Ozzuneoj wrote on 2021-02-11, 07:26:

Wow! New in box... that's a pretty rare item in that condition. Some nutty person will probably buy it. […]
Show full quote

Arctic wrote on 2021-02-11, 07:09:

I dont know where else to post this, I am not gonna bid on this, what do you guys think?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-GDM-FW900-CRT-M … or/164685875289

Wow! New in box... that's a pretty rare item in that condition. Some nutty person will probably buy it.

Having had (and sold) a used one, and made... a lot... I totally don't blame the person for listing it high. People read about it or see it in youtube videos and they simply must have it. Whatever... it pays the bills and funds future projects. 🤣

Honestly, it's a nice display, but the price is mostly hype. Remember, it's nowhere near the newest CRT made, with many (Most? All?) being made before 2001. Later CRTs often have better refresh rates and specs, and the 16:10 ratio of the FW900 is much less useful for retro gaming... plus, when buying used, newer models may have far less usage, since LCDs became much more popular in the mid 2000s and people were replacing CRTs just to save space. Mitsubishi and NEC displays from 2003-2005 have great specs and don't reach the insanely high prices of the FW900. Some of the best will do a maximum of 2048x1536@86Hz, 1600x1200@109Hz, 1024x768@160Hz, etc. At lower refresh rates they are super crisp if they've been taken care of.

Still, the sheer size, sheer visual real estate of a 24" widescreen is something to behold. My last primary PC CRT was a w900, so the FW900's predecessor. Its specs were lower, with max 1600x900@85Hz, but I wasn't complaining. It was perfectly acceptable as a television in my then living room, allowing me to watch HD widescreen content from the sofa, and was fine for desktop work or current (we're talking 2005-2010) gaming. Eventually we moved to a smaller apartment and bought a 1280x720 beamer for watching those films - so I traded it for a 2.5" 60GB HDD. Most asymmetric trade in terms of bulk and weight I ever did (even beat the swap of an SGI Orign 2000 for a bottle of whisky) 😜

That said, I can't think of anything that would bring me to offer even a fraction of the asking price of that FW900, all the more so as current TFTs vastly outclass it for productivity and as you point out it's worse than 4:3 for retro stuff too.

Artex wrote on 2021-02-10, 23:05:

How do you like that mixer? I was looking for one with 1/8 in. / 3.5mm inputs like that one.

It's been great so far, 5 stereo inputs, 2 outputs (1 RCA, 1 3.5mm). I like the fact its small. It has an headphone output with vol control and bluetooth but I haven't tried the BT yet.

mpe wrote on 2021-02-11, 10:46:

Bought two interesting (not the usual Cirrus Logic) VL-Bus cards. They've never been used apparently. Need to get memory upgrade […]
Show full quote

Bought two interesting (not the usual Cirrus Logic) VL-Bus cards. They've never been used apparently. Need to get memory upgrade for the Tseng so that it can benefit from bank interleaving.

Great looking cards!
After a long time I got a SS7 board(NMC-5VMX) which brand I had never heard of - EMNIC. The chipset is MVP3 based.
The BIOS was done for so I flashed an eeprom with the PE-MVP3G2's and it's working now. In addition to that I had to change the battery. It has 1MB of cache and works well with the 112 mhz fsb option.
(btw, I tried flashing the eeprom with an ASUS P5A but always got an error - worked flawlessly on the S7 Tekram though)

NMC are relabeled Epox boards, essentially an Epox MVP3

Congratulations, very good price!

dionb wrote on 2021-02-10, 21:38:

winuser_pl wrote on 2021-02-10, 20:32:

[...]

Very nice collection! Tell me how much did you paid?

EUR 20

winuser_pl wrote on 2021-02-11, 16:52:

[...]
Congratulations, very good price!

Yep, I like this kind of gambling: buy unknown, untested stuff cheap. Sometimes it's abused, damaged and doesn't work, or utterly uninteresting models. Sometimes you find real gems. Haven't tested any yet, but if the older CPUs work here I'm more than happy. No real gems, but good solid meat.

mpe wrote on 2021-02-11, 10:46:

Bought two interesting (not the usual Cirrus Logic) VL-Bus cards. They've never been used apparently. Need to get memory upgrade […]
Show full quote

Bought two interesting (not the usual Cirrus Logic) VL-Bus cards. They've never been used apparently. Need to get memory upgrade for the Tseng so that it can benefit from bank interleaving.

Any idea which S3 chip is under the Orchid sticker on the Fahrenheit 64 VLB? I'd like to add it to gpuzoo.com if you know?

AOpen i45GMt-HR mini ITX board with mobile dual core, not quite retro, but have you ever seen socketed SPI BIOS chip? I found that quite interesting. This board also has engineer's names printed on silkscreen 😜

debs3759 wrote on 2021-02-11, 18:18:

mpe wrote on 2021-02-11, 10:46:

Bought two interesting (not the usual Cirrus Logic) VL-Bus cards. They've never been used apparently. Need to get memory upgrade […]
Show full quote

Bought two interesting (not the usual Cirrus Logic) VL-Bus cards. They've never been used apparently. Need to get memory upgrade for the Tseng so that it can benefit from bank interleaving.

Any idea which S3 chip is under the Orchid sticker on the Fahrenheit 64 VLB? I'd like to add it to gpuzoo.com if you know?

Never mind - I found the manual by googling the FCC ID

debs3759 wrote on 2021-02-11, 18:42:

Any idea which S3 chip is under the Orchid sticker on the Fahrenheit 64 VLB? I'd like to add it to gpuzoo.com if you know?

Either S3 864 or 868. Not quite sure.

mpe wrote on 2021-02-11, 20:10:

debs3759 wrote on 2021-02-11, 18:42:

Any idea which S3 chip is under the Orchid sticker on the Fahrenheit 64 VLB? I'd like to add it to gpuzoo.com if you know?

Either S3 864 or 868. Not quite sure.

I found the manual. It's an 864.

Arctic wrote on 2021-02-11, 07:09:

I dont know where else to post this, I am not gonna bid on this, what do you guys think?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-GDM-FW900-CRT-M … or/164685875289

Sooooo, yeah. Looks like this thing just sold for 35k $. I can't even. What the actual f*uck is going on?

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2021-02-11, 07:26:

Wow! New in box... that's a pretty rare item in that condition. Some nutty person will probably buy it.

Nutty indeed. Could not believe my eyes whe I saw the final price.

I've bought this ASUS M2N Sli Deluxe. It came with AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ and 4 sticks of 1GB DDR-2 PC2-6400.
Paid $12.
The motherboard is a bit dusty, but I'll take care of that. The nice touch is that it has I/O shield.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-02-11, 08:03:

I had dual sony 20” displays back in the day but I always wanted the Wide hi-def displays. The FW900’s use to sell for about $25 […]
Show full quote

Arctic wrote on 2021-02-11, 07:09:

I dont know where else to post this, I am not gonna bid on this, what do you guys think?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-GDM-FW900-CRT-M … or/164685875289

I had dual sony 20” displays back in the day but I always wanted the Wide hi-def displays.
The FW900’s use to sell for about $250 on eBay back then.
I never got around to purchasing them because the CRT’s became replaced by LCD’s
We had some Sun Microsystems dual LCD workstations at work.
Post photos of your favorite 1990’s computer.

Can someone here please send this to Sony? If not I will 😀
They need to make those again or newer models!

gex85 wrote on 2021-02-11, 20:46:

Arctic wrote on 2021-02-11, 07:09:

I dont know where else to post this, I am not gonna bid on this, what do you guys think?
(snip)

Sooooo, yeah. Looks like this thing just sold for 35k $. I can't even. What the actual f*uck is going on?

You see, the FW900 has a bit of a cult following... And to make things even worse, some folks made a video on it, touting the monitor as better than LCDs (or at least that's the gist of it), result? The FW900's price hiked high and far. Add to that that it is one of the few 16:10 CRTs (along with the Multiscan W900, another of my white whales, I'd rather have a curved CRT that hits lower resolutions than a flat one that can hit high res!)

Truth be told there are other 4:3 VGA CRTs that perform identically, if not better than the FW900, such as the GDM-F520.

winuser_pl wrote on 2021-02-11, 21:46:

I've bought this ASUS M2N Sli Deluxe. It came with AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ and 4 sticks of 1GB DDR-2 PC2-6400.
Paid $12.
The motherboard is a bit dusty, but I'll take care of that. The nice touch is that it has I/O shield.

I have the same board, beware that it can be a bit fussy sometimes, mine would often complain about a "USB overload" thing, probably my PSU that doesn't put enough juice on the 5V rail or something else - I don't really know what went down as I had nothing plugged into the USB ports.

Otherwise it's a nice board, I bought mine to replace a M2N-MX with bad caps.

I might have gotten the deal of the year. An Amiga1200 for the price of shipping and what I then want to pay once I recieve it. The thing is, that it is in unknown condition. I will post some images, once it have arrived by mail in the next week. The only thing I know about it so far, is that it is physically intact. Personally I suspect that it needs a deep clean and a recap.

gex85 wrote on 2021-02-11, 20:46:

Arctic wrote on 2021-02-11, 07:09:

I dont know where else to post this, I am not gonna bid on this, what do you guys think?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-GDM-FW900-CRT-M … or/164685875289

Sooooo, yeah. Looks like this thing just sold for 35k $.

Yikes! That's truly insane. You have to have so much disposable income to spend $35,000 on a CRT. I think that sets the record for the highest price I've seen a PC-related item sell for since I started paying attention to this stuff.

I bet a YouTuber bought it. Linus will have a video about it in a few weeks...

Anyway, I just bought a pretty nifty looking item. I'm really hoping the BIOS is PC compatible (kind of doubt it TBH...), but it is definitely the craziest ISA video card I've ever seen.

It is a Salient Systems AT3000. It has a Sierra Falcon 64 (only ever seen on PCI cards), coupled with a 175Mhz Ti DAC... and a TMS34020APCM (marked 340x) TIGA processor, on an ISA card with two video outputs.

The only mention I can find of the card is a single line in a .doc file here: http://bigbro.biophys.cornell.edu/internal_in … are_Catalog.doc

1Salient Systems Corporation			AT3000 TIGA drivers v2.20.2.30 (8/9/96)

Seller says it came from an ADE CR8X system, which Google tells me is a "Wafer Inspection System" from 2002! (Not text searchable, but it is mentioned near the bottom of the 13th page of the PDF).

Anyway... I have no idea what to expect with this, but all of that added up to a "must buy" oddity. I'm hoping that at the very least the Falcon 64 is usable, as that is a very late VGA chip for an ISA card. 😀

darry wrote on 2021-02-03, 20:34:

I have a Yamaha AW4416 24-bit multi-track recorder (I seem to be addicted to those, LOL) on the way, which would be a great thin […]
Show full quote

I have a Yamaha AW4416 24-bit multi-track recorder (I seem to be addicted to those, 🤣) on the way, which would be a great thing except... http://www.home-machine-shop.com/AW4416_RTC_R … tc_ds12887.html

Yes, I have managed to find and order something other than a PC motherboard that uses a Dallas DS12887 RTC/battery combo and, as a bonus, it is often soldered rather than socketed, or so I hear .

We'll see if I get lucky (socketed) or if I will need to have a socket soldered in (I am just not confident enough yet to try my hand at soldering on something so expensive, but I have a great place a 20 minute walk from where I live that would probably make short work of it ). Alternatively, I could try to mod the DS12887, but even that seems a bit risky to do without desoldering it first .

Oh well, live (spend) and learn .

EDIT : Why ? because I feel too lazy to do precise level matching that my current 16-bit VS-880EX requires, so a 24-bit unit seemed like a good idea (note to self : never go Ebay shopping while drunk)

EDIT2: I wonder if adding an 8 channel MY8-AE AES EBU I/O board and some S/PDIF to AES EBU converter would allow multiple S/PDIF inputs easily, or whether I would still need to find a way sync the clocks of the S/PDIF sources to the AW4416's internal clock . Even if it worked, it would not be an inexpensive solution .

Well, it arrived yesterday . It is huge and weighs 30-odd lbs ! It will have to go on top of my 3 storey lackrack ( https://web.archive.org/web/20210124024612/ht … ex.php/LackRack ) . But, as a bonus it came with an 8-input card, so I now have have a 16-input digital mixer ! I plan to set the thing atop a "lazy Susan" type rotating tray . Additionally, I would like to have it on an angled, wedge shaped equipment stand but the only things resembling this that I can find at a reasonable price are meant for laptops an d hence too shallow and not sturdy enough. I may need to design and build my own .

Before I do any of that, I will wait for my DS12887 replacement from these folks https://www.tindie.com/products/glitchwrks/gw … acement-module/ and corresponding socket to arrive . Then, I will disassemble the beast and decide whether to try unsoldering myself or to seek professional help . Incidentally, the battery is still detected as good, so it may already have been replaced and/or socketed . I will know when I open it . Oh, and, surprisingly, the SCSI CD-R drive still works (at least as a reader), so I am really lucky it seems, even if my only use case for this is upgrading the firmware (which is already current enough for my needs).