True... And to top new year in the burns devision, I poked my hand with a lit sparkler. The fun part of all, was that I only felt the foot getting wet and I have yet to feel pain on my hand. Am I beginning to have a messed up body, regarding feeling pain? I mean... It took 20 minutes before I felt any pain on the foot, and not until yesterday that it began to feel any serious pain in my foot.

dionb wrote:

dionb wrote:

The good: upgraded my idiotic Packard Bell from a P3-1000EB to a Celeron 1400A. Apart from reporting a 153MHz bus speed (it's obviously running on 100MHz) it's doing fine.
The bad: starting to get graphical glitches & artifacts, even in Win2k desktop. Pleasepleaseplease let the onboard Voodoo3 - or more specifically: its RAM - not be dying 😮

It's dying 🙁

That's with the original CPU back and everything set to most conservative defaults. With a Voodoo3-3000 PCI in the same system running the same drivers, it looks perfect, so it really is the onboard Voodoo 😢

Ahh that's a shame - have you tried different memory speeds for the onboard V3? Maybe dropping them a bit will help?
I was going to suggest the CPU because of the different AGP divider perhaps, but it looks like you've already tried that one. Maybe give some games a go to figure out whether it's the GPU or the memory that's having trouble?
Maybe try a Katmai to see if that makes any difference? (grasping at straws...)

The last couple of days, I've been modifying some ISA riser cards to become ISA SBC backplanes - I plan to wire in some power connections eventually but they work enough at the moment for testing sound & the ISA POST card. I've been pretty excited about the concept of making my own case for some of the computers I've been putting together, inspired by this thread

Sadly, while I bought these riser cards to save money compared to buying full new ISA slots and/or SBC backplanes, I managed to destroy my good "soldapullt" style desoldering pump while pulling out the solder for maybe 500 pins (great for learning technique!)

Here's the tall version:

And the flat version:

brostenen wrote:

True... And to top new year in the burns devision, I poked my hand with a lit sparkler. The fun part of all, was that I only felt the foot getting wet and I have yet to feel pain on my hand. Am I beginning to have a messed up body, regarding feeling pain? I mean... It took 20 minutes before I felt any pain on the foot, and not until yesterday that it began to feel any serious pain in my foot.

Ouch, burns to the hands can be pretty confusing sometimes too - I managed to grab a 450C soldering iron the other day and that's been super painful because it's between finger and thumb, but I do pretty often burn myself and usually don't even notice it. Hope you recover from that burn to your foot quickly, serious burns like that can be nasty to deal with - my sister did that with some oil years ago and it took quite a while to heal up.

I was given three PS3's a Wii and a bunch of games a couple of weeks ago. Before that i built a semi adjustable console rack out of left overs and scrap i've hoarded for twenty years plus. Kinda counts as retro activity i suppose? 😒

Tested my free SuperNintendo console. My brother gave it to me a couple of month's ago, and it has been sitting in the closet. Then yesterday I recieved the composit A/V cable that I had ordered for cheap. The reason for the cheap cable, was that I needed to get a cheap way of testing if the machine was working flawless or need some recapping or something. Turns out the machine is working perfectly and I can begin to investigate what good cables and so on, are avaliable on the market. I also need to attend the yellowing of the machine. Once cosmetically in order, I will give it to my children's mother, so they can game super mario at home.

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/foAUSGXl.png […]
Show full quote

Great OS until I saw the 10 part.

liqmat wrote:

Great OS until I saw the 10 part.

That's exactly what I thought. 7 was the last good Windows in my books.

voodoo5_6k wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Great OS until I saw the 10 part.

That's exactly what I thought. 7 was the last good Windows in my books.

Still use 7 to this day exclusively and without any recent updates since it has as much spyware as 10 with the updates from what I've been reading. After the horrendous forced update debacles and recent research found they were collecting data even AFTER you turn it off and opt out I was sure I made the right choice. Apple is no better either. Their new OS has completely abandoned NVidia driver support for some reason and everyone is pissed about it and Apple has done nothing about it.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/282263- … data-collection

https://hothardware.com/news/angry-mac-owners … -drivers-mojave

We've come so far, haven't we? Anyway, I'm not sticking with the retro theme of this thread, I'll stop now.

Cleaned and prepped my PNY GeForce4 Ti4400 card for my Windows 98SE machine and it's working, and in fantastic shape. No blown or bloated caps, and the fan works after I cleaned the contacts with DeoxIt since the fan hasn't been spinning in years, and the bearing is still silent. I'll post pictures later on.

I finally had the time to turn on the replacement for my dead s478 board which were sitting in its box for the last 3 weeks. It's not as flashy as the previous one, but it came for about 12$ with a 3GHz Prescott, 512MB RAM and a neat Zalman cooler which probably worth more than the rest of the pack together.

Now I just need to replace tha fan of that PSU, find a case and decide whether I should use it with my 9800 Pro or X800 XT. I think it will be a decent early-to-mid 2000s machine.

brostenen wrote:

Tested my free SuperNintendo console. My brother gave it to me a couple of month's ago, and it has been sitting in the closet. Then yesterday I recieved the composit A/V cable that I had ordered for cheap. The reason for the cheap cable, was that I needed to get a cheap way of testing if the machine was working flawless or need some recapping or something. Turns out the machine is working perfectly and I can begin to investigate what good cables and so on, are avaliable on the market. I also need to attend the yellowing of the machine. Once cosmetically in order, I will give it to my children's mother, so they can game super mario at home.

You might find this video useful: My Life in Gaming: Getting the Best Picture from your Super Nintendo, those guys are great with stuff like that.

Only retro activity I've been doing lately is trying hard to not buy everything I see.. it's weird how powerful the urge to have something you really don't need at all can be.

Crank9000 wrote:

Only retro activity I've been doing lately is trying hard to not buy everything I see.. it's weird how powerful the urge to have something you really don't need at all can be.

Haha, I can so understand and relate to this.

I'd spend myself into bankruptcy given half the chance!

Crank9000 wrote:

You might find this video useful: My Life in Gaming: Getting the Best Picture from your Super Nintendo, those guys are great with stuff like that.

Only retro activity I've been doing lately is trying hard to not buy everything I see.. it's weird how powerful the urge to have something you really don't need at all can be.

Yup... I read articles about video output last month, and that was one of them. I tend to spend a couple of days reading about all I can find, when dealing with a problem. My personal problem, is that I have a shitty short term memory, so in order to have it sitting in my memory, I need to read the same thing at least some 8 to 10 times. I do however remember the layout ans colours of an website or page, so I can easily find them again.

Playing around with an VLB SCSI Controller and 50-Pin SCSI devices. Always fun to fiddle with SCSI. :-p

Not today... but this week my sister told me one of her coworkers had left the company where she works and that she had bought a shop that used to be a computer shop. As soon as she told me the area where the shop was located, I knew exactly which one it was (it's a small town) and the treasure trove that was hidden there (or so I thought).
After getting in touch with the now new owners of the shop, they told me I could swing by and have a look as they wouldn't want anything of what was there and it was mostly go to the scrapyard. Sadly we couldn't seem to find a time where we both were available, but one day I just happened to stop by and the shop was opened. She wasn't there but her parner in cr..erm.. business was, which was also another ex-colleague of her. He already knew of our "arrangement" and told me to go for broke. I got a few supposedly non-working laptops and a couple of pc towers (fairly recent, p4's or so) from the shop itself together with a few NIB fans, a fan controller, and some assorted cables (including a 25m VGA cable...(!)). "Meh, thought they had more stuff but I guess they cleaned up shop before they left", I thought. And as I was going to say thanks and my goodbyes since the trunk of my puny Renault Clio was already full, the guy asks me if I had ever gone to the basement.

BASEMENT ?!?!?

BASEMENT?!?!?!?!??!?!?!??

Basements are good. I mean, basements are the best. I never knew the shop had a basement. The access was thru the outside since it was the basement of the building where the shop is located. Immediately my mind starts racing, and thinking, that's where the good (old!) stuff is. So, I present to you, the basement:

A pile... erm.. maybe a pyramid of old towers (around 30 or so), together with a 1m x 3m wood box full of loose laptop and pc parts, plastics, beer bottles (!), a couple of printers, some monitors, a couple of stereos and strangely, no bugs other than a spider or two.

I took advantage of the few hours of daylight I had left and made a smaller pile of the computers that had the case in better shape, picked the other cases that still had something inside of them (not all, but most did) and that was pretty much it. The garage was opened normally during the day since it serves only as storage for the shops above, so I carried (3 boxes of) the stripped parts from the battered computer cases and the wood crate, 4 UPSs and 6 or 7 computers in the back seat, and home I went. Next day, after some meticulous planning, I managed to fill the Clio with not 5, not 10, but around 15 computers, including one massive Thermaltake case. I had to go thru most backalleys back home (10km ride) thru the city since I didn't want any issues with the cops, but the trip went well.

This is everything I brought from there:

After I did another selection of cases, now with better daylight, stripped the other ones of their goods and with a lot of elbow grease cleaned up the ones in better state, having ended up with this:

Unwanted Cases:

Cleaned up Cases:

There was also a Goldstar Desktop PC (486 SX25) which caught my eye as probably being the oldest (I'll open up a thread about this one):

Hard Disks:

Optical and Floppies (and a pair of ZIP Drives too):

Motherboards \ CPU \ RAM bundles:

I haven't yet tested the Hard Disks, nor the Optical Drives, and I forgot to take a picture of the various Graphic, sound, network and other cards. There wasn't much RAM there too. Apart from this, I also brought home a couple of satellite receivers BNIB, 5 or so access points (3 brand new).

What I did test were the motherboards (up to POST at least), and only 6 out of 18 were broken, so I salvaged the CPUs and BIOS Chips (what else can you salvage from a dead mobo?) and put them up together with the unwanted cases to recycling.
The computers inside the cleaned up cases all worked but one, most of them are standard PC's from the day ranging from Pentium II 350's to Pentium III 733's.

One of them as a borked PSU (the iDot Explora) which is less than half the size of a standard ATX so I'll have to find one on ebay. There are also a couple of AMD Athlon systems in there. The "strangest" of the bunch is a Cyrix Media GX AT-based system that runs @ 266MHz with everything onboard.

Most of this will be up for sale at the bays, but i'm surely going to keep a board or two... 😀

Edit: I almost forgot. When I was leaving with the last computers, one of the ladies helping clean the store (computer shop guys aren't the tidiest, believe me) was carrying some stuff from the shop and opened a garage inside the basement. I peeked as soon as she left to go fetch more stuff.

Guess I am not done yet... 😁 Already spoke with them, and as soon as they have time I'll have another go at the stuff 😀

Edit 2: Found out how to shrink the thumbnails.. 😜

Wow!!! Aren't those type of finds fun and exhausting? Sounds like everything is free as well. That's always a good price.

Yup to both points. It was a lot of fun but I'm still tired from everything. Next to this pile there was a pile of old printers and stuff from a shop next door... I might've inhaled a couple of toners worth of ink dust and normal dust too...

xeon3d wrote:

Guess I am not done yet... 😁 Already spoke with them, and as soon as they have time I'll have another go at the stuff 😀

Edit 2: Found out how to shrink the thumbnails.. 😜

Cool find - hope you have some room in your house left after storing all this 😉

Holy smoke..... Must be the motherload of your life. 😮