Re: How to fix your dead on-board floppy controller

Posted on 2023-05-13, 20:15

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Since you're seeing a non-functioning LPT port and the floppy isn't working, try booting off the hard drive and see if PCM sound works, if it doesn't then perhaps something is wrong with DMA which would break floppy access. That's a late enough board that that stuff should all be integrated though. …

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Re: How to fix your dead on-board floppy controller

Posted on 2023-05-05, 12:58

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Gladly I found this thread as I have most likely a fried UM8663BF chip on my Gigabyt GA-5486AL that I working on. Floppy doesn’t do anything even during boot, it just stays silent and no led lights up as if it is not connected at all. Also, the boot splash screen shows no LPT port available, …

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Re: Modern Retro PC cases, whats your favourites?

Posted on 2023-05-03, 18:36

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

for the horizontal pc case folks: SilverStone Grandia GD09 fits ATX only one 5.25 bay likely strong enough for a crt on top https://i.ibb.co/55d76QP/5-ss-grandia-gd09.jpg wish there was more horizontal options out there. I have this case for HTPC use and I certainly wouldn’t put CRT on top of it. …

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Re: Your most shitty motherboard?

Posted on 2023-04-27, 07:59

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Abit NF7-S2G. I still has this board pretty much unused in box. Back in the day, I fiddled a lot with Socket A platform. Bought cheap Athlons, tested several motherboards, had fast memory, watercooling and tweaked the hell out of the systems just for fun. Athlons were so much fun, because you could …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2023-04-26, 12:54

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I agree. Anything with a genuine OPL chip is still very useful. You can always add an additional card, ISA or PCI, for digitized sound, but a genuine OPL chip is always on the ISA bus. This does of course except things such as the ESS Solo-1 (ESFM) and Yamaha PCI cards. I'm referring to discreete …

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Re: Running DOS games in a real hardware. What issues am I going to encounter?

Posted on 2023-04-25, 17:21

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If DOS is a priority then get a Pentium II 333 + 440LX/BX (not VIA). Those have open multiplier and thus can down clock if needed. You should be able to play games also in SVGA. 486 and Pentium 120 do not have have sufficient speed for SVGA games. You will be missing a lot. IMO it really depends …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2023-04-25, 15:52

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Got these today, I'm going to use most of this stuff for my next 486 build: Gigabyte GA-5486AL with 32MB RAM and AMD DX4-120. Board had slight battery leakage, but it should boot just fine (worked with the seller). Did the vinegar stuff already and "washed" it a bit with flux, wick and iron and …

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Re: My IBM PS/2 model 35SX build

Posted on 2023-04-12, 14:04

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

ramon wrote on 2023-04-11, 16:19: Nice build! Good read, thanks for the details 😀 Glad you enjoyed it! 😀

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Re: My IBM PS/2 model 35SX build

Posted on 2023-04-08, 13:44

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Thanks for the write-up, that was fun to read! Beautiful machine. I have a 76i that has the same case, but is a MCA machine with a 486DX. What do you plan to run on it? And do you have a socket for a cpu ugrade? There is a wealth of upgrade possibilities to turn your 386 in a half decent 486 :-) …

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Re: My IBM PS/2 model 35SX build

Posted on 2023-04-07, 09:51

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

PART IV - Wrapping up the project System was up and running and it was time to wrap up the project. But wait! I only have Compaq and some unbranded peripherals and while latter would perhaps be suitable for IBM, using Compaq keyboard and mouse with IBM would be a travesty. So, I guess I needed to …

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Re: My IBM PS/2 model 35SX build

Posted on 2023-04-07, 09:50

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

PART III - FPU and sound Now that the basics were up and running, there practically was only two things I could still do inside the case: installing a soundcard and a math co-processor. Now, I did consider installing an SVGA card as this has a plain old vanilla 256KB VGA and I have few cards laying …

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Re: My IBM PS/2 model 35SX build

Posted on 2023-04-07, 09:50

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

PART II - RAM, networking and storage Now that I had fully working system, I certainly needed to make some improvements. I already had planned stuff during the floppy repair and first testing and started to search parts I needed. As I said, my machine came with 4MB memory, which is more than enough …

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My IBM PS/2 model 35SX build

Posted on 2023-04-07, 09:50

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I've been gradually working with this model 35SX during the last couple of months and I've pretty much finished it during the last week or so. I will post the build log here probably in few parts in short succession within a day or two [edit: ALL PARTS ARE HERE, SO BUILD LOG IS COMPLETE]. So, …

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Re: IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486, no post, no beeps, just blinking cursor.

Posted on 2023-03-30, 16:08

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Are they surface mount caps? There usually can be several different type of drives and from different manufacturers in these systems. AFAIK a FRU number can have drives from different manufacturers, so FRU isn't necessary unique in this sense. Because drive models can be different, it also means …

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Re: IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486, no post, no beeps, just blinking cursor.

Posted on 2023-03-28, 17:25

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm not too familiar with parity memory. Do 12 chip SIMMs generally have parity? The parity SIMMs I remember seeing had 9 chips. The ones in this PS/2 were are all 12 chip. I have quite a bit of memory. I just might have some that goes in this thing. :lol: There might be better memory experts than …

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Re: IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486, no post, no beeps, just blinking cursor.

Posted on 2023-03-28, 14:44

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm curious to know what it will do if I install some random untested memory from my stockpile. It'll probably work fine. :Rofl: At least my PS/2, and I think most of them do, require memory with parity. Of course regular FPM with parity won’t work. Also 60ns doesn’t work. However, many regular …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2023-03-27, 17:23

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I got this jumper configurable ES1688F card today. It has the proper jumper settings printed on the back side, which is handy:

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Re: IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486, no post, no beeps, just blinking cursor.

Posted on 2023-03-27, 17:19

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah, this is basically what I'm thinking. Also, this RAM has been in it for many years... not that that is a guarantee that it wasn't just thrown in there at some point. But the owner is more of a software guy, and not so much into constantly messing with hardware. He said it's been decades since …

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Re: IBM PS/2 Model 90 XP 486, no post, no beeps, just blinking cursor.

Posted on 2023-03-27, 16:07

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Are you using the correct ram? these late mca machines used special snowflake ram, even though it is 95% standard 72-pin simms. also make sure you are putting the correct simms in the correct slots. I havent looked at my own xp90 in a while but I think it takes 2 simms at minimum and they need to …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2023-03-23, 18:21

by

by CharlieFoxtrot

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Got the same problem on a 386DX/25. But I can press the ESC key to cancel the memory test during power on and it will boot directly to DOS. Maybe it works for you too? Nope. IBM seems to really want to make that check no matter how much I smash the keyboard. It is actually a nice feature when you …

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