paint job complete \o/ https://imgur.com/a/VtHRx

Hit an AMD 5x86 jackpot and got a 180mhz(only 3.x volt) 486 system running - 2nd level cache is disabled though.

Northbridge was unstable at 66mhz - heatsink added which resolved the issue.
Bigger heatsink added albeit 200 are unrealistic under normal circumstances.

luckybob wrote:

@dionb

if shipping wasn't an absolute bastard, you could sell it to me. 😀

Tempting - but you're right about shipping, that would make any deal thoroughly uneconomical for at least one of us. I have the same problem the other way round with getting my Trackball Explorers repaired: the only people doing it are in the US, and just shipping there and back would cost more than buying another, even with the inflated prices they command.

Some day I see myself getting so frustrated I fly to NYC or similar for a weekend, with a suitcase full of hardware to take to the nearest post office 😉

I bought the big brother to that board a few weeks ago. I was surprised to see yours didn't have onboard video. anyway. I love these systems they make great XP rigs.

Surprised me too, although given these boards can run headless with no troubles by no means a disaster.

I've been stripping our retired systems at work, and boss is letting me take home anything that isn't useful to us at the station. Lots of DDR1, IDE drives, etc. Scored a nice Antec 350W PSU with 35A +5v, so I decided to put together a build for fun and paired it up with a spare 2500+ Barton I have. Other specs are Asus A7V333-X, 2x256MB PC2700, Radeon X1300XT (DDR2 version unfortunately), Audigy SE, and a 160GB Caviar Blue. I put XP Home SP2 on it, and have been wondering why it feels so damn slow in Windows, especially copying files...

That explains it! Compared to a (much less healthy, note) drive in my 2400+ system:

So I guess I need to figure out what's up with that. Also, on this motherboard, the main IDE port doesn't seem to work (won't detect hard disk), so I'm wondering if the whole IDE controller is flakey. Guess I'll try the drive in another system, and maybe try one of those Promise PCI cards in this system with the drive too.

I finally managed to crack open my Toshiba Satellite 315CDS laptop, a couple of screws have been stripped, so a lot of hard work was indeed necessary but it was all worth it. At some point I'm going to get a TFT screen from a 3xxCDT laptop to replace the cruddy DSTN screen, I just need to keep an eye on a cheap parts or repair laptop on eBay to use as a parts donor. (due to the attachment size being changed to 2MB, I had to resize this image before I could upload it.)

For anyone who has a mid '90s Toshiba laptop, have you checked the inside to see if the screen has this connector?

CapnCrunch53 wrote:

Scored a nice Antec 350W PSU with 35A +5v

I'd check the capacitors on that if I were you. Antec has been known for using questionable capacitors in some of their power supplies.

Demoed my app to build a retro pc to my girlfriend and advertised pixelmusement's dos videos to her. The app received the mild praise it deserves and she didn't give a toss about the dos videos, never does.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

I finally managed to crack open my Toshiba Satellite 315CDS laptop, a couple of screws have been stripped, so a lot of hard work […]
Show full quote

I finally managed to crack open my Toshiba Satellite 315CDS laptop, a couple of screws have been stripped, so a lot of hard work was indeed necessary but it was all worth it. At some point I'm going to get a TFT screen from a 3xxCDT laptop to replace the cruddy DSTN screen, I just need to keep an eye on a cheap parts or repair laptop on eBay to use as a parts donor. (due to the attachment size being changed to 2MB, I had to resize this image before I could upload it.)

IMG_1805fixed.jpg

For anyone who has a mid '90s Toshiba laptop, have you checked the inside to see if the screen has this connector?

IMG_1809.JPG

CapnCrunch53 wrote:

Scored a nice Antec 350W PSU with 35A +5v

I'd check the capacitors on that if I were you. Antec has been known for using questionable capacitors in some of their power supplies.

The connecter on the mobo for DSTN and LCD versions is different so this should not work.. 😒
I have a few of those older Toshiba notebooks and already looked into it.. Check the difference between the motherboards.

Im messing with a FIC 486-GIO-VP motherboard from the huge load.

It came without cache and loads of jumpers were either missing or configured... interestingly.

Normally setting up a CPU and the cache (I added 256kb) with the help of Stason takes 2 minuts, I think I spent half an hour messing with this board.

"I'm Afraid I Can't Do That, Dave"... It seems like this board would not work past the BIOS screen unless jumpered to perfection... Well after some trial and error I got it going.

Notice the amount of jumpers,..

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/F/FI … 486-GIO-VP.html

I had 2 486 AT motherboards that had so many jumpers that I had to find the manuals online for them. My Packard Bell only needed a couple of jumpers moved in order for me to upgrade the CPU from the SX2-50 to a DX2-66, then DX4-100 OverDrive (jumpers stayed the same).

Nvm1 wrote:

The connecter on the mobo for DSTN and LCD versions is different so this should not work.. 😒
I have a few of those older Toshiba notebooks and already looked into it.. Check the difference between the motherboards.

Fuck. I thought there'd be a chance on getting the DSTN screen on my 315CDS replaced with one from a 3xxCDT. Upon quick glance on some eBay listings it looked like the Satellite 2210/2250CDT used the same LCD connector as mine so IDK for sure. Now that you warned me about this, I decided to look for inside shots of a 3xxCDT Toshiba laptop (I managed to find an inside shot of a 330CDT here) and it appears that even though the motherboard looks the same, it's the type of screen connector that's different (I want to say the TFT connector is a clip-on connector like the floppy drive connector), so this might require some modification. We'll see when/if I find a cheap Toshiba Satellite 3xxCDT to use for this experiment.

bjwil1991 wrote:

I had 2 486 AT motherboards that had so many jumpers that I had to find the manuals online for them. My Packard Bell only needed a couple of jumpers moved in order for me to upgrade the CPU from the SX2-50 to a DX2-66, then DX4-100 OverDrive (jumpers stayed the same).

No need to change much as all your cpus are 5V. You only needed to change FSB from 25 to 33Mhz when going from SX2-50 to DX2-66. Overdrive also works on the same 33MHz bus. Maybe a jumper for selecting DX over SX... but this isn't even necessary.

Otherwise you also need jumpers for WT/WB cache operation, voltage, multiplier and so on... but this is on newer boards.

oeuvre wrote:

paint job complete \o/ https://imgur.com/a/VtHRx

That's actually not bad at all. As a bodyman, I would have pounded out the slash on the side a bit more carefully, or even used a filler to blend it, but overall, yeah! If you're going to clear coat the front bezel, be careful - let it dry completely and apply the laquer (I suggest laquer over any other top coat) sporadically and in light coats.

A few things actually:

From my 30 minute glance through the setup manual and 5 minutes of googling, I realize this thing is "mostly" IBM compatible. Even GGA graphics are a miss.

I'll file this one away for now, concentrating on the shipment from China:

Two of these were ordered - 256 MB IDE drives, but they arrived as a mis-matched set. One was a 512 Mb unit, one was 256 Mb. As it turns out, the 486DLC's maximum capacity IS 512Mb.

Score.

I let the thing boot up, and this is what it did:

It did a soft reboot after a while and recycled itself, infinitely. The partitions were set to 99% HPFS and 1% unknown. I briefly considered mounting it into a computer that could handle it, file system wise, but I decided to install DOS 6.22 on it and run it through some burn tests before I give feedback.

The only issue is, the drive header is female, which makes it hard to connect to anything else, IDE cable-wise. Looks like I will have to cut 40 individual solid AWG 20 or 22 wires, slot them into the header and gaft tape the female ends in together. I do plan on using the slave for a CF card along with SCSI2SD and depending on BIOS calls, the boot order is TBD, as I may have to now shuffle the SCSI2SD between the solid state IDE drive and the CF card.

I'll do some more diags after vacation, but I did notice the seek time is negligible, whereas write times were about (upon cursory glance) on par with an SCSI Barracuda, or at least an IDE Medalist.

It's quite strange to hear the system boot up silently after over a decade of hearing the SCSI Barracuda's wild rotational noise 😉 I will keep that drive as well as an MFM unit and make a display case with MOLEX connectors as an auditory museum so I can hear those things spin up when I feel the nostalgic need 😉

Jed118 wrote:

Looks like I will have to cut 40 individual solid AWG 20 or 22 wires, slot them into the header and gaft tape the female ends in together.

Couldn't you just use two rows of pin headers as a dongle?

Jed118 wrote:

The only issue is, the drive header is female, which makes it hard to connect to anything else, IDE cable-wise. Looks like I will have to cut 40 individual solid AWG 20 or 22 wires, slot them into the header and gaft tape the female ends in together.

🤣 no let the thing live 🤣 Just get a "gender changer", something like this

Moving my modern build into an older case. It's not necessarily retro but... once the 5.25" USB 3.0 and DVD/RW drive come in the mail, I'll share it.

konc wrote:

Jed118 wrote:

The only issue is, the drive header is female, which makes it hard to connect to anything else, IDE cable-wise. Looks like I will have to cut 40 individual solid AWG 20 or 22 wires, slot them into the header and gaft tape the female ends in together.

🤣 no let the thing live 🤣 Just get a "gender changer", something like this

I hadn't thought of that, excellent idea, or the row of pin connectors as CkRtech suggested. I know just where to get those from as well.

More of something on the Apple side of things but I have four Radeon x800 cards that need to be tested.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/CGS_7816.jpg

Two of them are non-qualification samples. The cards have a major design flaw in the heatsinks. Instead of being a one-piece extrusion it's a copper plate and fins soldered together. Works fine until the fan either begins to seize up or dies entirely. Then as the heatsink overheats the fins desolder and the cards tend to race away to a firey hell.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsa … ed/CGS_7817.jpg

Sometimes if you are lucky you can catch it before that point and either a new fan or a moderate chip reflow repairs them. I'm hoping one at least works.

Replaced the Asus V7700 (Geforce 2 GTS) in my Pentium 4 build with the same model but with passive cooling, as the fan failed on the other...

I was trying to get the most of SS7 system made of Shuttle HOT-591p and Pentium 200 ( p54c ).

I managed to get it to post at 83mhz fsb and 210 mhz and 75mhz fsb and 225mhz. 83x3 didn't work, so no 250mhz Pentium for me. Neither did work 90mhz fsb.

On related note, on the same board I am trying to validate old 850MB and 2GB drives, but it seems both are dead. My alternative plan - of using a IDE->Sata converter and a 4GB SSD, but the board does not even post with the converter plugged in.

So I guess it's CF card for this system.