Wow, monkey brain like "Am I supposed to throw rocks at it?" (2001 Space Odyssey joke)

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-01-20, 15:41:

Wow, monkey brain like "Am I supposed to throw rocks at it?" (2001 Space Odyssey joke)

It is kinda Monolithic looking!

That's a very nice case, I think that's probably one of the most space efficient regular ATX cases?

I was trying to fix my Toshiba T2130CT and something went wrong, the board no longer powers up and a replacement board is £22. So it's time for a new board rather than troubleshooting further (I think the board did this when I first got it so nvm). The only board I could get was a DX2-50 instead of a DX4-75 and that's unfortunate so I have to make it go faster 😀
While everything's apart this is not too tough to do, it requires removing the PC card slot which covers some jumpers that control the PLL that sits on the other side of the board.

This info comes from a now defunct japanese website that never got translated and I don't know of anyone wanting to overclock 20 year old laptops these days: https://web.archive.org/web/20120513160512/ht … ance/gt475.html

It requires moving the little 0-ohm resistor from W35 to W6 and the bus speed goes from 25MHz to 33MHz, making it a DX2-66 which seems to be running well enough:

If you want to speed up an old Toshiba laptop from the 486 to Pentium MMX era, this website's got some excellent information: https://web.archive.org/web/20120707221419/ht … jp/performance/
I considered doing something like this to speed up one of the Pentium based satellite laptops but it's more involved.

Received parts and put 32MB of 4x 8MB parity DIMMs on compaq card for deskpro/M intended target is high end 386 or 486. Need to finish it.

Microindusties SBC 486 ISA only and does have socket for PC104 modules, searched my ram stash and put on 2x 8MB FPM for 16MB. Comes with 256K cache module and DX2 66 with clip on tall heatsink. Quality stuff. Unfortunely no manual for the jumpers. Based on C&T chipsets which is unusual for 486.

Waiting for a disposable NLX pentium motherboard to gather parts from, missing the riser slot which I do not need. Cheaper this way and was not too expensive. GD5434 chip can be repurposed into ISA, FDC37C665GT can be repurposed into homemade ISA i/o card as well.

Final 4 more 1MB parity SIMMs for the 486 board that has 16x 30pin slots, bringing up to 16MB, still waiting.

Many more.

Cheers,

I finally took the time to get my MIDI stack hooked up.

I was going to buy a bunch of fancy cables to keep the wiring all pretty and tidy, but in the end just got a bunch of the cheapest 1.5' RCA cables and RCA to 1/4" adapters I could buy and I used all the original (slightly too long) Roland MIDI cables I had on hand to hook everything up. Saved a ton of money, and once everything was hooked up with the 50 extra feet of AC\DC adapter cords all tangled together, I was glad I didn't try to beautify that side of the stack. It's hopeless. 🤣

How about that color match on the power center LEDs though? I think it looks so cool. And yes, the switches work in order. Mixer on "Master", and each module has it's own switch from right to left, top to bottom of the stack. 😀

Tweaked the real-mode Windows 3.0 desktop aesthetics. Huzzah.

I managed to produce some "magic smoke"!
How to 😀
I have 2 old pentium I systems with defective floppy drives.
So I hooked up my "modern" pc (fujitsu Fujitsu Siemens D1561-C23 from 2005 with working floppy drive) to prepare a hdd (for 8 gb capacity, bootable, fat32 format) using floppy hitachi f tool and ontrack manager).
I was carelees and inserted wrong the floppy power cable, just 3 pins.
So, the second I turned on the pc, white smoke started to flow from the floppy drive and burned plastic smell.
I took out the smoking floppy drive and tested the pc.
The motherboard is fine, but the PSU might be damaged.
I continued with preparing the hdd with usb images of hitachi ftool and ontrack disk manager, but when I turned off the pc, the hdd was really hot, almost untochable.

I finally got around to testing the five Voodoo 2 cards I've had sitting in a box for a few years, three STB Black Magic 3D and two Diamond Monster 3D II, all 12 MB variants. One of the STB cards has a crushed capacitor and is not working, and one of the Diamond cards seems like it may have intermittent issues, need further testing in another PC, but the other three are GTG so far.

I'm always so paranoid when testing 3dfx cards. When other cards I test don't work, I'm like, meh, but when a 3dfx card isn't working right, I'm like "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Played around with Dos compatible cards in a PowerMac 6100.

Tried some serial nullmodem multiplayer games, Doom and Descent to name them, between the Mac Dos card and a Compaq Armada 1592.

And tried some OSes other than Dos/Win 3.x which the card only officially supports, some do work, like Linux running entirely from a ramdisk, V2_OS and the QNX 3.03 demo floppy.

Others don't, any regular Linux distro that requires accessing the drives, as in needing a root floppy for a multi floppy mini distro or loading root from the hdd
etc,
QNX 4.05 demo just hangs in there not loading after displaying "Q",
Tomsrtbt doesn't load either, maybe a problem with using a superformatted floppy disk...

Painted the back of the case of one of my retro rigs, it was quite rusty on the bottom and in the cards area. Aluminium-zinc spray for automotive purposes serves good for the job. Only re-printing the psu sticker is yet to be done.

Already painted the cover in white a couple of months ago but didn't have the chance to finish it (not finished yet... The front is yellowed but it's winter here so I have to wait 😀

Not so much a retro doing in this case, but a neat thing I discovered to apply to retro doings. I guess a tip then...

I was using a ziptie, and just scrabbled around for the nearest thing to hand to trim off the spare, and that happened to be a pair of cheap dollar store cuticle trimmers, and snip, amazingly close and clean cut, no jaggy bits. They might even clean up previously trimmed zipties, that you did with a regular sidecutter or something and left that compressed plastic blade shape on the end which scratches up your wrists when you are rooting around in a case. Anyway, the doom of scratchy ziptie ends = cuticle cutters apparently.

went MoCA gocoax over TV freeview aerial cables. huge improvement to speeds compared to tp-link powerline adapters I've used for years, tenfold jump in speeds.

Been cleaning up some 775 PCs. One came with a pretty lovely KME/KeyMouse case (CX-6059) that needs retrobrighting.
The other is a rather compact but cute Linkworld (or Stinkworld - you don't want to know how bad the PSU was on that thing.) case that's in mATX form. Might be saving it for a "SFF" form factor 1156 build (if you can call micro ATX a small form factor.)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-01-21, 03:47:

I finally took the time to get my MIDI stack hooked up. […]
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I finally took the time to get my MIDI stack hooked up.

20230120_200533 (Custom).jpg

I was going to buy a bunch of fancy cables to keep the wiring all pretty and tidy, but in the end just got a bunch of the cheapest 1.5' RCA cables and RCA to 1/4" adapters I could buy and I used all the original (slightly too long) Roland MIDI cables I had on hand to hook everything up. Saved a ton of money, and once everything was hooked up with the 50 extra feet of AC\DC adapter cords all tangled together, I was glad I didn't try to beautify that side of the stack. It's hopeless. 🤣

How about that color match on the power center LEDs though? I think it looks so cool. And yes, the switches work in order. Mixer on "Master", and each module has it's own switch from right to left, top to bottom of the stack. 😀

That is a lovely looking stack of MIDI gear! And that Power switch unit does look cool, what brand is it?

Did some testing and benchmarking of the IO Data PK-X486S50-3 (286-to-486 upgrade) in my Tandy TL today.

Weird results, using this 'upgrade' causes the Tandy TL to run slower than the stock 80286 @ 8 MHz. 😒

Without using the REVTO486.SYS driver, it runs @ 16 MHz. If I use the REVTO486.SYS driver, it runs @ 24 MHz w/ cache enabled (using /CN switch).

I also tried using the /2 and /3 multiplier switches with the REVTO486.SYS driver, but they don't seem to do anything.

In each case, the faster the MHz translates into slower reported system performance (and yes I tested multiple benchmarks and games to confirm this).

If anyone has any ideas as to what is going on, I'd love to know.

Swapped out the still working 500GB 7mm HGST for EVO 850 250GB. Sped up the Mother's notebook some and quieter, no more humming sound. AOMEI backupper made this a snap. Yes had alignment box checked.

Now to find 1.5V 2x 8GB DDR3 1600, not easy these days other than chinese. 🙁

Cheers,

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-01-22, 18:29:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-01-21, 03:47:

I finally took the time to get my MIDI stack hooked up. […]
Show full quote

I finally took the time to get my MIDI stack hooked up.

20230120_200533 (Custom).jpg

I was going to buy a bunch of fancy cables to keep the wiring all pretty and tidy, but in the end just got a bunch of the cheapest 1.5' RCA cables and RCA to 1/4" adapters I could buy and I used all the original (slightly too long) Roland MIDI cables I had on hand to hook everything up. Saved a ton of money, and once everything was hooked up with the 50 extra feet of AC\DC adapter cords all tangled together, I was glad I didn't try to beautify that side of the stack. It's hopeless. 🤣

How about that color match on the power center LEDs though? I think it looks so cool. And yes, the switches work in order. Mixer on "Master", and each module has it's own switch from right to left, top to bottom of the stack. 😀

That is a lovely looking stack of MIDI gear! And that Power switch unit does look cool, what brand is it?

Thanks! It took way too long for me to get it wired up and working just the way I want it to.

The power center thingy is made by National Lighting. I have posted about it in this thread:
Re: PSA: Please open and inspect your surge protectors and power centers\controllers... today.

More testing of the IO Data PK-X486S50-3 board.

Tested it in a Packard Bell Legend I. Without the REVTO486.SYS driver it reports as running @ 24 MHz, but benchmarks lower than the stock 12 MHz 80286.

With the REVTO486.SYS driver loaded, it reports a speed of 48 MHz and much improved performance in benchmarking.

While this board does nothing for my Tandy, at least I have another system I can use it with.

Bancho wrote on 2023-01-20, 13:55:

Re-housed my main Retro Rig (Via C3) into the Lian-Li today. Would like to maybe do some custom length wiring on the PSU. […]
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Re-housed my main Retro Rig (Via C3) into the Lian-Li today. Would like to maybe do some custom length wiring on the PSU.

ah the good old PC-A05b. I have one from back in the day. Use to house my 4200 x2 939 amd desktop. Was thinking of doing a P3 build in mine.

I made a Sing Along program in C for my old Mac Plus of a pretty retro song (The Last Unicorn (1982))
✅THINK C was used (1990ish)
✅Studio Session was used (1986)
✅Apple discouraged alternate buffer hack was used
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSOBp2aMJh