I wonder if it's already going to the modem audio pin and is just muted with no modem activity.

Got the RocTec RocHard RH800C Amiga500 sidecar to fully work. But there is something really strange about the drive.
I can use 8 and 32 megabyte CF cards, but a 512 megabyte will not be partitioned. As I have no cards between 32 and 512, then I am kind of stuck.
Anyway... I now have a fully working drive/memory expansion that attaches to the side of Amiga500.

As to the size issue. I have no idea why it reports wrong parameters when using 512mb cards. Even a 512mb DOM will not work.
When trying with a 1gb CF card, the Amiga wont boot at all. So I guess something like 256 or 125 megabyte is max on this controller.
But it is ok. It is for a classic late-80's setup anyway, and 256 or even 125 would be massive for that time periode.

I have all kinds of weird problems with CF cards and over flash media. I've found that I can always reset them to a state that old software likes by deleting all positions and creating a single FAT position with DOS fdisk. Then, once it can be recognized elsewhere, I can delete the partition
and do whatever I want with it.

There are some subtle variations of FAT, and I think it confuses old software. Give it a try.

Moved the 462 system in higher end case, since i got enough of that tank build like HP case.. The case was fine overall, but there was some paint wear, some broken plastic mechanism of the extension I/O of the expandable AGP/ PCI slots, and did not hold well anymore. + the SS case was empty, as i wanted to build s939 system, but i lack AGP 939 mobo, high end 939 CPU (best i have is an Opteron 165..), and i dont have spare PSU, as the 500W EnermaX Liberty is for testing purposes, since my 1000W Seasonic platinum does not have CPU cable, and i cant use it on anything above Pentium 3, since i dont have the CPU cable... So i did just move the system in that nice case.. But i think in the future i will find other case for that system...

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-15, 13:39:

I have all kinds of weird problems with CF cards and over flash media. I've found that I can always reset them to a state that old software likes by deleting all positions and creating a single FAT position with DOS fdisk. Then, once it can be recognized elsewhere, I can delete the partition
and do whatever I want with it.

There are some subtle variations of FAT, and I think it confuses old software. Give it a try.

The cards are fully working under Dos on 486/Pentium systems. However this is an Amiga HDD Controller which uses FFS that I am trying to get to play nice. 😉

EDIT:
This one here...

Just tested the RocTec HDD speed on stock 68000 CPU. It gives between 8,8 and 9,1 mb/s when testing with sysinfo.
I have never seen anything like this before. Not even my Amiga1200 with 68030 gives this high speed.

got my socket 939 system working this time with a neo2 platinum with opteron 180 2.4 GHz. ghetto rigged a large 80mm noctua (overhangs and cools caps too) on the heatsink and paired with fx 5900xt and cmi8738 (really good soundcard for 4 pin motherboards). its good to go. tried with all sorts of soundcards, settled on this. no dos support or sc-55 compatability soundbalster wise (hanging notes). replaced the southbnridge heatsink fan for a heatsink with fins, so nearly silent system 😀
now need to downgrade socket A cpu (replace 2600+, too power hungry on 5V rail) so i can pair with beefier gpu (currently has a anaemic rage 128 pro plugged in). then i will have vortex 2 and sc-55 compatability that socket 939 cant give

I put in new 35mm film in the 1986 Olympus Infinity and took a couple of pictures before and after I cleaned the lens and other items since they were a bit dusty. Once I take all 24 shots, I'll get the film developed to see if any of them are blurry or perfect.

The battery is from about the 1990s and it's still rocking. The Minolta Maxxum 5000i needs a new battery since it's flat or I'm not doing something right (the display should turn on, but the camera hasn't been used in years).

So apparently I can't let the idea of a perfect computer vacuum go and have been working on one, all the better to dust you with my dearies. (Not you lot, the dustbunny warrened retro stuff I haven't touched in years) My complaint about regular cylinder vacs for this, is that the hoses are too fat and clumsy, and the machines are a bit on the, "You're always tripping over them if they're close enough to use" side. The complaint about retail computer vacuums is they don't... vacuum (You had ONE job). Anyway, dollar store fairy gifted me the ridiculous crap in the pic below.

So I dug out an old car vacuum, cylinder type wet and dry, the design is at least 30 years old, this one is about 20, and they still sell them, though I'd look for the discount store $15 version if you want one, not the home depot $60 version... only the color looks different. Anyway, close to bona fide retro car vac 🤣 Made an adapter for those tubes, which join together, and expand about 3x. They're actually seem a tad more sturdy than similar construction ones I've had on cheap inflator pumps and extremely cheap car vacs. My vac stil had it's hose, but it's too short and stiff, and kinda near household vac dimensions. So by shrinking a bottle with a small neck, over one with a large neck, I was able to make an adapter to hook those tubes to... it's a qualified success.... the old filter in the vac, was really caked and it's elastic had gone. So I tried a 3 layer "surgical" type mask in there... suction isn't up to par. Oh right power, needs somewhere near 8 amps and didn't have one of those nifty drivebay power points, so I made a lead with a PCIe power connector.... this is the 2000s 🤣 So might also be down on suction a tad vs in actual car, because it might get near another 2V vs a flat 12 out of PCIe 6 pin. So the mask as filter might be too restrictive, tried giving the old filter a wash anyway, that and a wet wipe are drying. Gonna try that put on with a rubber band. I'll see how that works tomorrow, or I might peel a mask apart to less layers. Another thought is some cheap HVAC filter vents I picked up, might try hotgluing one of those into a cylinder with stiff card blocking the end. If the car vac cannot be persuaded not to suck, I mean to suck even more, then using method of shrinking bottles with heatgun, I might make another adapter for house vac hose to those tubes. They're just about big enough to shove your thumb in the fat end if you want a scale ref.

edit: Maybe the named brand ones are better, this is the design, Koolatron seem to have hotrodded it with a 14A motor though, https://www.koolatron.com/products/12v-canister-vacuum hmmm wonder if I want to get into motor modding, rewinding, or just replace the damn thing.. Heyyy, do Koolatron have parts avail? 🤣

EditII: Sunday update. So I got the rinsed and dried wet wipe on the filter holder with a rubber band. Suction seems okay with that, seems to leak some superfine stuff, but can only just smell it, typical to what non-hepa vacuums leak I think. It was not quite wide enough to go on easy though. Next time I think I'm gonna staple one together as a sock/pocket. Messed around with nozzles a bit, I was looking for a "wand" end to use, but nothing around the right size at the moment, made an approx 1/4" nozzle end with the top off a used up nasal spray. Tested with all the tubes on, suction a bit sub par, cut it back to one full stretched, which if you have this, small, vacuum near the job seems to give a radius of action sufficient to reach all round a mid tower. Picks up the loose stuff quite easily. Using a bristle brush flicking toward it helped knock the caked on stuff off. Putting it on the blow end, it blows hard enough to dent your skin with the nozzle on. Tried a "loop charged" mode, 1/4" blower nozzle to the crevice tool on the stock hose on the vacuum end... sorta worked but didn't seem much more effective than brush and suck. Half lubed the motor, couldn't get to the front bearing without prying off the impeller and thought I might break it. Tried a hit and hope with a needle oiler through the closest hole and hit the back bearing well. Motor is an RS555 in this one. Impeller and motor combo outside of the housing is FIERCE... felt like the blow off a 200cfm fan, even with no hoses on the housing seems really restrictive. Need to "port" my vacuum cleaner 🤣

EditIII: Oh It's peroxide and rubbing alcohol bottles that those tubes fit on well. Being HDPE doesn't shrink as well as PET does though with heat, maybe do better with vacuum applied at the same time. Anyhoo, just had a thought... air only needs to exit the blow hole for blower mode, and it seeeems that opening up the exhaust would maybe give more suction, so I might look into gluing some cut off bottle tops into the housing, so you can take the caps off when you just want vacuum, but can have them bleeding blown air when you want full suck.

Tinkered with my Epson 286 today. I wanted to install the joystick port, which is supported by my I/O controller card. And while all the ISA slots are taken up, one of them is being used by the Lo-tech XT-IDE card, which meant the actual rear slot was free.

Removing the 25-pin serial port from the bracket, I was able to squeeze the joystick port over top of the XT-IDE card.

I'm starting to wish this board had at least one more ISA slot, or even just an extra spot for brackets on the case itself.

You could mod it for bracket room, by finding a 7 or 8 slot donor piece and putting that on instead of the one on there. But yah, it's only original once etc.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-17, 00:57:

You could mod it for bracket room, by finding a 7 or 8 slot donor piece and putting that on instead of the one on there. But yah, it's only original once etc.

Given the nostalgia I have for this particular make/model, I don't want to do any destructive modding to it. 😀

What I am hoping to find one day is an Epson Equity III+, which apparently has nine ISA slots. That will be the 286 I can trick out with umpteen cards.

In the mean time, I can work within the limitations of the Equity II+ machine's mere 6 slots...

Pulled out of the shelves SCSI parts in order to test the 540MB Conner i did buy (the crappy looking one), rest drives are mine, but was untested from some systems (Compaq AP550, NCR System 3300), so did get them to be tested as well. It turned out very well everything is working. The new Conner is working (surprise-surprise there), but it have bad sectors after 350-400MB, so i am thinking maybe to isolate with some program the bad part of the disk, and to use only the healthy one, since on HDtune showed 1.5% bad sectors, but when i did copy files from and to the drive it did work well, so i think if i isolate the bad sector part of the HDD it will work fine...

That Fujitsu is 10K, compared to 7K IDE on the dual Tualatin system, so i am thinking maybe to replace the 20GB Exelstor (IBM Deskstar) with that SCSI Fujitsu, to gain abit more speed and responsiveness compared to the IDE drive.. But will see, since i did just install everything, and will be annoying to have to REinstall everything...

Did some experiments on a 2ghz pentium 4 machine.
It has 1 gig of ram, an ATI AGP Card with 256mb ram,
500gb PATA disk that surprise is fully supported by the bios.
1000 watt PEAK GPU because it was available 🤣

Installing windows XP as period correct the result was nice: boot fast, plays games purr purr purr.
Then running windows 7 for 15 minutes the little passive GPU card was quite warm.
Then it was time to try a linux distro and I chose one that wanted to wipe out windows than install as multiboot.
Must find a livecd linux that'll not want to nuke windows.
So its an XP machine .... now i can play simcity 4 that won't run on core duo or newer .
Now is time to find a linux that will install alongside than try to remove windows.
I wonder if anyone knows such a linux distro ? It need to be a 32bit one of course.

Fedora 14. It's the last release with the Gnome 2 desktop. Every release since has been a step backwards. The experience is better than anything that you can find on any "modern" distro.

If you install Linux and it nukes Windows that'a a PEBKAC error.

I settled for linux mint 19.3 32bit as dual boot with xp pro and it works really good except it stops being maintained next year then i'll have to look again but I am dissapointed mint users think 32bit died 10 years ago I sure find it useful as dual boot with my retro machines because it takes away the need to switch machines to use the internet and stuff.
I will probably use my retro machine as a backup system now. And its parts are almost 20 years old (except the psu)

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-17, 15:01:

If you install Linux and it nukes Windows that'a a PEBKAC error.

Nope, sometimes the installer is that buggy.

(Thanks, Ubuntu !)

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-17, 13:17:

Fedora 14. It's the last release with the Gnome 2 desktop. Every release since has been a step backwards. The experience is better than anything that you can find on any "modern" distro.

I use Gnome 4 on the latest Fedora, and it's really superior to anything from the past. The best user experience by far !
I was a Xfce fanboy. Not anymore.

Aaahhh, that wasn't supposed to happen:

I was trying to solve the flickering backlight problem with my T2130CT now that it's up and running. What you see here is the spare inverter that didn't have the problem but it needed recapping anyway - the purple cap is fine as far as I can tell, they made that capacitor with epoxy and I've not seen that one leak. But the little 35v 10uF one next to it always leaks.
While I was trying to find electrolyte I got a bit carried away and burned out that white thermal fuse, which isn't a resetting one. Thought I'd try pulling that off and ended up destroying the npn transistor it was there to fuse. Oops, now to figure out what on earth the markings "C C" and "T5C" indicate on what seems to be a SOT89-3, to repair it again.
UA0392P01 inverters are always worth fixing imo since they have a design weakness with that capacitor, people will always be replacing them and eventually they'll run out. With my spare inverter now broken, I fixed the original inverter by spraying lots of IPA onto the inverter PCB, front and back, under all its parts to clear out the electrolyte that must have been left over. Now inverter #1 isn't flickering, hooray.

I should really put what I know up on caps wiki...

xcomcmdr wrote on 2022-10-17, 19:15:

I use Gnome 4 on the latest Fedora, and it's really superior to anything from the past. The best user experience by far !
I was a Xfce fanboy. Not anymore.

Gnome 2 is the classic desktop metaphor. Since Gnome 3, focus has been on looks and design, to the detriment of usability. The problem wasn't the desire for change, but the destruction of what was, in my opinion, the peak of the professional Linux desktop experience. Even Linus Torvalds agreed:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds- … design-failure/

I broke down, and upgraded my old aging Fedora install on my desktop. Simply because my old F14 comes with ancient X versions that don't contain all the fixes to make Intel 3D really work well. And yes, things really do work better on the graphical side.

But with F17 comes gnome3. And I knew I'd have trouble, but also knew that most of the worst crap could be fixed with extensions, and I'd used 3.4 on my laptop enough to know it should be all somewhat usable.

Notice that he said F17 (Fedora 17). It was the end of an era.

If you've never tried Fedora 14 with its Gnome 2 desktop, I would highly recommend the experience, even if you won't run it once. It's far more polished than anything I've seen in the last 10 years.

I tried to make a Gnome 3 theme to try and bring some of the design aesthetic back, but there are features missing from Gnome 3 that make it impossible. See here for my GitHub release, although it doesn't work right with the most recent releases of Gnome 3, you can get an idea of how it used to look from the screenshots.

https://github.com/gnome-themes/clearlooks-f14