accidentally dropped my 2010 smartphone in the sink so it's drying out in a sack of rice until I pick up some silica gel stuff. So far so good 😁

Got the experience of carrying a 19" CRT monitor again then a friend gave me a Compaq P900 Trinitron monitor today.

Predator99 wrote:

Indeed, it should be 512k. Yes, I tried some dip combinations but nothing changed. I set 512 manually in the CMOS and I get still this error, it only disappears when setting to 128K. I dont think its a hardware problem and I am not going to use this board. Its just for my collection therefore I will not care any more about this.

Does your XT have a CMOS (would be quite unusual)? Maybe you have to set the correct memory size there first?

I don't think it does, but until I get a working XT keyboard, which will be soon, I wont know. Luckily I have all the original docs/software for it (purchased separately), but unfortunately the jumper settings for the board are only in the technical reference manual which I don't have. The dip switch settings in my docs shows settings for up to 256K, so you have to wing it with anything over that.

I did find this ITT Xtra technical reference guide, but it is for a slightly different board model so the jumper settings don't match. All the dip switches line up though. I have J1-12 on my board where as the board in the tech doc has J1-J6. I'm still messing around. Part of the fun. Right? Fun. I have convinced myself this is fun. Grrr... 😈

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/ITT/I … 20Reference.pdf

Came out pretty good. Next thing I gotta do my speakers at some point.

Alas, I repainted my SNES, NES, and Atari XE before the concept of plastic treatment became a reality (they were each nearly neon brown at the time), but my XE's buttons weren't painted, and my other classic computers could stand to lighten up. Alas, being nearly winter, that will have to wait, unless I use Dave's stovetop method for the XE buttons. Economy being as dead as it is, I have to go quite a distance to buy peroxide now.

Scraphoarder wrote:

Got the experience of carrying a 19" CRT monitor again then a friend gave me a Compaq P900 Trinitron monitor today.

Compaq_P900.jpg

Nice looking crt + you got a good workout.

clueless1 wrote:

I went ahead and cleaned all the contacts and put it back in. Upon firing it back up, flickering was gone. So maybe the card got a little loose in the VLB slot or the contacts were dirty. Who knows?

Yuk I hate it when things go bad an then mysteriously come good again without a specific reason. Fingers crossed it was a one-off!

I spent some time finally sorting out my multi-gigabyte folder full of retro computing stuff. I found the th99 hardware archives in zip format and decided it'd be nice to have it unzipped for easier access... but I didn't really want 60,000 files dumped onto my system, so I'm in the process of copying it all onto an old 1GB micro-SD that I would probably never do anything else with. I thought about putting it on a CD, but it'd probably be painful to navigate such a large number of files with that kind of latency.

Kind of incredible that an archive of information on 15,000 different PC components (in HTML with pictures and another copy in plain txt) can fit onto something as tiny and obsolete as a 1GB micro SD. 😀

Took a photo and powered on/fixed an HP 28C calculator that had function issues, and the old Palmtop PC 320LX my dad had for a number of years.

The HP Calculators were known for not being serviceable, but prying a spot, and spraying contact cleaner in the calculator got it functioning once again.

Possibly picking up mystery white box pc with a 10gb fujitsu HDD dated late 1998. So hopefully it will have some good stuff in it! Got the hard drive first and asked about what it came out of, so saving another box from the great recycle machine of death.

clueless1 wrote:

So maybe the card got a little loose in the VLB slot or the contacts were dirty.

Very Loose Bus

oeuvre wrote:

Came out pretty good. Next thing I gotta do my speakers at some point.

Well, you show me yours, I guess I show you mine..

In other news, my homemade SLI cable failed. It was a wonder it worked in the first place, I made it myself and it was ghetto as hell. Now both cards work individually but SLI is not detected, so I need to buy a new cable on eBay. God people are overcharging for this POS..

CkRtech wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

So maybe the card got a little loose in the VLB slot or the contacts were dirty.

Very Loose Bus

I see what you did there.

Formatted a huge pile of 3.5" dd disks I got for free a few days ago. Even included some single sided disks, which formatted fine as double sided, though.

clueless1 wrote:

CkRtech wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

So maybe the card got a little loose in the VLB slot or the contacts were dirty.

Very Loose Bus

I see what you did there.

Bang Bus?

bjwil1991 wrote:

Took a photo and powered on/fixed an HP 28C calculator that had function issues, and the old Palmtop PC 320LX my dad had for a n […]
Show full quote

Took a photo and powered on/fixed an HP 28C calculator that had function issues, and the old Palmtop PC 320LX my dad had for a number of years.

The HP Calculators were known for not being serviceable, but prying a spot, and spraying contact cleaner in the calculator got it functioning once again.

Wow. Seeing that CE device reminds me of when I had a Compaq iPAQ H3870 running the Microsoft PPC 2002 OS. It had an arcade perfect port (may have been emulation) of Marble Madness that I played to death on that thing. The cool thing about those PPC PDAs was all the games were portable so you could copy them to your computer and run them in an emulator or another PPC device.

No video of it running on Pocket PC 2002, but this guy has a photo of it down at the bottom of his page.

http://www.bodenstaendig.de/marble/bio.htm

Spent a while trying to figure out an issue with my hard disk that first cropped up a couple days ago. Upon power up or rebooting, my 486 would sometimes say it could not find any system disk. Attempting to either reset or power off and wait a bit before trying again would change nothing.

When it first happened, I just assumed that the hard disk had gone kaput. On a whim, I tried unplugging and re-inserting the IDE cable and then booting the PC up again. For whatever reason now worked fine. Strange. However, the same issue happened again later. Decided to this time try the BIOS' IDE auto detect and see what came up (the BIOS previously had no problems doing this). Detected a drive on the correct IDE channel but with junk values that were quite off. Not entirely unexpected if the system is complaining that it can't find a system disk to boot from.

I'm using a Promise Technology 560C VLB I/O controller card that has two IDE channels + floppy. I had the hard disk connected to the primary (VESA bus) channel and the CD-ROM connected to the secondary (ISA) channel. Both drives configured as master. I had been using this exact setup with the same motherboard, IO card, drives and IDE cables with no issues since I got the IO controller card in early September. As a result, I again was suspecting that the hard disk was maybe not quite totally dead yet, but was perhaps on it's slow way out.

Swapped in another drive to test and it worked, but a couple reboots later it started to not detect this hard disk either. Argh! Ok, maybe the drive isn't dead / dying after all? Maybe the problem is with the IO card. Luckily I had one other IO controller card on hand to try out, a UMC SST-2946/8 VLB card. Had a little bit of a problem at first with this card. Even though it also has two IDE channels, my previous setup with both drives on their own channel (and cables), both configured as master did not work. Had to set the CD-ROM to slave for it to boot successfully. Then it pretty much was the same story as before... first couple of boots, it all worked fine. Eventually the same issue did crop up again. I also tried without the CD-ROM connected at all and eventually hit the same issue with that configuration also. Ugh. 🙁 Tried a different IDE cable too, but no luck there... eventually showed the same issue.

Decided this time to go back to the Promise Tech IO card and bypass the VESA bus entirely for the IDE devices (kind of wish I had a plain ISA controller card right now, but unfortunately I do not). The card has a jumper configuration printed on the card itself that seems to clearly indicate that it sets the ISA channel as the primary (the UMC card probably has this configuration too, but it's not as obvious to me from looking at the labels printed on the card itself and I cannot find a manual for either of these cards). Configured the CD-ROM to slave and connected both it and the hard disk to the same IDE cable.

So far -- knock on wood -- this configuration has been working... at least I've so far gone much longer (and through more reboots) without the issue reappearing then I had been able to before. Will have to give it a couple more days to see for sure I guess. However, I am quite a bit uneasy about the fact that this problem just spontaneously occurred without any other hardware changes. I guess the only thing I've not tried replacing so far is the motherboard, currently a FIC 486-PVT. I guess this is potentially a good excuse to finally try the NOS Eagle G486SLV board I got a few weeks ago that I've been really lazy about trying. Also, will need to pick up a regular ISA IO controller card and maybe another IDE cable in another attempt to rule out any problems there.

Nice, these Optiplexes were quite nice for their time... and they make great retro boxes due to their versatility

Finally busted out the soldering iron for use on my Panasonic WSX MSX2+ system. This has been in my electronics hobby backlog for nearly 10 years!

I've installed Rhapsody DR2 on a spare hard drive in my P1MMX rig so I could experience what it was like. I've seen screenshots of Rhapsody on GUI sites like Toastytech and GUIdebook before which drove my curiosity towards other operating systems. If you don't know what Rhapsody is, it's basically OPENSTEP with a classic Mac OS user interface and is considered the pre-cursor to Mac OS X. Pretty interesting that Apple once released an x86 OS that resembled the Mac OS before the Intel transition even though it didn't last long.

I guess this is a good way to start my journey on running obscure 90s operating systems that barely anybody remembers.