RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-17, 21:30:

Picked up a Pentium MMX from market place for a great price! But it was listed as untested and had quite a roadtrip to go and get it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVo3nd2b2jQ

COOL FIND!, what blast from the past i had the exact same pc case when i was a kid around 6 yrs old, back in 1997 running windows 95, my first experience with a computer. remember the hard drive clicking, when booting up to windows 95, playing windows games like Hover! (the 3d bumber cars capture the flag game), toy story, chasm: the rift, Jedi Knight: Dark forces 2, Captain Claw and lots of DOS games like aladdin, dave, prehistorik, keen, doom, wolf 3d, most of them were demos. i was too young to remember what motherboard it was. i barley knew how to read that point in time. but it was definitely a socket 7 for sure. we had that pc until early 2002. since windows xp was way too demanding for such old system hardware.

sunkindly wrote on 2025-11-17, 21:52:

Sweet! […]
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RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-17, 21:30:

Picked up a Pentium MMX from market place for a great price! But it was listed as untested and had quite a roadtrip to go and get it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVo3nd2b2jQ

Sweet!

I like that you documented the whole journey as opposed to just starting from having it already.

As a casual viewer, I feel like it'd be easy to not realize that retro computing is not just having the computers but the effort and anxieties involved in acquiring them hehe.

Whew, isn't that the truth.

More than once in my life I have found myself (a person that grew up in the woods, 100 miles+ from anything you'd call a city) either driving in ridiculous city traffic to go down some back alley to little recycling center to pick up a pair of as-is EGA monitors, or going to some random person's home in an area even more rural than where I live and then following them down to their dank basement, alone...

Every time, I say to myself "What on earth am I doing?? Is this my life??" 🤣

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-18, 00:13:

Whew, isn't that the truth. […]
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sunkindly wrote on 2025-11-17, 21:52:

Sweet! […]
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RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-17, 21:30:

Picked up a Pentium MMX from market place for a great price! But it was listed as untested and had quite a roadtrip to go and get it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVo3nd2b2jQ

Sweet!

I like that you documented the whole journey as opposed to just starting from having it already.

As a casual viewer, I feel like it'd be easy to not realize that retro computing is not just having the computers but the effort and anxieties involved in acquiring them hehe.

Whew, isn't that the truth.

More than once in my life I have found myself (a person that grew up in the woods, 100 miles+ from anything you'd call a city) either driving in ridiculous city traffic to go down some back alley to little recycling center to pick up a pair of as-is EGA monitors, or going to some random person's home in an area even more rural than where I live and then following them down to their dank basement, alone...

Every time, I say to myself "What on earth am I doing?? Is this my life??" 🤣

On the last sentence, I would say this:
It's like going to discover old hardware, computer archeology, the beauty is the discovery, sometimes you can find something else, in short, life is also this.

I installed 128 MB RAM on a PB Club 30 (Socket 7, the seller provided) myself.

Recapping time...

MSI MS-5169 getting me back into the ALi Aladdin V game (after the demise of my P5A a year or two ago). According to the seller it was in 'mint condition' - but as usual all the major caps were bulging and it didn't boot reliably. Some quick zaps with the desoldering station followed by an equally quick solder of replacement caps solved that.

The GeForce 7600GS AGP was a tougher nut. I hate ROHS unleaded solder. In the end I needed to mix some leaded solder in with all the pins on ground plane and then heat it viciously hot and suck for all the station was worth. Still, all's well that ends well.

One of the best advantages in being retire (even though it was kinda forced for medical reasons) - is that I get to "play" with all the stuff I really loved, but kinda fell to the wayside because I got too distracted by bothersome things like making a living, running a company and providing for a family.

---

I've always been keenly interested in radio - not so much to communicate with other people, but it has always been of high technical interest to me. As a kid I made radios so that my buddy and I could communicate across the village, I also had the usual walkie-talkies and later on got into CB - and eventually got my amateur operators certificate (VE3 DRD here).

So I've been digging into my "radio" shelf, and found a few things:

- Apparently some time shortly before my accident, someone had give me or I had otherwise accuired a bunch of old 2-meter handhelds. I always have two dual-bands, but now I find 7 more single-band rigs!, many of which not working (peobably why I got them cheap or free) - so I got to spend a few days working on old radios (many of the problems were from dead internal memory backup batteries)

- And I also found "DARC" (Daves Amateur Radio Controller) - an 8051 based box I had made to automatically control radios - for a while I had run a 2M repeater - but don't have the HUGE cavity filters anymore - so now I've been playing around with controlling some of these old handhelds - just for low-power control stuff (fortunately DARC has a built-in DTMF detector) but mainly because I've always loved working this kinda stuff.

-- Between DARC and the "General Test" device I mentioned earlier (Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?), I found some things in their firmware I wanted to update .... fortunately my handbuilt EPROM programmer still worked, but I wasn't very long before I remember how painful "burn and learn" debugging can be... - so I found and got working again some gadgets I'd built many years ago.

- QDRE (Quick and Dirty Rom Emulator) is a device I had made to be able to "fake" a ROM with a RAM (on a powered umbilical cable) written by this device, and them moved to the device under test. It of course is controlled by a PC parallel port (in very non-standard ways) so I had to dig out a DOS system - I happend to have a P4 based DOS system handy, but I think I must have designed/built this thing in 8088 days - so lots of digging into 25+ years old code I'd written, figuring out and adjusting timing...

-Also want to build up some new toys around the "BD52" (Bob and Daves 8052) that I had once sold as a product - turns out I still have 4 left. And I decided to resurrect the 8051 InCircuitEmulator that I had also built many years ago. It's based in a Dallas DS2250 - and or course it's internal lithium battery had died - fortunately unlike most Dallas devices, the 2250 isn't baked into a hard plastic shell - it's an exposed SIP device, so not too hard to tack on a new battery (bit a good couple days figuring it out and restoring connections and
other aspects of long dis-used stuff.

One pic is DARC, QDRE and 8052ICE, second it my EPROM programmer with a BD52 board sitting on top, - inside the ICE is on the right.

Sorry, I know this is a very long post about stuff probably not that many of you find interesting ... but it does seem that the older I get, the more I like to reminisce.

Not exactly today but during the weekend i went through a stash of machines with gathered dust for the last few years.
- 8088 Turbo, POST completeted, but complained about defective drive wich is one of two ST234 on a Perstor controller, need to look further
- IBM PS2 Model 50, dead Battery, bad floppy, need to order caps for a floppy recap
- 80286 Slot CPU system with 2x 1,5 MB memory expansion, no more POST after a first sucessful one, HDD sounds working, need to look further
- 80386 with Cyrix FPU and 16x 1MB, no Post, 10 long Beeps from the AMI BIOS which is not listed, HDD makes strange noises, need to look further
- 80486 EISA, missing HDD, dropped in a SCSI disk with preinstalled W98SE, runs fine after driver installation, SPEA Media FX (rebadged Ensoniq Soundscape) audio not working, need further investigation
- HP Kayak XAs, aquired recently, Dual P2, replace bad SCSI drive, installed W2k incl drivers for the Visualize FX10 graphics, working fine, Floppy issues, does reed, but no boot
- Athlon x64, from trash, installed SATA HDD, WinXP works fine, but complains about pirated product key.

First boot with a beast of an entirely different nature!

It belonged to UPenn apparently and it's still heavily attached to the workings of its former system, so I'll have to reinstall IRIX.

I'm always with my paws 🐾 on the PC ISA PINE PT-2068.1 with i486SX25@33, I wanted to save 🛟 the BIOS with AWDFLASH, unfortunately I can't find a suitable version, but I just have to save it, I don't have to rewrite it.
I restarted the Slot1 Olidata OLI-BX PC with P3-500, basically it's an ASUS P2B, it had trouble starting 🛫, after a few attempts I did it, it starts from its 4 GB 🇬🇧 CF Windows XP, I have to do some bench, maybe in the next few days.
For the transfer of files to the PC 486 PINE, I use a floppy reader 💾, and a PC QDI Advance 10T with P3S1266, I realized that I only have 128 MB of RAM, it's fine for DOS or Windows 98SE, but theoretically I could get to 1.5 GB, with three SDRAMs of 512 MB each.
A little while ago I looked at a list of motherboards to repair, I have 36 but 3-4 have been fixed, but the list at some point has not been updated, I suspect that there are about 10 other boards, which would make a total of just over 40.
Most of them don't give any sign at startup, some because they have scratches on the back, others have been partially repaired, and then there are some cards that have suddenly stopped working, of the latter there are:
Freetech Falcon P5F76 S.7
Siemens D1120 S.370
MSI MS-6309 S.370
LuckyStar K7MKLE S.462

Spent several hours being a human pick n place today...

Swapped a somewhat problematic Intel 815 board out of my test bench for an Asus CUSL2-C to determine which of all my Coppermines actually worked. It was not without some challenges, but it seems the i815 board's issues may have been memory issues, as some of the SDRAMs I'd used, which I believed were fine, actually only ran at 100 MHz, which was possible to diagnose with the Asus board with selectable memory divider.
So in stead of testing CPUs it went down to finding good PC133 RAM 🤣 looks like some nice CL2 PC133 should be on this Christmas' wish list now ... Kind of excited to test out the Intel board again with the actually working RAM ...

TheChexWarrior wrote on 2025-11-18, 11:08:

I installed 128 MB RAM on a PB Club 30 (Socket 7, the seller provided) myself.

Are there just 64 MB cacheable like on many S5,S7,SS7 systems or the full 128 MB?

dionb wrote on 2025-11-18, 22:17:

The GeForce 7600GS AGP was a tougher nut. I hate ROHS unleaded solder. In the end I needed to mix some leaded solder in with all the pins on ground plane and then heat it viciously hot and suck for all the station was worth. Still, all's well that ends well.

I have one just like that as well.
Don't remember the caps giving me problems, though... but then again, I'm probably too used to doing recaps.
Might want to change the stock cooler if you find something better. It's a bumpgate-era GPU after all, and best to keep these under 60C under load. I have several coolers lined up for mine, but need to sit down to do it someday. It's somewhere deep in my storage boxes. I already have another (PNY) 7600 GT modded/hacked/janked up with an Xbox 360 all-aluminum GPU cooler and a 70 mm fan on top turning slowly at 5V. Except for the hottest months in summer (when indoor temps can reach nearly 30C), the rest of the time the card runs in the low 50's C under load... which is quite an improvement over the stock cooler.

dionb wrote on 2025-11-18, 22:17:

The GeForce 7600GS AGP was a tougher nut. I hate ROHS unleaded solder. In the end I needed to mix some leaded solder in with all the pins on ground plane and then heat it viciously hot and suck for all the station was worth. Still, all's well that ends well.

Preheat your board. If you don't have an actual preheater, you can use your hot air station at around 150*C. Take the nozzle off and use it to heat the whole board generally.

If you don't have a hot air station, you can use your oven to get it warmed up. Nothing on it will melt at 150.

There's also a trick for clearing PTH if they aren't clearing easily. Flood the PTH with solder and while still hot, insert a long piece of bus wire (a component leg will do). Leave it soldered in there. Flux up the PTH again and grab some wick. Push the wick up against the PTH and the wire. Heat with your iron while slowly pulling the wire out. It will pull all the solder from the inside of the hole with it onto the wick.

Lostdotfish wrote on 2025-11-23, 21:57:

Preheat your board. If you don't have an actual preheater, you can use your hot air station at around 150*C. Take the nozzle o […]
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dionb wrote on 2025-11-18, 22:17:

The GeForce 7600GS AGP was a tougher nut. I hate ROHS unleaded solder. In the end I needed to mix some leaded solder in with all the pins on ground plane and then heat it viciously hot and suck for all the station was worth. Still, all's well that ends well.

Preheat your board. If you don't have an actual preheater, you can use your hot air station at around 150*C. Take the nozzle off and use it to heat the whole board generally.

If you don't have a hot air station, you can use your oven to get it warmed up. Nothing on it will melt at 150.

There's also a trick for clearing PTH if they aren't clearing easily. Flood the PTH with solder and while still hot, insert a long piece of bus wire (a component leg will do). Leave it soldered in there. Flux up the PTH again and grab some wick. Push the wick up against the PTH and the wire. Heat with your iron while slowly pulling the wire out. It will pull all the solder from the inside of the hole with it onto the wick.

Tnx for the tips. I have a preaheater I've never actually used. Maybe time I started. Or otherwise use my hot air station 😀

Another good way to desolder PTH components is by using low temperature solder like the ChipQuick SMD4.5NL, which melts at appx 80 deg C. Mix it up with existing solder for a much lower general melting point, making it easier to wick out. Flux and repeat. Saw this product in some video somewhere, and it has really made a lot of desoldering tasks easier 😀

When retro activities don't go to plan:

Received an old Action Max games console without a PSU. I read the back - 9V Center Negative, no problem I have plenty of those adapters. Plugged it in and... nothing. Opened it up and plugged it in to test voltages etc, then the voltage regulator released the magic smoke and was burning hot!

It took me a while to spot the stupid mistake I'd made. You see it actually requires 9V Center Positive, but for some strange reason they put the DC polarity diagram upside down! It said 9V DC the correct way up and my brain has just processed the negative symbol to the right, without properly paying attention and spotting that the "C" was upside down. Why the hell would they put the diagram upside down!!!!

I've ordered a replacement voltage regulator, so hopefully that's all that I've killed. It may have killed a capacitor near the DC socket too.

I blasted 275°C of hot air at a Geforce4 Ti 4600, one minute per RAM chip, 2 or 3 minutes at the GPU.

The card survived and I just did a full 3DMark 2001 benchmark. So it works again without artefacting and crashing when loading the driver in XP, but for how long... Is it advisable to add RAM heatsinks? The chips don't get hot.
Should have a few blue Zalman ones somewhere...

Now running 'Video Memory stress Test v1.7.116'.

Another retro-related activity today, a bit more successful and fun.

I bought some converters from Aliexpress.

An ODV Composite & S-Video to Component Converter & a Component to RGB Scart Converter:

The ODV does line doubling to 480p/576p with smoothing options and correct 240p/288p handling on modern TVs etc, but that's not what I purchased it for.

Instead I'm taking it's output in passthrough mode and putting it into the pictured Component to RGB Scart Adapter. So, Composite or S-Video goes in and gets converted to Component which is then fed into the 2nd converter and converted to RGB.

The result is the ultimate trolling, a Commodore 64 displaying on an Amstrad Monitor 🤣 -

I now have a nifty way to pretty much connect any of my computers and consoles to the Amstrad Monitor. It was a bit limiting only being able to connect RGB Scart devices, so these 2 converters are ideal.

I need to look into the off-center positioning. I know Aliexpress also has those Scart Picture Shifters with potentiometers, which I may consider in the new year to solve this minor issue.

I did a tested the Age old Question, was windows 98 Faster than XP , used same hardware, same driver versions to test the difference in performance. I remember back in the day people would argue and even gaming benchmark websites still used win98 because it was said to be lighter and faster than the NT based systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIRDA-mfEXY