VOGONS


Reply 21120 of 27169, by Shreddoc

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Another factor is simply this: ebay is only a minority of the world's business transactions. Yes, even in retro computing. Only a tiny % of my personal retro gear stash ever came from ebay. So, "what ebay and it's users do" isn't necessarily indicative of the world at large. To some degree, ebay is it's own (very large) insular bubble, with it's own internal trends.

Reply 21121 of 27169, by Kahenraz

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Sometimes you keep playing the game even when you know it's rigged, hoping for something good to come around. There aren't any retro groups or places for me to buy anything locally so I can only eBay. I've gotten pretty good at it but a lot of the good stuff that people have alerts setup for are usually out of reach for anyone but the high rollers.

My best score was years ago when I bought a LAPC-I for a song because it was listed as a LAPC-1 and no one else noticed. I let the auction lapse twice, I think, then made a lower offer through a private message.

Last edited by Kahenraz on 2022-03-05, 12:30. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 21122 of 27169, by Masaru

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I've found quite a few scores locally, but maybe it's because I live in a small town filled with people who would rather go muddin in their big jacked up trucks than dabble in old electronics. Not judging too much, but I've noticed this is pretty common in towns where the latest and greatest electronics are coveted until they are outdated.

Reply 21123 of 27169, by fool

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Build 4P4C to DIN5 keyboard adapter used in Wyse 2108 and works perfectly. Some issues though with the system itself. Weird but after about 5mins system locks up. MFM low level format locked at about 90%. CPU gets really hot, cannot keep my finger on it. Also 80287 gets really warm. System doesn't post before cooled down. 5V supply is in specs. I'll try if better cooling helps.

Toshiba T8500 desktop
SAM/CS9233 Wavetable Synthesizer daughterboard
Coming: 40-pin 8MB SIMM kit, CS4232 ISA wavetable sound card

Reply 21124 of 27169, by xcomcmdr

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Played the 4th Mission of House Atreides in Dune 2 (Megadrive port) in bed this morning. Blasted that Harkonnen base with regular tanks eventually after 30 minutes.

This port is really enjoyable, despite its obvious limitations compared to the PC (or even Amiga) versions. A key part of that is the fact that it uses a changing cursor like Command & Conquer did on PC some years later.

What's a little annoying is that it's a PAL Megadrive, so the music is slower to what I'm used to hear on YouTube or the like.
I got used to it, but it still feels weird/innapropriate for tracks such as "Evasive Action"

Last edited by xcomcmdr on 2022-03-05, 13:35. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 21125 of 27169, by Joseph_Joestar

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xcomcmdr wrote on 2022-03-05, 12:14:

What's a little annoying is that it's a PAL Megadrive, so the music is slower to what I'm used to hear on YouTube or the like.

You can solder a switch which lets you toggle between PAL, NTSC-US and NTSC-J.

I successfully did that with mine, and my soldering skills are quite mediocre. Search YouTube for "Megadrive region mod" for a video showcasing this.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 21126 of 27169, by BitWrangler

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Masaru wrote on 2022-03-05, 06:52:

I've found quite a few scores locally, but maybe it's because I live in a small town filled with people who would rather go muddin in their big jacked up trucks than dabble in old electronics. Not judging too much, but I've noticed this is pretty common in towns where the latest and greatest electronics are coveted until they are outdated.

Heh, sometimes see people in the "country" small towns listing stuff on local classifieds and marketplace, and they're like "Top of the line Pentium 4, hardly used, practically new, cost $1,500 from Future Shop (dead for 10 years chain) sacrifice at $700.".... yeah, they still think P4s are the shit.... potentially because some of them are still on diallup, have real crappy DSL that only manages 500kbit unless the weather has been dry for a week, or pay out the arse for 1.5Mbit wireless that goes out in thick weather.... in other words, they prolly wouldn't see much difference interwebbing on an old P4 vs a new i7.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 21127 of 27169, by AngryByDefault

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Hi there,
Feeling uneasy about me always making questions and rarely having something to share back I had decided to step back for a while...
But today I tested a couple of sound cards and I figured I could share a few pics of the DIY PC Bench I'm using for these tests (although I took them a few weeks ago...).

I built it with these primary goals in mind:
- Have some fun.
- Make something nice but with very few resources.
- Make it easy to disassemble when not in use.

It can accommodate both ATX and Baby-AT boards

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The lateral frames and some underside velcro help with cable management for a tidy work area.

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It has a few stands dedicated to avoid boards flexing when their width makes the power or IDE connectors "hanging" out.

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Features a "stand-by" mode allowing me to slide the keyboard beneath the bench.

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"Stand by" mode.
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And in "Tuck Away" mode it becomes quite compact.
Removing the 8 small nuts is all it takes to place one cover on top of the other and the stands between them. The rubber feet act as a separator leaving more that enough room for every other piece to fit between the covers.

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"Tuck away" mode.
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Honestly, it is absolutely worthy by how much easier and less messy all this card-swapping becomes...

Reply 21128 of 27169, by debs3759

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AngryByDefault wrote on 2022-03-05, 22:51:
Hi there, Feeling uneasy about me always making questions and rarely having something to share back I had decided to step back […]
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Hi there,
Feeling uneasy about me always making questions and rarely having something to share back I had decided to step back for a while...
But today I tested a couple of sound cards and I figured I could share a few pics of the DIY PC Bench I'm using for these tests (although I took them a few weeks ago...).

I built it with these primary goals in mind:
- Have some fun.
- Make something nice but with very few resources.
- Make it easy to disassemble when not in use.

It can accommodate both ATX and Baby-AT boards
IMG_20220129_121148.jpg

The lateral frames and some underside velcro help with cable management for a tidy work area.
IMG_20220129_121301.jpg

It has a few stands dedicated to avoid boards flexing when their width makes the power or IDE connectors "hanging" out.
IMG_20220129_121334_.jpg

Features a "stand-by" mode allowing me to slide the keyboard beneath the bench.
IMG_20220129_121603.jpg

And in "Tuck Away" mode it becomes quite compact.
Removing the 8 small nuts is all it takes to place one cover on top of the other and the stands between them. The rubber feet act as a separator leaving more that enough room for every other piece to fit between the covers.
IMG_20220130_173902.jpg

Honestly, it is absolutely worthy by how much easier and less messy all this card-swapping becomes...

That's cool! You should start making them to sell, very professional looking.

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 21129 of 27169, by Kahenraz

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The issue I had with acrylic test benches is that the motherboard tray tends to warp due from the weight of everything on top of it. I ended up throwing mine away and getting a high quality Top Deck Tech Station (as seen on Phil's Computer Lab).

Since you are engineering this yourself, I would recommend designing some kind of horizontal support beam to prevent this. This might even work with the same material as the "beam", but turned 90 degrees.

Reply 21131 of 27169, by Brawndo

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This is a multi-day project, but I decided it was about time to take my old Dell D830 laptop out of storage and figure out what I need to upgrade the hardware so it's as powerful as it can be, and since I had to remove the keyboard to get to one of the RAM slots and I want to upgrade the CPU anyway, may as well take the whole thing apart and really clean all components inside and out. Looks like I'm in the market for an Intel T9500 dual core CPU and 2X2GB DDR 5300 RAM modules to really perk this thing up. It can actually support 8 GB RAM total, but the current price difference between a 4 GB DDR2 RAM kit (about $10) and a 8 GB RAM kit (about $80) is stupid. Since I'll likely set it up as a dual boot XP/7 32-bit system, 4 GB will be enough, and also considering its age, it's period appropriate.

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Reply 21132 of 27169, by TrashPanda

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Brawndo wrote on 2022-03-06, 06:24:
This is a multi-day project, but I decided it was about time to take my old Dell D830 laptop out of storage and figure out what […]
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This is a multi-day project, but I decided it was about time to take my old Dell D830 laptop out of storage and figure out what I need to upgrade the hardware so it's as powerful as it can be, and since I had to remove the keyboard to get to one of the RAM slots and I want to upgrade the CPU anyway, may as well take the whole thing apart and really clean all components inside and out. Looks like I'm in the market for an Intel T9500 dual core CPU and 2X2GB DDR 5300 RAM modules to really perk this thing up. It can actually support 8 GB RAM total, but the current price difference between a 4 GB DDR2 RAM kit (about $10) and a 8 GB RAM kit (about $80) is stupid. Since I'll likely set it up as a dual boot XP/7 32-bit system, 4 GB will be enough, and also considering its age, it's period appropriate.

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Have one of these, fully upgraded, managed to shove an x9000 in there. It’s quite a nice lappy with the new cpu, ssd and quadro gpu, tho I have it dual booting with Linux/vista 64.

Don’t own a spare win7 64 to use on it.

I don’t recommend putting a extreme cpu in these, mine does run a bit warm even with upgraded cooling.

Reply 21133 of 27169, by kaputnik

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Been exploring the 486 ISA SBC concept. Never even knew they existed until just recently. Hopefully getting one of those soon 😀

Was involved in transferring an old passenger ferry to new owners in the Mediterranean a couple of weeks ago. Before handing a ship over, you go through it and take care of anything valuable in the exclusion list, like power tools, computers, etc. While doing that, I had a look in the phone exchange room, and found what looked like an old computer in an industrial tower case the size of half a shoe box. No cables connected, obviously not in use. Had very limited time, so basically just opened it up and had a quick glance. Never took any photos, regretting that now.

Inside there was an ISA backplane, the SBC, a couple of serial/parallel port controller cards, NIC, graphics card, hdd, floppy drive. I believe the IDE and floppy controllers were integrated on the SBC card.

The CPU had a small passively cooled heatsink (interestingly kept in place by a toothbrush handle jammed in between it and the PSU 😁). The SBC had PS/2 ports for both keyboard and mouse. Also, the ship had its keel laid in 1999. One can assume this kind of equipment was installed in the last phase of the construction, a couple of years later. I've understood that these SBCs were still made well after the heyday of 486, using late models like DX2 66 and DX4 100.

I believe the SIMMs were 30 pin ones, but might have gotten that wrong in the hurry. The computer was really cramped, easy to miss the details. All the 486 SBCs I've found documentation for so far uses 72 pin ones.

Given the above, I'm hoping it's a high end 486 of some kind.

Now it's stashed in a wooden crate, together with my personal effects, in a container hopefully on its way to Sweden as of writing this. Can't wait to get it in my hands, and start going through it and bringing it back to life 😁 Always wanted a 486 computer, but got quite limited space in my computer corner, so had to prioritize until now. The small form factor of this might just change that.

Will of course document and post the project here once it arrives 😀

Reply 21134 of 27169, by arnovdheiden

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Brawndo wrote on 2022-03-06, 06:24:
This is a multi-day project, but I decided it was about time to take my old Dell D830 laptop out of storage and figure out what […]
Show full quote

This is a multi-day project, but I decided it was about time to take my old Dell D830 laptop out of storage and figure out what I need to upgrade the hardware so it's as powerful as it can be, and since I had to remove the keyboard to get to one of the RAM slots and I want to upgrade the CPU anyway, may as well take the whole thing apart and really clean all components inside and out. Looks like I'm in the market for an Intel T9500 dual core CPU and 2X2GB DDR 5300 RAM modules to really perk this thing up. It can actually support 8 GB RAM total, but the current price difference between a 4 GB DDR2 RAM kit (about $10) and a 8 GB RAM kit (about $80) is stupid. Since I'll likely set it up as a dual boot XP/7 32-bit system, 4 GB will be enough, and also considering its age, it's period appropriate.

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Still a very nice laptop. I am typing this comment on a D830 running windows 11 right now. Don't expect any miracles with windows 11 installed, but hey, it works. I specifically chose the systemboard with intel integrated graphics since the boards with the nvidia chips die easily. In the past replaced the motherboard twice because of graphics faillure and i was done with the crappy nvidia graphics chip so i went for the intel. I upgraded my system with a T9300 because it's more affordable than the T9500. And It has 4GB of RAM now. As a bonus my D830 has the 1920x1200 screen, but the backlight has had its best days. It's turning a bit yellowish.

Reply 21135 of 27169, by TrashPanda

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arnovdheiden wrote on 2022-03-06, 15:23:
Brawndo wrote on 2022-03-06, 06:24:
This is a multi-day project, but I decided it was about time to take my old Dell D830 laptop out of storage and figure out what […]
Show full quote

This is a multi-day project, but I decided it was about time to take my old Dell D830 laptop out of storage and figure out what I need to upgrade the hardware so it's as powerful as it can be, and since I had to remove the keyboard to get to one of the RAM slots and I want to upgrade the CPU anyway, may as well take the whole thing apart and really clean all components inside and out. Looks like I'm in the market for an Intel T9500 dual core CPU and 2X2GB DDR 5300 RAM modules to really perk this thing up. It can actually support 8 GB RAM total, but the current price difference between a 4 GB DDR2 RAM kit (about $10) and a 8 GB RAM kit (about $80) is stupid. Since I'll likely set it up as a dual boot XP/7 32-bit system, 4 GB will be enough, and also considering its age, it's period appropriate.

20220305-230752.jpg
20220305-230851.jpg
20220305-230926.jpg
20220305-230948.jpg

Still a very nice laptop. I am typing this comment on a D830 running windows 11 right now. Don't expect any miracles with windows 11 installed, but hey, it works. I specifically chose the systemboard with intel integrated graphics since the boards with the nvidia chips die easily. In the past replaced the motherboard twice because of graphics faillure and i was done with the crappy nvidia graphics chip so i went for the intel. I upgraded my system with a T9300 because it's more affordable than the T9500. And It has 4GB of RAM now. As a bonus my D830 has the 1920x1200 screen, but the backlight has had its best days. It's turning a bit yellowish.

Should be easy enough to replace the backlight, these D830s are pretty durable machines and dont mind being .. experimented on 🤣.

Reply 21136 of 27169, by davidrg

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This weekends (and last weekends) project: a PC with no drives at all:
img-90.png
(it does have drives but they're all disconnected)

Running Windows 95:
img-91.png

I'm not sure why windows thinks there is a floppy drive present. I even tried disabling the floppy controller and windows still insisted there must be one. But the important thing here is there is only the ghost of a floppy drive and a pile of network drives. No hard disk at all. Windows is running entirely off the network. The network cards boot ROM loads some initial windows 95 files from the server and after watching the windows 95 splash screen for a few moments the computer drops back to a console to ask you to login before resuming the splash screen and continuing to start windows.

Surprisingly its not even slow! Starting from the network seemed to take a similar time to the old Quantum Bigfoot that was in this machine. Once its started you wouldn't know the windows folder (and swap file!) was on the network - probably thanks to the 64MB of RAM this machine (a 133MHz Pentium) has. I imagine it would get a bit slower if it started swapping to the network. Interestingly to logout you've got to reboot - the only login screen is that text-mode one half way through windows startup. And there is no way to shut-down windows - the shut-down option reboots the computer rather than doing the "now its safe to turn off your PC" thing.

Took quite a bit of effort getting this to work! The process was poorly documented at the time and 27 years later the situation hasn't improved. Plus the first two machines I grabbed out of storage had faulty power supplies - guess I need to get out the desoldering gun and order some capacitors some time. But the third machine (which I don't think I've ever turned on before - I've no idea where it even came from) worked ok!

Having now done it I'm not sure diskless Windows 95 is particularly useful - for one you can only do it with the original retail release of Windows 95 (OSR2/2.5 are not supported), you can't install any version of internet explorer newer than 3.0 and I'm sure a lot of other things are awkward or impossible to install too. But it was fun figuring out how to make it work!

Reply 21137 of 27169, by chrismeyer6

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Like you said it may not be completely practical but that is a really cool project you got going there. How's the system responsiveness with it being totally network based?

Reply 21138 of 27169, by davidrg

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chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-03-06, 20:21:

Like you said it may not be completely practical but that is a really cool project you got going there. How's the system responsiveness with it being totally network based?

Hard to say for sure when limited to just the accessories that come with windows but overall its surprisingly snappy. It doesn't feel any slower than it did running from a local disk. But with 64MB of RAM it won't be having to use the swapfile - I imagine that's when performance would go down the drain. Especially because its using a 10mbps ISA network card as Windows doesn't support running diskless with a 32bit (PCI, MCA, EISA) or Plug'n'Play NIC. I imagine a whole computer lab of machines all swapping to the network would degrade performance further.

I'll have to have a go at installing Office or Visual C++ after work to see what its like running something a bit more resource hungry. Perhaps pull out some of the RAM too - 64MB isn't a very normal amount for a 133MHz Pentium (it originally came from a local aerospace company - had AutoCAD installed on the disk).