In awe of this artist's papercraft which you can download ALL for FREE and make your own. I would suspect you would need some decent paper in the printer to make this worth while. Just wow!

https://rockybergen.com/papercraft

Time to take a bath...

The previous owner has cut the cables off, but luckily he left enough cable to be soldered the connections back again. Reset button is missing, so making another one will be a challenge. I've just cleaned it for now. A true restoration comes, when I find suitable components. What does this computer case look like to you? Like a 386 or 486?

Looking better again, good work.

Doesnt the label state "XT"?. But from look I would say 286. For 486 a Trubo button and a keylock was not up to date anymore. Its for sure older.

Went thrifting today in some weird and wacky places. This one in particular was cool and creepy at the same time. It was like being in a movie prop house.

While I was there I picked up a working (boots right up) Mac Classic II for Vogons member cj_reha for $35. Good deal considering it works out of the gates.

The cellar, on the other hand, felt a tad creepier than the main floor as I had eyes on me. Never liked a stiff audience.

Gahh! The heaped mannequin parts are hilariously creepy... I have been to places like that where the owner says "There's more in the basement..." and you go down there and see things that make you wonder how you got to this point in your life (while looking over your shoulder to be sure the door isn't about to slam shut behind you).

As for my retro activities today, I installed a 16GB M.2 SSD (using no less than three adapters to get it to desktop IDE) in my Windows 98SE tester system (450Mhz PIII, 440BX) and was blown away by the speed increase. It's truly amazing how much of an improvement solid state storage can provide, even with a system from 1999.

To further streamline my tester system I finally broke down and installed a network card, ran an extra ethernet cable from my 8-port switch to my new test bench, installed FileZilla FTP Server on my main system and FileZilla FTP Client on my tester. Now I can freely browse the 60GB of retro-computing files on my main desktop from my tester extremely quickly without any flash drives or disks. Yay!

Ozzuneoj wrote:

...and you go down there and see things that make you wonder how you got to this point in your life...

>>LOL<< so true

Hah I've got a similarly cramped and interesting mostly-computer store here in Toronto. I've got to go down soon and pick up my 120 Mb Caviar hard disk from the guy. No mannequins though, that I know of!

Thrifting yielded a mouse, keyboard, and monitor for about $15.

Pulled out an old P4 from my closet, worked on it for 5-6 hrs today on and off, and got a dual boot XP/ 98SE out of it. Now I have a 2003 period-correct build:

Gotta clear this stuff out so I can buy a Ryzen. My 10 year old Xeon isn't up to the task of editing in 720p and I've got tons of new material!

Interesting case, upside down IE logo?:

Original spec sheet inside too, mostly the same (different CPU, more RAM, and newer PSU)

So I got my "last ever" midi module the other day...a Kawai GMega. It takes a 10vdc input, but it came with the original 110vac power brick (i'm on 240v). I had a couple of 10v power supplies lying around but it didn't turn on with either of them! Not a dead unit! So in desperation I picked up a stepdown transformer to give the original PSU a try, and....success! And it doesn't sound half bad....better than many reviews and comments I read about it.

Jed118 wrote:

Original spec sheet inside too, mostly the same (different CPU, more RAM, and newer PSU) […]
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Original spec sheet inside too, mostly the same (different CPU, more RAM, and newer PSU)

I love it when original handwritten docs and receipts are with systems like that. Kind of a nice peek into history of someone else's experience.

^^^ I found one in my Escom 286 case, it was in German. I did my best to get the build right 😉 I should work on that video, actually!

This computer I happen to know the history of. I was around when it was purchased by my aunt. I was a little jealous of the specs at the time as I still had a Coppermine T 1.133 GHz - Same amount of RAM and a decent graphics card (I think I had a Radeon 8500, one of the ones that can have several bus lines reactivated - successfully) and about the same amount of hard disk space.

Still, it was a P4 😉 I seem to recall it was not cheap. She was actively using it until about 2015, then she called me up one day and asked if I wanted it. It has been in my closet until today. Fired right up and kept the time correct up to the second.

Jed118 wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/nsAZGkTl.jpg […]
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Those white Logitech keyboards from the early 2000s are the best wireless keyboards ever made, hands-down, IMO. I'm typing on one right now. They are easy to type on, built like a tank, and thanks to running at the shortwave frequency of 27mhz, a pair of AA batteries will literally last for a few years even with daily use. I use this keyboard at least several hours a day, and I'm not joking when I say I change the batteries once every 2 to 3 years.

Mine's a model Y-RC14 but yours looks slightly newer style in style.

EDIT - wait, it looks like maybe yours isn't cordless? I have the cordless version of that keyboard.

Jed118 wrote:

Interesting case, upside down IE logo?: […]
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Interesting case, upside down IE logo?:

If Windows XP were a PC case

Predator99 wrote:

My Amiga Merlin card seems now to be (hopefully!) "blurks-approved" :-p Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today […]
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My Amiga Merlin card seems now to be (hopefully!) "blurks-approved" :-p
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

I removed the SCSi-HD from the Amiga, connected to the PC and installed the Software with WinUAE. No Diskjokey, but needed several tries to get around nonsense error messages and crashes...

Now it seems to work, at least at max 640x512. Maybe my Monitor is the problem at higher resolutions, but for the moment I am happy thats running.

DSC_8277r.jpg

DSC_8282r.jpg

That is sweet.... Congrats on getting it working. 😀
You need to look for an accelerator and more memory now.

bmwsvsu it is not wireless. What it was was real dirty though - that's the one setback with thrift shop keyboards, they're biohazardous sometimes 😉

This one cleaned up well, but some others I've had to dismantle with vinyl gloves on. NAZ-T!

Sorted through most of the rest of the "scrap CPU" lots I have acquired.

Getting ready to put a big lot of real scrap CPUs up on eBay for the scrappers.

Thermalwrong wrote:

I made a small case for the DreamBlaster X2, since I've already managed to break my DB-X2 once already. It should be quite tough now, but maybe it will get rather warm? I'm not sure I would want to use it when it's fitted onto the soundcard again, but while it's sitting out being a USB midi-er, this helps.

IMG_6209 (Custom).jpeg

IMG_6210 (Custom).jpeg

Looks great !!
I don't think it will get too hot, should be ok.

Managed to get my Deskpro EN-SFF with flaky onboard IDE working with a Sil0680 PCI RAID controller card. However for whatever reason the WD 80GB HD I installed on it, despite being registered as 80GB by the card's BIOS, would appear as only 10GB in FDISK.. So I put the original 20GB Seagate back in, and it worked like a charm.

Then I found out that for whatever reason the one of my Matrox G450 PCIs was busted. The second one worked fine but once I installed drivers for it, full screen command prompts did not get any image on my monitor (using DVI if that matters) - any ideas why?

Then I installed Windows 98 to find out that SY-XG50 and SC-88 software midi synths did not work in command prompt windows. Booo.. Any alternatives?

Messing around with this keyboard where one of the "wells" for the screws that hold the frame together broke off. I have no idea what kind of plastic this is; so far my attempts at glueing it back in place have been torn apart by the torque from putting the screw back in.

This is such a tiny part to glue, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be easier to just glue a bigger chunk of plastik into the corner opposite the screw-hole and drive a small wood screw through.

In other news I managed to set up the CF hard drive for my portable project, but after I installed Win95 I realized something was off with the display output. User "retardware" kindly alerted me to the fact that this might be dying caps on either the video card or PSU, so it's probably more adventures in Soldering-Land for me.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Gahh! The heaped mannequin parts are hilariously creepy... I have been to places like that where the owner says "There's more in the basement..." and you go down there and see things that make you wonder how you got to this point in your life (while looking over your shoulder to be sure the door isn't about to slam shut behind you).

Ooh those mannequins indeed!

Had an experience myself like that once, but that was doing some urban exploration. There's an old Soviet submarine rusting away in the Amsterdam harbour (how it got there is a tale in itself). Officially it's off limits and they have at last started to salvage it recently, but for years anyone with a boat could reach it and nose around. So when I had an adventurous lady-friend visiting, we got out my rubber dinghy and paddled over. We'd expected guano, cobwebs and dusty cyrillic inscriptions. What we hadn't quite bargained with was what looked like body parts all over the place... turns out someone had once, after a failed attempt to turn the sub into a nightclub, held a one-off fashion show that ended in an over-the-top party, resulting in mannequins being scattered all over, up to and including the torpedo tubes.

Not quite computer-related, but a mid-1950s project 611 ("Zulu-class") submarine is definitely old hardware 😉

Link for the submarine (and Dutch language)-curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVapjCN3BD0