Thallanor wrote:

liqmat wrote:

When I used to be a computer tech back in the early 90s someone brought in a computer with PSU issues. I turned it on and an electric arc formed between the PSU and the case. Have no idea why, but if my arm had been in the way at the time I certainly would not be around anymore. Needless to say, I replaced the PSU immediately. Solved the issue. It happened so fast I had no time to react.

In the early 2000s, I was working on a PC at work when I pinched a cable between the chassis and the cover and did not notice. I had a case window and when I turned on the PC, immediately, the cable caught fire. I cut the power and the fire went out. It was a work computer and figuring it was already toast at this point, I turned it back on and saw the fire return. I then spent the next couple minutes turning the computer on and off, watching the fire turn on and off with it, 🤣. Yes, I'm special.

We're brothers from another mother. 🤣

I still exist.

I took my high paying (and long hours) job back. I now have the money to buy retro parts, but I sure as shit don't have the time to use/test/play games on them. All I do is sleep, eat, and work.

I have a question, what in your experience is the failure rate of your components while sitting unused in your collection? I have so much stuff sometimes I wonder if any of it has quit just sitting inside cardboard boxes/PCs. Hell, I have 70 GPU's alone. Once I have time I need to figure out why my Viewsonic GA-17 (which is in use with my permenantly setup DOS PC due to its built in speakers) has gone wonky. It starts going crazy if it's tapped or bumped, and tapping it a few times again it starts working again. I'm guessing I have a cracked solder joint somewhere. I also need to fix the ground pin on the VGA connector (t's bent down in the connector) as the lack of contact is causing some minor but annoying geometry issues when it's working right. That should be fun.

My mission over the next 4 months is to acquire working examples of the GeForce 256 DDR, GeForce2 Ti and Pro, GeForce3 Ti 200 and Ti 500, GeForce 4 Ti 4400 and 4600, GeForce FX 5200 5400 5500 5600 5700 and 5900, GeForce 6200 6600 (GT) 6800 (Plain and GS), GeForce 7600 (GT and non GT) GeForce 7800 (GS, GT, GTX, GTO) and 7900 (GT, GTX). These cards seem to be going up in price and I'm hoping to spend under a grand getting all of them. Radeon cards are on the back burner because honestly they seem to be pretty stagnate in price (excluding the Rage Fury MAXX which I also need to acquire). NVIDIA cards seem to have much higher retro demand. I'll worry about DX10 cards later as I already have quite a few of them.

oeuvre wrote:

Replaced the motherboard in my Optiplex 745... it had a leaky cap and a new mobo was cheaper than buying soldering iron + caps. […]
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Replaced the motherboard in my Optiplex 745... it had a leaky cap and a new mobo was cheaper than buying soldering iron + caps.

new

old (see cap above video card)

I hate bulged out caps on motherboards. My Dimension 4550 motherboard still has 4 bulged out caps by the processor, yet, the system still runs. I'm planning on replacing those caps with better ones in the near future and install Linux on the system as XP won't activate any longer since October. Every other motherboard I have never had cap issues, especially a PCChips Socket 754 board that I have is still in working order. The only add-on card device that needs new caps is my STB Black Magic VooDoo2 card since two of them either went missing and broke off mysteriously or the one had a big dent on the top of the cap (SMD capacitor), which I've never soldered on SMD anything before, except the one time I repaired my ThinkPad R40's heatsink fan power connector a couple of months ago.

Also, that is one cool system you got there. Is it running Windows XP, 7, or Linux?

bjwil1991 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Replaced the motherboard in my Optiplex 745... it had a leaky cap and a new mobo was cheaper than buying soldering iron + caps. […]
Show full quote

Replaced the motherboard in my Optiplex 745... it had a leaky cap and a new mobo was cheaper than buying soldering iron + caps.

new

old (see cap above video card)

I hate bulged out caps on motherboards. My Dimension 4550 motherboard still has 4 bulged out caps by the processor, yet, the system still runs. I'm planning on replacing those caps with better ones in the near future and install Linux on the system as XP won't activate any longer since October. Every other motherboard I have never had cap issues, especially a PCChips Socket 754 board that I have is still in working order. The only add-on card device that needs new caps is my STB Black Magic VooDoo2 card since two of them either went missing and broke off mysteriously or the one had a big dent on the top of the cap (SMD capacitor), which I've never soldered on SMD anything before, except the one time I repaired my ThinkPad R40's heatsink fan power connector a couple of months ago.

Also, that is one cool system you got there. Is it running Windows XP, 7, or Linux?

I made my last post at work. Just a few minutes ago I powered on an Optiplex 745 I had setup last year to wipe hard drives with and a capacitor exploded.

Not the most reliable machines.

I modded a stock LGA 775 cooler to be used on a geforce 4 TI, the stock cooler of the geforce 4 is totally not up to the job and the fan is noisy as all hell so i took an old unused stock 775 cooler and used a dremel to drill holes and cut the feet used to attach it to the motherboard, then i modified the fan to be powered directly by the GPU and everything is perfect BUT, now i don't know what kind of heatsink springs to use for the smaller holes near the chipset (the 5700 has the same holes)

Anybody has an idea or a link to ebay ?

ssokolow wrote:

I don't suppose you maintain some kind of catch-up archive I could download so I only have to grab the updates going forward from now? If nothing else. I'm not sure if I'll find a use for them, but my packrat sense is tingling.

Un-coincidentally, the site linked in my signature. Icons are on the Files page. Made a mega-pack of the first 64 icons to save hassle, and it's still a small file. Need PKUNZIP to decompress it if you're doing so on an older system, as plain old Winzip for Win3 can't handle the compression level that I use.

What software have you tried (both for image editing and for hacking PSP3)?

Borland C++ Decompiler. Choked on trying to disassemble PSP.EXE (something about it being encrypted or compressed), so I didn't bother with PROGMAN and FILEMAN. Also went fishing though PSP with a hex editor, but none of the text on the shareware popup is in the executable as plain text, though I could change the menu text without issue. Still, didn't have a computer growing up, so I missed out on all of the opportunities to learn how to do this properly. You know, before the language centers of your brain stop becoming so readily accepting of new languages. I wanted to change the minimize, maximize, menu, and other mundane icons in Windows 3 without going so far as using Calmira. My 486 seems to hate it for some reason anyway. As far as image editing as a whole goes, I use PSP 7.04 (that I bought at an Office Depot about 16 years ago), and rarely PSP X. PSP 3 is only used for saving screenshots from the 486.

To show it permanently, right-click any toolbar widget without its own context menu and "Menu Bar" will show up in the list of toolbars that can be toggled.

Thanks for the tip.

I have a question, what in your experience is the failure rate of your components while sitting unused in your collection?

Not bad. Just watch out for leaking batteries and excessive humidity. I've had a few things fail because of corrosion due to those factors. Some things will appear to be dead at first, but they just need contacts cleaned, chips reseated, or jumper settings corrected. I had one card that blew a capacitor after being unused for 15 years. But if you showed me a pile of gear that had been working that was stored for a decade or two, I'd expect at least 90% to still be good.

bjwil1991 wrote:

~snip~
I hate bulged out caps on motherboards. My Dimension 4550 motherboard still has 4 bulged out caps by the processor, yet, the system still runs. I'm planning on replacing those caps with better ones in the near future and install Linux on the system as XP won't activate any longer since October. Every other motherboard I have never had cap issues, especially a PCChips Socket 754 board that I have is still in working order. The only add-on card device that needs new caps is my STB Black Magic VooDoo2 card since two of them either went missing and broke off mysteriously or the one had a big dent on the top of the cap (SMD capacitor), which I've never soldered on SMD anything before, except the one time I repaired my ThinkPad R40's heatsink fan power connector a couple of months ago.

Same here. I've had two Dells with capacitor issues: an Optiplex GX260 and an Optiplex GX520. The GX260 motherboard will be recapped at some point. I ended up replacing the GX520 motherboard with a 745 one (which hasn't had a capacitor bulge so far, thankfully) because I wanted to upgrade that system with some things that weren't permitted with the GX520 board. If my 745 motherboard ever has a capacitor issue, I'll probably replace it with a 755-780 board at that point while they're still cheap.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I made my last post at work. Just a few minutes ago I powered on an Optiplex 745 I had setup last year to wipe hard drives with and a capacitor exploded.

Not the most reliable machines.

I remember using my Optiplex GX520 to wipe hard drives. It had a bulged capacitor, but it still worked OK aside from the CMOS settings not being saved even with a new CMOS battery. Since you're dealing with a work computer, hopefully your workplace will take care of it if it gets any worse. After all, those old Optiplexes are a dime a dozen these days.

I don't remember what model it was, but I had a pizza box Optiplex desktop (Core 2 Duo, ca.~2007) that was rotten with bad caps. Every single one was bulging or leaking. Whatever they used in those were pure junk & the heat buildup and crappy airflow in there just set them all off.

Swapping the board won't fix this, it'll just delay the inevitable. If you're gonna keep using it, it'll need new caps eventually.

On the other hand, my Vostro 400 minitower from the same era shows no such signs. Maybe they went with a different board manufacturer or maybe they used more expensive caps in the slightly-upmarket Vostro line, I dunno. YMMV.

Trying to get an HP T5720 thin client going.

Went through 5 new 44-pin IDE to msata adapters with all of them not behaving correctly... pieces of trash. Didn't even bother trying the 6th one.

Then tried a 120GB Seagate HDD and it gave an error writing to the drive when installing Windows 98SE.. this was after a full format. So into the scrap pile it went. I really hate Seagate drives. More of them in my scrap pile than any other drives.

Now trying with a Fujitsu drive...

^Agreed on the Seagate drives. I have a 1tb model purchased about 2 years ago that has 36 bad sectors. . .and about 2000 power on hours. First newly purchased Seagate drive, wont be happening again.

Meanwhile the 2012 Hitachi 2tb drive with 20k plus power on hours I bought used for $20 is perfect.

Mister Xiado wrote:

Un-coincidentally, the site linked in my signature. Icons are on the Files page. Made a mega-pack of the first 64 icons to save hassle, and it's still a small file. Need PKUNZIP to decompress it if you're doing so on an older system, as plain old Winzip for Win3 can't handle the compression level that I use.

Thanks. 😀

Mister Xiado wrote:

Borland C++ Decompiler. Choked on trying to disassemble PSP.EXE (something about it being encrypted or compressed), so I didn't bother with PROGMAN and FILEMAN. Also went fishing though PSP with a hex editor, but none of the text on the shareware popup is in the executable as plain text, though I could change the menu text without issue. Still, didn't have a computer growing up, so I missed out on all of the opportunities to learn how to do this properly. You know, before the language centers of your brain stop becoming so readily accepting of new languages. I wanted to change the minimize, maximize, menu, and other mundane icons in Windows 3 without going so far as using Calmira. My 486 seems to hate it for some reason anyway. As far as image editing as a whole goes, I use PSP 7.04 (that I bought at an Office Depot about 16 years ago), and rarely PSP X. PSP 3 is only used for saving screenshots from the 486.

If it is encrypted/compressed, see if UNP can make it more comprehensible to your tools.

As for debugging it, back when I was in high school, I did crack a shareware DOOM level editor by following some instructions which used a cracked copy of Win32Dasm. Judging by this entry on Softpedia, it's either abandonware or freeware now, and it'd be the easiest solution. (I say "abandonware or freeware" because the last release claims to be a non-redistributable registered version, but various sites claim it to be freeware, I haven't been able to track down an authoritative answer because the vendor is long gone, and there is precedent for software being free'd without them bothering to patch out the warnings.)

This blog post goes through the process of doing something similar in great detail and with screenshots.

Unfortunately, the copy of IDA Pro Freeware v5.0 that's offered on ScummVM's HOWTO-Reverse Engineering page doesn't seem to support Win16 (just DOS and Win32), so the legally free option for one of the two approaches covered by the blog post is inapplicable.

OpenWatcom C/C++ has the WDW.EXE debugger, which can show a disassembly, and supports running under Windows 3.1, but I haven't figured out how to search for strings properly. (On that note, if you have Borland C++ Decompiler, do you have Borland Turbo Debugger? It should have a disassembly view.)

I did a little googling around and here's what else I found:

The Wine developer Wiki recommends a disassembler named Windows CodeBack for disassembling NE files (Google for "wcb105a.zip". It's shareware with no registration required for non-commercial use and none of the registered-only features being relevant.)

If you have a Linux machine, semblance seems to be equivalent to at least the basic functionality of Windows CodeBack. There's also a tool named MBBSDASM which appears to be a Windows analogue.

None of them are as convenient as win32dasm, but win32dasm doesn't work in Wine currently. (It seems to have font-loading problems.)

(TatraDAS is also an open-source disassembler that supports NE and it even has a built-in hex editor... but it doesn't seem to support working with non-code segments, which makes it pretty useless for this task.)

Another Linux option would be to run PSP3 in Wine and use WineDbg with gdbgui's "remote GDB" support.

I have really got to start doing something productive.

Make an icon pack for modern Windows and OS X.

As some of you know I recently purchased a second Cardinal SNAPplus video capture/overlay 16-bit ISA card which are very hard to find complete. The second card had the other variation of drivers/software that came packed in. So after over a year of hunting down the SNAPplus variant bundle I have now compiled an absolute definitive archive of the Cardinal SNAPplus if any of you need the drivers, manuals or software that came with it. You can find that download over at -0° here:

http://minuszerodegrees.net/manuals.htm#Cardinal

ssokolow wrote:

(Information regarding gutting Win16 applications)

Appreciated, and saved for later.

oeuvre wrote:

Make an icon pack for modern Windows and OS X.

I made an icon pack fourteen years ago for Win9X/XP, but I really don't like it anymore. It's called Ninomium. As far as OSX goes, possible, but ultimately pointless. I wouldn't be bringing anything new to the table, and my only OSX-capable Apple system isn't Intel-based, which means I can run anything made in, oh, maybe the past decade on it, putting me way too far behind the times. Also anything I would do has likely been done better and worse by thousands of others who believe that spending thousands on Apple's veblen goods makes them the superior artiste.

Made another pack. Sleep deprivation has its uses.

Would anyone like me to upload the images of these Wang APC disks? I acquired these through a Craigslist listing from a very nice gentleman. There are 25 Wang 5¼" 360K diskettes for the Wang APC. All of them are in mint condition. He also included two cleaning disks. One for an 8" floppy disk drive and one for a 5¼" floppy disk drive. It looks like they are all the system and diag software plus two versions of Wang's word processor software.

I put a new fan in my PSU. My old one was making an awful noise. It turns out that the noise wasn't from the fan, but only happened if I over tightened just one of the screws inside the case. Weird... But this fan is a quieter and cost me 15 bucks, so it stays.

And I ended up plugging the fan into a 5 pin connector, so luckily I could just fit the cable through the same hole as the power switch cable. The connector in the PSU was a 2 pin. I have an adapter that fit into it well enough, but I felt better about using the 5 pin.

Next I'm going to paint the inside of the case black and I'd also like to swap out my boring gray IDE cable for one of these cables if they're compatible?

Mister Xiado wrote:

Appreciated, and saved for later.

Looking back at that post, I got carried away again. It's now a blog post with even more on offer:

Resources for Reverse-Engineering 16-bit Applications

ssokolow wrote:

Mister Xiado wrote:

Appreciated, and saved for later.

Looking back at that post, I got carried away again. It's now a blog post with even more on offer:

Resources for Reverse-Engineering 16-bit Applications

Thanks again. Tried a few tools, they all choked on PSP's executable. Upon further investigation, even if I was able to gut it, it would be like disassembling a jet engine. I wouldn't know what to do to fix the problem. The time required to achieve proficiency exceeds the value of the results.