Law212 wrote on 2021-08-20, 15:20:

spiroyster wrote on 2021-08-20, 15:08:

They come up on ebay uk quite regularly, they are silver plated ... I've seen them branded and non-branded... always that PS/2 L […]
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Law212 wrote on 2021-08-20, 14:41:

Theres always a crank on these forums isnt there? Someone else asked if it was actually silver or metal and because I dont know for a fact, I cant say. Someone else mentioned it could be shiny plastic like his , but it definitely isnt.

I have never seen a mouse like this so any info from people who know anything about it would be great. Just because the box says silversmith , doesnt mean its not some cheap fake company. Though doing some googling All i can find id this company's silverware cutlery

They come up on ebay uk quite regularly, they are silver plated ... I've seen them branded and non-branded... always that PS/2 Logitec mouse.

Here's one now... (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/154554995758?hash= … -0AAOSw2Zde~upb).. obviously not my auction 😀. [EDIT: search "Wallace Mouse"... more than one on both ebay UK and US].

In your first photo, looking at the gap next to the mouse button, you can see the layer of plating on top of the regular beige plastic. Only plated, so probably not worth stamping with hallmarks.

I think this was (and still is) a popular past time for some Jewellers, although I think in this case this is/was an actual range for custom promo swag as I can see them for various other companies PMC, IBM and non-branded. I have a 24K USB drive somewhere for birthday a while ago customised by a goldsmith, only 2 gig so very dated now... case worth more than the chips probably these days... or not given current climate, so this still goes on.

Thanks, Thats neat, i wish I had that slipcover. Its a cool looking mouse that im going to keep and display. Thanks for the info.

Yeah it's a cool looking mouse. Good to see someone on Vogons get one in the flesh. Probably for display, I bet it's a fingerprint-magnet and if you're anything like me, my OCD wouldn't settle if I was using that mouse regularly... or I would get a mouse mat that could double up as a polishing cloth. 😀

I would guess that it would tend to make your hand black from the silver oxide if you used it, then green when it started wearing down to the copper (Frequently the base layer under EP silver)

spiroyster wrote on 2021-08-20, 15:25:

Law212 wrote on 2021-08-20, 15:20:

spiroyster wrote on 2021-08-20, 15:08:

They come up on ebay uk quite regularly, they are silver plated ... I've seen them branded and non-branded... always that PS/2 L […]
Show full quote

They come up on ebay uk quite regularly, they are silver plated ... I've seen them branded and non-branded... always that PS/2 Logitec mouse.

Here's one now... (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/154554995758?hash= … -0AAOSw2Zde~upb).. obviously not my auction 😀. [EDIT: search "Wallace Mouse"... more than one on both ebay UK and US].

In your first photo, looking at the gap next to the mouse button, you can see the layer of plating on top of the regular beige plastic. Only plated, so probably not worth stamping with hallmarks.

I think this was (and still is) a popular past time for some Jewellers, although I think in this case this is/was an actual range for custom promo swag as I can see them for various other companies PMC, IBM and non-branded. I have a 24K USB drive somewhere for birthday a while ago customised by a goldsmith, only 2 gig so very dated now... case worth more than the chips probably these days... or not given current climate, so this still goes on.

Thanks, Thats neat, i wish I had that slipcover. Its a cool looking mouse that im going to keep and display. Thanks for the info.

Yeah it's a cool looking mouse. Good to see someone on Vogons get one in the flesh. Probably for display, I bet it's a fingerprint-magnet and if you're anything like me, my OCD wouldn't settle if I was using that mouse regularly... or I would get a mouse mat that could double up as a polishing cloth. 😀

Yeah theres no way id use it because id be polishing it every two seconds

Wallace Silversmiths is a very good company. Me and my wife inherited alot of silverware and serving platers from her grandmother. And all the pieces are probably 70+ years old and still look like new. So odds are that mouse has a seriously high quality silver finish. I'd personally get it polished and display it.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-08-20, 14:31:

The Asus A7M266 I ordered arrived in the mail today. The cpu cooler appears to have two different connections leading out of it […]
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The Asus A7M266 I ordered arrived in the mail today. The cpu cooler appears to have two different connections leading out of it and they were connected when I unwrapped the board. there seemed to be writing on the white one but it isn't readable. I need to now figure out what graphics card to put in. The only agp cards I have is the rage 128 pro and diamond media viper v550. I also have a geforce4 mx4000 pci card.

20210820_090903[1].jpg
20210820_091035[1].jpg
20210820_091049[1].jpg

Pretty sure that that cooler has dual fans in it. That is why there are two connectors.

Those Orb coolers were pretty crappy cooling-wise when they were on the market.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-08-20, 16:24:

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-08-20, 14:31:

The Asus A7M266 I ordered arrived in the mail today. The cpu cooler appears to have two different connections leading out of it […]
Show full quote

The Asus A7M266 I ordered arrived in the mail today. The cpu cooler appears to have two different connections leading out of it and they were connected when I unwrapped the board. there seemed to be writing on the white one but it isn't readable. I need to now figure out what graphics card to put in. The only agp cards I have is the rage 128 pro and diamond media viper v550. I also have a geforce4 mx4000 pci card.

20210820_090903[1].jpg
20210820_091035[1].jpg
20210820_091049[1].jpg

Pretty sure that that cooler has dual fans in it. That is why there are two connectors.

Those Orb coolers were pretty crappy cooling-wise when they were on the market.

yeah I some other people I asked seemed to believe it had dual fans as well, but that doesn't explain the electrical tapes on all the wires on the longer cable.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-08-20, 16:26:

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-08-20, 16:24:

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2021-08-20, 14:31:

The Asus A7M266 I ordered arrived in the mail today. The cpu cooler appears to have two different connections leading out of it […]
Show full quote

The Asus A7M266 I ordered arrived in the mail today. The cpu cooler appears to have two different connections leading out of it and they were connected when I unwrapped the board. there seemed to be writing on the white one but it isn't readable. I need to now figure out what graphics card to put in. The only agp cards I have is the rage 128 pro and diamond media viper v550. I also have a geforce4 mx4000 pci card.

20210820_090903[1].jpg
20210820_091035[1].jpg
20210820_091049[1].jpg

Pretty sure that that cooler has dual fans in it. That is why there are two connectors.

Those Orb coolers were pretty crappy cooling-wise when they were on the market.

yeah I some other people I asked seemed to believe it had dual fans as well, but that doesn't explain the electrical tapes on all the wires on the longer cable.

Looks like somebody took the extra connectors off.
It does have dual fans. See here for a review:
https://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/R … s/minisuperorb/

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-08-20, 16:24:

Those Orb coolers were pretty crappy cooling-wise when they were on the market.

They were and they weren't. Obviously the design spoke to people who wanted a cool cooler, rather than a cool cooler. When they came out in the socket 370 celeron overclocking boom, they offered competitive performance, also versions for the Slot As and the early Durons were okay in that particular time, but there quickly got to be much better options around, so they were obsolete pretty quickly, but the early reputation fueled demand enough to keep them on the market past their best before date.

Edit: Personally I'd use them on ~900Mhz and below, just to give an idea, while the shorter 1st gens, I'd keep on 700mhz and below. I wouldn't necessarily "choose" them, but a working cooler is a working cooler.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-08-20, 16:04:

Wallace Silversmiths is a very good company. Me and my wife inherited alot of silverware and serving platers from her grandmother. And all the pieces are probably 70+ years old and still look like new. So odds are that mouse has a seriously high quality silver finish. I'd personally get it polished and display it.

Cool INfo. Thanks. I probably will do that.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-20, 16:38:

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-08-20, 16:24:

Those Orb coolers were pretty crappy cooling-wise when they were on the market.

They were and they weren't. Obviously the design spoke to people who wanted a cool cooler, rather than a cool cooler. When they came out in the socket 370 celeron overclocking boom, they offered competitive performance, also versions for the Slot As and the early Durons were okay in that particular time, but there quickly got to be much better options around, so they were obsolete pretty quickly, but the early reputation fueled demand enough to keep them on the market past their best before date.

Edit: Personally I'd use them on ~900Mhz and below, just to give an idea, while the shorter 1st gens, I'd keep on 700mhz and below. I wouldn't necessarily "choose" them, but a working cooler is a working cooler.

I was working at a computer store when they came out. The thin-fin regular style coolers beat them performance-wise very easily.

They did beat the super crappy coolers but I'm not sure that is much of an accomplishment.

The design of the orbs is actually really horrible from a cooling standpoint. There is no way a design like that can effectively remove heat from the CPU. The path to the fins it too far and the fins are way too thick to dissipate heat efficiently.

If you'll remember that time though, coolers very seldom had much of a name, maybe a part number, so if you walked into most stores and asked for a CPU cooler for X, you got the crappy generic one, just having a name, and awareness meant you knew an orb was better than low end, so you knew what you were getting. I'd agree though, they needed more thinner and shorter fins really. There were zalman coolers that nailed it later.

Yep. The Zalman fan style and the round style was good as well.

My favorite from that time period before the heatpipe coolers came out is the standard design but with thin fins and copper heatspreader ones made by Antec.

Around that time I had tried pretty much everything I could get my hands on. For Slot-A I even had one of those super expensive Alpha coolers with the dual 6k rpm 60mm fans.

That cooler was a piece of trash as well. It soaked up the heat and then couldn't dissipate it.

I picked up a Roland Sound Canvas 8820

This is one of the latest models of Sound Canvas. It supports SC55, SC88, SC88 Pro and a native 8820 instrument mapping.

I used to have an SC55 mk2 which I regrettably sold years ago. The Sc8820 is much smaller, and although it lacks the LCD screen and buttons of its older brothers, I wouldn't know what to do with those anyway. I never touched them when I owned an SC55.

The SC8820 also has a USB interface. I was surprised to find that Roland has drivers on its website. Although the latest drivers are for Vista x64 they work perfectly in windows 10. If you run it over USB you also don't need to plug in an AC adapter, which is nifty.

Getting it working in Dosbox over USB was easy, simply had to run mixer /listmidi which told me the ID number of the SC8820, then editing the Dosbox config, set mididevice=coremidi and midiconfig=1 which was the ID number of the SC8820 PART A listed in the previous command.

I made a couple of recordings:
Rise of the Triad - Havana Smooth - SC55 mode
Doom e1m1 - SC55 mode

To my untrained ear, in SC55 mode it sounds exactly like a real SC55, at least compared to recordings I found on youtube.

I feel like SC88 mode is a little bit nicer sounding:
Rise of the Triad - Havana Smooth - SC88 mode
Doom e1m1 - SC88 mode

The only downside is that it doesnt have an MT32 instrument mapping. This means that Monkey Island, for example, sounds a bit odd. Not a big problem for me, as I have an LAPC-I already.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it 😀

Well, I picked up a cute little Yamaha card earlier.

Yeah, an actually Yamaha branded YMF-724.

BetaC wrote on 2021-08-21, 00:29:

Well, I picked up a cute little Yamaha card earlier.
65995B3C-8825-428B-A0A8-69980C7BF899.jpeg
Yeah, an actually Yamaha branded YMF-724.

How is it? I am curious if it is a viable OPL alternative my ISA lacking rig. Even if it already has 3 soundcards atm...

Joakim wrote on 2021-08-21, 05:23:

BetaC wrote on 2021-08-21, 00:29:

Well, I picked up a cute little Yamaha card earlier.
65995B3C-8825-428B-A0A8-69980C7BF899.jpeg
Yeah, an actually Yamaha branded YMF-724.

How is it? I am curious if it is a viable OPL alternative my ISA lacking rig. Even if it already has 3 soundcards atm...

I can't give you an answer on that, really. I don't have any way to sblink.

Today's flea market find, for about 7 Euros/8 USD...

Gigabyte GA-6VXDC7 rev 5.0 in like new condition, sealed in its electrostatic bag, but with a little bit of damage.
Four retention clips from the RAM slots are broken, but I have them.
Hope it works...

It's no Model M (or so a cursory googling of the product number told me) but I picked myself up a neat IBM KB-7993 keyboard today. It feels great, and only cost $20. Previously I was using some old mushy-keyed Windows XP media thing keyboard I found while I looked for something better, and this is definitely the something better I was after.

The most important thing, to me at least, is that the layout is essentially identical to my main PC's keyboard. The shape and location of a bunch of keys on the old one I was using really messed me up a lot. But it's also solid and the keys feel good to press.

bearking wrote on 2021-08-21, 06:32:

Today's flea market find, for about 7 Euros/8 USD... […]
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Today's flea market find, for about 7 Euros/8 USD...

20210821_090527.jpg

Gigabyte GA-6VXDC7 rev 5.0 in like new condition, sealed in its electrostatic bag, but with a little bit of damage.
Four retention clips from the RAM slots are broken, but I have them.
Hope it works...

That's amazing. Though bargains like that cost you a couple of hundred to make the most out of them 🤣

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-21, 13:21:

That's amazing. Though bargains like that cost you a couple of hundred to make the most out of them 🤣

I don't know what friends you have, but most people I know in this hobby have their Smaug piles they pull from when they find a cool new part. 🤣