dominusprog wrote on 2024-01-19, 19:53:

Combine two broken floppy drives into one working drive, also I’ve changed the LED to yellow.

IMG_20240119_205556.jpg
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Congratulations on making one working one 😀 I've done similar and if you managed that while keeping the calibration then that's excellent - even impressive if you had to recalibrate after. At this point I've done motor swaps and other stuff on Citizen W1D drives to get 1 working one from 2 duds - always worth it.

The past few days things have settled down and I've been able to print a much more suitable Compact Flash card holder since I now have much more than 10, this design screws into the bottom of a wood shelf and uses VHB tape on the front to attach while keeping the space above fully usable. This design holds 25 cards and is the width limit of my printer - it sucked having to re-do it as well since it takes 4 hours to print and the first print I forgot to put in the tolerances so no cards could fit.

Previous designs I've done for a PCMCIA card holder were just 1 row holding six cards but they weren't staggered like this - the 45 degree angle means I can get to each row and column easily, it prints very nicely too since no overhangs.

The very dirty Tecra 750DVD is all cleaned up now and apart from the smashed LCD panel (which I have a spare for), it's working great. The DVD drive didn't want to read discs though and it's very unique to this laptop model. I spent some hours with the drive in bits and eventually got it functioning by reflowing the flex cable connectors for the drive sled and laser mechanism. A USB > laptop IDE converter + a bench PSU were a great help in getting it working.
Also this laptop got upgraded to a CF card instead of the 5GB hard drive which was making some crazy clunking noises and the bearing noise drove me crazy. So much nicer with general operation now being silent.

I'm glad I was able to get the DVD drive working - it's a custom physical size so a replacement drive just isn't an option, this laptop has an integrated DVD decoder so dropping to a CD-ROM drive would be a real loss.

Actually using USB-C Power Delivery is such a huge convenience - cables that can request their specific voltage mean I don't have to use the bench PSU to power every single thing any more:

Not pictured but I even made a USB-C Power Delivery 'dongle' for my Toshiba Portege 3000 series and Libretto 100CT laptops - they use a really tough to source tiny 2-pin connector and I hacked one up by melting a suitably sized JST connector. Now my Portege laptops are portable again even with dud batteries since power banks can source enough power to pretend to be the DC power brick 😀

Many more games installed, tested, and working on the EPIA-800!

Found about 20 so far that need more testing, mainly early DOS games.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-01-21, 02:32:

The past few days things have settled down and I've been able to print a much more suitable Compact Flash card holder since I now have much more than 10, this design screws into the bottom of a wood shelf and uses VHB tape on the front to attach while keeping the space above fully usable. This design holds 25 cards and is the width limit of my printer - it sucked having to re-do it as well since it takes 4 hours to print and the first print I forgot to put in the tolerances so no cards could fit.
shelf-cf (Custom).JPG
Previous designs I've done for a PCMCIA card holder were just 1 row holding six cards but they weren't staggered like this - the 45 degree angle means I can get to each row and column easily, it prints very nicely too since no overhangs.

Very nice design! Does it print on the front side, since you can do with no overhang?

Figured out the issue with 3dMark's complaint being the nV drivers. Installed 71.98 (I think, all I remember is it was in the 7x range) and managed to run it.

Later drivers require DirectX 9 to be installed, I believe, even if it's not a DirectX 9 capable card. Anything past driver version 56.64 requires SSE to be stable.

NVIDIA GeForce FX driver testing on an Intel 440EX summary and report

It was on 93.71 before, and as a added punch, Midtown Madness 2 would not even allow HW rendering.

Ah well, I figured something older in the 45-7x range would work properly... almost. Midtown Madness 2 still doesn't allow HW rendering, but 3dMark2000 works, at the very least.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-01-20, 21:09:

Today I sorted some of my stuff, I’ll probably get rid of my mainboard/CPU combos from C2D and up to get some space back.

My goal was to only have SS7/370/A/754/939 systems and nothing more. Well now I have some 486 and other stuff I absolutely don’t need 😂

I finished sorting my stuff (not only computer related) and the candidates which need to go because they are too new or don't interest me are:

A silent Asus GeForce 9400GR. Nothing special about the card, its only nice side is the fanless design. It wasn't a well performing card for its generation.

An Intel DP35DP mainboard with an E2200 and 4GB RAM. This mainboard is actually really nice, rock stable, solid design, many different ports. But I already have an Opteron of similar vintage.

A Gigabyte 990FX-based mainboard with 16GB RAM. This was a high-end mainboard with SLI support and lots of I/O capabilities.

I'll let them stay on my desk for another 2 weeks and if I don't have remorse by then they will go up for auction or eventually to the recycler.

-

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-01-21, 16:46:

An Intel DP35DP mainboard with an E2200 and 4GB RAM. This mainboard is actually really nice, rock stable, solid design, many dif […]
Show full quote

An Intel DP35DP mainboard with an E2200 and 4GB RAM. This mainboard is actually really nice, rock stable, solid design, many different ports. But I already have an Opteron of similar vintage.

Those copper SIMM heatsinks make it all look so steampunk. 😀

Fully restored to working condition - a rather rare DMS4 Pro chip on a version 7 SCPH-39004 PS2, one of my fave revisions of the phat PS2.
All that was needed was a Kynar wire reinstall (trust me, it was worse spaghetti in there than what I posted here) and a fresh laser.

Intel AN430TX reverse sleeper build alive and kicking.

Had to ditch SCSI though, none of my HDDs where identified by FDISK even though they got a SCSI ID and were identified correctly by the Adaptec 2940AU BIOS (which was active). This way I could use a black IDE DVD-drive instead of the beige Ultraplex 40TSi and my SD-IDE adapter which makes transferring files and switching OS that much easier. Had to use a 80-conductor ribbon cable with the GSA-H10N DVD-Writer though, otherwise it would only read garbage if at all. Other thing that was a bit strange was that after booting into DOS 6.22 I only had about 20K of upper memory left, apparently all the onboard stuff of the AN430TX take a big chunk of UMB for shadowing. When I installed my old ELSA Victory 3D I got 10K more UMB free, so the Video BIOS of the onboard Rage II uses more space. Finally making B000-B7FF available for EMM386 freed up enough UMB to get every driver into upper memory. Next steps: Configuring Windows 98SE on a second SD-card, installing the Diamond Monster 3D II as well as a small fan blowing from the side panel over VGA and 3dfx card.

Not much of a secret probably if you are into TAS, but I FINALLY got Ultima VII running in FreeDOS today.....

- Using XMGR.SYS /T0 and a chopped down configuration in FDAUTO.BAT AND FDCONFIG.SYS
- Basically all that's loaded are the SB AWE64 drivers, Mouse Driver, and XMGR.SYS
- Seems I found a little more on the incompatibility, apparently Ultima 7 and Serpent's Isle do a memory check using either the Ultima7.exe/Serpent.exe, or the Intro.exe/mainmenu.exe executables, the workaround is using this command, which I'm going to figure out more about......

U7 c150 p

or

SI c150 p

This will avoid the startup, kind of like Ultima 6 when you run GAME.EXE instead of ULTIMA6.COM - therefore bypassing the memory check. There's mentions of a General Protection Fault somewhere along the line, but I have had some pretty good luck thus far.

https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/17768 - the topic on which I found this trick

Maybe in the future a hacked intro or mainmenu might be possible using a hex editor to skip the memory check and let it run. U7 runs like freakin' crazy fast on my DX4 with 64MB of RAM (and about 594K free). Serpent is a little slower, but still fun to play.

also runs just ignoring the c150 and just running U7/SI and p afterward - maybe that will prevent the later crash....we'll see.

i added a diamond stealth 64 vlb card to my winpro 486e.
i also converted it to 2gb compact flash, installed ez-bios, installed dos, mouse and cd-rom drivers.
ready for some games.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-01-21, 07:22:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-01-21, 02:32:

The past few days things have settled down and I've been able to print a much more suitable Compact Flash card holder since I now have much more than 10, this design screws into the bottom of a wood shelf and uses VHB tape on the front to attach while keeping the space above fully usable. This design holds 25 cards and is the width limit of my printer - it sucked having to re-do it as well since it takes 4 hours to print and the first print I forgot to put in the tolerances so no cards could fit.
shelf-cf (Custom).JPG
Previous designs I've done for a PCMCIA card holder were just 1 row holding six cards but they weren't staggered like this - the 45 degree angle means I can get to each row and column easily, it prints very nicely too since no overhangs.

Very nice design! Does it print on the front side, since you can do with no overhang?

Yep, I had to re-model it a couple of times because the surface on the print bed was so small that it peeled up halfway through and ruined the print. Here's the latest version if you'd like to use it. Potentially I could share custom versions with different quantities but one that holds 20x won't print much faster than this one that holds 25x 😀

Not today, but this last weekend I recapped my Intel Classic R motherboard. I’ve never worked with surface-mount components before, and this board had 20 of those little buggers (some of which had started to leak and smell bad during operation). At least all of the capacitors had the same values and the board had the polarity for each location well marked which made the job a bit easier.

The motherboard seems to function properly after the work. The recap, unfortunately, did not solve an issue I have with a known-good ISA network card (based on an RTL8019AS chip) that I’m using to host an XT-IDE boot EEPROM. The card passes the diagnostics in the Realtek setup program, but every OS I’ve tried refuses to initialize the card regardless of which driver set I use. Now I need to buy another ISA network card if I want to connect the computer to my NAS.

While the solder work doesn’t look too pretty, I think I saved a 486 board from a slow death.

Testing out an MT-32 on a Pentium 4 running DOS 6.22.

Upgraded my 1998 i686 build from P2-400 & Voodoo Banshee to P2-450 & i740 & Voodoo 2 SLI

I was unpleasantly surprised by how poorly the i740 ran, it is every bit as terrible as I remember it 😁 I am now regretting not going with the Matrox G200 but what's done is done, I don't want to change the card and reinstall drivers now. Or do I.. Hmm..

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-01-23, 01:42:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-01-21, 07:22:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-01-21, 02:32:

The past few days things have settled down and I've been able to print a much more suitable Compact Flash card holder since I now have much more than 10, this design screws into the bottom of a wood shelf and uses VHB tape on the front to attach while keeping the space above fully usable. This design holds 25 cards and is the width limit of my printer - it sucked having to re-do it as well since it takes 4 hours to print and the first print I forgot to put in the tolerances so no cards could fit.
shelf-cf (Custom).JPG
Previous designs I've done for a PCMCIA card holder were just 1 row holding six cards but they weren't staggered like this - the 45 degree angle means I can get to each row and column easily, it prints very nicely too since no overhangs.

Very nice design! Does it print on the front side, since you can do with no overhang?

Yep, I had to re-model it a couple of times because the surface on the print bed was so small that it peeled up halfway through and ruined the print. Here's the latest version if you'd like to use it. Potentially I could share custom versions with different quantities but one that holds 20x won't print much faster than this one that holds 25x 😀

Wow, that's not much area on the bed. Impressive. Don't think I could get that sticking on my Ender 3v2 🤣

Manage to get the final piece of hardware for my XP/Win7 Build. Creative Labs X-Fi Titanium PCI-E card. Just installed it in both OS's, and then proceeded to Play a bit of Outrun 2006 Coast2Coast in XP. Passing Breeze sounded soo good. This PC is now finished and I'm thrilled how it turned out.

Athlon XP fun... with laptop storage!

And an actual Athlon XP lappy as well - Bekom 2440 XL+.

Also, ran 3dMark01 on my MSI 694D Pro-AR + 2x1GHz P3 bench build.