Cleaned the read/write heads on two Amiga floppy drives (one for a500 and one for a600). Now they work again. 😀
Cleaned the internals of my a500 with some alcohol, and had a look at the motherboard.
It is an revision 8a (or 8a1 or something with "a" and "8" ) It has ECS, space for internal battery clock, and pads for 1mb ram.
Yet this board has kick 1.3 and only 512k of internal mem. I was under the impression that late a500's only used up to
revision 8.0 and not something with an a in the revision number. Must be one of the absolute last 500's before it was all 500+.
This only gives me some room, for improvements. As I have a 2.xx rom in the closet (37.300) that I can use with a kickrom
switcher. I can upgrade to 1mb chipram or find a 8mb that sits under the CPU.
Or I can find a kipper2k board, with 4 or 8mb ram, that has IDE/CF-Card slot. Will become a great a500. 😜

EDIT:
Had an ekstra look at the board.... Yup... It is an "Revision 8a.1"

aww ye, got the AU8830 in the mail and it works perfectly in the NetVista PIII.

Working on recovering the data from an old laptop (IBM Pentium III running DOS.. or maybe Win98) that was used for programming a MAZAK CNC lathe.

Went to transfer everything to a newer laptop and when I went to boot up the old laptop it said NO OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND. Oh yay...

I wonder if the people that had been using it knew this and just didn't tell me.

Drive lost it's format so I brought it home to do recovery on it.

Forgot I bought the Pro version of EASEUS data recovery last year. So I am a sorta happy camper now.

Been cleaning and testing the past couple of days.

Finding that the AGP slot on my Asus P4P800-E is screwed was frustrating, but seems to have been a common problem from some of the old threads - it runs fine on PCI, but doesn't boot if it only has an AGP card in it. Bit of a shame as its purposes seem limited now.

Had a bit of success with a Toshiba T2150CDS; it was sold as non-working, and initially didn't respond to power. I was able to get a flicker of life from it by removing the crunchy Varta standby battery, and using vinegar on the blue chip legs. It now blinks to tell me that the built in PSU is faulty, I'll have to swap it with a working one to test. Gave the laptop housing a wash too, and did the best I could to sand off '6 6 6' that was scratched into the lid 😲

Makin' movies 😀

Getting a Presario 5130 in working order. ATM just need to install Win 98SE on it but the CD drive might be close to death it seems.
Changed CMOS battery, added some RAM and changed the 6GB 5 1/4" HD which was dead for a 3,5" 10GB model.
Pics after completion 😀

I cleaned yet another floppy drive today. This time the old one, that came with my parents first computer.
This is an old drive from around 1987'ish, as the drive motor has Feb. 87 stamped on it.
What is quite interesting about this drive, is the jumpers. It seems as I can jump it for use in Amiga/Atari's.
Another interesting thing that I found, is that the face-plate are attached, using two screws inside.
Never seen that before in my life.... Anyway... Pic's below.

The LED itself is placed in a bizarre way, most fdds have the LED underneath the notch

brostenen wrote:

What is quite interesting about this drive, is the jumpers. It seems as I can jump it for use in Amiga/Atari's.

Not sure about your exact model as Teac made billion different models, but switching the jumpers is just half the work. You might need to do some soldering as the signal wiring is a bit different:

http://elgensrepairs.blogspot.fi/2012/10/modd … u5-fdd-for.html

Testing yesterday's haul (slowly due to a bout of the flu). The known good boards are indeed good, but that poor PB430 LPX So3 board is in worse state than I first saw. When I got out the vinegar to soak the battery corrosion I noticed something was odd nearby: there was a suspicious empty spot on the PCB with a few disturbed solder points - the 14.whatnot MHz oscillator crystal had also been removed. Someone really didn't think this board would ever live again. Time to find a replacement.

The 14 some-odd oscillator is for the ISA bus, right?

bjwil1991 wrote:

The 14 some-odd oscillator is for the ISA bus, right?

ISA, CGA, VGA and NTSC-M (the latter being the reason IBM chose 4.77MHz for the 8088 and PC bus - it meant one oscillator could drive that lot and the composite-out of CGA as well). Pretty fundamental to every PC, in other words.

Tried to install my new mATX Socket 754 board inside an old HP OEM case only to find out that not only are the IO plate holes non-standard but so are the motherboard holes. The case has been thrown away, I need to find a few nice small mini tower ATX cases for Socket 754 and AM2 AMD builds..

dionb wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

The 14 some-odd oscillator is for the ISA bus, right?

ISA, CGA, VGA and NTSC-M (the latter being the reason IBM chose 4.77MHz for the 8088 and PC bus - it meant one oscillator could drive that lot and the composite-out of CGA as well). Pretty fundamental to every PC, in other words.

Interesting. Can you post some pics of the motherboard as well? Just to make sure the oscillator is the through hole version and not the SMD.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Interesting. Can you post some pics of the motherboard as well? Just to make sure the oscillator is the through hole version and not the SMD.

Not right now, as it's bathing in vinegar. But it's definitely through hole - on the top it wasn't clear whether a component had been removed or never installed, but on the bottom were some messy blobs of solder making obvious that someone had removed through hole pins.

Ah. Well, that sucks solder (no pun intended).

Made a DIY A/V cable (many swear words and burn marks later) for my C64 and did a video about it. Almost successful (still a little flaky, but it works), but I feel good that it works. Composite, s-video, and mono audio (attempted to do a noise reduction for the S-video but it didn't work out as the audio wasn't working).

Link: https://youtu.be/Jj9TZYN8aBA

Made a 100% functional A/V cable with noise reduction and clearer S-video (300 Ohm resistor soldered onto Pin 6) and composite signal for my C64 with "stereo" audio as well. New video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjck5SRsKIk and I have to say, I'm proud of myself for getting the cable to function thanks to bloggers and advise from people on forums for both the DIY A/V cable and testing the SID chip. Going to use my USB Dazzle video capture card to capture footage from the C64 and posting it on YouTube. Next thing I'm going to make is going to be an IEC to Arduino Uno R3 with 3x 100 Ohm 1/8W resistors and make the 1541 emulation for games. If there's a way to make a cartridge version, much like the cartridge style floppy diskette drive for the Commodore Plus/4 and 16 (and 116) for faster load times, I'd be happy since IEC transfer rates are low (using a FastLoad cartridge + JiffyDOS in the near future would suffice).

@bjwil1991

saw that vid pop up on my feed earlier. What were you munching on at the start? ^.^

Did a functionality test of my new to me SB Pro 1.0.

Used my Pentium 233MMX rig to do so.

At 233Mhz, it wouldn't detect the card at all.

At 133Mhz, it detected it and sound worked, but nothing from FM.

At 100Mhz, sound worked and FM worked but was way too fast

At 100Mhz with L2 cache disabled, same thing.

At 100Mhz with L1 and L2 cache disabled, sound just produced some garbage, but FM worked as expected.

Now that I know it works, I just have to build a system for it to work in. Guessing a 486-something would fit the bill.
Anybody know what the fastest CPU speed this thing will work properly with?