That sounds lovely, but I personally didn't see any small case ever. Yeah, I have few baby-AT, but that is too big for this board so it doesn't feel right to me...
Finally found an old Gateway 2000 Anykey at a thrift store! Been wanting one of these for years. It's got a PS/2 style connector and is in perfect condition aside from some mild yellowing. Time to mix up a batch of Retrobright...
IMG_20160911_161554.jpg
Oooooooo an AnyKey. I have an unhealthy fascination with those things for some reason. I'm sure if I had one I'd be annoyed at how huge it is but I can ogle yours from the other side of the internet. Nice find.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
Unusual for me: I found something in the wild, in a charity shop!
A Konix Speedking, copyright 1986 - it's the single button model. Cost me £7, which I don't object to - it has nice sounding microswitches in both the joystick and the button! Yet to test it though.
It came with a CGA on board card and a monocrome monitor. Does anyone know if I can add a VGA card in one of these?
Here's how the GX400 socket 423 machine turned out after a little TLC:
before:
after:
I had to repaint the case - it was too badly scratched and it looked bleached. Unfortunately I could not find the original dark gray, so I used some flat 202 charcoal gray. It's slightly darker then the original, but I'm happy with the results.
Another XG-DLS board, with brackets, a 550 Mhz 1MB Xeon and the steel backplate, insulation sheet and I/O plate. This is to be a direct swap into my Xeon Prime rig; if that works properly I can narrow down the motherboard as the issue and hopefully a recapping will fix the instability.
A Supermicro S2DL3 server board, with a couple 700 Mhz 1MB Xeons I totally need. It has no brackets for the procs either, but I have some on hand for this pattern of Slot-2 board. Also this board may support 5/12v Xeons at 100 and 133 Mhz FSB. I have a pair of 900 Mhz 2MB 5/12v procs to test this with.
Ideally I would like to throw a Voodoo5 5500 PCI on this thing, but I don't have one. Next best option I guess is a pair of Voodoo2s and another PCI video card as the main. If only this board was the S2DM3, I could use my Voodoo5 5500 AGP card.
Last edited by m1919 on 2016-09-16, 00:32. Edited 1 time in total.
Crimson Tide - EVGA 1000P2; ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS; 2x E5-2697 v3 14C 3.8 GHz on all cores (All core hack); 64GB Samsung DDR4-2133 ECC
EVGA 1080 Ti FTW3; EVGA 750 Ti SC; Sound Blaster Z
It came with a CGA on board card and a monocrome monitor. Does anyone know if I can add a VGA card in one of these?
Here's how the GX400 socket 423 machine turned out after a little TLC:
before:
after:
I had to repaint the case - it was too badly scratched and it looked bleached. Unfortunately I could not find the original dark gray, so I used some flat 202 charcoal gray. It's slightly darker then the original, but I'm happy with the results.
Is that paint a little bit glossy / smooth? Where did you bought it?
Is that paint a little bit glossy / smooth? Where did you bought it?
It's not actually. it seems glossier then usual because I used the flash on my phone - w/o flash the whole PC looked like a featureless black blob 🤣
I got the paint at my usual pain shop. Gunmetal Gray (gunmetalgrau 214) and Diamond Black (diamantswartz metallic 181) were a bit closer to the original color, but it's metallic paint and I wanted matte.
Picked up a pair of A64 dual core am2 machines. Dell E521 and a custom built by a local pc shop that is still around.
They should call those damn things Heater/Computer combo's. My single core Athlon heated up my room as much as my Core2Quad. Make sure to reapply the thermal paste and clean them out. I once had a PC second hand with the cooling design that had which had been left on for basically 8 years straight according the HDD Smart reading and sucked in enough dust as to make the entire inside case, motherboard, and every component earth-tone (the color of dirt) with filth, you actually couldnt see chips on the motherboard or tell what color the PCB was.. It had even fowled the DVD drive bad enough it wouldnt open correctly. When i first turned it on it shot out this huge ass cloud of dust that make me choke and coated the wall in a thin layer of dust. I wish i had pictures. I don't know how that thing could suck in so much dust and still work. I remember the first time i opened the case it made me sick within 30 seconds to the point i threw up. It was basically gas attack in a box..... So on a sidenote wear something to keep that shit of your lungs.
I made the half hour trek on foot to the recycle center again (same place I got all that XT stuff) and this time I was once again rewarded richly. I found an AT clone in a horribly bent up case (marked "goof box" for whatever reason - huh), so I removed all of the parts and ditched the case, it being too heavy to carry back anyway. There were some pretty cool parts in there, including a Seagate HDD, but I wasn't allowed to take the hard drive because "it might have user data on it". Darn, oh well. I guess I'll stick with floppies for now.
There was also a humongous AT power supply (the fans still spin up when I flip the big red switch - does this mean it will work?) and two floppy drives, one 5 1/4" and one 3 1/2".
I also found two mechanical key keyboards (woo hoo!), one of which has a switch to go between XT and AT mode, so that solves my XT keyboard problem.
Pictures:
The mainboard. The CPU is an Intel 286 8 MHz. I also see an Intel 80287 coprocessor. Can somebody identify this for me? How much memory does it have (I assume the standard 640K, but you never know) and how do I upgrade it with more? For instance, if I want XMS or EMS, is there an add-on card for that? Sorry, but I just have never learned this stuff since I've never worked with pre-Pentium stuff before.
Now the video card, which is very hard to find on the internet but appears to be something by "Video 7". Question: what is Video 7? Is this EGA-compatible or what? I managed to find information on those DIP-switches, and, assuming that info is correct, the card is set to EGA mode. Apparently one of those RCA connectors is for composite out and the other is for a "light pen", whatever that is.
And this appears to be some kind of DAC. An audio DAC? I looked up those chips and they're supposed to be 16 bit audio DACs, but this obviously isn't a 16 bit card. What on earth is this?
And a 16-bit I/O card. This doesn't look like standard IDE so I have no idea what it is, but at least I know how to hook floppy drives to it so I can at least boot the system if and when I get it going.
And finally, unrelated to all of the above stuff, is the piece de resistance. I literally dipped my hand into a box full of random cables and junk parts, and pulled out this beauty:
Oh yes! I've wanted one of these for so long, and now I have it. Mwa ha ha ha! This will go into my far-in-the-future planned PIII rig, if and when that happens.
All of this stuff was a royal pain in the rear to haul back up to campus. I managed to stuff as much as I could in my backpack, and put the rest in a file archive box, hauling the whole lot the whole mile and a half back, up a steep hill at the end. Good exercise though 🤣
Nice haul, and great dedication to haul all that stuff back by foot! If I had that kind of stuff at a local recycling center, I'd make the walk too, I'm sure!