xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-06-21, 17:47:

Damn ! That's a very good piece of Amiga hardware ! […]
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Damn ! That's a very good piece of Amiga hardware !

Back 8 years ago, I had gotten a Blizzard 1230 IV with 8 Mb of EDO RAM and a FPU for €200.
Now it's around €800.
Don't even think about a Blizzard 1260 or any 68060 based accelerators.

eBay prices are gouged up to eleven and beyond. Disgusting.

The only potentially good thing to come out of this pricing situation is the fact that it probably helps make projects like the Vampire series more attractive to people and likely more financially viable to their makers (more demand and more ability to price them profitably, but still below old accelerators).

Oh WOW!!! Time to run some Doom Quake on it 😁

Amiga 1200 with a PPC accelerator and a Voodoo can run Quake. I've seen it.

But at this point, it doesn't feel like an Amiga anymore, especially since all that is usually put within a tower case for cooling.

Amiga can run a voodoo?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz5bQuyxwkc for example.

Mediator PCI :
https://amigastore.eu/482-mediator-pci-1200-tx-black.html

It's a very heavily modded Amiga 1200 at this point.

Started cleaning up an old PC I upgraded for a customer. It was in a machine shop and the stuff on it isn't just dust - it's dried, crunchy, machine-oil grease stuff (similar to what you'd find in the engine bay of a vehicle). Not sure on the best way to clean the board; any thoughts? CRC Electra-Kleen? DeOxit?

BetaC wrote on 2020-06-20, 02:34:

As per my "addictions", I went through Dark Forces and Jedi Knight yesterday and today respectively. I did Dark Forces on my Pentium II setup, using my original disk despite having the DeHacker, and I just used my Steam copy of JK this time. I'm probably the only person on steam with over 60 hours in Jedi Knight.

20200619192354_1.jpg
It's always good to play the game with high LOD mods and modern resolutions, even if it's hilarious looking when played the way it was "meant" to be on my Voodoo 3. And, before anyone asks why I say addictions, I play through these two games in full every few weeks, and thanks to Limited Run Games, have purchased them both three separate times.

I admire you people who can commit to playing these games all the way thru. Guess I got the attention span of a two year old toddler, after about
15 min. I'm ready to move on to another game.

Duron 1200 with a TNT? Now that’s strange..

appiah4 wrote on 2020-06-22, 15:21:

Duron 1200 with a TNT? Now that’s strange..

Definitely was a WEIRDLY cobbled together machine. Seagate 7200.10 80 GB PATA drive, RIVA TNT AGP, Duron 1200, 256MB SDRAM (2x128), and Windows 98. Onboard serial and parallel ports disabled with a PCI serial/parallel card installed. No sound card whatsoever.

IBM had Vanta cards in some of their Netvista P4 machines, so not so surprising.

NautilusComputer wrote on 2020-06-22, 13:55:

Started cleaning up an old PC I upgraded for a customer. It was in a machine shop and the stuff on it isn't just dust - it's dried, crunchy, machine-oil grease stuff (similar to what you'd find in the engine bay of a vehicle). Not sure on the best way to clean the board; any thoughts? CRC Electra-Kleen? DeOxit?

For this greasy, gritty stuff, use eviroment-friendly engine bay cleaner mixed with bit of water in a large tub, put all this disassembled parts in that tub, brush them clean with stiff natural bristle brush including heatsink except fan, throw away that fan and replace with a delta or NMB or Nidec with 4 pin PWM fan from ebay.

Then rinse out with warm water and soap then, rinse 3 times with warm water in a tub. Then pour 99% alcohol (this takes excess water with it and evaporates quicker), over the boards and let it drip off. Let it dry naturally.

Cheers,

I did retrobright on my 486 PC.

Ph@nt0m-X wrote on 2020-06-22, 17:56:

I did retrobright on my 486 PC.
before.jpg
after.jpg

Great Job! That turned out awesome. What Method did you use?

Ph@nt0m-X wrote on 2020-06-22, 17:56:

I did retrobright on my 486 PC.
before.jpg
after.jpg

Indeed, it'a a great result!

Wow that is quite the transformation. That case looks like new again.

Ph@nt0m-X wrote on 2020-06-22, 17:56:

I did retrobright on my 486 PC.
before.jpg
after.jpg

What mixing percentage and process did you use.
It’s summer and very hot in California right now and there are some cases I would like to restore.

Bancho wrote on 2020-06-22, 18:53:

Ph@nt0m-X wrote on 2020-06-22, 17:56:

I did retrobright on my 486 PC.
before.jpg
after.jpg

Great Job! That turned out awesome. What Method did you use?

I used oxidizing emulsion cream for hair vol.40 (contains 12% hydrogen peroxide), stretch wrap and the sun light. I left it in the sun all day.

Ph@nt0m-X wrote on 2020-06-22, 17:56:

I did retrobright on my 486 PC.
before.jpg
after.jpg

That is much better . I don't mind a bit of yellowing, personally and I actually like darker shades of brown, but that middle ground was not very appealing . The end result is much better .

I cleaned this QDI EXPLORER II motherboard :

It was already working, but it was full of grime and it seems something corrosive leaked on its back (probably a dying 486 sitting on it). Thankfully that stuff cleaned quite well and left only a few dull looking solder joints, but traces and vias weren't damaged.

Then I wanted to clean some more boards I had laying around (all boards came off a big lot I had bought in october 2019) :
this pcchips m577

(With some greasy looking stuff on it ...)

this 286 motherboard

Again there was some kind of greasy stuff on it

Also the two RAM slots at the top used to be green because of some battery leakage that also probably came off another board stored in the same box it's been sitting in for a decade or two ; but it cleaned quite well as you can see. The previous owner also took off two crystals off the board 🙁

And finally this GMB-486SG v1.1 486 motherboard which suffers from a battery leakage (its own this time)

After the cleaning they came back like this 😀

After further testings :
the PCChips don't seem to power the CPU at all, but I noticed that some capacitors got removed (and also it may be misconfigured)
the 286 came back to life after I installed a 24MHz crystal 😁
the 486 doesn't POST even after installing a new keyboard and AT connector (the old ones were corroded). I also fixed two dead traces, but the rest seemed ok ... I'll have to investigate some more to figure this out (I'll probably take a look underneath the KBC socket)

Edit :
ah now I see why the pcchips doesn't turn on the CPU, look at Q18

The transistor seems to have blowed up (probably a lack of cooling considering it's a super socket 7 board with no cooler installed for these ...). It's a PHD45N03 LT transistor ... I'm going to try to find a replacement for it !

Today I replaced the Trusty ESS ES1868 in my MMX-200 PC with a C-Media CMI8330 and found out that it is an astonishing chipset.

- C-Media FM is quite pleasant to my ears. It's a bit softer/smoother than genuine OPL3 but it is not discernably off when it comes to playing music. It could pass off as OPL3 for casual listening.
- Very low noise despite being a somewhat cheap-ish looking card (Zoltrix Audio Plus 6400 3D PnP V.5 AV310)
- Pretty solid DOS and Windows 3.x drivers and suite. Great initialization/testing/mixer software.
- SB Pro, SB 16 and WSS compatible - ran every game I threw at it. Full duplex, and supports real High DMA (5/7).
- Software Wavetable (DLS) for Windows 9x (A tad dry but serviceable - made me remove my Dreamblaster S2)
- Dİgital audio IN and OUT headers. WOW. I can record from this card using digital out, how cool is that? (I need to build a breakout bracket for this)

It replaced the ES1868 as my all around favorite ISA DOS sound card for the moment.