luckybob wrote:

i will never turn down a retro system if the price is reasonable.

All I'm askin is, somebody, anybody, give me a chance! 😀

Yeah, that's my perpetual whine, not much around here despite major metro area. We had massive "ewaste recycling" programs pushed here and they were too effective.

Merovign wrote:

I am lucky to have areas I'm not even interested in, like the PET, and therefore I can safely walk past them (not that any ever […]
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I am lucky to have areas I'm not even interested in, like the PET, and therefore I can safely walk past them (not that any ever show up around here).

But here's a small hint of something going on my bench shortly, which is pretty mint and worked perfectly the last time I ran it, inlcuding both drives:

Kaypro_Tease.jpg

As I mentioned, I used this very system as early as 1984. Often I'm not that nostalgic, but in this case I am. I want to at least examine the caps before starting it again, though.

Cool. You still have the cover. I don't see those very often.

Got these printed:

😀

AlphaWing wrote:

I have bad luck with win9x and P4's. Never had a single P4 board that would run 9x stable or without some weird issue. That will […]
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I have bad luck with win9x and P4's.
Never had a single P4 board that would run 9x stable or without some weird issue.
That willy I had to put 2000 on because it would just randomly hardlock no matter what I tried in 98,98se and ME.
Runs 2000 rock solid tho 😐
An I850 Rdram based board I have is exactly the same way.

I tried running 98 on a 3.0 P4. It had all kinds of issues, so you don't have bad luck.

appiah4 wrote:

Got these printed: […]
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Got these printed:

😀

Those are great!!

Butler2679 wrote:

AlphaWing wrote:

I have bad luck with win9x and P4's. Never had a single P4 board that would run 9x stable or without some weird issue. That will […]
Show full quote

I have bad luck with win9x and P4's.
Never had a single P4 board that would run 9x stable or without some weird issue.
That willy I had to put 2000 on because it would just randomly hardlock no matter what I tried in 98,98se and ME.
Runs 2000 rock solid tho 😐
An I850 Rdram based board I have is exactly the same way.

I tried running 98 on a 3.0 P4. It had all kinds of issues, so you don't have bad luck.

Why did you respond to a four-year old post from this thread? For the record, I actually managed to run Windows 98SE on two Pentium 4 Dells (including an Optiplex GX260 and a Dimension 4300S) with little to no issues a long time ago, so I guess not all P4s are affected.

appiah4 wrote:

Got these printed:

-snip-

😀

Neat. For a while, I've had the idea of printing replicas of old stickers that are extremely hard to find (mainly pre-XP "Designed For Windows" stickers and Intel CPU stickers), I just haven't gotten around to doing so and not to mention I currently don't have metallic sticker paper (which is necessary for replicating the metallic feel of the originals).

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

Butler2679 wrote:

AlphaWing wrote:

I have bad luck with win9x and P4's. Never had a single P4 board that would run 9x stable or without some weird issue. That will […]
Show full quote

I have bad luck with win9x and P4's.
Never had a single P4 board that would run 9x stable or without some weird issue.
That willy I had to put 2000 on because it would just randomly hardlock no matter what I tried in 98,98se and ME.
Runs 2000 rock solid tho 😐
An I850 Rdram based board I have is exactly the same way.

I tried running 98 on a 3.0 P4. It had all kinds of issues, so you don't have bad luck.

Why did you respond to a four-year old post from this thread? For the record, I actually managed to run Windows 98SE on two Pentium 4 Dells (including an Optiplex GX260 and a Dimension 4300S) with little to no issues a long time ago, so I guess not all P4s are affected.

I'm curious what brand of boards you were using and such, and if all the proper drivers and such were used. There has to be a better explanation than "most P4 systems run Win98 unstably".

Also, have a nice P4 system with an Asus motherboard, 1GB of RAM, and dual-boots Win98 and XP. No problems.

Just my two cents.

the_ultra_code wrote:

I'm curious what brand of boards you were using and such, and if all the proper drivers and such were used. There has to be a better explanation than "most P4 systems run Win98 unstably".

Also, have a nice P4 system with an Asus motherboard, 1GB of RAM, and dual-boots Win98 and XP. No problems.

Just my two cents.

...and the P4-era Celeron 1.2GHz that was the first PC I bought with my own money (which I still have in storage, modulo a replacement PSU) ran Win98SE beautifully for most of its life.

(I waited long into the WinXP era to upgrade because I took Luna's "Fisher-Price aesthetic" as a personal affront)

Going through my stacks/boxes/bins of computer parts to try to start thinning out stuff. First phase will be to get rid of stuff I am pretty sure I will never have a use for.

My struggle today has been disabling my Tandy 1000 TL/2's floppy controller so I can use a high-density controller I bought that's in my ISA slot.

So frustrating. It's supposed to be a simple matter of running a program from DOS after boot that then disables the floppy controller. Instead, it drops me back to DOS (great!) but then doing anything, I just start getting random garbage all over the screen and eventually, the computer locks up. 🙁

So damn frustrating. Might make a post to the main forums to see if anyone has some feedback.

cyclone3d wrote:

Going through my stacks/boxes/bins of computer parts to try to start thinning out stuff. First phase will be to get rid of stuff I am pretty sure I will never have a use for.

I only ever get rid of things I will *really* wish I hadn't later, so at least when it happens I did it on purpose rather than on accident.

😉

Merovign wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Going through my stacks/boxes/bins of computer parts to try to start thinning out stuff. First phase will be to get rid of stuff I am pretty sure I will never have a use for.

I only ever get rid of things I will *really* wish I hadn't later, so at least when it happens I did it on purpose rather than on accident.

^^ in my experience, getting rid of stuff begets twice as much stuff coming in, so it's better never to touch anything & leave it in a state of unstable equilibrium. 😜

Today I upgraded my "modern" gaming rig (Q9300 + GTX750Ti) from 3GB RAM (2x1GB + 2x512) to 7GB (3x2GB + 1x1GB) after watching it chug a bit in LawBreakers. Because even numbers of memory are for chumps.

For a bit of retro-ness, I found this in my stash of RAM, so it's what I used:

Yes, this is the same Rendition of Verite V1000/2x00 fame - well, sort of. Seems the company's assets were bought out by Micron after they tanked, who decided to use the brand on a line of budget RAM several years later. I have no idea why they thought this made sense. I don't understand big business, like, at all.

Incidentally despite the mismatched memory config, it still seems to be running in dual channel mode? Not sure why this works, but I'll take it.

I ran 3DMark06 (which was not memory limited under the previous config AFAIK) to test it out, but it didn't seem to change much.

Swapped the boards on my Ultimate Windows 98SE machine from the Socket 754 (placed it back in my XP machine), put in, I'd say 1GB of RAM (maybe less, have to check that) to the Socket 462(A) DFI KM266Pro-MLV that has a Sempron 2200+ 1.5GHz to use a better VGA card (GeForce 6200 PCI) with the 3dfx VooDoo2 card and Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Platinum, and 384MB RAM (16MB being used for the IGP, which I cannot find a way to disable it). Also installed the appropriate network drivers since the one that was on there was meant for the KT400A chipset, not the KM266Pro chipset. It's pretty darn fast as well with boot times, especially with a NIB 60GB Maxtor HDD that I purchased last year. Best of all, no conflicts of any kind after disabling the VGA PCI IRQ in the BIOS.

I'm testing some old computers with CGA and EGA cards. The issue is that I do not have any monitor that support the digital TTL signal, or so I thought.

I own a NEC LCD1990FXp TFT screen that is known to suppoort most analog signals but the manual dosn't mention EGA, CGA or TTL at all. The former owner said the monitor supports every video signal known to man so I thought that it was worth trying to see if it could handle CGA/EGA TTL signals.

To be able to test this a professional CGA/EGA 9pin to "EGA/CGA 15pin" cable is needed.

Well it seems it works! 😀

EDIT

MDA also seem to work with the same cable as I just powered on an early model IBM 5150 (with a black & white / paralell card) that I bought some time ago. I don't think the system has been powered on for ages going by what a total mess the inside of the unit was. This 5150 has been upgraded at some point with a 130W PSU and a Tandon TM502 full height 10MB HDD, sadly the previous owner seems to have forgotten to park it...

Other than the head crash sounding HDD I had a "1010 201" code indicating a faulty memory chip on a memory expansion card. Just reseating some chips in the first row of chips on one of the two memory cards temporarily changed/moved the fault to "1090 201" so it's probably just bad contact.
I also have an intermittent 301 keyboard error and sometimes 131 "cassette port wrap-around" error, could be connected to the memory error.

All in all it's at least not totally dead! 😀

/Edit

Edit2

I fixed the memory issues and could finally boot DOS. 😀

I was too lazy to search extendedly for faulty chips (it seems to be more than one) on the memory cards. I have no manuals for them so I don't know what chip is at what address and so on. I can't even test the memory chips in one of the onboard sockets as they are 64k chips and my 16-64KB motherboard only supports 16k chips. Even if I replace one bank at a time it would still be alot of trial and error as it seems there are faulty chips in more than one bank on each of the two memory cards which holds 192KB and 256KB making the total 512KB.

Luckily I remembered that I have a Lo-tech 1MB memory card and I configured it to fill up from the onboard 64KB to 576KB (544KB).

The "cassette port wrap-around" error seems to have solved it self but the keyboard error is stubborn. The keyboard sort of works but half of the keys are recognized as totally different keys... I think it's a compatibility issue with my clone XT keyboard even if it works just fine with all other XT class systems I have tried.

/Edit2

Swapped keycaps between a dead and a working Amiga500 keyboards. Now I have a fully working Red-Light Danish Amiga500 keyboard, for my Amiga500 reastauration project. Updated my blog with the progress and added picture.

Skyscraper wrote:

To be able to test this a professional CGA/EGA 9pin to "EGA/CGA 15pin" cable is needed.

DUDE. Explain this sorcery.

luckybob wrote:

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/897/221/ad1.gif […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

To be able to test this a professional CGA/EGA 9pin to "EGA/CGA 15pin" cable is needed.

DUDE. Explain this sorcery.

Well the secret sauce is just having a a monitor that recognizes all types of signals and scanning frequencies.

I first tried with a VGA 9pin to 15pin cable but that didd't seem to work. I had a weak memory of getting some Frankenstein contraption with this NEC TFT monitor when I bought it and after some digging in one of my storages I found this cable. The issue was that some leads had come loose so I had to do some trial and error and I had no idea if it would work with digital TTL signals.

well, I own a very similar monitor, so if you would be kind enough to post the details of that cable, I'd love to try it out on my monitor.

luckybob wrote:

well, I own a very similar monitor, so if you would be kind enough to post the details of that cable, I'd love to try it out on my monitor.

I will poke around with the multimeter tomorrow to see exactly how the pinout ended up! 😀

Should I forget just remind me.

Partly repaired my Xbox today by swapping the DVD drive. The old one was completely dead, this one now works but the tray can only be opened manually.