VOGONS


Reply 11820 of 27059, by Gered

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oeuvre wrote:
Gered wrote:

I'm using a method I saw mentioned over on the thinkpads.com forums where you just scrape it off with an old credit card or something similar. It's a bit slow going in my case, but I'm getting there. The last time I tried cleaning off this sticky rubber crap on a Thinkpad with a magic eraser and I felt like it didn't do as great a job as this seems to be doing so far.

Try a magic eraser. Works wonders. Clean the surfaces first with rubbing/isopropyl alcohol.

Unfortunately as I found out previously, a magic eraser is not exactly a magically perfect solution 🙁 In fact the last time I tried it (on a different Thinkpad), it just made the lid worse. I've noticed other people having mixed experiences using magic erasers with Thinkpads where the rubber coating has gone sticky and gross... wonder if it has to do with how "bad" it has gotten. *shrugs*

486DX2-66/16MB/S3 Trio32 VLB/SBPro2/GUS
P233 MMX/64MB/Voodoo2/Matrox/YMF719/GUS CD3
Duron 800/256MB/Savage4 Pro/SBLive (IN PROGRESS)
Toshiba 430CDT

Reply 11821 of 27059, by PTherapist

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Cleaned up my Sega Master System & Mega Drive consoles a bit. They're in a slightly better state now. The Master System in particular was rather disgusting inside.

KTp2ykRh.jpg

Pulled my games out of storage too. Couldn't find about 8 of them nor my Master System Converter, I really should get my retro storage more organised.

I've been having to go through the games 1 at a time, cleaning the contacts on the cartridges of each one. The amount of black/grey gunk that comes off each cartridge is astonishing, but they all appear to be working so far.

Never had too many games for either system, money was tight when I was a kid and games for the Commodore 64 were so much more affordable. 🤣

Reply 11822 of 27059, by GigAHerZ

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Tried to debug my 386 machine: Motherboard cache error checking software [386]

Wasn't able to detect the problem yet. But i found out that EZ-Drive has a sys file (ezmem.sys) that you can load in config.sys before anything else, that frees up 5KB of conv. memory that the overriding bios for hdds originally takes. So no drawback on using EZ-Drive!
Also properly configured my soundblaster card so cd-rom is now on the sound card's ide port, while hdd is attached to the super-io card.

At least some interesting things found. 😀

Next thing to try out is to use a real hard drive and see, if problems are created by the use of CF card. I have a perfect 504MB hdd for that. (But if possible at all, i would avoid using any moving parts in my retro PCs...)

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!

Reply 11823 of 27059, by dkarguth

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Recapped my newly acquired IBM 5175 professional graphics display. This particular example had been slightly modified to take a VGA signal sometime in its life, so I'm going to use it with my IBM AT.

xEvKO8Zl.jpg

"And remember, this fix is only temporary, unless it works." -Red Green

Reply 11824 of 27059, by bjwil1991

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The picture is amazing.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 11826 of 27059, by Cyrix200+

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dkarguth wrote:
Recapped my newly acquired IBM 5175 professional graphics display. This particular example had been slightly modified to take a […]
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Recapped my newly acquired IBM 5175 professional graphics display. This particular example had been slightly modified to take a VGA signal sometime in its life, so I'm going to use it with my IBM AT.

xEvKO8Zl.jpg

Beautiful 😀

1982 to 2001

Reply 11827 of 27059, by creepingnet

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I bet this must be a trip for whoever is monitoring the Vogons domain....

I'm posting this from the 1989 GEM 286 computer which I worked on today, did a few more tweaks...I'm using DOSLYNX 1.39 BTW.

- Added EMS Driver, quite an improvement (EMM286)

- Tweaked Arachne 1.97 GPL a bit, getting better speed wise. Kind of amazing a 30 year old computer can handle 1024x768 and render something.

- Tweaked and finally got DOSLYNX working, all I had wrong was the connection type was set to BOOTP in the DOSLYNX.CFG, changed that to DHCP and now it's happy. The difference between DOSLYNX and ARACHNE is like night and day.

I'm actually quite enjoying DOSLYNX TBH, it's not that slow at all, surprising considering this is a 12 MHz 286 I'm typing this on. Some other tweaks have made the appearance of pages more pleasant, and I'm still shocked I could logon to my acct here.

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 11828 of 27059, by RandomStranger

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For a time now I wanted a machine that is a bit more accessible than most of what I have. Most of those are under a pile of other PCs or disassembled in boxes and I'm often too lazy to get them running to pleasure myself with them. I had a chance to save an old laptop from being scrapped. It's an ASUS L7200, which was an entry level laptop from around 2000 (give or take a year). It came with it's original charger, bag, driver CD, users manual, and some other disks.

ukUmaqCl.jpg VZ0SNdhl.jpg

It was probably dropped. It has a little crack at the hinge a white line at the top of the on the screen and some flickering when I'm bending it so there must be some issues around the ribbon cable and the floppy drive doesn't read any of my disks and screaches as if the drive belt fell off. I will have to look under the hood, but otherwise it's in good condition and runs really nicely.

I'm currently running it with Windows 98 and planning to downgrade to 95. I'm having some issues setting up the audio driver. It doesn't want to work even from it's own driver CD for some reason.

It's performance is decent for the era of games I'm targetting. My only issue is that ASUS decided to solder a slice of potato on the motherboard to handle graphics. It's a Silicon Motion SM910 Lynx chip with 2MB SGRAM. I'd expect at least some form of 3D acceleration even if it's in name only from a laptop this young, but I'll have to do without it.
Carmageddon, International Rally Championship and Worms Armageddon, which I tried so far runs nicely, however with Quake I have to go down to 320×240 resolution to keep the framerate at a playable level.

Over all I think it will be worth keeping it on my desk after a bit of fixing. I recently orderd Tomb Raider 1 and 2 and I'm curious whether it can run them at a decent speed or I'll have to go over to my desktop Pentium MMX or one of the Pentium 2s.

sreq.png retrogamer-s.png

Reply 11829 of 27059, by Salient

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A couple of days ago though;

Two of my kids were doing some retro gaming (Re-Volt on the Sega Dreamcast):
retromay201901.jpg

But of course I was in for the REAL retro-thing:
retromay201902.jpg

MIDI comparison website: << Wavetable.nl >>
(Always) looking for: Any Wavetable daughterboard, MIDI Module (GM/GS/XG)

Reply 11830 of 27059, by keenmaster486

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Added a Ralink RT2561 MiniPCI WiFi card to my IBM Thinkpad A20m. A pretty cool upgrade, considering it can do WPA2 security if you follow dr_st's instructions on his website (just google and you can find it).

It actually feels kind of surreal having integrated WiFi with WPA2 on a retro Windows 98 laptop.

The only drawback I have noticed is that the range of reception seems to have decreased quite a bit, probably because this particular machine was not really designed to have a WiFi antenna underneath it. There's a lot of metal surrounding that antenna, and it probably is in just about the worst spot on the machine.

Plus this does mean that I had to forego the Ethernet/modem card, but that's OK.

But it works, and that's what I was looking for.

Posting from the machine now, connected to my main home WiFi instead of the unsecured network I have set up for my retro computers.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 11831 of 27059, by yawetaG

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Installed a vintage expansion board in a vintage keyboard:

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I used the special Roland screwdriver that was provided with the expansion board, of course.

Reply 11832 of 27059, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Clearing a few old boxes - came across a nice new retro mouse mat

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Reply 11833 of 27059, by McBierle

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Made my self a custom "pcb holder" (correct word?). 🤣

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Reply 11834 of 27059, by MMaximus

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yawetaG wrote:

Installed a vintage expansion board in a vintage keyboard:

IMG_0555.jpg

I used the special Roland screwdriver that was provided with the expansion board, of course.

Cool! Is it an SR-JV80 board? which one?

Hard Disk Sounds

Reply 11835 of 27059, by yawetaG

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MMaximus wrote:
yawetaG wrote:

Installed a vintage expansion board in a vintage keyboard:

IMG_0555.jpg

I used the special Roland screwdriver that was provided with the expansion board, of course.

Cool! Is it an SR-JV80 board? which one?

JV-35/50/90/1000 expansion board. There were two, one providing a JV-35 engine and GM sound set on a board (VE-GS1), and the other providing a JV-90 engine and the JV-80/1000 sound set plus PN-JV80-04 Contemporary Composer sound set on a board (VE-JV1). And when I write "engine" I mean it's basically the heart of a synth on a board, with all parameters accessible via MIDI (unfortunately Roland borked the integration of the boards into their host synths, so accessing all parameters via the user interface isn't possible)...

Reply 11836 of 27059, by ssokolow

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Managed to fit in a bit of work on my far-too-backlogged effort to build a DOS installer toolkit analogous to InnoSetup or NSIS.

Specifically, I refactored the internals and, while I was at it, found ways to tune the routines I'd already written to shave down the final binary size by 74 bytes. (Mainly stuff like mutating pass-by-value arguments rather than using temporary variables and refactoring loops to produce tighter code, with another 18 bytes of potential savings on offer once I've got some asserts in place to ensure they don't cause hard-to-identify brekage if someone tries to build it under a memory model where the Program Segment Prefix is no longer in the same segment.)

Internet Archive: My Uploads
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I also try to announce retro-relevant stuff on on Mastodon.

Reply 11837 of 27059, by keenmaster486

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Received an IBM Thinkpad 600E in the mail, and set it up. It will be replacing the Thinkpad A20m, as the A20m is simply too large and heavy.

So far I am impressed. The keyboard is very nice, much nicer than the A20m, and more akin to the keyboard on the Thinkpad 560 series. The Pentium II 400 MHz CPU ticks along just fine so far with anything Windows 98 can handle. The 1024x768 but still 13 inch screen is nice, as 14 or 15 inch screen laptops are just a little too large for me.

An SSD upgrade has maxed out the IDE interface. PCMCIA 54mbps WiFi card works nicely, and if I enable "pipelining" in RetroZilla, browsing the internet is zippy, and I am getting download speeds of 700 KB/s consistently, pushing 1 MB/s.

The battery will require a rebuild. I'll attempt it tonight. But I also have a battery for the "UltraSlimBay" coming in the mail. I'll also be replacing the CMOS battery.

Making this post from said machine.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 11838 of 27059, by Thermalwrong

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Nice, the Thinkpad 600 series is one of my favourites - what's the rubbery coating like on your one? It's mostly gone sticky / been removed on my 600X.

I'm also quite keen to know how you get on with repairing the battery - now that it's so old there's no chinese knock-off replacements left, that's become more necessary.

Reply 11839 of 27059, by keenmaster486

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The coating is definitely coming off. There was a sticker on one of the corners that the original owner had attempted to remove, unsuccessfully, in the process scraping off some of the coating surrounding it. I removed it all the way and much of the coating in that area came off.

Basically, if you touch it wrong with a fingernail, it comes off 🤣

It will need work at some point, but for now, it is fine. It's not a museum piece, but it doesn't look horrible. After cleaning, it looks acceptable at least.

Last night I replaced the CMOS battery, upgraded the RAM to 544 MB (wow! 32 MB onboard, two 256 MB sticks of PC-100. All I had to do was limit Win98's file cache and swap file, although I'm not sure what it would actually do if it had to use ALL the memory), and finished installing some software.

It now has Windows 98, Office 97, RetroZilla, Outlook Express 5.5 for email (first OE that works with modern Gmail), KernelEx with the new "core updates" (not sure when I will use this; tried K-meleon 74 but it was absurdly slow even with JS turned off), PuTTY, FileZilla, etc. etc... basically all my "core" software that I always use. Haven't worked on media player stuff yet but that will happen today.

I tried some games on it. DOS games all seem to work fine - *except* for some 2D games when the screen is in scale-up mode. Commander Keen causes the screen scaler to go bonkers. Turning it off makes it work, but of course then you just get a tiny screen in the middle. In Jazz Jackrabbit you can see a couple "ghosts" of the rabbit each a couple pixels away from him as he moves around, another screen scaling issue. Epic Pinball needs MS-DOS mode. But then again I didn't really buy this computer specifically for playing DOS games. I have more compatible systems for that. I want it for maximum portable retro fun, good Internet connectivity, and productivity to the max.

The current version of Sonic Robo Blast II does not run with KernelEx, sadly. I know one of the developers released a binary for Windows 9x, which I was able to test back when it was released and it works - however, I cannot find the game files for that version anywhere (2.1.8 ). The current version is 2.1.23 and it definitely will not load. But version 2.0.6 DOES work, with vanilla 98SE too (as long as you update MSVCRT.DLL to version 6.1), as I remember from back in the day when I used to play this on an old Pentium III. 640x480 works, but you can tell it is struggling sometimes. 320x240 is zippy.

The battery repair may or may not happen today - I am going to bring it in to Batteries + Bulbs and see if they can do something about it. I heard somewhere that if all the battery needs is a "boost" (basically, if the voltage dropped below the protection circuits' threshold and now it won't charge but the cells are still good) then the word on the street is Batteries + Bulbs might do that for free, as they will have a "smart charger". Not sure if this is true or not. I do know that they offer battery rebuilds but I would rather do it myself, as I have some nice Samsung 18650 cells that I've been itching to use for something.

I just don't really like getting into these old batteries. They are so utterly cramped inside that you wonder how they were put back together in the first place. Plus you basically have to destroy the case in order to open it.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.