jmannik wrote:

CT2501-TDQ I should read up on it and see if its one of the ones with the hanging bub I guess... […]
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Godlike wrote:

Excellent, thank you

CT2501-TDQ
I should read up on it and see if its one of the ones with the hanging bub I guess...

Yes output look very similar. I wonder if any older audio cards have same output layout, Vibra16 seems to be from doom ages but this card sit in 286 second generation personnel pc...

Godlike wrote:

jmannik wrote:

CT2501-TDQ I should read up on it and see if its one of the ones with the hanging bub I guess... […]
Show full quote

Godlike wrote:

Excellent, thank you

CT2501-TDQ
I should read up on it and see if its one of the ones with the hanging bub I guess...

Yes output look very similar. I wonder if any older audio cards have same output layout, Vibra16 seems to be from doom ages but this card sit in 286 second generation personnel pc...

286s were produced and still for sale in the early 90s. It's not unusual at all to for 286 owners from that period to fit later sound cards to their systems. Certainly no reason at all not to. My Zenith 286 from 1990 has a CT 1740 sound card which has the same back plate layout but the ports are marked.

This looks more like it-SB 2.0 , no port usage markings:

- Laughs evilly...

Interestingly, the BIOS date is from one day before the launch of the Pentium OverDrive (which I intend to use in here) so I suspect they added support for it, given that this motherboard existed before then and I know for a fact someone has updated this BIOS at some point. The board appears to have been running a 486DX2-66 before I got it though, so as yet I do not know if it actually is compatible as I'm waiting for my case and other parts before I transplant that from where it is now. The older 4DUV which the OverDrive is currently installed in is compatible with it so I hope the 4DUP has carried over this capability.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Here's a link to 9 pin vga pin out http://old.pinouts.ru/VideoCables/9to15VGA_pinout.shtml 9 pins are all that's needed for VGA.

Also a bit of further reading http://www.dansdata.com/gz061.htm

Well I'll be damned. Thanks for the info, Caluser. Good stuff.

I got my "Mystery box" 286 16 Mhz going 😀

I reconnected all cables and the system powered on without issues but the BIOS had of course lost all settings. It took a while to sort out the BIOS settings but now the system is running fine. The barrel battery holds charge! Not bad for an original battery in a 27 year old system that hasnt seen any use this Millennium if one would believe the previous owner. The HDD seem to be a "type 2" 20MB so that diddnt take long to figure out by trial and error and the memory is 1MB 640KB + 384KB extended (all chips on the mainboard). The computer can be upgraded with at least 7 MB EMS with SIPPs and/or an EMS ISA card.

The DOS version installed on the HDD is DOS 6.2 so the computer was still in use late 1993.

I am going through my collection to decide what to a) sell, b) donate, c) recycle or d) take with me. I am very likely going to move south soon.

PeterLI wrote:

I am going through my collection to decide what to a) sell, b) donate, c) recycle or d) take with me. I am very likely going to move south soon.

With a collection like yours, it would be a shame to recycle anything instead of keeping it in circulation within the community.

I have now removed Double Space from the 286 and scanned the disk with scandisk. No new bad sectors since the last time scandisk was run late 1993, Im guessing it was run just after the installation of DOS 6.2 😀

Perhaps 0.5 MB of the 20 MB is marked as BAD, but as long as the plague isnt spreading who cares! 😀

Sweet!!Another 286 up n running. With a nic the world will be your oyster 😉 30 pin simm holders will fit into the SIPP holders if you ever decide to add more ram to the mobo.

After a memory jog I tracked down a suitable cable to piggy back the LS120 drive to the back pack cdrom drive. It was buried under a couple of parallel port scanners in a box out in the shed. Some day I intend to put a Wfw 3.11 setup together using one of those Genius/KYE scanners just as an example of how things once were.

So far recycling appears highly unlikely. I am giving my 21" CRTs to a friend tomorrow.

Setting up a replacement for my dead media center. Emachines t1840 w/ ASUS p4p800-mx motherboard, 3.0ghz Prescott p4 w/HT, 250gb sata WD drive and a 300gb WD IDE drive for movies with a 160gb Seagate IDE drive for the OS and misc storage. Integrated intel extreme graphics are completely disabled in the bios and it is rocking a 256mb pci Geforce 6200 for video output. This system is growing on me 🤣

Today I messed with my new 486 (still has no case, that is still in Illinois apparently) and benchmarked it with the POD. It is fast! Most of the time anyway which leads into the other stuff I did today;

I developed a very strong dislike for these cards as the SoundScape refuses to change it's resources, has non-functioning Sound Blaster emulation and installing a real Sound Blaster next to it causes the synth onboard to freak out and not work properly... After I went to all the effort to make a bodge cable to pipe the SB into the CD-IN header. Might try and trade it for a PAS16 with someone, because it works as intended, the design just sucks ass for what I want to do. Undecided as yet, but if you have a PAS16 or something else you may be willing to trade for the S-2000, by all means let me know as at present I cannot see any use for this Ensoniq as I can't even use it as just a Midi card, guess I'll be stuck with FM Synthesis again.

The graphics card will not operate in SVGA modes with the BUS set to 40MHz (And PCI Divisor off, turning it on ruins the machine), as a result I can get more from the machine using my Diamond Trio 64 VLB or my S3 Trio 32 PCI which is only ever used for testing. How the hell did they manage to screw up an ET4000? I guess the 1994 of this system is out of the window because I will probably replace it with an ET6000 as there were a few going cheap when I bought these cards. Sucks to get rid of one and not the other anyway, because they're like part of a set as it were, both SPEA branded.

PeterLI wrote:

So far recycling appears highly unlikely. I am giving my 21" CRTs to a friend tomorrow.

Good for you.

Some day I intend to put a Wfw 3.11 setup together using one of those Genius/KYE scanners just as an example of how things once were.

I thought 3.11 requires a 386? Standard 3.1 will work on a 286.

Good for my friend. He is very happy with 2 CPD-E500 21" Sony Trinitron CRTs. 😀

I got this VI15G VLB motherboard a few years ago, I can’t recollect from where. It’s made by Acer and has a decent chipset, coin battery, and that funky mouse driven AMI BIOS. Details here:

http://museum.ttrk.ee/th99/m/C-D/32306.htm

I did test it but had an excess of 486 boards at the time, so didn’t persist for long when I couldn’t get it to recognise a HDD. It went onto my wall of donor parts, and indeed I stole its battery holder at some stage.

It occurred to me recently that I should have tried harder, so I pulled it down, gave it a good wash in warm water and dishwashing detergent, left it to dry for a few weeks, and fired it up. It booted fine but again I was having trouble getting a 400MB HDD to initialise. Setting the jumper on the drive to ‘cable select’ allowed the BIOS detect it correctly, but I was still getting a ‘HDD failure’ message during POST. Moving the VLB IDE card from slot 1 to slot 2 fixed that problem, and it booted into DOS no problem.

I’m glad I have it another shot, it’s a good back-up board.

This evening I finally found the time to hook up a Sony CDU-33A in my Magnavox 486 SX.

Cleaned my old Keytronic keyboard from 1996. Totally crusty inside from 19 years of old dirt.
Yummie stuff all included old cornflakes. Oh so delicious.... 😁

The keys were soaked in hot, really hot water. Mixed with soap for the washing mashine.
Plastic parts were cleaned using the shower head and some wet-wipes for dieper changing.
(tip.. They work great for screen/monitor cleaning too)

Installed one of the floppy drives from my AT&T PC 6300 into a Win98 machine, just long enough to create a set of original system disks. I can now boot it beyond POST! 😁

I'm debating whether to leave the AT&T as I received it with dual-floppies, or replace one of the floppies with a hard drive. If I do the latter, the removed floppy drive could find a permanent home in that Win98 machine so I could make more disks for it.

I have been busy some time with this memory tester, to test my memory modules if they are failing or not.

I also have the previous version here, but need to repair the buttons on that device, because they where worn out when i got it here..

smeezekitty wrote:

I thought 3.11 requires a 386? Standard 3.1 will work on a 286.

The wfw 3.11 setup WILL be a 486. Windows 3.11 on the other hand DOES run on a 286. Also wfw 3.1 will run on a 286 but you forgo the networking functionality.