bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-04-11, 00:44:

Have 2 myself, but I swapped the displays around so that the one I got a year ago (in fantastic shape) would have a TFT display. The other one isn't in good shape and missing a lot of things.

As I paid less than £2 for it I wasn’t expecting it to work so have been pleasantly surprised with it so far - only thing I don’t like is the slight crack/dent in the corner but other than that its a very nice laptop 😀

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-04-10, 23:53:

I picked up a few old IBM ThinkPad laptops from a car boot sale earlier on in the year but I've only just gotten around to takin […]
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I picked up a few old IBM ThinkPad laptops from a car boot sale earlier on in the year but I've only just gotten around to taking a look at them.

The first one I picked off of the pile was an IBM ThinkPad 380D Pentium laptop with 16MB of RAM - not only was it relatively clean but it also booted and loaded Windows 95 so it appears to be in full working order!

2020-04-10_16-51-55.jpg

As you can see I even managed to (just about) play a game on it - the playback of videos was/is terrible but I was able to play the game!

You can see more on my blog here if you wish: https://www.retrocomputing.co.uk/2020/04/test … laptop-car.html

Nice! I have on myself of which I replaced the DVD drive last year, from the top of my head, I think it's a T41. It's cool that all drivers for these things are still available.

Bought 16 and 20 MHz oscillators. My plan is to mod my 486 motherboard to get 16 and 20 MHz 486SX working. None of my motherboards has straight 16 MHz setting.

Will be for a fun project to find out how the 486SX-16 compares with 386DX-33.

Bought and received this board a few days ago, forgot to post about it. It's an Austin Computer Systems 33VL 386DX board, that I got for €25. Very good price, but it does have some work cut out for me. It's clearly been stored in a box full of other things or something like that, given it's fairly dinged up. Some of the SIMM slots have bent pins, but seemingly not bad enough to short or not make contact at all. One SIMM slot is really shot, and probably needs replacing. One ISA slot's a bit bent, and another few have pins that are slightly pushed back, but that probably can be massaged back into place. The board has a chipped off corner, and some top layer chipping next to the ISA slots, but both of these spots don't have traces or components on them, so it's not too bad. I might get some UV soldermask to cover it up, to prevent further chipping.

The Dallas RTC (very Texan thing going on here) has already been desoldered and I already have an idea how to mount the CR2032 to it, which I'll post later. The chipset QFP pins are all fine, and despite some scuffing and scratching, no traces appear to be damaged. Could be much, much worse, this board has had some luck getting damaged where it doesn't matter too much, or can be relatively easily fixed. Online resources say this board will work with 33MHz and 40MHz 386DX chips, so an Am386DX40 is on my way from China. Just need to find a good VGA card, sound card, NIC, a good amount of memory, and maybe a 387 to go with it, to build a nice 386 rig.

There were two nice AT systems with good early 90s cases for such a build at my internship, but sadly I won't be going there for a while due to the COVID-19 situation. Hopefully those will still be there, and I'll be allowed to take those away, as they're in the storage room with a pile of other systems that were taken from clients when the company upgraded their systems. One is still its original color, the other one's been painted black. I did do a quick test of the black one, and that had a Pentium Socket 7 system of some kind. I do hope my boss won't do a clean up of those while I'm gone!

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-04-10, 23:53:

The first one I picked off of the pile was an IBM ThinkPad 380D Pentium laptop with 16MB of RAM - not only was it relatively clean but it also booted and loaded Windows 95 so it appears to be in full working order!

Beautiful! Bento-box thinkpads, aww yeah.

I hadn't bought anything in a long while until I picked this up the other day:

A somewhat uncommon card; FireGL 2, from the time before FireGL were ATI cards. It's a bit bowed and it turns out it's missing a SMD cap:

Oh well, can't always win. Maybe someone has this card on hand and help me out by checking the specs of the cap (C67)? In the hoard it goes in the meantime...

I also got a legit copy of Win2k, the last Windows I ever used (as my main OS at home) before switching to linux full time.

Check the pads, is one of them is grounded? This is heavy traces. Means power rails filtering using capacitors.

Cheers,

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 and a Fast VIA C3 CPU.. when i can find one!

I've been trying to get a Voodoo3 AGP for a while now but haven't found one that's less than $75.

Shit..cannot stop buying stuff 😁 Maybe indeed a good idea to put parcel in quarantine for some days before opening...

As I saw this offer (only photo) for a price much better than scrap value and this Amiga card inside there was not much time to think about it - klick...bought.

So some id*** has damaged the card by removing the slot bracket. But I hope its repairable in that area.
More difficult is to get the missing CPU/FPU and especially MMU for a reasonable price.

http://amiga.resource.cx/expde/a2620

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Toshiba-Satellite-40 … 872.m2749.l2649

I got this killer deal off eBay in the mail today and it actually works! Has Windows 2000 on it, which is kind of a lot to ask for with only 96MB of RAM (I generally throw in at least 256 for Win2K myself) but hey, it does work.

Bancho wrote on 2020-04-11, 16:31:

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 an […]
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Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 and a Fast VIA C3 CPU.. when i can find one!

Looks like a Voodoo3-3500

brostenen wrote on 2020-04-11, 21:06:

Bancho wrote on 2020-04-11, 16:31:

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 an […]
Show full quote

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 and a Fast VIA C3 CPU.. when i can find one!

Looks like a Voodoo3-3500

ehm, 3500 has a TV-tuner on it 😉

Predator99 wrote on 2020-04-11, 19:50:

Shit..cannot stop buying stuff :-D Maybe indeed a good idea to put parcel in quarantine for some days before opening... […]
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Shit..cannot stop buying stuff 😁 Maybe indeed a good idea to put parcel in quarantine for some days before opening...

As I saw this offer (only photo) for a price much better than scrap value and this Amiga card inside there was not much time to think about it - klick...bought.

So some id*** has damaged the card by removing the slot bracket. But I hope its repairable in that area.
More difficult is to get the missing CPU/FPU and especially MMU for a reasonable price.

http://amiga.resource.cx/expde/a2620

eb.jpg

🙁 that looks like it is bent/broken all the way over the first chip

also yeah... I also bought a few things lately... but I have bought a lot less at least ^^

tbx wrote on 2020-04-10, 17:02:

After looking for a beige case for a while, I found Evercase. Outside of some NOS from eBay, they sell the only beige desktop/to […]
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After looking for a beige case for a while, I found Evercase. Outside of some NOS from eBay, they sell the only beige desktop/tower ATX cases I was able to find. Inexpensive cases, but the shipping was 2x the cost of the case.

Hah, I have the black one with gray trim! It has housed my Athlon XP 1700+ and NF7-S 2.0 since 2003. Basic case but well constructed, and I like that they put the side panel fan on an arm connected inside the back of the case (rather than screwed to the side panel). Certainly the best implementation of a side fan I've ever seen... no wires to fight with when opening the case.

I actually didn't like the flat gray trim so I painted it (and the gray power button) way back in the day. Still looks pretty okay in my opinion. 😀

Predator99 wrote on 2020-04-11, 19:50:

Shit..cannot stop buying stuff :-D Maybe indeed a good idea to put parcel in quarantine for some days before opening... […]
Show full quote

Shit..cannot stop buying stuff 😁 Maybe indeed a good idea to put parcel in quarantine for some days before opening...

As I saw this offer (only photo) for a price much better than scrap value and this Amiga card inside there was not much time to think about it - klick...bought.

So some id*** has damaged the card by removing the slot bracket. But I hope its repairable in that area.
More difficult is to get the missing CPU/FPU and especially MMU for a reasonable price.

http://amiga.resource.cx/expde/a2620

eb.jpg

If you look at the very bottom of the pile, you can see a card with two VGA plugs. The bottom one seems to be a male plug ... that screams Voodoo 1 or 2 to me 😁

Deksor wrote on 2020-04-12, 00:59:

Predator99 wrote on 2020-04-11, 19:50:

Shit..cannot stop buying stuff :-D Maybe indeed a good idea to put parcel in quarantine for some days before opening... […]
Show full quote

Shit..cannot stop buying stuff 😁 Maybe indeed a good idea to put parcel in quarantine for some days before opening...

As I saw this offer (only photo) for a price much better than scrap value and this Amiga card inside there was not much time to think about it - klick...bought.

So some id*** has damaged the card by removing the slot bracket. But I hope its repairable in that area.
More difficult is to get the missing CPU/FPU and especially MMU for a reasonable price.

http://amiga.resource.cx/expde/a2620

eb.jpg

If you look at the very bottom of the pile, you can see a card with two VGA plugs. The bottom one seems to be a male plug ... that screams Voodoo 1 or 2 to me 😁

pretty sure that's just the same PCIe serial card that is visible on the right:
https://c1.neweggimages.com/ProductImage/15-166-024-04.jpg

Bancho wrote on 2020-04-11, 16:31:

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 an […]
Show full quote

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 and a Fast VIA C3 CPU.. when i can find one!

I would add a fan. These cards run very hot and excessive heat is a known cause fi=or these cards failing.
Broken solder ball welds and ram chip welds.

Learnt that the hard way with a V3 2000 PCI card. Once I got my V3 3000 PCI, I added a fan to it and works without issues.

gex85 wrote on 2020-04-09, 18:21:

Today I have finally been able to find what is - at least to me - something like the holy grail of Tualatin mainboards: The MSI MS-9105, aka the Pro266TD Master-LR.
Dual Socket 370 with Via Apollo Pro266T chipset, capable of handling up to 4GB of DDR RAM and with AGP 4x slot, onboard LAN and IDE RAID controller.
The seller lives an hours drive away from me and I know him because I bought a fair bit of retro stuff from him about two years ago. Once all this COVID-19 stuff is over, we'll meet to hand over the board.

That is my favourite 266T-based dual Tualatin board. Very stable. Very hard to find. The DDR doesn't help at all compared to single-channel SDRAM.

imi wrote on 2020-04-09, 15:16:

I've seen several people mentioning the TL866(II?) also testing DRAM, I can't verify that though as my Genius G540 seems to be indeed limited to SRAM

Can it?

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2020-04-11, 12:45:

Bought and received this board a few days ago, forgot to post about it. It's an Austin Computer Systems 33VL 386DX board, that I got for €25. Very good price, but it does have some work cut out for me. It's clearly been stored in a box full of other things or something like that, given it's fairly dinged up. Some of the SIMM slots have bent pins, but seemingly not bad enough to short or not make contact at all. One SIMM slot is really shot, and probably needs replacing. One ISA slot's a bit bent, and another few have pins that are slightly pushed back, but that probably can be massaged back into place.

On 30-pin SIMM sockets, aren't both sides of the pin normally shorted together, so you only need one pin to make contact with the SIMM module?

Bancho wrote on 2020-04-11, 16:31:

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 and a Fast VIA C3 CPU.. when i can find one!

What is a reasonable price to you? To me, it is $65 or less for the PCI version and $35 for the AGP version. Does anyone know how much faster, if any, the SGRAM version of the Vodoo3 is compared to the SDRAM version?

feipoa wrote on 2020-04-12, 03:21:

Does anyone know how much faster, if any, the SGRAM version of the Vodoo3 is compared to the SDRAM version?

AFAIK, the SGRAM version is about 3-4% faster than SDRAM one, but SDRAM overclocks way better.

imi wrote on 2020-04-11, 21:16:

brostenen wrote on 2020-04-11, 21:06:

Bancho wrote on 2020-04-11, 16:31:

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 an […]
Show full quote

Managed to pick up a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI for a reasonable price. This is to be used on an up and coming project using a G-ITOX3 and a Fast VIA C3 CPU.. when i can find one!

Looks like a Voodoo3-3500

ehm, 3500 has a TV-tuner on it 😉

Not all 3500's have TV-Tuner on them. I think that card is the "Compaq" version. I had one of them Compaq cards a coupe of years ago. The size and looks of the PCB gives it away. You can not tell by the heatsink alone. Other cards such as the Compaq TNT2-Ultra have the same, just in black. And yes. I have two of those TNT2's in my collection.