I'm about to keep dumping hundreds of IBM PCjr disks.

My very first computer was a IBM pcjr my grandparents bought me.

I have been on a small road trip the last couple of days. I finally found an apartment (new home), that fully fullfill my needs. And that is in a part of the country, were it is near impossible to find something cheap enough, unless you know someone in person. Everything else is big company owned apartments, and always in modern condition, so the prices are high. The new place is in an old hotel or tawern or something, that have been made into apartments.

- 76 square meters.
- 3 rooms (plus small yet useable hall and a bathroom)
- Space for 6 person dinner table, tv-area and computer area.
- Under 15 minutes walk to were my children live with their mother.
- No more expensive than I can afford, with money to spare/save up.
- 5 minutes walk to the nearest grocery shop. (and two shops in same town)
- Town with just under 2000 people.
- Under 5 minutes walk to public transportation.
- 20 minutes bus ride to a town with +20.000 people.

My brother want to help me move my stuff. He has a busted back, so he can not lift anything, however he can drive the car and a box-trailer. And he want to see if he can get my other brother in on the move. And he have said that he has time to spent two or three days on this. Absolutely perfect. I told him, that it most probably will end up in some brother-beer-time, if things work out as he plans to help me. Yeahhh.... Brother-beer-time. An old tradition we used to have, were we told each other good and bad stories that happened during the time we met last.

Feel for ya, moving is a pain in the butt. Sounds like the new place has potential for decent "mancave" tech-wise.

I'm glad to hear you found a place. It sounds great and with decent space. I really hope your move goes well and this place works out great.

Took a PS/2 rear I/O plate connector from one of my spare pentium motherboards and re-wired it for use on my 486DX/2 66 computer.

And what do you know, works perfectly.

Yay for me, and especially Yay for optical mice. (I've never seen a modern serial optical mouse, while PS/2 optical mice are pretty common, and last forever)

Long story made as short as possible:
A few days ago my mom was having some Internet issues so went over to help figure it out. Simple router reboot fixed it.
Back track history to about 2008: gave my parents one of my Nokia 446XS crt monitor (bought new in 1997) and a newer computer. Their old monitor was a 14" and old computer was having issues, figured they would like the bigger screen and faster computer, and they did. Back to present: So after fixing the internet issue my mom told me I can have the old crt monitor and computer back as she "had not used it since you got me the HP a few years ago AND the old computer would not start proper". Good news is they both still work (old monitor and old computer). Had setup a dual boot with two HD and one drive was failing so forced boot off the second HD and all seems good. The Nokia has some moir issues at lower Windows resolutions and is not as sharp image as could be but overall works just fine considering the age. The old computer has a Intel e6600 on a MSI P6N-SLI board and seems to work OK so far. Glad she offered them back instead of donating them away where the crt would end up gone forever (recyclers cannot sell or give away anything crt based here, they are destroyed). A few pics, under her office lightning and with flash..and don't give me grief about the white floppy and cd in a black case 🤣

Today I finished the preparation of my dual king board for my take on my ultimate DOS/W98SE/XP tripple boot system…

After desoldering the last couple of pads I soldered in an ISA AT-BUS. The voltages are in check, I couldn’t measure any shorts… fingers crossed… will test with an CT4520 in the next couple of days…

CMB75 wrote on 2020-06-13, 14:03:

Today I finished the preparation of my dual king board for my take on my ultimate DOS/W98SE/XP tripple boot system…

After desoldering the last couple of pads I soldered in an ISA AT-BUS. The voltages are in check, I couldn’t measure any shorts… fingers crossed… will test with an CT4520 in the next couple of days…

I would love to see that. Is it a Gigabyte board? I see it has pads for a second BIOS ROM chip.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-06-13, 14:21:

I would love to see that. Is it a Gigabyte board? I see it has pads for a second BIOS ROM chip.

Yes, it's a Gigabyte GA-6VTXD Rev 1.0 from September 2001... I'll try to build this system with an AWE Gold, a V5 5500 and an USB 2.0 card.

Was digging through some of my old new stock (so the computers that I bought, but didn't have time to play with properly). Found some porn on one of them. Sample below (censored it, of course, but if it's still in violation of whatever rule, please remove either the image or the post):

OldCat wrote on 2020-06-13, 15:32:

Found some porn on one of them.

Haha, I know that feel. Last year I bought large amount of used floppy disks. Dug around and found some DOS porn floppies with looped animations and some "story" behind it. 😁 Well, it's still a time capsule somehow.

Today I took care of Compaq Prolinea 575e I bought last week. Intel Pentium 75, 8 MB RAM, Cirrus Logic SVGA, DOS 6.22+Windows 3.1.
I have added a CD drive to it (some Sony x24 so it's quite matches the era). This PC has some drive mount brackets to mount the CD, I didn't had one so needed to improvise and use some screws hacking. It's not perfect (there is a little hole when looking from the side), but it fits solid.
Also replaced the Sony MFP520 floppy disk drive with Sony MFP920. Needed to remove some parts of the FDD case and swap some plastics, but fortunately those drives are very similar and everything has fit from the broken one.
Finally, I have added the ISA sound card - this time I decided to use CMedia SoundPro CMI8330. I only need to install drivers for it.

Same here, I found port on old 360K floppy disks once 🤣.

Can you imagine porn on EGA ? Well I saw it ... That was ridiculous ! (But still better than Atari 2600 porn I think lmao)

OldCat wrote on 2020-06-13, 15:32:

Found some porn on one of them.

🤣 I had also found porn on my laptop (Satellite A100) when I first found it back in September. Homemade porn, in fact. Seriously, who the hell abandons their PC with porn of themselves?! Smash the HDD first or something, but no, in fact, the HDD was in perfect health.
And the real kicker, it only needed 3 things: a screen, a service, and another charger. I figured I would also upgrade it while at it, and installed a Core 2 Duo T7200, 4GB of RAM (later downgraded it to 3, since 945 supports only up to 3GB, even in 64-bit mode), and a 120GB SSD. It flies with Linux Mint 19.3 XFCE 64-bit, though 720p60fps video on Youtube seems to struggle a bit.

Humans havent changed in 100,000 years...

luckybob wrote on 2020-06-13, 17:58:

Humans havent changed in 100,000 years...

Maybe that's why we're still around 😉 - another kind of retro activity...

Finally found what seems to be a decent CRT from late 1997, all for €20. On scamBay, of all places !

Vendor blurb :
"Dell D828L CRT vga 800 LS series" ("34.5 centimeters in diagonal, or 13.56 inches")
https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-d828l-crt- … 15-refurbished/

I have a one hour drive each way just to get it, however. That sucks.
I also will have to find a power cable and a vga cable.

I sure hope it works...

CMB75 wrote on 2020-06-13, 14:03:

Today I finished the preparation of my dual king board for my take on my ultimate DOS/W98SE/XP tripple boot system…

After desoldering the last couple of pads I soldered in an ISA AT-BUS. The voltages are in check, I couldn’t measure any shorts… fingers crossed… will test with an CT4520 in the next couple of days…

The last picture is a beauty. I see you bought best possible fans for cooling. I hope ISA bus will work.

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-06-13, 18:55:

CMB75 wrote on 2020-06-13, 14:03:

Today I finished the preparation of my dual king board for my take on my ultimate DOS/W98SE/XP tripple boot system…

After desoldering the last couple of pads I soldered in an ISA AT-BUS. The voltages are in check, I couldn’t measure any shorts… fingers crossed… will test with an CT4520 in the next couple of days…

The last picture is a beauty. I see you bought best possible fans for cooling. I hope ISA bus will work.

Yes, these fans are a very good. I use the low noise adapters (~50Ohms). Together with the copper coolers from Thermaltake they’re really silent and efficient.

CMB75 wrote on 2020-06-13, 14:03:

Today I finished the preparation of my dual king board for my take on my ultimate DOS/W98SE/XP tripple boot system…

Follow up on my dual king ISA slot project … SUCCESS

After several theoretical tests, checking for shorts, checking voltages and continuity tracing of all 98 contacts I started live testing today.

I used several different sound cards because some make use of different power supply contacts on the ISA AT bus (-12, -5, 5, 12 (V)). I also tested PnP and non PnP cards.
These included an ES1868, CT1740, CT2230, CT4500 and CT4390 … I didn’t run into any limitations, yet. Now, let the real test commence - GAMES...