dionb wrote:

My first suspicion was a bad BIOS EEPROM, but a re-flash on a different known-good EEPROM gave identical results. New CMOS battery didn't help either. Regardless, if it doesn't boot for you, try repeated CMOS clear & ESCD resets.

Getting some beeps now after ECSD resets, one long three short - might be RAM, could still be the PSU being garbage. It did power off immediately when I pressed the power button and then it bumped the power about every 1.5 seconds.
Replaced the cmos battery and now I get nothing 🤣 Pulled the sound and NIC but still nothing. Oh well. I'll wait until I get my new stuff in to tear it down. Probably ought to order some thermal compound too...

Recapped my C64-C, board number 250469 Rev.3. It was beginning to flash in brightness intensity, and letters were sometimes unreadable. Furthermore it had a horisontal band of noise, moving slowly from top to bottom. Now all those issues are history.

JodieC wrote:

Getting some beeps now after ESCD resets, one long three short - might be RAM, could still be the PSU being garbage. It did power off immediately when I pressed the power button and then it bumped the power about every 1.5 seconds.
Replaced the cmos battery and now I get nothing 🤣 Pulled the sound and NIC but still nothing. Oh well. I'll wait until I get my new stuff in to tear it down. Probably ought to order some thermal compound too...

Back to beeps, and get this - ctrl+alt+delete works, and caps lock, num lock cycle on the keyboard. I swapped out monitors but it didn't seem to help.
Guess I need to order the GeForce 2 or a TNT2, and in a hurry...

brostenen wrote:

Recapped my C64-C, board number 250469 Rev.3. It was beginning to flash in brightness intensity, and letters were sometimes unreadable. Furthermore it had a horisontal band of noise, moving slowly from top to bottom. Now all those issues are history.

Great result! It makes sense that those 30 year old caps would be going bad so hearing this makes me glad I did mine.

badmojo wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Recapped my C64-C, board number 250469 Rev.3. It was beginning to flash in brightness intensity, and letters were sometimes unreadable. Furthermore it had a horisontal band of noise, moving slowly from top to bottom. Now all those issues are history.

Great result! It makes sense that those 30 year old caps would be going bad so hearing this makes me glad I did mine.

Yup... People were like "no need, they are not smd" and "they are japanese so no need to recap" and "I have never heard that they can go bad, so there is no need".

Well...
It turned out that it is indeed something that has to be done. And as my model is the first of the two CR versions of the C64 model C. Then the old breadbins have even older caps. I think my model is from somewere around 1989/91 or something. So not 30 yet.

I have seen the same talking point and argue on the Amiga500. You know. People saying that the caps will necer go bad. Shure they are better than the cheap SMD ones in Amiga600, 1200 and 4000. I tend to reply those people that there is indeed no reports on a500's having bad caps, yet it is only a question of time, as all caps will go bad. We see that all the time here on vogons. You know... Old PC stuff from the mid-80's beginning to show sign and creative labs sound cards that benefits from a recap.

C64's need recap now, a500's were not used that hard, so I will say, that 500-recapping will begin to appear within the next 5 to 6 years from now. Perhaps as soon as 4 years from now...

Well, with regards to the Swedish Mystery Card;

I've been in contact with Rune Tapper of Rune's PC Museum in Sweden, who was able to answer some of my questions.

The card is an Ericsson brand card, the model number uses familiar revision language. No word on what it was for/ I found out with a little more research that VOX (on the card edge) was (and is) the voice/telecom department of Ericsson.

Given that the card was found with a 1985 "Smart Answering Machine" from Dialectron (I can never remember that name), I still suspect that it was either for voice synthesis or voice compression and recording. I'm leaning away from research or radio and toward a more prosaic 1980s spam caller or voice messaging system, possibly an automated version of the then-common answering service.

If I can't find Ericsson's history department and a card catalog from the 1980s, the next step is to pull and try to read the ROM chips. I guess I had better get a programmer after all.

Reworked my MMX 233

* Changed the S3 (Virge I believe) card for a Rendition Verité V2200
* Swapped AWE32 for Ensoniq AudioPCI ES1370 with SB PCI 64 drivers (the system kept locking up with the Ensoniq driver I found somewhere)
* Installed W98SE instead of W95

On a 386 I tackled the problem of the empty external battery. Now it's using a holder with 2 CR2032 batteries

Wouldn't say strongly "retro", but definitely on the edge of it, but I spent hours installing Windows XP Professional SP3 (getting it up to date, well, whenever Windows Update started to work, installing drivers, etc.) on my new Ivy Bridge OP XP/decent 10 build that's supposed to replace my somewhat unpredictable Nehalem system of the same purpose (lessons learned: don't install broken GPUs when you know they are bad physically, and don't overclock on a sh*tty motherboard that has piss-poor VRM cooling). After getting it up and running, I made a ddrescue backup of the 500GB drive, then installed and played some NFS:HP2 and Halo: CE. Man, playing some Halo CTF online on Blood Gulch - that's hits the spot. 😀 (I'm surprised how even after GameSpy closed down, and without me installing the associated GameSpy server, I was still able to access online servers and play with others online; must have a strong community of maintainers both on the front- and back-end).

*Forgive the mess - still a major work in process. Need more money to get a new SSD for Windows 10, new SATA cables, and then, of course, the huge task of transferring files and other parts over to it.

Merovign wrote:

Well, with regards to the Swedish Mystery Card; […]
Show full quote

Well, with regards to the Swedish Mystery Card;

MysteryCard1.jpg

I've been in contact with Rune Tapper of Rune's PC Museum in Sweden, who was able to answer some of my questions.

The card is an Ericsson brand card, the model number uses familiar revision language. No word on what it was for/ I found out with a little more research that VOX (on the card edge) was (and is) the voice/telecom department of Ericsson.

Given that the card was found with a 1985 "Smart Answering Machine" from Dialectron (I can never remember that name), I still suspect that it was either for voice synthesis or voice compression and recording. I'm leaning away from research or radio and toward a more prosaic 1980s spam caller or voice messaging system, possibly an automated version of the then-common answering service.

If I can't find Ericsson's history department and a card catalog from the 1980s, the next step is to pull and try to read the ROM chips. I guess I had better get a programmer after all.

So... The swedish computer museum are more helpfull? I have tried asking the danish a couple of times regarding hardware. And they always reply, that I can become a member for an annual fee, and that there are lots of members that know stuff. Not helpfull at all. Vogon users are not asking for money, and there are more help to get here, than to get from the danish computer museum. It is as if they do nothing than fill a warehouse and keep the club as a closed coffee club. So sad.

I used to donate to museums and now have decided to halt all donations to museums, in general, after some bad experiences. My train of thought, now, is to give back to the community that supports my endeavors.

I installed :
PC Dos 7 aka 2000
Windows 98se on dell gx1,
btw anyone know why on windows 98se pure dos mode i cant launch any apps?
When i boot pc dos 7 every dos app works

Repairing a 486 VLB motherboard damaged by leaky battery.

Has intermittent keyboard problems, so removed the keyboard connector to look underneath, it's not pretty.

Scrubbed with a brush with dilute vinegar, better but a trace is completely corroded and whatever copper was left that was making intermittent contact is gone after the scrub:

So now soaking in distilled water (only the affected edge of the motherboard) after removing from it everything that was removable: CPU, BIOS, cache, all jumpers.

After that will be thoroughly dried, the missing trace repaired, all others checked for continuity and repaired as needed, protected with varnish, all stuff reinstalled and test.

That board looks amazing, man.

clean as a freshly bathed baby!

Not as vintage as my usual stuff, but my father-in-law had an old 2006-vintage HP-Compaq nx9420 laptop he was convinced was useless. I suspected it could still be good enough for his (limited) purposes. Turns out that was easier than I had expected. Original specs were a Core Duo T2400 with 1GB of RAM. However someone had upgraded that to a T5500 Core2Duo. Still stuck with 1GB though, so I dug up some 2GB DDR2 SO-DIMMs and let my 5-year old son install them one by one and read the difference in the RAM count. He was gleaming with pride as he screwed the last cover down again 😀

Once he went to bed I started on the software. It had an ancient Windows XP install on it, which combined with the 1GB RAM was slow as hell. So downloaded the latest Lubuntu 64b image and now it flies. If he likes the end result, I'll recommend replacing the HDD with and SSD and upgrading the ancient a/g/n WiFi to ac. But as it is it's already suitable as his grandpa's daily drive.

Also got my Jetway J446A up and running and tested all the <5V So3 CPU's I had lying around. Only disappointment was that my IBM (Cyrix) DX4-100 seems completely dead. But both my WT and WB AmDX4-100 CPUs are alive and kicking and - more importantly - so is my IBM (Cyrix) 5x86-100GP. I intend to have some fun with that when my crazy weeks end (after tomorrow, the next time I have 24h at home with no guests is in a month's time 😦 ).

Had to work on my Socket AM2 Hackintosh again. I wanted to setup a dual boot with Windows 10 and inadvertently ended up erasing the Mac OS X install. 😲

So I've spent the last couple of days battling with it to get Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard reinstalled & updated to 10.6.8. I couldn't remember what I did last time to get it all working correctly, but thankfully I figured it out in the end and my Mac OS X & Windows 10 dual boot is now up and running.

Now I just have to set about reinstalling all the software & games. I've already reinstalled a few bits, most importantly Rosetta for PowerPC support.

Other than that, I tested things out with my usual Beginner levels run-through on Marble Blast Gold. Managed to beat my fastest times on a couple of them too. 🤣

Tried an old 10mbit 3Com ethernet hub, liked how the LED's flashed during self test. 😊

Received a XpertVision Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS (says in the V-BIOS that it's a "GTS" `\_ 😐 _/` ) from Hungary, shipped in one of the most ghetto put-together boxes I have seen with a dozen+ variously-sized foam blocks; thankfully, though, the seller put the GPU in an anti-static bag - good on him (must have it rough over there, but hey, it worked 🤣 ). Was filthy AF, so spent an hour or two carefully taking it completely apart and cleaning it, you know the drill. Also added some thermal tape between the memory heatsinks and the memory chips, because there wasn't any there beforehand, and I feel that bare contact isn't the most efficient means of heat transfer.

Also has a strange retention clip mechanism for the GPU cooler that I have never seen before - completely screwless.

Good news is, though, it works! It's nice for a change to receive a GPU that works. 😀

Does "using dialup to process transactions because our internet was down for over 12 hours today" count? :p

torindkflt wrote:

Does "using dialup to process transactions because our internet was down for over 12 hours today" count? :p

What, are you in retail? Also, I'm sorry if I sound ignorant, but like - why would businesses still have dialup of all things? 🤣