Cyrix200+ wrote:

Maybe a suction desolderer could work? Annoying!

I like the UMC build.

One day I'm going to invest in some proper desolder gear. But that day is not today.

And yeah, the UMC build is purely for fun. Performance is going to be horrible - the CPU isn't too bad but the VGA makes a Trident 8900B or old Oak OTI037 look fast. But with a bit of luck it will slow down the system enough to be able to run Ultima 7 and use an MT-32 without timing issues 😜

The one thing that would make it complete though still eludes me: an UMC UM85C418-based VGA+I/O VLB card, like the one in this topic: 486 VLB UMC-Chipset, what is it? - a TK 85C418GVIO. There's been one on eBay for months now, but the asking price is too high for something not known to work (and “WORKING, BUT MY MONITOR COULD NOT SET UP FOR HER RESOLUTION ( SEE PICTURES )” doesn't improve matters 😢 ), and the seller's not prepared to drop to the max I'd be prepared to spend on the risk.

Oh well, another will turn up sooner or later.

cj_reha wrote:

liqmat wrote:

I like that hard drive pedestal holding up your floppy drives. Use what you have at hand. Nice looking system.

🤣 Thanks, was wondering if someone would notice. The cable Radio Shack put in there is so short that it's nearly impossible to run them out of the system. 😠

I am sure you are aware, but if you ever need help with that Tandy machine the Tandy group over at vcfed.org is insanely technical and impress with their skills.

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?4 … ndy-Radio-Shack

Grumble...

Continued working on my UMC build. The core system is fine, but the FDC on the multi-I/O controller seems dead. Whenever it is enabled I get FDC error in BIOS. If I disable it on the multi-I/O I can boot from the same (Gotek) drive from my ancient WD WA1003-WA2 MFM+floppy controller - but then the HDC on the multi-I/O refuses to work, even if I set the WD controller to secondary - and I can't totally disable the HDC on it. So at this point I can have either floppy or HDD (or floppy + ST-412 10MB dinosaur...), but not both.

Long-term solution is to find that UMC VGA+I/O combi card, but fortunately I expect a usable workaround in the post any day now: an Adaptec AHA-1542 ISA SCSI controller with FDC. I don't need SCSI in this system, but at least it will happily coexist with IDE.

Does anyone know if S370 Coppermine P3's are multiplier locked downward as well as upwards? I'm thinking about trying an underclock.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Does anyone know if S370 Coppermine P3's are multiplier locked downward as well as upwards? I'm thinking about trying an underclock.

From my rusty memory: Yes they should have a locked multiplier both ways.. 😐

Last month I got fed up with the mess I have in my collection so I started feeding a database with my collection of hard drives. Right now I am on drive number 151 which is about third of my inventory. Quite a lot of drives, huh?
I am using simple, but awesome program that my friend wrote for me.

By the way the drive selected is very nice and quite rare, made by JTS Corp. 100% OK without Bad Blocks 😀

And made this "Iron Mile", as it was described by my friend

But what I have done today? Not much. I was fiddling with this pile of junk that was donated to me (this is about half of what I got) and thinking very hard how to revive all of them. Some of them has totally worn bearings, some refuses to talk with the controller, the big one doesn't start at all, one is 100% completely dead (sadly the rather expensive one - ST277R) - spindle motor driver dead, spindle motor dead, bearings frozen, head crash, even stepper motor is burned out. That will not come back for sure. The SCSI one did not want to talk to the controller and that's the one I really hope to revive. It is quite uncommon, sadly enough.

Right, now stuff is getting a bit strange. I decided to play around with my ST-506 stuff after all if I can't get IDE and floppy working at the same time. But despite having three known-good ST-506 controllers, system BIOS keeps throwing me "Primary HDC failure", despite two of them having BIOSs and being able to initialize that. I'm beginning to think the motherboard/BIOS may be playing up. Will see if I can get a second opinion in another system, otherwise I might just start another thread. Failing anything HDD-like, I'll see if I can do some DOS VGA benchmarks from Gotek/floppy.

I have learned the hard way to store my HHDs on the ground not on shelves or tabletops.

I attempted to repair the Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro that I posted in the "bought hardware" thread a few days ago. One capacitor was busted, not exploded but had been physically torn at one end from the PCB. The cap itself looked fine but the remaining lead on the torn side was too short and I couldn't solder it back. So I replaced with a new one. But alas, no video from the card. All the other caps look OK, and after inspection it doesn't look like any other components were torn off. Who knows...

Also I flashed 2 Gotek emulators with the FlashFloppy firmware. It took a lot more time than I expected as they kept not being recognized by the software flasher. I then realized that if I press on the motherboard _just_so_ it will allow the flashing to proceed. Doesn't bode well for the longevity of those if they have bad solder joints brand new from the box. I also replaced the front LED displays with 0.91" OLEDs. Will need to enlarge the openings in the front with a dremel as the OLEDs are a tad longer and narrower than the original display. I know FlashFloppy has a "narrow" mode where it restricts the display to the width of the original cutout but dammit, I paid for the display area and I want to see that last couple of millimeters. 😀

I found some bad caps on an eMac. Not the typical ones people mention, the mainboard seems fine, but the power converter board was a wreck and I found one visibly bad cap on the monitor board:

So I replaced that:

And when I was reassembling, I found that the solder joints on a 24-pin connector, with individually-soldered pins with no bracket, clip, or socket, were coming loose:

That's just terrible design, especially considering the short cable length and extremely stiff connector on the other end. Still trying to figure out how I'm going to rig this so I can resolder it properly.

My best guess, *if* I can get everything mounted properly, is to desolder all 24 pins, insert them manually in the connector, putty the connector to the board in place with something rigged to hold the board securely, and then resolder the pins and hopefully not melt everything into the connector, which is plastic. Maybe if I have them barely in the connector and a heatsink inbetween.

I can't think of any way to hold the pins straight in the correct positions with something that won't melt. This should have been a socket, not bare pins soldered to a board. There are two cables holding the board to the monitor that aren't socketed, and I'd rather not desolder this further, so I'm stuck working on it dangling from the bottom of the monitor. (Yes everything is discharged!)

If I knew the pinouts for the monitor connector I *might* be tempted to convert it to an LCD. It's a slightly odd size, though, and while 16" LCDs exist, you can barely search for them on the internet, because search engines can't tell the difference between 16" and 16:9 and 16:10 and 1650. (sigh)

krivulak wrote:

Last month I got fed up with the mess I have in my collection so I started feeding a database with my collection of hard drives. Right now I am on drive number 151 which is about third of my inventory. Quite a lot of drives, huh?

No wonder I am having so much trouble finding early IDE drives! 😀

I also have a BFG Geforce 9800 with what appear to be bad *coils* on it.

The card works, but the coil or coils literally *scream* while it's running. Angry, high-pitched very loud vibration. Don't run into that very often. Not sure whether it's the coil causing it or just expressing a problem elsewhere in the circuit, but I'm hoping that when I get around to replacing them, the screaming stops.

debs3759 wrote:

krivulak wrote:

Last month I got fed up with the mess I have in my collection so I started feeding a database with my collection of hard drives. Right now I am on drive number 151 which is about third of my inventory. Quite a lot of drives, huh?

No wonder I am having so much trouble finding early IDE drives! 😀

No kidding, it's like finding out that diamonds aren't actually rare, they're just all in one place!

I'm still confused that I found four mid 90s Seagate Barracuda SCSI drives and they all work, even though one of them wasn't even secured in the machine and just hanging off the ends of the cables and banging all over when it was moved.

Seems to be an all-or-nothing world sometimes.

Modded my Sound Canvas SD-35 with a FlashFloppy GOTEK drive. I'll replace it with a black unit when I get it in the mail, for now it works flawlessly.

Also, my Voodoo Banshee card with a missing cap and solder pad returned from repairs.. Some electronics guy did it for me as I have no idea how to replace an smd with a missing solder pad; it sure looks like a weird repair job. I haven't tested it yet (I'm kind of scared to..)

So a while ago my brother saved from shredder a couple 2012 laptops and a monitor. They were about to be thrown into electric garbage, despite not having been used at all. He grabbed a few, just in case. Laptops can be refurbished (discs were torn away etc) and either sold or given away, but it's the monitor that caught my eye. Lo and behold, totally unused EIZO Foris FX2431! Knowing how I like retro stuff, my brother gave the monitor to me. Have been testing it for last couple of days and so far it works with my ZX Spectrum:

and PSP:

and DOS laptop Panasonic CF-41:

All that in addition to plugging both my work and private laptops into it as well.

Lovely stuff, not without some quirks (cannot use full resolution via HDMI, automatic detection of signal source only works with HDMI, etc.), but so far great for retro. If I manage to get my Amstrad working with it, I will be selling both my current HD monitor and Samsung MP710 I've kept for retro machines. Happy days!

Merovign wrote:

No kidding, it's like finding out that diamonds aren't actually rare, they're just all in one place!
I'm still confused that I found four mid 90s Seagate Barracuda SCSI drives and they all work, even though one of them wasn't even secured in the machine and just hanging off the ends of the cables and banging all over when it was moved.
Seems to be an all-or-nothing world sometimes.

Well, believe me, this was not the matter of days, i collect old hard drives for almost ten years now and usually I find two or three usable drives in a month 😀

appiah4 wrote:

Modded my Sound Canvas SD-35 with a FlashFloppy GOTEK drive. I'll replace it with a black unit when I get it in the mail, for now it works flawlessly.

SD-35 Gotek 01.JPG

SD-35 Gotek 02.JPG

I have the opposite problem with the color, I have a bunch of black ones and would prefer beige. 😀

Also, my Voodoo Banshee card with a missing cap and solder pad returned from repairs.. Some electronics guy did it for me as I have no idea how to replace an smd with a missing solder pad; it sure looks like a weird repair job. I haven't tested it yet (I'm kind of scared to..)

Guillemot Maxi Gamer Phoenix Repair.JPG

If the repair guy gave a warranty you should test it ASAP.

appiah4 wrote:

Modded my Sound Canvas SD-35 with a FlashFloppy GOTEK drive. I'll replace it with a black unit when I get it in the mail, for n […]
Show full quote

Modded my Sound Canvas SD-35 with a FlashFloppy GOTEK drive. I'll replace it with a black unit when I get it in the mail, for now it works flawlessly.

SD-35 Gotek 01.JPG

SD-35 Gotek 02.JPG

Also, my Voodoo Banshee card with a missing cap and solder pad returned from repairs.. Some electronics guy did it for me as I have no idea how to replace an smd with a missing solder pad; it sure looks like a weird repair job. I haven't tested it yet (I'm kind of scared to..)

Guillemot Maxi Gamer Phoenix Repair.JPG

That SD-35 looks pretty good with a Gotek fitted, I really need to refit the gotek to my MT90s, I just don't like using floppy disks with a midi player like this, because it slow down what's already slow, and makes noise 🙁
Do you find the number display too bright?

That repair on the SMD pad looks pretty interesting, maybe it required digging into the PCB to find enough of a working trace to solder to? I agree you should probably test that sooner rather than later.

Today I finally made actual use of this ridiculous thing

I got a DataExpert EXP4044 (486 VLB Opti chipset) motherboard from someone in russia, which looked promising from the pictures, but look closely..

Enhance:

Hmm, not so good, I think these go around the IO controller area, just behind some ISA slots

Some careful soldering later:

I'm going to clean the board before I try powering it, but no shorts to ground and all the parts are there, so hopefully it works 😁

I just got a copy of Hollywood Hijinx. It is the Apple II version, but I will play it either on the 286 or on my iPad using Frotz...

I started by reading through the extra material, which is quite a lot in this game! 😀 The game is a treasure hunt of some sorts: your eccentric, rich aunt has died and she and her late husband (a Hollywood producer) have hidden ten 'treasures' in the house. You have to find them in the course of one night to claim your inheritance.

Looking forward to actually playing it!

Thermalwrong wrote:

That SD-35 looks pretty good with a Gotek fitted, I really need to refit the gotek to my MT90s, I just don't like using floppy disks with a midi player like this, because it slow down what's already slow, and makes noise 🙁
Do you find the number display too bright?

That repair on the SMD pad looks pretty interesting, maybe it required digging into the PCB to find enough of a working trace to solder to? I agree you should probably test that sooner rather than later.

The LCD is not jarring, but if you want to dim it it would be very easy to stick on a semi-transparent black film on top of the display I would think.

The repair guy said exactly the same thing, he had to scrape off the PCB until he got to the trace and he then (apparently) soldered an extension to it, to which he soldered the cap?