I was always a fan of the QuickShot II Turbo (the red base / black stick ones). Though they don't age very well as they're not very well built inside.

In saying that though, I did recently get hold of 2 Archer Joysticks that were a rebadge of the QuickShot II Turbo, but they were built even more shoddily and literally fell to pieces when I tried to repair them.

I still have 2 QuickShot II Turbos, 1 works great but is a little over sensitive on the up axis whilst the other has some issues with holding down certain directions and firing at the same time (I'll get around to fixing that one day).

PTherapist wrote:

I was always a fan of the QuickShot II Turbo (the red base / black stick ones). Though they don't age very well as they're not very well built inside.

In saying that though, I did recently get hold of 2 Archer Joysticks that were a rebadge of the QuickShot II Turbo, but they were built even more shoddily and literally fell to pieces when I tried to repair them.

I still have 2 QuickShot II Turbos, 1 works great but is a little over sensitive on the up axis whilst the other has some issues with holding down certain directions and firing at the same time (I'll get around to fixing that one day).

Are earlier Quickshots actually decent joysticks? I have a gameport Quickshot Warrior from around the late Windows 3.1 era and that thing is hot garbage. It was new in box when I received it and I never could get it calibrated or functioning well.

merry christmas to me.
installed some upgrades for my pentium 4 rig.
asus p4c800-e deluxe, geforce 6800 ultra and corsair xms platinum ddr-500

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Are earlier Quickshots actually decent joysticks? I have a gameport Quickshot Warrior from around the late Windows 3.1 era and that thing is hot garbage. It was new in box when I received it and I never could get it calibrated or functioning well.

You can't really compare the PC ones with those for Atari/Amiga/C64, as they are completely different inside, even if they may look the same. However, apart from the Quickshot II Plus (1984) and Quickshot II Turbo (1985), I would avoid the rest.

I was lucky enough to own a QuickShot II Turbo when I had my Atari 800XL and it was awesome. I really enjoyed the QuickShot II Plus on a friend's C64 - it was pretty good.

That said, my experience is worthless today. Majority of my 8/16-bit home computer gaming was done with QuickShot Python 1s which I also loved back then, but can't stand today.

Pretty much all joysticks were probably shit back then.

QuickShot II Turbo on an Atari 800XL? That's what I had set up 2 days ago. 😁

I don't think these joysticks were bad back then. It's just that we abused them rather hard when we were young. On the one hand because we didn't care, on the other hand because the games demanded that. Now there were some really shitty joysticks back then as well, no question.

damn, that bad boy requires 2 molex plugs

oeuvre wrote:

damn, that bad boy requires 2 molex plugs

somehow, santa knew exactly what i wanted.
i must have been extra good this year. 😀

Been working on setting up the interim TUV4X, so when the replacement arrives I'll have everything up and running once again. In the meantime, I had some fun at overclocking the new RDD motherboard. First, I begun by increasing the FSB in the BIOS, and managed to reach a stable overclock at 154MHz of FSB and 1.5v core voltage. If I tried to go beyond 154MHz, the system would fail to POST when you turned it on. Since I have fitted two 1GB ECC sticks, I've enabled ECC mode and made the machine stable. I was happy.

Then, I remembered I had SetFSB in my data drive, and thought to give it a spin, to see if I could push the FSB a little bit more. And fate has been friendly to me, since the program supports the PLL of my motherboard!

That allowed me to push the FSB up to 165MHz (with the memory running at 3-2-2-6), although I had to raise the core voltage to 1.7v in order to stabilize it, and as a safety measure, I also have increased the I/O voltage to 3.6v. I've been stress testing it with 3DMark 99, 2001SE and 2003, ran Final Reality and then a 32M run of SuperPi. The system is rock solid.

I've been amazed by how fast it became, the Tualatin can surely pack a punch. Now it's running at 1728MHz without breaking a sweat, and none of the cards are having issues despite the AGP and PCI busses are running out of spec.

Now, I just hope to find other two 1GB PC133 ECC sticks that can run stable at such an high frequency, so I can expand the RAM of the system to 4GB, which is incredibly overkill, but who cares: 4GB of RAM on a Tualatin is cool nonethless. 🤣

Testing out the Virtual IO iGlasses!

Today I installed my brand new AdLib replica card into my 286 machine. The AdLib works beautifully, and it is a big improvement over the PC speaker. Tommorow's upgrades will consist of an 80287 XL, and a game port joystick card. Over the weekend, i'll do my final upgrade to the 286, which will be a CPU swap from the AMD 8 MHZ 286 to my NOS Harris 20 MHZ 286. Ive also bought an oscilliator socket and oscilliators to run the CPU at 10, 12 or 16 MHZ, depending on what my board and ISA bus handles. I'm a bit scared that i'll mess up the soldering job, but it's only 4 pins and i'll make sure to practice good until the weekend when I finally do the swap.

I also got a Sound Blaster X FI SB 0460 today and I installed that in my XP-era gaming rig. I have good headphones, and I am amazed at how immersive EAX audio technology is in games such as F.E.A.R. The SB card also makes music sound slightly better and it allows me to plug in multiple outputs at once.

Yay another adlib clone! Photos of the card? I sometimes wonder if I should replace the ES688+MusicQuest combintion in my 1987-1989 386SX25 (which is basically a stand-in 286) with Adlib+MusicQuest.. There are no games prior to 1990 that actually take advantage of SB's OPL3 or digital sound let alone an SB Pro, right?

Got my hands on a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro 13, rescued from the ol' corporate discard pile.

Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4GHz), 4GB of RAM, 250GB 5400rpm spinner, 8x Superdrive.

Not a bad machine per-se - as it contains nVidia's Geforce 320M/MCP89 chipset, which is a very good integrated chipset. It's the only Core 2 Mobile chipset that will allow 8GB DDR3 DIMMs per socket, yielding 16GB of RAM total (must be PC8500/1066MHz RAM, though. Any higher timing and the machine will simply not work). The integrated graphics performance were arguably better than the Intel HD3000 (Sandy)/HD4000 (Ivy) integrated GPUs and match the Geforce 8600 Go on normal usage, which is good for older games like Quake 4, Battlefield 2142, NHL 2002 and Star Wars Battlefront (the 2004 release). Man, I really miss old-school Apple and their repairability. Especially when compared to the current generation MBP13 sitting at my desk in the office.

So, what to do? Swap out the 4GB, tried some other pieces of RAM sitting at the old homestead (the G.Skill Ripjaw is PC3L-12800 if I remember correctly, and it refused to run on the machine at all), eventually found a pair of 8GB PC3-8500, popped in a Samsung Qvo 960 1TB SSD and reinstalled MacOS 10.13 (last version to have full CUDA support and works with non-metal compliant GPUs). The machine is held back by the Core 2 Duo/Penryn CPU, though. I kinda wished that nVidia didn't exit the chipset business and actually released the MCP99 for the Nehalem based mobiles.

Purchased and ran the machine off a 60w rated USB-C PD to Magsafe L-Tip adapter (because the Apple originals are such a piece of fragile crap, plus my power bricks/power banks are all USB-C PD nowadays). Works well enough.

Long term plans? Use it as an Era 6 vintage gaming machine - probably going to install a Bootcamp environment for Windows XP and Windows 7 (or 10), just to run some DX9 and 10/11 stuff on the hardware respectively.

On other news, finished Rowan's Airpower: Battle in the skies, working on a Dosbox/bare-metal install/config guide (SVGA support was a massive pain)/game review.

appiah4 wrote:

Yay another adlib clone! Photos of the card? I sometimes wonder if I should replace the ES688+MusicQuest combintion in my 1987-1989 386SX25 (which is basically a stand-in 286) with Adlib+MusicQuest.. There are no games prior to 1990 that actually take advantage of SB's OPL3 or digital sound let alone an SB Pro, right?

I unfourtunately did not get any pics of the card before I put it in. Ill put the manufacturer's stock photo below. It's a exact replica of the AdLib, execpt for the fact it has a different logo due to copyright reasons I am assuming. Personally, I feel like installing an Adlib into that system would be a good period correct choice. The good thing about the Adlib is the fact that you do not have to fiddle with jumpers or install drivers to get it to work. My card had all the jumpers not installed, but there is an option to install pin headers if you would like. You just plug the card in, and select the AdLib option in games, and everything works. I paid about 60 bucks for mine, pre assembled. It's a really good card. No clue what the volume knob on the back of mine is set at, but it is very loud and crisp. As far as games before 1990 supporting OPL3, I don't think that was a thing back then. There were some that took advantage of the Sound Blaster's PCM channel if I remember correctly, but personally I don't think you'd be missing out if you replaced the ESS688 with an AdLib. I think the SB Pro came out in 1991, so as far as games before 1990 using it I don't think so.

Nice.. Did it come with a metal bracket? Mine was my own solder project so it's not as clean as yours. It also has a volume shaft that is a few mm longer and and lacks a metal bracket, but I think it cost me half of what you paid so I can't complaing 🤣

appiah4 wrote:

Nice.. Did it come with a metal bracket? Mine was my own solder project so it's not as clean as yours. It also has a volume shaft that is a few mm longer and and lacks a metal bracket, but I think it cost me half of what you paid so I can't complaing 🤣

If you really want a metal bracket, it wouldn't be much harder than drilling two holes in a blank bracket with a step drill bit. A cheap one from Ebay or Aliexpress is good enough for that job. Drill on low rpm, with the bracket firmly clamped to a piece of wood.

Fastening tabs could be made from any piece of sheet metal, and soldered on with regular electronics solder. You'll probably need liquid flux for a good result though. Otherwise it's surprisingly simple to DIY a working spot welding machine, in it's basest form, only an old transformer and a piece of heavy gauge cable to replace the secondary winding is needed 😀

derSammler wrote:

Cleaned, fixed, and tested a couple of C64/Atari joysticks yesterday and today. Was quite interesting to see the differences in their construction and to choose the one that feels best while playing. May post more details in a separate thread later.

I settled on using this one, btw:

A Quickjoy II Turbo. It has the cheapest construction of all the various joysticks I own, but after cleaning and fixing it, it feels just as good as the other ones. Also, I have two of these; so should this one break, it's not much of a loss.

kaputnik wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Nice.. Did it come with a metal bracket? Mine was my own solder project so it's not as clean as yours. It also has a volume shaft that is a few mm longer and and lacks a metal bracket, but I think it cost me half of what you paid so I can't complaing 🤣

If you really want a metal bracket, it wouldn't be much harder than drilling two holes in a blank bracket with a step drill bit. A cheap one from Ebay or Aliexpress is good enough for that job. Drill on low rpm, with the bracket firmly clamped to a piece of wood.

Fastening tabs could be made from any piece of sheet metal, and soldered on with regular electronics solder. You'll probably need liquid flux for a good result though. Otherwise it's surprisingly simple to DIY a working spot welding machine, in it's basest form, only an old transformer and a piece of heavy gauge cable to replace the secondary winding is needed 😀

I'm really not crazy about the welding and whatnot so I guess I'll stick with a grey plastic 3D Print for the moment 😀

Also, went ahead and replaced the ES688 with the Adlib. The ES688 got relieved of duty on page 688 of this thread. 😎 I will put it to use elsewhere.

EDIT: Ooops, page 689 🤣

Had to manually eject a tape that would not eject at all in another VCR. Also attempted to repair it with some, but not all success. The motor that controls everything was stiff, so I cleaned it off and put in sewing machine oil on the shaft and spun it around to free it up since it felt like it was sticking.

The VCR is basically plug and play internally, especially the power supply. Never seen anything like it and seeing the inside of a VCR is pretty cool. Still need to do adjustments on the VCR, but I am getting pretty close at fixing it (rejects the tape when I insert it, which could be a stuck gear or something thereof).

appiah4 wrote:

I'm really not crazy about the welding and whatnot so I guess I'll stick with a grey plastic 3D Print for the moment :) […]
Show full quote

kaputnik wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Nice.. Did it come with a metal bracket? Mine was my own solder project so it's not as clean as yours. It also has a volume shaft that is a few mm longer and and lacks a metal bracket, but I think it cost me half of what you paid so I can't complaing 🤣

If you really want a metal bracket, it wouldn't be much harder than drilling two holes in a blank bracket with a step drill bit. A cheap one from Ebay or Aliexpress is good enough for that job. Drill on low rpm, with the bracket firmly clamped to a piece of wood.

Fastening tabs could be made from any piece of sheet metal, and soldered on with regular electronics solder. You'll probably need liquid flux for a good result though. Otherwise it's surprisingly simple to DIY a working spot welding machine, in it's basest form, only an old transformer and a piece of heavy gauge cable to replace the secondary winding is needed 😀

I'm really not crazy about the welding and whatnot so I guess I'll stick with a grey plastic 3D Print for the moment 😀

Also, went ahead and replaced the ES688 with the Adlib. The ES688 got relieved of duty on page 688 of this thread. 😎 I will put it to use elsewhere.

EDIT: Ooops, page 689 🤣

Mine did come with the metal bracket. I checked the image out of your replica, and it looks awesome! If possible, you should find a way to put the Adlib logo on that circuit board. Now that would be cool. Also, as far as putting a bracket on yours, I think this bracket from Mouser would do. I know others who made replica Adlibs used this same bracket. You just have to drill the holes for the audio jack and volume knob, and it is ready to go. How is the Adlib doing as a replacement for the ESS688? Are there any particular features you miss about it?

Link to bracket:
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Keystone … AaK7BsRT8JJQ%3D