Some time ago I was going to get a nice Asus P/I-P55TP4XE i430FX motherboard in a trade. I was going to use it in a year 1995 Pentium 133 build that I want to tinker with.

The one I traded with noticed that the motherboard was defect (not only a dead RTC battery) when he tested it so that plan didn't pan out.

Well that wasn't going to stop me, I have an Asus P/I-P55TP4N somewhere... dead RTC battery but that can be fixed... if I only can find the board...

Well it turned out I couldn't find it... Ebay to the rescue! I payed 18 euro + shipping for an "untested" Asus P/I-P55TP4N. I got the board today so now I have two!

As the board was sold as "untested" while the same seller sold some other Socket 7 boards as "tested and working" something was clearly wrong with this motherboard.

These Asus boards wont work past the BIOS setup without a working battery so I figured that was the issue, it was.

Well no time to waste... I'm going to operate!

20 minuts later the battery issue was permanently solved. Perhaps not a beautiful incision, it did leave somewhat of a scar but it will have to do.

The modified Dallas RTC.

The Asus Asus P/I-P55TP4N motherboard.

A quick test so see that the patient survived.

liqmat wrote:

I have two black floppy drives that I recovered from an external Tandy enclosure. If they work you are welcome to one of them for this system. I believe they are 360K drives, but I will confirm on my Socket 370 workbench system once I get them cleaned up. Just PM me if you are interested.

Hi, thank you for the offer but I won't take you up on this as it would just be a waste of the hardware. Whilst it would look nice in the case next to my hard drive etc, it would ultimately just end up gathering dust as I'd never use 5.25" floppies in this system. The current 3.5" drive with 720KB support is more convenient for me and sufficient for this system's needs.

Hope you find a good home for it though. 😎

Working on my 8088 again today - added an I/O card that I got off eBay for Serial, Parallel & Game ports.

After some dip switch & jumper configuration, I now have working COM1, LPT1 & GAME ports on this XT build and have added a 3-button Serial Mouse which works great with the CuteMouse driver. I couldn't get COM2 working, even after adjusting the IRQ etc, but not a priority for now I can sort that at a later date.

Was testing the mouse out by playing Block Buster - much easier to control now. I always found the joystick a little too fast moving for this infuriating game. 🤣

I've got 2 empty ISA slots left (the 8th slot is obscured by the ATX case layout, but it only works with certain cards anyway so I'm leaving it hidden out of the way). I'll probably fill 1 slot with an 8-Bit CD-Rom controller and install my single speed CD-Rom drive into the case. The drive needs a good cleanup as it's outer metal has rusted a bit, but it should gel nicely with this old XT - assuming of course the DOS CD Player software works with 256KB RAM. Plus I'll have to rig up a batch file to enable/disable CD-Rom support, to clear up some RAM when I don't need to use it. Highly unlikely I'd be using the drive for anything other than playback of proper Audio CDs, no CD-R for data transfer on this old thing haha.

Spent the last couple days fixing up a Dimension 4600 for a friend, in between work and sleeping. It refused to take a 3.4 Prescott but a 3.2 Northwood worked no problem. Replaced the Deathstar with a Raptor. With 4gb of DDR400 it makes a competent web browser.

The only concern I currently have is that Youtube is pretty much unusable, Im thinking it's due to the GPU. It has a 9800 Pro, would the X1950 i have on hand make a difference?

I had no problem running youtube a year back on a similar system with a pci geforce 6200 and half as mich ram.

PTherapist wrote:

liqmat wrote:

I have two black floppy drives that I recovered from an external Tandy enclosure. If they work you are welcome to one of them for this system. I believe they are 360K drives, but I will confirm on my Socket 370 workbench system once I get them cleaned up. Just PM me if you are interested.

Hi, thank you for the offer but I won't take you up on this as it would just be a waste of the hardware. Whilst it would look nice in the case next to my hard drive etc, it would ultimately just end up gathering dust as I'd never use 5.25" floppies in this system. The current 3.5" drive with 720KB support is more convenient for me and sufficient for this system's needs.

Hope you find a good home for it though. 😎

No worries. Just got done cleaning them today and I will be testing them tomorrow. 360K drives are always handy to have around when you need some CP/M disks formatted.

ODwilly wrote:

Spent the last couple days fixing up a Dimension 4600 for a friend, in between work and sleeping. It refused to take a 3.4 Prescott but a 3.2 Northwood worked no problem. Replaced the Deathstar with a Raptor. With 4gb of DDR400 it makes a competent web browser.

The only concern I currently have is that Youtube is pretty much unusable, Im thinking it's due to the GPU. It has a 9800 Pro, would the X1950 i have on hand make a difference?

I had no problem running youtube a year back on a similar system with a pci geforce 6200 and half as mich ram.

First off, try using the h264ify extension for Chrome or Firefox. It will force youtube to serve H.264 videos instead of the newer and more demanding VP8/9.

Nvidia PureVideo gained VC-1 / H.264 decode starting with the GeForce 6 series, though it was substantially improved in the 8 series. So that may explain why the 6200 was able to help with decoding youtube. ATi/AMD added H.264 decode with their Unified Video Decoder (UVD) in the HD 2000 series. So the 9800 and x1950 won't be much help with H.264 decode.

An AGP or PCI version of a Geforce 6 or 7 series card is probably the best bet. An 8400GS PCI card would also be a cheap/easy option with even better decode than the 6/7 series.

Did some more troubleshooting with the electrical in my house (my mom and I were right on where the issue was). Apparently 3 neutral (beige/off-white) wires got burnt (noticed a funny plastic-y smell to it a few weeks ago) and the twist-tie caps that interconnects wires to each other got disintegrated as well, and with my multimeter, I tested the wiring and got low voltage (between 80V and 94V AC), but the hot (black) wire was at 120V AC. Trimmed the neutral wires until good wiring was exposed with a new end twist-tie caps, tested the voltage, and everything was back to normal at 120VAC across the board. No more flickering!

Also, I charged up my ASUS laptop to prepare it for an event and ran a live version of Linux on a flash drive (with the ability to save data to it as well), tested the slideshow, and everything's working grand. Will install Linux on another flash drive.

Katmai500 wrote:

First off, try using the h264ify extension for Chrome or Firefox. It will force youtube to serve H.264 videos instead of the newer and more demanding VP8/9.

Nvidia PureVideo gained VC-1 / H.264 decode starting with the GeForce 6 series, though it was substantially improved in the 8 series. So that may explain why the 6200 was able to help with decoding youtube. ATi/AMD added H.264 decode with their Unified Video Decoder (UVD) in the HD 2000 series. So the 9800 and x1950 won't be much help with H.264 decode.

An AGP or PCI version of a Geforce 6 or 7 series card is probably the best bet. An 8400GS PCI card would also be a cheap/easy option with even better decode than the 6/7 series.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'l try the h.264 first. Unfortunately a 3.3volt surface mounted cap fell off the GeForce 6800xt i was going to give him. Monitor picks up the signal but screen remains black 🙁 I can try the Geforce 8400 pci and 9500 gt I have handy but the system currently has a audio card and wifi card installed, so Im worried the pci bandwidth wont be up to par 🙁

It's alive!

After getting proper cables and a second ST-506 drive to test with I at last managed to figure out what was wrong with my MFM setup (incorrect jumpers on one controller, second controller dead, third controller just doesn't detect the drive) and now I have this dinosaur working - a Seagate ST-412 10MB HDD, Type 1, the original one out of the first XT, complete with black 5.25" full height frontplate with IBM logo. Not only is it built like a tank and makes as much noise as one, it is still superbly reliable, with just a single bad sector found after 34 years (it's from the beginning of 1984) during SpeedStor initialization.

The controller it's working with is a WD1003-WA2, completely non-period as a 1985 design and 1987 production date. New-fangled stuff indeed 😉

The only bad news: the Microscience HH-1060 I now also have is dead. It spins up, but with an awful metal-on-metal grinding sound. It actually tries a few seeks, but spins down again within a minute, and does not get detected at all. Given the mechanical sound of the problems, it's probably a write-off 😢

Spent slightly longer than I should have getting Wingroove set up on my P2 Thinkpad so I can listen to tunes while I get some work done. Sadly it looks like most of the links for any 0.Ax version I could find are dead, but 0.9E is running great. I still can't believe how decent this sounds for such a small patch set.

Anyone know a decent stash of MIDIs that I can grab as a big zip? Original upbeat synth-y stuff preferably, or anything. Gimme the goods. 😀

Finally came around repairing my Samsung Syncmaster 206BW. Not really retro but I own the monitor since 2007 and have constantly used it.
Since half a year the monitor wouldn't start immediatly but first started switchin on and off for a while before showing an image.
What started with 2 minutes of switching on and off now went up to 45 minutes which finally 🤣 made me dissassemble and replace the three leaking caps on the powerboard which caused this.
30 minutes of work later and a bit of cursing because the old solder was very though to remove and the monitor works like a charm again.

Cleaning hardware from a smoker's house. Mmmm... tasty. This was just from the ribbon cable alone.

xjas wrote:

Spent slightly longer than I should have getting Wingroove set up on my P2 Thinkpad so I can listen to tunes while I get some work done. Sadly it looks like most of the links for any 0.Ax version I could find are dead, but 0.9E is running great. I still can't believe how decent this sounds for such a small patch set.

Anyone know a decent stash of MIDIs that I can grab as a big zip? Original upbeat synth-y stuff preferably, or anything. Gimme the goods. 😀

Here are all the midis 😀
https://archive.org/download/archiveteam-geoc … collection-2009

I'm trying to get an old Opti 924 soundcard with attached wavetabley thing working - now it has drivers, outputs sound, but the sound is horribly distorted and seem to have a ton of system noise mixed in, so effectively broken.
Now to try different drivers, then look at re-capping it (if it's even worth it?)

Upgraded my CD32 with a TF328. 😁

You realise your ISA VGA card is **SLOW** when a Trident TVGA8900CL you happen to stick in your system benches at twice the frame rate in 3DBench2 😮

The Trident scored 19.1 FPS, the other card, a DFI VG-3000 with Oak OTI037C only managed 9.7FPS... fortunately this system should shortly be receiving a Diamond Viper VLB, although whether that really helps in DOS is another matter - at least it's an OTI087 chip instead.

derSammler wrote:

Upgraded my CD32 with a TF328. 😁

That's slick.

I've been spending the past week or so digitizing all of my family's old 8mm camcorder tapes. Not directly vintage computer related I know...but doing this has at least allowed me to get what is so far the clearest picture yet of our old "Dream 486" computer we had when I was a kid, along with a bonus "just barely in the frame" shot of a closed Toshiba T3100 portable, as seen in July 1998.

I just realized that the MPEG-2 downloads of the Computer Chronicles are encoded at 60 fps! All this time I've been watching the crappy MP4 files.

Oh, and I pushed my V3-3000 to a blistering 192MHz. I might not need a 5500. 😁

Grr.

The 1994 17" NCD CRT I use for my DOS early Win32 machine was hit by a piece of art hung above it. Shattered the artwork (IDC about that) but now the monitor seems to have a very very very very slight rotation in the image towards the side it was hit on. Maybe it was there the whole time and I'm only now noticing due to the fact I'm now looking for defects?

This monitor has everything. Great contrast and brightness, detachable VGA, parrabelum, concave or whatever that adjustments called, it even has an option to switch between 1.0v and 0.7v video signals.... but no rotation option.... at least not that is indicated. I need to find a manual and see if it has any hidden button combonations. It has no OSD. I've checked and its def an image level issue. The tube isn't loose so I know the tube hasn't rotated inside the chassis. Can a minor impact even cause an issue like this?

Also, my Gateway CrystalScan EV700 has somehow mysteriously moved its OSD to the top of the display. That's very odd considering the display has no OSD adjustments and part of the OSD is cut off (about the upper 1/10th).

I'm beginning to think perfect geometry (or near perfect) on a beige CRT is a pipe dream. What was the margin for error in a gaming 17" CRTS geometry back in the day? These issues aren't objectionable in game but IMO a defective display prevents a valid era correct experience.

Installed the newly acquired GeForce2 MX400 GPU, and Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 SB0100 in my Socket 370 system, installed the drivers, and they're amazing. Heck, I get 138FPS in Doom (have to find the DOS TSR program for the SB emulation for games and stuff).