liqmat wrote:

About half way through a 286-12 cleanup...

286-12_mobo.jpg

Great work on the restoration. I have recently restored several 286 systems and I have a few of what appear to be the exact same model of Suntac mainboard. Have you found the key command to access the BIOS setup page on startup? For some reason the usual suspects like "del" "Esc" or the F keys don't seem to work.

MMaximus wrote:

liqmat wrote:

About half way through a 286-12 cleanup...

286-12_mobo.jpg

Great work on the restoration. I have recently restored several 286 systems and I have a few of what appear to be the exact same model of Suntac mainboard. Have you found the key command to access the BIOS setup page on startup? For some reason the usual suspects like "del" "Esc" or the F keys don't seem to work.

Typically a function of the BIOS itself; is it AMI, Award, Erso, or Phoenix? You could also try the "stuck key" trick and see if it tells you what to press when there's a stuck key-- or even remove the keyboard to see what it says to do.

AlaricD wrote:

Typically a function of the BIOS itself; is it AMI, Award, Erso, or Phoenix? You could also try the "stuck key" trick and see if it tells you what to press when there's a stuck key-- or even remove the keyboard to see what it says to do.

The Bios is from Phoenix - on post it says "Phoenix 80286 ROM BIOS PLUS Version 3.10.22"

It seems I'm only able to enter the Bios setup when I mess with the system configuration - i.e. removing the floppy drive or the hard disk. Then the system displays the "Invalid configuration information" message and offers me the option to press the F2 key to run the setup utility. On the other hand if the system configuration is correct, no amount of "F2 bashing" will allow me to enter setup...

luckybob wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

McBierle wrote:

<snip>

While i'm waiting for a Slot-A heatsink for this newly bought board+cpu:

WP_20180903_002.jpg

Did you also get the GFD?

great minds think alike, eh?

No the seller diddn't have it anymore.

Had to run the bios recovery floppy on my Matrox G200 AGP (G2+/MILA/8BI/20 with 8 + 8MB SGRAM) as it seemed to have gone slightly loopy (blank screen) in storage.

I removed all 51 capacitors on my Abit VH6T motherboard.
Some of them were leaking, so I'm not taking any chances.

Took me an hour to do it. I expected much worse, since I was working without a desoldering pump.

Now I just need to wait for the new ones to arrive... 😒

Not PC related, but I fixed two C64s over the weekend. One had all of the memory and 6510 dead, the other had two slightly leaky caps. It was the first time I saw bad caps on a C64.

I had solid caps, so why not? Meet Solid C64.

In case you're wondering, it works fine.

MMaximus wrote:

liqmat wrote:

About half way through a 286-12 cleanup...

286-12_mobo.jpg

Great work on the restoration. I have recently restored several 286 systems and I have a few of what appear to be the exact same model of Suntac mainboard. Have you found the key command to access the BIOS setup page on startup? For some reason the usual suspects like "del" "Esc" or the F keys don't seem to work.

Yep. Pretty much the same here. I am still waiting on a MFM and floppy controller so for now I only see the BIOS because there are errors at post.

Received my Cypress Cy7C68013A development board thus I can start working on the USB/LPT emulator; had already to fight with some undocumented jumpers that enable/disable the on-board eeprom.

So today has been a workbench day for me.

I washed and cleaned all the expansion cards in that 286-12 I am restoring. Started to screw them down one by one and... screw head broke. Oh man, I hate it when this happens. So I had to disassemble the entire machine and drill out the screw, which went well, all things considered. Used compressed air to get out any metal shavings in the case before I reassembled the system. Now it's just a waiting game for the two controller cards that Luckybob has so kindly shipped to me.

Some new 47uF 16v capacitors arrived and I replaced the two caps that had exploded in my NEC Powermate Portable APC IV's keyboard. Now the keyboard is working like a pro, BUT the left CTRL key is sometimes working and sometimes not. So i desoldered the switch and am in the middle of inspecting that. If I short the solder joints of that key it works perfect so it is definitely something going on with the switch. Not obvious to me yet, but I'll tinker with it. This particular keyboard is hard to find so repairing this is essential before the system goes to the museum that has claimed it.

The NEC Powermate Portable APC IV is an odd beast. NEC decided to add a switch on the keyboard to reverse the position of the CAPS LOCK key and the left CTRL key. If anyone knows why this is advantageous to do please fill me in. Since this was basically an almost unused system when I picked this up from a Craigslist listing it still had the spare CAPS LOCK/CTRL keys that came with the system. I have also decided to scan the entire owner's guide for the APC IV. The DIP switches are important, but I have also found some other items in the manual that will be helpful. One being a "change notice" to one of the DIP switch pages in the manual. An oversight on my part so I will be uploading that in the next few days.

liqmat wrote:

The NEC Powermate Portable APC IV is and odd beast. NEC decided to add a switch on the keyboard to reverse the position of the CAPS LOCK key and the left CTRL key. If anyone knows why this is advantageous to do please fill me in.

Having Ctrl on the home row instead of Caps Lock is known as the "Unix keyboard layout", derived from old workstations & terminals in the '80s. It was still relatively common until around the turn of the century, although virtually never on anything x86. SUN for a while sold the same keyboard with the option of getting a "PC" (caps lock next to A) or "Unix" variant. I'm sure you can still find loud men with square glasses, suspenders, and large beards who are willing to defend this layout to death.

xjas wrote:

liqmat wrote:

The NEC Powermate Portable APC IV is and odd beast. NEC decided to add a switch on the keyboard to reverse the position of the CAPS LOCK key and the left CTRL key. If anyone knows why this is advantageous to do please fill me in.

Having Ctrl on the home row instead of Caps Lock is known as the "Unix keyboard layout", derived from old workstations & terminals in the '80s. It was still relatively common until around the turn of the century, although virtually never on anything x86. SUN for a while sold the same keyboard with the option of getting a "PC" (caps lock next to A) or "Unix" variant. I'm sure you can still find loud men with square glasses, suspenders, and large beards who are willing to defend this layout to death.

Interesting. Good to know. So I guess NEC was trying to appease both keyboard layout crowds by having this option.

McBierle wrote:

luckybob wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

<snip>

Did you also get the GFD?

great minds think alike, eh?

No the seller diddn't have it anymore.

Ah, too bad!

FuzzyLogic wrote:

Not PC related, but I fixed two C64s over the weekend. One had all of the memory and 6510 dead, the other had two slightly leak […]
Show full quote

Not PC related, but I fixed two C64s over the weekend. One had all of the memory and 6510 dead, the other had two slightly leaky caps. It was the first time I saw bad caps on a C64.

I had solid caps, so why not? Meet Solid C64.

solidc64.jpg

In case you're wondering, it works fine.

Technically speaking, the Commodore 64 and 128 are PCs. Lookin' good, though.

Mostly re did the cooling system on my Alienware Area 51m 766, other than the 2mm pads for the vram (which seem fine). The CPU fan seems to be pretty lazy as the max core temp on the 3ghz Northwood P4 was about 87c (someone can tell me if this is good or bad for a P4 in a laptop, I know its super high, but I used pretty good paste on it and it is a laptop after all). All in the name of playing Metal Gear Solid 2, since my other old Alienware laptop with dual 8700ms has graphical errors in game. If anyone also knows the "max" GPU without graphical errors for MGS2 on PC that would be great.

87C is too high for any system regardless. You might as well clean the heatsink and fan, and put a cooling fan underneath the laptop as well.

On a side note, I swapped the 350W PSU with a 250W PSU in the CBW Diplomat PC since when I plug in the FDD power cable, the computer won't turn on (might be an internal short in the PSU, but, it works without the FDD connected), put in a new CR2032 battery, and the FDD wasn't doing a drive seek (would've helped if the dummy checked to see if the FDD cable was correctly plugged in the right way and I was wrong on both the FDD connection and motherboard connection), but, I got it to work. Tomorrow, or Friday, I'm going to copy everything from the 2GB CF Card onto my desktop's hard drive, insert the 4GB CF Card into my Packard Bell, format the CF card to FAT32, install Windows 95C, and copy everything back on the 4GB CF card from my other desktop's hard drive,

I put together an XT-IDE kit. Took a bit longer than I wanted.

The biggest problem was that I didn't use enough solder on a lot of the pads. This caused the BIOS not to be being detected and general non-operation of the card. After testing with a multimeter, I found at least 1 pin of the BIOS chip was not making good contact, so I went over it all and added more solder to any pad that looked underfed 😀

Now that I have it working, the biggest thing is that I wasn't able to get the existing MFM controller to play with the XT-IDE controller. I believe this might be due to the XT-IDE bios, as it seems to completely replace the drive routines in the PC's BIOS. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Not been doing anything much retro recently as I've been too busy working on a 10-year-old Core 2 Duo PC, installing an Nvidia GeForce 10 series graphics card for 4K video playback & clean installing Windows 10 x64 onto an SSD. As an unintended consequence, this old PC can now play some modern games which is a reason why I can't consider these old systems as retro, they're just "old" modern machines. 🤣

I am going to be setting up my 8088 XT build in a more permanent position tomorrow though, as I've got friends over at the weekend and I fully intend to show off it's classic gaming prowess. At the very least I'll use it as background filler, either running some demo animations in Fanta Vision or certainly 8088MPH.

Merovign wrote:

the_ultra_code wrote:

I tried cleaning the card's contacts with some isopropyl-alcohol-tipped Q-tips and re-seating the card, to no avail. Is the poor thing truly dying, and if so, is there anything I could do? 🙁

I'm guessing VRAM, though it could be software. I mean, if you can test it in another machine, that would be a good idea. If it turns out to be the VRAM, it's probably cheaper to replace the card rather than fix it, which is sad.

It is *possible* to fix anything. If I found another identical card, I'd keep the old one for spare parts.

Well, as you can see, this actually has some removable memory chips on it.

I guess one thing I could do is remove those chips, right? Later, I will also, well, try another PCI slot in the same machine, and yes, try another machine. This specific model of graphics card is somewhat rare and expensive. There are very similar models (at least in name), but, according to PhilsComputerLab (my big reference :p), this is the specific model you want. So, it won't be fun if I have to find another one of these. :{

Actually, this does raise the question: Does anyone know where I can find information on all of the different variations on these late Cirrus Logic PCI video cards? I had trouble even finding information on this card.

That's DRAM not VRAM. And half of it is socketed, so first thing to try is to remove those chips and see what that results in.