In the quest to figure out why my Genesis is totally fine with the Sega CD but hates the 32x, I went and eliminated at least one of the potential causes. My genesis has been completely re-capped now, and it seems happy to finally be rid of the ones that predate my parents getting married.

Of course, the issues I was having have persisted, so I guess things are gonna get even more interesting soon enough.

liqmat wrote on 2020-03-27, 23:58:

Shagittarius wrote on 2020-03-27, 23:53:

My first HDD was a 20MB Hard Card (HDD and Controller on the same ISA Card). It cost 200$ or $10 a Meg in im guessing '90 or '91.

When I used to play live music I had an Ensoniq EPS sampling keyboard with an external 80MB SCSI HDD attached to it. That external HDD was $800 in 1988, but man was it essential in loading up song sets quick on stage.

Wow that is a lot of money, considering at the time you probably could buy a good used car for that.
Have seen some old advertisements from the late 80's that show how much parts cost back then. Was not uncommon for a business to spend near $5000 for a good working XT computer with all the extra's.

Worked on getting drivers installed on the eMachines eTower 366c. Typical stuff...video, chipset, USB, sound. Then when this is done I can tackle the abnormally small reported RAM amount and try updating the BIOS.

Horun wrote on 2020-03-27, 23:33:

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-03-27, 04:26:

That makes me happy. Glad the HDD is working for you (if only my Quantum Fireball 3.2GB HDD would format, but the sectors are long gone).

I have a "once was good" WD 4.3Gb ide with the click of death. There are some firmware fixes for some models but can't find this one wd 24300 yet..

I'm trying to find firmware updates for my Quantum Fireball ST 3.2A drive (it formats and the surface test passed), but SMART results aren't very promising: 37 reallocated sectors count in CrystalDiskInfo. Not chancing using that hard drive in any system I put in it. Firmware is A0F.0800 according to the software. I should test my 4.3GB Western Digital as that is not sounding pleasant either.

FInished restoring my breadbin/Aldi styled c64g , picked looong ago at a Flea Market for just 10 eur.
Usual Black screen.

For the first time i had some issues with my Chinesium desoldering gun 🙁 used a bigger tip to try desoldering the stubborn pins and made a mess with some traces.
I am a bit disappointed. Maybe it's time to buy a Hakko.

Repaired all traces 🙁

I've socketed all chips excluding the superPLA since i did not have any spares of that.(the bigger chip you see in pic)
Tested all ICs:
One of two CIA,both ram,both ROM, and SID were broken. I suspect the previous owner had a faulty power supply at 5v maybe? Too many chips broken (they are from'88, so they should be more reliable than the '84 batch)

Had spare parts for everything except for one ROM (flashed a spare 128k EPROM and it works without adapters,it's the one covered with red tape), and it works again! Thankfully the superPLA chip is still ok.
Retrobrited all keys and the lower chassis.

I successfully proved old Gateway tech documentation about my motherboard wrong by getting a 486DX4-100 running in my P4D-66. Feels good.

mongaccio wrote on 2020-03-28, 16:44:

FInished restoring my breadbin/Aldi styled c64g , picked looong ago at a Flea Market for just 10 eur.
Usual Black screen.

For the first time i had some issues with my Chinesium desoldering gun 🙁 used a bigger tip to try desoldering the stubborn pins and made a mess with some traces.

Great work! I'm not a soldering guru but have had some trouble with C64's in the past too - they have such chunky circuit boards that parts of them act like heat sinks I've found, so all your heat disperses into the board and the bloody solder around the pin won't budge.

Anyway a little trace patch wire adds character, nice work bringing it back to life.

After, oh, I dunno, 23 years of writing on recordable discs for Windows OS's with a sharpie, I decided to level up my game today after realizing that a stack of DVDRs I had were inkjet printable.

Iiiitsss aliiiive! (more or less)

How's this for a Frankenstein:

ECS SL486E EISA / ECS Local Bus motherboard
BusTek BT-747 SCSI/floppy controller
SMC Ether 10/100 NIC
Compaq Advanced VGA
Am5x86 on VRM interposer
4MB FP
Miniscribe 8425S (yes, ancient 21MB 1987-era drive)

This is a build I've been messing around with for literally years. Every damned connector on it was oxidized, so electrical connections were flaky on everything from cards to CPU. The SIMM slots are incorrectly numbered, first bank needs to be filled first, but that's slots 5-6-7-8... however the biggest issue was of course the soldered DS1387. As it's the 1387. I made a bit of a butcher's job of de-soldering it, losing a few pins in the process (damned GND plane soaking all my heat as usual) so after putting in a socket I needed to bodge a prosthetic set of legs onto the module using another socket. Then hacked it open to connect the external battery... it wasn't pretty but it worked. About twice 😦

Because of all the contact issues I wasn't sure the problems were related to the DS1387 - if removed the board definitely didn't even start POST. So ordered a new one and installed it today. Not only did the system boot, it turns out the 21-year old battery still holds power. So I'm back in business.

EISA config was interesting. Little things like the FDD on the BusTek card was disabled by default and the Advanced VGA card claiming it couldn't do any graphical modes (it can, I checked afterwards). The HDD is temporary of course, it's the only 50p SE-SCSI drive I had at hand. I have a huge 535MB full-height 5.25" drive I could use, but it's currently doing cosmetic duty filling a bay in an XT clone, and it's so noisy I don't want to use it anyway. Only alternative I have that's not far too big (or fast - 486 running a Cheetah 10k.7 is even more crazy than an old SCSI-1 20MB drive) is a 1.2GB Seagate ST31200WC pulled from a Sun Sparcstation. Only it's worse than the monster drive, this is the loudest single drive I have ever had. Oh well, once I run out of 20MB I'll choose (or buy) something.

One issue I still need to sort out: keyboard. The keyboard seems to go crazy (registering huge numbers of presses) at random and at pretty much every boot. Press a key and it behaves again for a while. Feels like de-bouncing is also off. Tried three keyboards: same trouble. Tried a different keyboard controller chip: same trouble. Downgraded to 486DX33: same trouble. Weird...

Must be the keyboard port itself.

Welp, getting kind of bored with cabin fever setting in. Know what I'm doing tonight. It's party time!

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-03-28, 23:23:

Must be the keyboard port itself.

Given the oxidation I'd be tempted to believe that, but I have my doubts. It looks like the spurious keypresses are coming out of some buffer. Last example: I had previously entered "c:". Then realized I needed to be on floppy after all. I pressed "a" and got "ac". Backspace removed the "c", but then when I pressed ":" I got "a::" as if the next character also recalled the next one being stored somewhere. And no, no DOSKEY or similar installed. Completely vanilla MSDOS 6.22 install. For that matter, the same thing happens in BIOS, so it's OS-independent. Of course, as I'm typing this it seems to have stopped misbehaving. For now.

dionb wrote on 2020-03-29, 00:01:

Given the oxidation I'd be tempted to believe that, but I have my doubts. It looks like the spurious keypresses are coming out of some buffer. Last example: I had previously entered "c:". Then realized I needed to be on floppy after all. I pressed "a" and got "ac". Backspace removed the "c", but then when I pressed ":" I got "a::" as if the next character also recalled the next one being stored somewhere. And no, no DOSKEY or similar installed. Completely vanilla MSDOS 6.22 install. For that matter, the same thing happens in BIOS, so it's OS-independent. Of course, as I'm typing this it seems to have stopped misbehaving. For now.

Nice ! Got to love EISA 😁
Ugh ! Hate KB errors/issues. Maybe a partly dry cap and it could end up working OK after having power on for a while. Have seen some odd behavior on old boards stored for a while that smooths out after powered up for a hour or overnite. I have a KB error on soc5 that I can not figure out. No visible corrosion, all traces good, volts good, diodes good. Hoping it is not the via 82c416 chip........

Fujoshi-hime wrote on 2020-03-28, 22:52:

After, oh, I dunno, 23 years of writing on recordable discs for Windows OS's with a sharpie, I decided to level up my game today […]
Show full quote

After, oh, I dunno, 23 years of writing on recordable discs for Windows OS's with a sharpie, I decided to level up my game today after realizing that a stack of DVDRs I had were inkjet printable.

Those actually look great. Better than the real things!

Decided to clean out and fix my GameCube (eject and reset buttons were stuck) and they both work and the tray actually closes this time.

LewisRaz wrote on 2020-03-29, 00:46:

Those actually look great. Better than the real things!

I am in increasingly pleased with this 7 year old photo printer I picked up used for CAD$60.

I took some time to test my Amiga 1200 some more. The RGB/audio cable I ordered as well as the aftermarket PSU arrived in the last couple of weeks so I gave those a spin while playing Lemmings for the first time ever. After about half an hour I can say I see the appeal in Lemmings. The nuke button is great!

Only downside was that I was having either sync issues with my OSSC or still had some faulty HDMI cables in my setup. Considering that I am running a spider-web network of HDMI adapters, digital audio output switches, and multi-HDMI out repeaters per some recommendations over at the SHMUPS Forum, the fault is likely on some cables not quite staying in place.

Worked on a Pacific Computer Systems XT luggable. Has a DTK PIM-TB10 Turbo XT board and Amber mono monitor. Got it up and running but the HD is dead (story of my life 🤣). A few pics...

Nice luggable. How is the HDD dead? Not spinning?

liqmat wrote on 2020-03-29, 01:50:

Nice luggable. How is the HDD dead? Not spinning?

Yes is an old 20Mb MFM and it just blinks at me 🤣
added: wich I have the manual to this, looks like I have to totally tear down the case and internal side rails to get to the HD. Good thing is both floppies work 😀