If you see the notch at the end of the socket, the notch on the chips themselves must follow to prevent them from baking.

Predator99 wrote:

Interesting card, some data here:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=6joEAAAAMBAJ … ro%2016&f=false

diamond computer systems sound card ISA

@Predator99 - Thank you very much for this!

I used Aria16 drivers from the Vogons topic you paste and the darn thing works! The sound quality isn't as good as SB pro, but that doesn't even matter. It matters that we've got another working vintage card in pure DOS 😀

bjwil1991 wrote:

If you see the notch at the end of the socket, the notch on the chips themselves must follow to prevent them from baking.

Yeah that is why I asked.
The sockets are like this (> or < is the notch)
>------ ------<
>------ >------
>------ >------
>------
>------
tag: >-----

Just find it odd the one is turned around..

Turbo -> wrote:

Spend a few days of finding drivers for my ISA card collection and testing them. However, I also have this interesting ISA sound card Viva Maestro 16VR from Computer Perherpials inc, and was unable to find drivers whatsoever. In fact, wery little information is obtainable on the internet about this card. If anyone can point me to the right direction about finding the drivers for this card, I would appreciate it...

I have a New In Box one of those. I also have all the software, etc. available for the ARIA 16 based cards that I am aware of.. .even a bit of unreleased stuff (source code) that I will be posting when I do a review.. still have to get official permission although I already have permission from the person who originally had it.

I won't have access to the software, drivers, etc. until at least the 4th of January. Shoot me a PM so I don't forget about uploading and sharing.

cyclone3d wrote:

I won't have access to the software, drivers, etc. until at least the 4th of January. Shoot me a PM so I don't forget about uploading and sharing.

Will do. Thanks.

Managed to revive a half broken square dell monitor from the mid 2000s with a bit of contact cleaner, some tape and a screwdriver. To be precise, it was one of these things:

Not fantastic by any stretch of the imagination but this was the one my parents had a few years ago on the family PC. The problem was with the main input board on the front of the screen, none of the buttons worked and if they did, you needed to press them very hard to do anything with the middle two not working at all. Contact cleaner on the metal contacts solved that issue quick 😀

I also looked at cable management on my main daily retro rig (the Duron-based system I made a thread about a little while ago, probably a good time for an update) and re-installed my now functioning SB Live in place of the vibra 128

xjas wrote:

I managed to get my Asus P4S333 (right) working, which I'd previously written off as dead and was about to toss, by swapping & r […]
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I managed to get my Asus P4S333 (right) working, which I'd previously written off as dead and was about to toss, by swapping & reseating the RAM a bunch of times and reseating the CPU. My 8IPE1000-G was in the same box, so while I had it out, I dismantled & cleaned the CPU coolers on both boards and replaced some DISGUSTING crusty thermal paste with fresh Arctic Silver.

1.jpg

The P4S333 is a really cool board with a 3.3V-compatible universal AGP slot and what looks like a PC-PCI (SB-Link) header?? :

CameraZOOM-20181225224740783.jpg

It has a 1.7GHz Willamette on it right now. I think I'll use this as my Substitute Tualatin, as it should be roughly comparable and fully support Win98. I also have a 2GHz Northwood that could go on there if I need more speed.

Unfortunately I didn't have as good luck with this A8N-SLI Premium I got for free the other day:

CameraZOOM-20181225230557024.jpg

CameraZOOM-20181225213259694.jpg

About 50% of the caps on this thing look like the one on the right. She's dead, Jim. I did harvest the CPU and sweet Thermaltake heatsink, but the board itself will be making a trip to the recycling place.

Anyone know what kind of fan this thing needs?

Why not recap it? Its a fairly high end 939 SLI board. To throw it away over something fixable is a waste IMO.

Productive day today. Managed to finish the 386 system I've been tinkering with for a while. It's become a right little beauty - as bare as I got it (RAM, CPU and I/O only, leaking battery and filthy case) as full it is now:

- cleaned the battery damage, in the end only lost the uppermost 8b ISA slot to corrosion.
- replaced the battery with an external 3x AAA NiMH holder stuck at the lowest point in the case.
- cleaned the case thoroughly
- added 121MB HDD, CDRom drive, Intel EtherExpress 8/16 NIC and Soundblaster 16 Value CT2770.
- got all that stuff set up and installed MTCP - yep, this old beast is on the internet 😜

As I'm not keeping it, that's as far as I'm taking it, but given the CT2770 has an IDE header, the CDRom could be moved there, freeing up the slave position on the regular IDE controller for a second HDD. And as well as good performance and great drivers, the EtherExpress 8/16 has a nice ROM socket that could take an XTIDE.

After that I took a 486 that was booting but not detecting any keyboards. Removed the motherboard battery, cleaned the inevitable mess and gave the area around the keyboard connector an extra clean too. Once it's dry tomorrow we'll see what's going on.

Finally re-capped an MSI MS-6340 (Via KM133 chipset, from a Packard Bell iConnect). After working on 1990-era leaded solder, it's a shock how hard (in every sense of the word) the RoHS stuff is again. But that's just a temporary irritation. Now it's sporting flashy new Nichicon, Rubycon and United Chemicon caps. Haven't had time to test it yet.

xjas wrote:

I managed to get my Asus P4S333 (right) working, which I'd previously written off as dead and was about to toss, by swapping & reseating the RAM a bunch of times and reseating the CPU. My 8IPE1000-G was in the same box, so while I had it out, I dismantled & cleaned the CPU coolers on both boards and replaced some DISGUSTING crusty thermal paste with fresh Arctic Silver.

Liking your Gigabyte board - I have its little brother, the 8IPE1000MK, in one of my old video capture builds

Worked on my Dad's computer this evening and also reclaimed my IBM Model M keyboard. Replaced it with a new Dell keyboard. If he decides he doesn't really like it, I'll get him a different one. Action is pretty nice even if it is a membrane keyboard.

Replaced the slow as dirt 250GB WD SATA HDD with a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD.

Refurbished his Gravis PC Gamepad by cleaning it up, taking it apart, cleaning the contacts on the buttons and also retro-fitting a replacement directional pad button unit because the old button pads were starting to tear and were not registering properly all the time.

The replacement buttons came from his collection of buttons we took out of old broken controllers probably 15+ years ago that he kept for his PACMAN-2 tabletop game... pretty sweet old game.. you can even do 2-player with one person being the ghost and the other being pacman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EWddnJH-8k - not my video - looks to me like the dude needs to take it apart and clean the button pads and contacts or maybe even replace the button pads. What the guy didn't mention is that it also has a plug for an external A/C power adapter.

Also swapped out his old mouse for a much newer one.

Testing memory and CPUs on a Tyan S1662D motherboard which is a really nice compact dual Socket 8 design.

⅄ ⅁ O ⅂ O ᴎ H Ↄ Ǝ ⊥

xjas wrote:

⅄ ⅁ O ⅂ O ᴎ H Ↄ Ǝ ⊥

🤣 I saw that in the photo when I was cropping and had to leave it. You can thank a Gigabyte motherboard box.

what a sweet mobo

I've been doing a lot of building & comparative benchmarking over the last few months, so I combined all those results into one massive spreadsheet of benchmarks. This took me multiple hours and was the biggest waste of time ever. Seriously, what the hell am I going to do with this? Oh well, feel free to peruse & laugh.

(And no, it's not completely filled out, because I haven't found all the scribbled pieces of paper or random text files some of the results I know I have are stored in. I think I've spent too much time on this already. 😜)

Tested a Ti4600 I had repaired recently (partial recap + broken inductor replacement) and it works flawlessly:

Also got an X800XT PE AGP in the mail today but it seemed to have had some rather crude cap replacement repairs (not that I have any desire to redo it) so I thought testing it may be a good idea:

Again, works flawlessly, but I reverted to the XT1950PRO as there was little reason to set this PC up as a Win98/XP Multi-Boot. The X800 will go into a fast Socket A build eventually..

2 in 2 - not gonna push my luck with more testing tonight. 😎

A day of downs and ups...

I have far too much stuff for the storage space available, which means some things are piled too haphazardly. Usually I'm careful enough for that not to cause problems. Tonight I failed...

An unplanned drop test on an IBM 2264 15" CRT. Didn't go well 😦

The electronics & tube look shaken but not stirred, but pretty much every plastic mount is broken. Looks like I need to think of a good project for a mediocre 15" CRT without casing - or prepare to recycle 🙁

Better news on the 386 front. Completed a second system today:

MG 8517 386SX-33 motherboard
2MB RAM (2x 1MB SIMM)
WD 2120 125MB IDE HDD
52x CDRom drive (because I ran out of older ones...)
Oak OTI077 ISA VGA card
Generic ISA IDE/floppy controller
Generic 8b ISA serial+parallel
Intel EtherExpress 8/16 ISA NIC with nice ROM socket in case that's ever needed
Aztech I38-MMSN824 "Sound Galaxy Pro 16 II" 3rd gen Aztech (i.e. last non-PnP) sound with full hw SBPro 2.0 support.
Original 200W AT PSU (living dangerously, but no bad caps at the moment at least)
Note that I hooked up the 3.5" 1.44MB FDD after the pic was taken.

Installed MS-DOS 6.22, configured sound and network - and replaced the long-dead onboard battery with an external 3x AAA pack (visible in the pic).

took this cool screen shot of a retro OS on my no so retro PC.

appiah4 wrote:

Tested a Ti4600 I had repaired recently (partial recap + broken inductor replacement) and it works flawlessly: […]
Show full quote

Tested a Ti4600 I had repaired recently (partial recap + broken inductor replacement) and it works flawlessly:

3DMark2001SE Ti4600.PNG

Also got an X800XT PE AGP in the mail today but it seemed to have had some rather crude cap replacement repairs (not that I have any desire to redo it) so I thought testing it may be a good idea:

3DMark2001SE X800XTPE.PNG

3DMark03 X800XTPE.PNG

Again, works flawlessly, but I reverted to the XT1950PRO as there was little reason to set this PC up as a Win98/XP Multi-Boot. The X800 will go into a fast Socket A build eventually..

2 in 2 - not gonna push my luck with more testing tonight. 😎

In all this testing DDU seems to have messed up my Catalyst drivers, now I can not bring my tray icon to appear on boot or get my control center context menu back..

If anyone can give me the registry keys for these from their XP systems I would be grateful.

The tray icon process is StartCLI.exe for reference.

The context menu key ought to be HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{5E2121EE-0300-11D4-8D3B-444553540000}\InprocServer32 or something?

Mr. horse wrote:

took this cool screen shot of a retro OS on my no so retro PC.

Nextstep? Afterstep? Or something like WindowMaker on Linux?