Today I perfomed a quick and easily reversible modification to my Neo Geo CD console.

I took 2 pieces of jumper wire, soldered a toggle switch onto 1 end and then soldered the other end of the wires to the region selection jumper pad inside the console. Now at the flick of a switch, I can select the console's region between Japan & USA. USA for English language on the games that don't offer it as an option and Japan for full uncensored glory - ie. full red blood in fighting games & the likes of Metal Slug and other unadulterated graphics in several games.

I didn't want to drill a hole in the case, as I want this 100% reversible, so hot glue and electrical tape bodge job it is -

Not the prettiest looking thing, but it's hidden away at the back. It does the job, so will suffice!

Drilled 8 holes in sheet metal in 1 hour for the very future PC104 case I'm making!
(It'll be an Icop 6071, dual PS/2, floppy, VGA, one serial, probably sound output and USB but still undecided on those, same for SSD as I already have a fine 2GB CF card but after adding adapter and 44-pin cable the price would compete with an 1GB DOM...)

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-02-21, 16:44:

ChrisK wrote on 2023-02-21, 16:08:

Yes I know it's more lower end but it is the only board I can use as a testbench atm. I've already recapped it and it did run ok […]
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BitWrangler wrote on 2023-02-21, 15:46:

Awesome work, there's quite a few of these cards around cheap because the cables are unobtanium.

K7SEM tho... not a great board as you might have figured by now, all of the ones I've seen have had advanced cap rot. Even when those are replaced I think it might be short on AGP power, since it's a cheap design that was done a couple of years before 9x00 series. There's gonna be limited historical experience to guide you I fear, the kind of systems that got K7SEM got MX400s or other low spec cards, probably one of those and a spitfire core duron would be something of a classic combo on it. So not sure how much here is gonna be fighting the board vs fighting the GPU.

Anyway, looking forward to when you post the cable pinout and share any details about where you can get that goofy connector from.

Yes I know it's more lower end but it is the only board I can use as a testbench atm. I've already recapped it and it did run ok with most graphic cards I throw at it. The last must have been a GF4 Ti4200 AGP4x.
I think the reason lies somewhere in the AGP support. The SiS chipset only supports x4 (even the board's manual says it only suppports nvidia AGP x4 cards, whatever the reason is) and the 9600Pro is an x8 card.
I know the 9600Pro works as I had it in some board when figuring out the pinout of the vid-out connector. I just can't remember which one it was.

Only thing in particular I'm hearing about SiS chipsets and ATi is to make sure AGP fast write is off in CMOS setup. Presumably you've got the SiS AGP drivers installed if the 4200 was working before.

SiS AGP drivers are installed, right.
The only AGP-related options in BIOS setup are for setting the aperture size and for en-/disabling "AGP Auto Calibration", whatever that does. However, neither setting had any positive effect.
Maybe I will try some even older driver, if that doesn't change anything I consider this board/VGA combination non-working.

Ryccardo wrote on 2023-02-21, 18:30:

Drilled 8 holes in sheet metal in 1 hour for the very future PC104 case I'm making!
(It'll be an Icop 6071, dual PS/2, floppy, VGA, one serial, probably sound output and USB but still undecided on those, same for SSD as I already have a fine 2GB CF card but after adding adapter and 44-pin cable the price would compete with an 1GB DOM...)

I drilled holes in a steel case once to attach wheels. Four holes per wheel, 16 holes total. I had to use a cobalt drill bit in my hand drill, and even then it was extremely difficult.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-02-22, 17:21:

Ryccardo wrote on 2023-02-21, 18:30:

Drilled 8 holes in sheet metal in 1 hour for the very future PC104 case I'm making!
(It'll be an Icop 6071, dual PS/2, floppy, VGA, one serial, probably sound output and USB but still undecided on those, same for SSD as I already have a fine 2GB CF card but after adding adapter and 44-pin cable the price would compete with an 1GB DOM...)

I drilled holes in a steel case once to attach wheels. Four holes per wheel, 16 holes total. I had to use a cobalt drill bit in my hand drill, and even then it was extremely difficult.

Not sure if you meant hand held electric or hand cranked... but anyway, general thing about HSS, Titanium and Cobalt tipped bits is they like a decent amount of speed, the "HSS" for high speed steel being a bit of a clue. 2000-2500rpm is best... then they're in "hot knife through butter" mode on mild steel which is what case steel usually should be. Overheat them one time and they're trash though, so some convenient oil to hand or real cutting oil to go in the hole is good if you're trying to get through more than 1/8 of an inch. The problem is, a lot of corded and driver/drill cordless combo drills these days are plodding along at 900RPM and slower when they've got a speed control, and just go "chimble chimble chimble skip" with these kind of bits, and they are about the same with actual hand cranked drills. The slow drills actually tend to do better with a "general purpose" bit rather than high speed bit. I keep an older corded Wolfcraft 2400RPM for metal drilling, leave the "handyman" variable speed one for house stuff.

iraito wrote on 2023-02-18, 15:29:

4: I got thanks to the kindness of acl a slot 1 mobo with a pentium 2, it's a non common form factor, so i'm planning to create a WIP thread and work on a 3d printable case for it, lucky me i work with professional 3d scanners and printers so i already have a 3d scan of the board to work with.

Wow that's a good quality 3d scan compared to what I can get. Is it one of the handheld type scanners or a turntable one? It looks like it handled scanning the reflective PCB really well, good luck with the case build 😀

-------------------

A long time ago I plugged my Citizen VIDA-15B floppy drive from the Compaq LTE Lite 4/25E into a regular 26pin floppy cable and burned out the drive. That sucked.
So of course I had to convert my Compaq LTE Lite 4/25E to a direct drive floppy! The pinout is basically the same as the Compaq SLT's Citizen OSDA-53B pinout listed here.
I had to get familiar with what connection does what and verify all of the pinout which is basically the same:

Fitting a Teac FD05-HG in the bay works really well - 3 of the 4 screw holes match up with regular floppy drives so the drive sits properly without major modification. I had to trim down the eject peg so I didn't have to trim the case.

This took a while and after getting it all together, the drive didn't work? It didn't seem to do anything and I spent ages checking I had the lines right with the oscilloscope (shoulda used logic analyser but scope is easier for these quick checks). The original Citizen VIDA-15B drive just made the computer upset since I burned out some components on it plugging it into a flat cable connector that put 5v into its sensors and things, so that was rather useless for reference.

I also spent a really long time figuring out how the connections are done on the mainboard - some of them are exposed on the docking connector which really helped, but after it didn't work I was second guessing everything and was about to go back to the drawing board.
It turned out I didn't have any pins wrong, but the flat flex cable connector I'd wired it up for had the connector pins on the other side than what I soldered it up for, argh. These are all just salvaged from dead drives so it's tough to know what's what.

Once it was resoldered the drive has just worked! Considering the trouble that Citizen belted floppy drives have given me, a direct drive floppy on this LTE Lite is awesome. It predates PCMCIA so getting files on and off of it is otherwise a hassle.

Now the prototype works I can get some adapter PCBs made - it also means that a Gotek PCB could go in potentially.

Hello all, new here. I've been trying to get a Packard Bell 402CD up and going using ISOs from archive.org. Having ....some luck, but not enough to quite get me through. It's still fun though working on this stuff after all these years. Things are just so easy to build and configure these days we forget just how nuanced it was back in the day. Software seems to be keyed to specific hardware more often than not.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-02-23, 02:11:

Wow that's a good quality 3d scan compared to what I can get. Is it one of the handheld type scanners or a turntable one? It loo […]
Show full quote

iraito wrote on 2023-02-18, 15:29:

4: I got thanks to the kindness of acl a slot 1 mobo with a pentium 2, it's a non common form factor, so i'm planning to create a WIP thread and work on a 3d printable case for it, lucky me i work with professional 3d scanners and printers so i already have a 3d scan of the board to work with.

Wow that's a good quality 3d scan compared to what I can get. Is it one of the handheld type scanners or a turntable one? It looks like it handled scanning the reflective PCB really well, good luck with the case build 😀

-------------------

A long time ago I plugged my Citizen VIDA-15B floppy drive from the Compaq LTE Lite 4/25E into a regular 26pin floppy cable and burned out the drive. That sucked.
So of course I had to convert my Compaq LTE Lite 4/25E to a direct drive floppy! The pinout is basically the same as the Compaq SLT's Citizen OSDA-53B pinout listed here.
I had to get familiar with what connection does what and verify all of the pinout which is basically the same:
compaq-citizen-vida-15b.png

Fitting a Teac FD05-HG in the bay works really well - 3 of the 4 screw holes match up with regular floppy drives so the drive sits properly without major modification. I had to trim down the eject peg so I didn't have to trim the case.
IMG_0892 (Custom).JPG

This took a while and after getting it all together, the drive didn't work? It didn't seem to do anything and I spent ages checking I had the lines right with the oscilloscope (shoulda used logic analyser but scope is easier for these quick checks). The original Citizen VIDA-15B drive just made the computer upset since I burned out some components on it plugging it into a flat cable connector that put 5v into its sensors and things, so that was rather useless for reference.

I also spent a really long time figuring out how the connections are done on the mainboard - some of them are exposed on the docking connector which really helped, but after it didn't work I was second guessing everything and was about to go back to the drawing board.
It turned out I didn't have any pins wrong, but the flat flex cable connector I'd wired it up for had the connector pins on the other side than what I soldered it up for, argh. These are all just salvaged from dead drives so it's tough to know what's what.
Citizen-VIDA-15B-adapter-wiring.jpg

Once it was resoldered the drive has just worked! Considering the trouble that Citizen belted floppy drives have given me, a direct drive floppy on this LTE Lite is awesome. It predates PCMCIA so getting files on and off of it is otherwise a hassle.

Now the prototype works I can get some adapter PCBs made - it also means that a Gotek PCB could go in potentially.

It's an Einscan HX, it's professional grade scan for art preservation and retro engineering, i didn't use any opacity spray otherwise the scan would be 100% filled without a single mm missing, it serves me well for my work and for hobby projects, hopefully i will start working on the case soon.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-02-21, 15:46:

Anyway, looking forward to when you post the cable pinout and share any details about where you can get that goofy connector from.

A bit late a reply but I had to dig out my notes on that at first.
Here's what I've got so far.
The pinout is correct for the two VGA ports. All others are a bit of a guess so far basing on my measurements on the card as I could not test them any further yet.
Please keep in mind that this holds true only for the AiW 9600 Pro. For other cards using the same connector I can't give any guarantee whether the same pinout fits.

I couldn't find a supplier for the original connector, altogether I think this can't be bought at all but was a custom part made just for ATi. The manufacturer should be "Wieson" as far as I could find out but not sure about that any more.
That's why I've made a small PCB for getting all those tiny wires fixed together (gerbers attached).
At first I tried to use some 1.27mm/50mil pin headers for contacting to the graphics card but eventually I used some crimp contacts I ordered from Aliexpress. They are long enough to reach trough the PCB and make good contact in the connector of the AiW. Mounting is still some fiddling but in the end it will do the job. Would have to dig out the link for the contacts if there's any interest.

Almost finished a Win98 overkill machine with P4 530J, Intel Intel D865GSA MB and GeForce FX 5900XT . Case, CD and FDD are retrobrited, all metal parts washed.

Started planning my 4 player doom lan party rigs. Want to build 4 identical machines to bring to the local lan party for 4 player multiplayer doom. Thinking Pentium 200 mmx cpu's. The hard part will be finding 4 identical motherboards, I'll probably end up with OEM boards like dell or gateway. They seem to be the easiest to find on ebay in multiple quantities.

I've been working on this double speed Aztech CD-ROM drive. It refuses to spin a disc. But the motor spins for a brieve moment when powering on, even when powering off it spins a little.

I don't think it's worth to replace the whole CDM-12.4 unit... I think the problem lies at the main PCB. Cause power is OK (it spins).

Playing a good game of Solitaire and reading through some of my old highschool reports, on the Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 that my dad finally let me have 🤣 a bit of a PITA to play Solitaire, since the rolls in the built-in trackball really needs some serious TLC, and I don't have a serial mouse to attach ... 🤣

Installed a SB Live! CT4830 in my Socket 370 PC.

Tested different drivers, VXD and WDM ones. The best one were the VXD in the Audigy 2 ZS package downloaded from Phil's Computer website.
Installed DOS drivers too and SB16 emulation works flawlessly in both real MS-DOS and Windows MS-DOS mode. I just had to change in BIOS the IRQ assigned to the real PCI card because it was interfering the emulated SB16 one.

in the light of all these flashcarts and thingamyjigs, i still use the old fasioned swap-trick to play CD-R games on my sega saturn
https://youtube.com/shorts/A1yOz0fm9Yk

ChrisK wrote on 2023-02-23, 10:44:

A bit late a reply but I had to dig out my notes on that at first. Here's what I've got so far. The pinout is correct for the tw […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-02-21, 15:46:

Anyway, looking forward to when you post the cable pinout and share any details about where you can get that goofy connector from.

A bit late a reply but I had to dig out my notes on that at first.
Here's what I've got so far.
The pinout is correct for the two VGA ports. All others are a bit of a guess so far basing on my measurements on the card as I could not test them any further yet.
Please keep in mind that this holds true only for the AiW 9600 Pro. For other cards using the same connector I can't give any guarantee whether the same pinout fits.

I couldn't find a supplier for the original connector, altogether I think this can't be bought at all but was a custom part made just for ATi. The manufacturer should be "Wieson" as far as I could find out but not sure about that any more.
That's why I've made a small PCB for getting all those tiny wires fixed together (gerbers attached).
At first I tried to use some 1.27mm/50mil pin headers for contacting to the graphics card but eventually I used some crimp contacts I ordered from Aliexpress. They are long enough to reach trough the PCB and make good contact in the connector of the AiW. Mounting is still some fiddling but in the end it will do the job. Would have to dig out the link for the contacts if there's any interest.

That is awesome thank you very much. Ah, roll your own connector, I had ideas before of getting single pin contacts, putting them all in place then casting a plug in place around them with hot glue or epoxy. Nice work on the PCB but I might be trying it that way still. 95% sure I've got the same card as you. I am however going to compare this pinout with one for a later AIW that's posted on that pinout site, just to see if it has common elements, that one has DVI outs, and also see if the comps line up with a video only cable I have for a 8500 all in wonder.

Thanks again

Edit: Other known pinout X1xxx series AIW?? https://pinoutguide.com/Audio-Video-Hardware/ … e5_pinout.shtml

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-02-23, 12:10:

Playing a good game of Solitaire and reading through some of my old highschool reports, on the Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 that my dad finally let me have 🤣 a bit of a PITA to play Solitaire, since the rolls in the built-in trackball really needs some serious TLC, and I don't have a serial mouse to attach ... 🤣

Just a feel good image from the grey scale monitor, including specs

Modified two Dallas DS1397 modules.

In 15 minutes I made a spacer tool made of thick cardboard from a drill package card and took old 32 pin eeprom and beat over the pins to keep that cardboard in place and at same time allow Dallas module fit over it and allow me to clamp both together in a vise without damaging the dallas pins.

Just a fine tooth hacksaw and small sharpened screwdriver and a screwdriver as a hammer. Sawed four slots then chipped out plastic to expose the pins and broke open internal connection for negative side battery to complete modifications. All I do is to finish is solder battery holders to them. I rechecked and marked positive by scratching a plus sign.

Just that, I don't like make big mess with dremel.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-02-23, 20:47:

Modified two Dallas DS1397 modules. […]
Show full quote

Modified two Dallas DS1397 modules.

In 15 minutes I made a spacer tool made of thick cardboard from a drill package card and took old 32 pin eeprom and beat over the pins to keep that cardboard in place and at same time allow Dallas module fit over it and allow me to clamp both together in a vise without damaging the dallas pins.

Just a fine tooth hacksaw and small sharpened screwdriver and a screwdriver as a hammer. Sawed four slots then chipped out plastic to expose the pins and broke open internal connection for negative side battery to complete modifications. All I do is to finish is solder battery holders to them. I rechecked and marked positive by scratching a plus sign.

Just that, I don't like make big mess with dremel.

Cheers,

That sounds like a great method. I also prefer not to involve power tools when possible. Power tools generally make a lot more mess than what a hand tool makes. Plus, there's far less of a chance of ruining something or injuring myself with hand tools. 🤣

I helped my brother-in-law clean up his storage, and I asked him if he would sell his old horizontal beige case to me, which he agreed to. It has a UMC board with a 486 CPU and a Realtek ISA video card.