Whaddya know, my one accurate purchase, the 266MHz Athlon 2800+ (AXDA2800DKV4C) is from Electronyme. There isn't anything wrong with that one. Still, one out of ten sellers is not a good start.

AmoRetro seem OK too, they sold me a malfunctioning board with dangerous modifications but would have still accepted a return, even after the returns period was past. Unfortunately I was too busy and too poor to do anything about it at the time, but so long as you don't buy anything that has been modded, they should be fine.

As for boot managers, I have been using one called GAG on my OverDrive machine to load DOS/3.11 and 95C from different CF cards which are installed at the same time. Of course, there probably isn't any support for SCSI and such.

I have wondered for a while if I should mess with OS/2 again. I never much liked it but I have a Pentium machine that isn't doing anything and has a corrupted WFW install, so I might screw around with it for a while just for fun before I put WFW back on... Actually I might put NT3.51 on it. Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly dislike OS/2 either (I'm fairly neutral towards it), it's more that I don't know how to operate it and I have no software for it, leaving it to be nothing more than a small novelty.

philscomputerlab wrote:

That is a lovely lawn 😀

Thanks... 😀 It's small and easy to handle.
Nothing else than a lawn of grass of a hedge that are supereasy to cut.

Bought 4 x 4MB 30pin 60ns. Today I want to repair a broken at supply or repair with wires a 386 mobo.

HighTreason wrote:

Whaddya know, my one accurate purchase, the 266MHz Athlon 2800+ (AXDA2800DKV4C) is from Electronyme. There isn't anything wrong […]
Show full quote

Whaddya know, my one accurate purchase, the 266MHz Athlon 2800+ (AXDA2800DKV4C) is from Electronyme. There isn't anything wrong with that one. Still, one out of ten sellers is not a good start.

AmoRetro seem OK too, they sold me a malfunctioning board with dangerous modifications but would have still accepted a return, even after the returns period was past. Unfortunately I was too busy and too poor to do anything about it at the time, but so long as you don't buy anything that has been modded, they should be fine.

As for boot managers, I have been using one called GAG on my OverDrive machine to load DOS/3.11 and 95C from different CF cards which are installed at the same time. Of course, there probably isn't any support for SCSI and such.

I have wondered for a while if I should mess with OS/2 again. I never much liked it but I have a Pentium machine that isn't doing anything and has a corrupted WFW install, so I might screw around with it for a while just for fun before I put WFW back on... Actually I might put NT3.51 on it. Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly dislike OS/2 either (I'm fairly neutral towards it), it's more that I don't know how to operate it and I have no software for it, leaving it to be nothing more than a small novelty.

Yup. Electromyne it is then. Their parts/items are not modded. They look clean. They are tested. And they are shipped at a low price and works.
I have bought 3 items from them. All items are working. And sometimes they have discounts on good parts.

I like Os/2 Warp3. The feel of the desktop is great, Reminds me of a mix between Amiga workbench and NT-4.0.
For a more stable Os/2, stick to Warp-4 and for that Dual-boot. Try extended fdisk. If not working then get those modded Warp4 Install floppy's.
They have new drivers embedded for harddrives up to a size of 40gb (possible more).
I used to run Os/2 Warp3 on 500mb partitions, so I would say that a 1gb is just fair enough for Warp3 or 4.

retrofanatic wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

Hacked my IBM 5150 mainboard to disable onboard memory and parity checking 😀

Nice job. I'm guessing you did this to use an external 8 bit memory card instead?

That's right, although I disabled the on-board memory mainly so I could drop these chips in another computer.

Only after modding and pulling the chips, I realized the other machine takes 41464 chips, not 4164... 😒

I replaced the battery on my PA-5000 NEAT chipset 286 motherboard 😀

I did a quick and dirty but pretty neat mod so I can replace the battery without soldering.

With a little distance between the board and the battery I also hope that there will be less chance of the board beeing damaged by corrosion.

Played Red Alert 2 with a friend. We booted up some old machines (Athlon / Pentium III / Pentium 4) for that. Great game.

Sometimes its hard to understand why things doesnt work.

I replaced the battery in the 286-16 system with NEAT chipset, everything worked fine and the new battery had no issues with holding charge.

After that success I though that I should upgrade the memory. I used SIMM slots in the SIPP sockets and installed 4x1MB leaving the 1MB DIP (32 chips + 4 parity chips) in their sockets. The next post the board complained about wrong memory size which its normal but I could not change memory size in the BIOS and it would not count up the extra memory during memory test. After testing both 3 chip and 9 chip modules with the same result I though that I should try to remove the DIP memory and see if that would make a difference. It did make a difference, the system woulldnt post so I thought perhaps the SIPP sockets wouldnt work without DIPs in Bank1 and Bank2 as the SIPP sockets are Bank3 and Bank4.

I had placed all the memory chips in order and I monuted each and every memory chip in the same socket I removed it from, I double checked that every chip was oriented corrctly before powering on. Now the system would not post, not even a beep, it seems this board got very upset when I tried to run it without memory in Bank1. Im leaving the board with the battery disconnected over night to see if that will revive it, or I guess there could be some dust in the memory sockets but one would think that the board would at least beep.

brostenen wrote:

I had good experience with the german seller "Electromyne", wich is an online eBay-shop.
They are top rated seller, so I guess it depends on if they are shop's or private sellers.

Same. Got processors, graphics card and memory modules from them. Prices are fair, especially shipping to Australia. They do an excellent job at actually knowing what they have. E.g. TNT2 M64 vs. a proper TNT2. With RAM sticks, the picture is usually generic, but the part numbers are spot on and exactly what you will receive.

I got quite a few motherboards from AmoRetro a few years ago. He put all these 386 and Super Sockt 7 boards online, so I got most of them. They all work fine and I haven't really seen these boards up for sale again, especially at those prices. His items are a bit on the expensive side, but they are all tested and he knows his stuff. He's got an awesome website as well with lots of information.

I got quite a few items from the UK, for some reason they have extremely good prices on games, and the lowest shipping costs to Australia. Got a ton of PC games from the UK.

New items, especially newer stuff, like adapters, CF readers, cables, I always get them from eBay Asia. They cannot be beat on price and service, but shipping takes a month which is a pain.

The 16 MHz 286 with Neat chipset is working perfectly again. It was a typical user error 😀

It turned out that the board did not like having one of its 36 memory chips mounted with one leg outside the socket shorting against a solder pad... With all legs inside the socket everything works fine, still no luck with SIMM ---> SIPP memory with this board though. Im tempted to use the PC Chips M209 board as my main 286 system as it works with the SIMM ---> SIPP modules and 20 MHz is more than 16 MHz 😜.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Same. Got processors, graphics card and memory modules from them. Prices are fair, especially shipping to Australia. They do an […]
Show full quote

Same. Got processors, graphics card and memory modules from them. Prices are fair, especially shipping to Australia. They do an excellent job at actually knowing what they have. E.g. TNT2 M64 vs. a proper TNT2. With RAM sticks, the picture is usually generic, but the part numbers are spot on and exactly what you will receive.

I got quite a few motherboards from AmoRetro a few years ago. He put all these 386 and Super Sockt 7 boards online, so I got most of them. They all work fine and I haven't really seen these boards up for sale again, especially at those prices. His items are a bit on the expensive side, but they are all tested and he knows his stuff. He's got an awesome website as well with lots of information.

I got quite a few items from the UK, for some reason they have extremely good prices on games, and the lowest shipping costs to Australia. Got a ton of PC games from the UK.

New items, especially newer stuff, like adapters, CF readers, cables, I always get them from eBay Asia. They cannot be beat on price and service, but shipping takes a month which is a pain.

When you want that stuff cheap, you need to be patient.
Shipping time is of no issues to me.
It is like back in the days of the Amiga. We were used to wait years for something.
So I guess it is that same thing still hanging on to me. 😁

It really sucks that intercontinental surface mail was killed between the EU and US/CA. That used to make shipping of big items affordable.

I got home earlier today and decided to give my Super Nintendo Entertainment System a spin 😁

-Donkey Kong Country
-Nigel Mansells F1 Championship (or something like that)
-F-Zero
-Super Mario World

good times 😁

brostenen wrote:

I had good experience with the german seller "Electromyne", wich is an online eBay-shop.
They are top rated seller, so I guess it depends on if they are shop's or private sellers.

Same here. I've purchased an item or two from Electromyne. I can't speak for all of them, of course, but Electromyne has appeared honest and reputable.

QBiN wrote:

brostenen wrote:

I had good experience with the german seller "Electromyne", wich is an online eBay-shop.
They are top rated seller, so I guess it depends on if they are shop's or private sellers.

Same here. I've purchased an item or two from Electromyne. I can't speak for all of them, of course, but Electromyne has appeared honest and reputable.

Well my package (from another German) has not been dispatched yet and here I thought daß alle Deutschen arbeitete wie Maschinen, stupid me.

Electromyne is allways helpfull if some issues should arise......

Anyway...
I have installed Win98SE on my P133 to check out if my new card is working, and to check out how well it is running on a P133.
I can not recommend Voodoo1 on P133 running Win98-SE at all. NFS2-SE is just too slow and sluggish.
The good news is, that my newly aquired Orchid is working 100% as it should. Not bad for a 15-Dollar card. 😁

Made disk images of about 30+ games, a lot AD&D and such from 3.5" 720K disks.

I'm about 30% done archiving my collection, that is, scan of box, manuals, disks, making disk images, etc. This is a LOT of work....🤣

Added 32MB to my CT3900 AWE32. Loaded the 28MB Chorium Rev A soundfont. Enjoyed great GM music from Descent and Tyrian.

Dealt with a Vista install and issues for the past week. So far everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, leaving me to regret not referring my customer to a fresh refurb unit instead of dealing with his current setup. NEVER underestimate the destructive power that is Windows vista!

Mucked around some more with Amiga emulators. Really impressed with the perfectly smooth 50 Hz PAL scrolling that it support.