Predator99 wrote:

xeon3d wrote:

Guess I am not done yet... 😁 Already spoke with them, and as soon as they have time I'll have another go at the stuff 😀

Edit 2: Found out how to shrink the thumbnails.. 😜

Cool find - hope you have some room in your house left after storing all this 😉

Wife already gave me hell due to all the cases being on our "yard", but after a couple of days I managed to store the cleaned ones in my "man-annex". Luckily, I can also use part of an unused American-sized Caravan (?) as a storage site. At home, I only have my laptop (where I'm typing this from) and VERY FEW cables, and a couple of portable hard drives. Everything else goes in the annex \ caravan.

brostenen wrote:

Holy smoke..... Must be the motherload of your life. 😮

Well, it might turn out to be. I don't like to take things for granted so until I empty that other garage clean, this is probably tied with the time someone called and asked me if I wanted some computers from a state-financed learning center that opened for 3 or 4 months in the late 2000s. I ended up with 25-ish Celerons 2.0Ghz, 256MB sticks, 40GB Hitachi, oem 52x cdrom drives and P4S61 motherboards. None of them had a spec of dust inside.

Edit: Just got a text message from the girl, they'll be there tomorrow after 19h00. 😁

Good to know that you have so much time. Nice... 😀 Personally I am more of an 1985 to 1995 era hardware guy. When it comes to x86 hardware.

L0L. I had no idea you could do this. I'm calling it a "retro activity."

Yes, this is Win7 SP1. Completely stock out of the box; no downloaded themes or anything.

I was just messing around, but definitely going to leave it this way. I would actually consider using Win10 if it let you do this.

^ I think you can achieve the same result by turning off (and disabling) the themes service. That is how servers are configured (well, up to 2008 anyway not sure about newer versions) as the themes are rather pointless on those platforms resulting in that retro look.

Imma let you finish but the Magnavox Odyssey 2 is not well-engineered.

I just tried to get a quick look at the mobo and caps but I can't get to the last retaining screw because it's under the motherboard casing. I'm going to need some long angle thing, and/or desolder connections to get to it.

I know, 1970s tech, but seriously, mount something with a screw, then put something over it and solder it down to the thing you screwed down?

Also I think it was a rush job for other reasons. There are what looks like joystick cable spaces on the case but they're uncut blanks and the joystick cables just run through the case split and get squished. This may be normal, hard to say because no one ever takes a picture of the back of these things:

Tried out a CT2900, a nice Vibra16 with an odd, square, low-power OPL3. Tested the sound on Biomenace then played waaay too much.

Have you ever hunted for a VERY hard to find driver or firmware/BIOS update on an old piece of hardware only to be greeted by a dead website or link? Then you go to archive.org to rescue you only to find the website is partially there, but none of the files were archived? Then sadness overwhelms your silicon soul. So I have a couple of these very old DPT Smartcache EISA SCSI controllers that I have been looking for the BIOS, firmware, EISA config files and DOS utility files.

Well, I grabbed the firmware zip file filename and did a search just for that and found some obscure Taiwanese university's FTP site which ended up being a goldmine for me as it had most of the files from the long dead DPT website for my controllers plus the latest firmware and BIOS files! Excellent! Unfortunately the controller is old enough where you have to program the chips with an EEPROM programmer which I have never done. I am hoping to learn how to do that shortly, but at least I have found the files. It's an interesting browse of vintage drivers and articles TBH on their FTP site and some of you may find something you are looking for as well. I found this early DPT article on I/O bandwidth amusing.

ftp://ftp.dyu.edu.tw/pub/Hardware/stuff/scsi_ … xt/diskband.txt

Anyway, happy hunting to you!

ftp://ftp.dyu.edu.tw/pub/Hardware/stuff/

Testing the AMD K6-III+ 400ACR 2,0V with 550MHz and 2.1V on a DFI K6BV3+.

Here is my newest Socket 7 CPU, should do the 550MHz with the standard VCore:

I've been measuring some voltages because I want to order capacitors for my old K8 board, but before I do I would like to ask advice from the cap-gurus in the forum. Here's a cap map of the board, where there are a few free spots marked as circles with no filling:
-top of the board in green, I measured 1.6V;
-top of the board in pink, 2.6V measured;
-under the mosfet heatsinks in blue, also measured 1.6V;
-near ATX connector in pink, seems to be power for nForce4;
-near "AGP" connector, measured 12V.

A few questions:
-3300uF and 1500uF caps seem to correspond to 2 phases for CPU power (they are connected to each other and I measured 1.6V in those spots, but please correct me if I'm wrong). I would like to exchange them with polymer caps, filling up the empty spots in the process. Why were different cap values used for the distinct phases? Would it be safe to fill up all those spots with say 1800uF@4V caps instead of using the 2 different values?

-in general, if I want to fill up an empty silkscreen in a capacitor bank, can I just slap a cap of the same value and characteristics and call it a day?

-would there be any advantage to filling up the cap spot near the AGP slot? its connected to the 470uF@16V cap between the PCIe ports, which goes to the 12V pins of the AGP/PCIe ports.

-which caps would you recommend to exchange for polymers, if any at all? I was thinking just the VRM ones for the CPU (1000uF@16V, 3300uF and 1500uF) and use Panasonic FR for the rest of the board, but I would like to hear recommendations.

NostalgicAslinger wrote:

Testing the AMD K6-III+ 400ACR 2,0V with 550MHz and 2.1V on a DFI K6BV3+. […]
Show full quote

Testing the AMD K6-III+ 400ACR 2,0V with 550MHz and 2.1V on a DFI K6BV3+.

Here is my newest Socket 7 CPU, should do the 550MHz with the standard VCore:

Recap it with Panasonic FL caps, maybe you can get a slight better OC. 🤣

Just rescued a nice NEC MultiSync EA190M, it has a particular perk, it sync's at 15khz. It also has built in speakers which is nice to have when connected to an AMIGA.

Here it is connected to my Amiga 500 using the RGB port.

PS: I'm waiting for the delivery of the Schneider EuroPC prototype boards from JLCPCB, hope to have some developments soon.....

Last night, I modified my GameBoy Color to have a frontlight on the display, got a new case, buttons (and the silicone ones), some white LEDs (will add to the system later on), a glass screen (better than the plastic screen), and a tri-wing screwdriver.

The frontlight, however, started to get dust particles on there again (will remove it and use scotch tape to get the dust or hair off of there), but, after a few attempts, there are less air bubbles than before.

Video (with sound): https://i.imgur.com/45Hac4A.mp4

Gallery: https://imgur.com/gallery/VL59lOF

Xicor wrote:

Just rescued a nice NEC MultiSync EA190M, it has a particular perk, it sync's at 15khz. It also has built in speakers which is […]
Show full quote

Just rescued a nice NEC MultiSync EA190M, it has a particular perk, it sync's at 15khz. It also has built in speakers which is nice to have when connected to an AMIGA.

Here it is connected to my Amiga 500 using the RGB port.

Nec.jpg

PS: I'm waiting for the delivery of the Schneider EuroPC prototype boards from JLCPCB, hope to have some developments soon.....

pcb.png

Good catch.... Congrats. 😀

I dug out an old Adaptec ISA SCSI Controller. I tested both the SCSI port and the Floppy port. Everything is working beautifully. Tested an ET4000 ISA as well, and that is working perfectly. Two cards that I did not know if they were working. Nice.

setting up XP on an Optiplex GX280 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT, 4GB RAM, 160GB HD, and NVIDIA Quadro FX580

Man, it's been a while since I've been on VOGONS. 🤣

liqmat wrote:

Well, I grabbed the firmware zip file filename and did a search just for that and found some obscure Taiwanese university's FTP site which ended up being a goldmine for me as it had most of the files from the long dead DPT website for my controllers plus the latest firmware and BIOS files! Excellent! Unfortunately the controller is old enough where you have to program the chips with an EEPROM programmer which I have never done. I am hoping to learn how to do that shortly, but at least I have found the files. It's an interesting browse of vintage drivers and articles TBH on their FTP site and some of you may find something you are looking for as well. I found this early DPT article on I/O bandwidth amusing.

If you are looking for an EPROM programmer, I would suggest the TL866 Plus from here, which PCL has used to some success himself. It comes with all of the accessories you could ever really need for removable EPROM chips that I could foreseeably see, and the software is easy enough to use.

Any who, so far today, I have done a bunch of soldering work. I finally got this miracle-worker in the mail today for the low-low price of $260 😜 :

I love this Hakko gun. It has saved me soooo much time, pain, and misery versus trying to desolder by hand. It was worth every single penny I put towards it. 🤣

Equipped with my new desoldering gun, I went about replacing capacitors on my Samsung SyncMaster 710N's power PCB that I mentioned here on this thread a few weeks ago. Samsung didn't make it super-easy, though, to remove the massive capacitor on the PCB - they glued that sucker down, and it took a lot of prying to pull that old capacitor away from the PCB.

As a recap (pun maybe intended 😀 ), all of the caps circled in red are the brand-new caps that I soldered on, and the two missing caps denoted by the blue rectangle I'm still waiting on - they are back ordered until late January (which is better than the original estimate, which was March - yikes!).

I also finally finished replacing all of the electrolytic caps on my PNY Nvidia GeForce FX 6800GS that I have in my possession, which was giving me problems when I tested it out over a month ago. The only electrolytic cap that I couldn't find an equivalent polymer cap for was the top-right-most electrolytic cap near the PCIe power connector - I had to replace that with a new electrolytic cap instead, just like some of the caps on that Samsung monitor's power PCB shown above.

I have yet to test it thorough under Windows, but the card did survive 15 minutes in BIOS without any issues, so at least what I did to the card didn't make it worse AFAIK. I am not sure when I'll thoroughly test the card, but I know it's not going to be for maybe a month.

the_ultra_code wrote:

Man, it's been a while since I've been on VOGONS. 🤣

If you are looking for an EPROM programmer, I would suggest the TL866 Plus from here, which PCL has used to some success himself. It comes with all of the accessories you could ever really need for removable EPROM chips that I could foreseeably see, and the software is easy enough to use.

Yes! LB forced me at soldering gun point to get one and an eraser.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CYP1DPP/ … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014ZYWR8O/ … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

liqmat wrote:

Yes! LB forced me at soldering gun point to get one and an eraser. […]
Show full quote

the_ultra_code wrote:

Man, it's been a while since I've been on VOGONS. 🤣

If you are looking for an EPROM programmer, I would suggest the TL866 Plus from here, which PCL has used to some success himself. It comes with all of the accessories you could ever really need for removable EPROM chips that I could foreseeably see, and the software is easy enough to use.

Yes! LB forced me at soldering gun point to get one and an eraser.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CYP1DPP/ … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014ZYWR8O/ … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Huh. How does that eraser work? Just stick a chip in it and have it blast the entire chip with electrons?

UV light.

It's for the chips with windows.