Murugan wrote:Just started to do some quick checking/testing on a lot of retro hardware I bought last week.
Seems I will have some busy weeken […] Show full quote
Just started to do some quick checking/testing on a lot of retro hardware I bought last week.
Seems I will have some busy weekends 😀
That's a nice herd of beige boxes in that last picture 😀
Yeah. I made a VERY good deal on this lot.
You should see the contents of the smaller boxes :p
I was a little sad that there is no 386 amongst them. I did find a 486DX4-100 + mainboard so I'm hoping to make a fully working system.
A few of the systems will be sold too since I have no need for P1-MMX ones.
Decided the Voodoo3 in my P3 was redundant as I already had a Voodoo 2 SLI in my K6-2 system so I upgraded that to a GF2 GTS and now that system covers 1998-2000 not 1998-1999; spent the whole day installing games from 2000.. So many great games too! I wonder if I will miss anything by playing Diablo 2 without Glide though.
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.
Decided the Voodoo3 in my P3 was redundant as I already had a Voodoo 2 SLI in my K6-2 system so I upgraded that to a GF2 GTS and now that system covers 1998-2000 not 1998-1999; spent the whole day installing games from 2000.. So many great games too! I wonder if I will miss anything by playing Diablo 2 without Glide though.
Only going to install 2 games on my p3: Nolf 1 and 2 😀
When I say a "compatible" adapter, that means it has the right connector. It still needed some filing to physically fit. And yes, I am somewhat annoyed I stuffed up taking off the second tab on top. Oh well.
Up & running, except you might notice the drive is reported as 3GB. I've actually had that problem with this drive in the past. Even on a modern machine through a USB IDE interface it comes up as 3GB. I suppose the 5GB could be "unformatted" capacity & it formats to 3GB? But I don't see why the BIOS would report formatted size? And 2/5ths of the drive is an awful lot to lose to the format.
I suppose it could be a case of IBM sneakily selling 3GB drives to HP remarked as 5GB knowing they wouldn't use the full capacity for their plotters, but that really doesn't seem very IBM-like.
Anyway it worked fine, there was an old backup of a different laptop already on the drive which I'd forgotten about so it unexpectedly booted to Win98 with all the wrong drivers. Can't complain about that too much. 😜
Unfortunately the sound still doesn't work (not even PC speaker!) because of this cut ribbon cable between the mainboard & the front panel volume control wheel. The previous owner apparently removed the old HDD with Gordon Freeman's crowbar before they tried to throw it away, which irritates me to no end. It's in really nice shape otherwise, seems barely even used.
I really really want this laptop to be perfect; it will be a great little machine when it's up to 100%. I'll be putting a "parts wanted" thread up on VCF shortly in case anyone has some bits for one of these lying around.
Last edited by xjas on 2018-02-28, 22:08. Edited 1 time in total.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
^^ Got one of those sitting on my desk at work, also in good shape with several spare batteries that still charge. I suspect the same person threw them both out.
Fun fact: you can flash the Inspiron 600m to become a Latitude D600. They're exactly the same laptop, but the Latitude can use Dell's PD01X docks which have a PCI slot (and are getting heaved into landfills by the truckload by businesses.)
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
This is one of those situations where I was blown away by how wrong I was about something...
I made some changes to my IBM 5150 setup a month or so ago, and ever since I've had a really obnoxious beeping sound coming from something during the bootup process and at other times. I thought it was related to the very old Kensington 62104 surge protector (with EMI filter, a resettable breaker and a fuse!), since that has a "buzzer" on\off switch on the back. I opened that up, found the piezo speaker, took out the speaker part of it, put it all back together and... it still did it when I turned the computer on!
So i thought it must be some crazy thing in the computer that I'd never heard about. Then it dawned on me... what if it was the keyboard?? I had recently been given three mechanical Cherry MY-1900 point of sale keyboards that actually have PC\AT switches on them. My only other PC\AT switchable keyboards are old Keytronic rubber dome models (they're mushy and require so much pressure, its just not enjoyable to use them in DOS at all), so I was using one of the Cherry boards on this system. I unplugged the keyboard, turned it on... and the problem was gone. It was the stinking keyboard beeping at me! I've worked retail since 2006 so I should have thought of this... all of our equipment beeps and bleeps when machines are reset or lose power. 🤣
I opened the keyboard, was sad to see a little gray surface mounted cylinder type speaker (like the black ones on motherboards), rather than something with a wire. I said "sorry buddy" and twisted the the little thing gently with pliers until it came loose. No more beeping and the keyboard still works perfectly. I should probably do this to the other three. These aren't valuable keyboards, and the switches are certainly not of the same quality and feel of Cherry MX (I have a Corsair K70 with MX Reds), but they feel much better than most dome keyboards and switchable PC\AT keyboards are getting harder and harder to find... especially ones with mechanical switches.
Update: thanks to a tip from vwestlife on VCF I got the ribbon cable connected up on the Thinkpad. Sound now works! Was playing Pinball Fantasies using the PC speaker driver and it actually sounds pretty decent. 😀
No idea if the ES1946 sound chip has decent DOS compatibility yet.The Rage Mobility chip is nice, it uses the Mach 64 core so it's a great 2D chip at least. Gonna set this thing up with some more advanced stuff & see how it does.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
Update: thanks to a tip from vwestlife on VCF I got the ribbon cable connected up on the Thinkpad. Sound now works! Was playing Pinball Fantasies using the PC speaker driver and it actually sounds pretty decent. 😀
No idea if the ES1946 sound chip has decent DOS compatibility yet.The Rage Mobility chip is nice, it uses the Mach 64 core so it's a great 2D chip at least. Gonna set this thing up with some more advanced stuff & see how it does.
It does. The ES1946 is essentially a Solo 1 chip that's been optimized a bit more for use in laptops, so it's got ESFM on board (no crappy wavetable based FM), SB Pro compatibility, and DDMA/SB-Link/TDMA support for handling legacy I/O.
My 7950GT arrived and after one run through of the Luna tech demo and 5 minutes of Oblivion did the whole magic smoke routine. That's the second 7000 series card I've had do that exact same thing.
Needless to say I've demanded a refund from the seller for trying to burn my house down.
EDIT: NVM, it was the GPUs faceplate melting from overheating......
EDIT 2: I forgot to install thermal paste... yep, that'll do it any day of the week...
Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone:https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction
TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:My 7950GT arrived and after one run through of the Luna tech demo and 5 minutes of Oblivion did the whole magic smoke routine. T […] Show full quote
My 7950GT arrived and after one run through of the Luna tech demo and 5 minutes of Oblivion did the whole magic smoke routine. That's the second 7000 series card I've had do that exact same thing.
Needless to say I've demanded a refund from the seller for trying to burn my house down.
EDIT: NVM, it was the GPUs faceplate melting from overheating......
EDIT 2: I forgot to install thermal paste... yep, that'll do it any day of the week...
TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:My 7950GT arrived and after one run through of the Luna tech demo and 5 minutes of Oblivion did the whole magic smoke routine. T […] Show full quote
My 7950GT arrived and after one run through of the Luna tech demo and 5 minutes of Oblivion did the whole magic smoke routine. That's the second 7000 series card I've had do that exact same thing.
Needless to say I've demanded a refund from the seller for trying to burn my house down.
EDIT: NVM, it was the GPUs faceplate melting from overheating......
EDIT 2: I forgot to install thermal paste... yep, that'll do it any day of the week...
🤣
Oh man... That's not good. Does it still work?
Idk. I think it took the power supply with it 0.0
Or for all I know maybe that's what I smelled burning and not the faceplate warping.
EDIT: The card posts. I won't know if its 3D functions survived that until I get some thermal paste. I imagine bumpgate is heading toward this card at warp speed now though.
EDIT 2: Wait..... why did the seller send the card to me without any thermal paste? That means he or the prior owner disassembled it at some point.
Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone:https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction
TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:Idk. I think it took the power supply with it 0.0 […] Show full quote
Ozzuneoj wrote:
TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:My 7950GT arrived and after one run through of the Luna tech demo and 5 minutes of Oblivion did the whole magic smoke routine. T […] Show full quote
My 7950GT arrived and after one run through of the Luna tech demo and 5 minutes of Oblivion did the whole magic smoke routine. That's the second 7000 series card I've had do that exact same thing.
Needless to say I've demanded a refund from the seller for trying to burn my house down.
EDIT: NVM, it was the GPUs faceplate melting from overheating......
EDIT 2: I forgot to install thermal paste... yep, that'll do it any day of the week...
🤣
Oh man... That's not good. Does it still work?
Idk. I think it took the power supply with it 0.0
Or for all I know maybe that's what I smelled burning and not the faceplate warping.
EDIT: The card posts. I won't know if its 3D functions survived that until I get some thermal paste. I imagine bumpgate is heading toward this card at warp speed now though.
EDIT 2: Wait..... why did the seller send the card to me without any thermal paste? That means he or the prior owner disassembled it at some point.
In response to EDIT2; no thermal compount tells me that it's probably an oven-baked 7950 that will last a whole of 30 minutes before it dies.
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.
Trying to troubleshoot onboard audio on a motherboard. It's an Intel DG33BU with a Q9400 + 8GB RAM, onboard audio doesn't work. Tried updating BIOS, resetting to BIOS defaults, enabling/disabling audio in BIOS, but nothing regarding it shows up in Device Manager. Tried installing the proper driver, no dice.
Also booted off an Ubuntu flash drive and ran lspci, nothing found for it. So I ordered a cheap SB Live! PCI card
One more update on the Thinkpad. I went through my stash of parts and holy crap actually found a suitable hard drive caddy. I don't remember where it came from but if fit perfectly and seated the HDD in there like it was made for this thing.
So I glued the cracked plastic on the front panel as best I could, carefully connected up the remains of the ribbon cable and screwed it back together. Mint!
I just reconfigured the Win98SE install that was already on the HDD rather than wiping it. Installed all the Thinkpad drivers, DX9, KernelEx, USB mass storage drivers, etc. Runs great, boots in seconds. It's a Mendocino Celeron 433 and I stuck 384MB RAM in so it can do lots of useful stuff. The big, bright TFT is awesome even if it's only 800x600.
Unfortunately Freedom Planet 2 (the desktop background 😉 ) doesn't run on it, but
Unfortunately it's a liiiiitle too slow to be fun, it seems to run about half speed. The readme recommends a 1GHz CPU so that makes sense. Let's go back a couple more years...
This is a gorgeous game with awesome music & fluid controls. A huge step up from Jazz 1. I love the small sprites/big map style gameplay & am always a sucker for a ton of parallax layers.
After seeing Jazz 2 fly, I'm actually convinced this thing could run Freedom Planet 2 if they'd code it for it. 😉 For a "budget" Thinkpad this one sure gets a lot of stuff right. I think I have a new favorite laptop.
I'm going out of town for a few days tomorrow & am seriously considering taking it with me instead of a modern machine. Who needs 64 bits anyway?
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
I got a Toshiba Tecra 720CDT and accompanying Desk Station V Plus. It has a bad case of rust because of a leaky roof. But after a teardown and rebuild it seems to be working again. Expect to see a full thread here soon.
