That one actually does look brand new, with the original >25-year old battery still in place and leaking as expected. Lovely price indeed.

Came across a similar claim earlier this week - fortunately a more reasonable price, but advertised "as new":

This board (MS-6199VA) was fairly shitty when new, and those caps were never good, but if this is "as new" I'll eat my hat 😵

keropi wrote:

nice ones!

Thanks. Here are the most recent ones.

I've received my untested FIC 486-VIP-IO from the Ukraine a couple of days ago. I’ve now spent a good 3 hours over the last couple of days on this board, because holy there are a lot of jumpers on this board. I was about pretty sure this thing was dead because there was nothing on the POST card no matter what I changed but low and behold it lives! I had to find the bad SRAM, add about 10 jumpers switch about 20 around, and find out it likes his double sided memory a bank apart but I’ve got it to boot! Sometimes this hobby can be satisfying at last. Here is a picture with my known good jumper configuration for SX CPUs if anybody else wo bought this board is as incompetent in jumpering the board as I am.

Eleanor1967 wrote:

I've received my untested FIC 486-VIP-IO from the Ukraine a couple of days ago. I’ve now spent a good 3 hours over the last couple of days on this board, because holy there are a lot of jumpers on this board. I was about pretty sure this thing was dead because there was nothing on the POST card no matter what I changed but low and behold it lives! I had to find the bad SRAM, add about 10 jumpers switch about 20 around, and find out it likes his double sided memory a bank apart but I’ve got it to boot! Sometimes this hobby can be satisfying at last. Here is a picture with my known good jumper configuration for SX CPUs if anybody else wo bought this board is as incompetent in jumpering the board as I am.

Yeah, mine should be arriving tomorrow here in the states. I asked him to ship me one with full cache and he had one. We'll see if I have any luck with it. Need a VLB board to test some cards. Hoping for the best.

BTW, how's your PPro gear working out or have you had time?

Got my 386SX laptop out for the first time in ages. I noticed some of the paint on the bottom bubbling, so I scraped it away and saw green corrosion/acid underneath. Turns out it had a CMOS battery made from 4x AAA NiCD cells that had leaked and gone through the plastic.

Luckily the motherboard escaped unharmed, so after cleaning up the case it's mostly as good as new. Just has a patch where the plastic is worn down.

liqmat wrote:

BTW, how's your PPro gear working out or have you had time?

Quite good I'd say. I've played with my dual PPro quite a bit. I managed to install Red Hat Linux 6.2 on the system. At first it always failed to install anything and any Linux would just kernel panic left and right. Turns out one of the RAM sticks is bad which means I'm now down to 128 MB which is just not enugh, especially because I would like to install a more modern Linux on there too (The installer of Suse Linux 8.2 I've tried runs out of memory before the Installation really started..). Prices on ebay for big 72 EDO are stupid so it's on halt now. I'll surely come back to it. It's a fun system to play with.

dionb wrote:

That one actually does look brand new, with the original >25-year old battery still in place and leaking as expected. Lovely pri […]
Show full quote

That one actually does look brand new, with the original >25-year old battery still in place and leaking as expected. Lovely price indeed.

Came across a similar claim earlier this week - fortunately a more reasonable price, but advertised "as new":
[...]
This board (MS-6199VA) was fairly shitty when new, and those caps were never good, but if this is "as new" I'll eat my hat 😵

I bought a Geode GX1 a while ago where the seller had ticked the "condition: new" box, but in the description they said explicitly "pulled from a working system." I think the Ebay listing process is just too confusing for some people. When I got the chip it had old thermal paste residue on it, so it was definitely used... I probably could have gotten money back for that, but it works fine & I was more-or-less expecting it not to be new, so I didn't feel the need to file a claim.

Did battle with Amiga stuff all night and got my A2000 to boot from another IDE HDD (barely). Wrote about it on my blog

Amiga partition tables are weird, but I wonder if it would be possible to take a PC harddisk and add an RDB and FAT filesystem driver in there to make it bootable on x86 PC and 68K Amiga simultaneously...

Overly hot weather lately has removed all motivation to work on my current Pentium 1 project from the hardware side, since I don't have air conditioning in the garage. So I've been working on non-hardware parts.

I hate referring to digital manuals on my phone or laptop when using old hardware, so I've begun printing out manuals. Using cheap eBay Chinese ink and the cheapest A4 paper from Officeworks, I'm getting close to 1,000 pages total. From there, I've been either binding or punching holes in them, all to be kept in a nice ring binder at the end.

I'm mainly interested in these Roland & soon to be Yamaha manuals for their MIDI implementation specs, and the printer manual for its implementation specs for some software. But at that point I may as well print out the whole thing and have a nice complete manual.

In addition to that, around New Years I have cleaned up the KX-P2123 that I posted about here earlier that I found on the side of the road. Cleaned the print head, removed all the rust that had fallen inside it from the rusted barbeque that it was underneath and just generally tidied up the appearance. Obtained some A4 computer paper. Tested with self-test mode, Win95C & WinXP to great success.

I'm strongly considering shelling out for the colour upgrade for this printer now that I know it's working as intended, as both the parts and the ribbons are available on eBay. I've never had a colour dot matrix before! 😲

For non-PC things, I got my hands on a Playstation 1 & 2. I've really been wanting to play console games lately. Never was much of a Nintendo or Sega guy. The real challenge is getting my hands on a CRT TV that I like. Aesthetics matter more than best picture quality for me. I've always felt that "looking" the part was more important than having the best picture quality when it came to using retro consoles. I have no interest in mastering or broadcast monitors. I just want a nice mid-late 90s TV which seems to be a challenge when everyone threw them out 10 years ago. 😵

Eleanor1967 wrote:

I've received my untested FIC 486-VIP-IO from the Ukraine a couple of days ago. I’ve now spent a good 3 hours over the last couple of days on this board, because holy there are a lot of jumpers on this board. I was about pretty sure this thing was dead because there was nothing on the POST card no matter what I changed but low and behold it lives! I had to find the bad SRAM, add about 10 jumpers switch about 20 around, and find out it likes his double sided memory a bank apart but I’ve got it to boot! Sometimes this hobby can be satisfying at last. Here is a picture with my known good jumper configuration for SX CPUs if anybody else wo bought this board is as incompetent in jumpering the board as I am.

That's great 😀 I'm glad yours is working, I posted my experience with the FIC 486-VIP IO2 the other day, where I haven't been so lucky yet. I didn't spot that memory configuration quirk in the manual, maybe that's what's stopped mine from working. 😀
The manuals that I can find for the the VIP IO2 are very patchy, seemingly missing most of the cache configuration and a few other jumpers.

What were you seeing on the POST card before it started working? Was it "--" or a number?

Thermalwrong wrote:

That's great 😀 I'm glad yours is working, I posted my experience with the FIC 486-VIP IO2 the other day, where I haven't been so lucky yet. I didn't spot that memory configuration quirk in the manual, maybe that's what's stopped mine from working. 😀
The manuals that I can find for the the VIP IO2 are very patchy, seemingly missing most of the cache configuration and a few other jumpers.

What were you seeing on the POST card before it started working? Was it "--" or a number?

I've got the tip for the memory quirk from here Re: Need help with FIC 486-VIP-IO and AMD 486 120mhz. You already found this I assume?: ftp://ftp.fic.com.tw/motherboard/manual/486/486-vip-io2/ My post card just showed me --.-- the whole time. Don't give up!

Thank you! 😁

It turned out that the manual was wrong for the placement of the resistor networks with AMD DX4 processors - it should be in RN40 instead of RN13. And I had a couple of other jumpers wrong. It's finally booting - I Think I changed too many things at once, because I'm also doing the slot 1 & slot 3 setup with 2 double-sided 8mb SIMMs, but it's working at last.

It doesn't want to boot with any of my EDO memory, which is strange / a bit of a shame since my Advantech PCA-6145 SBC has the same northbridge and does work with EDO.

Now if only I could get the PS/2 mouse support working, the chipset is supposed to support it without a KBC fitted, but that's not working 😒

Thermalwrong wrote:

Thank you! :D […]
Show full quote

Thank you! 😁

It turned out that the manual was wrong for the placement of the resistor networks with AMD DX4 processors - it should be in RN40 instead of RN13. And I had a couple of other jumpers wrong. It's finally booting - I Think I changed too many things at once, because I'm also doing the slot 1 & slot 3 setup with 2 double-sided 8mb SIMMs, but it's working at last.

It doesn't want to boot with any of my EDO memory, which is strange / a bit of a shame since my Advantech PCA-6145 SBC has the same northbridge and does work with EDO.

Now if only I could get the PS/2 mouse support working, the chipset is supposed to support it without a KBC fitted, but that's not working 😒

Eleanor1967 wrote:

Thermalwrong wrote:

That's great 😀 I'm glad yours is working, I posted my experience with the FIC 486-VIP IO2 the other day, where I haven't been so lucky yet. I didn't spot that memory configuration quirk in the manual, maybe that's what's stopped mine from working. 😀
The manuals that I can find for the the VIP IO2 are very patchy, seemingly missing most of the cache configuration and a few other jumpers.

What were you seeing on the POST card before it started working? Was it "--" or a number?

I've got the tip for the memory quirk from here Re: Need help with FIC 486-VIP-IO and AMD 486 120mhz. You already found this I assume?: ftp://ftp.fic.com.tw/motherboard/manual/486/486-vip-io2/ My post card just showed me --.-- the whole time. Don't give up!

Thanks for those links Eleanor1967. That actually helped out quite a bit. Most of the jumper settings are right on the board, but not all. Installed an AMD 486 DX2-66 and it would not post at first. Double checked the jumpers and I had to reset J7 since the BIOS had a password. Had trouble at first locating J7. I noticed the cap near the CPU was loose so I soldered it back on to the board. Then it posted right away. Did some testing and noticed with my configuration I cannot enable burst write or the floppy drive will not boot properly off a DOS boot disk. I have 32MB fast page memory installed. Quite happy with the results and I was able to test my Mach64 VLB card and alas it definitely has problems. I tried it on another VLB board previously and it came up with nothing but garbage. With this motherboard it does odd things to the board like memory does not count up properly at post when it's installed. It does boot, but strange things happen with the system like I mentioned. The good news is I have a few PCI video cards that perform well on this board. Overall a great purchase for me and a good deal. Ukraine for the win this time.

No burst write if I want to boot from the floppy properly.

Motherboard posted perfect after soldering the loose VRM cap next to the CPU.

Ran Chris's 3D Bench for giggles. Works good, but not the fastest results on a 66MHz CPU.

The AMD DX2-66 is benching properly. Using NSSI here.

Working on organizing my stuff and also my storage area.

Trying to figure out what to do with dead hardware.. as in stuff that is too dead to try to fix.

Should I try making some keychains or other stuff from chipsets and parts of circuit board.. maybe encase them in resin to keep the pieces nice? I see some of this stuff on Etsy and wonder if anybody actually buys any of it.

Some pieces such as CR2032 battery holders and some other things I will harvest.. but not exactly sure what I should do with the left over parts.

I took a Soundscape Elite for a spin. Had it sitting in a box complete for years...it might be new for all I know. Interesting card...very orchestral midi...but the worst Adlib emulation I have ever heard. I think it tries to route it back through the wavetable synth and fails badly. Digital sound was OK, although at a SB2.0 level. MT32 emulation was pretty good, some games sounded excellent in it. GM in Doom sounded weird...maybe because flutey orchestral sound isn't' so great for heavy metal inspired midi tracks. A strange beast overall.

I took two packets of graphics cards PCI and AGP 1x/2x

Still looking for a replacement CRT monitor. Been messaging several sellers but I haven't got any reply and the few who replied to me don't ship and offer local pickup only. The perspective is quite bleak for me at the moment, forcing me to stick with the current one I have, that doesn't work reliably due to a colour bleeding problem. I hope in a miracle at this point. 😢

To get even more realistic feeling in BBS'es with my old 386 computer, i ordered USB->COM adapter + some port converters. (On picture)

This monstrosity actually does work! DB9 -> NULL modem adapter(switches RX and TX) -> DB9 to DB25 -> Gender changer

No need to load packet drivers and hack telnet stuff with zmodem protocols etc. Pure experience on the retro machine side. (Y)

Hayes modem is emulated from my main pc. One application (tcpser) can map phone nr to a url, another app (Internet Modem) accepts url as phone number.

GigAHerZ wrote:

To get even more realistic feeling in BBS'es with my old 386 computer, i ordered USB->COM adapter + some port converters. (On picture)

This monstrosity actually does work! DB9 -> NULL modem adapter(switches RX and TX) -> DB9 to DB25 -> Gender changer

No need to load packet drivers and hack telnet stuff with zmodem protocols etc. Pure experience on the retro machine side. (Y)

Can you explain what this actually does? What does the USB end connect to?

He's emulating a modem connection from his main pc to he retro pc instead of using a nic and setting up the packet drivers and related software.