Just bought another MiTAC notebook. This time with an AMD K6 200 MHz. 😀

MiTAC... That name sure rings a bell to me, I know I've heard of this brand before but where? I can't remember for the life of me.

Anyways I didn't know they went as far as putting K6s in some of their laptops.

You probably heard of them because they built many well-known notebooks. The MiTAC 5033 was also sold e.g. by Fujitsu-Siemens as the Liteline 5033, by IPC as Topnote, etc. They are even still around and made notebooks until not that long ago.

I just brought home this Presario 4110EA from 2001. Seller bought it for his mom back in the day pretty much only for internet banking and it most likely has uptime more in dozens than hundreds of hours. It is in excellent condition apart from slight yellowing on the top of the case and bit of dust being in the storage. It has all the original peripherals including JBL speakers and it works flawlessly.

The machine itself is quite underwhelming. It was branded as "Internet PC", so although it has 850MHz Celeron and thus quite good CPU for turn of the millennium gaming, it only has 64MB RAM (expandable to 512MB), onboard graphics and no AGP slot. I am thinking of installing a FX5500 PCI or at least a Voodoo2 to get some gaming oomph out of it and of course adding couple of sticks of RAM.

Machine currently just sits on my shed as I just don't know yet what to do with it, but I already took the monitor and put it on my retro battlestation desk and attached it to my 1998 gaming PC. I haven't used a CRT since 2006 and I must say that I am thoroughly impressed of the motion smoothness and of course resolution scaling of these old cathode ray tubes. Although this Compaq FS740 is far from being a top model, it also produces very clear image. Overall experience is a night and day compared to any modern LCD I've used for retro computing.

But all in all, isn't that adorable looking little machine! Those curved lines appear also on the side of the monitor, so the whole machine has this nice chubby and rounded look.

derSammler wrote:

You probably heard of them because they built many well-known notebooks. The MiTAC 5033 was also sold e.g. by Fujitsu-Siemens as the Liteline 5033, by IPC as Topnote, etc. They are even still around and made notebooks until not that long ago.

I remember now, it was the MiTAC 4023 that I once saw, it was a 486 laptop AFAIK, there isn't too many pictures of the 4023, well, maybe I have yet to see one in person.

This is how the 4023 looked AFAIK (not my picture by the way, this was one of the only "clear enough" pics I could find of this machine):

Either that or you just remembered reading my other thread:

MiTAC 4022 - a vintage 486 notebook (1994)

😉

No I definitely saw it first in a (now gone) video on YouTube (but back then I couldn't put a model # on it, I only knew it was a MiTAC), but then I saw your topic about the 4022 (which might be the predecessor to the 4023) dunno why it got stuck in my mind, presumably because the 4023 has a uncanny (well to my eyes) ressemblence with a particular PowerBook.

Edit: also while searching for pictures of the 4022, I mistyped "Mitac 4023" instead of 4022, forgot to add that.

Vynix wrote:

presumably because the 4023 has a uncanny (well to my eyes) ressemblence with a particular PowerBook.

Well, I'm glad Apple never was so stupid to put the screen off-center. 😁

Early Christmas present - Intel Batman

Likely a dead non-socketed Dallas chip so there should be a minor soldering work. But other than that looks OK.

Why are these boards called "Batman's Revenge" and what is special about them?

appiah4 wrote:

Why are these boards called "Batman's Revenge" and what is special about them?

That's a codename used by Intel. This is a Socket 4 board, designed for Pentium 60, Pentium 66 and Overdrives 120 and 133. It's a bit uncommon (at least, compared to Socket 5/7) because it was an expensive platform that could only outperform 486DX4 in certain applications.

I have a board like this. Basically it was a "money is no object" alternative to late 486 boards. It's not as boring and common as Socket 3 PCI boards, but it's also easier than most VLB configurations.

One thing to note is that it can be slower than DX4 in some games. Particularly in Duke Nukem 3D and other games using Build engine — those games depend on CPU frequency.

Also it has a turbo option that slows down Pentium to mid-levels. Wing Commander plays nicely on a system like this.

jheronimus explained it well.

My board appears to be actually just "Batman". "Batman Revenge" should have an extra voltage regulator next to the power connector designed to run early P66 chips a little more stable at 5.27V.

mpe wrote:

My board appears to be actually just "Batman". "Batman Revenge" should have an extra voltage regulator next to the power connector designed to run early P66 chips a little more stable at 5.27V.

That place is actually to provide 3.3V and was later populated for the socket 5 version of the board (which is identical apart from the chipset - it uses NX instead of LX).

jheronimus wrote:

Yet another haul — this December has been particularly kind to me. I now have a bit of an issue, because I've nearly doubled my […]
Show full quote

Yet another haul — this December has been particularly kind to me. I now have a bit of an issue, because I've nearly doubled my collection, and now I have to let go of some items, but nearly every thing in the last three hauls was new to me. So, here's what I got today for a total of 55 USD:

Two combo floppy drives by Epson, a Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM and a regular 5.25 inch drive

A bunch of old HDDs. Mostly MFM, but there is also an early IDE drive in the mix. I really like the disk on a panel with an MFM controller.

Bunch of MFM controllers, two EGA/VGA cards and regular ISA IDE controller.

SCSI ISA controllers

GeForce 256 and AWE32 Value

DX2 and DX4 Overdrives

A multi I/O with what looks like a Microsoft InPort Mouse port (at least the mouse fits), two IDE2CF adapters and two keyboards adapters (PS2>AT and AT>PS2).

And now the most interesting part: UMAX S900:

On the surface it looks like a regular ATX case akin to a Dell Dimension T500 (and it's really the same case by Palo Alto), but it's actually a Mac. Just not made by Apple.

It was upgraded to a G3 500 MHz CPU:

It also somehow has 400MB of RAM, three SCSI hard drives and 6 PCI slots. Guess this machine really needs a Voodoo!

Reach out to Compgeke, he loves these old Macintosh clones.

derSammler wrote:

mpe wrote:

My board appears to be actually just "Batman". "Batman Revenge" should have an extra voltage regulator next to the power connector designed to run early P66 chips a little more stable at 5.27V.

That place is actually to provide 3.3V and was later populated for the socket 5 version of the board (which is identical apart from the chipset - it uses NX instead of LX).

Yes. You are referring to Intel Plato (Premiere PCI II) which was an early Socket 5 board and was used a very similar layout and indeed used 3.3V regulator. But Socket 4 Batman & Batman's Revenge predate that board. The later used 5.27V regulator on that position as there was no need for 3.3V on Socket 4 board. Early P66 chips struggled to run reliably at 5V.

From the Premiere/PCI (Batman) manual:

Premiere/PCI Baby-AT motherboards equipped with 66 MHz Pentium processors have a voltage control circuit that regulates Vcc to the CPU and frequency synthesizer. The voltage regulation accomodates a variety of Intel CPUs and increases the overall robustness and reliability of the motherboard. Boards without the voltage regulator circuitry cannot reliably use 66 MHz Pentium processors.

jheronimus wrote:

Yet another haul — this December has been particularly kind to me. I now have a bit of an issue, because I've nearly doubled my […]
Show full quote

Yet another haul — this December has been particularly kind to me. I now have a bit of an issue, because I've nearly doubled my collection, and now I have to let go of some items, but nearly every thing in the last three hauls was new to me. So, here's what I got today for a total of 55 USD:

Two combo floppy drives by Epson, a Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM and a regular 5.25 inch drive

Those combo drives... Worth it!

Got one of those myself in my 486. 'Twas free.

hello can any body help me with recognize this keyboard please?

gdjacobs wrote:

jheronimus wrote:

Yet another haul — this December has been particularly kind to me. I now have a bit of an issue, because I've nearly doubled my […]
Show full quote

Yet another haul — this December has been particularly kind to me. I now have a bit of an issue, because I've nearly doubled my collection, and now I have to let go of some items, but nearly every thing in the last three hauls was new to me. So, here's what I got today for a total of 55 USD:

Two combo floppy drives by Epson, a Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM and a regular 5.25 inch drive

Those combo drives... Worth it!

Yeah, those combo drives are nice but if one part goes bad it’s not to east to find a replacement.

It arrived.. and works. 😁