canthearu wrote:Finished restoring the old 286 I bought a week and a half ago.
Previously I had:
a) Stripped down the system, and removed motherboard.
b) Removed battery from motherboard, clean remaining corrosion, reinforced one track with solder and used a wire to repair a second trace damaged by corrosion. Removed the remains of an exploded tantalum capacitor.
c) Pulled apart power supply and give basic clean on the inside.
d) Test floppy drives. The 5.25inch drive worked fine. The 3.5inch drive was non working properly.
Today, to finish the job:
a) Washed the case completely in the bathtub. Case is in reasonably good shape for a 30 year old case.
c) Repair 3.5inch drive with new capacitors, as existing capacitors read very bad ESR. This fixed the drive, although the new capacitors are a bit large and do not quite fit.
c) Create replacement CMOS battery pack, using and 4xAA battery pack and installing a wire in one of the battery position. This makes it a 3 battery pack.
d) Reassemble computer into clean case. Install with new battery pack and add sound card to the mix.
e) All tested and working. Fix front panel display to show 12mhz when turbo on, and 8mhz with turbo off.
Now I should redo the software on it, installing a fresh copy of DOS and Windows 3.1.
Computer specs:
286-12mhz
4meg RAM, in DIP sockets.
50meg Quantium Plus Impulse IDE hard drive (no bad sectors)
1.44meg floppy
1.2meg floppy
IDE/Floppy ISA card (16-bit)
Serial/Parallel ISA card (8-bit)
Trident 8800 VGA card (8-bit) (maybe this can do EGA too, it has a 9-pin plug as well as the standard VGA plug)
ESS-1869 Sound card. (16-bit)
This computer was definitely worth picking up and restoring.
Predator99 wrote:
...but it still POSTs only every 5th attempt or so.
Out of ideas at the moment...
canthearu wrote:Predator99 wrote:
...but it still POSTs only every 5th attempt or so.
Out of ideas at the moment...
I'd test/replace the electrolytic caps on it.
Intermittent faults are very often due to these infernal capacitors.
Then if that isn't the problem, I'd go over it carefully looking for poor or cracked solder joints.
brostenen wrote:Finished up the last thing on my 500 refurbish project. I am only talking about functional things. Or things that makes it a fully working machine. I still need to fix up the cosmetic part. It is now ready to be used again.... Gave it a memory upgrade as well. (and take some nice pictures, when it is 100% finished). The cosmetic part will however not be possible before summer. I need warm and dry weather for the paintjob, as I will be doing it outside.
https://to9xct.blogspot.com/2018/09/my-amiga500-refurbish-project.html
EDIT:
A few members here on Vogons have said that it was a NO-GO and I would kill or destroy the plastic when using liquid acetone for welding. To that I can say that it holds up beautifully. The structure are like new and nothing have melted more than it was supposed to melt. It simply works. There are only two things to take into acount when working with liquid acetone. One is to use a tiny amount, and the second is that you need to work extremely fast.
I can't stress this too much... Work fast and be gentle with the amount of acetone used.
Baoran wrote:I think he already mentioned that he replaced the caps.
© Logitech 93 Ⓜ
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appiah4 wrote:brostenen wrote:Finished up the last thing on my 500 refurbish project. I am only talking about functional things. Or things that makes it a fully working machine. I still need to fix up the cosmetic part. It is now ready to be used again.... Gave it a memory upgrade as well. (and take some nice pictures, when it is 100% finished). The cosmetic part will however not be possible before summer. I need warm and dry weather for the paintjob, as I will be doing it outside.
https://to9xct.blogspot.com/2018/09/my-amiga500-refurbish-project.html
EDIT:
A few members here on Vogons have said that it was a NO-GO and I would kill or destroy the plastic when using liquid acetone for welding. To that I can say that it holds up beautifully. The structure are like new and nothing have melted more than it was supposed to melt. It simply works. There are only two things to take into acount when working with liquid acetone. One is to use a tiny amount, and the second is that you need to work extremely fast.
I can't stress this too much... Work fast and be gentle with the amount of acetone used.
I have been following this project for a while, and as a fellow A500 lover, I commend you on everything you've done to it.
liqmat wrote:This past week has been a week of archiving a large amount of vintage software for preservation purposes. Updated my year long Cardinal SNAPplus archival project with more found drivers, manuals and software. Imaged twenty hard to find Wang APC software & systems disks. Categorized, combined and labelled two large ALR server file and document archives. Finally, I am in the middle of building an archive for the long forgotten Tempra line of software from a long ago defunct company called Mathematica, Inc. Found two more sealed products from them and have been scanning and imaging for the last few days. One of the products is so rare I didn't even know it existed until I saw it on Ebay. They were mainly producers of DOS multimedia content creation software before they went belly up. Found a Windows version of their software and this must have been released just moments before they went under because I never knew about it until now and I used their products extensively back in the early 90s.
One of the many challenges of archiving old 5¼" floppy disks is possible disk warping like the disk you see below. Luckily the magnetic disk itself was not warped and only the casing was. What I had to do to get the data off was slowly and carefully move the disk in the disk drive as WinImage read the disk. When WinImage encountered an error I would have to press down on a different part of the disk casing to flatten it as best as possible and hit "retry" in WinImage. Eventually, with a lot of patience, I got a complete image off the disk. What some of us do for historical preservation. So worth it though.
It's kind of hard to see in this light, but you can see the disk casing is warped. Mr. floppy drive was not happy about this.
canthearu wrote:Baoran wrote:I think he already mentioned that he replaced the caps.
You are right, the caps have been replaced.
Predator99 wrote:canthearu wrote:Baoran wrote:I think he already mentioned that he replaced the caps.
You are right, the caps have been replaced.
Indeed, I already replaced them. Bad caps are a good explanation for that behaviour. I also noticed that it preferably POSTs when it has been turned off for some hours. After that, with each powercycle it gets more unlikely that it works...
Predator99 wrote:No, I just kept it running while it hasnt POSTed. All ICs are cold. When it POSTs, everything has normal operation temperature.
Yes, there is some corrosion on the PLCCs pins. Maybe a good idea to continue...
No, havent touched the blue components. And I will not, these are too many and they dont look that bad
I dont know how these things work, but I assume the error is on the Amiga side not the PC side.
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