gerry wrote on 2023-04-25, 19:14:

ah well, the convoluted paths taken by vintage pc hobbyists!

First World problems, don't ya just love them 😀

Builded 775i65G R2.0 another Core 2 Quad+AGP+DDR400 rig! 2 GB DDR400 RAM+Core 2 Quad Q6700+X1950 GT AGP GPU is the beast!

kiwa wrote on 2023-04-25, 01:02:

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.

Hey! Thanks this worked great with my Lite

That's wonderful 😀 I'm glad it's worked for someone else, that confirms the pinout I've shared so far is the right one after all, was worried I'd shared one that didn't work. Specifically the pin I've labelled as RPM_LC should not be connected, it all won't work if that's hooked up to pin 11 on the floppy drive.
Still got to make up those adapter PCBs and finish the PCB design I said I'd do for the Citizen OSDA drive

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-25, 06:34:

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.

Are the dimensions similar to the Citizen W1D? I haven't found any other drives that will fit the same footprint to match the case molding of my LTE Elite.

Nope, it's only for the larger form factor V1DA-15B drive in the Compaq LTE Lite models. The Citizen W1D is actually quite unique in that it's about the thinnest laptop floppy drive ever made, so there's no easily available replacement. Personally I'm just very good at repairing W1D drives now, stuff like cleaning the gears that move the head stepper, replacing the belt then the drives are usually fine.
If you know where to look, W1D floppy drives are pretty easy to get - the silver Toshiba PA2669U floppy drive from the Portege series is a late model W1D and since the special cable they are used with is often lost, the drives can often be picked up quite cheaply (maybe it's just me hoovering them up tho).
There is some recent development on a Citizen W1D replacement though, there's now an Openflops / Flashfloppy drive emulator made to replace a W1D - https://github.com/silvervest/OpenFlops-W1D
That's something I considered as a possibility but silvestron put the work in and made one 😀 I believe he's selling some of the ones he built up so I recommend checking out the github and the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x54SSQnMsc

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-04-26, 13:23:

Nope, it's only for the larger form factor V1DA-15B drive in the Compaq LTE Lite models. The Citizen W1D is actually quite uniqu […]
Show full quote

Nope, it's only for the larger form factor V1DA-15B drive in the Compaq LTE Lite models. The Citizen W1D is actually quite unique in that it's about the thinnest laptop floppy drive ever made, so there's no easily available replacement. Personally I'm just very good at repairing W1D drives now, stuff like cleaning the gears that move the head stepper, replacing the belt then the drives are usually fine.
If you know where to look, W1D floppy drives are pretty easy to get - the silver Toshiba PA2669U floppy drive from the Portege series is a late model W1D and since the special cable they are used with is often lost, the drives can often be picked up quite cheaply (maybe it's just me hoovering them up tho).
There is some recent development on a Citizen W1D replacement though, there's now an Openflops / Flashfloppy drive emulator made to replace a W1D - https://github.com/silvervest/OpenFlops-W1D
That's something I considered as a possibility but silvestron put the work in and made one 😀 I believe he's selling some of the ones he built up so I recommend checking out the github and the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x54SSQnMsc

that's good to know, several years ago i modified one of the aliexpress laptop gotek emulators to fit on a laptop that had the W1D, but having a better custom pcb for that is great, probably will order a couple for future projects.

Rant:

What is the deal with ATi drivers from the late 90s? I had a pile of random bottom of the barrel cards I wanted to test quickly today and now I see that I've spent at least a few hours fighting with stupid ATi drivers, broken ATi installers, bugs, missing features, missing information, crashing etc. This is on Windows 98SE, on a 440BX system that I use for testing all the time. This system has separate Windows installs for each type of card, so there are no drivers or programs from other vendors causing problems. In fact, this is basically a fresh install because the ATi install bricked itself and needed to be deleted and replaced several months ago and this is the first time I've tried using it since.

I have worked with far FAR more cards from other vendors (TNT2 M64 for example), and absolutely nothing else gives me as much trouble as ATi cards from this era... particularly Rage 128 based cards.

Back in 2000-2002 I remember ATi cards basically being a joke, and I know that reputation has been incredibly hard for them (now AMD) to shake, even after ~25 years. Now, looking back at these early 3D cards with 20+ years of knowledge available online can paint a very different picture, and I'm totally willing to accept that. However, what I am finding is that things really are as bad as I remember back then... and yet I frequently read messaged where people are talking up Rage 128 cards like they're somehow these hidden gems of cards. Are these just the people that get a fluke card that happens to work properly with the first set of drivers they found, they haven't yet had to swap the card out or reinstall any ATi software AND the card just so happens to provide the performance they need?

I find that every other Rage 128 card I try to test is looking for a different driver (to be fair, there seem to be two major "sets" available on the VOGONS driver archive... a main one and an alternative), and they are basically impossible to manually install because they have almost 20 file dialogs that pop up asking for different files from different "disks", and they are scattered all over the place. The one time I tried to do this (simply telling it where to find drivers that were already installed for the previous card) I manually located 6 drivers and then gave up on it and had to skip about a dozen other files.

I don't want to drag this on too long, but here are the other issues I've run into:

* Zero consistency with basic specs between models. Is a card 64bit or 128bit? Absolutely no idea. Every source online (Techpowerup, VideoCardz.net, wikipedia) has conflicting information about the various models... and even pages that seem to have lots of detail (like this one) are missing things that make me question the rest of the information... like the "Rage 128 PRO Ultra GL 109-73100-10 " . I have 5 identical cards here that say "Rage 128 Pro Ultra", have that model number and are detected as Pro Ultra GL cards in some places, but four of them are 16MB cards with 2 chips missing. The other is a 32MB model with all four chips. Are they all 128bit? Who knows. Some sites, like Techpowerup list some Rage 128 GL cards has having DDR for goodness sake, and that's completely wrong. The issue seems to be that no utilities can read this information from the cards themselves. I've tried Powerstrip, Everest, Rivatuner, SIV and the ATI tweaker that came with the one of the driver packs... most won't even tell me if its a 16MB or 32MB card, let alone the memory bus width.

* Doing anything that makes the system crash (like playing a 3D accelerated game or simply trying to install some ATi software) has a strong tendency to do some kind of inexplicable damage to either Windows or other programs. It crashed once when I tried to run the ATI Rage 128 Dawn demo (because I was hoping it would have an FPS counter... which it didn't!), and after that the program would refuse to run the demo, saying it would only run on a Rage 128 (even though that was selected). Reinstalling the demo and reinstalling drivers didn't fix it, and there are no registry entries or config files that I could find that appeared to be connected to this. Clearly, something somewhere "broke", and it's so obscure that I couldn't track it down.

* The crashing. I have tried multiple cards and frequently get crashes in 3D applications, even though I wasn't getting crashes with the first 3 cards I tested. Perhaps swapping drivers back and forth did this...

* Driver compatibility and the ability to just INSTALL the stupid things... I have to mention this again. With one nvidia driver I can drop in 20 different brands and models of TNT2 Vanta, M64, vanilla, pro or Ultra and most of the time they just work. At worst they require a reboot, but I never have to reinstall the driver completely... ever! The ridiculous part is that ATi is the actual manufacturer of almost every Rage card I've ever come across, so why do I have to do all of this driver gymnastics? There is absolutely no reason for this. On top of this, I have found situations where a driver that just worked will throw up an error if I try to reinstall it. Why? What would be the purpose of stashing or modifying some file somewhere that the installer would look at and say "wait... no... not this time..." . Just look at the hardware ID, put the files where they belong and change some registry entries. What's so hard about that?

On the plus side, the 2D image quality is reliably fantastic, and when the games work they seem to run okay... but honestly, it's only okay if these are 64bit models. If these are 128bit models, it's not very impressive at all. But I can't tell which is which so... *shrug*

Anyway... I just had to get that off my chest. These things are driving me bonkers. I can do this all day with S3 cards using their terrible 3D drivers and not have the woes that ATi gives me.

I agree. This is back when each OEM could have a different PCI ID for their card that was incompatible with ATI's reference driver. It was a mess.

See here for a thread I made a while ago:

An interesting Rage 128 Pro which needs very late drivers

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-04-27, 05:30:

Rant: ...... particularly Rage 128 based cards. […]
Show full quote

Rant:
...... particularly Rage 128 based cards.

....are talking up Rage 128 cards ..

I find that every other Rage 128 card I...

... like the "Rage 128 PRO Ultra GL 109-73100-10 " . I have 5 identical cards here that say "Rage 128 Pro Ultra", ...... Techpowerup list some Rage 128 GL cards .....

,,, I tried to run the ATI Rage 128 Dawn demo..... only run on a Rage 128 ......

....almost every Rage card I've ever come across,

They did not choose this name for nothing..... 🤣😅😆😋😁🤔
(and they then had to make sure the drivers induced the correct feeling when installing them....!)

using yet another old motherboard, this time from an old HP business machine - with celeron 900mhz and no AGP. tested and working. added a real FDD and ide to sd card to act as HDD and the HDD was immediately recognised in bios with its 8gb. installed windows 98se as a test and it was actually quite fast, really no different from installing from a regular HDD. And new files can be added by removing the sd card and copying from another machine with a reader

i know that's common practice for many, but the first time i really went about using and ide to sd card adaptor as most of my ancient HDDs do still work

also only had one 32mb ram stick during install, that part felt very 90's 😀

After my K6 CPU cooler upgrade it's tome for the GPU (FX 5700LE)...I had an old Zalman kit around and had to remove some of the fins to leave space for the capacitors. It's connected in 5V and is completely silent now 😀

Today I troubleshot a funny issue with my ISA sound cards. For context, I have a sound system with a full size mixer, into which the retro rig is hooked up through a sub mixer; I also have my more recent computer going in there via USB.

When the cards were connected (an SB16 and an ESS), I was getting a cyclic hum from the main mixer, even with the cards muted on the sub. And the computer's PSU switched off. AND, with the cards physically detached from the slots, but with line outs still connected.

Completely baffled, I then thought this was an EMI issue, so I built a Faraday cage for the sound cards out of cardboard and aluminium foil, however this was to no avail: the issue persisted. Dumbstruck as I was, I then proceeded to hook up just the computer and the main mixer to a different power grid, with nothing else hooked up, and it STILL was happening. It was then that I thought about checking how the main mixer was connected to the modern PC, and then it hit me.

A cheap and cheerful, flashy USB cable with colored LEDs, fading on and off cyclically.

This was enough to cause funny interference only with the ISA cards, and absolutely nothing else; after removing it, I was greeted by a blissful silence. So I guess that the takeaway is not to to use LED cables when there's a vintage computer in the house?

Now I'm mighty curious to know why that might have happened from an electronics standpoint; still, it was an interesting couple of days to say the least.

Today I opened an old Quantum ProDrive LPS to get the magnets. I think I'm starting to suspect why it might be faulty 🤣

Update on this.
Bought off ebay a set of Apple keyboard and mouse. Keyboard arrived broken, there was no protection at all inside the box. Keyboard was just inside a plastic bag.

(warning horrible smarpthone camera photos ahead)

I got a full refund from the seller. But I still really got sad\angry... it's not a really valuable item but in any case there won't be ever new keyboards like that!

So I tried to fix the keys as best I could... with hot glue! The result is very acceptable, I don't notice any difference with the other keys. And since it's only some glue it can be removed anytime.

Next step is retrobright everything. I never done that, I'm waiting for the hydrogen peroxide and uv light (they should arrive tomorrow). I will try before on a very yellowed Logitech mouse.

This is my very small Apple collection. An iBook G3 Late 2001 sporting Mac OS X 10.4.11 (dual-boot 9.2.2) and the Power Mac 7100/80 with Mac OS 8.6.

I love hot glue and use it for a lot of misc repairs. It's also fairly easy to remove by force, as long as you haven't sanded the original surface.

Been contemplating whether I should stay with the current Northwood HT 2.8GHz on my IS7-E, or go Prescott.
GPU is a X1950 Pro 256MB, and there's about 2GB worth of DDR400
So far it's been great with the Northwood and stock HSF (the copper based one), but the kicker is that for a Prescott, I have to use one of those ASRock funky 478/939 hybrid brackets, along with a Thermaltake Silent K8 cooler.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-04-28, 15:13:

Today I opened an old Quantum ProDrive LPS to get the magnets. I think I'm starting to suspect why it might be faulty 🤣
IMG_20230428_170741.jpg

Looks perfectly ok to me.
Why buy a portable slicer? You just need to replace the blade I guess.

This is incredible, never seen a deader unit before. Ok, some scratches but this beats them all.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-04-28, 20:27:

Been contemplating whether I should stay with the current Northwood HT 2.8GHz on my IS7-E, or go Prescott.
GPU is a X1950 Pro 256MB, and there's about 2GB worth of DDR400
So far it's been great with the Northwood and stock HSF (the copper based one), but the kicker is that for a Prescott, I have to use one of those ASRock funky 478/939 hybrid brackets, along with a Thermaltake Silent K8 cooler.

Will there be a performance uplift worth the trouble and extra heat? I recall Prescott being very underwhelming at release.

I've been having a bit of a retro writeoff month, lots of chores, appointments, running around, leaving me zapped, then the mighty engines of tree semen fired up to max and pollened up the air, which has had me even more zapped. Looked for new coping tips, found something that went like "What you don't want to do if you've got bad pollen sensitivity, is live in southern Ontario, which is about the worst area in all Canada" well then, screw me right? Stuck a new HEPA filter in the HVAC, just about takes the edge off a bit. Zombie mode engaged a lot though, drooped in front of the TV sniffing and snorting.

House/yard maintenance probs are looming though and look like occupying a good chunk of coming months, and insane chunks of cash quite likely. But a lot of them I can't do crap about if it's either too polleny, or too rainy. So maybe will get some playtime on rainy days, IDK about the remaining dry but polleny ones, much zombie, too brain fog. Anyway, if I'm missing for long periods I'm dealing with crap or zoned out.

In between the foggy bits, sorta been planning a "lunchbox portable" style build. Though just got disappointed because it turned out my "small monitor" was bigger than I thought, thought I had a 14" or even 13" LCD, but it was a 15". So unless something turns up, might need to get into some homebrew LCD interfacing. Unsure whether ATI's AMC connector is going to be helpful or not. It's going to be socket 7, but not sure whether I'm going Cyrix for the better crawler gears or AMD for the top end. It's getting ATI rage pro turbo or 128 graphics because I seem to have some unassigned and everything more premium is kinda earmarked for serious desktop configurations not quirky experimental contraptions.

Also into some preliminary pondering for a proper retro subnet, since I've gotta rejig the modern end.

Nexxen wrote on 2023-04-28, 20:54:

Looks perfectly ok to me. Why buy a portable slicer? You just need to replace the blade I guess. […]
Show full quote

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-04-28, 15:13:

Today I opened an old Quantum ProDrive LPS to get the magnets. I think I'm starting to suspect why it might be faulty 🤣
IMG_20230428_170741.jpg

Looks perfectly ok to me.
Why buy a portable slicer? You just need to replace the blade I guess.

This is incredible, never seen a deader unit before. Ok, some scratches but this beats them all.

Yeah, I was surprised. Wonder how long did it run after it got stuck? There was a spacer of some sort with some very sticky black goo on it. I assume it might have originally been a rubber damper, but there is no way telling if it turned into goo before or after the drive failed.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-04-29, 04:43:

PcBytes wrote on 2023-04-28, 20:27:

Been contemplating whether I should stay with the current Northwood HT 2.8GHz on my IS7-E, or go Prescott.
GPU is a X1950 Pro 256MB, and there's about 2GB worth of DDR400
So far it's been great with the Northwood and stock HSF (the copper based one), but the kicker is that for a Prescott, I have to use one of those ASRock funky 478/939 hybrid brackets, along with a Thermaltake Silent K8 cooler.

Will there be a performance uplift worth the trouble and extra heat? I recall Prescott being very underwhelming at release.

Good question. I'm still wondering whether SSE3 (which I recall came with it) is worth it. Both chips I have are E0 steppings (SL7PM) and someone here reported the E0 (and E1, which I couldn't find anything about) being less hungry than the first revision of Prescotts - I'd suppose it'd be something like the later revisions of it that were shifted to 775 in terms of heat but again, you're pretty much right - I don't think it'd be worth ditching a Northwood HT 2.8 for a 3GHz Prescott.

That - and I already have much of a space heater - a recent P5Q Deluxe/Q9400/HD7850 combo I cobbled together from a car boot sale machine - that thing originally came with a 9600GT w/ Zalman cooler - unfortunately, I haven't been able to silence that Zalman fan whatsoever (even after lubing it) so I'll probably have to find one of those chinese knockoff Zalman clones to harvest its fan from, and attach to the real deal. For reference, it's the same as @Minutemanqvs' cooler, except mine reads Gigabyte instead of Zalman.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-04-29, 06:07:

I've been having a bit of a retro writeoff month, lots of chores, appointments, running around, leaving me zapped, then the migh […]
Show full quote

I've been having a bit of a retro writeoff month, lots of chores, appointments, running around, leaving me zapped, then the mighty engines of tree semen fired up to max and pollened up the air, which has had me even more zapped. Looked for new coping tips, found something that went like "What you don't want to do if you've got bad pollen sensitivity, is live in southern Ontario, which is about the worst area in all Canada" well then, screw me right? Stuck a new HEPA filter in the HVAC, just about takes the edge off a bit. Zombie mode engaged a lot though, drooped in front of the TV sniffing and snorting.

House/yard maintenance probs are looming though and look like occupying a good chunk of coming months, and insane chunks of cash quite likely. But a lot of them I can't do crap about if it's either too polleny, or too rainy. So maybe will get some playtime on rainy days, IDK about the remaining dry but polleny ones, much zombie, too brain fog. Anyway, if I'm missing for long periods I'm dealing with crap or zoned out.

In between the foggy bits, sorta been planning a "lunchbox portable" style build. Though just got disappointed because it turned out my "small monitor" was bigger than I thought, thought I had a 14" or even 13" LCD, but it was a 15". So unless something turns up, might need to get into some homebrew LCD interfacing. Unsure whether ATI's AMC connector is going to be helpful or not. It's going to be socket 7, but not sure whether I'm going Cyrix for the better crawler gears or AMD for the top end. It's getting ATI rage pro turbo or 128 graphics because I seem to have some unassigned and everything more premium is kinda earmarked for serious desktop configurations not quirky experimental contraptions.

Also into some preliminary pondering for a proper retro subnet, since I've gotta rejig the modern end.

The past 3 years I've started eating local raw honey along with my daily Zyrtec and that's has made allergy season much more manageable. Before doing that when spring hit I was basically a zombie untill we hit late June. I use a good N95 mask when mowing and doing other yard work and that also helps a lot.