I cleaned one of my new toys today. A lovely Lacie SCSI case with a Yamaha CD-R drive in it.
It is an old lady from around 1998/99. The drive it self say 98.
Cleaned it for the worst dust and dirt, gave the fan some oil in the bearing and washed the
complete unit in 99% alcohol.

Tested two 3.5" Conner hard drives - 120 and 170MB. Both OK without any bad sectors 😁

On my PB Legend 812CD, I overclocked my 100MHz Pentium CPU to 120MHz.
So far it works fine. All I did was mess with the jumper settings. 😀

I wiped and formatted a crap ton of old IDE drives. Mostly 40's and lower.

Played around with 86Box and set it up with a 486 DX4 100, 32MB RAM, TSENG ET4000, Sound Blaster 2.0 and played around MS-DOS with it. Pretty cool emulator.

Cut the SuperCap off my SEGA NAOMI arcade board before it can leak. Replaced the CR2032 on same board. Swapped the RAM in the NetDIMM to 512mb. General NAOMI cleaning since I pulled it out.. Trying to get the NAOMI net tools onto my NAS so I can netboot games off the NAS straight onto the NAOMI...

looking over it, lots of electrolytics from 1999 😒 makes me want to recap this thing but ugh.

Few days ago old Technics SA-EX100 Amplifier died in our music class room. I thought it has its time, because it is not new, actually, it was made in August 1997, so it is as old as me. 😁
Yesterday they bought new one and man, is that a piece of shit! So I volunteerly got the old amp home to look inside.

On first powerup nothing happened. So I pulled it apart and my jaw dropped down. I have NEVER seen such beautifuly made piece of equipment (under such big layer of dust 😁). Everything is nicely layed, it is modular, each part is separated, everything is sturdy, nothing moves around, fixing something like this is just pure happiness. So I took the front bezel off and quickly found out that green corrosion appeared on contacts. After cleaning the panel started working and buttons started behaving like it should. But the volume button was scratchy, dirty and almost not working, so next dissassembly happened and after desoldering the potentiometer I took it apart, sprayed it with Konkor (czech equivalent of WD40 or DeOxit), lubed gear mechanism (for my huge amusement the remote control works as motor manually rotating the volume knob. Amazing piece of tech 😁)
After I assembled it I wanted to try the sound, but I don't have any speakers. So I pulled out speakers from old TV and soldered cable to it. The sound, aw. the sound. It is such beauty! About fubajilion times better than that crap that is there now. But, it didn't last for too long. It started to heat a lot, so the fan kicked on. Yikes! Rattle from hell. I thought it was standard fan, but it wasn't. It was fan blades stucked on high-end DC brushless motor like the one used in RC cars. So, few drops of heavy oil at the shaft, cleaning the blades, oiling run on full speed thanks to PC 12V DC line and final cleaning. Now it looks awesome, like new, works like new and I am just sad that I have to return it back. 🙁 😁

Currently I am waiting for the fan how it sounds. Oh, wait, nevermind. It is running all the time. I genuinly didn't notice 😁

Continued writing specs for my whitebox collection. Today I found out one of my W98 Gateway boxes has a 1.44 MB floppy drive that also takes SuperDisks (Mitsubishi LS-120 😳 )

I might swap it out for my 98 box 😜

Removed the ide harddrive and controller from my 286 and Installed scsi harddrive and controller instead.

Took it for a spin. 10mhz is too slow for Lotus-III, yet Dynablaster runs perfect. I was surprised, as I thought it needed at least a 386sx to run.

I did something I should have done a long time ago: make a fresh install of 98SE for my SE440BX-2 and then install Norton Ghost 2003. Then backup the image file on a CD-ROM (~300 MB).

Now I can reimage a fresh copy of 98SE in four minutes flat to test out new soundcards. Also, create a separate CD-ROM for each soundcard install.

Been playing around with old 90's camera's. Not much else.

recieved my IDE Coupler and Voodoo 1 yesterday.

Was very excited to install everything so went ahead. Installed all except the ram and booted..... and smoke started coming out of my psu 😵
.... ok there goes my computer I thought, I disconnected everything to start testing what's broken. Got a other Psu and went ahead, everything worked except my hd's, so I removed the IDE cables and there was the problem..... A melted IDE cable so I presumed my Samsung disk broke however to my surprise my kingspec DoM shortcircuited on the chip.
Now I am at a loss what the cause of this might've been, before I had Dom plugged in directly in the primary IDE slot and my Samsung and cdrom on the secondary IDE. Is the cable to blame or the IDE coupler.... meh lost a new psu and DoM 😢 lucky me the rest survived though.

krivulak wrote:

I have NEVER seen such beautifuly made piece of equipment (under such big layer of dust 😁). Everything is nicely layed, it is modular, each part is separated, everything is sturdy, nothing moves around, fixing something like this is just pure happiness.

Quality audio equipment from the experienced Japanese vendors always was beautiful to work on. Even the maintenance documentation is amazingly detailed.

gdjacobs wrote:

krivulak wrote:

I have NEVER seen such beautifuly made piece of equipment (under such big layer of dust 😁). Everything is nicely layed, it is modular, each part is separated, everything is sturdy, nothing moves around, fixing something like this is just pure happiness.

Quality audio equipment from the experienced Japanese vendors always was beautiful to work on. Even the maintenance documentation is amazingly detailed.

I personally dread the day my 20 year old stereo equipment (Sony/Akai and a Philips CD player) will fail, because modern replacements are 3-4 times the price for half the features (and shitty quality), even if they're from Japanese manufacturers.

For a long time I have looked for a way of mounting three 3.5" drives in two 5.25" bays. You can get brackets for hard drives that can do this, but it is very hard to find ones with an open face suitable for mounting floppy drives. So I made my own by carving up a plastic 3.5" -> 5.25" mounting tray.

I made some brackets I am too embarrassed to show to screw all the drives together, then they are screwed into the bottom (unmodified) adapter, with the two halves sitting on top (screwed into the case.)

Hooray! Now I have an extra three 3.5" bays in my case 😀

Finally found a working 512Mb PC133 I needed to complete my Athlon Thunderbird machine for this config:

Asus A7V133 (KT133A)
Athlon 1400 / 133Mhz (Thunderbird)
1,5 GB PC133
Geforce2 MX 32MB

I could go for the Athlon XP that could still run on this but I think the right top cpu is this.

386SX wrote:

Finally found a working 512Mb PC133 I needed to complete my Athlon Thunderbird machine for this config: […]
Show full quote

Finally found a working 512Mb PC133 I needed to complete my Athlon Thunderbird machine for this config:

Asus A7V133 (KT133A)
Athlon 1400 / 133Mhz (Thunderbird)
1,5 GB PC133
Geforce2 MX 32MB

I could go for the Athlon XP that could still run on this but I think the right top cpu is this.

I think a geforce 2 pro or geforce 3 will be better matched.
Mx is too old for that system. Who had 1.5gb ram back then? 😵

Malvineous wrote:

For a long time I have looked for a way of mounting three 3.5" drives in two 5.25" bays. You can get brackets for hard drives t […]
Show full quote

For a long time I have looked for a way of mounting three 3.5" drives in two 5.25" bays. You can get brackets for hard drives that can do this, but it is very hard to find ones with an open face suitable for mounting floppy drives. So I made my own by carving up a plastic 3.5" -> 5.25" mounting tray.

90-022.3-in-1_bracket.jpg

I made some brackets I am too embarrassed to show to screw all the drives together, then they are screwed into the bottom (unmodified) adapter, with the two halves sitting on top (screwed into the case.)

Hooray! Now I have an extra three 3.5" bays in my case 😀

91-007.3-in-2.jpg

That is awesome, well done!!

Skalabala wrote:

386SX wrote:

Finally found a working 512Mb PC133 I needed to complete my Athlon Thunderbird machine for this config: […]
Show full quote

Finally found a working 512Mb PC133 I needed to complete my Athlon Thunderbird machine for this config:

Asus A7V133 (KT133A)
Athlon 1400 / 133Mhz (Thunderbird)
1,5 GB PC133
Geforce2 MX 32MB

I could go for the Athlon XP that could still run on this but I think the right top cpu is this.

I think a geforce 2 pro or geforce 3 will be better matched.
Mx is too old for that system. Who had 1.5gb ram back then? 😵

Yeah but the original Geforce 2 GTS (and 3) are not easy to find in good conditions, not to mention the Ultra. Also I already reached 110->130W of total watt usage mostly on 5V rail, so I try to save some watt with a time correct card (the first on full 0,18 micron process?).
The ram was important cause I'm testing this as everyday machine and a recent os but I understand it sounds like too much ram for a time correct point of view.

Setup DOS 6.22 and WfW 3.11 on a Thinkpad 755CX. This laptop is the one on which I can't get sound working (built-in mwave card) in Win98 due to BIOS being too old, and not able to flash the BIOS because I don't have a working battery.

But the mwave sound works fine in DOS and Win 3.1 because it uses older drivers. Those aren't compatible with Win98 unfortunately. So until I find a way to flash the BIOS without battery, or find a battery, I'll be stuck with 3.11 on this laptop because I want to have working sound.

Also, while doing that I went through a huge stack of floppies trying to separate the bad ones from the usable ones. I needed a total of 14 working blank floppies to transfer all the drivers needed onto the Thinkpad. I tried to use a CF card through a CF/PCMCIA adapter, but it didn't work. If I formatted the card (an old 64MB one) on my main laptop and write files to it, the Thinkpad can't see it. If I format it on the Thinkpad then transfer it to my main laptop to write files to, it can't be read and I need to format it again before writing to it, but then again my Thinkpad can't see it anymore. Grr.