Private_Ops wrote:

Points for crafting your own but, I believe you can buy those for cheap.

That's true, it's more a mixture of having the material + lots of free time! 🤣

Private_Ops wrote:

Points for crafting your own but, I believe you can buy those for cheap.

Building your own allows you access to the 5V SB circuit for soft switch conversions on your AT case. The ebay adapters usually omit those pins.

mmx_91 wrote:

Today, I managed to build a homemade ATX to AT power supply adapter, from an old ATX extension cable. In my opinion it's one of […]
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Today, I managed to build a homemade ATX to AT power supply adapter, from an old ATX extension cable. In my opinion it's one of these things you 'have to have' when you are into old hardware 🤣 🤣, you don't know when you would need it!

Most satisfying doing one on you'r own. Did my own a couple of month's ago.
I used all the wires on the ATX extension cable, deviding them into same number of bundles for each AT-Cords.

Those ATX -> AT converters are relatively cheap, but still probably more expensive than rolling your own if you have PSUs that aren't worth fixing that you can harvest parts from. Instead of connecting the green and black wires together (which will cause the PSU to power on every time power is applied), or trying to build a circuit with 5VSB, you can connect them to the case's power switch so it works as normal to turn the machine on and off. If you have an AT case, attach spade connectors to those wires and plug them in to one side of the AT switch (if you get it wrong nothing will happen, it won't cause problems as it's not 240V.) If you have an ATX case, you will need to replace the momentary power switch with a toggle switch of the same dimensions (these are readily available) and connect that to the green and black wires.

I've done this myself (but with the pre-made ATX -> AT converters) and it works well.

Well, for no particular good reason, I picked up a Parallel Cable and connected my printer to the Retro machine. DOS ASCII printing works by default, of course. But the built-in Windows 3.1 drivers for the HP LaserJet 4/4M also worked, which was nice (mine is a LaserJet 1320, for reference).

Of course, I cause a paper jam when I realized my test document (The Windows readme) was too long and "aborted" the print job by cutting the power 😁.

Now, if there were some way to get the duplexer enabled for double-sided DOS/Win 3.1 prints, that would be magical. But if nothing else, I can always use the official drivers in Windows 98.

Malvineous wrote:

Those ATX -> AT converters are relatively cheap, but still probably more expensive than rolling your own if you have PSUs that aren't worth fixing that you can harvest parts from. Instead of connecting the green and black wires together (which will cause the PSU to power on every time power is applied), or trying to build a circuit with 5VSB, you can connect them to the case's power switch so it works as normal to turn the machine on and off. If you have an AT case, attach spade connectors to those wires and plug them in to one side of the AT switch (if you get it wrong nothing will happen, it won't cause problems as it's not 240V.) If you have an ATX case, you will need to replace the momentary power switch with a toggle switch of the same dimensions (these are readily available) and connect that to the green and black wires.

I've done this myself (but with the pre-made ATX -> AT converters) and it works well.

I connected the green and the black straight onto the powerswitch in the AT-Case.
If you have an ATX psu with the fan in the back, you can just mount it in an AT-Case upside down.
This is the way, I got an Pentium1 166 AT-Machine working again, when the AT-Psu was dead.
Another way, is to do as phil did. Mounting switches on a PCI slot cover bracket when having an ATX case.

You could go further, and drill a hole for an switch in the front of the ATX case.
So many cool ones to choose from on eBay. 😜 Like this one here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/5-X-12V-20A-Red-Cover … D9TXcNn&vxp=mtr

The A-Open HX45 case like the one here below, have the exact same internal mounting-bracket for the Powerswitch,
as an AT-Case. In theory this gives you the possibility to change the momentary on/off switch with an
110/220 volt AT switch.

Installed a V30 10MHZ CPU to replace the 8086 8MHZ CPU in my IBM PS/2 Model 30. 😀

brostenen wrote:

I connected the green and the black straight onto the powerswitch in the AT-Case. If you have an ATX psu with the fan in the bac […]
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Malvineous wrote:

Those ATX -> AT converters are relatively cheap, but still probably more expensive than rolling your own if you have PSUs that aren't worth fixing that you can harvest parts from. Instead of connecting the green and black wires together (which will cause the PSU to power on every time power is applied), or trying to build a circuit with 5VSB, you can connect them to the case's power switch so it works as normal to turn the machine on and off. If you have an AT case, attach spade connectors to those wires and plug them in to one side of the AT switch (if you get it wrong nothing will happen, it won't cause problems as it's not 240V.) If you have an ATX case, you will need to replace the momentary power switch with a toggle switch of the same dimensions (these are readily available) and connect that to the green and black wires.

I've done this myself (but with the pre-made ATX -> AT converters) and it works well.

I connected the green and the black straight onto the powerswitch in the AT-Case.
If you have an ATX psu with the fan in the back, you can just mount it in an AT-Case upside down.
This is the way, I got an Pentium1 166 AT-Machine working again, when the AT-Psu was dead.
Another way, is to do as phil did. Mounting switches on a PCI slot cover bracket when having an ATX case.

You could go further, and drill a hole for an switch in the front of the ATX case.
So many cool ones to choose from on eBay. 😜 Like this one here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/5-X-12V-20A-Red-Cover … D9TXcNn&vxp=mtr

The A-Open HX45 case like the one here below, have the exact same internal mounting-bracket for the Powerswitch,
as an AT-Case. In theory this gives you the possibility to change the momentary on/off switch with an
110/220 volt AT switch.

I have a generic ATX case that I bought in the early 2000s for my first Athlon XP that I've fully converted into an AT case that now houses a Pentium-200 build. That era was still somewhat transitional regarding form factors, so the case has the following features despite being ATX:

- Mounting holes for Baby AT form factor motherboards
- IO backplate for AT motherboard with just a hole for the keyboard (below that it has a section that can be punched out for a PS/2 connector)

And the most interesting thing is that the momentary ATX power switch can be removed and there are a couple of screw posts for installing an AT power switch using a bracket such as these:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-AT-Computer-PC-Ca … w4AAOSwjVVVpVIh

Of course, when I saw all that I couldn't resist and decided to perform the full "sex-change" operation on the case and put the aforementioned AT Pentium motherboard and one of those Startech AT power supplies. 🤣

Unfortunately when installing the power button I noticed that the screw posts for the mounting bracket were too tall and the switch would not fit correctly, but sawing off a bit of the plastic screw posts solved the problem. 😈 I think I also had to bend a metal section in the front of the case so the AT switch could fit, but that is not visible since it is covered by the plastic front plate.

I will post images as soon as I have time to take the pictures, the build itself is not really interesting but I was pretty satisfied with the ATX --> AT case conversion.

I have just finalized a massive overhaul of my Pentium 133MHz-based DOS gaming computer into a hybrid DOS/Windows machine (shoutout to PhilsComputerLab and his video "Building a 4 in 1 Retro Gaming PC" for giving me the idea in the first place). From a basic DOS machine with these specs:

-Shuttle HOT-569 motherboard
-Intel Pentium 133MHz
-64MB of RAM
-ATi 3D Rage II+DVD PCI graphics card (this was my only PCI graphics card with S-Video output at the time, but I have moved on from S-Video since then)
-SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 CT1600 and Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000 1MB sound cards
-Single 3.5" floppy drive and LG IDE CD-ROM drive
-12GB hard drive
-MS-DOS v6.22 with Windows 3.11

The overhauled machine has these specs:

-Lucky Star 5MVP3 Rev. 1.4 motherboard
-AMD K6-III+ 450MHz (can be overclocked up to 600MHz with a 100MHz FSB and Gerwin's SETMUL utility)
-256MB of RAM
-3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 AGP graphics card
-Quad sound cards: SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold CT4390 (handles SoundBlaster 16 support, AWE32 support, General MIDI for my two MT-32s, my CM-64 and CM-300 and also streaming music from the CD drive), Yamaha YMF719-based sound card (I would have used a SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 CT1600 in its place, but it simply doesn't fit due to terrible CPU placement on the motherboard - this card handles OPL3 and SoundBlaster Pro audio), Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000 1MB (this is a placeholder until I get a Soundscape Elite, which is my favorite Soundscape and I want to use it), Aureal Vortex AU8820-based PCI sound card (handles Windows games)
-3.5" floppy drive, 5.25" floppy drive and Mitsumi IDE CD-ROM drive
-12GB hard drive (same hard drive I was using prior to the overhaul - this will soon be replaced by either a 16GB or 32GB SDHC card and SD to IDE adapter as this hard drive is quite noisy)
-Windows 98 SE

Now back to figuring out a good high-performance Windows 9x machine that suits my needs.

Very nice machine Ace 😀

Played Civilization yesterday and today with the V30 in my PS/2: quite a performance difference. 🤣

I argued to an nostalgianecdotal Youtube commenter that Quake can't run with 4MB of RAM on a 386 (requires 8mb as the absolute minimum) and the 486dx2 66 8MB RAM "fast" upgrade for Quake isn't going to do any good.

😀

leileilol wrote:

I argued to an nostalgianecdotal Youtube commenter that Quake can't run with 4MB of RAM on a 386 (requires 8mb as the absolute minimum) and the 486dx2 66 8MB RAM "fast" upgrade for Quake isn't going to do any good.

😀

🤣

Replaced a hellish hot FX5500 128MB card I had with a ice cold Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB AGP 8x card from Gecube. Feels better now,and faster too!

I started the weekend off with some benchmarking for Phil's spreadsheet.I then swapped the SB16 Vibra (CT2800) with an Audician that arrived Saturday and did some testing with it. Lastly, made some progress in some retro games--I'm now 2 missions away from beating WC2, got to the boss on Duke3D Abyss level (no luck beating it so far), got a little further on System Shock, and made some progress on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

I must say, I really like the sound of the Audician. When you max the volume in the mixer, it requires much less of a volume knob turn on the speakers to get to max volume, and much less hiss or other noise while at max volume. And yup, I set the jumpers to line out.

Yea the Audician is a sweet card 😀

Didn't do much lately, waiting for a ton of parts to arrive, can't wait 😀

Hooked up a SB Audigy SB0090, which works good if I just hook it to the line-in on my AWE64 Gold, for my W98/WXP Pentium 3 machine for Windows games. Some of the plastic around the main output port is gone though so the audio cable could come out easily 😜

So the specs so far:
GA-6VTXE Tualatin board with ISA
Pentium III-S 1.4 GHz (Haven't gotten it yet)
Geforce 4 Ti 4600 (Again, haven't recieved it)
512 MB of PC133 RAM (Same as above)
Voodoo 2 SLI
Soundblaster AWE64 Gold
Soundblaster Audigy SB0090
Some decent Dell PSU which has been going strong for the past year
And a Dell 1080p monitor which can scale 4:3 and has DVI and VGA outputs

Getting hyped for this build, a lot 😜

Installed Quake 2 and Quake 3 on my recently build K6-2+ 550MHz/Voodoo3 3500 system and started playing! Quake 2 is buttery smooth and I'm looking forward to going through the single player campaign. Quake 3 is a little slow, but quite playable (20-40 fps @ 640x480 in the action). I'm amazed at how many active servers and players there are online still! My next step is to get Starsiege Tribes (the first one that came out in 1998) on the K6-2+ box and enjoy it in Glide! I still play a lot of Tribes on my new computer (the R9 280x can push it up to 1,000 fps @ 1680x1050 🤣 ). Sadly, there are not many active Tribes servers left, but still enough to get a good match in every now and then.

My AMI Baby Voyager is here, so once I've dealt with getting my groceries I shall be testing that out.

Trying to figure out if it's a 6 layer board or if there is just a layer of more dense fiber/resin between the 2nd ant 3rd layer.

In the process of restoring an HP DC7600 SFF computer to a working state. (No idea on what to use it for)
In order to make an Radeon X550 Pci-E fit in the case, I just did a quick and dirty mod to the slot-bracket.
Nothing fancy. Never the less, it is doing it's job. The computer is fairly good. P4-775 3Ghz, 2gb ram.