megatron-uk wrote on 2024-02-20, 20:01:

Made an offer on a ISA single board computer, an Advantech PCA-6145 - looks to have either 16 or 32mb ram and a DX4. Has a 1mb C&T 65550 video and can take pc/104 cards. It's pretty small - no longer than a 16bit ISA card.

Have been wanting to build a tiny 486 for a while now , I will be using a with a passive 3 slot ISA riser and putting all of my big box towers away in storage.

Can you share some photos of your plans? I have a 386 ISA SBC and don't know what to do with it. I don't have any 386 computers, so if it can be worked into a small machine, it would become something useful to me.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-20, 20:04:

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-02-20, 20:01:

Made an offer on a ISA single board computer, an Advantech PCA-6145 - looks to have either 16 or 32mb ram and a DX4. Has a 1mb C&T 65550 video and can take pc/104 cards. It's pretty small - no longer than a 16bit ISA card.

Have been wanting to build a tiny 486 for a while now , I will be using a with a passive 3 slot ISA riser and putting all of my big box towers away in storage.

Can you share some photos of your plans? I have a 386 ISA SBC and don't know what to do with it. I don't have any 386 computers, so if it can be worked into a small machine, it would become something useful to me.

Nothing as grand as plans yet - the general.idea will be to use a 3 slot ISA riser as the backplane, with the SBC, a network card (for networking and XTIDE rom) and an ESS 1868F sound card.

So the overall size of the system will be just over 3 slots high and not much longer than the length of a 16 bit ISA slot.

Will probably use a spare pico-psu for power and a CF adapter for storage - no floppy.

Not sure of case yet - I have 3d printing facilities, but I'm no 3d artist. It will probably come down to a small enclosure from RS or Mouser, or maybe dust off my creaky old woodworking skills and fabricate something myself.

Think perhaps 50% shoebox size. That's the aim. The card I have on the way is almost identical in size and layout to the one you posted. I love the size of these things.

A bit OT but I have some stuff (small/worthless/obscure) to give away - where's the best place to post it on Vogons so I can see you showing it here 😀

We have a thread going here... Old hardware giveaway thread.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-20, 21:01:

We have a thread going here... Old hardware giveaway thread.

Perfect

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-02-20, 20:33:

Nothing as grand as plans yet - the general.idea will be to use a 3 slot ISA riser as the backplane, with the SBC, a network car […]
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Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-20, 20:04:

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-02-20, 20:01:

Made an offer on a ISA single board computer, an Advantech PCA-6145 - looks to have either 16 or 32mb ram and a DX4. Has a 1mb C&T 65550 video and can take pc/104 cards. It's pretty small - no longer than a 16bit ISA card.

Have been wanting to build a tiny 486 for a while now , I will be using a with a passive 3 slot ISA riser and putting all of my big box towers away in storage.

Can you share some photos of your plans? I have a 386 ISA SBC and don't know what to do with it. I don't have any 386 computers, so if it can be worked into a small machine, it would become something useful to me.

Nothing as grand as plans yet - the general.idea will be to use a 3 slot ISA riser as the backplane, with the SBC, a network card (for networking and XTIDE rom) and an ESS 1868F sound card.

So the overall size of the system will be just over 3 slots high and not much longer than the length of a 16 bit ISA slot.

Will probably use a spare pico-psu for power and a CF adapter for storage - no floppy.

Not sure of case yet - I have 3d printing facilities, but I'm no 3d artist. It will probably come down to a small enclosure from RS or Mouser, or maybe dust off my creaky old woodworking skills and fabricate something myself.

Think perhaps 50% shoebox size. That's the aim. The card I have on the way is almost identical in size and layout to the one you posted. I love the size of these things.

ADVANTECH-PCA-6145B.jpg

I should really share my design at some point.... 😀
(I need to revise some stupid design decisions made for the 1st prototype, to use parts on hand. And make the front panel so it can be easily modified. The PCB riser also needs re-making in Kicad since I lost access to Eagle)
I wonder if it would be worth making a thread for it in System Specs?

Yeah, something like that (minus the fdd) is pretty much what I'm thinking.

In UK and maybe parts of Europe also, the VME bus, Euro card etc card cages used to be quite popular for industrial, medical, burglar alarm, phone systems etc, and you could pick them up easily. I think you could repurpose them for a backplane system as long as you don't have cards that are too long, I wanna say about 8 inches 20cm but not sure of exact depth. I don't know what the good surplus stores are any more, used to be Greenweld annnnd IDK small ones scattered all over.

Iv got a couple of systems like that - including a m68060 running Netbsd, as well as a host to a Transputer card carrier. I think it was a 12 slot VME backplane... But the enclosure is about the size of one of those under desk fridges!

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-20, 19:52:

I took a punt on a mixed CPU lot "pulled from working environment" there's nothing too special in there, but it gets to my door at the same price as getting low end testers twice, i.e. about $20 a purchase with the shipping in. Hoping the Phenom II black edition turns out good, but there's also a windsor to screw with, a PentiumD, some core2 class to act as scratch monkeys for modding tests, and some randoms for testers, might end up divesting some of the spare on the freebie thread. Had laptop in the title, but only 5 are mobile I think, possible a couple of those might offer a minor speed bump to machines that are in the fam.

I was looking for other stuff but got sidetracked as you do. Another cheap/variety lot that caught my eye was "Lot 24 Intel Pentium & AMD Mixed w/ Pentium-II ..." price seemed reasonable for good variety, kind of a 96-2006 starter kit, though a bit socket A heavy.

Just checked on a couple of the laptops that might benefit, awww yisss, massive upgrades, A6-3400 to 342o, T7100 to T7250 .... heh, don't think I'll be in too much of a rush, next time they're due to be cleaned out.

edit: btw gotta say that that A6 machine impresses me, heckin' smooth for a lowly chip, think it must be the hardware codecs in the onboard Radeon keeping videos from stuttering etc, but still, other stuff stays fairly slick too.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs … inch-specs.html
Got an offer for 35€, has 2GB of ram

Should I go for it?

Nexxen wrote on 2024-02-21, 14:12:

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs … inch-specs.html
Got an offer for 35€, has 2GB of ram

Should I go for it?

"NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT" = bumpgate, its either already broken or will die within few weeks of usage. Buy only if you want it for the nice case for a casemod.

Picked up this AT case locally because I needed the case, and because it's my first case with a speed display. What I don't like is the turbo switch controls the display, but I want the MB turbo output to control the display so a little controller board is in order.

Two parcels full of goodies arrived today:

First some industrial stuff from 20 years ago

Bought it for the PICMG backplane and assumed the SBC would be a crappy i845B design. Turns out the Nexcom Peak 735VL is a bit better, with i865G chipset and ability to handle any So478 CPU. Might use it after all

But the second box had the really nice things from a decade and a half earlier

Paradise PEGA2A

DFI ATRAMbank rev 7 - nothing special, can offer up to 2MB, configurable as conventional, EMS or XMS RAM. Important bit is that there are manuals for it online.

Seagate ST-02. Not only an 8b ISA SCSI adapter with bootROM - getting scarce these days - but also a floppy interface that supports HD disks

And last but not least:

Eizo MD-B12 TIGA graphics accelerator. 1980s GPU design. Documentation could be more of a challenge here, but there's at least a YouTube video of this card in action with manuals and software....

dionb wrote on 2024-02-21, 18:41:

PXL_20240221_163944554.jpg
Seagate ST-02. Not only an 8b ISA SCSI adapter with bootROM - getting scarce these days - but also a floppy interface that supports HD disks

The BIOS in those only appears to be for the SCSI side, it doesn't extend the system BIOS as far as floppy support is concerned. So it supports HD floppy like a 16bit I/O card supports HD floppy... if system or another extension BIOS supports it. However you can mess around with drvparm and read them under DOS after boot. I believe that XTIDE BIOSes have HD floppy support though so you can use one of those (elsewhere, not plugged into this card) if there isn't support in system BIOS.

eesz34 wrote on 2024-02-21, 16:53:

Picked up this AT case locally because I needed the case, and because it's my first case with a speed display. What I don't like is the turbo switch controls the display, but I want the MB turbo output to control the display so a little controller board is in order.

Have that case, just with 3xCD/DVD slot design. (still AT thought)

Got Diamond Viper V770 32MB aka NVidia Riva TNT2 chip.

Untested, with two other lowend cards (Ati Rage 128 Pro XPert 2000pro and Asus MX440-8x), so it was risk.
Out of 3 cards, only one didn't work , Asus MX440-8x 9180SE version, well it had bad memories, so artefacting, and after installation of drivers, freezing.
It was very stressful to try if V770 will work, after that Asus.

Luckily , Viper V770 is working, just tested it in 3D games!

W.x. wrote on 2024-02-22, 01:24:

Out of 3 cards, only one didn't work , Asus MX440-8x 9180SE version, well it had bad memories, so artefacting, and after installation of drivers, freezing.
It was very stressful to try if V770 will work, after that Asus.

Check the back of that carefully for missing SMD capacitors and resistors, for some reason everything GF 2-ish has super delicate SMD on the back that like to get crunched.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-22, 01:59:

W.x. wrote on 2024-02-22, 01:24:

Out of 3 cards, only one didn't work , Asus MX440-8x 9180SE version, well it had bad memories, so artefacting, and after installation of drivers, freezing.
It was very stressful to try if V770 will work, after that Asus.

Check the back of that carefully for missing SMD capacitors and resistors, for some reason everything GF 2-ish has super delicate SMD on the back that like to get crunched.

I can confirm that cracked/missing tiny SMD capacitors are very common in this vintage. Crunched capacitors on the underside of the PCB beneath the GPU and missing/damaged capacitors around the memory chips. I've seen and repaired many of these.

That's good idea, I didn't check it. Thought, it will be bad memory chip. Video memory stress test under DOS (VMTCE) marked like 12000 errors on memory bits.
I have these photos.
But I don't find it worth of repair. These MX440-8x 64-bit are very often cheap. I have already 4 of them, and already 2 sold (Sparkle versions).
I kinda wanted it because of that solid capacitor design, and Asus... usually have quality build and nice VGA output (so wanted to switch it for MSI or Sparkle version).
But it's not important thing, and I think I will be not repairing it, but put it to box of damaged and partially working graphic cards, that I sell once a while for spare parts, when several of them collects over time... maybe someone who finds it worthy to repair take it. I think, it will be cheaper to get another one, than put time into it.
These are spread like FX5200 64-bit versions, I see them very often. But it's true, that usually with electrolyte capacitors (I've heard, later versions and revisions had electrolytes, so it is cheaper to build, while first ones used to have solid capacitors, and also, more of them. Because after release of the chip, they could be more expensive.)