Recent retro activities:
1. Fired up the Gigabyte GA-5AA Super Socket 7 mainboard I found in the "Voodoo 5 scrap lot" the other day. Pleased to find out that it does not only POST, but already has the latest BIOS installed for K6-2+ support. Guess I have to build another SS7 box then. *shrug*
2. Tested the Voodoo 3 3000 that I got for cheap, seems to be dead. Meh.
3. Played around with the Pentium MMX 200 laptop that I recently bought.
The good:
- Relatively good overall condition
- Everything that came with it seems to work fine (more or less)
The bad:
- What I thoght was a missing battery turned out to be a missing HDD tray and HDD. Completely proprietary, of course. So unless I get another one of these machines, I probably won't be able to install a HDD.
- No optical drive either, but I knew that before
So I am basically left with a 3.5" floppy drive and a CF to PCMCIA adapter I had in the drawer. But the laptop won't support booting from CF card, so I had to figure out other ways.
Tried to boot Plop boot manager with pcmica support --> no support for PCMCIA to CF adapters.
Tried to boot Plop boot manager + PCMCIA USB 2.0 card + USB thumb drive --> not recognized by Plop
I ended up using the APSoft ATA enabler for DOS and a DOS boot floppy and somehow managed to get through the Win95 install routine. But starting Win95 from a DOS environment afterwards yields all sorts of errors and this is where I gave up for now.
Since I really like the machine, I might end up buying a second one just for the HDD tray.
4. Took out my dual Socket A board (Asus A7M266-D) just to confirm that it is dead. Fans start spinning as soon as I plug in the power supply, but that's it. Apart from two slightly bulged caps the board looks good, maybe I'll replace them some day and see if that changes anything...