Finish retrobrighting these. Also cleaned the CD-ROM, add silicon grease to the moving parts and cleaned the lens. I tried different methods for retrobrighting including UV light and direct heat but none of them come close to just put the plastic in mixture of water and hydroperoxide and placed under the direct sunlight. Sun is just awesome 🌞.

I came relatively late to the cd burning party, a 32x speed Lite-On was my first burner. Good work on the retrobrighting.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-05-14, 00:48:

Looks good, how is it in terms of heat? I've got a very similar Dell pizzabox case with the Netplex 4/25 which right now has a s […]
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LewisRaz wrote on 2023-05-13, 11:53:

Benched my DX4 Overdrive against the stock DX2 in my dell 466i.

https://youtu.be/yL86qGZdJW0

Looks good, how is it in terms of heat? I've got a very similar Dell pizzabox case with the Netplex 4/25 which right now has a somewhat slower sx25. Does your one have a fan in the front possibly?

The other day I was going through some of my old boards that were put away as 'for parts', since I've found more than one board I thought was dead actually works sometime later because of a dumb thing I missed.
A Toshiba Satellite 110CT board that I thought had been broken when I tried to clean its corrosion, turned out to work quite well but I was using the wrong power supply which it would refuse to power from. (it needs 18.2v internal AC>DC PSU, it was mixed up with a 15.2v PSU from another model). Put it back together and found the internal keyboard / mouse were all messed up, but external kb/mouse worked. Known good laptop keyboards wouldn't work on it and it appeared that the battery leak had got to the keyboard area first. Decided to pull off the keyboard connector and found it was so badly corroded and stuck on there that in the end I just cut it up and broke chunks of it off. Some traces had gone bad:

The attachment Satellite-110ct-keyboard-tracing.jpg is no longer available

For reference, from left to right everything except the last 6 pins is the keyboard connector which integrates the upper and lower layers into one connector. Then the last 6 are the Toshiba Accupoint mouse which is a 4-way variable resistor between 5v and gnd to make up the left/right and up/down directions. The keyboard connector is mostly the same on the Toshiba Satellite T2100 to Satellite 400 / 410 / 420 / 430 series laptops.
I was able to repair most of the traces underneath and put solder mask on everything to keep it in place and not melt off:

The attachment sat110-kb.JPG is no longer available

Took a connector from a board I thought was dead (hot air 250c at full speed) and soldered it onto this 110CT. That got the keyboard working then the mouse was not detected unless an external one was plugged in. That turned out to be the Alps chip which is the internal pointer controller had gone bad. Borrowed that from the same board and now the mouse works. It got downgraded to a Satellite 110CS with a DSTN screen in the process because that's what was left and now it's a pretty nice laptop that was a pile of junk parts a little while ago.

In the process, I learnt that using hot air soldering on a Toshiba Satellite motherboard when it's not secured to anything is a *terrible idea*. These motherboards have large QFPs on both sides and if the board flexes while the PCB is heated, legs from those QFPs will come unstuck. I thought I'd re-killed this Satellite 110CT but through careful resoldering of the QFP legs and inspecting it was working again.

That got me thinking, I had bought a Toshiba Satellite 430 motherboard some months ago which I thought I'd killed because I put hot air on it after failing to get the VGA working right, thinking it was a badly fitted VGA card connector, I tried resoldering the QFPs and eventually it stopped posting at all after I'd worked on it a bit. I thought that maybe some internal vias were broken and these boards are fragile but no. These boards just have lots of pins and lots of things to get wrong.
Looking at it a few months later and in bright daylight I made tons of mistakes, bridged legs on some chips and the corner of one QFP had pins just completely off the board.
Delicately resoldering those and cleaning up my mistakes the board now works again and with a scrap Satellite 400CDT case, along with a mostly broken video card that can't run an LCD display, it's a working system again - til I get some better parts for it:

The attachment sat430-pcb-1.jpg is no longer available

The speaker is from an HP laptop and the buttons are hot glued into place. I'm upset about the arrow keys, notice they're a different colour? Turns out melting hot glue with a hair drier also melts keyboard keys 🙁

The attachment sat430-pcb-2.jpg is no longer available

The 400CDT's case is smaller than the 430CDT so uh, I made it fit.

The attachment sat430-pcb-3.jpg is no longer available

The last Satellite 4xx power supply I tried fixing had a load of corrosion in it and went bang when I last powered it, so stuff it, now the laptop runs from DC instead. This could be useful in future when more of the internal AC>DC power supplies on these 400 series laptops fail to capacitor leaks.

Also hopefully just helped epictronics with overclocking an IBM 486 motherboard

Hmm, two years later I won an auction for what I thought was a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CS but it's actually a Toshiba Satellite 100CS. I was surprised to discover that despite all three batteries having leaked, the laptop posts and works.

However the keyboard and mouse were broken just like the Toshiba Satellite 110CT / 110CS that I fixed in the post I've quoted above. The keyboard itself was all corroded at the connector and even with a different good keyboard the kb/mouse didn't work.
Same thing as the one above all the traces had corroded on the connector on the motherboard too, this time I decided to just clean the contacts and run traces - every single trace was broken pretty much:

Even after that I found that the keyboard wouldn't work with keys like A D Q E Z C all not working, but I know all the wires from the connector have been repaired. Checking while the system was on, the first 8 pins run through those little 3-pin diodes which I think are TVS diodes, most of those 8 pins measured 5 volts, but there were two at 1 or 2 volts instead. Initially I thought it was the diodes that were bad until I took the little D49 diode off, revealing a trace running off to the keyboard controller as well and there were bad traces there too. Now the keyboard all works with those additional traces fixed - hope it stays fixed this took AGES.

Had to repair another keyboard for these Toshibas so that enough working laptops have good keyboards, but I've run out of the good conductive paint and just have the stuff I don't like which only goes down to ~80 to 200 ohms instead of >10, it still worked thankfully, keyboards are pretty tolerant of higher resistance as long as it's not over 1k or something.

PD2JK wrote on 2025-05-27, 13:49:

I came relatively late to the cd burning party, a 32x speed Lite-On was my first burner. Good work on the retrobrighting.

Thanks 🙂. Yes, these one along with those early 48X Asus drives still works great.

Fast CD drives can also be very expensive. Some 52x drives were so loud that they sounded like a jet engine. I prefer quiter 16x DVD drives for this reason, even for CDs, which is roughly equivalent to a 40x CD drive.

Sure, but finding a 16/24X working drive is very hard.

dominusprog wrote on 2025-05-28, 08:05:

PD2JK wrote on 2025-05-27, 13:49:

I came relatively late to the cd burning party, a 32x speed Lite-On was my first burner. Good work on the retrobrighting.

Thanks 🙂. Yes, these one along with those early 48X Asus drives still works great.

Agreed, the 'Quietrack' ones are pretty good. And quiet. 😉

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-02-23, 02:11:

Wow that's a good quality 3d scan compared to what I can get. Is it one of the handheld type scanners or a turntable one? It loo […]
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iraito wrote on 2023-02-18, 15:29:

4: I got thanks to the kindness of acl a slot 1 mobo with a pentium 2, it's a non common form factor, so i'm planning to create a WIP thread and work on a 3d printable case for it, lucky me i work with professional 3d scanners and printers so i already have a 3d scan of the board to work with.

Wow that's a good quality 3d scan compared to what I can get. Is it one of the handheld type scanners or a turntable one? It looks like it handled scanning the reflective PCB really well, good luck with the case build 😀

-------------------

A long time ago I plugged my Citizen VIDA-15B floppy drive from the Compaq LTE Lite 4/25E into a regular 26pin floppy cable and burned out the drive. That sucked.
So of course I had to convert my Compaq LTE Lite 4/25E to a direct drive floppy! The pinout is basically the same as the Compaq SLT's Citizen OSDA-53B pinout listed here.
I had to get familiar with what connection does what and verify all of the pinout which is basically the same:

The attachment compaq-citizen-vida-15b.png is no longer available

Fitting a Teac FD05-HG in the bay works really well - 3 of the 4 screw holes match up with regular floppy drives so the drive sits properly without major modification. I had to trim down the eject peg so I didn't have to trim the case.

The attachment IMG_0892 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

This took a while and after getting it all together, the drive didn't work? It didn't seem to do anything and I spent ages checking I had the lines right with the oscilloscope (shoulda used logic analyser but scope is easier for these quick checks). The original Citizen VIDA-15B drive just made the computer upset since I burned out some components on it plugging it into a flat cable connector that put 5v into its sensors and things, so that was rather useless for reference.

I also spent a really long time figuring out how the connections are done on the mainboard - some of them are exposed on the docking connector which really helped, but after it didn't work I was second guessing everything and was about to go back to the drawing board.
It turned out I didn't have any pins wrong, but the flat flex cable connector I'd wired it up for had the connector pins on the other side than what I soldered it up for, argh. These are all just salvaged from dead drives so it's tough to know what's what.

The attachment Citizen-VIDA-15B-adapter-wiring.jpg is no longer available

Once it was resoldered the drive has just worked! Considering the trouble that Citizen belted floppy drives have given me, a direct drive floppy on this LTE Lite is awesome. It predates PCMCIA so getting files on and off of it is otherwise a hassle.

Now the prototype works I can get some adapter PCBs made - it also means that a Gotek PCB could go in potentially.

And an update to this Compaq LTE floppy direct-drive mod. I got the PCBs made and my Compaq LTE Lite has been sitting out on the bench for about the last week - I tested the new direct-drive floppy with the adapter PCB and it broke the drive! Teac FD05HG we salute you for your service, it now can't read HD disks and will only read DD disks.
Turns out that just not hooking up the MEDIA and DENSITY_SELECT signals works fine with both DD & HD disks, now using an NEC FD3238T floppy. Funny as well how sometimes you don't spot stuff - I was stumped on why the new NEC drive would work when the top-casing was off but would give 'no-disk' errors when the case was fitted. Turns out, the cuts I made to the floppy eject plastic peg weren't enough so that when the top-case was in place, the floppy disk couldn't fully insert because the eject arm couldn't pop-out properly. This time I spotted it as soon as I put a disk in with the top case fitted.

Something I should have done *ages* ago was trace out the Citizen OSDA-53B adapter board I got a couple of years back, it didn't take very long and some of the traces are guesses since there are parts in the way but I know how everything hooks up now, so the pinout here is correct for the VIDA-15B and the OSDA-53B drives: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/com … r-pinout.62311/

Today I worked on my 486 VLB system I'm putting into a 1992ish minitower, and ordered an EPROM I can hopefully use to put in a modified BIOS that will take >2GB drives. It makes a nice counterpart to the 486 PCI system I'm putting together to replicate my first non-used PC build in 1997 or so.

I also toyed around with the Socket 7 board I got cheap with a broken CR2032 holder and figured out the correct pins for an external battery. Unfortunately it's got a weird other issue where it gets corrupted data trying to read floppies, even with the onboard FDC disabled and an ISA one installed. Annoying and somewhat baffling, but at least it's new enough to support CD-ROM boot if necessary.

Killer robot wrote on 2025-05-29, 07:41:

I also toyed around with the Socket 7 board I got cheap with a broken CR2032 holder and figured out the correct pins for an external battery. Unfortunately it's got a weird other issue where it gets corrupted data trying to read floppies, even with the onboard FDC disabled and an ISA one installed. Annoying and somewhat baffling, but at least it's new enough to support CD-ROM boot if necessary.

Often that's a sign of cache or memory problems which is revealed due to floppy controller using DMA. Sometimes it's only that the timings are wrong in setup, otherwise it might be a physical glitch due to oxidation in a socket somewhere or scratched trace or be actual bad modules.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-05-30, 15:13:

Killer robot wrote on 2025-05-29, 07:41:

I also toyed around with the Socket 7 board I got cheap with a broken CR2032 holder and figured out the correct pins for an external battery. Unfortunately it's got a weird other issue where it gets corrupted data trying to read floppies, even with the onboard FDC disabled and an ISA one installed. Annoying and somewhat baffling, but at least it's new enough to support CD-ROM boot if necessary.

Often that's a sign of cache or memory problems which is revealed due to floppy controller using DMA. Sometimes it's only that the timings are wrong in setup, otherwise it might be a physical glitch due to oxidation in a socket somewhere or scratched trace or be actual bad modules.

Thanks! I swapped memory already but hadn't thought of changing timings or cache settings, I'll look into those.

Swapped a larger HDD to my Presario 4/50, which is turning out to be one my favourite systems, although it isn’t even the fastest 486 I have. But it has neat things installed and with the integrated local bus ET4000/w32i it packs a decent punch with 256kB l2 and cpu OCd to 66MHz. I like these Compaq 486s, I have three of them: this Prolinea, Deskpro 466 XE and Presario 425.

The original Conner HDD was 170MB which is decent considering I have my DOS systems networked making file transfers a breeze. But I had one Seagate Medalist 540MB from the same period in my bin, so I decided to throw it in. It takes quite a bit time to setup everything from scratch, such as installing boot menu for different options (qemm, emm386 etc.), PAS16 drivers, network, 4DOS tweaking and all that jazz. Here again network saves the day. I took a backup of everything from the original HDD, installed new one, installed setup/diagnostic partition, formatted C and installed DOS. Then I just copied network drivers and MTCP to HDD so that I could launch ftp-server and copied everything from the backup to new HDD. It literally saves hours of work.

My first idea was to use IDE-USB adapter to copy the backup files on new HDD. Unfortunately Compaq’s stupid setup partition prevented the DOS partition showing up at all to windows at least on my adapter. I tried it on win98 and win11 and it was the same.

Had an itch to give more legroom to my voodoo 3 3000 agp. was on 440bx Pentium iii 700mhz with picogus and audigy 2zs. Some games like mechwarrior 3 and heavy gear 2 were flaky. Moved onto a K7T266 Pro and messed around with solo-1 PCI and ymf744. Got the ymf744 to behave a little, solo-1 was a right pain and still wouldn't function properly messing around with the autoconfig.bat , "cannot find the AudioDrive" issue during startup. The K7T266 Pro with athlon @ 1.67GHz, 512MB ram is really stable and runs mechwarrior3 and heavy gear 2 like a champ. Happy so far.
Also extended bank with power ymf

Linear modded my dell at 102w Bigfoots, both beige and black version. Took a while to get into the flow of taking out the leaf from each Alps black switch. Key presses are now beautifully smooth, linear and "chonky". Was scratchy before due to age. Much much prefer the linear feel and chonky noise like the key presses in the movie, "Hackers" 😀

Kicking myself. A few days ago I noticed a Sound Blaster CT-1320 advertised on a well known auction site. I have been looking for this model for a loooong time. The listing was an auction and it expired at 5am on a Saturday morning. I set an alarm for the Friday. At the end of Friday I had the site open "so I would not forget to place a bid". Yeah, nice try you old fart. I watched a bunch of stuff on YT and then just went to bed... Keep in mind that that web page is right there, open, staring me IN MY FACE!

Woke up this morning, missed the auction. 🙁

The Sound Blaster CT-1320 went for $81USD... Congrats to whoever got it. All things considered, that was a great deal for the buyer.

pan069 wrote on 2025-05-31, 01:19:

Kicking myself. A few days ago I noticed a Sound Blaster CT-1320 advertised on a well known auction site. I have been looking for this model for a loooong time. The listing was an auction and it expired at 5am on a Saturday morning. I set an alarm for the Friday. At the end of Friday I had the site open "so I would not forget to place a bid". Yeah, nice try you old fart. I watched a bunch of stuff on YT and then just went to bed... Keep in mind that that web page is right there, open, staring me IN MY FACE!

Woke up this morning, missed the auction. 🙁

The Sound Blaster CT-1320 went for $81USD... Congrats to whoever got it. All things considered, that was a great deal for the buyer.

Sounds like something I would do! 😁

pete8475 wrote on 2025-05-31, 02:27:

pan069 wrote on 2025-05-31, 01:19:

Kicking myself. A few days ago I noticed a Sound Blaster CT-1320 advertised on a well known auction site. I have been looking for this model for a loooong time. The listing was an auction and it expired at 5am on a Saturday morning. I set an alarm for the Friday. At the end of Friday I had the site open "so I would not forget to place a bid". Yeah, nice try you old fart. I watched a bunch of stuff on YT and then just went to bed... Keep in mind that that web page is right there, open, staring me IN MY FACE!

Woke up this morning, missed the auction. 🙁

The Sound Blaster CT-1320 went for $81USD... Congrats to whoever got it. All things considered, that was a great deal for the buyer.

Sounds like something I would do! 😁

Congrats! I hope it turns out faulty 😀

pan069 wrote on 2025-05-31, 02:33:

pete8475 wrote on 2025-05-31, 02:27:

pan069 wrote on 2025-05-31, 01:19:

Kicking myself. A few days ago I noticed a Sound Blaster CT-1320 advertised on a well known auction site. I have been looking for this model for a loooong time. The listing was an auction and it expired at 5am on a Saturday morning. I set an alarm for the Friday. At the end of Friday I had the site open "so I would not forget to place a bid". Yeah, nice try you old fart. I watched a bunch of stuff on YT and then just went to bed... Keep in mind that that web page is right there, open, staring me IN MY FACE!

Woke up this morning, missed the auction. 🙁

The Sound Blaster CT-1320 went for $81USD... Congrats to whoever got it. All things considered, that was a great deal for the buyer.

Sounds like something I would do! 😁

Congrats! I hope it turns out faulty 😀

🤣 no I meant missing out on the auction by watching youtube.

To be clear I did NOT buy this soundcard or was I even aware of the auction.

pete8475 wrote on 2025-05-31, 04:05:

pan069 wrote on 2025-05-31, 02:33:

pete8475 wrote on 2025-05-31, 02:27:

Sounds like something I would do! 😁

Congrats! I hope it turns out faulty 😀

🤣 no I meant missing out on the auction by watching youtube.

To be clear I did NOT buy this soundcard or was I even aware of the auction.

Ah, right. Sorry. All good. 😀

I missed the auctions for quiet a few things. Seems to be a pattern. Luckily I really don't have enough place for new stuff.

Also, I tested the new VBESVGA drivers on WIn 3.1 under DOSBOX-X. If you use 16-bit apps (no win32s) and don't touch DOS prompt, it actually works stable-ish in the newest version. Earlier versions used to crash very fast.