So I finally located the charger to the Compaq Presario 1920 P-II laptop I acquired the other day.

The verdict: It works. Sorta.

It will only turn on if the bottom unit which contains the floppy and CD drive is disconnected. This is a problem, because that CD drive is the only way to actually load software or an OS onto it. It has a USB port, but that doesn't do a lot of good when Windows 98 is installed and there are no USB mass storage drivers installed. I got it to randomely boot with the drives connected just once. Sometimes (rarely) it also wont boot with the drive unit off it. In these cases holding pressure on the right palm rest while pressing the power button seems to be the trick. The battery works, and the CMOS is holding charge (which may indeed be a bad thing in this case if its a configuration issue).

I'm probably going to have to disassemble the laptop, its got to be a lose connector somewhere. As it sits right now I have a Windows 98 FE install on it (which was half way through setup by the previous user) with no means of loading drivers, software, or anything else. Great.

Pulled my hair out trying get a Dreamblaster S2 working with an ES1868F card for a couple of hours. Turned out it was just the AUX channel volume the Waveblaster header uses being set to 0 by default. So silly...

Added internal Line In and Line Out headers to a CS4236 ISA sound card I had (Acer Magic S23) so that I can use it alongside a PCI card in my Slot-A build.

I decided to go with this instead of several other options that had real OPL3 because, well, I have a shitton of builds with real OPL3 and CrystalFM is just beautiful.

Back when I initially built my TubeTime Adlib clone I could not find a real Bourns logarithmic potentiometer. I eventually got one. I got around to replacing the cheap Chinese pot with the correct size not long ago, but only recently did I have the time to design an STL file for a bracket for it. So today I got the 3D printed bracket in the mail, and I think it turned out fantastic (I did have to enlarge the holes manually by 1-2mm though..)

Do you have the STL file for it you can share? I'm building one right now. 😁

Sure, I will share it as soon as I get back home. Remember to enlarge the holes a bit though. Also, make sure you have the same kind of 3.5mm jack, mine is a low profile one.

Thanks. I should be able to modify the 3D file to fix it for my design. 😀

wiretap wrote:

Thanks. I should be able to modify the 3D file to fix it for my design. 😀

Actually, I managed to get access to it. It's attached.

Installed VIA 4-in-1 4.43 driver set on my Shuttle AV18V31 motherboard that has a VIA Apollo Pro 133A northbridge and the newer drivers made my nVidia GeForce4 Ti4400 AGP run at 2x instead of 4x. With 4.43, the AGP port is running at 4x now and all of my games are smooth as butter now.

Source: Guru3D.com Archive January 2004

Search for 4.43 and it'll be the one uploaded on the 31st of January 2004.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Installed VIA 4-in-1 4.43 driver set on my Shuttle AV18V31 motherboard that has a VIA Apollo Pro 133A northbridge and the newer drivers made my nVidia GeForce4 Ti4400 AGP run at 2x instead of 4x. With 4.43, the AGP port is running at 4x now and all of my games are smooth as butter now.

Source: Guru3D.com Archive January 2004

Search for 4.43 and it'll be the one uploaded on the 31st of January 2004.

Why not download the newest drivers right from VIA site?

Because the system reports my AGP card is running at 2x instead of 4x that my board has enabled. The older nVidia drivers is not DX9 compatible, so...

Recapped 7 motherboards - all from some new-old-stock HP T5700 thin clients. I hand 8 of these altogether, and 7 had the same 2 bad caps. Of those, 5 wouldn't even post to BIOS. But now with the new Panasonic caps, all 7 boards work perfectly!

This is my first attempt at recapping anything. Luckily the underside of the board was easy to get to and once I got the hang of this, it wasn't too bad.

The hardware itself is nothing special, but with its VIA chipset and ATI Rage onboard video, it was able to take a fully functional Windows 98 installation.

appiah4 wrote:

wiretap wrote:

Thanks. I should be able to modify the 3D file to fix it for my design. 😀

Actually, I managed to get access to it. It's attached.

Awesome, thank you!

Next stage in my Gotek(s) mods: rotary encoder

The ones I got were on a little PCB, would not fit in the Gotek easily, so I decided to desolder it from the PCB and hook it up directly. Needed some pins soldered to hook it up and a patch wire to connect the two ground pins. Since I do all this in threefold it took me some time. Only to find out that I don't have the correct size drill to drill the hole, so I can't finish it tonight 🙁 It all works fine though! FlashFloppy is a must-have on a Gotek! (or HxC but haven't used that myself.

I'm just reinstalling Windows 2000 Professional from scratch with VMWare, and applying all the updates I can. And I want it to stay vanilla, so no kernel extenders for now.

Next on my list is to find a decent browser - I believe my best candidate is Pale Moon 26.5...

Then I will install all my old games on it. I'd go with Windows 98, but... browsing is kinda impossible.

bfcastello wrote:

I'm just reinstalling Windows 2000 Professional from scratch with VMWare, and applying all the updates I can. And I want it to stay vanilla, so no kernel extenders for now.

Next on my list is to find a decent browser - I believe my best candidate is Pale Moon 26.5...

Then I will install all my old games on it. I'd go with Windows 98, but... browsing is kinda impossible.

I used Windows 2000 on my main PC until just 2 years ago. It was the lack of web browser support that made me finally upgrade to Windows 7. Now when I do Win 2k builds on retro machines, I go with K-Meleon v74 (equal to Firefox v24).

bmwsvsu wrote:

bfcastello wrote:

I'm just reinstalling Windows 2000 Professional from scratch with VMWare, and applying all the updates I can. And I want it to stay vanilla, so no kernel extenders for now.

Next on my list is to find a decent browser - I believe my best candidate is Pale Moon 26.5...

Then I will install all my old games on it. I'd go with Windows 98, but... browsing is kinda impossible.

I used Windows 2000 on my main PC until just 2 years ago. It was the lack of web browser support that made me finally upgrade to Windows 7. Now when I do Win 2k builds on retro machines, I go with K-Meleon v74 (equal to Firefox v24).

Thanks for the tip. I could try it later!

Was playing around with my 286 today. Not having touched QuickBasic for close to 30 years, I wondered how long it would take me to make analogue clock. Turns out, about an hour or so, had to look up a bunch of stuff I'd forgotten about. Still heaps of room for improvement. 😀

1DECLARE SUB drawClock ()
2DECLARE SUB drawHour (t$, c%)
3DECLARE SUB drawSecond (t$, c%)
4
5CONST PI = 3.141592654#
6
7CONST ORG.X = 640 / 2
8CONST ORG.Y = 480 / 2
9
10LET prevTime$ = TIME$
11
12SCREEN 12
13CLS
14
15drawClock
16
17ON TIMER(1) GOSUB displayTime
18
19TIMER ON
20DO
21LOOP UNTIL INKEY$ = CHR$(27)
22TIMER OFF
23END
24
25displayTime:
26  LET currTime$ = TIME$
27
28  drawHour prevTime$, 0
29  drawSecond prevTime$, 0
30
31  drawHour currTime$, 7
32  drawSecond currTime$, 15
33
34  prevTime$ = currTime$
35
36  RETURN
37
38SUB drawClock
39  LET a = 200
40
41  ' Draw seconds dots
42  FOR i = 0 TO PI * 2 - (PI * 2 / 60) STEP (PI * 2 / 60)
43    LET s = SIN(i)
44    LET c = COS(i)
45    LET x = ORG.X + (s * a)
46    LET y = ORG.Y + (c * a)
47 
48    LET sd% = s * (180 / PI)
49    LET cd% = c * (180 / PI)
50
51    IF sd% <> 0 AND cd% <> 0 THEN
52      PSET (x, y), 15
53    END IF
54  NEXT i
55
56  ' Draw hourly dots
57  FOR i = 0 TO PI * 2 - (PI * 2 / 12) STEP (PI * 2 / 12)
58    LET s = SIN(i)
59    LET c = COS(i)
60    LET x = ORG.X + (s * a)

61    LET y = ORG.Y + (c * a)
62
63    LET r = 1.5
64    LET k = 7
65
66    LET sd% = s * (180 / PI)
67    LET cd% = c * (180 / PI)
68
69    IF sd% = 0 OR cd% = 0 THEN
70      r = 3
71      k = 15
72    END IF
73
74    CIRCLE (x, y), r, k
75    PAINT (x, y), k
76  NEXT i
77END SUB
78
79SUB drawHour (t$, c%)
80  LET hh% = VAL(MID$(t$, 1, 2))
81  LET mm% = VAL(MID$(t$, 4, 2))
82 
83  LET a = 120
84  LET f = PI * 2
85  LET x = ORG.X + SIN(-(f / (12 * 60)) * (hh% * 60 + mm%) + PI) * a
86  LET y = ORG.Y + COS(-(f / (12 * 60)) * (hh% * 60 + mm%) + PI) * a
87
88  LINE (ORG.X, ORG.Y)-(x, y), c%
89END SUB
90
91SUB drawSecond (t$, c%)
92  LET ss% = VAL(MID$(t$, 7, 2))
93
94  LET a = 190
95  LET f = PI * 2
96  LET x = ORG.X + SIN(-(f / 60) * ss% + PI) * a
97  LET y = ORG.Y + COS(-(f / 60) * ss% + PI) * a
98
99  LINE (ORG.X, ORG.Y)-(x, y), c%
100END SUB
101
102

Today I received the EasyFlash 3 cartridge that I ordered for my Commodore 64.

It's great being able to flash .crt images to it and have multiple cartridge games on 1 cartridge, but the greatest thing of all of it's amazing features is - JiffyDOS! I'd heard about JiffyDOS for years and wondered what all the fuss was about and now I know - the speed difference loading disk & prg files is outstanding!

The EasyFlash 3 has other fast loading kernel images, as well as slots for Action Replay & Super Snapshot 5. All in all I'm quite happy with this cartridge. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of something like the "1541 Ultimate-II", but it is much more affordable and is sufficient for my needs. 😎

My next aim is to create some multi-game cartridge images on my PC and fill up those program slots, as well as flashing the GEOS boot kernel image for fast booting of GEOS from disk. Mind you, even booting GEOS from disk in the regular manner with JiffyDOS is a vast improvement, 1-2 minutes load time before down to about <30 seconds with JiffyDOS enabled!!

PTherapist wrote:

I'd heard about JiffyDOS for years and wondered what all the fuss was about and now I know - the speed difference loading disk & prg files is outstanding!

Yes it's amazing - I accidentally turned it off a while back and thought my machine must have been dying, but no, it was just loading at stock speeds 😵