More light pen testing......

I've got the feeling that I need to go find a Tandy 1000 compatible light pen first so that I can get an accurate idea of what kind of circuit I need to make these things actually work as intended. I keep getting close, sometimes even registering on screen, but so far away, so I'm giving up for awhile, after all, I want to do some sick SATA experiments with the 486.

Shame Computer Reset is not within reach, I'm sure they'd have a Deluxe Mouse and possibly a compatible LIght Pen such as the Warp Speed one compatible with the Tandy 1000 for me to clone. I'm sure they'll be locked up and closed down by the time I could afford a trip to Texas to nab some items.

Got my Windows 98SE build to get the 3D to work once again after installing the chipset and AGP drivers. My Ti4400 AGP card works and I also decided to lubricate the fan as the bearing was stiff, and my VooDoo2 card cannot get DX7 to work well, but DX8 works, and I realized that I installed the FastVooDoo 4.6 drivers again and forgot to reset the computer.

Making a Windows 10-like icon set for Windows 95, I suppose. I forgot that Win95's icons are 4 bit like Win3, so there's actually a purpose to this.

imi wrote:

it's as if they used a universal switch size for PCs or something 🤣 direct screw-in replacement.

Yes, these red IBM style switches were commonly the same on the original and (almost) all clones and are interchangeable.

whipped out this pinout, maybe it's useful for others? Might work for similar era Optiplex models like the GX1 or GX100

so... I was sorting through some cpus and was wondering about this... "pentium"? wait... weren't the black s370 cpus only celerons?

umm... wait what 😕

wha... I checked pictures online, that hole is definitely not there by default... like... who does that 😐

the cpu pins seem fine 😕 so either someone purposefully poked a hole into the socket to make the cpu "fit" or that plastic is really weak and got punctured by the pin... I wonder if anyone tried actually using it like this... and what happened.

Installed the Lite-On DVD burner I repaired in my Socket 370 system and it took a while to get it detected. After switching the jumper to slave and the LG CD burner to master, the drive works without any issues. Tested it with some DVDs I made and they work without issues. I still need to fix the other DVD drives that cannot read either anything or DVDs, except for CDs for that matter (lenses are dirty).

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/1WGESHal.png […]
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whipped out this pinout, maybe it's useful for others? Might work for similar era Optiplex models like the GX1 or GX100

Useful to me, thanks.

I repaired a trace destroyed by bleeding battery on a Soyo 4SAW2, then solder on a coin battery holder in place.

I wonder if anyone tried actually using it like this... and what happened.

At least the CPU and slotket didn't go up in flames. Interesting mod though 🤣...

Built this for use in my Amiga 2000 with a 286 bridge board.

Fixed my 386 after I broke the system.ini file while trying to get a mouse to work in windows 3.1/Dos 6.22.
Working on getting a cd drive working rather than deal with that mouse for a while.

Glad someone found it useful.

Got my 486 rig back on it's feet, the original 260 MB maxtor had crashed(head had come off) and one of the 4MB RAM sims was bad, all happy now with a replacement of both.

This is not a bad little machine despite not having any cache installed, it has UMC chipset, Cirrus 5430 and Intel 486 DX/2 66 WB CPU, obviously not the fastest 486 out there but good enough even for windows 95.
glad to have her up and running again.Speed test gives 236979.

Is that a Sony CD drive or an early Panasonic? Good looking system. My $17 Packard Bell went through upgrades or feature installations: sound cards, CD-ROM drive, dual floppy drive, tape drive that connects to the floppy controller, HDD upgrade from the old, still functional 428.1MB Seagate HDD to 4GB CF card, memory upgrade from 8MB to 32MB (2x 16MB and the 4MB onboard is disabled), video RAM upgrade to 2MB (Cirrus Logic 5428), L2 cache from 0K-512K, CPU upgrade from SX2-50 to DX5-133 16K L1 WB, BIOS upgrade, and additional board features: 3.3V CPU support and a battery slot to insert a CR1220 battery.

Going to hook up the 10GB Western Digital to the secondary channel and force a drive letter change to E for storing my data on there as a backup system and do a file copy from my main laptop to copy those files and folders in case the HDD starts to go.

Here's a photo of the beast:

Windows 95 system icons are done. The readme contains instructions for setting the icons. I may make a host of random drive icons (Zip, tape, MO, whatever) just to fill up a second set.

In action:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Is that a Sony CD drive or an early Panasonic? Good looking system. My $17 Packard Bell went through upgrades or feature install […]
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Is that a Sony CD drive or an early Panasonic? Good looking system. My $17 Packard Bell went through upgrades or feature installations: sound cards, CD-ROM drive, dual floppy drive, tape drive that connects to the floppy controller, HDD upgrade from the old, still functional 428.1MB Seagate HDD to 4GB CF card, memory upgrade from 8MB to 32MB (2x 16MB and the 4MB onboard is disabled), video RAM upgrade to 2MB (Cirrus Logic 5428), L2 cache from 0K-512K, CPU upgrade from SX2-50 to DX5-133 16K L1 WB, BIOS upgrade, and additional board features: 3.3V CPU support and a battery slot to insert a CR1220 battery.

Going to hook up the 10GB Western Digital to the secondary channel and force a drive letter change to E for storing my data on there as a backup system and do a file copy from my main laptop to copy those files and folders in case the HDD starts to go.

Here's a photo of the beast:

I love that combo drive.

Steve Ballmer's voice: How much did I pay for this? $500, $1,000, even more? NO! Got it for free 3 years ago.

Could use a good head cleaning on both the 3.5" and 5.25" as they can read almost every diskette, except Disk 2 of Civilization gets stuck on 1 file and the other files get copied onto my hard drive without issues and Mickey's Fun Time Print Kit also gives me a message about a bad sector, but the diskette works in my other computers with a 3.5" diskette drive. I could get another one for my Pentium 1 and K6-2/300 builds.

Speaking of retro activity, I modified my Super GameBoy to have it where the speed matches the GameBoy DMG-01, Pocket, and Color speeds. Before, the sound/music was at a higher octane than the GameBoy systems and the games were a bit too speedy.

The device I bought is quertymodo's Super GameBoy Clock Mod v2.2 on Tindie and soon, a Game Link Port mod will be installed.

I thought my soldering job was bad, but, it turned out to be fully functional and a good/sufficient amount of solder was in place and after installing the cartridge into my SNES and Donkey Kong 1994, I was happy the way it turned out. Another good thing about the mod, if I find a Hori SNES Super GameBoy controller, I can increase or decrease the speed easily.

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV-uK4S6XQI

Video is up now. I also opened my SNES (needs a new top shell now as 3 of the screws are stuck in there as the plastic broke off somehow) to remove the pieces of plastic that were stuck inside the system and did a thorough inspection of the logic board and no bad caps, traces, and everything still looks pretty good.

Figures, as soon as I make a set of icons specifically for Windows 95, I figure out how to force it to display icons in higher bit depths.

I'm planning on using that on my Windows 95 machine. Will it work with 98/98SE?