xjas wrote:

wiretap wrote:

Doing a little poking around with my Dash OPS-1000.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this thing. Everything about it is perfect. Even how every slot is filled with expansion cards & interlink cables like that. So awesome.

Agreed, that thing is amazing 😘

Question about that CRT - is it VGA, i.e. 480p 31kHz? Or is it MDA/CGA/composite/15kHz/something else? How does it connect to the video card?

Not sure about this one, but I once bodged a 3" mono CRT into a bigtower for a somewhat similar effect. It was from an ancient (early 1970s) Philips video camera. The camera consisted of one huge long CCD-based camera and a second equally large unit on top for the CRT. They were connected by a regular DE9 connector.

After poking around a bit, it turned out only three pins were wired up, one clearly related to signal, one headed into the power circuitry and the third attached to ground. Even though the camera was dead, it powered up enough to let me measure +12VDC on the power pin, so I hooked that up to +12V from a Molex, took composite video from the TV-out of a video card and hooked up both the ground of the video and the GND from the Molex to the third - and it just worked 😜

In my built-in setup I used a dedicated Trident 9685 PCI card to run the screen, and took the luminance from the S-Video output instead of using composite, but didn't notice any significant difference in picture quality. I ran it at 800x600 (downscaled to PAL 720x576 by the card) and generally showed Winamp or similar on it. Because I could 😉

I assume this Dash machine is a bit more professional, but it could work in a very similar way.

Installed a PCI Ultra ATA adapter in my Deskpro EN-SFF and FINALLY it seems to be playing ball with my 80GB IDE HDD and LG DVD-RW; installing Windows 98SE on it now.

Just WHY it would not work with the two on onboard IDE controllers is beyond me. I moved the hard drive to the PCI Controller and the DVD-RW works on the onboard controller just fine. Must be a strange BIOS (or maybe even HDD or DVD-RW ROM) bug?

dionb wrote:

Not sure about this one, but I once bodged a 3" mono CRT into a bigtower for a somewhat similar effect. It was from an ancient ( […]
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Not sure about this one, but I once bodged a 3" mono CRT into a bigtower for a somewhat similar effect. It was from an ancient (early 1970s) Philips video camera. The camera consisted of one huge long CCD-based camera and a second equally large unit on top for the CRT. They were connected by a regular DE9 connector.

After poking around a bit, it turned out only three pins were wired up, one clearly related to signal, one headed into the power circuitry and the third attached to ground. Even though the camera was dead, it powered up enough to let me measure +12VDC on the power pin, so I hooked that up to +12V from a Molex, took composite video from the TV-out of a video card and hooked up both the ground of the video and the GND from the Molex to the third - and it just worked 😜

In my built-in setup I used a dedicated Trident 9685 PCI card to run the screen, and took the luminance from the S-Video output instead of using composite, but didn't notice any significant difference in picture quality. I ran it at 800x600 (downscaled to PAL 720x576 by the card) and generally showed Winamp or similar on it. Because I could 😉

I assume this Dash machine is a bit more professional, but it could work in a very similar way.

Yeah, exactly - I'm thinking along the lines of DIY. 😉 I have a small accumulation of tiny CRTs (portable TVs, security monitors, one from an old karaoke machine) but AFAIK they all scan at 15kHz and would only be suitable for NTSC/PAL-type signals (or CGA with a bit of extra circuitry.) I've been keeping an eye out for a ~5" VGA/31kHz CRT for many years but I don't think anyone ever made one. The smallest "common" ones I've found are 9", like this Zenith.

wiretap wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/rfVYEz9l.jpg […]
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I'm seeing an I/O card, a Hercules/printer card, and a modem, but what are the four interlinked cards below them?

I heard about something called the falling star challenge, and pretty soon I knew what I had to do 😉

^^^^ Oh man, that makes me laugh so hard. ^^^^ I just heard about that a few days ago.

For the uninitiated:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/falling-stars-challenge

appiah4 wrote:

Installed a PCI Ultra ATA adapter in my Deskpro EN-SFF and FINALLY it seems to be playing ball with my 80GB IDE HDD and LG DVD-RW; installing Windows 98SE on it now.

Just WHY it would not work with the two on onboard IDE controllers is beyond me. I moved the hard drive to the PCI Controller and the DVD-RW works on the onboard controller just fine. Must be a strange BIOS (or maybe even HDD or DVD-RW ROM) bug?

Scratch that, it did not work.Everything gets detected and Windows installs just fine, then at first reboot I get C> Prompt asking me the location of COMMAND.COM. When I boot from a diskette I see C: as being completely empty. When I do scandisk it finds 128MBs of lost files, tries to recover, and messes up.

This IDE controller isn't working too well either.. Maybe the hard drive is toast, after all?

Tonight I got home from work, took a shower, took a nap... and then I got out my Voodoo2 which I bought after 3Dfx went under, for $45 after my original V2 had died on me. My only regret is that I did not buy two for SLI

Anyway it works in this Dell I have been playing with. I installed some drivers, installed the Unreal Tournament Demo and played around with it for a bit. 😀

Errius wrote:

wiretap wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/rfVYEz9l.jpg […]
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I'm seeing an I/O card, a Hercules/printer card, and a modem, but what are the four interlinked cards below them?

They're to connect to the OPS-1000 phone router system. (this system is a landline voice server) It consists of router control cards, voicemail server & caller id board, and a T1 network interface card. I really have no use for them, so I'll likely put them in storage to sell with the system in the distant future.

EDIT: Here is the manual for it.. http://www.mitchellenright.com/wp-content/upl … 0ICO%20rev3.pdf

xjas wrote:

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this thing. Everything about it is perfect. Even how every slot is filled with expansion cards & interlink cables like that. So awesome.

Question about that CRT - is it VGA, i.e. 480p 31kHz? Or is it MDA/CGA/composite/15kHz/something else? How does it connect to the video card?

Thanks. The monitor is a 9-pin connection that connects to the rear via a ribbon cable. I haven't had time to take everything apart yet to see what the video card is, and I haven't taken apart the monitor to see what inputs it accepts. I'm just getting off of working 84hr weeks, so I have a lot of other catching up to do with housework and having a needy wife & 1yr old. 😵

The closest thing to a retro activity that I did today (yesterday, technically) was chat about vintage computing for a couple hours when meeting someone to purchase an old Pentium 4 PC. 😀 Always great to meet people enthusiastic about the hobby.

Just spent a whole bunch of time trying to figure out why Red, Green, Beige, & Blue stopped booting while I was messing with the RAM timings.

After undoing a good couple hours' worth of tweaking and optimization, putting EVERYTHING back to stock, swapping the old crappy RAM back in, and yanking all the IDE devices & every SATA drive that wasn't the boot drive, I figured out ... I left a (non-bootable) USB stick plugged into the back panel. Pulled that out & it fired right up.

I HATE USB so freaking much it's not funny, and I HATE the fact that this is the stupid "standard" that "won" and now we're stuck with it forever. Every time I get some weird, BS, untraceable problem that brings a machine down it's always some USB device that just decided to stop cooperating.

TO BE FAIR, I should've expected this, as my Mac Minis with similar Nvidia chipsets will also refuse to boot with "wrong" USB devices plugged in. So maybe it's Nvidia's fault, but it's certainly not the only unbelievably shitty USB implimentation I've seen.

Anyway, time to re-do everything I just un-did...

Haha, I know the feeling. I once had a Logitech USB mouse that was flaking out periodically. (maybe 8 years ago) It would cause BSOD's, random cold boot problems, etc. I had even given up and purchased a new motherboard/CPU/RAM because there were so many problems, then with the new hardware it did the same thing. The damn USB mouse was the whole issue, 🤣. Lesson: Always unplug all USB shit when troubleshooting.

Tearing apart the Siig Minitouch for a cleaning + Retr0brite. (going to use Salon 40 Developer Clear Liquid + 160F degree water submersion method per 8bitGuy) The keyboard has SMK "Alps" Blue mechanical switches, functional RJ11 keypad adapter, and the AT DIN keyboard connector. It's lovely to type on, and I have to say I like the feel better than my Ducky keyboards that have Cherry MX blue and brown switches.

When you pressed on the blank key next to the backspace key and above the [`~] key, did it show a character on the display? That keyboard looks amazing.

bjwil1991 wrote:

When you pressed on the blank key next to the backspace key and above the [`~] key, did it show a character on the display? That keyboard looks amazing.

Interestingly enough, I didn't try that key. 🤣 When I get it reassembled, I'll have to see what it does.

Also playing around with keyboards here. A few weeks back I got my hands on an Olivetti M24 Keyboard 1 at last to use with my M24. It was utterly filthy, with cigarette tar, spilled coffee and even a cigarette burn, but still better than nothing. I didn't have time to do anything with it until today, so after a quick wipe clean I hooked it up and gave it a spin.

Conclusions:
- it works!
- it feels as filthy as it looked, so needs a complete strip-down and clean (including chucking the keycaps in the washing machine in a pillow case).
- two keys are dead, the num-pad 8 (i.e. cursor up with num lock off) and the B. Both are pretty essential, so need sorting out. Worst-case if the switches are actually dead (the B feels less clicky than other keys so there's definitely something mechanical happening there) I can at least swap them out for less essential stuff (i.e. one of the two shift buttons, or num pad + or -),
- Enter is very sticky/touchy. Also needs looking at.

Fortunately this keyboard is famed for its modular, easily serviceable design, so this shouldn't bee too painful I hope... then it's time to dig up Sokoban somewhere and play it in real XT-class mono glory 😀

Took the monitor out of my Dash OPS-1000 for those interested.. It's an Omnivision LP05: http://www.omnivisionusa.com/Industrial-LCD-C … ofile-kit-.html
Graphics card is a Tamarack TD3088A5 Hercules clone. But the monitor appears to be in great shape. 😀

Neat, so according to the datasheet it can display 15kHz all the way up to 48kHz(!) hscan modes, and accepts both TTL (CGA/MDA/Hercules) or analog signals. It cites a max resolution of 1024x768[/b]. You could theoretically run just about any EGA or SVGA mode on this thing, albeit in amber. Wow.

I was honestly expecting them to have just stuck a cheap NTSC/PAL tube in there. This thing is WAY overkill for the Hercules card they used.

Might have to see if I can track one down.

There's several on ebay, but not in 5". I see a few 6" ones with bad image burn, and a 7" in good condition. They also make 5.7" LCD replacements that fit in the same chassis, but it looks like composite video only. Several other companies offer LCD replacements as well, with VGA and DVI. (but of course LCD wouldn't be retro)