Merovign wrote:

I may have posted this before, but there are cheap ESD bags on eBay, but it takes some digging because of the "lot of 10-50-100" or whatever means the really expensive singles end up at the top of the list, and then the kind of expensive lot of 5 or 10 after that.

no need for ebay, like I said, I bought them in packs of 100 for ~€10 from the usual electronics retailers.

and yeah I was looking around for boxes everywhere, but couldn't find anything local, I found a really good deal for some but couldn't order them at the time and then they were gone (EOL)... and as this is a one time investment hopefully I just finally ordered new ones.

I spent most of the day on making an actual DOS device driver, with intent to get UMBs going on several 486 chipsets (or anything else i can find documentation on). Thänk you to Uwe Sieber (UMBPCI author) for crucial info ~

Sounds like fun. Out of curiosity here, does the driver enable UMBs on certain chipsets? My 486 has an OPTi 82c895 northbridge, but runs perfectly fine (to a point). Going to re-enable the 4MB onboard RAM to have a whopping 36MB RAM or upgrade to 128MB. And the system in question is a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus that has been modified with 3.3V CPU support, CR1220 battery holder, 512KB L2 cache, Evergreen 586 w/ 16KB L1 WB cache, and lots of good hardware, I/O, and storage drives.

It would be nice to include the chipsets supported by this driver as well 😁 http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php? … =30&f=8&t=26070

Completely disassembled an Xbox 360 Slim I got for cheap lately in order to give it a good cleaning. Fortunately, got it cracked open without breaking any tabs. Still, what a poor construction. What's the point in melting plastic parts together so no one can ever open it again after factory assembly?!

bjwil1991 wrote:

Sounds like fun. Out of curiosity here, does the driver enable UMBs on certain chipsets?

It is completely chipset specific, I'm starting with Intel Aries (420EX) but todo list has SiS471, SiS496, ALi M1489 and OPTi895 also (basically hardware I have, that also has chipset documentation available).

Deksor wrote:

It would be nice to include the chipsets supported by this driver as well 😁 http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php? … =30&f=8&t=26070

I can only support things for which documentation exists. Most of those chipsets don't seem to have any publicly available info (i.e datasheet or some register reference)

Sweet.

derSammler wrote:

Completely disassembled an Xbox 360 Slim I got for cheap lately in order to give it a good cleaning. Fortunately, got it cracked open without braking any tabs. Still, what a poor construction. What's the point in melting plastic parts together so no one can ever open it again after factory assembly?!

I would say that less than one percent, of less than one percent of XBox owners are capable of servicing and repairing their consoles, so Microsoft really had no justification to ensure that people could keep their budget model game systems running for perpetuity. You tend to transmigrate into some strange realm of strange beings when you re-cap a mainboard, or replace a CDROM laser diode, and that realm is unfathomable to most.

Mister Xiado wrote:

derSammler wrote:

Completely disassembled an Xbox 360 Slim I got for cheap lately in order to give it a good cleaning. Fortunately, got it cracked open without braking any tabs. Still, what a poor construction. What's the point in melting plastic parts together so no one can ever open it again after factory assembly?!

I would say that less than one percent, of less than one percent of XBox owners are capable of servicing and repairing their consoles, so Microsoft really had no justification to ensure that people could keep their budget model game systems running for perpetuity. You tend to transmigrate into some strange realm of strange beings when you re-cap a mainboard, or replace a CDROM laser diode, and that realm is unfathomable to most.

Still no justification for making a consumer electronic unservicable by the user.

Discovered a DPDT switch is perfect for switching two different jumpers on/off in an opposite fashion. Useful for swapping midi ports 330/300 between an AWE32 and a musicquest clone. Also discovered the round hole for an audio port in an IO shield is the perfect size to mount the power cable socket of a picoATX PSU, which screws in nicely.

Got SMB sharing up on my 98SE SS7 machine via a 3com NIC, found the drivers at retronn.de.

Will setup FTP later since SMB seems unsecure on Win 10 haha, also used one of these wireless nano routers in bridge mode because the PC is too far to get another ethernet cable routed.

Also realized that my old 512MB Kingston stick does not seem to want to work with the VIA USB ports? files are all 0kb and system hangs during transfer. Even though I had the VIA USB Filter Patch 1.10 installed and tried different nusb drivers. Switched to another USB stick and suddenly it works flawlessly 😲

Mister Xiado wrote:

I would say that less than one percent, of less than one percent of XBox owners are capable of servicing and repairing their consoles, so Microsoft really had no justification to ensure that people could keep their budget model game systems running for perpetuity.

But if it's broken, someone must be able to repair it. So even a service partner or Microsoft itself would have to crack-open it for a repair. How stupid is this? It's like having a car with a hood that can not be opened by the owner, because the manufacturer welded it.

svfn wrote:

Got SMB sharing up on my 98SE SS7 machine via a 3com NIC, found the drivers at retronn.de. […]
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Got SMB sharing up on my 98SE SS7 machine via a 3com NIC, found the drivers at retronn.de.

Will setup FTP later since SMB seems unsecure on Win 10 haha, also used one of these wireless nano routers in bridge mode because the PC is too far to get another ethernet cable routed.

Also realized that my old 512MB Kingston stick does not seem to want to work with the VIA USB ports? files are all 0kb and system hangs during transfer. Even though I had the VIA USB Filter Patch 1.10 installed and tried different nusb drivers. Switched to another USB stick and suddenly it works flawlessly 😲

I stumbled upon the very same problem yesterday. It's on my KT133A based KinetiZ board. With some USB stick, file transfer stalls after the first file is copied successfully and one has to reboot, and the second attempted file always results in 0kb. Copying manually makes it stall as well when trying to copy the second file. This happens in W98 as well as in 2k/XP on this machine.

Right at this minute, installing Red Hat 6.2 on a 8gb CF card connected to an 810e/500 MHz mendocino/128mb ram combo. Had to use 'no-hlt' to get the installer to start. Oh look, 'installation ended abruptly', 'you may safely reboot' etc. Ha, 'DISK BOOT FAILURE'. Such fun!

I'm in a bit of a lull with retro activity. I've recently moved house and all my retro kit (about 10 quite big, inefficiently packed boxes worth) went into the attic until we had sufficient storage. It's been 2 months and enough things have been put away and furniture bought that it can all come down again - I was getting nervous about it being in the attic for so long (especially as it's pretty cold now in November).

Thinking about it, perhaps all my crap being in the loft is why I have not been that interested in Retro stuff!

Anyway, I think I'll use this time to have a clear out too. I'm sure I don't need 5 poor quality 478 coolers and about 20 gigabytes of DDR1 memory.

... and about 20 gigabytes of DDR1 memory.

Yet.

That's not made anymore, and you'll work your way into those spares as your in-use sticks fail. I'm old enough to regret tossing quite a bit of "I'll never want it" now. Just... don't be me.

Put together my Super Socket 7 build today.
Tyan Trinity 100 AT, K6-2+ 550@600, Voodoo 3 3500 TV, AWE64 Gold, etc.

Not 100% finished, especially the fans are still too loud, but I am already pretty pleased with how it worked out. Will open a dedicated system specs thread for this one later.

And because my wife and kids aren't home for a few days, what else would I do than get that Trinitron CRT from the basement, set everything up on the dining table and celebrate 20 years of Unreal Tournament (released exactly 20 years ago on 1999-11-23)?

Not a lot computer related today, other than I managed to find some more of my missing Commodore 64 games in my loft. The most important finds being 2 game cartridges - Robocop 2 & Star Ranger.

Also pulled out an old 80s VCR to test how it handles the output from my ZX81. The answer was, it doesn't.

But whilst I had the VCR out, I decided to test it. Obviously not retro computer related, but interesting nonetheless: this thing is mostly working, it appears as if the only major issue is a worn belt on the load/eject mechanism. I'll have to try and source a replacement belt to get this baby up and running fully. Some pics of this beast:

This thing was always such a temperamental contraption, but I suffered with it as a kid so nostalgia wins out. 🤣

gex85 wrote:

Put together my Super Socket 7 build today.
Tyan Trinity 100 AT, K6-2+ 550@600, Voodoo 3 3500 TV, AWE64 Gold, etc.

Not 100% finished, especially the fans are still too loud, but I am already pretty pleased with how it worked out. Will open a dedicated system specs thread for this one later.

Looking forward to seeing your eventual system specs post! I also use a Tyan S1590S Trinity 100 AT motherboard in my Socket 7 build (currently somewhat under-utilized with a Pentium 233MMX). I found the inclusion of an AGP slot on this one to be cool in theory, but useless in practice, because I used a baby AT case which left me little room for all the IDE cables and such and they all just end up blocking the AGP slot. That was fine for me, since I was intending on using a Voodoo2 anyway, but still, annoying. 😐 I guess you probably wouldn't have had that problem (to a certain extent) since your case is a little bit bigger then a baby AT case.

Loved the original Unreal Tournament. Beautiful system to play it on. 😀

Tested my new Hercules card and monitor with a 286 12 suntaq. Loads of fun 😀