a small portion of the top shield of the drive, mount a plate on the bottom to shield off the spinning part and remove material from the plastic eject button. Then it would fitt without causing any issues. Did not catch any sleep untill 8am. So I was up the entire night, fixing the Amiga.

Today I copied a decent amount of ADF files to the CF card that I am using as an Amiga harddisk. Aprox 680mb ADF files. And for that, I used FS-UAE on my Linux laptop. Now it is back inside the Amiga, and later tonight I will test if the drive fix resulted in a positive outcome. Else, I need to buy a new drive. The one I installed had some issues though. The pins that are detecting if a disk is inserted, was kind of not functioning correctly, so I soaked a cue tip in some alcohol and cleaned it. Solved that minor issue. Now I just need to see if it is working when writing ADF files and making disk to disk copy, using D-Copy or X-Copy.

EDIT....
Success. 😀 I can now create ADF files and I can rewrite them to a disk. Still has some minor issues regarding disk detection. I have eliminated most of the issues, were the drive thinks that there is a disk inserted. The issue are related to the small pins that are pushed down when a disk is inserted. I have no contact spray, so alcohol will do until I can source new drives. Or modify a working PC drive.

Anyhow. I have a working machine now, with only minor issues. I was really worried that it was memory related, at worst the first 1mb that are soldered on the mainboard. That would not have been so awesome.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
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Reply 7913 of 27188, by Stiletto

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My father had been on the hunt for his digital photos from my parents' Italy trip in 2003, We managed to track them down to a. some backup CDs that were approximately that old and b. a former internal hard drive that we had put inside an external drive enclosure which was last touched around 2008, whose power adapter had been lost.

The other day, I went over with the box of CDs I had found. After the recent SSD upgrade to his desktop system, the optical drive had been unplugged, so I switched the system off, plugged the optical drive back into the motherboard, and rebooted. No real issues there, and we were able to find the files within a disc or two.

This left the external HDD. I found an appropriate power adapter from another external HDD I had and well, we had powered it on for a few minutes, but then it seemed as if it never detected the drive. This was a bit frustrating, so even though we had found some of the files on the CDs, I took the external HDD back to "my workshop" here at home.

Now, as luck would have it, the drive was a Maxtor 250GB IDE hard drive from 2003. That jogged a memory loose: one of my former employers had got a steal of a deal on refurbished Maxtor 250GB IDE drives back around 2004-ish. They had all been of the same age, many from the same batch, with the same model numbers and part numbers, and all with the same firmware. I remembered that I had taken a chance on buying a refurbished hard drive and purchased at least two drives: one for myself and one for my father's computer. The one for myself, I ended up not using right away, so it sat in its antistatic bag and gathered dust - for at least a decade.

So, taking my father's Maxtor in my hands, I turned it over and noticed that there was some bubbling in the ceramic, and a little scorching, on one of the chips of the controller board. Not surprising - don't power on a fifteen year old hard drive for a while, things can happen, especially in an enclosure like that. Still - could it be that simple? I took my old-but-unused Maxtor drive, noticed the security screws it used, found my security screwdriver bit set, removed its controller board, removed the drive controller board from my dad's drive, and swapped boards, replacing its controller.

Now, I knew there's often a little ROM on the controller board that contains settings and ideally you would unsolder this ROM and solder it onto the replacement board, which starts becoming beyond my skillset - those surface-mount ROMs are TINY - but I took my chances that this drive was old enough that that wouldn't be an issue. If it did not fix the problem, I'd call time of death, and we'd either ship it off for professional data recovery, or not bother...

Success!

Perhaps it was a failure of that chip, perhaps the generic AC adapter used with the drive enclosure flaked out and surged it, maybe Dad had plugged the wrong power adapter into the enclosure at some point - it's hard to say. But after surgery, it decided to work with the same power adapter I'd used previously, not the one that came with the enclosure, which is still lost.

At any rate, I was able to retrieve all of the files off the drive, and headed to his house to drop it off.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 7914 of 27188, by Mister Xiado

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Fourth and fifth Windows 3 icon sets done. I forget if I already posted the fourth set. My personal website was killed since the last set I had made. Thank goodness I had the foresight to archive it before my host killed my domain and FTP access without so much as a ████ you email. Well, Geocities.ws is suitable for at least the Oldternet content. Everything is at the link in my signature. Chrome hates embedded MIDI files and auto-saves them, so use some Mozilla derivative if you want to ignore them, or IE if you want to actually hear them.

b_ldnt2.gif - Where it's always 1995.
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Reply 7915 of 27188, by bjwil1991

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Removed the broken RF Modulator from my C64 as two capacitors leaked on the board (no damage underneath), so my plan is to make a board with the bells and whistles to only use the video out port.

I also installed the Pentium OD for my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus to some success (had to disconnect the clock battery from the board, boot to the BIOS diskette to upgrade from 4.03 to 4.05.07 due to issues at the PnP BIOS string), but it won't boot from anything, but if the CMOS battery is disconnected, the floppy boots.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 7916 of 27188, by KCompRoom2000

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Since the Dell Latitude C800 that I accidentally ordered came, I went ahead and swapped some parts around with my Inspiron 8000 to make it less problematic, basically I ended up swapping motherboards, flashing the C800-A23 BIOS on both laptops, restoring the Inspiron splash screen on the i8000's new C800 mobo, and starting up Windows ME with the new motherboard to see whether or not a reinstall was necessary, I had to restart a few times during the driver re-initialization process (which is normal since it now has a "Latitude" BIOS instead of an "Inspiron" BIOS), but now it works as good as if nothing bad ever happened to it, no OS reinstall needed.

The Inspiron's old motherboard (now in the Latitude C800, ofc) has been pretty troublesome in the past week or so, I'm guessing the 1 GHz CPU fried the socket since I noticed a small burn mark on one of the pin holes, screwing it up to the point where the original 700 MHz CPU is the only CPU that will work with it (the Latitude's original 850 MHz P3 didn't work either), and running MemTest-86 froze with some garbled characters (no mention of memory errors oddly enough), so I guess it's a good thing I swapped boards because who knows what would've happened if I hadn't bothered with this project.

The one minor issue is that because I swapped motherboards, the Inspiron's service tag is not the same as it used to be, I tried using ASSET.COM to change it, but it didn't work, I can live with that.

Reply 7917 of 27188, by King_Corduroy

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Tallied all my Packard Bell equipment a few days ago... turns out I've got a small collection going. 😜

16 Computers, 17 Keyboards, 8 Monitors, 6 Mice, 2 Microphones, and one media express remote. 🤣

untitled_by_mad_king_corduroy-dc18wih.jpg

Check me out at Transcendental Airwaves on Youtube! Fast-food sucks!