I swear I have some power supplies in a box somewhere. I just can't find them. Which is bad because one of my cheap chinese units I use for testing shit broke (physically, the socket came loose and the ground wire is severed) and I need to replace it so I can test the GF6200 and GF6800s I bought.

Another day in retro-computer-hoarder-man land.

🤣 hate knowing you have parts but cannot find them when you need too. What is worse: when looking for one part but find another part you had looked for weeks before but never found it then. I ran into that scenario just this AM: was looking for a specific 386 board in my boxes, did not find it but stumbled on a M912 486 sitting in with the 386's. So I now have three m912 v1.7 all with real cache and one v1.4 also with real cache, had looked for those v1.7's before but only found two. Now where my 386 SIS based board went is a mystery, better check all my 486 boxes 🤣. And why I have three v1.7's? Bought or traded for them back in early/mid 2000's (for hoarding reasons).....

OK So I conjured up a power supply and the board I bought off some high schooler for $25 is dead. Nice board too, AM3 with full Phenom X6 support.

For some reason it will go to the post flash screen but hangs. Won't go any further. I've never seen a board that will display its full screen logo but not enter BIOs. That means everything essential is working, the issue must be with one of the various controllers (SATA or IDE probably) causing it to hang itself trying to detect devices. Might need a recap, might get it. Who knows.

So for now I'm cleaning up a previously working board that is now signalling RAM error codes. Came out of some old AM2 Inspiron I "Acquired" from a local recycler. I used it as a secondary PC for quite a while back then, and I remember having RAM issues, I just don't remember what the fix was. I thought it was in working configuration when I stored it though.

Hi, what kind of memory that is throwing errors on you inspiron computer? Pictures of these memory would help so we can help you out.

I tend to use very specific memory featuring brand and part number that are Samsung, Micron, Crucial, Hynix, Elpida in all of my computers.

Cheers,

Moved the VLB I/O card and SB16 CT2230 cards around since the FDC wasn't working right (not seated all the way) and currently refreshing the Windows 95 OS since it wasn't detecting a lot of things, including the floppy controller or too many conflicts. Need to buy L2 cache chips as it still detects 32KB L2 cache.

Need not to buy the cache. Found the missing jumper (JP36) and also added one to JP33 for the DX processors, which I forgot to add or was missing. Good thing I carry spare jumpers from broken motherboards and dead drives.

I gave the P3TDE6 a new home in an Antec/Chieftec full tower from 2001.

Specs:
Supermicro P3TDE6, dual Tualatin 1,4GHz, 2GB PC133-ECC
USB: VIA 2.0 on PCI
Sound: Hercules Fortissimi II on PCI
Disks: 9.1 Ultrastar 2*36 Seagate Ultra-SCSI, 2*150 WD Raptor in disk cage and 1*40GB Intel SSD on 3Ware 9550SX-8LP (PCI-X 66MHz 64-bit)
Optical: 2* Panasonic DVD-RAM on SCSI, 1 Plextor PX-116A on IDE
Legacy: 5'25" and 3'5" floppy's
Removable: 1 ZIP250
OS: WinXP

Purpose: SCSI test bed, Gotek base

edit: replaced SCSI disk

Did some final work on my breadbin C64 Rev. B from 1983. Added a heatsink to the SID chip, removed some rust from the tv modulator, and also removed the C9 cap from the modulator to improve sharpness of the picture. Had not much effect, however, as it is using an R1 VIC II.

flupke11 wrote on 2020-04-12, 15:19:

I gave the P3TDE6 a new home in an Antec/Chieftec full tower from 2001. […]
Show full quote

I gave the P3TDE6 a new home in an Antec/Chieftec full tower from 2001.

P3TDE.JPG

Specs:
Supermicro P3TDE6, dual Tualatin 1,4GHz, 2GB PC133-ECC
USB: VIA 2.0 on PCI
Sound: Hercules Fortissimi II on PCI
Disks: 9.1 Ultrastar SCSI, 2*150 WD Raptor in disk cage and 1*40GB Intel SSD on 3Ware 9550SX-8LP (PCI-X 66MHz 64-bit)
Optical: 2* Panasonic DVD-RAM on SCSI, 1 Plextor PX-116A on IDE
Legacy: 5'25" and 3'5" floppy's
Removable: 1 ZIP250
OS: WinXP

Purpose: SCSI test bed, Gotek base

Oh man, I feel the power of that monster through my screen. Awesome and menacing!

Almost finished with my Tulip AT Compact 3. I have two of those, one with a dead mainboard, that I combined into one. Not without some bumps along the way.

Exploding tantals

Floppy drives acting weird? Check the techical manual. Shugart interface instead of IBM-PC (took me some tome to figure out).

Results so far, without matching monitor or Gotek FF drive for convenience:

I did find this treasure on a floppy when testing the 5.25" FDD:

Intended to install linux on my BeBox, started it to check what free scdi ids there were, turned it off, plugged an external 230MB magneto optical drive i haven't used in a while, started the BeBox again, drive was a no-show in the scsi monitor.
I tried it on a laptop, not recognized either, and the motor keeps spinning when turned on without a cartridge in...ah well, ok, rough start i guess!

Fished out an old SCSI hdd from who knows where, opened the machine, disconnected the cdrom to avoid changing termination jumpers on it or the hdd, plugged the hdd in, started the Box once again, hdd detected, no issue there.

After finding some but not all of the necessary floppy images required, 2 versions of the bootstrap floppy worked and one didn't, the kernel 1.3.80 setup worked, 2.0.32 setup floppy didn't but the 2.0.32 boot floppy worked, weird i guess.
1.3.80 required a tools floppy that doesn't exist anymore anywhere, so the experiment did end there for the time being, I could probably prepare the hdd from another machine...
And I might install NetBSD on it at some point.

derSammler wrote on 2020-04-12, 15:27:

Did some final work on my breadbin C64 Rev. B from 1983. Added a heatsink to the SID chip, removed some rust from the tv modulator, and also removed the C9 cap from the modulator to improve sharpness of the picture. Had not much effect, however, as it is using an R1 VIC II.

Just saw a couple of videos on the topic of sharpening up the C64 video output. Not sure if they would be any help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTn36UaUfrk

That's part 2 anyway, he provided a link to part 1 in the description.

Stripped down some old Mac's. One G3, one Performa and one PowerMac will keep intact but have no use for most of the old Mac stuff anymore. Have to limit my collection and those are just taking up space. The older scsi HD's and CDROMS are worth more than the older Macs 🤣

I've started playing, for the first time, Star Wars Dark Forces on my newly built 486-100 Turbo Speed. I never played this game back in the day. It's actually quite good although sometimes the level design is a bit sloppy. It doesn't really seem to guide player as much, as e.g. Doom does. In this game I usually end up running around a level inspecting every nook and cranny because I'm lost of what I'm supposed to do next... But all in all, still good fun, and more importantly, something new (for me at least).

Last November I bought a "for parts" Thinkpad A21m off eBay that the seller said was otherwise working fine, but that the LAN network didn't work. I figured it was just a driver issue or something and didn't give it a second thought. When it arrived I quickly checked it over and put it away to come back to at some point later.

Finally came back to it today, heh. The seller had put some new Windows XP install on it and I quickly booted it up again to give it a second look before I was planning on taking it all apart and cleaning it thoroughly before I use it for anything else. While playing around a bit with the Windows XP install I noticed that the C: partition size didn't match the hard drive capacity and there was no visible second partition. Checking with diskpart and I see that there is a hidden partition also. I dunno how to get diskpart to unhide the partition and spending five minutes on Google didn't help as a bunch of guides I found mention using diskpart commands that did not work for me. Whatever. Popped in an old Linux CD instead. Found that the hidden partition was holding a recovery Ghost image from 2004. Cool, well I gotta see what's on that before I wipe out the hard disk.

After Ghost finished, it reboots into a Windows 2000 Professional install and goes through some mostly automatic post-install setup and reboots again... and then I get to find out what company's corporate laptop image this was.

Pitney Bowes. Perfectly boring. Oh well. Still, curious to see what was on it. Of course, login is required and who knows what the username/passwords are. Back to the Linux CD, grab the SAM off of it and crack the passwords with Ophcrack. Bunch of existing users like "ccadmin", "pbuser", "helpdesk", etc. Logged in and, yeah, perfectly boring corporate desktop indeed.

Microsoft Office 2000, Lotus Notes 6, McAffee, IE6. Bunch of shortcuts and bookmarks to internal corporate resources. Also this amazingly boring custom screensaver that flashes this souless business slogan before the company name complete with animated geometric shapes and lines.

Well, that was ... something. Hah. 😀

Also, the original eBay seller couldn't get the LAN to work on this laptop because it didn't come with a LAN mini PCI card. Only a 56k card. Confusing I guess if you were unaware that there could be different cards because regardless, these laptops still came with physical ports for both dial-up and LAN connectivity.

I unsoldered two fixed oscillators from my motherboards and replaced with socketed version to have more CPU options for my experiments.

First the 66 MHz one from my 486DX2-66:

Then a 80 MHz one from my 386DX-40. But I didn't have a 4-pin DIL socket any more. So I broke a normal wide DIP socket shortened it and removed extra pins:

Looks & works fine:

Gered wrote on 2020-04-13, 15:17:

Last November I bought a "for parts" Thinkpad A21m off eBay that the seller said was otherwise working fine, but that the LAN network didn't work. I figured it was just a driver issue or something and didn't give it a second thought. When it arrived I quickly checked it over and put it away to come back to at some point later.

Also, the original eBay seller couldn't get the LAN to work on this laptop because it didn't come with a LAN mini PCI card. Only a 56k card. Confusing I guess if you were unaware that there could be different cards because regardless, these laptops still came with physical ports for both dial-up and LAN connectivity.

Yeah, I have an A21M - actually bought it from new. An yes, it had both the dial-up and LAN connectors from factory. I upgraded AFAIR to a combo modem/lan card in mine .. Og yeah, and added an extra 128 MB to the 64 it had ..

Out of nostalgia for the first computer that was truly mine (a K6-2,) I picked up this PT-5VMD with K6-2 500 that needed some capacitor love. Now that's taken care of, I plan to swap the AT jack for PS/2, then see if it fits in my Gateway P5-90 case. For the moment I'm testing it with a Rage Ultra, but I've got a Geforce 256 SDR that I plan on using once I replace its annoyingly whiny fan.

I need to find a socket 7 board I haven't used in years to rebuild my childhood computer from the late 1990's to late 2000's (DFI P5BV3+ Rev. B+) and swap the Abit AB-TX5 board out with the DFI board and use my GeForce256 DDR in it or Riva TNT2 M64 AGP. Got plenty of RAM and everything else. I remember running XP Pro SP3 on that thing a long time ago.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-04-14, 01:34:

I need to find a socket 7 board I haven't used in years to rebuild my childhood computer from the late 1990's to late 2000's (DFI P5BV3+ Rev. B+) and swap the Abit AB-TX5 board out with the DFI board and use my GeForce256 DDR in it or Riva TNT2 M64 AGP. Got plenty of RAM and everything else. I remember running XP Pro SP3 on that thing a long time ago.

Here you go: https://www.ebay.com/p/74112600 Hahaa memories will cost you. What is wrong with the Abit ?
added: Had a Asus SS7 P5A back in the day but am very happy with FIC 503+, would not trade it or swap for the Asus now, no need. Some memories are just that....

The Abit AB-TX5 has an Intel i430TX northbridge, PCI, and ISA only. On top of that, limited to 256MB SD-RAM or SIMM-72 EDO. Plus, HDD limit up to 32GB and the beta BIOS has a bug in it (locks up constantly).