^^ BTW sorry for the blown-out flash pic above, I'm learning to shoot with a new-to-me camera that I got for free from an older man packing up his garage sale at the end of the day, so it fits in this thread. 😜 This wonderfully bizarre looking thing:

Seriously, I love this. It looks like a piece of 1950s safari equipment; even the color fits. It's all plastic but really chunky and solid; the swivel mechanism feels brand new. And look at that chrome side logo! The rubber parts are fading a bit but not gummy or deteriorating.

It actually takes really decent pictures, they're about as sharp as 3.3 Mpix can get and the color reproduction is vibrant & accurate. It's not great at low light, and the flash really isn't suited to close-up shots, but for a 2001 camera I'm not complaining.

Annoyingly I don't have a way to charge the battery, so I have to use it with a 9V wall wart, which plugs into the front:

^^ yeah, that's not awkward at all. And no, running it on wall power with the battery in doesn't charge it either. Oh well, guess I need to track down a charger. I could actually see carrying this around & using it for a bit of hipster cred.

Interesting camera. I wonder if it's one of those older digital cameras, or is it a 35mm film camera?

Digital. 😀 I took some of the pics on the previous page with it.

Last night I lowballed a NIB charger on Ebay ($5) and the seller accepted, so game on. However it didn't occur to me until just now that the 18-year-old battery might not work. Guess we'll find out.

Not computer hardware, but I succumbed to weird compulsions when I came across basically an entire rack of old video equipment that someone must have taken right from a TV studio and dropped off at my recycling center...naturally I decided to swipe it all and stack it up in my garage while I think about what to do with it.

The picture doesn't do it justice, but VHS looks GREAT on that studio monitor and I'm excited to try out my NES on it!

Last weekend, during a cleanup of a mates shed, we found a small and neglected PC with a turbo button on it. That got me quite excited, because there was bound to be more of the system kicking around. And after a bit more cleaning, I found the rest of the machine.

The system came back with me with the monitor, a keyboard with white alps switches, and a set of Sound Blaster speakers (don't have them ATM, my mate wanted to check them out). The system ended up containing a 486 DX 33 with 8MB of RAM, a Sound Blaster 16 CT1740 (has a genuine OPL3 chip instead of the CQM crap 😎 ), an old VESA compatible Cirrus Logic video card, a 540MB WD hard drive and a Panasonic CDROM drive which sadly doesn't work. I have an ESS audiodrive that can take standard IDE CD-ROM drives, but something tells me it probably isn't going to work the way I want it to in this system.

blougaville wrote:

Not computer hardware, but I succumbed to weird compulsions when I came across basically an entire rack of old video equipment that someone must have taken right from a TV studio and dropped off at my recycling center...naturally I decided to swipe it all and stack it up in my garage while I think about what to do with it.

[...]

The picture doesn't do it justice, but VHS looks GREAT on that studio monitor and I'm excited to try out my NES on it!

Nice going, I love this type of ex-professional retro A/V gear. Some studio paid tens of thousands for all this back in the day & now it's yours.

I have a similar rack of PVMs but mine has 4 black & white ones in a 4U space (PVM-411.) I still haven't quite figured out what to do with it/them. It looks like yours are color? You could always plug three consoles in and make a head-to-head speedrunning station. 😀

Heh... I picked up a PVM-411 recently along with a National 3 x B/W rack mount monitor, but I'm jealous of your color version - not that I have practical use for it. If you think VHS looks good on that monitor wait until you try that Panasonic deck - I had one once and it even made tapes I recorded myself on a $99 special 2 head VCR look better.

xjas wrote:

You could always plug three consoles in and make a head-to-head speedrunning station. 😀

Not a bad idea! I'm thinking about having an old school LAN party soon so I could probably find some fun stuff to do with this stuff on the side!

dr.ido wrote:

If you think VHS looks good on that monitor wait until you try that Panasonic deck - I had one once and it even made tapes I recorded myself on a $99 special 2 head VCR look better.

I'm super excited to try the tape decks out. I figure this weekend it'll be nice so I'll do some rough cleaning and maybe open them up and clean the heads and then start playing around with them.

ninkeo wrote:

Last weekend, during a cleanup of a mates shed, we found a small and neglected PC with a turbo button on it. That got me quite e […]
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Last weekend, during a cleanup of a mates shed, we found a small and neglected PC with a turbo button on it. That got me quite excited, because there was bound to be more of the system kicking around. And after a bit more cleaning, I found the rest of the machine.

The system came back with me with the monitor, a keyboard with white alps switches, and a set of Sound Blaster speakers (don't have them ATM, my mate wanted to check them out). The system ended up containing a 486 DX 33 with 8MB of RAM, a Sound Blaster 16 CT1740 (has a genuine OPL3 chip instead of the CQM crap 😎 ), an old VESA compatible Cirrus Logic video card, a 540MB WD hard drive and a Panasonic CDROM drive which sadly doesn't work. I have an ESS audiodrive that can take standard IDE CD-ROM drives, but something tells me it probably isn't going to work the way I want it to in this system.

That case looks nice 😀
What motherboard did it contain?
And please make sure you take care of any (probably already leaking) barrel battery, if it still has it.

Tetrium wrote:

That case looks nice 😀
What motherboard did it contain?
And please make sure you take care of any (probably already leaking) barrel battery, if it still has it.

I really got lucky with how good the case came up after a bit of a clean, it doesn't even need retro-brighting at all to be honest. The motherboard it had was an FX-3000 (ECS?) 386/486 hybrid, not sure if it could handle a DX2/66. Regardless, Phil posted more about this board a little while ago and seemed pretty happy with it (FX-3000 motherboard thread)

Funny you mention the battery, thankfully this board never had those barrel batteries. Instead of that, it had a long dead external 6v (4 non rechargeable AA) battery pack with corroded batteries included. I simply replaced it with a new pack with 4 rechargeable AA NiMH batteries, those work fine. I'm probably gonna post a build thread getting it back into fully working order, as I've found little things here and there that needed attention.

I found this guy in a storage room in the radiology department at work:

It's a 10Mhz 8088 XT clone with 640k of ram and a 30MB HDD. It came with no video card, and a couple of really long proprietary ISA cards witch the machine used to interface to an old medical imaging machine. I stuck an OAK 256k ISA VGA card in it, but it didn't post until I removed both proprietary ISA cards. Now it seems to work fine, it posts, but it won't boot into anything, and I don't have an XT compatible keyboard so installing DOS will have to wait until I can find one or get an adapter.

Socket3 wrote:

I found this guy in a storage room in the radiology department at work: […]
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I found this guy in a storage room in the radiology department at work:

It's a 10Mhz 8088 XT clone with 640k of ram and a 30MB HDD. It came with no video card, and a couple of really long proprietary ISA cards witch the machine used to interface to an old medical imaging machine. I stuck an OAK 256k ISA VGA card in it, but it didn't post until I removed both ISA cards. It seems to work fine, but it won't boot into anything, and I don't have an XT compatible keyboard.

Good looking systems. Those are keepers.

Saw in one local forum, that some stuff was given away for free. Mostly DDR2 memory era computer parts, but then there was this: SoundBlaster CT2940 (With IDE connector in place, and real OPL3 chip present)

Of course i made it mine. 😀

I look forward to the day when it's my turn to find really nice XT/AT machines.

I cannot gripe too much as I've been pretty lucky over the winter and spring, but those (and even earlier pre-PC PCs) are my unicorns right now.

Technically that was *near* a dumpster, and free, so I guess that qialifies.

I thought it was an Oki the whole week I left it in the back of my car, no idea why. It's an early Star Micronics 9-pin.

Haven't tested printing yet. I do have parallel cables and machines with parallel ports, so it's a matter of shifting stuff around. Could use a little light cleaning but seems low mileage. Accessories present but no manuals (they always throw the manuals and disks in the regular trash bags, don't they?).

^^ Most modern OSes can still use an old dot matrix printer like this for plain text, even with a USB->Parallel adapter. 😜 I had my MSX printer printing off my Mac OS/X & Linux boxes that way.

Yesterday I grabbed this wonderfully odd Microsoft wireless input combo out of a scrap pile. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, as I have tons of keyboards & mice, but these are bluetooth instead of needing a dedicated dongle so they'll be handy to have around.

They have a few scuffs, but came out nice after a good cleaning. I'm using them right now. 😎 The keyboard layout has a bit of a learning curve, but it has a decent 2007-ish laptop-style keybed (think Dell Latitude or similar) & is pretty nice to use. The ESC & function keys are capacitive touch buttons, and there's even some rudimentary controls for mouse functionality. I'm amused by the very Vista-ish Windows buttons.

The mouse works great and feels nice. As usual with Microsoft mice, the acceleration profile is a bit weird on Mac OS/X but I was able to dial in some settings I can get used to (MS have a 'universal' driver with some finer control including dpi adjustment that works with these.) The mouse can charge off its dock with a NiMH double-A fitted, although I need to find an A/C adapter for it.

Overall, not bad, and the price was right so I'm happy.

When I was carrying out my trash, I found a "miro P1998N" CRT in front of the trash container.
I thought, nice, a CRT, not a Sony though. So at least it was (comparably) lightweight.

Looks like 19 inch delta tube. Worked just fine when turned on. Tube seems like new, perfect colors.

When I opened it for the inspection and cleaning, I found that it is outrageously clean. As if it hasn't been used much.

Tube is Samsung.

Monitor type label:

Sadly I didn't find any specs on it on the web.
I only found that this monitor was sold under various brand names, like Gericom, Procom, Yakumo etc.
One page said it is 98kHz, so it at least seems not the crap class.

I think this will be a keeper, even though it is no Sony. Just to have one CRT with delta tube 😀

Does anybody know the specs?

retardware wrote:

Does anybody know the specs?

How's your German? 😀 Not sure it's an exact match, but does it look anything like this model which launched December 2002 (found it on an archive of mirodisplays.de)

EDIT: Looks like it is - I can see P1998F at the top of the label 😎

EDIT2: And possibly the manual

Cool! So this is apparently one of the last CRTs manufactured 😀 Thank you very much 😀
With up to 98kHz H and 160Hz V one can do DOS and Windows gaming without flicker 😀
Well I know, for purists this is probably already cheating...

When I had the case in the tub for cleaning, I found a label showing the actual manufacturer:
"Proview Technology (Shenzhen)". So this is genuine Chinese stuff, relabeled by a German graphics card manufacturer. I still remember back then the Miro monitors were extremely cheap compared to other brands.

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

How's your German? 😀

Although I am a German, regarding digital stuff my German is not really good. Since 40 years almost all technical literature I read is in English, so I often struggle when trying to find a German word for something. 😢

Next week I get a 1996 92kHz curved 0.25 pitch 17" Trinitron monitor, made in Finland:

It's not a Sony.
But I guess Nokia is a good brand too 😀 And they know CRTs.
Salora (which was the previous name of Nokia iirc) was a very sophisticated TV and monitor producer back then.
I already look forward to open it and look at the electronics 😀

I just found a graphics card at the bottom of a box at work. It seems to be a Permedia 2.
I have no experience with these cards, but based on a quick search it seems to be decent.

Early-ish pro OpenGL card.