TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-05-16, 19:25:

EDIT: Will not be buying the S2. 20 euros for shipping, it does not cost 20 euros to ship a tiny MIDI board to the US from the EU. Nice attempt at baking profit into the shipping.

You'd think that, but I can tell you from experience that EU to US shipping tends to be ridiculously expensive. For tracked shipping to the US from the Netherlands, for a package of 0g to 350g, it's already €29,30 through the national postal service. I doubt Belgium has it much cheaper, so €20 for tracked shipping on even something that small to the US doesn't sound unrealistic to me. We're pretty screwed over here when it comes to that.

US postage rates are possibly going to increase dramatically in the near future, so it's likely to get even worse if that happens. I miss the old days of being able to send a box of VHS tapes, comics, catalogs, and candy to Australia for $13, and have it arrive during the same week.

Mister Xiado wrote on 2020-05-16, 22:12:

US postage rates are possibly going to increase dramatically in the near future, so it's likely to get even worse if that happens. I miss the old days of being able to send a box of VHS tapes, comics, catalogs, and candy to Australia for $13, and have it arrive during the same week.

EDIT: I'm rephrasing this before I make the mistake of dragging US Politics onto VOGONS. I just hope your wrong, and if your right I hope the rate hikes are limited to Amazon, UPS, and FEDEX because then it wont effect most of what we do.

Oof..let’s not talk about that. (You’re not wrong, but..)

Fired up a stiff drink and went to work on my Athlon XP build again. A bad A7N8X resulted in an impulse purchase of a complete system, which featured an ECS N2U400-A. I have to say I like this board..no extra frills, and I mean, that purple PCB!

I have a BFG 6800GT OC in a beautiful blue to pair with it. This is turning out to be a very colorful system! Before we had RGB, we had this..

doogie wrote on 2020-05-16, 23:47:

Oof..let’s not talk about that. (You’re not wrong, but..)

Fired up a stiff drink and went to work on my Athlon XP build again. A bad A7N8X resulted in an impulse purchase of a complete system, which featured an ECS N2U400-A. I have to say I like this board..no extra frills, and I mean, that purple PCB!

I have a BFG 6800GT OC in a beautiful blue to pair with it. This is turning out to be a very colorful system! Before we had RGB, we had this..

I once bought a PC that had a bright purple motherboard like that in it. There was so much dust the entire board was earth tone. I literally threw up when I first opened it because the act of opening the sidepanel created a dust cloud of dust. You couldn't see anywhere a single exposed bit of PCB. I'm not even exaggerating. The hard drives power on hours indicated the PC had been on more or less 24/7 since it was bought (it was a low end eMachines) which was roughly 8 years. I found some web server programs on it that more or less confirm that. It was fucking nasty.

I washed the motherboard in the shower and tossed the rest of the PC, somehow the motherboard still works fine.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-05-17, 00:44:

I once bought a PC that had a bright purple motherboard like that in it. There was so much dust the entire board was earth tone. I literally threw up when I first opened it because the act of opening the sidepanel created a dust cloud of dust. You couldn't see anywhere a single exposed bit of PCB. I'm not even exaggerating. The hard drives power on hours indicated the PC had been on more or less 24/7 since it was bought (it was a low end eMachines) which was roughly 8 years. I found some web server programs on it that more or less confirm that. It was fucking nasty.

I washed the motherboard in the shower and tossed the rest of the PC, somehow the motherboard still works fine.

🤣 I bought a Dell off Craigslist a long while age that was used in a business. On opening the side panel it made me cough, sneeze and gag. Fur balls all over the place and coated in dust, the green board was tan Hahaa. Looked like it had sat on the exit pipe of a clothes dryer for years. Two cans of compressed air later it was clean enough to try and boot it up... and it did !

Oh yes - I’ve seen that scenario a whole bunch over the years..caked on dust, rat droppings, roaches, ugh. God awful. Right there with you guys.

This latest acquisition had to be a small biz builder that put the system together for home use. An XP Home COA on the side backs this theory. The case had its share of bumps on the outside, some sticker residue etc - but the internals? Untouched, and barely needed a brush to remove what little dust there was. A real find if you ask me.

Modest specs for sure originally, but I’ve since amped it up with a Barton 3200+ and 2GB RAM.

Today I am testing PCem on macOS. I finally (not without some big headaches) managed to compile and put it to work and I am currently doing a Win 98 SE install. Fingers crossed.

Just installed this in my 486 DX2/66. Works awesome.. the MIDI music is definitely unique.

wiretap wrote on 2020-05-17, 03:02:

Just installed this in my 486 DX2/66. Works awesome.. the MIDI music is definitely unique. […]
Show full quote

Just installed this in my 486 DX2/66. Works awesome.. the MIDI music is definitely unique.

That red PCB is still a thing of beauty . It's no sound canvas and has no real fx engine, but the patchset is balanced and still holds up, IMHO . The RAM-based patch caching was ingenious and flexible .

I do not give mine enough love these days, spoiled that I am with all the options at my disposal, but back in the day, I was crazy about it . The only I don't really miss is fighting with MegaEM and SBOS' SB emulation . Adding an SB16 in 1995 solved that .

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-05-16, 19:25:

EDIT: Will not be buying the S2. 20 euros for shipping, it does not cost 20 euros to ship a tiny MIDI board to the US from the EU. Nice attempt at baking profit into the shipping.

Your loss. Serdaco does not profit from the shipping and marginally profits from the product at best. This is a small scale enthusiast company operated by one man with a day job and he is an amazingly decent person who has continuously supported and developed his products. Your presumptious slur and arrogant tone speaks more about you (though no one is surprised here to be honest..) than him or the shipping cost.

Yeah we should be giving retro part makers all the support we can. It's amazing anyone has the time and energy to do it, but they have.

Mister Xiado wrote on 2020-05-16, 22:12:

US postage rates are possibly going to increase dramatically in the near future, so it's likely to get even worse if that happens. I miss the old days of being able to send a box of VHS tapes, comics, catalogs, and candy to Australia for $13, and have it arrive during the same week.

Yeah, the “good” old days when my sister sent me a shoe box sized package of candy for christmas from Germany to Upstate NY and I was told to pay 75$ of import duty. 😏

Nonetheless, I think unless the big players stay around in plural we’re going to be fine. Got to pay everyone in the process...

Recapped my Gigabyte GA-K8U.

Had some 3300uF HM series Nichicon capacitors spare to replace the existing Nichicon HM on the motherboard that had failed (5 of) Testing the caps, the ESR was ok, but they were leaking current, so only a matter of time before they would have completely failed.

There were also 3 failed United Chemi-con 1000uF KZG series capacitors. Replaced them with Rubycon 100uF ZLH capacitors. Specs not quite as good as the KZG capacitors, but far better than the KZGs that I pulled out 😀

Installed windows 98 on it, but wasn't able to get DOS compatibility working with the SB-Live I threw at it. Will try a different card, hopefully it was just incompatible with this card, not incompatible with DOS gaming.

Reformatted the 250GB SSD and the 1TB HDD on my daily driver MacBook 5,1 aluminum unibody (late 2008) and installed Fedora 32 KDE. Installed nvidia 340 driver for the 9400M and fixed the brightness control, installed broadcom fw and mbpfan to get it silent again, paired KDE Connect with my mobile, set up Asbru-CM and our work VPNs. Looks, feels and runs A LOT better than Mojave with dosdude's patcher or Win10 with the horrible outdated BootCamp drivers.

I experimented with Voyetra SuperSAPI on my Socket 5 PC with ALS100. It works just fine in Windows 3.1. Windows 95 is a different story. And yes, I know it's well known that SuperSAPI doesn't work on Win9x, but it didn't stop me from trying anyway.

psychz wrote on 2020-05-17, 10:22:

Reformatted the 250GB SSD and the 1TB HDD on my daily driver MacBook 5,1 aluminum unibody (late 2008) and installed Fedora 32 KDE. Installed nvidia 340 driver for the 9400M and fixed the brightness control, installed broadcom fw and mbpfan to get it silent again, paired KDE Connect with my mobile, set up Asbru-CM and our work VPNs. Looks, feels and runs A LOT better than Mojave with dosdude's patcher or Win10 with the horrible outdated BootCamp drivers.

Not really retro, but cool nonetheless. I use Mint 19.3 XFCE x64 with Liquorix 5.6 on my Satellite A100. Made it from trash find to daily driver.
Also, a little piece of advice: don't set your fan too low, or it will overheat and kill the GPU eventually. Source: I've worked at a store that repairs computers and the amount of heat-damaged GPU Macbooks that come for repairs is pretty high, and almost all of them are set to low, so they're quiet, but their thermal performance is crap when the fans are too slow (especially if it hasn't been serviced) so beware.

derSammler wrote on 2020-05-15, 09:15:

About to finish that once-poor PlayStation 2.

Finally done today. 😀

Had to fix one of the memcard slot covers, whose spring just broke on reassembling. It's now using a different one taken from the flap of an old floppy drive. Also had to modify the tray cover, but no issues here in the end either.

Originally wanted to sell it after the restoration - but seeing the outcome and the work spent on it, it will stay in my collection. So it's the second 50004 and the third fat PS2 I have now.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-05-17, 10:35:

Not really retro, but cool nonetheless.

Apple begs to differ :< Considers everything >4yrs "vintage" iirc, however Core2Duos are still perfectly usable. They provide no support at all, when my keyboard got damaged I had to track down a used one and replace it myself, same with the fan, I got a Sunon and replaced it myself... Hell, I can't even find a battery for it. Chinese rip-offs don't get the power estimation right and just die at random percentages!

TechieDude wrote on 2020-05-17, 10:35:

Also, a little piece of advice: don't set your fan too low, or it will overheat and kill the GPU eventually. Source: I've worked at a store that repairs computers and the amount of heat-damaged GPU Macbooks that come for repairs is pretty high, and almost all of them are set to low, so they're quiet, but their thermal performance is crap when the fans are too slow (especially if it hasn't been serviced) so beware.

I know, many of these logicboards had their GPUs die, many attempted to reflow, which (for some of them) worked for a short while. Even when on OSX, I used smcfancontrol and wouldn't let it go up, also I do change thermal paste and clean the fan once a year, probably that's why it still works after 12 years 😜 It's prudent advice to use a bit more aggressive settings on mbpfan. New replacement fans can be had for cheap, logicboards not so...

In Fedora, the idle temps are already much better than in Mojave though, so I guess I lost some of the oh-so-useful Apple default background jobs...

Anyway, the point is that the Mac-Linux situation is a LOT better than it used to be. Fedora worked almost out of the box, and with the nouveau->proprietary nvidia driver switch, sleep works as well. Maybe it's safe to say that it is getting closer to a drop-in replacement, seeing that it has hfstools preinstalled by default so you can access the HFS+ HDDs out of the box. Even Ubuntu which claimed 100% support, gave me various troubles (e.g. bluetooth crashes), however seeing Fedora at this state proves that it can be done nicely to be up-to-date, with minimal effort.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-05-17, 05:50:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-05-16, 19:25:

EDIT: Will not be buying the S2. 20 euros for shipping, it does not cost 20 euros to ship a tiny MIDI board to the US from the EU. Nice attempt at baking profit into the shipping.

Your loss. Serdaco does not profit from the shipping and marginally profits from the product at best. This is a small scale enthusiast company operated by one man with a day job and he is an amazingly decent person who has continuously supported and developed his products. Your presumptious slur and arrogant tone speaks more about you (though no one is surprised here to be honest..) than him or the shipping cost.

First off, I assumed it was a small company, I didn't realize it was a one man operation.
Second off, Sorry that I've received parts 4x as large from the EU for less than 20 euros shipping. After some further research it looks like Belgium has a fairly broken postal system, so it may be different from other parts of the EU.
Third off, where did I "Slur"? I'm thinking the term "slur" means something different to you than it does to me? Because that usually denotes a deragatory statement with racial context.

There is no "shipping from EU to USA". While the countries of the EU share many standards, there's no common shipping company within the EU. Each country has its own different prices for shipping to whatever destination therefore. Tracked shipping to the US is expensive from most countries. From Germany for example, it's 36,99 EUR with DHL for the smallest package if you want tracking and insurance.

Also, since he accepts PayPal, he can not just use the cheapest way of shipping, as he must follow PayPal's rules.