Yeah....
To have experienced the innovations from the early to mid 80's and onwards.
To have experienced the variaty of stuff to pick from in the past.
I would say that the industry now a days are a big fat joke.
As much as they say there are choices, there simply are not enough to call it choices per se'.
Today, everything are more or less the same in each machines.

No more is there 10+ different platforms to choose from.
And no more can you choose between at least 5 different operating system platforms.
It's sad that the opposite of innovation has happened.

rein_ein wrote:

Current activity today is derping around Quadfather,temporary put together in crappy microlab case and installed W7,do some ligh […]
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Current activity today is derping around Quadfather,temporary put together in crappy microlab case and installed W7,do some light stability tests and find out 1 memory stick is bad.Replacement on its way in few days

<snip>

Almost completed spex btw:
Still not sure if i can trust core temp in that question,it shows 15-25 while bios on start says 40-45
<snip>

Lucky you, you have the "B" model that takes barcelona.. I had the L1N64-WS version back then (no B) and they wouldn't take the quad cores.. and asus wouldn't release a bios update for them either. They made us buy the whole new "B" model for quad cores.. that's back when I switched to Intel because of it all.

Anyway, in Bios those chips run full speed (cool`n`quiet off even if it's switched on) and in windows C`n`Q works and throttles the chips down. So those temps are likely correct.

I installed a VGA card in my XT clone so it's ready when my new XT-IDE card gets here next week, or that was at least the plan.

I bought an expensive (not really but UK shipping chough chough) 8bit ISA VGA card for this system two weeks ago. It was sold as tested by a UK seller that sells volume and only gets good feedback so I diddn't even test the card as the XT clone was stored away. Now when I tested the card my XT clone did not even power on with this card installed, as in not even the PC-XT PSU wanted to start. The system works totally fine with a Trident 8900C so my suspicion directly fell on the new 8bit ISA VGA.

I tried the card in a 386 board with with a normal AT PSU, the exact same thing happend. This made me take a closer look at the card looking for freight damage as my £10 shipping strangely enough diddn't cover a box. The card came with only some ESD protection in an envelope but as the card diddn't look beat up I diddn't really think much of it other than the seller beeing unnecessarily cheap.

I found this transistor, its hard to see but the middle leg was perhaps shorting with the outer leg. There is a piece of plastic there which probably is meant to hinder these legs from shorting but it was already disloged in the sellers picture so when the transistor got beat up during shipping perhaps it created a short serious enough to short out any system the card gets installed in? It's either the transistor or the two welded togheter pads on the UM587F chip also visible on the picture, it would be strange if it was the welded togheter pads though as they are also visible on the sellers picture. I can however not find anything else looking messed up enough to hinder an AT PSU from powering on.

I have not lookied into the dip-switches much as there is no documentation on the card online. I have found the documentation for the chip so I know what 3 out of the 4 dip-switches are supposed to do just not which is which other than a fair guess but I seriously doubt the fourth DIP-switch is to short out the card. 😜

No other casualties than the card it self lucky enough. I have made sure the transistor isn't shorted any more (if it ever was) but the issue remains the same, perhaps the card is totally shorted out, perhaps the seller only dreamt he tested the card 😜

All in all two thumbs up! Very nice!!! The seller gives 30 days warrenty on his items but I have not decided if it's worth the trouble for £25 including shipping. It is a rare card, I have not seen another one like it.

If anyone can think of any other reason for a card hindering a PSU that is powered on with a f*****g live mains switch from powering on other than beeing one big short please let me know. 😀

Bought Star Trek 25th Anniversary CD-ROM Edition and Star Trek Judgment Rites on sale on Gog, then made DOS installation disks from the included ISO and BIN/CUE and played a bit on my DOS PC.

I spent a few hours playing Warcraft II, Grand Theft Auto and Crusader No Regret on my retro PC.

Went through my motherboards and pulled out two that were clearly damaged but that I hadn't got around to testing yet. Harvested the good components for my ever- increasing capacitor collection. Took a photo of what I found under some of the caps on a crappy slot 1 board - capacitor plague at its worst perhaps (it's a late board) :

Plus got my Graphite Power Mac G4 up and running with OS9 and played Quake III - performs amazingly well on the 533MHz CPU with GeForce2 MX graphics.

kithylin wrote:

Lucky you, you have the "B" model that takes barcelona.. I had the L1N64-WS version back then (no B) and they wouldn't take the quad cores.. and asus wouldn't release a bios update for them either. They made us buy the whole new "B" model for quad cores.. that's back when I switched to Intel because of it all.

Anyway, in Bios those chips run full speed (cool`n`quiet off even if it's switched on) and in windows C`n`Q works and throttles the chips down. So those temps are likely correct.

Actually mine originally wasn't B revision,i flashed it into it while try to find modified bios.
What can i say... i dont used modified bios coz basically didn't get response from those modders who made it.I used some kind of cheating with default asus flasher and feed /B revision bios to it.And success was most because it has native 22** Opteron Series support in some kind
Asus L1N64-SLI WS aka AMD 4x4 Bios help needed(not anymore)

Also as you can see it's look a bit different if compare to B revision,that has red pci-e slots and sticker 🤣

rein_ein wrote:

Actually mine originally wasn't B revision,i flashed it into it while try to find modified bios. What can i say... i dont used m […]
Show full quote

Actually mine originally wasn't B revision,i flashed it into it while try to find modified bios.
What can i say... i dont used modified bios coz basically didn't get response from those modders who made it.I used some kind of cheating with default asus flasher and feed /B revision bios to it.And success was most because it has native 22** Opteron Series support in some kind
Asus L1N64-SLI WS aka AMD 4x4 Bios help needed(not anymore)

<snip>

Lucky you. I tried that back in the day and bricked my L1N64-WS board and it never worked again, even after pulling the chip and flashing original bios back it wouldn't POST.

So yeah. You're extremely lucky 😀

Picked up my Windows 98 SE graphics card benchmarking project again. I'm scrapping some benchmarks. Partly because of time, simply too many benchmarks taking too long, but also because some cards don't have all the resolutions for example with Forsaken.

It's more compact now and I should be able to complete testing a card every day if I want to. I've got so many cards to go through, it's crazy 😵

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

It's more compact now and I should be able to complete testing a card every day if I want to. I've got so many cards to go through, it's crazy 😵

Sounds like you got work to do... 😁

On my behalf, I figured out why my IBM SCSI-HDD's were running so hot, they are LVD drives and I have been running them on HVD.
Duuhhh.... Stupid me. Well.... At least they have survived, so I will make shure that I read the manual from now on. 🤣

I have now tested my "new" sold as "untested" Juko "Nest" Baby XT board with another set of 8 known to be working 44256 memory chips from a 286 board, it still won't post.

This is how I have setup and jumpered the board. The memory chips can only go in the 8 sockets they are placed in as they are the only DIP-20 sockets. The Trident 8900C video card is working in my XT-clone computer so it works even with a 8088 CPU, this is a V20.

The dip switches are setup using this linked Juko baby XT motherboard as a template. The dip switches seem to be set for 4 floppy drives but that is how the board came and should not hinder the board from posting without any floppy controller?

https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/m/A-B/32279.htm

In case my boards dip switches do not fully match the ones on the linked board I have tried to set dip switch 1 on SW1 (parity) to both on and off. I have also tested to change switch 2 (NPU present or not) switch 3 + 4 (memory size) and 5 + 6 (monitor type). The reason I have not messed with switch 7 + 8 for number of floppy drives is that there isnt an option for 0 drives, only 1, 2, 3 or 4.

The diagnostic post card could very well be useless as I think XT boards sends post codes on address 60H and not 80H but I have both a monitor and a keyboard connected, not a PC speaker though as I'm not 100% sure wich header it goes on (I would guess J5). The 3.5" HDD is only to put some load on the PSU.

Edit

I tested the diagnostic post card in a working XT-clone system and it shows "FF" but nothing else, still "FF" is better than "--" 🤣

/Edit

I'm going to my parent's place today, to pick up my mom's old XT 😀

Half-Saint wrote:

I'm going to my parent's place today, to pick up my mom's old XT 😀

Right on!

I gave up on the Juko Nest XT clone motherboard with V20 CPU for now.

Instead I'm testing what kind of 16bit ISA video cards my working XT-clone with 8088 CPU likes.

I already knew that my Trident 8900C card workes (It's either auto sensing or was already set to 8bit), and now I have found that my Trident 9000C cards do not work even when jumpered for 8bit BIOS but there are many more jumpers I have no clue what they are supposed to do so it could be a "PEBCAK" error. The next video card I tried was a Realtek RTG3106 card and it worked at once without messing with jumpers!

I will try some more cards later. 😀

I have one of those realtek cards, none of the 16-bit traces actually go anywhere, it's a 8-bit card.

Busy trying to rebuild my old P2-333 over from a AT Case to a ATX Case , what was supposed to be a hour at max has turned into a nightmare, the new case has the bottom slot blanked out so the only ISA slot (formally occupied by a SB-16) can not be used... ever 🙁

This made me scramble and look for some PCI "dos compatible cards" nope none of them work on this motherboards, no surprises there 😒 PCI

So this means I have to grab the SB!Live from the Voodoo rig , and upgrade its sound card to a Audigy , and then go from there...

Other interesting thing to note: last night while testing I grabbed a Pentium 2 SL2QA (233mhz) , that I thought which by all accounts should just work, post 100%, does a ram check at post and passes, booting memtest+ it just instantly fails ALL tests, red lines everywhere.... Bad Co-processor , or bad Cache? no idea, was just interesting.

FaSMaN wrote:

booting memtest+ it just instantly fails ALL tests, red lines everywhere.... Bad Co-processor , or bad Cache? no idea, was just interesting.

It's bad mem modules. Memtest+ only tests memory.

Skyscraper wrote:

If anyone can think of any other reason for a card hindering a PSU that is powered on with a f*****g live mains switch from powering on other than beeing one big short please let me know. 😀

A tantalum cap may have shorted. Did you check the solder side for shorting pins? You can also remove many chips to exclude from being the culprit. Myself I would force some current from a regulated power supply in there and check which part gets hot.

Dealing with the combination of dodgy 1.44M floppy drives, dodgy 1.44M floppies and 720K disk images are totally super fun!

If I write a disk image to an 1.44M ---> 720K floppy (tape ftw) with Winimage and then modify the disk in any way in my Windows 98SE computer it renders the disk unreadable. 😀

If I format a disk as 720K in Winimage and let it write an image to the disk Windows 98 reads the disk as 1.0M (not 720K). If I format the disk as 720K with DOS 7 Winimage needs to format the disk again before writing a 720K image as the disk isn't the correct format.

As long as I let Winimage do the full format and writing of imaged disks and let Dos 7 handle the formating (/T:80 /N:9) of disks I will use for non imaged stuff everything works though. The XT-clone reads both floppies written from images with Winimage and floppies formated in DOS 7 correctly as 720K with a random 1.44M floppy drive. My first x86 computer was an IBM 55SX PS/2 386SX-16 with a 1.44M floppy drive so I have not really messed much with older disk formats before, except for Atari disks and making holes in 720K floppies to transform them to 1.44M . 😈

Here are some awesome performance numbers.

The performance at 4.77 MHz.

Just by the push of a button the performance reaches lightspeed. (it's 10MHz)

@Skyscraper

There's another solution to your JUKO Board. Not a cheap solution but it can get you upper memory blocks as well. It's the lo tech 1MB RAM Board. I have one in my XT and if i set the memory to none with the dip switches the Board takes over and provides 1MB RAM in 64kb blocks. If you Build it yourself its probably cheaper depending how much farnell/rs/mouser will charge you for parts shipping.