I started a new build for no reason. Bought the case, PSU, floppy and DVD-RW from an HP Compaq dx2200 for next to nothing the other day, for no reason other than that we used to have a lot of these things at work five years ago before they were decomissioned, I really like their rather nondescript black cases, which are incidentally about the same size as old AT cases from late 90s.. It arrived today and I realized that its IO shield was punched into the case's back, so it was unremovable. I was hoping to use this case with an mATX Tualatin board I had in order to build a Win9x PC, but now that plan is toast unless I either take a dremel to the case and cut out an IO shield slot, or find a motherboard that ill just fit. I was lazily browsing local motherboard offers when I came across and bought an ASUS K8V-MX Socket 754 motherboard with an unknown CPU and 1GB Ram to use in this case. I will also drop in a Radeon 9800, an SB Audigy ZS and an ESS Solo-1. That should be enough to turn it into a sleeper overkill Late DOS, Windows 9x and Windows XP crossover PC.

appiah4 wrote:

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.

Either way the seller should have mentioned there was no thermal paste (higher wattage cards I normally repaste before I turn them on but lower wattage cards I usually go ahead and test first before wasting the paste).

He's been informed that if he doesn't give me a partial refund (the 8600GT in the lot DID work) for the dead card that I would escalate this with eBay.

Not sure if it fits this particular thread, but I'm PLANNING to fix a hard drive on my primary retro-gaming rig. 40GB Seagate unit developed bad sectors & is slowing things down to a crawl... Internal disk test(s) confirmed that it's having a hard time, and that it's losing data.

Started messing with DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)) work using various suites on my 486 under Windows 95 and Windows 3.1.

Under Windows 95, the ruling champion for me is Cakewalk Pro Audio 5. Perfect performance, excellent sound quality, actually, somehow I'm getting a better guitar tone out of the 486 than I am my "modern" Core 2 Duo, so I guess the soundcard is a factor in sound too, the AWE64 must be a better card than the default on an INtel DQ45CB motherboard from 2009. 3 Audio tracks in and not a single artifact to be found - so I guess you CAN do ameteur audio production/rock demos on a 486 DX4-100 with 64MB of RAM Running Windows 95 like you can today using REAPER.

Windows 3.1, tried out a few, Cakewalk 4.5 runs on it but I can't get it to record digital audio for some whack'd reason. Oh well, will figure that one out another time.

Still working on the gateway, added some cool wallpapers but still having problems with random reboots so I might be looking at replacing the motherboard still, because this bloody reboot mess is driving me a bit nuts at this point and I want it PERFECT before I hand it over. I think it's probably somethingg to do with the BIOS settings for "Plug N' Pray".

Installed the Edimax EW-7811Un USB wireless adapter on my iMac G4/800 running Tiger successfully after acquiring the drivers from the site. I cannot seem to get another browser to install or download since the sites have higher security protocols.

Since I've had retro stuff on the brain again, I started fooling with a type 1 IBM AT motherboard. Sadly, I've only managed to keep a fraction of the stuff I had twenty years (and three moves) ago, but this AT board was one of the things I kept a close eye on because I knew that it worked and was kind of a historically significant piece.

Anyway, I have two controller cards like this: http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/isacard1.jpg
One is Rev A, the other is Rev B and has a slightly different layout. Does anyone recognize it? I think it was from a Zenith 286. I also think that the card pictured is missing a 20MHz crystal (I may have pillaged it at some point for another project but I can't remember). I connected a 720K FDD and was able to boot DOS and run the GSETUP program. Then I tried to get an MFM harddisk going. I have four MiniScribe 20MB drives (BIOS type 6?). On two of them it seems that the stepper motor which drives the head is buggered, the other two at least sounded healthy so I tried connecting each one. After booting and running FDISK it didn't show any partitions. Running FDISK /MBR and trying to create a partition didn't seem to have any effect either (no error though). I can run SNOOPER and do a disk benchmark, and hear disk activity, but it's really slow. It eventually finishes with a pathetic result of 30KB/sec (back in the day I recall getting 200KB/sec on these when they were working correctly).

I have seen mention of XT-IDE and alternate BIOS ROMs. I could try those out instead of using MFM drives, but I need to get another UV EPROM eraser first as mine seems to be broken. I also wanted to get a MiniScribe working because I found the sounds that these make to be very entertaining.

I also have these ISA cards with dipswitches and was wondering if anyone had info on how to set the switches. One is a Basic Time AT4x4, the other is an unknown I/O card.
http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/isacard2.jpg
http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/isacard3.jpg

Trying to fit my dual slot1 motherboard in this quite compact Dell case 🤣

Despite the fact it's an ATX case, it has some of the E-ATX holes drilled into the board. I moved the braces to the right locations, drilled a missing hole and made two rubber supports that act like braces.

I had to cut metal parts, bend things... Unfortunately those Dell cases aren't fully standard. The 5" cage doesn't fit anymore. I will have to cut it in half so I can still have a cd-rom drive. 🤣

But heh, it should work in the end 😀

Screwed up putting together a Pentium D machine with an ECS 945 based mATX mobo. I didn't notice that one of the standoffs didn't line up correctly. Plugged it in and (literally) immediately smelt magic smoke of the invisible variant.

I disassembled everything and found where the mid aligned standoff was. So I gave that precise area of the mobo a good sniff and verified that was the source of the Burning smell.

It was directly behind the south bridge..... this also scared the shit out of me because this is the second invisi-smoke scare I've had in 3 days. I won't know if I did any permanent damage until I power it on again. Nothing is visibly burnt but the south bridge has a heatspreader on it so I can't see the top. The only way you would know it's happened is the burnt smell of the area where the standoff made contact. My nerves are too shot to try again tonight but there is a very good chance I ruined a perfectly good motherboard and blew it's south bridge. At least it was a cheapo emachines board I had flashed back to retail bios and nothing too valuable.

Still, Its scary that I kid you not within 5 seconds I smelled burning electronics. Like I wonder what would have happened had I walked away or not noticed for a few minutes. It's making me jumpy and nervous working on electronics.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

[...] […]
Show full quote

[...]

this also scared the shit out of me because this is the second invisi-smoke scare I've had in 3 days.

[...]

Still, Its scary that I kid you not within 5 seconds I smelled burning electronics. Like I wonder what would have happened had I walked away or not noticed for a few minutes. It's making me jumpy and nervous working on electronics.

I feel your pain.

Yesterday I tried to disassemble my Sun 411 external 5.25" enclosure to see if there was a usable 50 pin SCSI cable inside I could borrow for troubleshooting my SCSI adapter/cable/drive issue. There wasn't, the one end was soldered to the backplate. But the plastic of the 411 had gotten so brittle literally every tab broke when I tried to open it, and worse, the front bezel also broke into three pieces. What had been a cosmetically perfect device now is an ugly if (hopefully) functional thing at best 😢

Done some quick compatibility tests on top end 2005 A64FX build,so far so good,but fancy asus hsf might go away.

Haven't Oc'd yet.

Just finished printing my first custom-designed CPU tray holder. This one is compatible with all 771/775/115x CPUs. Later I'll make some for other sockets too. 😀

rein_ein wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/fq96Cwzl.jpg […]
Show full quote

Dude, I can see plasma escaping from the fusion reactor powering that AMD.

Why blinkenlights on RAM? Does it show runtime latency/usage o.0... or simply a power indicator?

Tried a socket 8 Soyo mainboard (new in a box) and had my second Tantalum cap explosion...

Not much.... Upgrading my Amiga500 from 512k to 1mb, in order to play Pinball Fantasies and have full sound in Lotus-II.

flupke11 wrote:

DSC_3334.JPG

Tried a socket 8 Soyo mainboard (new in a box) and had my second Tantalum cap explosion...

DSC_3337.JPG

2 boards to recap now... ^.^

I’ve inventoried what electrolytic capacitors of my old motherboards, graphics cards and sound cards need replacement. Identified all the bad Taiwanese and Chinese ones. I ended up buying 180 new Japanese ones. That was pretty expensive 😐 So I have a lot of soldering jobs to do..

brostenen wrote:

Not much.... Upgrading my Amiga500 from 512k to 1mb, in order to play Pinball Fantasies and have full sound in Lotus-II.

A spreadsheet with sound?
Damn thats futuristic, considering modern spreadsheets dont have that.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

A spreadsheet with sound?
Damn thats futuristic, considering modern spreadsheets dont have that.

What? Modern spreadsheets do have sound, and Lotus II is a game 🤣

Well, I found out why my Dell Latitude CPi motherboard won't turn on.

That pesky little chip on the daughterboard is toast, maybe later I'll see if replacing that part will bring it back to life.

Also, I got around to replacing the front fan in my spare Antec 450W power supply, still won't spin (although the back fan spins), after further inspection I found out that some of its capacitors are Fuhjyyu so I'm going to get it recapped eventually (It's only a spare so no rush).

bakemono wrote:

I also have these ISA cards with dipswitches and was wondering if anyone had info on how to set the switches. One is a Basic Time AT4x4, the other is an unknown I/O card.
http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/isacard2.jpg
http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/isacard3.jpg

The small I/O card came up as one parallel on LPT1 and one serial on COM3 IRQ4. Enough to get out the parallel port cable and get INTERLNK/INTERSVR going.

The AT4x4 came up as two parallel and two serial but no memory. With some experimentation I found that turning on switch 5 (on the left block) enabled bank 0 (the 512KB soldered on) giving the system a total of 640KB conventional and 384KB extended which passed the memory test in Checkit.

I also have an 8-bit bus memory board with 128KB which can bring it from 512KB to 640KB. I was curious about the performance impact of having it on the 8-bit bus. Since most benchmarks need a 386 I wrote a very simple benchmark of my own to test the memory speed. It reads 64K blocks from 64-640K using REP LODSW, and then writes 64K blocks at A0000 to test the VGA card, then it spits out a count and a time for each area (in hexadecimal). I got 2.1MB/s from onboard memory (as well as the AT4x4), only 850KB/s from the 8-bit card, and 3.5MB/s to the Paradise VGA card. http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/spd16.zip

Using Checkit to test a MiniScribe HDD only showed problems on cylinders 1 and 3. Although it has no problem seeking, DOS still doesn't recognize the disk and it seems almost like no data is actually being transferred. Moving the data cable to the other port had no effect. (Turning it upside down caused a 1782 Drive Controller Failure though.) I also tried BIOS type 2 instead of type 6. I haven't yet found any sector editor that will run on here (Norton Diskedit crashes silently, does it need 386?) to see if there is any recognizable data coming from the disk.