derSammler wrote on 2020-04-01, 08:56:

May I suggest some dust-removal on that poor AWE card? 😉

What kind of cache module is needed for it?

Oops I noted and replied similar 🤣

gex85 wrote on 2020-04-01, 13:47:

I once again tried to resurrect my TMC PCI48AL Socket 3 mainboard, still without success. There has been a little damage from the leaking barrel battery (that I removed of course), but although it doesn't look too bad at all, I suspect this to be the reason why the board is dead. Tried various combinations of CPUs, RAM and graphics cards, double- and triple-checked jumper settings, but it doesn't even beep.
I don't have too much experience with troubleshooting dead mainboards - any advice what I could do? I will try to take some pictures of the corroded areas later today.

Yes please post some good pic of the board and close up of the battery area.

xjas wrote on 2020-03-31, 21:35:

Nice, I'm running an i7/3770 with a 750Ti for my "modern" gaming rig and I still haven't found any reason to want something faster. I mostly don't play the big-budget triple A stuff though.

Nice! Honestly with that i7 3770 a cheap 4gb rx480 or something along those lines would probably enable you to play even the newer triple A stuff. Quad cores are still holding on pretty well as long as you have HT. Its the 4 core chips that are really starting to struggle.

Repaired yet another Panasonic/Creative Labs/Matsushita CR-563-B CD-ROM drive that had a motor meltdown for the laser head. After freeing the motor and lubricating the bearing, it works. The drive has been installed in my 486 and looks better than the yellowed one (will retrobrite that one for another project computer).

Horun wrote on 2020-04-02, 00:32:

Baoran wrote on 2020-04-01, 08:54:

I did bit of upgrading for my compaq prolinea 4/50S. .. .. I installed Sound Blaster AWE64 CT4520 to get sound in dos games. […]
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I did bit of upgrading for my compaq prolinea 4/50S.
..
..
I installed Sound Blaster AWE64 CT4520 to get sound in dos games.

I see the board was made in Ireland, that is cool !. HuH.. is that major dust all over your sound card ?

I will clean it up before I close the system. The awe64 card is actually my own card that I bought in mid 90s. I was still cleaning up some plastics of the system today.
Nobody has any idea about where I could find a cache module for a compaq system like this?

Baoran wrote on 2020-04-02, 02:30:

Nobody has any idea about where I could find a cache module for a compaq system like this?

I cannot find anything but will keep searching. Some of the older OEM proprietary boards used things that are near impossible to find.

CR-563-B of this type and other like it that use same interface uses a toy-like motor DC motor that has commutator gaps (trenchs) get plugged with conductive dirt and can make motor spin very poorly or fail to spin reliably, skips. This is because of the motor driver chip is high impedance which spins the motor quietly, once that happens, not enough current to start well and RPM stability get harder to keep under control. Best way is get same type but new motor and simply replace. Make sure spindle table is at same height.

Back in the day, when CD players was so common as salt, we had to replace those 2 wire DC spindle motors all the time, partially to bearings wear but most of them had commutator gaps shorted.

take note on one type of motor I'm talking about specifically: "Simplest practical commutator"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutator_(electric)

When optical drives equipped with brushless DC electric motors came out the problem shifted to laser assembly replacement alone which is much better indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushless_DC_electric_motor

Cheers,

Had to repair the motor again as the wiring broke off, but after soldering the wires back on and placing the motor in the correct orientation, it's working without issues again. I will keep an eye on it daily to make sure it still works. If not, I can get replacement motors without issues.

Recreated a few Windows 3.11 virtual machines. The one on my iPad Pro is amazing, has networking. Im now definitely spending more time on my iPad than my MacBook Pro.

After setting up my VMs, I will proceed to some proper retro nostalgia. Headphones on, 80s songs playlist set up, lets see some gaming on! First on the list should be FIFA Soccer 😁

Baoran wrote on 2020-04-02, 02:30:

[...]

I will clean it up before I close the system. The awe64 card is actually my own card that I bought in mid 90s. I was still cleaning up some plastics of the system today.
Nobody has any idea about where I could find a cache module for a compaq system like this?

I had one a few years ago, but gave it away to someone else in your situation in early 2018. Sorry.

My damned EISA 486 has died on me again. I had weird SCSI stuff which was probably termination-related. So got new terminators yesterday. It was looking good, I was getting DOS running again until on one reboot POST hung on the SCSI controller option ROM. More drive/termination crap? Dead card or ROM on it? Nope, after reboot the whole system failed to POST, looping though error codes 06 (either ROM checksum or system timer OK) and 13 (chipset/interrupt vectors initalized). Stripped the cards, added a simple ISA VGA controller - and still this behaviour. Getting very, very tired of this system. Probably either CPU connection with socket not perfect (literally all contacts on board are bad), something wrong with RTC or the keyboard controller playing up. Not sure if I can be bothered to figure out which right now - I should be receiving a new (yes, NIB) Micronics 486 EISA board today and somehow I feel a lot more inclined to work on that than this frustrating beast.

On dialup today for internet.
dug out an old US robotics v.90 modem
dell latitude e5500 with a serial port and win 10
aol dialer
fast enough for forum sites and email.
Years ago after a hurricane and power was out for a week, old copper phone lines were still up.
I was able to send email and so forth with a dialup modem.

With all the COVID-19 Madness going on in the world, and not having to be in work currently... i took the opportunity to work on a new machine.

Been wanting to build a small but powerful Pentium III machine for a while and this is what i Put together. Really happy with the Power and the Size of the machine.

Specs

Pentium III 1400-S @ 1.6Ghz (152x10.5) Cooled by Startech Low Profile Fully Copper Cooler
Gigabyte GA-6OMM7E Rev 3.2 i815 M-ATX motherboard
256 Crucial 133 CAS-2 RAM at 2-2-2
PNY Nvidia FX5900XT With Artic Cooler attached
Aureal Vortex 2 With Yamaha DB50XG
82 Gig Hitachi Hard Disk
Small M-ATX Case With Noctua 120mm Fan Up Front
300 Watt FSP Power supply
LG DVD/CDRW Drive
Mitsumi Floppy with Card Reader (Not Connected)
Win98 SE

Bancho wrote on 2020-04-02, 15:52:

With all the COVID-19 Madness going on in the world, and not having to be in work currently... i took the opportunity to work on […]
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With all the COVID-19 Madness going on in the world, and not having to be in work currently... i took the opportunity to work on a new machine.

Been wanting to build a small but powerful Pentium III machine for a while and this is what i Put together. Really happy with the Power and the Size of the machine.

Specs

Pentium III 1400-S @ 1.6Ghz (152x10.5) Cooled by Startech Low Profile Fully Copper Cooler
Gigabyte GA-6OMM7E Rev 3.2 i815 M-ATX motherboard
256 Crucial 133 CAS-2 RAM at 2-2-2
PNY Nvidia FX5900XT With Artic Cooler attached
Aureal Vortex 2 With Yamaha DB50XG
82 Gig Hitachi Hard Disk
Small M-ATX Case With Noctua 120mm Fan Up Front
300 Watt FSP Power supply
LG DVD/CDRW Drive
Mitsumi Floppy with Card Reader (Not Connected)
Win98 SE

What a very nice and compact system!
Great colour match with the drives too.

Bancho wrote on 2020-04-02, 15:52:

Pentium III 1400-S @ 1.6Ghz (152x10.5) Cooled by Startech Low Profile Fully Copper Cooler Gigabyte GA-6OMM7E Rev 3.2 i815 M-ATX […]
Show full quote

Pentium III 1400-S @ 1.6Ghz (152x10.5) Cooled by Startech Low Profile Fully Copper Cooler
Gigabyte GA-6OMM7E Rev 3.2 i815 M-ATX motherboard
256 Crucial 133 CAS-2 RAM at 2-2-2
PNY Nvidia FX5900XT With Artic Cooler attached
Aureal Vortex 2 With Yamaha DB50XG
82 Gig Hitachi Hard Disk
Small M-ATX Case With Noctua 120mm Fan Up Front
300 Watt FSP Power supply
LG DVD/CDRW Drive
Mitsumi Floppy with Card Reader (Not Connected)
Win98 SE

Would you do me a big favor and run 3DMark 2001. I have a very similar system I would like to compare to your results. Thanks!

xtgold wrote on 2020-04-02, 15:49:

On dialup today for internet. dug out an old US robotics v.90 modem dell latitude e5500 with a serial port and win 10 aol dialer […]
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On dialup today for internet.
dug out an old US robotics v.90 modem
dell latitude e5500 with a serial port and win 10
aol dialer
fast enough for forum sites and email.
Years ago after a hurricane and power was out for a week, old copper phone lines were still up.
I was able to send email and so forth with a dialup modem.

Where did you find an ISP with dialup support?

originally it was walmart connect for $9.94 a month
they got bought up by netscape connect
they got bought up by AOL
Still $9.94 per month grandfathered in.I believe that is cheaper than AOL is now.

I still have juno accounts and netzero accounts,I didn't see what they have for dialers.

downloaded the netzero dialer
on that now
I had forgotten what the netzero banner looks like
10 hours per month free
juno should be the same,same company owns both.

I found a couple of Foxconn coolers for Socket 4/5 or so (need to measure/check). Going to junk a bunch of old ATX PSUs but I have to steal some cables and a fan first.

See a lot of beautiful desktop form factor machines here lately, I'm still one short though I have one now and a couple of Macs (one Mac one clone). After things loosen up a bit I may try to offer some 2-1 trades to try to get my hands on something like an XT and/or an Everex or Tristar or something.

Still doing Spring Cleaning, managed to blow a bunch of dust in my face a couple of hours ago and I still smell it and suffering some allergic response. Glad no one is watching me they'd think I was infected.

Was going to throw out one of those phone-base speaker assembles but it's pretty burly and a Klipsch, so I'm going to test it first.

Need to build some cardboard boxes to store full-height cards like I used the USPS boxes to hang sub-full cards. Need to get my storage density up (and make it easier to catalog stuff to keep or sell later).

Need to find some better way to store HDDs than stacked on anti-static wrap on a metal shelf, but that's also cheap. Trying to clear some shelf space.

Found a SyQuest ez flyer 230 external, don't have the power brick but the connector looks awful Commodore-ey.

Found my C64 Wishbringer box, so now I have C64 disks to test my 1541 and 1571 with! Have Legacy of the Ancients around somewhere I think.

It's lucky I have this huge stack of stuff to play with since I'm on "enhanced precautions" or whatever you want to call it.

Finally found a voodoo2 passthrough cable that seems to work well with the monitor (no timing erros), and is not corrupting color. Harder to find than you might think, and this was a non-ideal 1m length.