VOGONS


Reply 4820 of 4857, by Tiido

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PD2JK wrote on 2025-01-13, 13:31:
Got my hands on a beaten up Antec P180. Its contents are okay though. […]
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Got my hands on a beaten up Antec P180. Its contents are okay though.

Asus P5K/EPU, C2D E8400, HyperX 2x 2GB, GTX 650 1GB... and the star of the show;

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ESI Juli@

I have a boxed one of these that I picked up for cheap some years ago. Definitely a purchase I don't regret ~

Part of me wants to make a new analog section with some more modern and higher performing DAC and ADC chips...

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 4821 of 4857, by Mandrew

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Philips Brilliance 150P2. I didn't want to get "modern" monitors but this one is old enough to legally drink in the US and doesn't need too much space. It's older than my IBM E74 CRT and the brightness is excellent.

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Reply 4822 of 4857, by Kahenraz

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I actually prefer the look of these older CFL LCDs rather than the newer, crisper LED ones. The older ones will sometimes do a better job of supporting certain display modes in DOS and show less display anomalies for video cards that have noisy outputs.

Reply 4823 of 4857, by Repo Man11

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Repo Man11 wrote on 2021-04-18, 18:50:

I found this combo in the dumpster here at the apartment complex I'm living at. I've gotten as far as installing the sound card and so far it seems fine, not sure about how I'll go about testing the box.

I wanted to test out the sound card in a machine I've been having some sound issues in, but then I realized that the RCA outputs are SPDIF and I don't have a standalone DAC so I can't try that. Digging the box out, I realized that I couldn't find the cable that connects the box to the sound card, so I began digging through everything trying to find it, but I couldn't. Then I looked in the manual, and the cable is a standard DB25 parallel port cable, so I do still have one, but the actual cable that I fished out of the trash along with the sound card and the box is gone because I did a purge last year thinking "I haven't used a parallel port cable in over a decade, why would I keep more than one on hand?" So I do have one, just not the one that I originally found with it. The manual states that it's a standard DB25, so no issues there. I guess it's time for me to recap the break out box and try this thing out.

Everyone is ignorant, just on different subjects. - Will Rogers

Reply 4824 of 4857, by justin1985

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I'd noticed a pair of old PCs dumped in an outside space outside the clubhouse of a hobby club that I'm part of. Both had actually been there about a year, it turns out, but I just got the OK to raid them for parts.

The older beige full ATX system was very rusty on the case, but turned out to have a microATX Asrock Socket A board, as well as a fully working floppy drive and DVD/CD-RW drive. The hard drives of both had already been removed for data protection. This system had been running the catalogue of the club's library until relatively recently!

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It has a Duron 600Mhz and 256 + 128 Mb DDR RAM. I think I've actually had one of this particular board before and sold it on, but figure I might as well keep it now!

The more modern Compaq branded system (with HP labelled parts) turned out to be a late Pentium 4 in Socket 775, with PCIe, SATA, and also two IDE ports and floppy port. Another member, who's pretty young, saw me starting to take this apart and said he'd been thinking about breaking it down himself to get something that would run XP - his childhood nostalgia was for Vista and mainly Windows7, but he wanted to experiment with something older!

Both cases were rusted and dirty beyond being worth salvaging from being left outside for, it turns out, about a year. And I didn't think it worth bothering with the PSUs at all either. Still, a good haul of parts, I think!

Reply 4825 of 4857, by Ozzuneoj

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justin1985 wrote on 2025-01-25, 16:50:
I'd noticed a pair of old PCs dumped in an outside space outside the clubhouse of a hobby club that I'm part of. Both had actual […]
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I'd noticed a pair of old PCs dumped in an outside space outside the clubhouse of a hobby club that I'm part of. Both had actually been there about a year, it turns out, but I just got the OK to raid them for parts.

The older beige full ATX system was very rusty on the case, but turned out to have a microATX Asrock Socket A board, as well as a fully working floppy drive and DVD/CD-RW drive. The hard drives of both had already been removed for data protection. This system had been running the catalogue of the club's library until relatively recently!

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It has a Duron 600Mhz and 256 + 128 Mb DDR RAM. I think I've actually had one of this particular board before and sold it on, but figure I might as well keep it now!

The more modern Compaq branded system (with HP labelled parts) turned out to be a late Pentium 4 in Socket 775, with PCIe, SATA, and also two IDE ports and floppy port. Another member, who's pretty young, saw me starting to take this apart and said he'd been thinking about breaking it down himself to get something that would run XP - his childhood nostalgia was for Vista and mainly Windows7, but he wanted to experiment with something older!

Both cases were rusted and dirty beyond being worth salvaging from being left outside for, it turns out, about a year. And I didn't think it worth bothering with the PSUs at all either. Still, a good haul of parts, I think!

That's a pretty cool motherboard!

I had an ECS K7S5A based on the SIS735 chipset and it was a great board. The 741GX chipset should be similar except with 333Mhz FSB and only DDR support (no SDRAM). To me, the really interesting thing is the SIS Mirage (renamed SIS315 I guess) integrated graphics. SIS graphics chips were always a bit behind the times, but if you played older games on them they were surprisingly decent. There aren't many benchmarks available online, but based on comments online I think this would be somewhere in the Geforce 2 MX200 range roughly (with no T&L of course). Yeah, not great, but it provides some interesting variety for pre-2000 3D gaming, and I think it should have decent DOS game compatibility as well. 😁

This thread mentions having some issues getting the IGP working in Windows 98, but they did eventually get it.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 4826 of 4857, by justin1985

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Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-01-25, 19:09:

That's a pretty cool motherboard!

I had an ECS K7S5A based on the SIS735 chipset and it was a great board. The 741GX chipset should be similar except with 333Mhz FSB and only DDR support (no SDRAM). To me, the really interesting thing is the SIS Mirage (renamed SIS315 I guess) integrated graphics. SIS graphics chips were always a bit behind the times, but if you played older games on them they were surprisingly decent. There aren't many benchmarks available online, but based on comments online I think this would be somewhere in the Geforce 2 MX200 range roughly (with no T&L of course). Yeah, not great, but it provides some interesting variety for pre-2000 3D gaming, and I think it should have decent DOS game compatibility as well. 😁

This thread mentions having some issues getting the IGP working in Windows 98, but they did eventually get it.

Thanks for sharing this - interesting comparison with the Geforce 2 MX 😀 I've put it away for now, but will definitely hang onto it and play around with it more in future. The system it was pulled from had a Win98 license sticker, and I'm pretty sure I remember it actually running with 98 until relatively recently, so hopefully not too difficult to get it working again in 98 ...

One thing that surprised me is how cool it seems to run - according to the hw monitor in the BIOS the CPU barely gets above room temperature! The Akasa heatsink has a really beefy lump of copper at its base - overkill, really, I guess. This seems kind of surprising to me - I remember burning out a Duron within moments back in the day by forgetting to plug in the fan ...

Reply 4827 of 4857, by Kahenraz

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I really wish that the DirectX 7 era of games had lasted a bit longer and that we had seen fully working TnL engines across the market. A lot of the competition started to drop out around this time, had inferior driver releases, or chose not to incorporate TnL (or it was broken). We pretty much only have NVIDIA and ATI, if you want the most out of this generation at the high end.

I really enjoyed the chunky look of 3D games from around this time and would have been happy to see it last another few years before riding into the sunset. The early video game industry was very tumultuous, and so many aspiring and talented manufacturers got shaken out, far too early for their time.

Reply 4828 of 4857, by BitWrangler

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True, 7-8-9 seemed to happen too quick.

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 4829 of 4857, by Ozzuneoj

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Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-27, 00:01:

I really wish that the DirectX 7 era of games had lasted a bit longer and that we had seen fully working TnL engines across the market. A lot of the competition started to drop out around this time, had inferior driver releases, or chose not to incorporate TnL (or it was broken). We pretty much only have NVIDIA and ATI, if you want the most out of this generation at the high end.

I really enjoyed the chunky look of 3D games from around this time and would have been happy to see it last another few years before riding into the sunset. The early video game industry was very tumultuous, and so many aspiring and talented manufacturers got shaken out, far too early for their time.

Yep, I feel the same way regarding the variety of hardware from that time period.

I'm not a huge fan of the really hideous and pointy character models with blurry textures from the mid to late 90s, but by 2000 or so they were getting a lot better.

Still, early 3D accelerators are just such interesting pieces of history in my opinion. Absolutely crazy times for technology.

When people were having to spend a couple grand every two to three years to play new games I doubt anyone could have imagined the relative stagnation in the PC hardware industry over last 10 years and the resulting longevity of parts for most people.

Go back and tell a PC enthusiast in 1999-2000:
"Yeah, some day you'll be able to buy a used 10 year old video card, drop it into a 10 year old workstation that someone is throwing away and use it to play all but the most intensive 3D games... and you'll still be able to play games from 20 years ago on the same computer (with the latest Windows version that exists) with very few problems."

Would have sounded totally bonkers back then when the games that came out each year were nearly unplayable on the video cards that came out the year prior.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 4830 of 4857, by Kahenraz

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I really take for granted what's considered standard as integrated into motherboards nowadays. Whenever I set up a retro machine, I almost always add a video card, sound card, ethernet card, additional storage, and maybe USB 2.0.

Oh, and by sound card I mean trying to decide which combination of ISA and PCI sound cards into whatever is leftover, including a SoundBlaster/compatible, Ultrasound (Orpheus), Audigy ZX, and/or Aureal Vortex. And maybe I want a PCX2 as well. Are all of these things at once too much to ask?

Building a computer today is a no-brainer. CPU-integrated graphics and an NVMe and you don't even need to populate the PCIe slots.

Last edited by Kahenraz on 2025-01-27, 09:52. Edited 5 times in total.

Reply 4831 of 4857, by Ozzuneoj

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Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-27, 04:11:

I really that for granted what's considered standard as integrated into motherboards nowadays. Whenever I him up a retro machine, I almost always add a video card, sound card, ethernet card, additional storage, and maybe USB 2.0.

Oh, and by sound card I mean trying to decide which combination of ISA and PCI sound cards into whatever is leftover, including a SoundBlaster/compatible, Ultrasound (Orpheus), Audigy ZX, or Aureal.

Building a computer today is a no-brainer. CPU-integrated graphics and an NVMe and you don't even need to populate the PCIe slots.

Yeah, the integration is incredible these days, and the performance of some of these things is kind of mind melting.

Imagine showing the people working on the Cyrix MediaGX one of the Ryzen-based mini PCs that you can get for ~$200-$400. It's smaller than a CD-ROM drive from the 90s and yet can contain multiple TB of storage, scads of RAM, most of the processing power of a full sized desktop and fast enough graphics on-chip to do moderate gaming.

Even my big fat tower, like you said, has no internal drives with cables... it's all NVMe. The only reason I even have any SATA cables is to connect my dual-SATA 5.25" IcyDock.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 4832 of 4857, by nuno14272

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Scrapt yard

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1| 386DX40
2| P200mmx, Voodoo 1
3| PIII-450, Voodoo 3 3000

Reply 4833 of 4857, by nuno14272

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Just 15 minutes looking... on the surface..

Image a full day searching through all this big bags..

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1| 386DX40
2| P200mmx, Voodoo 1
3| PIII-450, Voodoo 3 3000

Reply 4834 of 4857, by Nexxen

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nuno14272 wrote on 2025-01-27, 14:11:

Just 15 minutes looking... on the surface..

Image a full day searching through all this big bags..

Nice!
486 w/ PCI, https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ford-lian-9885aw (looks like it)
or https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m921-486 (propbably same factory) + another bunch of clones
[https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/trang- … rangg-tb-486-ob
[https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/sunnyv … -syl8884pci-eic
[https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/u-board-jk-042e
[https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/u-boar … rev-semicolon-b
---> I'd trace it back to PCChips and other "spawned" from it.

SARC, https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/?itemsPe … 4&chipsetId=650 (probably unknown to the TRW)

Is that a QDI socket 370, https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/qdi-p6 … 93-a5-advance-5

Nice, 2 boards TRW doesn't have or that can be updated 😀

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K

Reply 4835 of 4857, by douglar

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nuno14272 wrote on 2025-01-27, 14:11:

Just 15 minutes looking... on the surface..

Image a full day searching through all this big bags..

That's a lot of tech. Most of it looks like "Capacitor Plague Era" stuff, but there's so much stuff there's bound to be something cool like a Cyrix Cx486DRx² or a Cyrix 5x86-133GP.

How bad are the pins on the CPUs?

Reply 4836 of 4857, by Kahenraz

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Capacitors are easy to replace. I'm more worried about gouges on the traces from everything being banged up around inside the bags. Ram clips can also get knocked off, as can SMD capacitors and inductors.

It's a lot harder to repair a board damaged like that if you don't know the correct part to replace it with.

Reply 4837 of 4857, by ikethefox

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Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-07-14, 15:11:
Rescued two laptops from going to the scrapper, a Gateway Solo 2300 and a IBM Thinkpad 1171-1300. The Thinkpad has a broken hi […]
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Rescued two laptops from going to the scrapper, a Gateway Solo 2300 and a IBM Thinkpad 1171-1300.
The Thinkpad has a broken hinge and a subsequent broken lid, haven't done much with it. It has a Celeron 500 and a crappy passive matrix screen.
It also has a ESS Maestro sound card and a Silicon Motion 2D only card. Not sure if it is worth repairing at this point.

The Gateway also had a passive matrix screen but I have already replaced it with and active TFT panel and upgraded the ram from 16mb to 80mb.
This laptop seems fairly well suited to DOS gaming with a genuine Yamaha OPL sound card and less exciting but mostly suitable Neomagic 2d chip.
The laptop has a 166mmx Pentium currently, but I found a 266 Tillamook chip on ebay for 19 bucks, figured it was deserving of the upgrade.

If anyone has much interest in these upgrades I might post a follow up. Sorry no pictures ATM

I just got two 2300s, both missing RAM and I can't find RAM that fits it, all 133 ram is too long.

Reply 4838 of 4857, by DaveDDS

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Lots of Lenovo!
-- Not sure I'd call it "dumpster diving" but all of these system were headed that way --

A couple months back, a friend gave me a Lenovo T440 - he had gotten it from one of his
customers because the wifi had failed - he took it apart and changed the wifi module, only
to have it say something like "The system can't startup because there is a non-Lenovo wifi
card installed - please replace with a Lenovo card".

He tried pulling the card, but then it wouldn't start at all, so he decided to put it in his "to be
recycled" pile - I happened to notice it, asked about it, and he told me the story with "take it
if you want it - there's an SSD in it and perhaps you can use some of the other parts".

When I took it apart, I noticed that he had just left the antenna wires for the wifi loose on the
bottom below the mainboard. They have little metal caps for connectors, and as the system is
very tight inside could be shorting something, I just put some black tape over them to insulate,
re-assembled and it came right up! When I told him I'd gotten it working, he said he didn't want
it back (he does some I.T. support and a fair number of older systems go through his hands
anyway)

It's actually a fairly impressive system - I7 with 12G ram, and an SSD - so very fast! It's also very
small/thin (about as thin as my chromebook) all the while having a decent sized screen - As it's so
small, it only has two external USB ports, I didn't want to tie them both up with wifi and bluetooth...
but I managed to find a single USB dongal that did both -- all working well for me!

-----

Another friend just gave me her old Lenovo laptop - an "IdeaPad S145" - I don't know what it's specs
are because we can't "get in" to it. She's always had fairly major problems, very slow... (think sometimes
an hour to boot) A couple places she had taken it to told her they thought the hard-drive was bad - but she
didn't want to change it because it had come with pre-installed packages that she uses a LOT (and weren't
part of the recovery image [which we also wouldn't have access to it we change the drive]).

She was using a "pin" to login, but she thinks it was updating when she put it away last time and the
battery ran-out during.. it still boots, but it won't recognize her pin any more!

I mainly wanted it to see if it's Lenovo wifi chip would work in the T440... But I think I'll change out the drive,
put a fresh Win10 on it and see how it goes - I know her brother could really use a newer system (his XP laptop
is very out of date these days).

-----

My son just gave me a Lenovo "ThinkCenter M600" this is a little cute and TINY desktop (I'd guess 6" square
by 1" high). He had gotten it from the same friend that gave me the T440 - I'd put Win10 on it and we set it up
as a PLEX server for him. It had some trouble if multiple clients were active, so he has just gotten a much more
powerful (and still about the same size) Win11 system - and gave it back to me (I can always use of another system,
especially when it's so tiny!)

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Reply 4839 of 4857, by momaka

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Mandrew wrote on 2025-01-06, 17:23:

The hunt for a decent CRT continues. It's a low hour 19" Philips 109S40 with excellent brightness, crisp picture quality and a wide range of supported resolutions. Nothing can be perfect though because it has a broken bezel, probably shipping damage that happened years ago. Whatever, it was free.

Oi, be careful with that cracked plastic bezel. Sometimes that's an indication that the plastic is going brittle. If the mounts for the CRT tube break all of a sudden, the tube can fall back and break its neck - quite literally. 😁 (I realize this sounds funny the way I said it.) A lot of my CRTs have developed brittle plastic syndromes - one so bad, that my hand went through the side of the case when I tried to pick it up and pushed on it slightly more with my thumb. I think another 5-10 years, and they might reach a point where they even need to be re-cased. I have one 19" Sony waiting for such surgery.

Mandrew wrote on 2025-01-07, 08:16:

What's hilarious is that there is literally no damage anywhere on the chassis other than the 4 corners of the bezel, not even a tiny scratch. It's spotless.
Like the bezel just decided that a huge 19" screen was too much and fell apart. 😁
Guess this is what it looks like when a crt is properly packaged but they drop it face down at the warehouse.

The front bezel is where the CRT tube mounts are - i.e. the entire weight of the tube is supported usually by 4 plastic stubs that are part of the bezel. So that's why I suggest to open and check your CRT at some point.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-06, 22:14:

Always keep a CRT that runs okay after a "beating" .... it means it's soldered together better than the other 80% out there 🤣

Haha, so true! 🤣

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-27, 19:59:

Capacitors are easy to replace. I'm more worried about gouges on the traces from everything being banged up around inside the bags. Ram clips can also get knocked off, as can SMD capacitors and inductors.

It's a lot harder to repair a board damaged like that if you don't know the correct part to replace it with.

Gouged / scratched traces also aren't that bad to repair. And missing components can often be figured out (save for special value resistors or capacitors around the clockgen chip.) What worries me the most when I see boards piled up like is how much they were flexed, particularly around any of the BGA parts (CPU socket, Northbridge, Southbridge, etc.) Having to rework a large BGA part on a board like that is where I usually throw in the towel.

justin1985 wrote on 2025-01-25, 16:50:

Both cases were rusted and dirty beyond being worth salvaging from being left outside for, it turns out, about a year.

Haha, you should see some of the rust buckets I've picked up and planning to restore/rework.
Not gonna lie, though, it IS a LOT of work usually... though sometimes, that's exactly what I need on a nice warm day to relax - bring out the angle grinder and sander, then have a got at the rust like a madman.

justin1985 wrote on 2025-01-25, 16:50:

And I didn't think it worth bothering with the PSUs at all either.

I always pickup free PSUs - even the completely garbage ones. The fans can always come in handy, if nothing else. (But I usually end up fixing the PSU most of the time, unless it really really is a hot mess that can't be re-worked in some way.)