Bought these two boxed beauties' this week. The Maui arrived today and just waiting on the awe32.

OK, so this came in the mail:

I'm super excited about it, my first Aztech card and my first ISA card with an onboard wavetable. I did some research on it prior to receiving it and apparently according to @Tiido this card has caps that are prone to drying up, so I thought I would turn it over and see how easy it would be to completely recap it.

Well, then I saw this:

WTF Aztech? Can this be a factory soldering error? Or maybe this card has been recapped at some point, and this is.. an oversight? Regardless, I will add some solder to these two before trying the card in a system..

looks like factory, those pads are way too clean to be reworked ^^
looks like it had just enough contact to work ^^

Won this for under a fiver shipped. It was listed as an Asus ENG600GT, but I think it's actually an EN6600GT.

Wow that's a great deal for 5 bucks. It's borderline theft.

kixs wrote on 2021-04-21, 01:37:

Some recent and some not so recent purchases: […]
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Some recent and some not so recent purchases:

Also bought some a bit rare cpus... photos later...

Wow that SW60XG box!

Is there much documentation inside?

mtgmackid wrote on 2021-04-20, 09:13:

486 tower with ASUS ISA-486SV2 + DX2, Genoa VLB, VLB I/O card- paid $30 for this https://i.imgur.com/ge3BQq9.jpg […]
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486 tower with ASUS ISA-486SV2 + DX2, Genoa VLB, VLB I/O card- paid $30 for this

Love this case, have a 386 build in the attic with this case. Time to dust it off 😁

appiah4 wrote on 2021-04-21, 12:06:

WTF Aztech? Can this be a factory soldering error? Or maybe this card has been recapped at some point, and this is.. an oversight? Regardless, I will add some solder to these two before trying the card in a system..

It looks like someone figured out they could do the job faster (and skip soldering) by bending the leads. Yes, that can work. For a while. I would just solder them and call it done.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2021-04-18, 18:42:

I bought an X1650 Pro 512 AGP for $33.00 total on Ebay. The seller listed it as PCIe, and priced it as one as well. A good price if I receive a working AGP X1650.

I got it, it works fine. I tested it in my P4P 800 which had an 128 megabyte Nvidia 6800GS, and I didn't realize there would be that much of a performance gap between the two . It went from 10,330 to 16,100 in 3D Mark 2001.

Salvaged some nice e-waste from the shredders today:

Managed to grab a Commodore 128D unit and a Link MC5 serial terminal (both missing keyboards, alas) along with a nice vintage '96 beige box PC. I was a bit sad because the PC's video card had already been liberated:

But guess what was hiding on top of the CD-ROM drive? An S3 Virge!

The PC has a nice Pentium 133Mhz processor installed and the board looks to be in great condition. Will probably have to replace the Odin. Hopefully I can use the DS12887+ as a replacement since I already have one lying around. And the sound card is weird weird weird: the CT3180 "Phone Blaster", because who wouldn't want a modem on their sound card?

Wonder how much of this gear will pass the initial smoke test? 😀

I think I'll have to go back and search for the 128D's missing keyboard because apparently those are even more rare than the 128D itself.....

LewisRaz wrote on 2021-04-21, 19:28:

kixs wrote on 2021-04-21, 01:37:

Some recent and some not so recent purchases: […]
Show full quote

Some recent and some not so recent purchases:

Also bought some a bit rare cpus... photos later...

Wow that SW60XG box!

Is there much documentation inside?

Actually it's pretty empty box. The card, CD and male-male cable.

I guess it's missing the instruction manual or I've already misplaced it 🤣

Looks like this:

kdr wrote on 2021-04-22, 05:43:

Salvaged some nice e-waste from the shredders today: […]
Show full quote

Salvaged some nice e-waste from the shredders today:

IMG_20210422_170323.jpg

IMG_20210422_170736_1.jpg

Managed to grab a Commodore 128D unit and a Link MC5 serial terminal (both missing keyboards, alas) along with a nice vintage '96 beige box PC. I was a bit sad because the PC's video card had already been liberated:

IMG_20210422_171021.jpg

But guess what was hiding on top of the CD-ROM drive? An S3 Virge!

IMG_20210422_170810.jpg

The PC has a nice Pentium 133Mhz processor installed and the board looks to be in great condition. Will probably have to replace the Odin. Hopefully I can use the DS12887+ as a replacement since I already have one lying around. And the sound card is weird weird weird: the CT3180 "Phone Blaster", because who wouldn't want a modem on their sound card?

IMG_20210422_174056.jpg

Wonder how much of this gear will pass the initial smoke test? 😀

I think I'll have to go back and search for the 128D's missing keyboard because apparently those are even more rare than the 128D itself.....

Nice score!! Honestly the creative phone blaster was a great modem back in the day. We had one and it was really able to work well over our poorly maintained Verizon copper lines and achieve almost full speed. We tried alot of other modems but that one was able to handle some really bad copper lines. Once Verizon reworked all the copper in our area for DSL were we able to use a 56k modem successfully but that was short lived once we were able to order DSL service. Ahh those were the days.

kixs wrote on 2021-04-22, 08:57:

Actually it's pretty empty box. The card, CD and male-male cable. […]
Show full quote

LewisRaz wrote on 2021-04-21, 19:28:

kixs wrote on 2021-04-21, 01:37:

Some recent and some not so recent purchases: […]
Show full quote

Some recent and some not so recent purchases:

Also bought some a bit rare cpus... photos later...

Wow that SW60XG box!

Is there much documentation inside?

Actually it's pretty empty box. The card, CD and male-male cable.

I guess it's missing the instruction manual or I've already misplaced it 🤣

Looks like this:

Ahh, still very nice. I have the manual and floppy disk but not the box

kdr wrote on 2021-04-22, 05:43:

[...]

And the sound card is weird weird weird: the CT3180 "Phone Blaster", because who wouldn't want a modem on their sound card?

Actually not so weird or rare for that matter. Around the mid 1990s, PCs in smaller-than-AT form factors were quite common, particularly LPX-style desktop systems. They invariably had expansion slots on a riser and equally invariably there were never enough slots, so there was a lot of pressure to integrate multiple functionalities onto the same card. Sound and modem were an obvious combination - neither needed PCI bandwidth, both tended to be found in the same home computer multimedia systems (office PCs of the day didn't have a sound card and had LAN cards which you didn't have in home PC). In fact it was even possible to combine a lot of the functionality as modems are essentially a very specialized sound card. IBM went down that route with their mWave DSP cards, with one chip handling both. The cards were ubiquitous in IBM's own systems and not too rare outside of them, with 3rd party vendors like Miro making cards with them. Other vendors were less ambitious. Aztech made a range of cards combining their own sound interface with a Rockwell modem. These popped up in all kinds of OEM systems, particularly Packard Bells.

The mWave cards could be 'interesting' to get working, but the Creative and Aztech cards were dead simple: a perfectly normal sound card with a perfectly normal modem that just happened to be sharing a PCB.

dionb wrote on 2021-04-22, 13:42:

the Creative and Aztech cards were dead simple: a perfectly normal sound card with a perfectly normal modem that just happened to be sharing a PCB.

Good to know! I'm hoping the card actually works. Not terribly excited about the Vibra chipset on it, though.

When I crack open a mid 90s PC case and see a near-full-length sound card, I start dreaming of things like a GUS or something even more exotic 😀

Bought a Promise DC-4030VL-2 dual IDE and dual FDD controller cache card (4MB present).

Seller's photos:

I wonder if these boxed Promise DC-4030VL-2 all come from the same original old stock and are now being resold on Ebay. Couple of years ago there was a seller on Yahoo auctions in Japan who had multiple of these, I bought one myself.

They can be upgraded with LBA support:
Re: LCS-6941 - BIOS upgrade

That is one of the many things I'm going to add on the card: LBA support. I'm wondering, for the quad floppy drive support, does that require the PC BIOS to support up to 4 drives? I can put the MR BIOS on my J-Mark OPTI-495SX 3/486WB board, but the one I wrote onto an EPROM UV doesn't work well (blank screen after the RAM is counted).

Picked up an Apple IIc Mouse, an Amiga Floppy Drive, and a Commodore 1581 Floppy Drive -- missing the power supply.

I'd like to modify the mouse in a non destructive way with a modern sensor, so that I can use it on my Mac Mini, which lives in an Apple IIGs case.

Bought two more Pentium AT towers from ewaste for $40 each. Bottom one for a friend:

The top tower didn't seem too special from the outside, but it had two nice surprises inside. Not complaining for the price 😉