TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-11, 11:45:

I’d love to see the pics, I’m hoping it doesn’t require any rework of components, hands just ain’t steady enough for that type of soldering.

It's impressive how much your dexterity improves under a microscope simply because you can see and react to movements that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye.

My hands aren't perfectly steady either at this pitch. As necessary, I brace my hand with a finger on the board, desk, or tool, then pivot as I place or position something that requires precision.

0402 capacitors are itty bitty teedy tiny! I think anybody would have trouble at this size no matter how steady they think they are. The problem isn't just the placement but if you use the wrong pressure with your tweezers it's easy to jettison the component into the ether.

I'm tracking down any interesting VG MIDI files that I've never heard before, so that I can listen to them on the S-YXG50 VSTi. Right now, I'm listening to Runescape's MIDIs and they are absolutely wonderful with XG sounds. It makes me want to buy one of those much loved XG MIDI daughterboards, but there aren't really any available anymore, including the NEC OEM variant.

TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-11, 11:45:

I’d love to see the pics, I’m hoping it doesn’t require any rework of components, hands just ain’t steady enough for that type of soldering.

Here you go. 😀

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4200 triage and repair

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-12-12, 02:41:

TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-11, 11:45:

I’d love to see the pics, I’m hoping it doesn’t require any rework of components, hands just ain’t steady enough for that type of soldering.

Here you go. 😀

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4200 triage and repair

You were not kidding about them being tiny ...time to find a reasonable priced microscope and some alligator hands.

Its great to see it back in action!

Well today I was consuming non-interactive fiction off cellulose media, with the assistance of one candlepower, due to the winds taking out powerlines and interwebnet.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-12-12, 03:23:

Well today I was consuming non-interactive fiction off cellulose media, with the assistance of one candlepower, due to the winds taking out powerlines and interwebnet.

That sounds like a truly retro activity.

True enthusiasts only consume their vintage entertainment media as scribed upon papyrus. Clay tablets and cuneiform are a bit too old for my personal tastes. I'm not an elitist.

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-12-12, 03:36:

True enthusiasts only consume their vintage entertainment media as scribed upon papyrus. Clay tablets and cuneiform are a bit too old for my personal tastes. I'm not an elitist.

Not sure you can get much older than Cuneiform 🤣

Papyrus and Tallow candles mmmm I can smell it from here.

I found my old Game CD/DVD collection(close to 100 CD/DVDs), I thought it had been tossed years back but nope just buried in a box in a box in a shed, mostly just your 2000 era games but the few stand outs were

-Star Wars Empire at war Gold edition
-Battle for Middle Earth
-Battle for Middle Earth II + Expansion
-Need for Speed Underground 2
-Both Knights of the Old Republic games
-Black and White 2 + Expansion
-Sim City CD + Sim City 2000 SE
-Red Alert 2 + Yuri's Revenge
-Total Annihilation + Expansions
-Delta Force 1 - 4 (I have thousands of hours in these 4 games alone)
-Hard War Special Edition
-Wing Commander Prophecy
-Decent Freespace 1 and 2 + expansions

All amazingly good games for their time and I'm super happy to still have the original discs to use on my P3 machine, no idea who buried the games collection in that shed but chuffed it didn't get thrown out or damaged.

Cleaning old cases. So much grime.
Used baking soda to clean covers, looks like it works better than degreaser (it leaves strings clearer than the rest).

Nexxen wrote on 2021-12-15, 10:53:

Cleaning old cases. So much grime.
Used baking soda to clean covers, looks like it works better than degreaser (it leaves strings clearer than the rest).

That's because baking soda is abrasive, you are not cleaning the dirt off you are sanding it away. That means you are also losing paint and texture.

TrashPanda wrote on 2021-12-15, 09:58:

-Wing Commander Prophecy

That brings back memories. They released a free expansion for it, Special Ops, which I was lucky enough to be able to download at a summer job with a decent network connection. Abiding memory of that was several times getting one shot killed by the main gun from my own carrier (Cerberus?) because they decided to start targeting the fighter I was about to finish off, and they had apparently never heard of leading the target.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-15, 12:50:

Nexxen wrote on 2021-12-15, 10:53:

Cleaning old cases. So much grime.
Used baking soda to clean covers, looks like it works better than degreaser (it leaves strings clearer than the rest).

That's because baking soda is abrasive, you are not cleaning the dirt off you are sanding it away. That means you are also losing paint and texture.

I'm just leaving a paste on the surface, not adding force. Gentle gentle.
Maybe it just soaks enough to get into the most difficult parts.

I don't know what to use to get these old beige cases perfectly clean with no grey visible (if you get what I mean).
I'm not stressing anymore though.

Nexxen wrote on 2021-12-15, 15:11:

I'm just leaving a paste on the surface, not adding force. Gentle gentle. Maybe it just soaks enough to get into the most diffic […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-15, 12:50:

Nexxen wrote on 2021-12-15, 10:53:

Cleaning old cases. So much grime.
Used baking soda to clean covers, looks like it works better than degreaser (it leaves strings clearer than the rest).

That's because baking soda is abrasive, you are not cleaning the dirt off you are sanding it away. That means you are also losing paint and texture.

I'm just leaving a paste on the surface, not adding force. Gentle gentle.
Maybe it just soaks enough to get into the most difficult parts.

I don't know what to use to get these old beige cases perfectly clean with no grey visible (if you get what I mean).
I'm not stressing anymore though.

Baking soda is not a solvent, no matter what force you use it is not dissolving the stain, it is sanding it away.

I thought sodium bicarbonate solution was slightly alkali and will soften some fats (like cooking oil spills that have gone hard), as well as the powder being abrasive? I know someone who used it to make a paste, cover over some hard fat, covered it all in cling film, left it over night, and the following morning just wiped it all up without needing to scrub anything. I mean, it's not sodium hydroxide or anything like that, but it's not chemically inert either.

If there's any electrolytic activity, bicarb becomes sodium hydroxide too. However as an abrasive, it's not sand, it's mostly just gently abrasive when dry, unless you're actually scouring with it, it won't damage anything, in fact the reason it's used is at all is because it's gently abrasive and is hard to damage anything with.

I have used baking soda and a wet rag to clean some of my beige plastics with good results... Not going to do much for yellowed plastics... Here is a pic of my first retrobrite experiment on on and old yellowed mouse... bottom no retrobrite for comparison.

Thanks all for the feedback.

Last night was an interesting mess....

Got 4 more hard disks, one won't spin but it's not stiction, one knocked so hilariously I took video of me messing with it, and the cat was amusingly looking at it like "what the heck is that thing (knock knock)....should I swat at it, sniff it, or try to eat it?". The other two, a 20GB WD200 and a 250GB WD2500 both work just fine. Put the 250GB in my 486, not sure what I'll use it for, but we'll see, 🤣. Took apart the two that don't work, threw the screws in the other one that did not work and put the lid back on just for giggles....did surprisingly little....might swap the platters for another fun experiment.

Slapped the 20GB in the Dell DImension 3000 and put that one right. I'm surprised to find Dell would apparently replace your recovery CD with one with a newer O/S. The PC is marked for XP, but it has a VISTA recovery CD, and it runs surprisingly well considering it's a 2.8GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM. That was a breeze.

Meanwhile, played with seeing what CD's my 486's would boot with the DDO'd 250GB Drive.....I managed to start booting Kolibri Linux, and a couple new BSD Variants, I think I even had a x64 version that somehow managed to do something for a short bit before rebooting the system, probably due to invalid opcodes. Thinking about making a huge Multi-Boot, Multi O/S HDD (Thinking DOS 6.22/WFWG311/Win95/Win98SE/Win2000/OS2 2.1 w/ WinOS2/OS2WARP/Slackware96......maybe a modern i486 compatible linux distro.....this is going to be fun).

But the real fighter of the night - the FitPC Slim, a AMD Quark LX800 based thing in a case the size of a Fuzz Pedal....which I slapped in a 128GB mSATA SSD in a 44-pin converter into. Now THIS was a challenge. First off, I hear it shiped with Gentoo LInux or Windows XP......Home or Embedded IIRC....I decided to get heady and use my old XP Pro SP3 Install on it....

First off, the FitPC, I tried putting FreeDOS and 98 on it and the results just were not to my liking. IT's just too fast for FreeDOS and has not enough Driver support for 98 SE. I toyed with 2000 until I realized I probably don't have enough of the correct drivers, and there's a chance XP Pro would have the right drivers, or enough to make it happy.

Then came getting XP on the darned thing, being the size of a Radar Detector ...there's no Floppy Drive, no CD-ROM drive, I don't have the PCMCIA or CF-Card option, and I don't have any PCMCIA media or CF Cards anyway (yet).

Attempt one found me making a bootable USB drive with my XP Pro install files on it, apparently 64GB Flash drives make this thing miserable, it'd just bypass the drive, try an older drive, nope. Honestly. Seemed like if it did try, it would hang the system.

So next I figured, slap the SSD into the Dell and reimage with XP that way.....then when I put the imaged SSD in there, which only took about 30 minutes to install at most BTW, it would hang on the FitPC (sigh)....okay....time to get the nuclear option.....

I took apart the FitPC, snapped a shot of it's WiFi controller and chipset, then put it back together, and decided maybe a USB-CD-ROM would work, but in lieu of one, I used my IDE/SATA device to USB converter instead and used that with the Dell's DVD-RW to image the FitPC via the fit PC and THEN, and only then did it take XP and boot, and honestly, for something that's only 500MHz and has about 512MB of RAM on-board, it runs surprisingly well.

Finding drivers was a total pain in the rear......see, everything except WiFi is on the AMD Quark LX800 microprocessor, so I had to nab drivers from other LX800 equipped devices to get it to work, and work they did, by the end I had everything but WiFi and a "USB Controller"....go figure, USB works just fine.

The WiFi was a QCOM branded thing, that turned out to need an RALINK driver for it after some Duckduck-fu. 54mbps, 802.11b/g, but compatible with WPA2-PSK, so I have WiFi now, one of the things that attracted me to the darned FitPC in the first place. Once that was going, it was about 1:52p, and what spurred a lot of this was some dramatic external shit I'd rather not get into. Working on computers and rocking out on the guitar during progress bars is how I keep myself sane.

So I guess, if I have more time tonight, I'll try loading some games on it, thinking "The Sims" possibly, maybe some other stuff that does not need a powerful graphics card.

creepingnet wrote on 2021-12-15, 20:30:

Last night was an interesting mess.... […]
Show full quote

Last night was an interesting mess....

Got 4 more hard disks, one won't spin but it's not stiction, one knocked so hilariously I took video of me messing with it, and the cat was amusingly looking at it like "what the heck is that thing (knock knock)....should I swat at it, sniff it, or try to eat it?". The other two, a 20GB WD200 and a 250GB WD2500 both work just fine. Put the 250GB in my 486, not sure what I'll use it for, but we'll see, 🤣. Took apart the two that don't work, threw the screws in the other one that did not work and put the lid back on just for giggles....did surprisingly little....might swap the platters for another fun experiment.

Slapped the 20GB in the Dell DImension 3000 and put that one right. I'm surprised to find Dell would apparently replace your recovery CD with one with a newer O/S. The PC is marked for XP, but it has a VISTA recovery CD, and it runs surprisingly well considering it's a 2.8GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM. That was a breeze.

Meanwhile, played with seeing what CD's my 486's would boot with the DDO'd 250GB Drive.....I managed to start booting Kolibri Linux, and a couple new BSD Variants, I think I even had a x64 version that somehow managed to do something for a short bit before rebooting the system, probably due to invalid opcodes. Thinking about making a huge Multi-Boot, Multi O/S HDD (Thinking DOS 6.22/WFWG311/Win95/Win98SE/Win2000/OS2 2.1 w/ WinOS2/OS2WARP/Slackware96......maybe a modern i486 compatible linux distro.....this is going to be fun).

But the real fighter of the night - the FitPC Slim, a AMD Quark LX800 based thing in a case the size of a Fuzz Pedal....which I slapped in a 128GB mSATA SSD in a 44-pin converter into. Now THIS was a challenge. First off, I hear it shiped with Gentoo LInux or Windows XP......Home or Embedded IIRC....I decided to get heady and use my old XP Pro SP3 Install on it....

First off, the FitPC, I tried putting FreeDOS and 98 on it and the results just were not to my liking. IT's just too fast for FreeDOS and has not enough Driver support for 98 SE. I toyed with 2000 until I realized I probably don't have enough of the correct drivers, and there's a chance XP Pro would have the right drivers, or enough to make it happy.

Then came getting XP on the darned thing, being the size of a Radar Detector ...there's no Floppy Drive, no CD-ROM drive, I don't have the PCMCIA or CF-Card option, and I don't have any PCMCIA media or CF Cards anyway (yet).

Attempt one found me making a bootable USB drive with my XP Pro install files on it, apparently 64GB Flash drives make this thing miserable, it'd just bypass the drive, try an older drive, nope. Honestly. Seemed like if it did try, it would hang the system.

So next I figured, slap the SSD into the Dell and reimage with XP that way.....then when I put the imaged SSD in there, which only took about 30 minutes to install at most BTW, it would hang on the FitPC (sigh)....okay....time to get the nuclear option.....

I took apart the FitPC, snapped a shot of it's WiFi controller and chipset, then put it back together, and decided maybe a USB-CD-ROM would work, but in lieu of one, I used my IDE/SATA device to USB converter instead and used that with the Dell's DVD-RW to image the FitPC via the fit PC and THEN, and only then did it take XP and boot, and honestly, for something that's only 500MHz and has about 512MB of RAM on-board, it runs surprisingly well.

Finding drivers was a total pain in the rear......see, everything except WiFi is on the AMD Quark LX800 microprocessor, so I had to nab drivers from other LX800 equipped devices to get it to work, and work they did, by the end I had everything but WiFi and a "USB Controller"....go figure, USB works just fine.

The WiFi was a QCOM branded thing, that turned out to need an RALINK driver for it after some Duckduck-fu. 54mbps, 802.11b/g, but compatible with WPA2-PSK, so I have WiFi now, one of the things that attracted me to the darned FitPC in the first place. Once that was going, it was about 1:52p, and what spurred a lot of this was some dramatic external shit I'd rather not get into. Working on computers and rocking out on the guitar during progress bars is how I keep myself sane.

So I guess, if I have more time tonight, I'll try loading some games on it, thinking "The Sims" possibly, maybe some other stuff that does not need a powerful graphics card.

Good to see you are having fun man.

It's been pissing down from the heavens down here. Just checked all the drains to make sure things are doing what storm water drains do. All have been clear of the recent leaf build up from the Moa Mans( yes that is what he calls his business) visit last Friday. All is sweet.

Might go play with my ShuttleX system for a change. It's been neglected for the last few months. I cut the lasted Devuan Distro back then but couldn't find one of those roundtoits. They can be quite hard to locate these days.