The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-06-28, 19:56: Horribly slow loading large photos. Downsize it and post via forum. Done -- thanks!

I acquired this interesting ET4000AX card, which has a composite output (and also S-video and a mysterious 9-pin connector). Does anyone know what can be made to come out of its composite output, and how? Particularly in DOS, though I'm curious about any way of driving it. (Sorry for the bad photos …

Thanks for the replies everyone! In hindsight my slot theory was a bit silly. I was thinking that was all the AGP cards I have, but then I remembered... I do have a Matrox G400 card in another machine. I swapped it in, and it worked fine. And then I remembered I have a spare Gigabyte socket 7 board …

Has anyone ever seen display corruption like the following? My best theory is that it's caused by a damaged/dirty AGP slot, but I'm really not sure. https://xylophone.dyndns.org/~stephen/tmp/agp-photos-202006/DSC_2106.jpg https://xylophone.dyndns.org/~stephen/tmp/agp-photos-202006/DSC_2108.jpg …

Make sure your DOS version isn't one that came with Windows 9x. Those require at least a 386 and hang the way you described on anything lower. Ah, good call. This boot disk is MS-DOS 6.22... I have booted the 286 successfully with it before, while using a different I/O card (and still with some …

You mentioned that before connecting the HDD the PSU wouldn't start, as if it was in protection mode due to a short. One thing you can do if you have a multimeter is to check the resistance between the power rails and ground to see if there's something wrong there. The same test can also be …

Thanks! Very helpful. I had not noticed how bad that corrosion was. Will do as you suggest. (Or try to! I've not done any major rework before, though a bit of cleaning, soldering and continuity testing is within my abilities.) Perhaps that will fix the seemingly keyboard-related stability problems. …

When you hear a 'pop!' and see a spark fly from your board, does anyone have any hints for detecting what failed? In my case there's no obvious burnt-out component. I'm aware of tantalum capacitors' tendency to fail... the ones I've seen are little blobs in yellow or red packaging. Is it obvious …