Cosmic wrote on 2024-03-09, 17:54:

Not a super big task but I dusted off this AWE64 Gold with an anti-static brush today. This one has blue colored capacitors whic […]
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Not a super big task but I dusted off this AWE64 Gold with an anti-static brush today. This one has blue colored capacitors which I don't see often. I also rubbed the connector with an eraser to shine it up a bit, though the card already worked fine.

This is the slightly larger and older CT4390, the newer revision CT4540 (not pictured) is a little smaller.

Before:

After:

Be careful with brushes made of horsehair etc. They can produce static a discharge when brushing electronic components.

When I want to clean cards like this (and motherboards as well), I just stick 'm in the dishwasher (no detergent) and rinse thoroughly with distilled water (which I get as a byproduct of some dehumidifiers I run) afterwards.

pan069 wrote on 2024-03-09, 19:55:

Cosmic wrote on 2024-03-09, 17:54:

Not a super big task but I dusted off this AWE64 Gold with an anti-static brush today. This one has blue colored capacitors whic […]
Show full quote

Not a super big task but I dusted off this AWE64 Gold with an anti-static brush today. This one has blue colored capacitors which I don't see often. I also rubbed the connector with an eraser to shine it up a bit, though the card already worked fine.

This is the slightly larger and older CT4390, the newer revision CT4540 (not pictured) is a little smaller.

Before:

After:

Be careful with brushes made of horsehair etc. They can produce static a discharge when brushing electronic components.

When I want to clean cards like this (and motherboards as well), I just stick 'm in the dishwasher (no detergent) and rinse thoroughly with distilled water (which I get as a byproduct of some dehumidifiers I run) afterwards.

Nice, I bet those cards come out sparkling clean. I would like to try that some day, bet it would make cards and boards look new. I picked up a pack of special anti-static brushes sold for electronics and they seem to work well, the bristles feel like some kind of plastic.

pan069 wrote on 2024-03-09, 19:55:

Be careful with brushes made of horsehair etc. They can produce static a discharge when brushing electronic components.

When I want to clean cards like this (and motherboards as well), I just stick 'm in the dishwasher (no detergent) and rinse thoroughly with distilled water (which I get as a byproduct of some dehumidifiers I run) afterwards.

These are the brushes I use for cleaning. The black ones are for scrubbing, but can dislodged SMD components if you're not careful. The nylon ones I prefer for dust and light grime. The paint brushes are for smaller, harder to reach places, and for precision work.

I also use the paint brushes when spreading flux. They are cheap and disposable, all from AliExpress.

Ran into an issue where EAX reverb used by my Audigy 2 ZS generates high-pitched digital interference noise.

Under Windows 98 SE, it's barely audible. Under Windows 2000 and XP, it's as loud as normal audio playback. This makes using EAX impossible under those operating systems.

Yet another thing to troubleshoot on this bloody build. Always feels like two steps forward, one step back...

As someone who has nearly gone white hair at soon to be 24 with these Audigys, I can feel your pain.

God, I still feel dizzy from the amount of fiddling it took me to finally get the Audigy 1394 working. First it'd force the driver from Audigy 2. Then, when I got the proper driver, it'd force WDM drivers - nothing bad until you realize it skips like crazy and it sounds like a corrupted mess when playing Star Wars EP1 Racer. Finally, I had got it to run VxD drivers and it was smooth sailing from there, at least audio wise - a bit of Bad Religion relaxing session and everything checked out perfectly.
My Audigy2 ZS flat out said nope even after reflashing the EEPROM to turn it into a retail card - Setup still says "Could not detect A2ZS soundcard" and now I have no sound as well.

In contrast, I love how the Live cards are just stick in, install driver, done. That's how the Audigy cards should be under 9x, not a total pain to deal with.

On topic, I just revisited another BX I have and gave it the 133 treatment - guess I didn't lose much in going with a BE6-II over a BX133-RAID (not sure why I'd need an ATA100 HPT370 over the 366 my BE6-II uses) - it runs an 1000B chip just fine, PC133 SDRAM of the sweet kind, a Radeon 9000 from Palit, VIA USB2 card (I had nothing else on hand for the time being), RTL8169SC NIC, and the wisest choice audio wise - a CT4830 SBLive 5.1.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-09, 21:26:

In contrast, I love how the Live cards are just stick in, install driver, done. That's how the Audigy cards should be under 9x, not a total pain to deal with.

Funny thing is I was so worried about getting it working under Windows 98 that I put my efforts into testing and troubleshooting that. And the Windows 98 install is basically fine.

Whereas I took Windows 2000 and XP for granted and that is where I'm having problems. 😅

If I can't figure it out, I'm going to switch to an SB Live or an X-Fi.

Just go for a Live card. They're swiss army knives at this point. My BE6-II used to run one of these (the CT4830 as a matter of fact - it wasn't until last year that I had gotten a SB0100 Live card I think) and it was about the only thing that went as far as even giving me the XP installation theme, aside from ES1373 and CT5800 based cards.

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-02, 02:43:

Making a batch of my slightly enhanced voltage blasters. […]
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Making a batch of my slightly enhanced voltage blasters.

Differences from Phil's version:
Surface mount regulator allows heatsinking to copper planes of PCB
Protection diodes as recommended in the 79xx regulator datasheet
LEDs for the 4 main power rails on the ISA bus
Disable/Enable jumper

IMG_1316.jpg
IMG_1653.jpg

I made an ATX power test jig to verify operation. It also lets me switch in load resistors. And of course has test points to monitor output voltage with a meter.

IMG_1712 1.jpg

It has a PCI slot because I was experimenting with some PCI power supply stuff.

Are these for Mainboards with a "no -5v" warning message on post when a modern ATX psu is installed? I get that message on my GA-6BA since I installed a EVGA 450 BR

PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-09, 21:41:

Just go for a Live card. They're swiss army knives at this point.

It's tempting for sure! I'll just have to see what's for sale these days...

GuillermoXT wrote on 2024-03-09, 21:42:

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-02, 02:43:

Making a batch of my slightly enhanced voltage blasters. […]
Show full quote

Making a batch of my slightly enhanced voltage blasters.

Differences from Phil's version:
Surface mount regulator allows heatsinking to copper planes of PCB
Protection diodes as recommended in the 79xx regulator datasheet
LEDs for the 4 main power rails on the ISA bus
Disable/Enable jumper

IMG_1316.jpg
IMG_1653.jpg

I made an ATX power test jig to verify operation. It also lets me switch in load resistors. And of course has test points to monitor output voltage with a meter.

IMG_1712 1.jpg

It has a PCI slot because I was experimenting with some PCI power supply stuff.

Are these for Mainboards with a "no -5v" warning message on post when a modern ATX psu is installed? I get that message on my GA-6BA since I installed a EVGA 450 BR

They will fix that, yep. But it's also if you need -5V for ISA cards. Like some NICs and some sound cards.

I started racking up my new recording studio, starting with my MIDI controller, which is from 1995, and my USB sound card, which is from 1999.

I had a hell of a time installing Windows 98 on the shitty HP laptop. Initially, I used a 120GB SSD split into two partitions (one for 98 and one for XP), and I got error SP0013. Then I deleted all partitions, made a new FAT32 partition slightly under 32GB (so Windows 10 would provide FAT32 as an option when formatting), and the install started. The installer then hung up at "Programs on the Start Menu," so I left for about half an hour. I came back to a blue screen, and when restarting, it gave me tons of registry errors and forced me to reinstall. On the third install attempt, I was able to skip past the "Programs on the Start Menu" freeze and finish installation successfully by ending the grpconv task as described here:
https://www.techzonez.com/forums/showthread.p … -during-install
However, that also broke the install in a weird way, where it installed the "typical" components, but left shortcuts to every component that I chose. I was able to install them through Add/Remove Programs, but Scandisk ran on restart like it was an unsafe shutdown.

Then I tried installing XP. It seemed to work in the same way as the VM I used for testing (aside from making the XP partition drive E while the dead optical drive is drive D), but it feels strangely slow. My XP ISO was modified with some bullshit, so that might be bogging stuff down. It had a bunch of drivers added on, and for some reason, I got the old WHQL warning when I plugged in a mouse. It also claimed to have full updates up to some time in 2013, but autorun is still active.

After all of that, I'm getting slow write speed (around 8MB/s) under XP, but in 98, both read and write speeds are at ATA33/UDMA2 limits (JMicron IDE to SATA bridge on a VIA chipset). It's slightly better than before the reinstall (originally 6MB/s write and 20MB/s read), but it still isn't good.

I also forgot that XP with nearly full updates will start locking up randomly. The hardware is fine, but everything stops responding. If you press the power button, it will look like it's starting to shut down, but it never completes. Also, flash drives don't appear immediately in My Computer. There's always a few minutes of heavy disk activity on the flash drive before I can use it. Every computer running XP did those two things, so it isn't my weird ISO.

This was all brought to an abrupt end by my nicest flash drive failing. I noticed that it was abnormally slow this morning (slightly over USB 2.0 limits on a drive that should come close to saturating 5Gbps USB 3.x), but when I tried to read certain files, XP threw a fit and the drive became completely unreadable until I unplugged it. Does anyone here have a good removable storage solution? Maybe I just need to put network cards in everything and build a NAS, but then I would have to run cables everywhere and spend too much money on hardware (instead of the huge Tech Tangents pile of PCI Ethernet cards, I got a huge pile of Pentium MMX 200s). The other option is to get an old flash drive from back when NAND had data retention times measured in decades instead of months. I could still go back to my old 8GB SanDisk that I filled up (removing stuff that I don't consider important) and deal with copying CD images at 3MB/s.

I replaced 13 capacitors on this board

Tried to power it up and got a high speed fan, no beeps, no post codes, no nothing. I stared at it for 10 minutes and started to think about what components I wanted to salvage before sending it to e-waste I saw that that I forgot to hook up the 4 pin CPU power cable. I'm used to benching 486 computers, so this made me laugh

douglar wrote on 2024-03-10, 01:03:

I replaced 13 capacitors on this board […]
Show full quote

I replaced 13 capacitors on this board

Photo Mar 09 2024, 6 58 17 PM.jpg

Tried to power it up and got a high speed fan, no beeps, no post codes, no nothing. I stared at it for 10 minutes and started to think about what components I wanted to salvage before sending it to e-waste I saw that that I forgot to hook up the 4 pin CPU power cable. I'm used to benching 486 computers, so this made me laugh

Photo Mar 09 2024, 6 56 58 PM.jpg

I had one of those! My boss had me come over and look at his malfunctioning computer, and it had failing caps. I was able to find a very similar ECS motherboard to fix his machine, and I then recapped that motherboard. I was put off by the OEM BIOS, but I found a modded BIOS that worked well (and allowed you to use a better CPU), and built a computer that I gave to my cousin. Here's the forum that has the BIOS just in case you're interested: https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=207

Here is a direct link to my experience with that board and the modified BIOS: https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/showthread.ph … =85715#pid85715

Inspired by Shponglefan, I spent a bunch of the day messing around with BootIt. I like it! Really flexible without being too intimidating. The only thing that gave me grief was actually Win2k/XP installers - hanging right at the very first "detecting hardware" message. Don't really know what I did to fix it, but I got it going eventually (might have been as simple as enabling the floppy interface in the bios). Anyway, everything is working great now - even got an OS/2 Warp install working.

As for one of my other systems - my mITX Socket 7 computer crashes hard on exit from DOS4GW apps like Descent and Open Cubic Player. Any ideas where I should start with troubleshooting this? Memory manager maybe? I'm using DOS 7.1 himem.sys

douglar wrote on 2024-03-10, 01:03:

Tried to power it up and got a high speed fan, no beeps, no post codes, no nothing. I stared at it for 10 minutes and started to think about what components I wanted to salvage before sending it to e-waste I saw that that I forgot to hook up the 4 pin CPU power cable. I'm used to benching 486 computers, so this made me laugh

I've done this as well, multiple times.

Tested an very cute SBC - Advantech PCM-4823. POSTs fine, someone ripped the 3.6v battery tho and I have to figure out what kind of IDE it uses.

Guess I got myself a (very smol) 5x86 machine in my hands 🤣

PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-10, 11:36:

Tested an very cute SBC - Advantech PCM-4823. POSTs fine, someone ripped the 3.6v battery tho and I have to figure out what kind of IDE it uses.

Guess I got myself a (very smol) 5x86 machine in my hands 🤣

Heh I was gonna congratulate you on that in the other thread. How can you tell it's a 5x86? Apart from it being an AMD part it looks like the lettering isn't visible?

I've got a PCM-4825 which I'm pretty fond of, I even made an LCD adapter for it 😀 It gets quite hot so you'll really need to add some cooling, I still haven't really sorted that out for mine so I just put a fan over it when I use it.
I soldered a coin cell holder in where the original soldered battery was, mine was missing or dead too.
For the IDE I use a 44-pin IDE cable with a CF to IDE adapter that has both 44-pin and 40-pin headers, I'm guessing it's designed for a 44-pin disk-on-module. Hmm, I should really get some CF adapters that have a female 44-pin header for this instead since they're very cheap.
Just needs a PC104 soundcard and some kind of housing and this would be one fantastic little retro PC. Now that I look at it, it might be cool to squeeze it into a laptop chassis which could use the LCD. Probably not so easy though since the laptop membrane keyboard would need a controller made up.

------------
The other day I got hold of a Tecra 8100 for cheap because I wanted to see what it was about. These are now very rare and the ones I do see available are broken. It was sold for parts and the faulty video memory was visible in the listing but I thought it was a faulty screen - it was not, the VRAM is bad *and* the screen's polariser is breaking down. This is the 3rd worst corroded laptop I've ever worked on, but the most corroded one that still works. Even had to drill out a screw and the rear parallel port shield has a hole rusted in it:

It works for now, but the fan is busted, the PCMCIA ports are gone, the screen is un-usable and there's more corrosion on the PCB so it might not last for long. But it did install Windows 98 okay! Doing that with stripes on the screen and selecting all my usual options is an experience.

OH YES - the floppy drive stopped working because the corrosion messed up the disk-detect / density-detect microswitches and then the battery pack started making strange cracking / something expanding noises when I put it on charge so that's now gonna live out in the garden in a covered pot to discharge.

I have finally tested my 3€ mystery graphic card I thought was a TNT2 but finally it's an S3 Savage 4 Pro as someone pointed out. The card seems to work flawlessly under Windows 2000 with the latest driver I could find:

Performance in 3DMark 2000 is of course terrible, as a GeForce 2 MX 400 is 4x faster, which is normal. Some graphic glitches can also be observed on lighting effects.

For 3€ I'm happy to have an S3 Savage of any kind in my small collection but I can only imagine the disappointment of people getting this card at the time...

Examined the three ATX power supplies, apart from one, the other two are in excellent (visual) condition, one seems practically never used, however overall they are all powerful enough to power an old PC, I also think quite recent PCs, as long as they use integrated VGA and CPU with a wattage less than 65W, the first visual test, was passed by two out of three, one of the two needs a clean internal (there is a bit of dust), the other is like new.

The one that has not passed the visual examination (the one with ASUS adhesive), is because it has at least three capacitors to replace, they are swollen, and I assume they create voltage problems, assuming it still works ️, the good thing is that it is very similar to another one that I have in repair, maybe I could be able to fix the other one too, making a parallel between the two.

The second check to be done, is that for any shorts on the lines, later if the values are normal, you can try the start and do a check of the voltages, which should all be within the tolerable limits.

I think I will be able to try the two in the next few days, while the other one I could only repair it if I can find the necessary time ⏱, for use I think they are fine for PCs like P4, or AMD analogues, but they could also be used safely for P3 or Athlon.