Restored some functionality to my MT-32 and began work on a song. This will be the last thing it ever does, as half of the patches non-functional, the FX unit does not work and it does not respond to programming so it is a lost cause. Meh, it won't be missed.

Also played with the Casio CZ and the Yamaha MU while I had it all wired up properly, haven't done anything for the Yamaha recently, which is a shame because the Yamaha is awesome, so I might move on to that when I am done with the MT-32 song. As for the Korg 01R... Bleh, don't know if I'll ever touch it again, still considering just selling it off as it really isn't very good.

I also glued this together;

Been spending lots of time archiving MESSDev's external artwork file collection.

@HighTreason
That benchmark launcher looks cool.
--

The last several days I was converting my main PC to triple boot WinXP32, WinXP64, and Linux Mint 17.2. The problem was it had to be done carefully because the XP32 install is my everyday OS and I really didn't want to trash it.
Most of XP64 and all of Linux are on a new GPT partitioned drive. XP64 won't boot from GPT so it's boot partition was squeezed into the old XP32 drive using gparted. XP32 is an aged install with 3 partitions and the rearrangement process was a bit awkward and scary.

nLite got XP64 to boot \Windows from the MBR drive, but map \Programs and \Profiles to the GPT drive. Thankfully this works. Of course this involves using drive letters, and "tricking" the Windows installer to map drive letters how you want them is another issue. I really wish that dumb thing would let you just set the drive letters manually.

Before all this, the XP32 drive was cloned to another drive. I attempted the whole process on the backup before redoing the clone and then repeating the process on the original. Trying to be careful made this take forever.

Because of how I went about things, XP32 and 64 weren't aware of each other and did not present a boot menu.
Linux Mint was installed last, and it kindly detected both Windows installs and gave a triple boot menu. It all works now, XP32 is still intact and I'm relieved.

Part of the end result is that an older 1TB drive has been liberated from the PC and can now be used for a P4 build, which can replace my P3 office machine, which can then be repurposed to something more fun.
It seems like everything I want to do gets held up by a chain of projects that have to get done in a certain order. I'm one step closer.

Runicen wrote:

dogchainx wrote:

Oh...and I played Ur-Quan Masters HD.....the High-Def remake of Star Control II. Love that game....

I had wondered about the quality of the remake. The project intrigued me, but I still have my copies of the original games, so I never took the plunge on it.

Did they really give it that dramatic of an overhaul?

Today I lifted the NB-heatsink on the KR7A and "popped" the heatsinks on the Voodoo 5. It wasn't pretty....

(I've cleaned the left one, it was like epoxy)

shamino wrote:

@HighTreason
That benchmark launcher looks cool.

Give it a try if you want, but I have to fix the menu jittering around like that. Probably something to do with the number of lines and the fact I am using cursor movement (possibly incorrectly) instead of clearing the screen to try and reduce flicker. Initially I also had keys remapped so one could use cursor keys, Return and ESC, but I wanted it to run no matter what and NNANSI does not appear to support key remaps very well if at all. Remember it isn't finished yet and it is very primitive. I wrote it for a few reasons. 1. I was bored. 2. It seemed useful and 3. I keep advertising someone else's channel in videos without meaning to and it seems poor manners to modify someone else's creation like that (when it's their name) so I wrote my own equivalent.

There are a few stupid things hiding in the menu and as usual when I do stuff like this, poking around with notepad will probably tell you what music I had playing when I wrote it... Actually, i should probably take that out as it doesn't paint the best picture of me, everyone will think I'm some soppy loser who listens to 80s ballads or something... Which I am totally not! Honest! * proceeds to quietly hum "Somewhere out there" (James Ingram & Linda Ronstadt) and hope nobody notices.

As for the drive shenanigans, that sounds very tedious. I have a couple of 1TB drives to move to another machine soon and was not looking forward to it, but as they are being demoted from boot drives to storage drives I will probably find it a whole lot easier thinking of all the tedium you just faced.

Marquzz wrote:

http://i58.tinypic.com/1zbtlbm.jpg […]
Show full quote

😳

Is that supposed to be an application of thermal paste? Who did that? Fire them. Eww! Eww! Horrible. Did they have to get like 1000 heatsinks done with the smallest size syringe or something?

Always a heart attack moment when you pop the heatsink off only to realize you've been running it like that for ten years.

HighTreason wrote:

Is that supposed to be an application of thermal paste? Who did that? Fire them. Eww! Eww! Horrible. Did they have to get like 1000 heatsinks done with the smallest size syringe or something?

Always a heart attack moment when you pop the heatsink off only to realize you've been running it like that for ten years.

Yes, but unfortunatly it's quite common. Wonder how the thinking was going; "Let's save money on thermal grease, but also let us put a fan on that heatsink" 😐

The second thing I always do when buying second hand hardware, after function testing, is cleaning old paste and putting new on.

Performed a board swap on a NeXT Magneto Optical drive on the assumption that the Digital control board was mysteriously dead.

Turns out both boards worked. It was the drive's ribbon cable that was bad. 😒

With thanks to a long-time subscriber on YouTube, I discovered that the board layout on my dead Quadro 4 XGL was (near enough) the same as my broken Ti 4600. Said Ti 4600 is a factory overclocked ASUS version that I very much liked. It also has an awesome heatsink on an ugly as sin board, Google V8460 Ultra Deluxe if you want to see one. Anyway, to cut a long story short, a part broke off a long time ago and I had no idea what it was.

I now know it was an inductor and I have also found that the XGL silk screen would suggest that the same component is in the same spot, even the numbering on said silkscreen is identical. Thus, it may be very possible to repair the card! Oh, yeah, I'm gonna PWN the DirectX 8.1 / OpenGL 1.3 scene for sure! Screw the 4800 SE... Though it will still make a good spare unless I can think of something to do with it, assuming it works, I still havent had time to test it.

Finally committed to painting my very yellowed Commodore 64C, I wasn't sure what to do about it for a while and I considered retro-brite but after I found out that it was only a temp fix that could lead to more brittle plastic I decided not to go with that option. So since I had a few dead "bread bin" C64s I decided I would swap the yellowed C64c keyboard with the best of those dead older style computers and go with a dark paint to match. I decided on semi-gloss black because I figured it would give a good result while matching most CRT television sets, it also would match my black and grey 1802 Commodore monitor (which is currently kaputt but in storage). So here it is!
Personally I'm pretty happy with it, it really looks kinda cool. 😁 The only problem I have with the paint I chose is that it's still pretty glossy so it shows dust and fingerprints like mad. 🤣

Here is what it looked like originally:

And here is what it looks like now!

As you probably saw from the last shot I also did the very yellowed C64c 1541 drive to match. 😁 (The label is intact, the camera just over exposed it for some reason)

and here it is as it is currently set up on my desk. That wooden box over there is my diskette box for the C64, I scored it at a thrift store a little while ago for 99 cents.

Nice work!

How / what did you do with they keys and lettering?

Looks like the keys are from an older Breadbox.

Marquzz wrote:

Today I lifted the NB-heatsink on the KR7A and "popped" the heatsinks on the Voodoo 5. It wasn't pretty.... […]
Show full quote

Runicen wrote:

dogchainx wrote:

Oh...and I played Ur-Quan Masters HD.....the High-Def remake of Star Control II. Love that game....

I had wondered about the quality of the remake. The project intrigued me, but I still have my copies of the original games, so I never took the plunge on it.

Did they really give it that dramatic of an overhaul?

Today I lifted the NB-heatsink on the KR7A and "popped" the heatsinks on the Voodoo 5. It wasn't pretty....

(I've cleaned the left one, it was like epoxy)

I left the heatsinks on my VSA100 cards on. Why? They work! They sink the heat 😁

brostenen wrote:

Looks like the keys are from an older Breadbox.

Yup, the keys are from a dead older C64 I had laying in storage (It took me a few tries to find a working bread bin and naturally I put all the working parts together to make a pristine breadbin and then took the second nicest keyboard and put it in this C64c).

Guess what I think I fixed...

The GeForce 4 Ti 4600! F*** yeah! My overkill DX8 card. Oh, the Ti 4800 SE seems to work too. Now I can build that Athlon box to replace my old, beaten and dysfunctional Athlon box... Oh... Hang on... No, it keeps overheating and that heatsink is the biggest one I have. I cannot find one anywhere either, so I am stuck, my only option is to drop to the 1500+ as I cannot cool this 2600+ with any heatsink I own. The only comparable heatsink is on another 2600+ but they are two very different models of CPU and I tried it before, it is a much smaller heatsink and cannot dissipate the heat at all.

I also cannot afford to damage the CPU as this version is very hard to find; http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/AMD-Athlon%2 … A2600DKV3C.html I do not think I will be so lucky as to find one at the glorious price of 1.99 again. Only thing I can think of is to get a fan adapter, but it would not fit in the case. Perhaps I can find a server-grade 60mm fan instead as noise is not a problem, I could even build a temp control circuit (existing fan actually has one) if it were a problem.

Have not tested GPU in Direct3D yet, but before the inductor was broken off it worked fine, without the inductor it caused a reboot as soon as the system displayed graphics for a few seconds. It no longer does this so I assume it will work, I can't see anything else just randomly dying because an obscure component went open circuit - it is not outside the realms of possibility I guess, but it seems unlikely. Thank you, dead XGL card... I hate butchering things like that, but it really was dead, very dead, the GPU was actually melted when I got it and of course it did not work... Has sat in the drawer since, though it donated its heatsink to something around a year ago.

I sure hope this thing works. I think I can get away with running it for now as it idles at 55°C and will go up to around 70° when loaded hard... Apparently they take 85° but I DO NOT like to run the machine above 60° EVER. In fact, I try to keep machines below 45°C at all times, am I fighting a losing battle here though? I mean, this CPU clearly runs much hotter than the 200MHz versions (This is a 133MHz chip), perhaps it always will? I still will try to improve cooling ASAP though and I will still set the fail-safe, I know it is responsive on this board and just cuts power unceremoniously, which is good.

EDIT: Oh, I also wanted to add. Something funny happens when you plug a U5S-Super33 into a Micronics M4Pi (A very finicky motherboard) - it detects a "486SX Operating at 100MHz" according to the POST screen. Obviously it is not, but I found it funny. Intel should have made a 486SX4 because that board reports this for other CPUs such as the 486DX4 (All makes) and the Cx5x86. It will not POST with an Am5x86 and is the only board I know of to have this problem, especially with it running the Cyrix. Very strange board and I may not own it much longer, so it is good to learn a bit more about its quirks. It actually isn't a bad board paired with a 486DX2 and an S3 video card.

Im testing old HDDs

I had a big box with ~30 old HDDs that took a 1 meter* nose dive down on my parquet floor half a year ago. Im now testing to see which drives survived and which drives sounds like waste shredders. The HDDs were just stacked in the box without any protection at all so I will be happy if half of them survived...

* 1 meter is ~3 feet in the medieval system of measurements.

HighTreason wrote:

Guess what I think I fixed... […]
Show full quote

Guess what I think I fixed...

Awesome_Ti.jpg

The GeForce 4 Ti 4600! F*** yeah! My overkill DX8 card. Oh, the Ti 4800 SE seems to work too. Now I can build that Athlon box to replace my old, beaten and dysfunctional Athlon box... Oh... Hang on... No, it keeps overheating and that heatsink is the biggest one I have. I cannot find one anywhere either, so I am stuck, my only option is to drop to the 1500+ as I cannot cool this 2600+ with any heatsink I own. The only comparable heatsink is on another 2600+ but they are two very different models of CPU and I tried it before, it is a much smaller heatsink and cannot dissipate the heat at all.

I also cannot afford to damage the CPU as this version is very hard to find; http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/AMD-Athlon%2 … A2600DKV3C.html I do not think I will be so lucky as to find one at the glorious price of 1.99 again. Only thing I can think of is to get a fan adapter, but it would not fit in the case. Perhaps I can find a server-grade 60mm fan instead as noise is not a problem, I could even build a temp control circuit (existing fan actually has one) if it were a problem.

Have not tested GPU in Direct3D yet, but before the inductor was broken off it worked fine, without the inductor it caused a reboot as soon as the system displayed graphics for a few seconds. It no longer does this so I assume it will work, I can't see anything else just randomly dying because an obscure component went open circuit - it is not outside the realms of possibility I guess, but it seems unlikely. Thank you, dead XGL card... I hate butchering things like that, but it really was dead, very dead, the GPU was actually melted when I got it and of course it did not work... Has sat in the drawer since, though it donated its heatsink to something around a year ago.

I sure hope this thing works. I think I can get away with running it for now as it idles at 55°C and will go up to around 70° when loaded hard... Apparently they take 85° but I DO NOT like to run the machine above 60° EVER. In fact, I try to keep machines below 45°C at all times, am I fighting a losing battle here though? I mean, this CPU clearly runs much hotter than the 200MHz versions (This is a 133MHz chip), perhaps it always will? I still will try to improve cooling ASAP though and I will still set the fail-safe, I know it is responsive on this board and just cuts power unceremoniously, which is good.

EDIT: Oh, I also wanted to add. Something funny happens when you plug a U5S-Super33 into a Micronics M4Pi (A very finicky motherboard) - it detects a "486SX Operating at 100MHz" according to the POST screen. Obviously it is not, but I found it funny. Intel should have made a 486SX4 because that board reports this for other CPUs such as the 486DX4 (All makes) and the Cx5x86. It will not POST with an Am5x86 and is the only board I know of to have this problem, especially with it running the Cyrix. Very strange board and I may not own it much longer, so it is good to learn a bit more about its quirks. It actually isn't a bad board paired with a 486DX2 and an S3 video card.

Have you tried one of those Zalman GPU coolers? Remember customers wanted the blue one with heatpipes n' stuff, back in 2005.
I was really impressed by how well it cooled card's like Radeon9800's and Geforce6800's.
They are to be found on ebay as of now. Not cheap, nor expensive I would say. And they come with a fan too.

Skyscraper wrote:

Im testing old HDDs

I had a big box with ~30 old HDDs that took a 1 meter* nose dive down on my parquet floor half a year ago. Im now testing to see which drives survived and which drives sounds like waste shredders. The HDDs were just stacked in the box without any protection at all so I will be happy if half of them survived...

* 1 meter is ~3 feet in the medieval system of measurements.

Hope the damage is minimal.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Yup, the keys are from a dead older C64 I had laying in storage (It took me a few tries to find a working bread bin and naturally I put all the working parts together to make a pristine breadbin and then took the second nicest keyboard and put it in this C64c).

Just as I thought, yeah...
No C64 is the ultimate for me though. Some have minuses and some have plus's.
The model C is by far the best looking of the bunch, the original breadbox with black/darkgrey keys have the best sounding SID and model "Aldi" (the all white sold in german Aldi shops) are just shit. If you can replace the SID in you'r C64 with the one from an older BreadBox, then you are darn close to getting the ultimate "standard" C64. I vaguely remember that the original SID chip has a different voltage compared to the more recent found in the C64-C.
I might be wrong on this, completely wrong, but I remember the original version being a 5V and the later being a 3.5V or something. Just be carefull if you choose to do something like this. If you have done it, then I have missed something on Vogons. 🤣

brostenen wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Im testing old HDDs

I had a big box with ~30 old HDDs that took a 1 meter* nose dive down on my parquet floor half a year ago. Im now testing to see which drives survived and which drives sounds like waste shredders. The HDDs were just stacked in the box without any protection at all so I will be happy if half of them survived...

* 1 meter is ~3 feet in the medieval system of measurements.

Hope the damage is minimal.

So far 5 out of 5 drives have been OK, 30KB or so in damaged sectors on a 540MB drive but those could very well have been there before the "accident". I have never fully tested all the drives before, just made sure that they were spinning up without nasty sounds, were recognized by the BIOS and that I could write a test file to them. This time Im deleting the partitions, creating new ones and formating them.

I need to test the rest of the drives in another computer as the Intel 430FX chipset board Im using now wont recognize disks larger than ~2.1GB.

brostenen wrote:

Just as I thought, yeah... No C64 is the ultimate for me though. Some have minuses and some have plus's. The model C is by far t […]
Show full quote

King_Corduroy wrote:

Yup, the keys are from a dead older C64 I had laying in storage (It took me a few tries to find a working bread bin and naturally I put all the working parts together to make a pristine breadbin and then took the second nicest keyboard and put it in this C64c).

Just as I thought, yeah...
No C64 is the ultimate for me though. Some have minuses and some have plus's.
The model C is by far the best looking of the bunch, the original breadbox with black/darkgrey keys have the best sounding SID and model "Aldi" (the all white sold in german Aldi shops) are just shit. If you can replace the SID in you'r C64 with the one from an older BreadBox, then you are darn close to getting the ultimate "standard" C64. I vaguely remember that the original SID chip has a different voltage compared to the more recent found in the C64-C.
I might be wrong on this, completely wrong, but I remember the original version being a 5V and the later being a 3.5V or something. Just be carefull if you choose to do something like this. If you have done it, then I have missed something on Vogons. 🤣

No you are correct, the original SID chip is 12v and the C64c revised SID is 9v so it would definitely not work. I agree though, I like the sound of the original SID but the reliability of the C64c.🤣 Both models are great computers though in their own rights, I'm pretty happy I have working examples of both. 😁