Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

Stay safe!

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

Stay safe!

And good luck and be strong! Good thing you're trying to think ahead a bit.

Good luck.

Meanwhile in ohio, nothing ever happens. Well there was that one boy the sent people into a corn field... but that was way back in the 60s.

Not much, but am clearing some room in the living room for a chore I've been looking forward to for a long time: Inventorying my collection of games! This should definitely be interesting 😁

Yeah nothing retro here. Still waiting for my pc case for my next build.

Added a Denon DRM550 cassette deck to my stack. Planning to digitise some old audio books.

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

Wish you good luck. Hope you will be allright. Never mind stuff, as long as you will be safe.

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

Damn. Good luck on your safe travels. I have great grandparents that live down there as well.

The caps arrived today, I got to work on the IIcx board, learning the hassle that is unsoldering SMD capacitors without specialized equipment (and half-pulling a couple pads in the process, thankfully not fully), carefully soldered the new ones in place (had to cheat a bit with the axials because removing the old through-hole leads just wasn't happening no matter what I tried), put it back together, hit the power buttons...

Happy days and jubilation, right? WRONG. It's still as dead as when I first got it.

So I take a look at the power supply. Pin 10 apparently provides 5V standby power; this checks out. Pin 9 next to it powers it on with 5V applied (quite the inverse of ATX PSUs that want you to ground the power-on line), and connecting that to Pin 10's standby power causes the PSU to click to life (presumably a relay flipping), but holding the connection for more than a second causes it to click repeatedly, while undoing the connection instantly causes the PSU to power off. Apparently, it relies on some sort of oscillation to keep the trickle/standby line separate from the mains.

Maybe the PSU is good after all, but this suggests the motherboard wasn't really fixed after all that extensive recapping. Ugh. This would be so much easier to diagnose if I had another known good IIcx, or a IIci or Quadra 700.

UPDATE: I decided to think outside the box with this one... literally. I mated the motherboard to the PSU outside of the case and bridged PSU connector pins 9 and 10 together. Also connected the speaker for diagnostic purposes.

It fired right up and gave a chime! ...of death. Damn. It also powers off immediately if the pins are no longer bridged. Bad mobo confirmed, despite my recap efforts, since I reconnected all the drives and the graphics card to the mobo as well, very carefully. Well, RAM might also be a possibility, but I'm pretty sure it rests elsewhere.

Rails check out at +11.9V, +5.12V, -12.01V, generally within the tolerances I'd expect. I definitely think the PSU's fine at this rate.

I'm gonna have to scrutinize this thing much more carefully if I'm going to figure out how the heck this motherboard can be fixed.

Tackled with i740 under XP today. I am not planning to use it under XP; I just like to see how far the old pieces can be stretched. By the way, my first real 3D video card was equipped with an i740 chip.
First I gave it an update in the flashrom. It has AT29C010A flash chip. The VB239 rom came with vflash v1.5, which is claimed to support the following chips:

VFLASH Intel740(tm) flash programming utility v1.5 supports the following flash devices: […]
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VFLASH Intel740(tm) flash programming utility v1.5
supports the following flash devices:

Intel 28F010 5V, 1Mb
Intel 28F001BX-T 5V, 1Mb

Atmel AT29C010A 5V, 1Mb
Atmel AT29LV010A 3V, 1Mb
Atmel AT29C512 5V, 512Kb
Atmel AT29LV512 3V, 512Kb

SST 29EE010 5V, 1Mb
SST 29LE010 3V, 1Mb
SST 29EE512 5V, 512Kb
SST 29LE512 3V, 512Kb

But actually the program tells you it expects only Intel 28F010 and Intel 28F001BX-T. VB233 came with the same vflash. VB231 came with vflash v1.7, which indeed supports the above chips.

The motherboard chipset is Aladdin V, which apparently i740 dislikes. I tried XP stock driver and 5.1.00.1404 driver for i740; XP stock AGP driver, XP stock PCI driver and ULi 2.20 driver for AGP.

XP AGP + XP i740: desktop can suddenly become extremely sluggish, no 3D
XP AGP + 1404: desktop freezes randomly
XP PCI + XP i740: blue screen
XP PCI + 1404: blue screen
ULi AGP + XP i740: normal but no 3D
ULi AGP + 1404: normal, has D3D support and D3D wrapper for OpenGL

The VB239 rom added support for 1280x1024x24bit but I can only get 1280x1024x16bit or 1024x768x24bit for desktop. It supports 1024x768x32bit under quake3.

cleaned these ThinkPads as much as I could http://imgur.com/a/dkGAf

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

Stay safe!

Still working on C7 vs C7 @1000Mhz. Now i have 8500 GT PCI version so I can test the CPUs with it. Integrated GPUs in via chipsets are bad, so bad...

In the process of setting up my Amiga600, wich have had its motherboard changed.
(the one I bought some days ago, wich were fully recapped)
I have installed a Kickstart 37.350 rom, CF-IDE adaptor and a 512mb CF card.
Created two partitions (100+ for DH0 and the rest for DH1), installed Workbench 2.10

So far I have installed Directory opus on it, and moved a shitload of ADF files.
Going to write each with ADF2DISK and test each out before I write the labels.
Formatted some 30 floppy disks on the side and played both Pinball Fantasies and Lotus2.

All this took me some 6 hours with the Amiga. Fun times.

Just when I'd lost all hope on the IIcx motherboard today, I decided to remove the RAM - one bank of which were like half-height 30-pin SIMMs that I was nervous about removing, trying not to bust the retainer tabs like what happened on the other bank.

Soft power on both keyboard and the rear button were still completely useless, of course, so I bridged pins 9 and 10 again. Yep, still the ol' Chimes of Death, but I would expect that due to the lack of RAM.

I put one bank back in (the bigger SIMMs that I think are just 1 MB each, possibly stock equipment), bridged the pins... wait, that's the normal Mac II chime! I'm getting somewhere with this thing!

Just for reassurance, I put the graphics card back on one of the NuBus slots (IIcx doesn't have integrated video), connected my monitor, jump-started it again... successful boot chime, working monitor output, floppy disk question mark icon because it couldn't find a System Folder with the drives disconnected (didn't want to reconnect those again outside of the case), this thing might just work after all.

I still need to figure out where the fault lies in the soft power switching circuit that makes it not respond to the proper power buttons at all, but I'm closer than ever to figuring out what's wrong with this thing and what actually isn't if it can boot fine when jump-started.

UPDATE: The physically larger SIMMs are indeed a mere 1 MB each, but the IIcx boots up fine with 4 MB of RAM. Floppy drive heads need some cleaning. The system doesn't seem to detect that the keyboard power button or rear mobo power button have been pressed at all, but going to the Shut Down menu option shows the "It is now safe to turn off your Macintosh." screen, as if they might've foreseen this sort of issue.

This gives me some loose ideas about what's wrong with the startup circuit - that the motherboard somehow isn't registering that the soft power buttons have been pressed in the first place. It's not the power switches themselves (the contacts switch accordingly), so I guess it's a matter of going through the schematic and seeing what is or isn't getting the connection it's supposed to be.

Reinstalling the second bank of RAM also results in a successful boot, but it's still only picking up 4 MB of RAM; it's like it can't see the Bank B slots for some reason. How peculiar.

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

are you in florida right now ? that must be the last place i want to be haha
One question i got for you are there shops in florida where you can get old hardware? like a goodwill in florida got old stuff ?

appiah4 wrote:

Received in the mail some SIMMs and tools I've been waiting for.. […]
Show full quote

Received in the mail some SIMMs and tools I've been waiting for..

And upgraded my S3 Trio64V2/DX from 1MB VRAM to 2MB VRAM.

No idea what good it will do or what PC I would use it in, but oh well - if I ever end up with a Socket 5 DOS PC, it would be a good fit I presume.

o boy where did you buy those? every card i find online is missing the memory in those slots

And the 600E is online!

Xircom adapter works nicely.

I tested a crap ton of motherboards and CPUs today.. well, at least to POST anyway.

Stuff I had gotten a while back and some very recently that I hadn't had the time to mess with.

4x Slot 1 boards I got recently all work as well as a PII-400 and a Slotket with a Celeron 667. Celeron POSTS but does't work properly on the BX boards I tested it on.
Abit AB-BH6
Abit AB-BX6
Asus P2L97
Asus P2B

My Gigabyte GA-6BXC rev 1.7 board is dead as is a Slot 1 PIII-550. None of the boards will detect that there is a CPU at all. Maybe I will test the CPU once more in my TYAN S1854 just to make sure it isn't some issue with the older boards.

An AM2 board with an Athlon 64 x2 6000.
Gigabyte GA-M575SLI-S4

LGA 1366
ASUS P6T with i7-920

No so Retro:

A couple AM3+ boards, a Phenom II 1090T and an FX8150 - Still have another 8150 to test after straightening the pins. One of these boards is probably going to get my FX8320E since the ASUS Crosshair IV board it is in now doesn't really support it. The Phenom II 1090t will probably go into the Crosshair board.
Sabertooth 990FX
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3

Out of the 2x LGA 1150 socket boards I tested with an i7-4770, it seems the micro ATX one is dead, just a repeated fan spin up and down. The other one works even though there is a broken pin in the socket.
Gigabyte GA-Z87-D3HP

I have 3 more LGA 1150 boards to test once I straighten out a couple bent socket pins in each.

I also tested out my ISA/PCI POST card in PCI mode. The ISA slot is not straighforward on which way it is supposed to be inserted. It has an arrow and test that says "back", but which way is back? I am guessing it would be towards the direction of add-in cards would be at the back of the case, but I don't want to fry anything.