Bought a i865 socket 478 board from over sea's, it arrived yesterday. Tested it well then loaded Win98 on a small drive. Soon it will be going into a small tower case.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-01-04, 04:24:

Can I get an ELI5 on why Amigas are so expensive compared to basically every other vintage PC? It seems the cheapest HDD equipped models go for around $500 USD.

Thats because a good running one without any caps issues are hard to find. Not as masny were sold compared to otherr systems either.

Here is the manual and some better photos of the Cardinal CP600. If someone wants to up this to bitsavers please do so. I'll leave this up for a week or so. Cheers.

https://mega.nz/#!z6QDGCwb!4qWa6-tBoElYDSI7mO … _58KyCnMME9a0_A

Some kind soul uploaded it to bitsavers.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cardinal/cp600/

Fired up my old Unisys CWD5001 just to make sure it still works. I try to run it about an every 6 months or so for an hour. Nothing has been done to it since I got it in early 2002. Appears it was used doing some eeprom programming from what software is on it, has Win95 original plus odd apps. My guess is the scsi card was used to access an external cdrom or ??. The eeprom software all points to COM1. Forgot to take a pic of the Windows desktop/apps. Smallest Pentium board and machine I own 🤣.

I'm thinking about creating a topic to discuss Windows 3.x related things, I have a WFW 3.11 VM with some nice apps installed in, and I wanted to find some ppl to discuss many things, for example, how to improve its stability, because sometimes it just stops at splash screen on start, some other times it starts flawlessly. I'm guessing it's something to do with DHCP which causes it.

I also want to talk about Win NT 3.51 and maybe create a VM for that to try and run Retrozilla, but NT 3.51 probably does not let me run DOS Games.

But I don't know in which forum section it fits in...

PS: For whoever may be asking why I want 3.x, I was never a fan of the new "start menu" GUI change that is still live to this date, even in Windows 10. I have a Windows 2000 Professional VM just for games like Grand Prix 4 and FIFA 99.

Good idea ! Not sure where the topic should go either but running native Win 3.1 on old hardware is diff than running it in a VM and is why there is a PC Emulation section. Am sure one of the admins could tell you.

Built my Lo-tech ISA CompactFlash Adapter. All went well, including the SMT stuff on the back!

However, I thought I would have a compatible EEPROM so I did not order one. Of course, I don't have anything compatible. Dumb me! Now I'm looking for a cheap, fast and reliable way to get one. Mouser has them, but shipping costs are too high 🙁 I don't trust anything on eBay to be real when it comes to logic chips.

Grrr

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-01-04, 04:24:

Can I get an ELI5 on why Amigas are so expensive compared to basically every other vintage PC? It seems the cheapest HDD equipped models go for around $500 USD.

Because Amiga are objectively the best PCs ever.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-01-04, 04:24:

Can I get an ELI5 on why Amigas are so expensive compared to basically every other vintage PC? It seems the cheapest HDD equipped models go for around $500 USD.

Guess I'm finally gettin too old for the interweb slang. Had to look up what the heck "ELI5" was.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-01-04, 04:24:

Can I get an ELI5 on why Amigas are so expensive compared to basically every other vintage PC? It seems the cheapest HDD equipped models go for around $500 USD.

Well, you live in the USA where the Amiga didn't do well, so they are rare and expensive there. Or maybe you only looked for the models that are very sought-after? Don't even think of getting an A3000 or A4000, they cost a fortune. You can get an A500 + ACA-500 (for speed-up, more RAM, and CF as HDD), or an A600 quite cheap. An A1200 is way under $500 USD, too.

Next CPU tray done.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4086334

liqmat wrote on 2020-01-04, 23:07:

Here is the manual and some better photos of the Cardinal CP600. If someone wants to up this to bitsavers please do so. I'll lea […]
Show full quote

Here is the manual and some better photos of the Cardinal CP600. If someone wants to up this to bitsavers please do so. I'll leave this up for a week or so. Cheers.

https://mega.nz/#!z6QDGCwb!4qWa6-tBoElYDSI7mO … _58KyCnMME9a0_A

Some kind soul uploaded it to bitsavers.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cardinal/cp600/

Wow! I rarely have luck with that, despite having known Al online for like 20 years or more. You must have met his exacting quality standards!

Incidentally, Cardinal Technologies was a short distance's drive from where I grew up. I actually worked for a few former Cardinal execs for their dot-com startup back a couple of years before VOGONS was born. If I remember correctly, Cardinal Technologies was an RCA spinoff.

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-05, 03:11:

But I don't know in which forum section it fits in...

VM discussion is appropriate for the PC Emulation forum.

Stiletto wrote on 2020-01-05, 22:40:

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-05, 03:11:

But I don't know in which forum section it fits in...

VM discussion is appropriate for the PC Emulation forum.

Thank you! I will look for it this week when I can.

Put some fans on some Slot 1 processors for later installation. 🤣 nothing really to see unless you have never done it.

Just replaced the fans on my ASUS V9950 Ultra. The bearings were worn out, making terrible sounds, so I got replacement fans that I mounted today.
These things were an absolute pain to find online (dual fans with a very odd placement of the mounting holes). In the end I found exactly one seller in China on eBay who had them in stock and was shipping to Germany. Took a few weeks but finally they were in the mail today.

Last night I was playing around with the EasyFlash 3 cartridge on my Commodore 64 and ended up accidentally erasing everything on the cartridge, including the system image. A bit of a pain in the backside, but my own fault.

So today I basically had to reflash everything back to the cartridge. It's a good thing I have backups of everything that's on there and after about an hour it was all back as before.

On another retro related note, I found an old multi-voltage DC laptop power supply that I was thinking about using for a retro system. I thought I'd test out it's voltages first with my multimeter - good job too, as this power supply was bad, outputting much lower voltages than it should have been. Glad I didn't just plug it in first!

Gotta love using multimeters on power supplies before using them.

Still mainly designing and 3d-printing CPU trays. What started as a good idea to get some tidiness into my CPU collection ended in the conclusion that I own too many CPUs. 😉

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-06, 20:21:

Still mainly designing and 3d-printing CPU trays. What started as a good idea to get some tidiness into my CPU collection ended in the conclusion that I own too many CPUs. 😉

Don't you think that your trays are occuping too much space? That's cool, but can I make a suggestion? I had an idea. Why don't you design a tray for these CPUs like the ones for vintage disks?

Like this one: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/image … tL._SL1024_.jpg then you could have a mini case to protect each cpu inside this box. I think this idea fits more CPUs with the same space. I used to do that with my Game Gear cartridges.

Or this one if you're fancy to design a smaller one: https://getprostorage.com/wp-content/uploads/ … age-Case-05.jpg

EDIT: Here's how I used to do that with my Game Gear cartridges - this is not my collection, just googled for a similar image:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TeVB8xn1Y-8/maxresdefault.jpg