I actually don't use floppy emulators in any builds. I really like to relive the times by waiting around for the floppy drive and living with the 1.38 MB size limit.

$16.80 is a pretty nice price for the convenience of aliexpress. Six years ago, I had to go through a real hassle sourcing these cache chips. I paid about the same cost per module.

Great case and a really sweet rig you have there.

Those 10ns chips look exactly like my batch from eBay last year. The exact same markings on every chip with never a variation in production week, lot or anything. They match chips that were photographed years ago, but the font is different now - and different from every other ISSI chip I had. A little suspicious, for what it's worth.

I'm betting that they are some kind of reproduction, and not by ISSI.

At least they seem to work! It'd be pretty easy of them to make fake cache - at least until the motherboard tried to use it.

Also a switching 5v to 3.3v regulator module would probably be more efficient, albeit costly. Seems to me a linear one takes away all the power savings of going 3.3v in the first place...

Yeah - I went into this knowing theyre probably not original based on what others have said in other threads - but if they work, they work 😀

At least with AliExpress it feels like there's more of a comeback if you're unsatisfied, and the item listings often have ratings from buyers - I think I saw some positive feedback on the listing I chose so it gave me a bit more confidence to try them.

I just bought these as well. This way I don't have to keep swapping cache amongst my boards. My main concern with reproduction units is their true response time. Are they really 10 ns? So far, I have not had issues either, aside from having to pickout the bad modules which were DOA.

Been having some fun with the machine and done a couple more things to it 😀

I had some I/O port/IRQ issues with my Music Quest PC MIDI card clone - I could output to it just fine, but couldn't receive input from one of my synthesizers. Windows 95 was detecting 3x MPU401s and the AWE32 MIDI interface, and device manager was showing problems - all kinds of wrong. The Music Quest diagnostics also guessed the correct port for the card, but it wasn't able to detect the IRQ, so I suspected an IRQ conflict.

The Music Quest card was set to port 330 and IRQ 2 (aka IRQ 9), where most old DOS games seem to expect it, whilst the AWE MIDI was set to 300 and IRQ 5 - no conflicts there. The culprit, it turns out, was my Tseng ET4000, which was also sitting on IRQ 2. The Hercules ET4000 card has a row of jumpers on the bottom, but they seem to be undocumented. I traced pin B4 (IRQ 2) on the Tseng card directly back to jumper J1 (if I remember correctly), so I set the jumper to open circuit.

I went back to Windows 95, deleted all the duplicate devices, did a re-scan, and two devices were detected properly - "Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 or AWE-32" and "Music Quest MPU-401 Compatible". Bingo, all conflicts gone, Music Quest diagnostics working, and MIDI in/out working perfectly! 😀

Hopefully this will help someone else trying to mix the Hercules Tseng card with an older MPU401 or similar.

Next thing to sort out was the power supply. It was a bit too loud for liking - the PSU fan drowned out my modern desktop! 🤣
At first, I wondered if the PSU was worth replacing with something more modern, as it is branded "Perfect", which is a bit questionable. However, upon opening it up I found that it's actually a re-badged Bestec BPS-2004-4U, and some of the capacitors are quality Japanese brands (Rubycon). The consensus from a Badcaps.net thread seemed to be that the PSU is pretty good, so I decided to keep it and improve it. I'll replace all the capacitors at some point to freshen it up.

I decided to do a classic modification to the grill on the rear of the unit to reduce the noise and improve airflow. With some careful Dremel work, the results can be quite neat and look almost "factory":

The fan was replaced with a nice quiet Noctua NF-R8 Redux 1800RPM and the PSU finished off with a stainless steel grill:

The grill fouls the cutout for the PSU on the AT case, but I absolutely refuse to take a Dremel to the case, so the solution was to simply space the PSU back slightly with some washers. I think it's turned out quite nicely, and the PSU is much quieter, so at least I can hear myself think now 😀

Also did some cable management as best as I could, so it's a bit tidier inside now:

And finally, I took the advice of feipoa and installed a proper floppy drive in there. 😀 I quite like the "squareness" of the design of this Mitsubishi drive, and it's a good colour match for the case:

I *might* have sourced a 5.25" drive, but the seller has discovered some issues with it, so we'll see - he's currently trying to repair it.

Cheers!

Keep looking! It can be difficult to find working units these days.

One day, I'd like to dedicate some time to fixing my defective 5.25" drive. I currently only have two working.

d0pefish wrote:

Been having some fun with the machine and done a couple more things to it :) […]
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Been having some fun with the machine and done a couple more things to it 😀

I had some I/O port/IRQ issues with my Music Quest PC MIDI card clone - I could output to it just fine, but couldn't receive input from one of my synthesizers. Windows 95 was detecting 3x MPU401s and the AWE32 MIDI interface, and device manager was showing problems - all kinds of wrong. The Music Quest diagnostics also guessed the correct port for the card, but it wasn't able to detect the IRQ, so I suspected an IRQ conflict.

The Music Quest card was set to port 330 and IRQ 2 (aka IRQ 9), where most old DOS games seem to expect it, whilst the AWE MIDI was set to 300 and IRQ 5 - no conflicts there. The culprit, it turns out, was my Tseng ET4000, which was also sitting on IRQ 2. The Hercules ET4000 card has a row of jumpers on the bottom, but they seem to be undocumented. I traced pin B4 (IRQ 2) on the Tseng card directly back to jumper J1 (if I remember correctly), so I set the jumper to open circuit.

I went back to Windows 95, deleted all the duplicate devices, did a re-scan, and two devices were detected properly - "Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 or AWE-32" and "Music Quest MPU-401 Compatible". Bingo, all conflicts gone, Music Quest diagnostics working, and MIDI in/out working perfectly! 😀

Hopefully this will help someone else trying to mix the Hercules Tseng card with an older MPU401 or similar.

Next thing to sort out was the power supply. It was a bit too loud for liking - the PSU fan drowned out my modern desktop! 🤣
At first, I wondered if the PSU was worth replacing with something more modern, as it is branded "Perfect", which is a bit questionable. However, upon opening it up I found that it's actually a re-badged Bestec BPS-2004-4U, and some of the capacitors are quality Japanese brands (Rubycon). The consensus from a Badcaps.net thread seemed to be that the PSU is pretty good, so I decided to keep it and improve it. I'll replace all the capacitors at some point to freshen it up.

I decided to do a classic modification to the grill on the rear of the unit to reduce the noise and improve airflow. With some careful Dremel work, the results can be quite neat and look almost "factory":

The fan was replaced with a nice quiet Noctua NF-R8 Redux 1800RPM and the PSU finished off with a stainless steel grill:

The grill fouls the cutout for the PSU on the AT case, but I absolutely refuse to take a Dremel to the case, so the solution was to simply space the PSU back slightly with some washers. I think it's turned out quite nicely, and the PSU is much quieter, so at least I can hear myself think now 😀

Also did some cable management as best as I could, so it's a bit tidier inside now:

And finally, I took the advice of feipoa and installed a proper floppy drive in there. 😀 I quite like the "squareness" of the design of this Mitsubishi drive, and it's a good colour match for the case:

I *might* have sourced a 5.25" drive, but the seller has discovered some issues with it, so we'll see - he's currently trying to repair it.

Cheers!

Nice rig you got there. I had a 486 from 1994 until late 2012, however, one of the boards was a PC Chips M912 v1.7 with 3 VLB slots, Y2K bug included, actual L2 cache AMD AM486 DX4-120, and the other board was a Shuttle HOT 443 with PCI slots, AMI WinBIOS (Y2K bug-free), AMD AM5x86-P75, and built-in Multi I/O (Serial, Parallel, FDD, IDE primary and secondary).

The PC Chips motherboard died in May of 2012 from a BIOS chip failure (the clock would freeze up, or not run at all, and the internal CR2032 battery wouldn't get detected on the motherboard until I pulled a MacGyver and "fixed" the battery issue by putting wires onto the battery slot and taping the battery with electrical tape to keep the system from losing the settings, and the original PSU died unexpectedly.

The Shuttle HOT 443 motherboard's ISA slot short circuited, and the PSU I purchased smoked from a bad fan bearing, so I purchased an ATX to baby AT PSU converter on eBay back in the fall of 2012, which did work out pretty well, I might add.

Nowadays, I have an AMD K6-2 300 machine that's seen better years (repainted the computer, and it's rusty... AGAIN), and it's the original case from the early 1990's, so now, my ultimate project for that system is to rethread the case since the screws never stay in place in some spots (expansion cards, HDD and FDD mounting bracket, and the metal panel as well), sand down the metal panel, repaint the case, and trim off part of the panel so that I can only unscrew one side to access the components instead of taking the whole dang thing off (might add a plastic window on the side panel, more cooling fans, and lighting to make the system look more interesting). I also have a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus that needs L2 cache (currently has 0KB L2 cache, only 8KB CPU cache), which I might get 512KB L2 cache and the VRAM upgrade as well, upgraded the CPU from the SX2-50 to a DX2-66 since some games and programs need a co-processor to run either better or just to run due to the codes in that specific program that requires a co-processor to make it run, otherwise, it'll crash saying "No Co-Processor is installed", has 36MB RAM (2x 16MB SIMM-72, and 4MB onboard), Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 integrated video 1MB (upgradable to 2MB), 2GB CF card, 48x Mitsumi CD-ROM drive, Epson SD-800 Dual Floppy Drive, Conner Tape Drive (purchased new for $4.99 at a thrift store), Packard Bell Keyboard and Mouse, Lo-Tech Tandy Compatible Sound Card (has a 0.8w 5ohm speaker connected to it) for older games up until early 1991 (before VGA), Music Quest MPU401 clone card rev. 1 for my Roland MT-32, Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro (SB Pro, YMF-262M, Covox Sound Things, and Disney Sound Source), 3Com EtherLink III ISA 10BaseT Ethernet card (uninstalled in Windows for Workgroups 3.11), running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 since I have some games that require Windows to run, such as SimCity 2000 CD-ROM Collection (Special Edition), Kings Quest VI and VII, and other games and software that I haven't played/used in years, or never played/used before. I also have a 2x AA battery holder as an external clock battery, and it's working out nicely as well. Takes a little longer for it to turn on, but it's no big deal.