Fired up several vintage builds to check their conditions. The ThinkPad X31 could not start at all. My Mom's Asus K31CD i5-6400 went down as well last week and I had to rush home to migrate all her personal files to the "reserve" computer, the Q8300 build. It could be powered up but nothing else i.e. no POST.

I've found and downloaded the detailed service manual of ThinkPad X30/31/32 series but trying to pinpoint and/or fix the problem might take an entire day, so I'll leave it until more urgent matters settle down. On the other hand, the i5-6400 should be easier to diagnose, and I've already narrowed it down to MB, CPU, or RAM, but I don't have another MB with Intel 100/200 series chipset and LGA 1151 (my current working build is H370 Coffee Lake and incompatible with Skylake, even with the same 1151 pins; for the record, I'm really sick of Intel's frequent socket redesigns). Still considering whether to acquire a tested, working Sky/Kaby Lake MB so I can perform a cross comparison.

dormcat wrote on 2024-07-15, 13:07:

Fired up several vintage builds to check their conditions. The ThinkPad X31 could not start at all. My Mom's Asus K31CD i5-6400 went down as well last week and I had to rush home to migrate all her personal files to the "reserve" computer, the Q8300 build. It could be powered up but nothing else i.e. no POST.

I've found and downloaded the detailed service manual of ThinkPad X30/31/32 series but trying to pinpoint and/or fix the problem might take an entire day, so I'll leave it until more urgent matters settle down. On the other hand, the i5-6400 should be easier to diagnose, and I've already narrowed it down to MB, CPU, or RAM, but I don't have another MB with Intel 100/200 series chipset and LGA 1151 (my current working build is H370 Coffee Lake and incompatible with Skylake, even with the same 1151 pins; for the record, I'm really sick of Intel's frequent socket redesigns). Still considering whether to acquire a tested, working Sky/Kaby Lake MB so I can perform a cross comparison.

Maybe you find this useful, maybe it gives you Tualatin on PIII board flashbacks... https://hackaday.com/2024/05/31/intels-anti-u … ith-kapton-tape

Something is bugging me. I watched one of Phil's videos yesterday about Slot A systems and I immediately recognized a feature of the board he was using. The board in question is the Biostar M7MKA, and the feature is those tall black heat sinks lining the back of the board with the funny white plastic protectors on the bottom.

Some time within the last couple of years I had a board with that exact type of thing on it and I found it really strange. However, I would certainly have noticed if it had been an AMD 750 chipset Slot A board. My question is, does anyone know of any other boards that have those same weird black heatsinks with the white plastic caps on the bottom? I remember them being super wobbly and sketchy looking. It's like the designers found a readily available oversized heatsink that suited their thermal needs and budget but the heatsink had no way to secure it to the board so they just added plastic caps to stop the wobbly things from scratching up the board or touching any components.

I have looked through my motherboard collection as well as my boards that need repaired AND photos I have taken of scrap lots I have sold (all badly damaged boards, don't worry...) and I can't find a board with these wobbly heatsinks anywhere... but I have held it and I know it was within the last couple of years.

I finally replaced the failed RAID in my system. It had 2x320GB Hitachi Deskstars. I had 2x300GB Hitachi Deskstars to replace them with. Issue: The ones in it were older and used molex connectors, the new ones only had SATA power. Hmm. Bah. I had a few Raptors, unused, in my inventory still, so I decided I wanted to hear those. A lot smaller, but I got the SSD now, so that holds what the RAID used to hold now and the 160GB Raptors get a bunch of games. The computer does make some very nice noises now. The drives all start sequentially, so that's pretty cool, didn't do that before.

I also tested the drive my brother fixed and filled it with music.

Wow, this is embarrassing!

I just saw a listing for this boxed Sound Blaster Live! LS, and I immediately recognized the box art. I remember seeing these Creative boxes with the race car on them back in the day, but for some reason that image just seemed familiar from somewhere else too...

https://www.mobygames.com/game/15505/top-gear-2/covers/

.... Creative... come on!! Maybe they were running low on funds after buying out Ensoniq and Aureal so they had to cut their box art budget.

For the price of giving my coworker the MFM HDD that I wasn't using, and getting his own XT set up for him, I was able to upgrade to a 1986 256-640 XT motherboard. Now I can boot in to DOS without having to press F1 to let the BIOS know that I am fine with Cassette Basic not being usable.

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....🤣....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found....

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- TinyCore Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- NetBSD - too big for a regular CD (746MB vs. 600ish MB)
- OpenBSD - Perfectumundo.......

So, right now, she's installing OpenBSD over the internet and rocking it - full 80GB HDD with DDO, all packages, the works. I've been getting more into *.nix from a "user" standpoint in recent years so I think this might be a fun "revisit". I ran OpenBSD on a Pentium Pro 20 years ago and and screams. I'm not expecting the same from a 486, I'm kind of surprised I could find anything that can run at all. Planning to play around with it mostly, and see what I can do with it.

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 01:38:

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)

Damn. I can confirm that DSL 4.4.10 will run on a P133 with 80MB of RAM. So close.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-07-17, 02:41:

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 01:38:

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)

Damn. I can confirm that DSL 4.4.10 will run on a P133 with 80MB of RAM. So close.

Yeah, I'm thinking it might also not be happy because I'm using a very ODD method of installing it on a 486 - booting from the CD-ROM (or DVD-RW drive in this case). It's probably expecting something i686 with over 128MB of RAM on the other end of that 40 pin IDE cable, not a 486 DX4 with 64MB. Runs out of memory.

With OpenBSD, I might play with the GUI but a big part of it is to FORCE myself to up my *nix skills by working in the command line more. Basically, do what I did when I took Windows Server courses in college - do the extra credit working in Server Core.

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 02:48:

ssokolow wrote on 2024-07-17, 02:41:

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 01:38:

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)

Damn. I can confirm that DSL 4.4.10 will run on a P133 with 80MB of RAM. So close.

Yeah, I'm thinking it might also not be happy because I'm using a very ODD method of installing it on a 486 - booting from the CD-ROM (or DVD-RW drive in this case).

Aside from the installing part, that's quite literally what I did with it. Even the DVD-RW drive.

(It happens to be a PATA DVD multi-rewriter that has a front headphone jack and volume wheel, so I spray-painted away the DVD logos to make it look older... I didn't quite get a color match, but there's such a mix of yellowed and un-yellowed elsewhere that it's excusable until I can try again.)

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 01:38:

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....lol....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found... […]
Show full quote

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....🤣....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found....

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- TinyCore Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- NetBSD - too big for a regular CD (746MB vs. 600ish MB)
- OpenBSD - Perfectumundo.......

So, right now, she's installing OpenBSD over the internet and rocking it - full 80GB HDD with DDO, all packages, the works. I've been getting more into *.nix from a "user" standpoint in recent years so I think this might be a fun "revisit". I ran OpenBSD on a Pentium Pro 20 years ago and and screams. I'm not expecting the same from a 486, I'm kind of surprised I could find anything that can run at all. Planning to play around with it mostly, and see what I can do with it.

If you install TinyCore Linux and its packages on the HDD, it will run with less than 64MB.

Problem is that booting the live CD requires 64MB, but you could try to do the installation on another PC and then moving the HDD to your 486DX

Installed a totally normal OS on my iMac G3 the other day 😜

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2024-07-17, 07:01:

Installed a totally normal OS on my iMac G3 the other day :-P […]
Show full quote

Installed a totally normal OS on my iMac G3 the other day 😜

Ahh. maciNTosh.

I'm so envious of people who have one of the supported models. I've only got a G4 Quicksilver 2002, which is too new, and a couple of Intel macs that I haven't Boot Camp'd yet because I want to put in bigger SSDs first (they're just dual-booting OSX 10.6 and 10.13 right now) and stuff like better desoldering gear and something that can run System 7 are higher priorities.

Wow, NT on Apple PPC!

I've got a domain of silly NT4s, all virtualised or emulated: NT4 server on MIPs as a domain controller, NT4EE, NT4TSE, OpenNT4.5, NTS3.51, some NT5 beta or two..... I've wanted to use the PPC version of NT for a while.

I've got a Macmini G4 here too, HDD died recently. Linux on it had got very out of date, so bad that when I tried to last update it dpkg/apt stopped working halfway through because glibc changed so much. At some point this MaciNTosh might get to the later G4 machines.

Otherwise, I wonder if this technique on the physical Macs can be used on Qemu PPC?

Demetrio wrote on 2024-07-17, 06:38:

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 01:38:

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....lol....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found... […]
Show full quote

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....🤣....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found....

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- TinyCore Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- NetBSD - too big for a regular CD (746MB vs. 600ish MB)
- OpenBSD - Perfectumundo.......

So, right now, she's installing OpenBSD over the internet and rocking it - full 80GB HDD with DDO, all packages, the works. I've been getting more into *.nix from a "user" standpoint in recent years so I think this might be a fun "revisit". I ran OpenBSD on a Pentium Pro 20 years ago and and screams. I'm nforget about it.
Ihe same from a 486, I'm kind of surprised I could find anything that can run at all. Planning to play around with it mostly, and see what I can do with it.

If you install TinyCore Linux and its packages on the HDD, it will run with less than 64MB.

Problem is that booting the live CD requires 64MB, but you could try to do the installation on another PC and then moving the HDD to your 486DX

I have 64MB....might try that. This is my new "experiments" drive. I like doing batshit crazy stuff like this

My mistake with OpenBSD was not factoring in the DDO (80gb). I know OnTrack 9.88 needs to start at sector zero, using this as a guide - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record . I believe at the very least I'll need to keep the first 63-512 bytes or so of the drive intact.

I let it auto partition the whole drive...wiping out OnTrack...so im thinking of doing a Win2K sp4 x86 limit push install first and using a trick with NTLDR to use that as the boot manager. Then that will point to OpenBSD....and the same might work with TinyCore as well. Found that info here...https://cvs.afresh1.com/~andrew/o/faq/faq4.html#Multibooting

Hopefully my.DVD-RW drive isn't dying though. Tried booting the install media this morning and the drive couldn't even find it. So I might be repairing/replacing that in the near future. Had some oddness last night too. Worst case I can swap with my Compaq 386s drive.

progman.exe wrote on 2024-07-17, 12:51:

Otherwise, I wonder if this technique on the physical Macs can be used on Qemu PPC?

It doesn't work on QEMU from what I understand, but most of the development of maciNTosh was done with DingusPPC, a relatively new PowerPC Mac emulator.
Rairii has his own fork catered towards maciNTosh compatibility.

One issue is that DingusPPC doesn't support virtual optical disc swapping yet, so you'll either need to make or find an ISO copy of NT4 with the maciNTosh files already added.
Won't link to any pre-made ones for obvious reasons, but VirtualFun describes how such an image can be made.

I finished my pink core Duo machine, and snagged the missing card I needed to install and use my Tecmar 8-bit ISA expansion chassis. Been on the lookout for that for a year now.

NHVintage wrote on 2024-07-18, 02:58:

I finished my pink core Duo machine, and snagged the missing card I needed to install and use my Tecmar 8-bit ISA expansion chassis. Been on the lookout for that for a year now.

Is the case pink as well as the components? I have a lovely glossy pink case from around the Core2 era. Not perfect for airflow if I were to overclock the CPU and GPU though, just a nice novelty 😀

There are even pink mainboards. AOpen AX3S Pro (Sweet Kiss)

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 16:53:

Demetrio wrote on 2024-07-17, 06:38:

creepingnet wrote on 2024-07-17, 01:38:

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....lol....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found... […]
Show full quote

Installing a more *modern* O/S on my 486 DX4-100 Desktop....🤣....burned some CD's, tried some stuff....this is what I Found....

- Damn Small Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- TinyCore Linux - not enough RAM (64MB)
- NetBSD - too big for a regular CD (746MB vs. 600ish MB)
- OpenBSD - Perfectumundo.......

So, right now, she's installing OpenBSD over the internet and rocking it - full 80GB HDD with DDO, all packages, the works. I've been getting more into *.nix from a "user" standpoint in recent years so I think this might be a fun "revisit". I ran OpenBSD on a Pentium Pro 20 years ago and and screams. I'm nforget about it.
Ihe same from a 486, I'm kind of surprised I could find anything that can run at all. Planning to play around with it mostly, and see what I can do with it.

If you install TinyCore Linux and its packages on the HDD, it will run with less than 64MB.

Problem is that booting the live CD requires 64MB, but you could try to do the installation on another PC and then moving the HDD to your 486DX

I have 64MB....might try that. This is my new "experiments" drive. I like doing batshit crazy stuff like this

Ah sorry, missed the (64MB) note 😄

Anyway, I managed to install TinyCore on a Pentium MMX with 64MB of RAM.

As you can see here, I'm able to do modern activities like surfing the Web in TLS and running the Python3 interpeter!

Had to find the correct installation steps to be able to install the system (no GUI) on the HDD, without incurring in Out-Of-Memory error.
I attached a txt file in this post: you might give it a try 🙂 (instructions are for a dual-boot installation with Win95, so you can just skip the steps for the latter)