KCompRoom2000 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Had some leftoeuvre parts lying around and cobbled this together. Not exactly sure what to do with it.

https://imgur.com/a/Cg3QY

Another case swap project involving the reuse of a late-90s Dell case for a Prescott P4 spare parts build? I like it. Your case swap projects always amaze me, it could probably be useful for testing parts since you never know what (semi-)modern parts you might run into without knowing whether or not they work.

BTW, you have the same processor that I have in my Dell Optiplex GX520.

Thanks! It has IDE, SATA, PCI, and PCIe so it could be handy for testing a variety of hardware and drives.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

creepingnet wrote:

While out checking for CRTs at Value Village I found a Lenovo T61 and a Compaq V2000.....not really vintage, but the Compaq was well worth the $3.99 I paid for it - because it had a 44pin PATA HDD - so I whipped out that quartet of ill-bought 44 pin to 40 pin adapters and currently I'm pretting my 486 with yet another large hard disk - this time for a Windows XP experiment......never tried XP on a 486 before - tonight's the night to do it, at least before my Pentium machine is handed off with it's CRT since I know the installer will trip once it finds out what it will be REALLY running on (heh).

I'd hate to be the bringer of bad news, but unless you have a Pentium Overdrive CPU installed (or have enough free time to mess around with SETUPLDR.BIN and NTOSKRNL.EXE in a disassembler), there's no way you're going to get Windows XP up and running on a 486. The reason is that the setup's bootup phase checks for the CMPXCHG8B instruction before it'll allow installation, which means that it'll refuse to even start the setup on a 486 class CPU (this includes 5x86, MediaGX, and IDT Winchip). However, the closest thing you can get is an early Whistler build (build 2223 or earlier I believe) from before the CMPXCHG8B requirement was implemented, you could probably find some builds at your nearest *cough*abandonware sites*cough*.

Do you think I don't know that, hence mentioning the Pentium 1 - every experiment with this on the internet I found did not involve ANY hacking - it involved installing the hard disk into a NEWER computer - imaging it - and THEN putting the drive back into the 486. If I did not plan to do that, the Pentium would never have been mentioned. As for XP on a Penitum 1 - I've done it before. This is just a "sick and twisted experiment" for my own entertainment. Plus it turns out the Pentium does not want to detect that disk for whatever reason so I'll be using the Compaq it came out of to invoke setup once I have a power supply.

creepingnet wrote:

Do you think I don't know that, hence mentioning the Pentium 1 - every experiment with this on the internet I found did not involve ANY hacking - it involved installing the hard disk into a NEWER computer - imaging it - and THEN putting the drive back into the 486. If I did not plan to do that, the Pentium would never have been mentioned. As for XP on a Penitum 1 - I've done it before. This is just a "sick and twisted experiment" for my own entertainment. Plus it turns out the Pentium does not want to detect that disk for whatever reason so I'll be using the Compaq it came out of to invoke setup once I have a power supply.

Sorry for the misinterpretation, at first it sounded like you were just going to install XP on your 486 the usual way, but now that I know you're going to install XP on a Pentium 1 PC and then put its hard drive into the 486, this will be interesting, be sure to post screenshots when you have it up and running, some of us would like to see Windows XP running on a 486 through the means of hard drive transportation. I actually want to try this myself to see if I can get Windows XP to boot on my Compaq Presario 2100 (MediaGX), I have a couple hard drives to spare as well as an nLite'd XP RTM (SP0) disc at my disposal.

Got a Coco 3 clean inside and out. Works like new.

Decided to be a bit more productive on my 4.77MHz 8088 build. Installed Microsoft Works 1.0 & WordStar 3.30 onto it. Having only 256KB RAM installed is certainly a pain for finding games & software that will run, but it's fun trying to squeeze every last drop out of it.

Small amusements when messing about with the above software briefly, but then I went back to playing games on it. 🤣

I've ordered a cheap Serial/Parallel/Game port card for it, as the Serial ports don't work on the one I was using and the old 8-Bit ISA card I had spare is missing it's Serial port connectors (26-pin connections on the card instead of the usual 10 pin).

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

creepingnet wrote:

Do you think I don't know that, hence mentioning the Pentium 1 - every experiment with this on the internet I found did not involve ANY hacking - it involved installing the hard disk into a NEWER computer - imaging it - and THEN putting the drive back into the 486. If I did not plan to do that, the Pentium would never have been mentioned. As for XP on a Penitum 1 - I've done it before. This is just a "sick and twisted experiment" for my own entertainment. Plus it turns out the Pentium does not want to detect that disk for whatever reason so I'll be using the Compaq it came out of to invoke setup once I have a power supply.

Sorry for the misinterpretation, at first it sounded like you were just going to install XP on your 486 the usual way, but now that I know you're going to install XP on a Pentium 1 PC and then put its hard drive into the 486, this will be interesting, be sure to post screenshots when you have it up and running, some of us would like to see Windows XP running on a 486 through the means of hard drive transportation. I actually want to try this myself to see if I can get Windows XP to boot on my Compaq Presario 2100 (MediaGX), I have a couple hard drives to spare as well as an nLite'd XP RTM (SP0) disc at my disposal.

I recall I tried this once years ago, but it wouldn't boot. Only after I changed CPU to a PODP-83 did it work. I then underclocked the PODP-83 by dropping bus speed to 16MHz and removing the PODP-83's fan to drop the multiplier from 2.5x to 1x. Slowest WinXP boot I ever saw, took the better part of an hour 😉

Found the 15" version of my old Trinitron monitor to play old low res games on - I forgot how heavy these things are though 😵
Our family computer used to have the 17" version of this monitor, the CPD-200ES, but I didn't want such a large display for this setup.

I don't have a car right now so I had to carry it back on a hand cart via train & bus - sadly I got it home to find it turns on but I can't set up the geometry, because it got bumped during the trip and its front buttons were damaged.

I've never had to look at the inside of a CRT before, but thankfully the PCB came out fairly easily so I could resolder the broken button and fix the two pushed in ones:

Here it is with the replacement button, before I noticed that two more buttons were pushed in:

It's all working now 😊

Now to learn about how this retro-brite stuff works...

Gered wrote:

After overcoming a number of obstacles, I got the rebuild of my P233 MMX system done. http://i.imgur.com/Ex74oyIm.jpg […]
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After overcoming a number of obstacles, I got the rebuild of my P233 MMX system done.

Only problem so far is that any cold boot, the memory test hangs. But after it's powered on, any and all warm reboots make it so it boots up perfectly fine. Will run a memtest to be sure, but I've tried it with definite known good RAM sticks I have and still get the same issue.

Did that MHz display come with that particular turbo/reset/HDD bezel, or did you add it in?

Installed an Etherlink III (3c509) in my 286 and connected it to the LAN. I used the mTCP FTP server to move some files which works pretty well, about 110KB/sec (almost as fast as WGET on my 486).

I tried several sound cards. First was an SB 2.0. That worked fine in DOS, while under Win3.1 the drivers would install but PCM audio did not play for some reason. Then I tried an SB16, the Win3.1 drivers for it apparently don't work on a 286 though (although the MIDI/FM driver for the SB 2.0 could still work). Some of the DOS software I tried worked on the SB16, some didn't, and I can't think of many things with 16-bit sound that would run on a 286 in the first place. So next I tried an SB-Pro compatible: OPTi931. This didn't work at all. 1.5MB of RAM with no optional stuff loaded was barely enough to run the installer but the Win3.1 drivers require 386-enhanced mode and the DOS configuration utilities didn't work. Finally I tried an ESS1868, this one works perfectly both in Win3.1 and DOS.

I tried to recover data from some old 5.25" diskettes. With a 1.2MB FDD hooked up I was able to read several HD floppies. (Anyone need a '91 vintage Speedstar VGA driver disk?) Most of my floppies are DD though and the few that I tried wouldn't read in the 1.2MB drive. I figured I'd need a 360K drive to read those, but I tried three different ones (one half height, and two of the creaky old full height IBM/Tandon ones) and didn't have much luck. DIR command was successful on one disk, and I ran the CheckIt floppy test on that one and about half the tracks came back bad. I wonder if the drives are in poor shape, the floppies, or both.

Disassembled and reassembled newly bought Siemens-Nixdorf PCD-4ND. Bad news - couldn't repair the LCD. I suspect it is a trivial thing, but nothing obvious like cables or connectors. Good news - it's a nice machine, compartmentalised and well designed. BIOS allows for enforcing LCD+CRT combo at all time, so it might become a very compact 486 desktop ("halftop", as someone called it) after dismantling upper body part. And yes, you were right, the hard drive is obnoxiously loud, so I will replace it with CF, like I do with most of my machines.

@bakemono

Normally you can read from a DD disk with an HD drive, what you can't really do (except on some drives) is to write to DD disks. If you can't read from disks with any drive, the disk is faulty. Try to gently rub the disk with alcohol and try to read from them. It can take a lot of time and often "dirty" disks tend to put crap on the heads of your drives but as long as you keep cleaning the heads it should be okay.

Also, look at your disks to see if there's not circular marks. If there is, your disk is probably dying 🙁

OldCat wrote:

Disassembled and reassembled newly bought Siemens-Nixdorf PCD-4ND. Bad news - couldn't repair the LCD. I suspect it is a trivial thing, but nothing obvious like cables or connectors. Good news - it's a nice machine, compartmentalised and well designed. BIOS allows for enforcing LCD+CRT combo at all time, so it might become a very compact 486 desktop ("halftop", as someone called it) after dismantling upper body part. And yes, you were right, the hard drive is obnoxiously loud, so I will replace it with CF, like I do with most of my machines.

Should you hook up a CRT to the laptop in the near future, would you check whether Win95 allows you to switch refresh rates for the monitor?

My PCD wouldn't allow me to, even when I changed the monitor to "Standard VGA" with different resolutions (this solved the issue on my Toshiba laptops). The driver for the graphics chips seems to be the most recent, but maybe I'm mistaken, since it's just a standard one (Westen Digital 1MB) that came with Windows.

Cheers
Henry

I always sought the battery in my Amiga 1200 died long time ago. Had the turbo card for almost 10 years now... I was reading about replacing it and found out it's actually a rechargeable battery. It could be dead too but I had to try it out... I left it running for around 6 hours. Switched it off. Waited two days and it still holds the time/date 😀 I guess I should use it more often and not like once per year 🤣

henryVK wrote:

Should you hook up a CRT to the laptop in the near future, would you check whether Win95 allows you to switch refresh rates for the monitor?y

I will check it if I find a CRT monitor - I don't have any VGA-capable CRT with me (one CGA/EGA CRT and that's all).

CkRtech wrote:

Did that MHz display come with that particular turbo/reset/HDD bezel, or did you add it in?

I added it, bought it off eBay a while back. Was happy to see that it fit really nicely. Originally the case came with a "188" display.

Don't know if a handiwork counts or not, but, I'm going to replace 2 outlets in my house (one has open ground, another one has missing pieces).

I continued today merging the parts of two broken Toshiba T3200SX from ebay into one working machine. One has a perfectly working HDD and FDD and the other one has a XT-CF, a working screen and 8mb memory, also a better conserved case but damaged internal connectors. Since I am relatively inexperienced with retro-modding or repairing, a lot of issues give me a hard time.

Currently trying to get the original Internal Conner HDD working together with a XT-CF-Lite v4.1 that can also have a bootable medium attached... so far only one works and the other one has so be disabled (HDD or CF) and that way I an not able to backup the drive. It looks like Xtide(on the XT-CF-Lite) can find the onboard controller and the CF controller, but I can not get it to find the original HDD on the primary controller on bootup or the two disks block each other or... I have no clue.

So I will be trying to read a lot about this and maybe do some try&error with the addresses in Xtide. >_<

reg4rds
\ chozilla

chozilla wrote:

I continued today merging the parts of two broken Toshiba T3200SX from ebay into one working machine. One has a perfectly working HDD and FDD and the other one has a XT-CF, a working screen and 8mb memory, also a better conserved case but damaged internal connectors. Since I am relatively inexperienced with retro-modding or repairing, a lot of issues give me a hard time.

Currently trying to get the original Internal Conner HDD working together with a XT-CF-Lite v4.1 that can also have a bootable medium attached... so far only one works and the other one has so be disabled (HDD or CF) and that way I an not able to backup the drive. It looks like Xtide(on the XT-CF-Lite) can find the onboard controller and the CF controller, but I can not get it to find the original HDD on the primary controller on bootup or the two disks block each other or... I have no clue.

Hey Chozilla,

Welcome to Vogons!

On your T3200SX - lovely computer that is. I have been down the same route (see the image):

Instead of XT-IDE you can update BIOS and use CF card directly (without upgrade if you are lucky with your BIOS revision). Users JaZz_KCS and IanB have extensively tested and written about T3200SX and T5200 - you can find the two threads here:
Toshiba T3200SX BIOS? (T3200SX)
Toshiba T5200 mods and upgrades (T5200)

If you run into any trouble, ask away. You're in a good place.

Cheers from Poland,

OldCat

Worked on my 8088 4.77MHz XT build some more. Finally got around to putting it into a case. The only spare case I had available was this ATX tower, which is a bit overkill for an XT but will suffice until something better comes along.

It's a work in progress, the case needs a clean for a start and I have to mod the power button to fit a regular AT-style on/off switch (quite straightforward on this case it would appear, due to the power button design).

The temporary setup:

The case's HDD LED is wired up to the MFM Hard Drive Controller card, so both the hard drive and the case LED light up together. Got no idea what to do for the Power LED or Reset buttons but they're not too important.

I was going to put my 5.25" floppy drive into this system, but decided it would be more useful remaining in my 286 as most of the stuff on those disks is tailored towards systems with 512KB RAM and above, whilst this old XT only has 256KB RAM.

The 3.5" floppy drive is happily functioning as a 720KB disk drive, so that will suffice for now. This build is equipped with a 3Com 3C509B Ethernet Card, so I'm hoping to get mTCP's FTP server up and running (another work in progress, as it runs but nothing can connect at present).

PTherapist wrote:

Worked on my 8088 4.77MHz XT build some more. Finally got around to putting it into a case. The only spare case I had availabl […]
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Worked on my 8088 4.77MHz XT build some more. Finally got around to putting it into a case. The only spare case I had available was this ATX tower, which is a bit overkill for an XT but will suffice until something better comes along.

It's a work in progress, the case needs a clean for a start and I have to mod the power button to fit a regular AT-style on/off switch (quite straightforward on this case it would appear, due to the power button design).

The temporary setup:

The case's HDD LED is wired up to the MFM Hard Drive Controller card, so both the hard drive and the case LED light up together. Got no idea what to do for the Power LED or Reset buttons but they're not too important.

I was going to put my 5.25" floppy drive into this system, but decided it would be more useful remaining in my 286 as most of the stuff on those disks is tailored towards systems with 512KB RAM and above, whilst this old XT only has 256KB RAM.

The 3.5" floppy drive is happily functioning as a 720KB disk drive, so that will suffice for now. This build is equipped with a 3Com 3C509B Ethernet Card, so I'm hoping to get mTCP's FTP server up and running (another work in progress, as it runs but nothing can connect at present).

I have two black floppy drives that I recovered from an external Tandy enclosure. If they work you are welcome to one of them for this system. I believe they are 360K drives, but I will confirm on my Socket 370 workbench system once I get them cleaned up. Just PM me if you are interested.