Accidentally posted this in the modern hardware thread instead, as I had both this and that thread open in different tabs, oops!
Got this C64 short board today for €27 + €7 shipping. I saw it for sale, and decided to bid a little, and got it for this nice price. The seller hadn't tested it, they noted the power switch was busted, and they had initially gotten it to try and refurb. However, due to a lack of time and skills, they decided to just sell them on. I got it, because I still wanted a second 8580 SID for my beloved childhood C64G (it's like the Aldi model, a Breadbin with the short board and a beige keyboard, although this one uses flat, cheap badges instead of the normal, thick ones). I was hoping most chips would be good, so I could snatch the 8580, and just flip the rest to make back the money, if not make a bit of profit (although I'm not going out for big bucks, I'll offer the ICs up for bidding once I have properly tested them).
Checked the switch, and it was stuck in the on position. However, only one of the power rails that it shorts in order to turn the C64 on was shorted, the other was still essentially off. So I just shorted that by adding some solder to both points and joining them up, permanently setting it in the on position. I first powered it on without the SID and VIC II, to test the voltages with a DMM, which were fine. With the VIC II in, all seemed well. Then, I put in the SID.
My heart sank as the C64 would black screen with it. I quickly dug out my C64G, pulled its heatsinked 8580, and dropped this one in. Hooked it up, switched it on, and... it worked. Loaded up a few tunes written for the 8580, and again, all seemed well. Running the SID Tester program as seen in some of Adrian's Digital Basement's SID-related videos, all the tests came out fine. So, something else is wrong with that donor board that's causing it to not boot with a SID installed. I'm hoping none of the more rare ICs are at fault, these short board's Sharp "SuperPLA" tends to be way more reliable than the original MOS PLAs, and I don't necessarily think the CPU or VIC II are at fault either. Oh well, I will have to experiment some more, although this board annoyingly only has the VIC II and SID socketed, with all of the other main ICs soldered down, and that whopper of a PLA with its DIP-64 package is especially daunting to remove. We'll see, I think I should be able to make back the €34 regardless, and if I do make a bit of profit, put that towards getting some Dual SID boards made.
Next, I also got this unusual Gigabyte GA-6VA7+ Socket 370 board. It's unusual, for being a Baby AT format board with this socket. I initially paid €20 + €6,75 shipping for it, but the seller got back to me as while packing it, he noticed one of the DIMM slots was busted. He offered to either fully refund me, or, if I wanted, he could also refund me the €20, and still ship it out. Given this board's obscurity, I opted to get the €20 refund and still get it. It arrived with this bracketless Realtek PCI NIC, two DIMMs (one 32MB, the other I think is 64MB), and a bunch of bent pins and caps. Two caps appeared to be bent enough to have the legs pulled out from the cap, which I bent back, but figure are just toast by now. They're just G-Luxons though, given I had some of those puff up and leak on a cheapo ECS VIA S370 board of the same age, it's no big loss. Hopefully it'll still work.
Given it's an obscure board, I plan to do an obscure builds of sorts if it does. Now, this board will support Mendocino Celerons as well as Coppermine Celerons and Pentiums (up to 1GHz) as per the CPU support matrix on the page for this board (Gigabyte surprisingly still has that online), but it appears to do VIA Cyrix III CPUs too. One of the BIOS files on the same page mentions it's been patched to properly display "VIA Cyrix III" in the BIOS, so that means it should at least support Samuel core C3s. I figure one of those, with an obscure GPU and sound card, in an AT case, would make for an interesting build. It's something different from the typical Intel/AMD/3Dfx/NVIDIA/ATi builds. Maybe an S3 MeTaL API card would be an interesting pick, even if it's likely somewhat bottlenecked by the CPU. For soundcard, I'll see what a good pick will be, it definitely will have to be something different from the typical SoundBlasters and such. Maybe PCI, maybe ISA, not sure yet.