Peter Swinkels wrote on 2024-02-24, 22:26:

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Not finished yet, but:
https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?90243 … 885#post5633885

Attached to this post is a much more complete version of my DOSPad project. One contains the source code and the other contains a compiled executable that should run fine in DOSBox or similar. I may add some rudimentary error handling in the future, but that is about it.

Also, virus scanners might be triggered when downloading the zip file with the compiled program and give a false-positive. As far as I know, there is NO actual malware in there. Either way, it should be safe to try in a properly configured emulator or some isolated system. 😀

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2024-02-25, 12:26:

Also, virus scanners might be triggered when downloading the zip file with the compiled program and give a false-positive. As far as I know, there is NO actual malware in there. Either way, it should be safe to try in a properly configured emulator or some isolated system. 😀

You could always throw it at VirusTotal and then include a link.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-25, 06:07:

I had a similar issue due to LBA limitations with Windows 98. I saw that you had addressed this later, but wanted to share my thread as well.

Trying to figure out the cause of data corruption in Windows 9x

That was an interesting read. It's good to know what symptoms of using too large a drive looks like in Windows.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-02-25, 14:36:

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2024-02-25, 12:26:

Also, virus scanners might be triggered when downloading the zip file with the compiled program and give a false-positive. As far as I know, there is NO actual malware in there. Either way, it should be safe to try in a properly configured emulator or some isolated system. 😀

You could always throw it at VirusTotal and then include a link.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e75b75a62 … 6c61c?nocache=1

Well, no malware or virusses, or so it would seem! 😀 So have fun trying it out I'd say to anyone interested. 😀

ssokolow wrote on 2024-02-25, 09:01:

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-25, 06:09:

FFXIhealer wrote on 2024-02-25, 05:05:

Today I went ahead and hooked up my Windows 98 gaming PC again. I recently got an original copy of Baldur's Gate 1 and wanted to install it, only to not be able to install due to the CD-ROM drive not being able to read certain files. I looked at the first disc and of course, it has lots of minor use scratches on it. All the discs do. I gotta take them to the local used game store tomorrow. Those guys have one of those CD polisher things that can make it look brand new again.

Disc error correction os actually very, very good. I've never had a disc error due to scratches on the plastic side. However, the label side hides the reflective layer underneath, and I have lost many discs due to extremely minor damage there.

It's not the scratches on the plastic but on the label, which often destroys a disk. And these cannot be repaired.

However, if a bit of grit got under the disc and then it was rotated, that's a very easy way to repairably kill the error correction by producing a scratch which follows the data track rather than cutting across it.

I have ripped so many music CDs over the years, with EAC in picky mode, to be able to give a simple test.

Hold the CD up to a light, and any pin points of light are regions of lost data-carrying layer. No amount of polishing can fix that.

But as for polishing out scratches, yes. I have had good results with a small amount of toothpaste, water and fingertip. You can feel the scratch with bare skin, and often just rounding off the edges of the tiny groove that is the scratch is enough for the CD to be read. It doesn't need to be brought back to a good shine, or a scratch polished out completely. Only polish/scuff as small an area as possible, going round in tight little circles and some back and forth, but not parallel for long: keep the CD moving too.

Maybe have a practice on some CD you don't care about, because this process does scuff the surface and it can look worse afterwards. I haven't ever made anything worse, but I guess going too far is also possible.

Using EAC in secure mode, dumping to a bin/cue, might also get data off the disk that otherwise one simple read errors on. No doubt there are other tools that do the same basic thing as EAC, re-reading sectors to make sure they are good.

progman.exe wrote on 2024-02-25, 17:48:

Using EAC in secure mode, dumping to a bin/cue, might also get data off the disk that otherwise one simple read errors on. No doubt there are other tools that do the same basic thing as EAC, re-reading sectors to make sure they are good.

I generally use GNU ddrescue for that when I'm recovering data. It doesn't do audio tracks, but it's also not specific to CDs.

And here is the final version of DOSPad. See my earlier posts in this thread for more info. 😀

progman.exe wrote on 2024-02-25, 17:48:

I have ripped so many music CDs over the years, with EAC in picky mode, to be able to give a simple test. […]
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I have ripped so many music CDs over the years, with EAC in picky mode, to be able to give a simple test.

Hold the CD up to a light, and any pin points of light are regions of lost data-carrying layer. No amount of polishing can fix that.

But as for polishing out scratches, yes. I have had good results with a small amount of toothpaste, water and fingertip. You can feel the scratch with bare skin, and often just rounding off the edges of the tiny groove that is the scratch is enough for the CD to be read. It doesn't need to be brought back to a good shine, or a scratch polished out completely. Only polish/scuff as small an area as possible, going round in tight little circles and some back and forth, but not parallel for long: keep the CD moving too.

Maybe have a practice on some CD you don't care about, because this process does scuff the surface and it can look worse afterwards. I haven't ever made anything worse, but I guess going too far is also possible.

Using EAC in secure mode, dumping to a bin/cue, might also get data off the disk that otherwise one simple read errors on. No doubt there are other tools that do the same basic thing as EAC, re-reading sectors to make sure they are good.

Well, I took the game to the local store and we found a literal crack in the first disc. They polished the other 5 discs for me, but said no to the first one. So on to the internet I went and downloaded the ISO for disc 1 and burned it to a CD-R and it worked like a charm. Installing the full game to my Win98 PC as I type this.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-02-22, 19:21:

Me again :) New topic though because I fixed one of my video cards - it's been sitting around on my desk for a week or two. I co […]
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Me again 😀 New topic though because I fixed one of my video cards - it's been sitting around on my desk for a week or two. I couldn't figure out why this Medion Geforce 3 Ti200 could display 2D perfectly but would restart the system almost immediately when running any 3d stuff.
I was going to set up a secondary test system doubting the AGP power output on my MSI 865 P4 testing system - but that wasn't it. The card has been sitting on my desk for a while and I looked in its direction at a different angle today and spotted one of the capacitors sitting at a jaunty angle:
Medion-Gf3-Ti200-MS8839-newcap (Custom).JPG
The purple polymer 4v 510uF capacitor had one leg broken off completely somehow. That I think was the filter capacitor for the voltage output of the GPU VCC rail, replaced it with this red poly-cap salvaged from another motherboard/card years ago and now the card is working 100%
edit: nope, it was the 3.3v input to the voltage regulator for GPU vcore. Which is why there's just one. The two poly caps next to it are the GPU vcore filter caps.

This is actually pretty interesting - there's an FX 5700LE card that did basically the same thing with crashing on 3d although 2d was perfect, perhaps it needs recapping.

Following on from my recent FX5200 purchase and testing: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
I've got one other good FX5200 in my collection that crashed when starting games and since I found the other day that a bad purple cap (power input for GPU voltage regulation) causes games to crash after a little bit.

At this point I have schematics and I know a fair bit about the reference design (P162) for the FX5200 cards so they're getting easier to fix and modify. This FX5200 - a Jace Tech JC2225, with 128MB of Samsung 5ns DDR memory has a weird UNI-CON SEHYUN SEL brand blue/purple cap where the regular OS-CON purple polymer capacitor would go.
I pulled the cap and it tested as nothing, no capacitance. Put a fresh cap in its place, gave it a fan, boosted the core voltage by 0.1v with a 6.8k resistor and it's now my best FX5200 by a long shot!

Today I spent time installing games on to my PS/2 M57, none of which have any real sound available beyond what can be forced through PC speaker thanks to the M-ACPA card it came with. I'm still very iffy on spending the money to get a resound card, as the model 56 has an incompatibility with the internal SCSI and the external joystick port. As this machine is close to the speed I would need for X-wing to not super fast, it's making the decision harder. I mean, given that the 9956 and 9957 are a single number different, and mostly the same, I can assume that the problem would affect my system, right?

Got both my vintage PCs in the garage on the internet via internet sharing on my Late 2015 iMac 21.5". I put MacOS Monterey back on it and got it running well, so I turned this feature on, and lo and behold, now I can have all three vintage desktops up all year round.

Replaced all the leaky "Teapo" brand caps on this Packard Bell mobo with some Kemet polymer caps.

Anyone remember ISAM from VBDOS/QBX 7.1?

1OPTION EXPLICIT
2DEFINT A-Z
3
4TYPE NumberStr
5 Number AS STRING * 10
6END TYPE
7
8DECLARE SUB CreateDataBase (Numbers() AS NumberStr)
9DECLARE SUB DeleteNumberTable ()
10DECLARE SUB DisplayDatabase ()
11DECLARE SUB ReadNumberList (Numbers() AS NumberStr)
12
13DIM Numbers() AS NumberStr
14
15CLS
16
17DeleteNumberTable
18ReadNumberList Numbers()
19CreateDataBase Numbers()
20DisplayDatabase
21END
22
23NumberList:
24DATA "zero"
25DATA "one"
26DATA "two"
27DATA "three"
28DATA "four"
29DATA "five"
30DATA "six"
31DATA "seven"
32DATA "eight"
33DATA "nine"
34DATA "ten"
35DATA "*"
36
37SUB CreateDataBase (Numbers() AS NumberStr)
38DIM FileH AS INTEGER
39DIM Index AS INTEGER
40
41 FileH = FREEFILE
42 OPEN "Numbers.mdb" FOR ISAM NumberStr "NumberTable" AS FileH
43  FOR Index = LBOUND(Numbers) TO UBOUND(Numbers)
44   INSERT #FileH, Numbers(Index)
45  NEXT Index
46 CLOSE FileH
47END SUB
48
49SUB DeleteNumberTable ()
50ON LOCAL ERROR RESUME NEXT
51 IF NOT DIR$("Numbers.mdb") = "" THEN
52  DELETETABLE "Numbers.mdb", "NumberTable"
53 END IF
54END SUB
55
56SUB DisplayDatabase ()
57DIM FileH AS INTEGER
58DIM Index AS INTEGER
59DIM NumbersInDatabase(0 TO 0) AS NumberStr
60

61 FileH = FREEFILE
62 OPEN "Numbers.mdb" FOR ISAM NumberStr "NumberTable" AS FileH
63  DO
64   RETRIEVE #FileH, NumbersInDatabase(UBOUND(NumbersInDatabase))
65   MOVENEXT FileH
66   IF EOF(FileH) THEN
67    EXIT DO
68   END IF
69   REDIM PRESERVE NumbersInDatabase(LBOUND(NumbersInDatabase) TO UBOUND(NumbersInDatabase) + 1) AS NumberStr
70  LOOP
71 CLOSE FileH
72
73 FOR Index = LBOUND(NumbersInDatabase) TO UBOUND(NumbersInDatabase)
74  PRINT NumbersInDatabase(Index).Number
75 NEXT Index
76END SUB
77
78SUB ReadNumberList (Numbers() AS NumberStr)
79 RESTORE NumberList
80
81 REDIM Numbers(0 TO 0) AS NumberStr
82 DO
83  READ Numbers(UBOUND(Numbers)).Number
84
85  IF RTRIM$(Numbers(UBOUND(Numbers)).Number) = "*" THEN
86   REDIM PRESERVE Numbers(LBOUND(Numbers) TO UBOUND(Numbers) - 1) AS NumberStr
87   EXIT DO
88  END IF
89
90  REDIM PRESERVE Numbers(LBOUND(Numbers) TO UBOUND(Numbers) + 1) AS NumberStr
91 LOOP
92END SUB

Probably should work in QBX 7.1 too. Run PROISAMD.EXE first.

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong!
the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the HD in my Tecra 520CDT just ripped in half - the repair attempt was not successful! 😠
Seems ironic, I helped with fixing this one, but now mine is broken: [SOLVED] Toshiba Tecra 550CDT HDD ribbon cable

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-02-26, 21:47:

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong! the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the […]
Show full quote

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong!
the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the HD in my Tecra 520CDT just ripped in half - the repair attempt was not successful! 😠
Seems ironic, I helped with fixing this one, but now mine is broken: [SOLVED] Toshiba Tecra 550CDT HDD ribbon cable
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFu-tecra-520cdt (Custom) (1).JPG

oof

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-26, 23:15:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-02-26, 21:47:

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong! the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the […]
Show full quote

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong!
the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the HD in my Tecra 520CDT just ripped in half - the repair attempt was not successful! 😠
Seems ironic, I helped with fixing this one, but now mine is broken: [SOLVED] Toshiba Tecra 550CDT HDD ribbon cable
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFu-tecra-520cdt (Custom) (1).JPG

oof

Yeah seriously, I did actually get it working again somehow - about 60% of the connector was ripped but not the 5V traces. The tiny grinder pen I got made it fixable where I could not have before, it tears through the kapton insulation and I put a round hole at the end of the tear to stop it ripping further apart. It only ripped like this because I had the HDD cover off while it was running on the edge of the desk and the drive flopped down at a bad enough angle to do damage.

Using that table in the linked 550CDT thread I checked each pin on both sides against it and found that there were 3 lines not connected that hadn't soldered on right.
Another popped off with just a little movement but now all the signal wires are back in place and it's working as it was before I broke it. I decided that it may as well have all the signal traces be wires instead of flex cable so that was something like 4 more wires.
But it's fixed and the replacement speaker sounds great 😀 This is the Tecra 520CDT I posted a page ago with the screen transplant, so now it looks and sounds great, even if it is a bit of a hack all round.

I'm probably not the first person this has happened to as I've seen other Tecra 520 > 550 series laptops for sale without the connector cable, I've got some ideas on how a replacement could be made without a custom flex PCB, which is what this computer really needs now.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-02-27, 00:58:

Yeah seriously, I did actually get it working again somehow - about 60% of the connector was ripped but not the 5V traces. The t […]
Show full quote

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-26, 23:15:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-02-26, 21:47:

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong! the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the […]
Show full quote

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong!
the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the HD in my Tecra 520CDT just ripped in half - the repair attempt was not successful! 😠
Seems ironic, I helped with fixing this one, but now mine is broken: [SOLVED] Toshiba Tecra 550CDT HDD ribbon cable
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFu-tecra-520cdt (Custom) (1).JPG

oof

Yeah seriously, I did actually get it working again somehow - about 60% of the connector was ripped but not the 5V traces. The tiny grinder pen I got made it fixable where I could not have before, it tears through the kapton insulation and I put a round hole at the end of the tear to stop it ripping further apart. It only ripped like this because I had the HDD cover off while it was running on the edge of the desk and the drive flopped down at a bad enough angle to do damage.

Using that table in the linked 550CDT thread I checked each pin on both sides against it and found that there were 3 lines not connected that hadn't soldered on right.
Another popped off with just a little movement but now all the signal wires are back in place and it's working as it was before I broke it. I decided that it may as well have all the signal traces be wires instead of flex cable so that was something like 4 more wires.
But it's fixed and the replacement speaker sounds great 😀 This is the Tecra 520CDT I posted a page ago with the screen transplant, so now it looks and sounds great, even if it is a bit of a hack all round.

I'm probably not the first person this has happened to as I've seen other Tecra 520 > 550 series laptops for sale without the connector cable, I've got some ideas on how a replacement could be made without a custom flex PCB, which is what this computer really needs now.

I just got one of those tiny grinder pens from ali express after seeing Northride Fix use one. What a game changer compared to scraping with tweezers. And now I don't keep ruining the tips of my tweezers 🤣

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-02-26, 21:47:

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong! the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the […]
Show full quote

Argh, what was supposed to be a simple speaker replacement has gone a bit wrong!
the unobtainable ribbon cable that connects the HD in my Tecra 520CDT just ripped in half - the repair attempt was not successful! 😠
Seems ironic, I helped with fixing this one, but now mine is broken: [SOLVED] Toshiba Tecra 550CDT HDD ribbon cable
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFu-tecra-520cdt (Custom) (1).JPG

You are gonna get there. It happened before, it'll happen again!
Cylon approved!

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-27, 01:02:

I just got one of those tiny grinder pens from ali express after seeing Northride Fix use one. What a game changer compared to scraping with tweezers. And now I don't keep ruining the tips of my tweezers 🤣

Oh? Which model?

I just shared a draft PR to add support for keyboard-triggered shutdown to the USB4VC.

Basically, rather than having to be cautious about discharging ESD before reaching for the surface-mount pushbuttons on the PCB to request a clean shutdown of the Raspberry Pi that powers it, the patch makes it possible to just press Ctrl+Win+Alt+ScrollLock (i.e. the Mac OS fast shutdown combo, but with Scroll Lock/F14 instead of Power or Eject) on the keyboard.

(It's a draft because I imagine hard-coding the hotkey is a no-no for getting it merged, but I don't know what the preferred solution is for making it configurable.)