andrewreader wrote:

Does anyone have any more info on the Wavetable header? Is there something i can order to get that working?

Dreamblaster of Serdaco has a couple of new wavetable boards:
New DreamBlaster S2 !
DreamBlaster X2 and S1 BLACK Editions Available Soon / Pre-Order / Black Friday Bundle

Went through all my graphics cards and re-pasted the coolers where needed. This Radeon 4890 from Powercolor might not be considered retro, but I found it interesting how a 256bit like this didn't have any heatsinks for the memory. Even the GPU cooler had very little copper with only a single heatpipe. For the time being I stuck some tiny heatsinks I had laying around until I can find something better.

Next up I made a last desperate attempt in seeing what might be causing artifacting on my Riva128. I have made numerous checks before and got a refund from the seller, but only now I discovered some remnants of a broken-off capacitor R66. I went ahead and de-soldered the remains, but don't know what to replace it with. The other Asus Riva128 that I got has a capacitor with the numbers 103 (same one like in R60) on it and that's it. Does anyone have an idea of what sort of replacement I need?
EDIT: stupid me, that's a resistor. Still don't know what to replace it with...

Kamerat wrote:

Dreamblaster of Serdaco has a couple of new wavetable boards: New DreamBlaster S2 ! DreamBlaster X2 and S1 BLACK Editions Availa […]
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andrewreader wrote:

Does anyone have any more info on the Wavetable header? Is there something i can order to get that working?

Dreamblaster of Serdaco has a couple of new wavetable boards:
New DreamBlaster S2 !
DreamBlaster X2 and S1 BLACK Editions Available Soon / Pre-Order / Black Friday Bundle

Thanks. I have already got an S1 and S2 unit which are brilliant.

On this motherboard, it's an 8 pin (4x2) motherboard pinout.

There's a thread here which talks about two ISA cards that would work that have the 8 pin pass-through to the soundcard.

ISA MIDI-only wavetable cards?

I'll leave it for now. 😊

Finally got that blasted Gateway working, turns out the Mach64 was dead, so I pulled that and threw an OAK card in there, which seems to be working pretty well, and probably is what's best since it simplifies the whole "True Color Desktop/256 Color" game problem as the guy whose going to be using this is not as technical as I am.

Put an XT motherboard, digital recorder, and a 250 Watt PSU up for auction, the PSU and Motherboard are already tested, packed, and ready to rock. Just digging up free packaging wherever I can get it and putting things in boxes readied for shipping as I go.

Started experimenting more with "Virtual CD-ROM" on my 486 and on the Gateway. Thus far it's great. Have Diablo, Freddy Pharkas (Talkie Version), and Hoyale Card Games all setup on there.

Next Up - take the old SCSI setup from the Gateway and put that in my 286. At the very least, the CD-ROM drive if nothing else. That way I can completely dump my ZIP Drives once and for all. I'm kind of trying to slim down the media I have on hand.

I've been playing with my recently acquired Dell Dimension 4600 lately. The first chore I did with it was give my old 160GB external hard drive a clean slate by copying its contents to the Dell's hard drive, reformatting the external hard drive, and copying its data back into it, that drive was contaminated by an old Windows 8.1 beta installation which couldn't be removed manually so it was due for a refresh.

I've also been testing my spare DDR1 RAM modules and SATA hard drives, I discovered that one of my 512MB DDR400 modules was bad as confirmed by both MemTest86+ and Windows Memory Diagnostic. Another thing I found out is that my spare Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB 2.5" SATA hard drive has bad sectors in the middle and end when I tested it with SeaTools. I'm currently wiping a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA hard drive, this could take a while because I'm using DBAN.

Replaced a blown 2A 250W 1/4" fuse that was in my Commodore4Ever PS-64 with the one that I pulled out of my other breadbin box that needs repairs (would be surprised if the system displays a picture without the RF Modulator and with a new 2A fuse), plugged in the cables to my newly acquired C64 that I got off of eBay, and it lives!

Restoration of my Compaq Deskpro 386n is now complete. They gave it to me like 20 years ago,had some problems (probably RTC battery was dead and they trashed it entirely).
To be honest, i was going to throw it away into the trash,but i decided to give it a try and restore it .

First of all, case was all rusty and battered, the plastic yellowed by age. Disassembled every board and proceeded to scrape the rust away. Had to paint back the case with a light gray paint, matching closely the original color.
Plastic parts received the retrobrite treatment with good results.

Visual inspection and dust cleaning of all disassembled parts, checking bad caps, bent pins, blown out components. Boards were surprisingly in good shape, capacitors from PSU were all good.

The first power on after 20 years. The PSU started without problems, correct voltages. RTC chip was obviously dead and needed the coin cell battery mod, as you can see. By the way, to enter BIOS,enable the default jumper on the mobo, and then press f10 at the right time when you power on this Compaq pc.
Testing ram. this Compaq proprietary pc is very picky. Originally had 2 mb ram, but i did find ONE compatible 4mb stick (out of 30 different modules i have)... 4 + 1 megs of ram is more than enough for this 386 sx 16

This pc came with a 40mb Conner hard disk. Still working. I decided to put a CF card as primary, but i'll keep the original HDD inside powered off. Even the IDE cable is proprietary,so i can't put it as a slave unless i modify the cable, adding a 2nd ide plug (i don't wan't to break it , tho).Cf card is also handy to transfer files from my main core i7 to all older pcs.
Had a SB16 PnP around, but it works well even in non PnP pcs like this one .Well, i can put maximum 2 isa cards here, and the 2nd one is a 3com etherlink 3 (in the pic is covered by the sb16). Both of them PnP and rather new, but as far as i tested, they work, even in windows 3.11, no irq conflicts.

Installed dos 6.22 , windows 3.11, lots of games and kept all the useful drivers in a directory. put the top of the case back, and well wow, good as new. nearly like the other Compaq (at least 10 years younger) that's laying under it

Specs: 386 sx 16, 5 megs of ram(up to eight),500 mb hdd, SB16 , internal vga card,1.44 floppy drive,network card, ps2 ports, parallel and serial ports. All cramped in this tiny proprietary pc. The only fear is the PSU failing, since is proprietary too, but someone already replaced it with one with the AT standard.

Sweet system you got there.

I was testing a PIII 550 most of the long weekend and I discovered that Civilization for Windows works a hell of a lot better on this machine than on my DX2/66 😉

MUST.PLAY.MORE.

I finished my testing of a FIC 486-GIO-VP.

The motherboard is very stable and works great except for often failing to POST when doing a soft reset. It always POSTs when doing cold boots and hard resets though so it's not really a problem. My Asus PVI-486SP3 shows the same behaviour, in that case at least I think it's a BIOS issue as it only happens with some combinations of BIOS versions and CPUs.

Very speedy is one thing the 486-GIO-VP isn't. The memory speed is much lower compared to motherboards with SiS and UMC chipsets but the CPU performance seems equal. With the fastest memory settings and an Intel DX4-100 CPU the board is still fast enough to run things you expect a 486 to be able to run. I could never get the "turbo" cache setting working even at 33 MHz FSB but the "fast" setting works fine at 40+ MHz FSB.

Ah, the joys of DOS networking...

Got fed up with having to swap around CF cards every time I wanted to get some software onto my 486. So dug up an old 3Com 3C509TP Etherlink III card and got started. My idea was to use the one of Crynwr's packet drivers and MTCP to set up an FTP server which I could dump stuff on from other computers. Due to my retro-stuff being in the one room in the house without UTP, I also needed some solution for that. Fortunately I have some G.hn powerline adapters, so wanted to use those to get connectivity.

First attempt: no link. Maybe card dead? Tried another: also no link. Problems with the powerline adapter or cable? Plugged a more modern laptop in - link & connectivity straight away. Then suddenly remembered - I'd logged a ticket for these devices (closed with 'won't fix') that they don't support 10Mbps 😦 Given lack of alternatives (no 100Mbps ISA cards, no other powerline or similar) I needed a switch. Now I have two in use, small 8-port things. And I have 4 in storage, but they're 48p monsters. Only other thing that could pass for a switch is an old, crap Sitecom router. So configured that thing as dumb as possible (no WiFi, no NAT, fixed IP inside my main router's range) and hey presto, through it I had link to both the 3C509 and the powerline adapter.

Next try: getting the card working. The packet driver found the card right away (on x210 and interrupt 9) and assigned software interrupt x60 to it. Added a minimal config file (a single line, "packetint 0x60"), set the mtcpcfg variable to that, ran DHCP and - got an IP, could ping my router, could ping outside, it all worked 😀

But...

Then I added the exact same commands to autoexec.bat, rebooted and... nothing. No ARP, no packets whatsoever over the card. Couldn't find anything wrong, so rebooted again without the commands, did them again manually and still nothing. Tried a different card: nothing again. On a hunch tried to log into the router and it failed after the first login prompt. Even after a power cycle it still was unavailable, so looks like it doesn't like being a switch after all and it's NVRAM is all screwed up. Too late today to do any more, but will get one of my big beasts out tomorrow to at least see if I'm right and it is the router that's to blame. If so, need to find a switch (any dumb 10/100Mbps thing should suffice) to replace it.

Oh well. Never a dull moment I suppose.

...and a day later I fixed it.

The router/switch had nothing to do with it as it turns out. This evening I turned the PC on and lo and behold everything worked. Great! But yesterday it also worked until a soft reboot. So did a soft reboot and... nothing again, no packets at all, despite not having touched any config. Given the packet driver sends the packets that was my main suspect. I was using the Crynwr packet driver 3C509.COM, but I also had the 3Com Etherdisk tools, so dug around in there and found that 3Com had their own packet driver, 3C5X9PD.COM. Tried that instead, and it just worked. Rebooted and it still just worked. Added it to AUTOEXEC.BAT and rebooted again - and yes, I could ping, ftp, do all the MTCP things I wanted.

Not sure if the Crynwr driver is designed for (much) older/slower systems than my 486 and hitting timing issues, or if it's just buggy. Regardless, as they say in Wales: Gwynt teg ar ei ôl! 😜

I put the finishing touches on my silent, non-period-correct retro gaming PC, and have added it to my sig.

It's a mini-ITX VIA C7 @ 1.2 GHz (roughly equivalent to a P3 750) with a PCI slot multiplier allowing me to fit both a Radeon 9200SE 128MB (or Voodoo3 2000) and a Yamaha YMF744. It's dual-booting Windows 98 SE (+ DOS 7.1) and Windows 2000.

The oldest game I've gotten it to run (so far) is Duke Nukem II, and the newest is Black and White II. That's 1992 to 2005. I'm quite the proud mama. 😊

mTCP is pretty easy to setup... easiest way to do it is setup networking in windows 3.x and then run ipconfig in Windows, pull those values and dump them into your mtcp.cfg file

I found out I have a dead Intel 486SX 25mhz..
Was testing multiple boards and one board wouldn't start. Checked all jumpers 2 times and still nothing. Swapped in the 486SX 25 from another board and the thing starts. 😵
Never ever had a dead one before, my own 486DX 40 even survived a lightning hit on our power net, only killing the psu and damaging the motherboard.
I really wonder what happened to/with it to make it die.

On a sidenote: all boards I tested worked, only concern is the last board I tested with a 386DX40 soldered on it, which has substantial battery leakage damage. One of the cache sockets is greenish, the AT connector is growing and 3-4 resistors/tantalum caps have a green base and legs.

oeuvre wrote:

mTCP is pretty easy to setup... easiest way to do it is setup networking in windows 3.x and then run ipconfig in Windows, pull those values and dump them into your mtcp.cfg file

mTCP itself was no problem whatsoever, it was just mucking around with the packet drivers and going on wild goose chases at layer 1 that took time. Typical - my professional expertise is in layer 1/2 hardware so that's where I instinctively look for problems. If your only tool is a hammer, all problems start looking like nails 😉

WIll be looking at WFW3.11 in my next builds (Pentium -> K6-3+ together with my son, 486 with only UMC chips for myself), this one is pure DOS and purely temporary, testing hardware and getting back all that long-forgotten knowledge about how DOS works.

Gearing up for my last three retro builds right now. I only have three old Sound Blaster cards left. This of course is plan A, and plan A is subject to change at any time. The four remaining motherboards had the leaking batteries removed when i saved my first 486.
https://imgur.com/a/AWdzM
I'll be sacrificing coin battery holders from newer - dead motherboards, one by one if any of these three fail to spin up.

Started a 486 VLB build, and decided I wanted to use my ARK1000 VLB video card in it.

Dang, that sucks. Upon visual inspection of the card:

Can you spot the problem? Fortunately I have a steady hand and could fix it. This was the first time testing the card, I don't know if I did this myself or the previous owner did it.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Started a 486 VLB build, and decided I wanted to use my ARK1000 VLB video card in it. […]
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Started a 486 VLB build, and decided I wanted to use my ARK1000 VLB video card in it.

Dang, that sucks. Upon visual inspection of the card:

Can you spot the problem? Fortunately I have a steady hand and could fix it. This was the first time testing the card, I don't know if I did this myself or the previous owner did it.

De pin De pin!

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Started a 486 VLB build, and decided I wanted to use my ARK1000 VLB video card in it. […]
Show full quote

Started a 486 VLB build, and decided I wanted to use my ARK1000 VLB video card in it.

Dang, that sucks. Upon visual inspection of the card:

Can you spot the problem? Fortunately I have a steady hand and could fix it. This was the first time testing the card, I don't know if I did this myself or the previous owner did it.

The pin leg on the right side is pressing against the next leg over (left of the bent leg). That's an easy repair (using a screwdriver carefully, that is).