appiah4 wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:50:

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:44:

Played with my new Furia-020 for my Amiga600. It has become quite the beast, my little Amiga600.

Furia.jpg

Are you experiencing the CPU clamping issues a lot of users of this card are having?

Nope. Not with the Furia-020. I can lift the entire machine, with all it's upgrades as it is in the picture. By grabbing the Furia it self. 😀

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:55:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:50:

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:44:

Played with my new Furia-020 for my Amiga600. It has become quite the beast, my little Amiga600.

Furia.jpg

Are you experiencing the CPU clamping issues a lot of users of this card are having?

Nope. Not with the Furia-020. I can lift the entire machine, with all it's upgrades as it is in the picture. By grabbing the Furia it self. 😀

Ahh, good for you. Just don't do that a lot because it does get loose over time from what I hear 😁

appiah4 wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:57:

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:55:

appiah4 wrote on 2020-02-14, 07:50:

Are you experiencing the CPU clamping issues a lot of users of this card are having?

Nope. Not with the Furia-020. I can lift the entire machine, with all it's upgrades as it is in the picture. By grabbing the Furia it self. 😀

Ahh, good for you. Just don't do that a lot because it does get loose over time from what I hear 😁

Yes... Those sockets get loose over time, if you insert and remove the accelerator a good number of times. However. I am not planning to remove it at any point in time. Unless it becomes broken. For that, I bought the active cooler (near silent or noise free) to keep it as cold as possible. Also. The machine have been recapped and I am using one of these Meanwell (65-something) PSU's that I have installed in an original Amiga500 PSU case. I bought the accelerator from the inventor him self. And yes. Running something with sound, that is games, demo or modules. Then I can not hear any fan noise. It is only when it is standing idle, I can hear a slight airflow hiss, from the fan it self.

Worked some more on an Dell LPX 486 motherboard I bought cheaply last year. Did most of this work the other day, but today just finalised a few tests:

The board was extremely picky about RAM, it required Parity RAM to even POST. But then even though it was posting, there was absolutely no display from the onboard VGA - it would turn on the monitor but just output a blank screen. No jumper settings on the board made a difference, other than 1 setting that disabled the onboard completely.

I didn't have a Riser card for it so I'd put off doing anything further for some time. The Riser slot looks identical to a regular ISA slot, but I was a bit wary of trying a card straight onto the slot. So I found an already faulty ISA Graphics Card from my collection (has memory issues) and thought I'd give it a go plugging directly into that slot - and it actually worked, so far as the faulty card allows. I was able to get into the BIOS and move around, however the system would freeze after about 30 seconds each time.

I'll have to test further with a working Graphics Card and see if I can get this thing to boot at all.

Today I have been creating a 'Golden Image' on a Pentium 4 HP/Compaq nx9010 laptop with Windows XP and some open source software ready to image the other ones that I have in my collection 😀

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-02-14, 12:37:

Today I have been creating a 'Golden Image' on a Pentium 4 HP/Compaq nx9010 laptop with Windows XP and some open source software ready to image the other ones that I have in my collection 😀

What tool did you use? I am testing out image creation, using DD on my Linux machine. (Learning or trying to image an Amiga HDD)

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-14, 13:21:

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-02-14, 12:37:

Today I have been creating a 'Golden Image' on a Pentium 4 HP/Compaq nx9010 laptop with Windows XP and some open source software ready to image the other ones that I have in my collection 😀

What tool did you use? I am testing out image creation, using DD on my Linux machine. (Learning or trying to image an Amiga HDD)

I'm using a copy of Norton/Symantec Ghost I got off of eBay last year. I have it installed to a bootable USB Flash Drive that has plenty of space to store the image as well. I believe Ghost works with Linux - as long as it's a version 'of the time' when the version of Ghost you has was released etc.

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-02-14, 14:20:

brostenen wrote on 2020-02-14, 13:21:

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-02-14, 12:37:

Today I have been creating a 'Golden Image' on a Pentium 4 HP/Compaq nx9010 laptop with Windows XP and some open source software ready to image the other ones that I have in my collection 😀

What tool did you use? I am testing out image creation, using DD on my Linux machine. (Learning or trying to image an Amiga HDD)

I'm using a copy of Norton/Symantec Ghost I got off of eBay last year. I have it installed to a bootable USB Flash Drive that has plenty of space to store the image as well. I believe Ghost works with Linux - as long as it's a version 'of the time' when the version of Ghost you has was released etc.

Well...
So far I am using DD to make an image file. If it works with Amiga FFS, then I believe it can be used for any other file systems and disks out there.
However. It is not the same as doing a standalone installer. For that you might need Ghost or something like that.
I know that you can remaster a Linux installation into a Live CD, if that is the goal. That however require some other tool than DD.

I was very happy testing my Athlon XP build (Building an Athlon XP Configuration on this days. This is what I got.). Yesterday tried some benchmarks before replace the graphic card. But... With 3DMark 02 system constantly reboots.
First thought: RAMs
So I tested the memory modules using MemTest86 and 2 of the 3 sticks (3x1GB) are with errors.
Now I have to find another set of memory to start all over again.

Slowly working on resurrecting a mortally-wounded IBM Thinkpad 760E that some waste of flesh had trod upon nearly 20 years ago. The display is shattered, but the plastic casing is fine. The bottom casing is cracked in the middle, but everything inside is fine. Alas, the CMOS battery is dead, but being an IBM, it won't allow you to use the system until that issue is remedied. The floppy drive had been swiped from it, making it even more fun to deal with. I'd have bought replacement parts years ago, but even then, I couldn't justify the excessive asking prices for anything, for a system I have no emotional attachment to.

Edit: Aaaand a proprietary cable was snapped clean across every line. 18 conductor plastic ribbon cable that bends back 180º under the plastic wrist wrest. Brilliant engineering. I'm not going to spend days trying to mend broken conductors on a "flexible" cable that I can't replace. Back it goes to its eternal rest in a box in the basement, never again to see the light of day while I yet live.

Mister Xiado wrote on 2020-02-14, 20:18:

Back it goes

To honor as future organ-donor. We've already reached the point where people are repairing CDROM drives, & fussing about getting the correct motherboard standoffs. It's a marvel.

I quit hunting on ebay for parts to repair the misfit systems I have due to the greed. People want $50 for a used and un-tested floppy drive. Now, to blazes with it. I'll just make do with what I have. If I can get Windows installed onto a system through a parallel port, I can do pretty much anything. Too bad I still need a drive controller for my 486 tower. Guess I have one last hunt in me.

Put a dvd r/w drive in my dell dimension 4100 multi-boot system and noticed the actcd.sys showed during boot it was a cd/dvd driver in dos.Just for laughs I stuck a dvd with my stored dos games on it and I was able to read the dvd with xtreegold.The driver has been around since 1998,so nothing new.I did a google search and found a later version of the driver from 2000 same name.Did a search for dvd4dos and found that program with cdrom.sys that also reads dvd's in dos.

It was Valentine's day, so I came up with a present for my sweet Libretto 50CT in the form of a revamped battery.

The 6" Libretto series laptops use 17670 Lithium-Ion elements. It turns out, quality 17670 elements are hard to come by, and I would rather not put a 6000mAh nonsense from aliexpress into my precious machine. I wanted to mod the battery case to accept 18650 elements instead, but it requires quite a lot of work and to be honest, I have been procrastinating for far too long for it to actually ever happen. Besides, I never even use it for that long.

Anyway, I bought three 1100mAh 17500 batteries with wires from a trusted source. At least the capacity is real and they probably won't catch fire. A few minutes with a soldering iron and a glue gun to close the gaps - et voila!

It works, it charges, and I wonder what the battery life will be. As an added bonus, the battery pack is now 15g lighter, which brings the whole machine's weight to 757g down from the original 840g.

Edit: fully charged battery depletes after 2 hours of continuous 3dbench.

Mister Xiado wrote on 2020-02-15, 02:18:

I quit hunting on ebay for parts to repair the misfit systems I have due to the greed. People want $50 for a used and un-tested floppy drive.

Yes ! Hate that some ask such high prices for "untested" parts.
Only retro thing I did lately is look thru a bunch of old driver disks looking for anything that has not been properly archived.

nobody buys those anyways, so they just sit there forever and pollute the search results.

I removed the clothes rail from my old wardrobe yesterday and put another shelf in so I can store more hardware.

imi wrote on 2020-02-15, 16:57:

nobody buys those anyways, so they just sit there forever and pollute the search results.

I removed the clothes rail from my old wardrobe yesterday and put another shelf in so I can store more hardware.

🤣 you want to help me organize my storage space ? It is truly a mess 😁

I have been playing with my Furia accelerated Amiga600. When testing the IDE-Speed, then I get 2480k in transfer rate. That is with Fast IDE enabled in FuriaTune-Tool. With it disabled, I only get some 2300k transfer. Much faster than stock speed of 600 to 700k. The Furia is an awesomme upgrade. And it can be controlled in dept. I can disable the FPU if something is freezing in WHD-Loader or makes other issues. Next I need to check out how the MapRom and ShadowRom functions is working. Takes time with new hardware that works a bit different than anything else. 😁

If you have an Amiga600, and want something awesomme. Then go for the Furia. It is well worth the money. I think it is the next best, that can be bought brand new today. The best should be the Vampire-V2.

Was having some issues with Windows 95 on my 486, running from the primary partition of a 120GB HDD with the help of XTIDE. Would often fail to boot with an error regarding incompatible ifshlp.sys. I was going to try repartitioning the drive to make the C: drive smaller, but had another idea instead -

I had a spare IDE to CF adapter sitting in a drawer, along with a spare 1GB CF card. So I set the 120GB HDD as Slave and installed the 1GB CF Card as Master and installed Windows 95 to that. So far so good, it's running much nicer and faster thanks to the CF card. All my games stay on the HDD and the CF just acts as the boot drive. As there's only 1 IDE channel on this 486, it does mean I'll have to lose the CD-ROM drive, but I think I can live with that.

Also found another issue whilst I was setting this 486 up - the Game port on my Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II card is faulty, requiring the plug to be pushed upwards otherwise it registers all 4 button presses no matter which button you use. I'll swap it out with my ESS 1868 from another PC.

Trying to upgrade my iMac from 10.3 Panther to 10.4 Tiger. Should be straightforward, verification of DVD went fine, but "there were errors, try again". Mac is great when things go OK and totally opaque when they don't... oh well, trying again, now as a complete clean install.