Deksor wrote:

Not really, I have several ones with the windows key

Same here. there were alot of latter 5 pin din keyboards out there with windows keys. Most are just PS/2 keyboards with a 5 pin din cable.

RandomStranger wrote:

...and not too long ago a coworker dumped on me a network adapter. If it works I might add it to my home network. […]
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...and not too long ago a coworker dumped on me a network adapter. If it works I might add it to my home network.

That's an ISDN adapter, no good for ethernet.

Parts man wrote:

Deksor wrote:

Not really, I have several ones with the windows key

Same here. there were alot of latter 5 pin din keyboards out there with windows keys. Most are just PS/2 keyboards with a 5 pin din cable.

For some reason I thought that by the time they added windows keys, the industry had already shifted to PS/2 ports... but I guess my memories are not that accurate!

Well they did for OEM, but since AT computers were still made until the very late 90's, they had to make some.

Kamerat wrote:

RandomStranger wrote:

...and not too long ago a coworker dumped on me a network adapter. If it works I might add it to my home network. […]
Show full quote

...and not too long ago a coworker dumped on me a network adapter. If it works I might add it to my home network.

That's an ISDN adapter, no good for ethernet.

I see. I haven't looked into what it was exactly, just assumed because of the RJ45 connector.
Then I have to use something else.

MMaximus wrote:

Parts man wrote:

Deksor wrote:

Not really, I have several ones with the windows key

Same here. there were alot of latter 5 pin din keyboards out there with windows keys. Most are just PS/2 keyboards with a 5 pin din cable.

For some reason I thought that by the time they added windows keys, the industry had already shifted to PS/2 ports... but I guess my memories are not that accurate!

Yeah, this is a late model. I did manage to break one of the stabilizing bar clips under the backspace key. When pulling keys for cleaning it's easy to do. Luckily it affects it none as the other side of the key still has a clip and the key works just fine.

liqmat wrote:

Nothing super special today, but did manage to find and cleanup an AT keyboard. Squeaky clean inside and out. Always can use an additional AT keyboard.

AT_keys.jpg

I found a real 101 key XT/AT keyboard at the same place I found my most recent keyboard. $4, hell yeah I'll grab that!

Jed118 wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Nothing super special today, but did manage to find and cleanup an AT keyboard. Squeaky clean inside and out. Always can use an additional AT keyboard.

AT_keys.jpg

I found a real 101 key XT/AT keyboard at the same place I found my most recent keyboard. $4, hell yeah I'll grab that!

Yeah, I paid like $5. $5 for any AT keyboard is worth buying be it just for parts etc.

Today I began working on converting a Lenovo m70e Thinkcentre into a hybrid 98/XP gaming machine.

Machine specs before modification:
-Pentium E5300 dual core processor - 2.6 GHZ
-4 GB DDR3 Ram - PC8500
-250GB Mechanical SATA hard drive
-Chipset - Intel G41+ICH7
-Onboard video - Intel® GMAX4500
-Onboard audio - Realtek ALC662
-Expansion slots - 2 regular PCI, 1 PCI-e, and 1 PCI-e x16
-Onboard Ethernet - Yukon 88E8057

Things I've done thus far to get Windows 98SE up and running:
-Remove the 4 GB of ram and replace with 1 GB.
-Replace the 250 GB drive with a 60 GB solid state drive, set BIOS to IDE compatibility mode
-Install a Radeon x800 PCI-e video card
-Install a Creative CT4810 (PCI 128) sound card and disable onboard audio in BIOS
-Install Windows 98SE
-Install modded chipset drivers that I found online for the G41 chipset
-Install x800 video drivers for Windows 98 (Catalyst 6.2)

That was the easy stuff. The sound card was a real challenge as the drivers that came on the CD caused blue screen errors when trying to install as did the ones I found on the Creative site. After a bunch of google searching I eventually found a driver package for an old motherboard that had the same chipset onboard, and that package to my surprise actually installed and worked. Audio works fine in Windows 98. DOS is another story - I managed to get SoundBlaster music working but eventually gave up on getting the sound effects to work. It appears to be an issue with the DMA settings but nothing I try works. No biggie as I wasn't aiming for DOS game support - it would have just been an added bonus (though I did get Doom and Duke Nukem 3d to play flawlessly as far as graphics go - including at 800x600 VESA mode for Duke Nukem; Commander Keen 4 locked up the system entirely). I also tried an older ES1370 card I had lying around and it installed with different drivers but same problem - no sound effect audio; just music (and it even supports SoundScape emulation.

I had high hopes for the ethernet as I have read that Yukon is one of the only ethernet chips on newer motherboards that works under Windows 98. However, the Yukon 88E8057 is just a tad too new. The 8053 is the last card officially supported by Yukon - I tried modding the .inf file for my system's Device ID, and it actually fully installed without issue and shows up in my device manager without any exclamation marks, but I cannot get an IP address. I may end up just using my other PCI slot to install something older that I know will work.

I tested some games today and initial testing is going well - Midtown Madness, Need for Speed High Stakes, and Half Life 1 all ran flawlessly on this setup at max graphics settings.

Sometime next week I'll get around to dual-installing Windows XP alongside this installation as well as testing some more problematic 98 games to see just how good the compatibility is.

System is incredibly fast - boots from the Lenovo screen to a functional Windows 98 desktop in about 5 and a half seconds. It goes so fast that the Windows 98 logo barely shows up.

Big question: why did you go with the Sound Blaster 128? The Sound Blaster Live! is a much better option with EAX support and more geared towards games + pretty cheap to buy:
https://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/Creative-Sound-B … ~0AAOSwpLxcmQgs

I always saw the PCI series to be just office or budget cards because of how basic they were. I got like half a dozen of them in a box somewhere collecting dust because every PC I built back in the day, had one due to their low cost and most people just needing basic sound and nothing fancy.
Mind you, if you want DOS support that sounds good, you pretty much have to get an AWE64 or older running on ISA slot - does your PC have ISA slots? Otherwise, you'll be stuck with pretty poor emulated OPL3.

Installed a new 300w Seasonic Flex-ATX power supply in the Voodoo 5 Shuttle. After 2 hours of gaming, it has resolved the random reboot issue I was having.

Figured out why not a single floppy drive I had tested recently seemed to work: *both* cables I was using were actually ST-506 (MFM/RLL/ESDI) HDD control cables. Same 34 pins, same connectors, but a different twist. Yet another reminder that I need to tidy my shit up better...

Turns out two of the floppy drives (pretty generic Sony 3.5" and TEAC FD-55GFR) were dead too, but my reference things still work fine and I now have a beautiful Mitsubishi M4851A DS-DD 5.25" drive that works like a dream to add to the stockpile.

Many of the FDDs can be repaired by replacing the small electrolytic capacitors on them. They don't age well.

But of course, 3.5inch floppy drives are as common as dirt. You may or may not have the motivation to repair them.

canthearu wrote:

Many of the FDDs can be repaired by replacing the small electrolytic capacitors on them. They don't age well.

But of course, 3.5inch floppy drives are as common as dirt. You may or may not have the motivation to repair them.

I find myself cleaning and fixing things like Mac floppies more than PC, for now. So there's a place for the techniques even when some of the models are as common as dirt.

Also I have a dual drive (Teac 5.25/3.5) that needs repair, and that's a specialized thing.

wiretap wrote:

Installed a new 300w Seasonic Flex-ATX power supply in the Voodoo 5 Shuttle. After 2 hours of gaming, it has resolved the random reboot issue I was having.

That looks awesome 😀 It's good that modern power supplies still provide most of the necessary voltages - though the cases don't exist (yet), I like the idea of pairing flex ATX or TFX power supplies with vintage hardware, much more compact and usually quieter than the original PSUs.

I made a small case for the DreamBlaster X2, since I've already managed to break my DB-X2 once already. It should be quite tough now, but maybe it will get rather warm? I'm not sure I would want to use it when it's fitted onto the soundcard again, but while it's sitting out being a USB midi-er, this helps.

red_avatar wrote:

Big question: why did you go with the Sound Blaster 128?

Cost. Got one brand new for $14.

I'd still like to possibly get DOS sound fx working on this rig. It looks like a lot of sound cards have issues on newer Intel chipsets, including the ICH7 in this machine. I may try a Yamaha YMF744-based card - looks like several people have had reported good compatibility on newer Intel chipsets.

Set up & spent a couple hours messing around with Lakka on one of my AOpen mini-PCs. (Lakka is essentially a bespoke Linux distribution for RetroArch, think XBMC/Kodi for gaming.)

To be honest, I'm a little disappointed with the experience. Lakka/RetroArch is a cool idea but I get the distinct impression the developers are doggedly following some grand personal vision of how they think it should work, and haven't sat down & listened to much user feedback. It has a ton of potential but parts of it are inexcusably bad.

Warning: long-ass post ahead. Feel free to skip to the next post if you don't feel like listening to me complain about a free piece of software for several paragraphs.

IMHO the biggest problem is there's NO way to manage files on the device itself. Even though it happily reads USB and optical discs, there's no file manager & you can't get at the console to copy or move things around. You can "scan" the directories on removable storage, which picks up game ROMs and system BIOSes, but it only indexes them in-place instead of copying them to local storage. So as soon as you remove the USB stick or whatever, they're gone. Also note that there's not even any way to properly eject a USB stick (i.e. unmount a filesystem) once it's inserted.

I ended up booting Puppy Linux from a CD to copy ROMs from my USB stick to the internal HDD, which works but shouldn't need to be done. BTW Lakka officially doesn't support dual booting & is incompatible with GRUB for some unexplained reason, so forget about installing a "maintenance OS" on the device itself. The way you're supposed to copy files over is via a network (Samba) share that it supposedly creates, but I couldn't get that to show up on my network at all. Which brings me to the next issue...

It absolutely would not work with any of my USB-Wifi sticks, even the one I use with my main Linux machine every day. I'm not sure if they removed the kernel modules or just broke support somehow else... There's no supported list of hardware anywhere in Lakka's documentation, which is really detailed in some areas but blatantly unfinished/incomplete in others. At this point I don't know if it supports USB Wifi at all. I don't have a wired network at home; I had to connect it to my Macbook with an ethernet cable directly & essentially use it as a wifi bridge.

Once I got a bunch of ROMs installed in the right location I found it only recognized some of them. Software for the systems you'd expect (Megadrive, TG-16, 32x) gets pulled in fine, but for less-popular machines it ostensibly supports (namely Commodore Plus 4 & VIC-20) I couldn't get it to recognize any of them. I think they assumed home computers worked like consoles, with "official" releases of games that could be easily indexed. In cases like the Commodore machines where the 'library' consists of a plethora of software experiments from all kinds of developers without any real distinction between "homebrew" and "official", their ROM indexing scheme doesn't work. The Lakka documentation helpfully points out that their index format is open & you're welcome to roll your own if you don't like it. Thanks.

(Conversely the MSX software I loaded on all indexed fine, but that was mostly distributed on carts.)

Again I have to point out there's no way to even edit text files from within Lakka itself, and copying files on and off is a runaround. So if you're replacing ROM index lists and need to do a bunch of trial-and-error I could easily see it being a huge pain in the butt.

Finally, while you're going through all this, the way the RetroArch menu itself controls is kind of terrible - it's designed to be navigated with a gamepad, which is fine, but it uses the same "unversal" gamepad controls as you'd set up for the emulators themselves. This is done over a weird abstraction layer, which tries to make it so you can use one pad mapping for like 40 different emulators with wildly different controller types. I can at least see some logic behind that, but it just doesn't work in practice & complicates things way more than setting up individual mappings for each emulator would. (In shorter words, forcing the GUI to use the same controller map as the emulated consoles is a bad design decision.) Thankfully, there are (clunky) keyboard controls active by default, but having ESC instantly kill and re-start the RetroArch server, making you stare at a black screen for several seconds as it "reboots" - instead of, say, going up one level in the menus - is inexcusable. Yes, that can be reconfigured, but it does NOT make for a good first impression.

The last problem I have is there's seemingly no way to play CD-ROM games off original media. This was one of the reasons I wanted to run Lakka on this thing in the first place. The mini PC has a front-loading CD-ROM drive and would fit perfectly into my console cabinet, so I thought it would make a neat "substitute console" for my few Saturn & Sega CD games. But sadly running games from disc just isn't implemented and probably never will be (even though some of the emulator 'cores' Lakka uses do support this in their standalone versions.) You can't even rip discs to the HDD from within Lakka. In order to play an original CD game on this thing, I'd have to rip it on another PC and copy it over the network or on a USB stick. May as well just download the ISO in that case.

Honestly, I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet, but I was pretty frustrated with the whole thing after hitting wall after wall. 90% of my issues would be solved by just letting me hit Ctrl+Alt+Fx to switch to another TTY shell like in any other Linux distribution. At this point I think you'd have a better experience installing a standard Linux distro (or even Windows XP!) and just running RetroArch as a normal app. Which is what I might do. What a shame to see such a cool piece of software brought down by so many small, fixable design flaws.

Edit: wow, that ended up being way more long-winded than I'd planned. Thanks for sticking with it if you read this far. I'm curious if any of you have tried Lakka/RetroArch out and have similar experiences.

canthearu wrote:

Many of the FDDs can be repaired by replacing the small electrolytic capacitors on them. They don't age well.

I suspect that's up with the FD-55GFR, it's electrically completely dead, which suggests something in the power circuitry has failed, and it's not a tantalum (no short).

But of course, 3.5inch floppy drives are as common as dirt. You may or may not have the motivation to repair them.

Not quite sure whether I will attempt to repair the FD-55GFR, it's common enough but this one is in cosmetically beautiful state. As for the 3.5" ones... no, unless they have very extensive jumper options for obscure systems I'm not going to make any effort there, and these ones didn't, just relatively late (1997+1999) PC-only drives.

My Amiga Merlin card seems now to be (hopefully!) "blurks-approved" :-p
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

I removed the SCSi-HD from the Amiga, connected to the PC and installed the Software with WinUAE. No Diskjokey, but needed several tries to get around nonsense error messages and crashes...

Now it seems to work, at least at max 640x512. Maybe my Monitor is the problem at higher resolutions, but for the moment I am happy thats running.

@echo off
cd C:
deltree /y *.*