I always asked myself why some graphics cards have a notch at the front...

And now that i have seen your mainboard i think i know why...

On with the show! Let's see what I got.

So far, so good.
There are not any dents in the outer case and the front plastics are in good shape.
Unfortunately, things are not so great on the rear of the case.

Appearently, this pc was built to conform to some abondoned quasi-standard called NLX and required graphics card with special low profile brackets. I quess a previous owner wanted
to install a standard AGP card and went a little crazy with the sheet metal shears. So, the rear of the case got hacked up and the internal mounting bracket was missing.
That was a real bummer, i'll probably never find one of those either.
In the meantime, I tried to correct the hackjob the best I could with some pliers and vice grips.

I can't attach any more images to this post, so I'll continue on with the next one.

DerBaum wrote on 2023-08-27, 00:30:

I always asked myself why some graphics cards have a notch at the front...

9b1ff27f4c2f9d0dfb74ccc02892.jpg

And now that i have seen your mainboard i think i know why...

That graphics card would have probably shipped with an optional
NLX bracket which would have allowed it to be installed in pc's
with this form factor. It actually took me a while to find one at
a decent price. I guess most of them probably got thrown away.

Here is a Gateway that would have required such a card.
https://ancientelectronics.wordpress.com/2022/07/

Nice! I assume this is actually a Digital PC 3500 (the 5xxx are a tower). These are pretty much the end of the line as far as Digital PCs go - all their x86 products got discontinued shortly after Compaq bought what remained of the company in what was the largest "merger" in the history of the computer industry at that point.

Some potentially useful links from my archives:

• Product page, tech specs, etc
• Documentation
• Drivers

Edit: Sticker on the back of the case confirms it is a Digital PC 3500. Based on the part number (FR-F2B2W-WF), the original specs for this particular machine were:

Digital PC 3500 6233 Low Profile, 233MHz Pentium II, 512KB cache, 3D video, 3.2GB ULTRA DMA hard disk drive, 32MB SDRAM, 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Drive, 32X CD-ROM, Country Kit required

And it turns out the 3500 was available in a tower too

davidrg wrote on 2023-08-27, 04:37:

Nice! I assume this is actually a Digital PC 3500 (the 5xxx are a tower). These are pretty much the end of the line as far as Di […]
Show full quote

Nice! I assume this is actually a Digital PC 3500 (the 5xxx are a tower). These are pretty much the end of the line as far as Digital PCs go - all their x86 products got discontinued shortly after Compaq bought what remained of the company in what was the largest "merger" in the history of the computer industry at that point.

Some potentially useful links from my archives:

• Product page, tech specs, etc
• Documentation
• Drivers

Edit: Sticker on the back of the case confirms it is a Digital PC 3500. Based on the part number (FR-F2B2W-WF), the original specs for this particular machine were:

Digital PC 3500 6233 Low Profile, 233MHz Pentium II, 512KB cache, 3D video, 3.2GB ULTRA DMA hard disk drive, 32MB SDRAM, 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Drive, 32X CD-ROM, Country Kit required

And it turns out the 3500 was available in a tower too

I just noticed and corrected the Model name. Thanks. I had previously found a different archive of that site and was able to download the drivers and latest bios update. It's cool that people are maintaining archives of this nature that allow plebs like me to keep old hardware like this going. I was hoping that I would find a restore disc, but it didn't happen.

Anyway, let's check out the goodies.
It still has the slot 1 Pentium 2 @ 233Mhz.
Next to it is a socket containing a voltage regulator board. If my understanding is correct, if I wanted to upgrade the P2, I would also have to replace the VRB. It has a full compliment of Pentuim era ports. Serial, paralell, ps2, and 2 USB. The USB ports will only work once the chipset drivers are loaded into windows, so that put a minor hiccup in my plans which I will elaborate on later.
An integrated Matrox Mystique graphics chip with a dedicated memory expansion slot.
An NLX Agp 1.0 expansion slot.
3 ISA slots: 2 of which are shared with PCI slots. In my case, I am using 2 ISA and 1 PCI slot.
Finally, it had 256MB of ram installed.
It came with 2 hard drives installed, but they were expectedly trashed.
I considered leaving one in just for the ambiance of the spinning
hard drive sound, but power is at a premium from this tiny powersupply
so I'll leave it out.

The machine came with 3 cards installed.
A PCI modem which I may harvest the peizo speaker from,
a Kingston ISA ethernet card, which will be useful in the near future, and a Yamaha Waveforce!
A pleasent surprise that I was not expecting.

Only thing to do next is to see if it will actually boot.

Success!

Next post will deal with hardware installation.

I got busy with work, so I've been slacking on the updates. There have been some problems with this build, but nothing that hasn't been solved with minimal hardware knowlege and some brute force.

Here is the hardware I chose for this build. Some of it was scavanged from my old 486, some came included with this machine, and some had to be aquired.

The current hardware configuration consists of:
Drives: FlashFloppy modified Gotek with OLED and encoder, Sony CDROM drive, and SD to IDE adapter with 32GB card. I tried to save the included Aopen disc drive, but after replacing
the belt, I found it's performance to be sub optimal so it was replaced.

Video: I found an NLX compatible Diamond Viper V550 (Nvidia Riva TNT) Since this card came with a standard mounting plate, I had to look for a correct NLX lo-profile mounting plate
so I could attach it to the case securly without worry that the VGA cable would bend the card or pull it out of the AGP socket.

Sound: The included Yamaha Waveforce WF-192XG partnered with an ESS Audiodrive 1868f Binaura 3D with either a Dreamblaster X-2 or an X-16GS. The Motherboard does not have a PC-PCI/SB-LINK port so the Waveforce will be only used for windows games. That may change if it is possible to build an adapter to connect the PC-PCI pins to the pins of the unused ISA slot.
The Waveblaster X-16GS would be perfect if there were a way to change soundbanks or upload new ones without having to open the case everytime. In the meantime, I am happy enough with the Buran bank on the X-2.

Other: I installed the included Kingston Ethernet card and mounted a Serdaco HDD Clicker.
Note: It's a bummer that Serdashop charges VAT for international orders. Every orher Euro site I've ordered from automatically deducts VAT during the shipping calculator stage.

Since I want to install the PC in my entertainment center, I needed a USB keyboard and mouse so I could use extension cables to reach my chair. This presented a problem, since the USB ports have to be initalised by the chipset driver once it is loaded in windows, making a USB kb/mouse unusable in DOS. This required a workaround. The only solution was to use the PS/2 ports, but even if I could find PS/2 extension cables, I didn't want to have to deal with a medocre membrane keyboards and crusty ball mice.

Well, I remembered that USB to PS/2 adapters exist, so I bought a set... and they did not work with either my Corsair K65 mechanical keyboard or any of the optical mice that I had. Ok, I figured that these things had to work with something, so I researched compatible mice and found this.

A Cherry M5400 optical USB mouse.
I'm not sure if these are NOS or new production,
but they are all over ebay/amazon for decent prices. I got this one for less than $10.00 shipped.

I ran out of attachment space, So I will continue with the keyboard solution in the next post.

I mentioned before that I didn't want to be limited to just some generic membrane keyboard, so I tried to remember if gaming
keyboards existed that were compatible with the USB/PS2 adapter. After a short search, I found one that claimed to possess this feature.

A Cooler Master CM Storm!
I found one a short time later and at $35.00,
it didn't seem like too big of a risk.

Sure enough, it worked!
Unfortunately, this one happened to be the stealth version and since I spent the majority of my time in computer lab playing Duke 3D when I was supposed to be practicing Typing Tutor, this would be a slight hindrance to me.
Maybe I should start practicing my touch typing.

Since I had to take it apart and clean it anyway, I decided to replace the keycaps.

It turned out pretty nice!
The old keycaps had windows for the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock LED's to shine through, but they are bright enough that illuminate the general area around the keys enough to be noticable when those features are activated.

Here's an in progress shot of Descent running on the machine through DOS.

I then installed Windows 98 and managed to get a Raspberry pi running retroNAS recognized as a network drive. It's not as optimal as I would have liked, but maybe there are some tweaks I need to do, or I just need to accept that there are limitations to this setup.

Now to the show stopper.

Occasionally, the pc would randomly shut down when copying large files or directories from CD. I did not think much of it since I eventually got everything that I needed to copied to the machine. It wasn't until it shut down while watching the demo video on the Win98 CD that I realized that something serious was wrong.

I did not get a bluscreen that typically accompanies RAM or expansion card issues, so I am assuming that the CPU is overheating and going into protection mode.

Right now, I've got the heatsink off and am trying to remove the rear plastic cover so I can remove the heatspreader and replace the crusty thermal paste. I'm being careful as not to break it, but it's proving to be quite a challenge.

I bought some case fans and a new heatshink, but I am waiting on them to arrive.

Stealth version of the keyboard is because the letters are not on the top of the keys?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-09-10, 06:18:

Stealth version of the keyboard is because the letters are not on the top of the keys?

That's pretty much it.
Not a problem if sitting at a desk,
but since it will sit in my lap, they would have been invisible.

warmachine wrote on 2023-09-10, 11:15:

That's pretty much it. Not a problem if sitting at a desk, but since it will sit in my lap, they would have been invisible. […]
Show full quote

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-09-10, 06:18:

Stealth version of the keyboard is because the letters are not on the top of the keys?

That's pretty much it.
Not a problem if sitting at a desk,
but since it will sit in my lap, they would have been invisible.

Yeah, get the problem if you're not into blind writing 😀

I'd completely forgotten about this thread when I dug my own Digital PC 3500 out of storage a few days ago and set out to figure out what the AGP situation was with it. Sadly mine is a bit more yellowed but pretty much the same model - 233MHz Pentium II, 64MB RAM. It will be getting Windows 98 just as soon as I find a suitable hard disk for it:

This is what the AGP slot should look like:

The metal blanking plate isn't screwed on or anything so just lifts up and out exposing the weird slot. I assume the top cover is what normally keeps it in place:

And someone kindly sent me a compatible NLX card out of, I think, A Compaq Deskpro:

Seems to work fine and should be better than the onboard Matrox video!