xjas wrote:

My supply of interesting stuff seems to be pretty dry lately, but I did grab this beige tower from one of my usual places. I got hopeful when I saw the Duron sticker on the front but it turned out to be a Thunderbird 1200 on a really basic Asus A7V. Looks like there's some kind of VRM board fitted to accommodate the upgrade.
...
To be honest I'm completely meh on this thing. The Tbird 1200 is a cool chip (I remember when these were the absolute fastest thing you could get your hands on!), but I just can't think of anything fun I'd want to do with it, especially on such a bare-bones board. Even though it has the Via 82C686A there's no onboard audio header (solder pads are there) and no sign of the DOS compatible audio options in the BIOS. And of course there's no ISA slots. Won't work for DOS, I have better gear to play with Linux or FreeBSD on, and my limited Win98 needs are fully met. I think this one might go back to the waste pile.

I'd at least keep (or sell) its case if I were you, those good old fashioned beige towers are getting harder to come by these days, especially for the AT form factor.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

I'd at least keep (or sell) its case if I were you, those good old fashioned beige towers are getting harder to come by these days, especially for the AT form factor.

It's ATX; they both were. REALLY cheap & nasty looking PSU. (At least it has a -5V rail.)

To be honest I've tried the "flog this cheap to another retro enthusiast just so it doesn't get trashed!" idea lots of times. There's Z E R O market for retro PC gear on this island & trying to get people to actually show up and part with any money is like picking up rice through a straw. Even interesting stuff like Amigas or 68k Macs takes months to sell. Sad state of affairs but what can you do. 🙁

I might pull the mobo & CPU out & hang onto them, hate to condemn a good T-bird if I don't have to. I wish I hadn't gotten rid of the NIB Soltek SL-75KAV with an ISA slot I had last year, that would be a far better home for the CPU. (I wonder if the guy I gave it to still has it?)

xjas wrote:

Even though it has the Via 82C686A there's no onboard audio header (solder pads are there) and no sign of the DOS compatible audio options in the BIOS. And of course there's no ISA slots. Won't work for DOS, I have better gear to play with Linux or FreeBSD on, and my limited Win98 needs are fully met. I think this one might go back to the waste pile.

The VIA 686 southbridges plays nice with several PCI sound cards in DDMA mode under DOS, like the Solo-1, YMF7x4 PCI, ALS4000 and Crystal 4xxx PCI. The nice thing about DDMA is that you don't need any nasty TSRs.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

To be honest I've tried the "flog this cheap to another retro enthusiast just so it doesn't get trashed!" idea lots of times. There's Z E R O market for retro PC gear on this island & trying to get people to actually show up and part with any money is like picking up rice through a straw. Even interesting stuff like Amigas or 68k Macs takes months to sell. Sad state of affairs but what can you do. 🙁

I totally hear you there.

I don't live on an island but we're so far from any big cities that it sometimes feels like it. I'm about 1.5 to 2 hours of highway driving from any moderately sized cities and probably 6 hours drive from any large cities.

I was amazed to find a retro-gaming collector in this town, but he doesn't do anything with PCs and even HE has to travel 3+ hours to find anything interesting any more.

The good thing is that I wouldn't have much competition if something popped up in a local classified, but the bad news is that things hardly ever do. I got a bunch of stuff recently but had to drive 2 hours one way on a dangerous icy roads and it was an interesting but not amazing lot and there's no way I'd be able to sell any of it locally. I'm even having trouble getting rid of stuff for gold scrap. 😵

Kamerat wrote:

The VIA 686 southbridges plays nice with several PCI sound cards in DDMA mode under DOS, like the Solo-1, YMF7x4 PCI, ALS4000 and Crystal 4xxx PCI. The nice thing about DDMA is that you don't need any nasty TSRs.

Do you need the "legacy sound" options in the BIOS for that to work though? This one doesn't have any sign of them. (It actually has an Award BIOS rather than the AMI one I usually see paired with this chipset.)

I believe that option is to allow SB emulation on the AC97 controller to be enabled.

xjas wrote:

My supply of interesting stuff seems to be pretty dry lately, but I did grab this beige tower from one of my usual places. I got hopeful when I saw the Duron sticker on the front but it turned out to be a Thunderbird 1200 on a really basic Asus A7V. Looks like there's some kind of VRM board fitted to accommodate the upgrade.

1.jpg

<snip>

That seperate little 'VRM' board is standard on the A7V. I think Asus really struggled to fit all components on the board so they chose this solution. It is one of the only boards I have seen with this.

Tetrium wrote:

Nice score. I especially like the ZIP drive, didn't know such ones existed but I do remember that transparent plastic Apple was using at the time 😜
I didn't even know old PCs could even be dumped there.

I don't think you're supposed to dump PCs there, it literally didn't fit. But that obviously didn't stop somebody 😉

Was in a small town an hour's drive away from my usual stomping grounds with an hour to spare, so decided to raid their three thrift shops. Found some useful non-computing related stuff, but apart from a beige IDE DVD-RW drive for in the retro box I intend to build with my son, absolutely nothing interesting.

Then I popped in to a friend who lived in the area to drop off a surplus laptop. Turned out he had some bags of 'old junk' he was about to trash. Very lucky he didn't.

- 2x 3Com Etherlink III ISA 3C509TP, one with bootROM
- Prolink SoundPlus-ES688 ISA sound card with ESS688F chip (which I'd been wanting for a while)
- Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space (PCI, with Via VT1724 chip)
- Matrox G550 AGP
- Seagate Cheetah ST39103LC 9.1GB 10k rpm SCA SCSI beast
- PS/2 to serial adapter cable (another thing I'd been digging for)
- a big bag of SIMMs and a few DIMMs. Mostly 4MB/8MB muck, but a couple of 16MB FP SIMMs that my 486 will enjoy and what looks like a 32MB DIMM with 16 chips that even an i430VX board might eat. Still have to test a few things I couldn't figure out based on SIMM/DIMM and/or chip code, but even if they're useless, this wasn't a bad unexpected score.

Oh, and a book: The Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide, ninth edition (1998). All >1550 pages, including one of the two original utility CDRoms. A quick browse shows I should be able to make good use of it - I want to test an MFM drive and have never actually done so before. This thing has an extensive paragraph dedicated to setting them up 😀

So my mothers coworker mentioned that she was about to clean up her basement and needed to throw out an old computer. My mother naturally said that I could pick it up instead to save her the hassle.
Said and done. She told me that the beige tower was a "gaming" computer for her kids when they were younger.

More then just an old computer

So, gaming computer, that just speaks to my curiosity. The specs is P4 2.4ghz 1gb ram aaaaand;

Soundcard:

Graphics:

Geforce 256 DDR. That was a surprise. But I'm not complaining. 😁

Wow that GPU heatsink is a work of art!

...and probably blocks the two PCI slots next to it. 😁

It'd be a nice thing to 3D print

Can`t find the damn secondary topic, where si for hardware, that i will not buy, but to show it to others...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Model-M13-PS-2-R … XEAAOSwJc9aeSOM

Just damnnnn, i want that keyboard so much, but im sure the price will go out of the roof..............

IBM Model M13 Stealth Black............................

Radical Vision wrote:

Can`t find the damn secondary topic, where si for hardware, that i will not buy, but to show it to others...

Just damnnnn, i want that keyboard so much, but im sure the price will go out of the roof..............

IBM Model M13 Stealth Black............................

I think that thread was locked or removed by moderators because of some problems there.

Found this in a skip bin about a year ago. Badly beaten up, im not posting anymore pics of it. At first i thought my own grumpy old father was responsible, he's always threatening to take his computer outside, chuck it on the driveway and run it over with Rover, or get Winchester out and shoot it, but it wasn't him this time. Somehow this thing was from the other side of the country.
"property of hqcc QLD" sticker says so. lols, look it up, oh the irony. Someone obviously had a bad day, then got mad. Honestly didn't even expect it to work after i panel beat it in shape and put it back together, so it only got a quick paint job this time. The i5 Win 7 works fine now.

Great job getting that system an amazing transformation. What kind of paint did you use? I've never seen something like that in the states.

Thank you kind sir. Been using Krylon fusion spray paint. Seems to work very well.

Picked this case up off the side of the road a few years back. It's such an odd shape, i want to paint it, but part of me is saying, just add a heavy duty handle on the top somewhere then go take a cold shower.

Ok, now I'm officially drowning in Slot-1 motherboards.

Full res: https://i.imgur.com/qm4nzIl.jpg

Asus P2B rev 1.10, Asus P2B-F rev 1.00, Asus P3B-F rev 1.03, Asus P3B-F rev 1.04 and Gigabyte GA-6BXS rev 1.5. Also found a MS4132G socket 3 motherboard.

I wish I lived somewhere where I could ship these out at a reasonable cost, now they are likely to go back to the trash because I can't stockpile dozens of motherboards in my apartment.

Don't do it bro! don't do it. Box'em up with positively charged static bubble wrap if you have too...somewhere somehow. Save them! ...Save them all!!