Re: Clip boards made from old motherboards
Posted on 2019-06-28, 12:34
Ah, got the socket wrong, it's just plain So3. with the i420TX 'Saturn' chipset. Looks like a nice little late 486 board.
Re: Clip boards made from old motherboards
Posted on 2019-06-28, 11:10
Interesting board. Unless I'm mistaken that's an So4 board, with onboard SCSI and a little CMI-640 IDE controller. Given 3-chip chipset solution I suspect SiS 501 chipset.
Re: What's the nastiest thing you caught from a retro PC/Part?
Posted on 2019-06-28, 10:39
1001 cuts and slashes on ~2000 era razorblade cases... As for biohazards, not many exotic critters in this part of the woods, a dessicated mouse mummy was about as bad as I've seen.
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2019-06-27, 21:34
Sound card time today: https://tweakers.net/ext/f/VBcqDzepgS0AVZL9yNXzt49H/full.jpg Don't normally go for boxed stuff, but if you can't find it without box and the price isn't too inflated, why not. I hate 3.5mm jacks, which leads me into the realm of prosumer audio stuff like this Emagic Audiowerk …
Re: P3 booting problems.
Posted on 2019-06-25, 16:34
Soltek boards had a bad case of capacitor plague around this time, so that would be my first suspicion, particularly as behaviour isn't consistent. One thing to try (given it has dipswitches) is to significantly underclock the board, so run it at 7.5x66MHz=500MHz instead of 7.5x133MHz. If it does …
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2019-06-25, 12:11
If you have a wide selection of old and new hardware, you can see a massive progression in all aspects of the computer. Old hard drives (the 10mb mfm kind) often have small cpu's on them. Old floppy drives too - Commodore 64 FDDs had more CPU power than their host system ;) old network cards used …
Re: Performance difference between ISA NICs?
Posted on 2019-06-24, 22:29
[...] Really? I have an Etherlink III too off the same chipset (I think, have to check) and I still can't get it to assign an IP or get it to NOT crash my computer on WFW 3.11. I think it's a resource management problem because the jumpers only allow 2 possible IRQs/Ports and then there's some …
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2019-06-24, 20:35
These odd graphic cards... I'm pretty sure they were designed for some sort of industrial machinery like CNC machine or something... Ah, that mysterious card with no video RAM... AGP was designed to allow use of the host RAM, but it was supposed only to be used for textures, to supplement the …
Re: Why is the Ensoniq 1370 recommended? it's trash!
Posted on 2019-06-24, 13:43
[...] its not like you have much choice for PCI and pure dos, Ensonic, Live/Audigy's, Aureal Vortex in that order, and that's it. Hardly... You're missing ESS Solo-1 and Aztech 3328, both of which are at least as painless as the Ensoniq 137x (and the Solo-1 supports wavetable header, one of which I …
IBM 3270AT troubles & troubleshooting
Posted on 2019-06-23, 21:27
Last Friday I picked up this beast (and almost did my back in - it's HEAVY): https://tweakers.net/ext/f/DeHdiEOmjPRDORf1QhQ3uT6F/full.jpg It's an IBM 3270AT. Basically, an early IBM PC/AT with some special hardware to talk to System/370 mainframes and a decidedly non-standard video solution (cards+ …
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2019-06-23, 12:44
Surprise purchase here - I saw an ad for 'PCI cards' come past. It looked sort of interesting, with a V3-3000 AGP and a Gf2MX PCI the most appealing, but still nothing I really needed (or was prepared to shell out a lot for). So more as a placeholder than anything else I did a lowball offer. Next …
Re: Avoiding too much overclocked 2000s motherboards ?
Posted on 2019-06-23, 10:43
After 25 years I'd say natural selection will have sorted this out for you. If people truly abused the boards, they wouldn't have lasted 5 years. Bigger issue than excessive overclocking is good old capacitor plague, combined with (particularly P4) VRMs dying due to not being quite up to the high …
Re: Performance difference between ISA NICs?
Posted on 2019-06-23, 07:54
One thing on my 'to-do' list is to do some extensive benchmarking of ISA NICs, both in terms of throughput and CPU usage. My day job involves quite a bit of tweaking network parameters to maximise performance; applying that to ancient stuff could be fun. There's a lot of contradictory 'common …
Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?
Posted on 2019-06-22, 22:00
Broke out the soldering iron this evening. Three to-dos: - My STB Velocity 4400 (the first nVidia TNT card) lost an SMD cap due to my clumsiness. It now has its cap back and is in full working order :) - The wire piggy-backing a new battery onto a Dallas DS1387 RTC RAMified broke off. It's back on …
Re: Unknown floppy drive
Posted on 2019-06-22, 18:35
Any chance of a better pic of the sticker on the rotating circle? That's your model number...
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2019-06-22, 12:30
Any info on that monitor? It doesn't seem to accept regular CGA/EGA, but it looks like regular TTL... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270_PC https://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/5271.html Uhuh, I found those, but there's very little on the monitor: Wiki: The display resolution is 720×350, either on …
Re: gameport to usb joystick adapter?
Posted on 2019-06-22, 10:12
I'd be happy with just digital / d-pad support to two PlayStation controllers or even 9-pin Atari/Amiga/Megadrive pads. For now, a gameport splitter and two 90s control pads are still working. I actually have an adapter from 9-pin Atari to 15-pin gameport. It works like a dream for arcade-style …
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2019-06-22, 01:16
[...] I've seen it advertised and was afraid that it would be bought by a member of the keyboard switch poacher community. Good to see that it's not :happy: (but I have my doubts about the fate of other PC AT's and their keyboards that were advertised for sale recently). To be honest the keyboard …
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2019-06-21, 15:49
Picked up something big this morning: https://tweakers.net/ext/f/DeHdiEOmjPRDORf1QhQ3uT6F/full.jpg That's an IBM 3270AT - in pretty much mint external condition. The 3270AT is a weird beast, basically a bog-standard early IBM AT with some decidedly non-standard I/O. It's desgined to act as an …
Re: Time period PC's vs the affordable norm
Posted on 2019-06-21, 14:51
We were fairly well-off Western Europeans, but still kept using our 1987 IBM PS/2 386-16 (DX before the term 'DX' had been invented) until 1995. In January I got my first own PC, a Pentium 60, and near the end of the year my mother upgraded to an IBM Aptiva with Pentium 100 (IBM again because she …
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