Today I transfered my K6-2 to a shiny new ATX case. I am going to order a few IO shileds for Baby-AT motherboards as I found them for US$ 1.50. The case was NOS and looks pristine and not yellowed at all. Is there anything I can do to prevent it ever yellowing? Like a "permanent sunscreen for plastic"?

brassicGamer wrote:

No but I mean the P133 is kinda stuck in the middle technology-wise and is kinda unremarkable. A 386 is great for those 80s-era games, but the next batch like Doom and Quake can run on a bog standard Pentium but one may as well use an MMX system as it has a greater reach in terms of newer games.

This is retrocomputing. If you were to nitpick one could say nearly all retro-systems have little motivation to be ever used, as between unnoficial patches, source ports, DOSBox and virtualization you could run quite a number of games on your main machine anyway. Sometimes, it is just about liking certain pieces of hardware for no practical reason.

My SNES and most of my cases aren't yellow and I never clean them unless I have to. Maybe try that? I have a few ideas but have yet to see their impacts long term, so I don't really want to say only to find out they eat the plastic or something. Some of my gear has a thin coating of oil at all times, though this is better with black plastic because it makes it shiny. I guess it will slow down the nicotine staining, but if the yellowing is internal, such as a bromide reaction, it won't do anything.

Today, I used retro internet.

Oh, wait, no, that's just KCom, it's the only internet we have.

HighTreason wrote:

Oh, wait, no, that's just KCom, it's the only internet we have.

Well, that upload speed is still faster than what we get with the standard DSL "high-speed" here in Canada.

Doesn't mean I have to like it. Upload can drop anyway. I feel for you though, it sucks.

Not really the kind of thing I want to hand over nearly £150 of my money over for this month anyway, so there is a fair chance I will be disconnected from the internet for a while aside from borrowing it in other people's houses or McDonalds.

On a more positive note, I got a PS2 working today and played some Clock Tower 3. Project Zero is not working for some reason and I cannot find my Rule of Rose disc, which is annoying, because the game was banned here for silly reasons and finding another disc could be very expensive.

I'll be doing a period correct Toy Story marathon tonight. Toy Story 1 on Laserdisc, TS2 on DVD, and TS3 on Blu-Ray, with plenty of extra buttery popcorn. It'll be glorious.

Just for shiggles, I edited the registry on the only working WinXP machine I currently have (Fujitsu Stylistic LT C-500 tablet) so it'll download and install updates for the Embedded/POS version of XP. 🤣

I did it mostly for curiosity, I have no intentions whatsoever to use this machine for any actual work. It's just a toy in my vintage computer collection now. :p

philscomputerlab wrote:

That Adaptec card, is that FDD+ SCSI?

What motherboard are you using?

Yep, it's a great Adaptec card.

The mobo appears to be a SHUTTLE HOT-317. https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/m/S-T/32931.htm

alexanrs wrote:

Today I transfered my K6-2 to a shiny new ATX case. I am going to order a few IO shileds for Baby-AT motherboards as I found them for US$ 1.50.

Yow, that's a great price, plus I can't seem to find them anywhere online - any tips? 😀

I just searched for IO shields and eventually found it in the "brazilian ebay", aka MercadoLivre.com.br

Im testing memory modules I have bought on Ebay and similar sites, both old 72pin FPM/EDO modules and DDR2 modules.

I have so far not found a single non working EDO or FPM module out of 50+ modules but quite a few dead DDR2 modules.

I'm installing again unattended Windows '98 OS installation disk (unofficial updated to Feb '08) in my Win9x rig, after one of the two HDs failed (the Seagate 30gb). This PC has got 2x PIII 800EB, but this time I'll keep only Windows '98, without Windows 2000 (that I've installed before just for tests and 'historical' meanings).

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I'll be doing a period correct Toy Story marathon tonight. Toy Story 1 on Laserdisc, TS2 on DVD, and TS3 on Blu-Ray, with plenty of extra buttery popcorn. It'll be glorious.

This is the second funniest thing I've seen on this site this week.

Skyscraper wrote:

Im testing memory modules I have bought on Ebay and similar sites, both old 72pin FPM/EDO modules and DDR2 modules.

This is the saddest thing I have seen this week. Dude, it's Saturday!

(To be fair, I have also been there)

alexanrs wrote:

Is there anything I can do to prevent it ever yellowing? Like a "permanent sunscreen for plastic"?

Only if you can find a case that was manufacturered without bromine as a flame-retardant. They do exist but probably came out of nations that gave less of a crap about health and safety.

alexanrs wrote:

Sometimes, it is just about liking certain pieces of hardware for no practical reason.

I do get it. I can see why the younger generation might find the idea of DOSBox appealing but, for me, it's about owning the hardware I could never afford to own back then, and playing the games I never played in the quality I never experienced. Only today I played Need For Speed III, Tomb Raider, Descent and Quake in all their 3DFX glory for the first time ever, a 32" LCD panel. Maybe next week I'll hook the machine up to my projector. These are things I didn't even dream possible when I was 15.

Every time I see that 3DFX logo appear on the screen it makes me smile a little.

brassicGamer wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

Sometimes, it is just about liking certain pieces of hardware for no practical reason.

I do get it. I can see why the younger generation might find the idea of DOSBox appealing but, for me, it's about owning the hardware I could never afford to own back then, and playing the games I never played in the quality I never experienced. Only today I played Need For Speed III, Tomb Raider, Descent and Quake in all their 3DFX glory for the first time ever, a 32" LCD panel. Maybe next week I'll hook the machine up to my projector. These are things I didn't even dream possible when I was 15.

Every time I see that 3DFX logo appear on the screen it makes me smile a little.

True...
For me, it is that too. Plus getting hardware that I had back then, and having getting hardware that I for some reason never got to have experience with. Then there is the thing with just having multiple choices, and having as much diversity in the collection, as possible.

My retro activity for today, were getting out in the nature, in order to find apples with my children.
Then I made a cake for them, served with hot homemade cocoa topped with whipped cream.

Not the most beautiful cake, yet it was with custard-cream, chopped dark chocolate and banana's.

Disk imaging ... lots of disk imaging.

I have too many loose floppies and CD-ROMs laying around. For original CD-ROMs I like to image them to a hard drive in case the originals are lost or damaged. For the floppies, they need to be examined. I don't have the time to do that now, so I'm just imaging them for a rainy day.

One set of floppies that I did look at were a set of GIFs that I saved to floppy back in February 1992. There were downloaded onto my 8Mhz PC AT using Procomm from a school computer, probably running Ultrix. Then I used FDFORM18 to format some double density diskettes to an 800K format, which is completely non-standard. (80 tracks, 10 sectors per track on double density media.) The 1.2MB drive had no problems with it at the time.

I looked at those floppies last night and they are all still readable. All 110 files (8.3MB) of GIFs are now on a modern machine. Some of them are pretty good quality for even back then; the others at 320x200 resolution just make me wince now. It was fun seeing them again though.

(The machine that read them was a P133 running IBM DOS 6.22. The original AT is still around, but it's had so many upgrades over the years that it's barely recognizable. Including the "upgrade" to a 360K double density floppy instead of the original 1.2MB floppy drive because I use it with an Option Board for disk imaging.)

brassicGamer wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Im testing memory modules I have bought on Ebay and similar sites, both old 72pin FPM/EDO modules and DDR2 modules.

This is the saddest thing I have seen this week. Dude, it's Saturday!

(To be fair, I have also been there)

Between 1999 and 2004 I used to spend on average about $100 - $150 every weekend on getting drunk and with luck laid, thats ~$32500 and alot of hangovers...

Its lucky we get wiser with age! 😀

mbbrutman wrote:

I looked at those floppies last night and they are all still readable. All 110 files (8.3MB) of GIFs are now on a modern machine. Some of them are pretty good quality for even back then; the others at 320x200 resolution just make me wince now. It was fun seeing them again though.

The only GIFs I had on floppy disk in the 90s were pornographic...

brassicGamer wrote:

The only GIFs I had on floppy disk in the 90s were pornographic...

Thanks for sharing?

mbbrutman wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

The only GIFs I had on floppy disk in the 90s were pornographic...

Thanks for sharing?

I found it pretty funny.

I got two lots of floppies recently for free (it was either that or going to the dump), and in both lots, at least 5 or 6 floppies contained retro porn. Either gifs, or DOS programs from early 90s.