Currently my work bench is my bed. Which leads to some interestingly horrific storage decisions before going to bed. Last week I woke up with a screwdriver jammed into my back and a broken pci raid card under my pillow. Good times! 🤣

Wow. I didn't realise such an old 386 would use 72-pin SIMMs....and EIGHT slots at that. Very cool.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Wow. I didn't realise such an old 386 would use 72-pin SIMMs....and EIGHT slots at that. Very cool.

Must have been a very expensive machine in 1990 (that is the datecodes on the parts). It has:

- Intel 386DX 20
- Intel 387
- 4MB of 72PIN PARITY (9bit) RAM (MAX 32MB of RAM or 4MB x 😎
- SCSI harddrive (with 240MB Seagate harddrive, dunno if this has been upgraded later though) - It has WIndows 3.1 installed and Office 6.0, seems to have been used last time in 1998.
- Adaptec AHA 1540B SCSI controller
- Replaceable/socketed Li-ion battery (I've replaced it so the clock/time now works)

I'm thinking of keeping it 1990 vintage and installing a SB 2.0 and a 3COM Etherlink II network card. I don't have any Roland MIDI card unfortunately.

I need to find the manual for this system. It took some time with trial and error to access the BIOS. If anyone is wondering it is CTRL+ALT+PAUSE/BREAK

vetz wrote:

My Zenith Z386/20 LIVES! I've tried for half a year to get this machine to boot! Now, get those errors sorted 😀

Hooray! I love it when a long term project comes to fruition. What was the problem?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Wow. I didn't realise such an old 386 would use 72-pin SIMMs....and EIGHT slots at that. Very cool.

I have an IBM 386SX-25 that uses 72 pin memory - only two slots. I tried it with 2x 4MB FPM and with onboard 2MB that made 10MB.

Markings on the back of the case were Machine Type 2133 and Model Number 111.

Yesterday I pulled 2 VGA cards from an IBM PS/ValuePoint 325 and IBM PS/1 Consultant that have VGA on the MOBO. I had other plans but I then played Age of Empires II HD again instead. Won a cool long war. 🤣

My 80286 has one 72PIN SIMM slot that now has 8MB RAM in it.

Got a S754 system with Nvidia chipset, Athlon 64 3400+ and 7800GTX up and running. And benchmarked Far Cry on another XP system for a project I'm working on.

I got a Roland M-GS64 Sound expansion. It's the rack version of the SoundCanvas SC-88.

I am having one of those days.

I got a Geforce FX 5200 today, it was one of the cards in an "untested" AGP-card lot I bought. I tested the card in a i875p XP system and the card worked great (well great for a FX 5200).
I was going to bench the card with my Windows 98 GFX bench system but I noticed that the card had no heatsink under the fan, just a fan strapped to the bare core This is not good for overclocking I thought and removed the fan and installed a heatsink with fan from a FX 5600 XT.

When I installed the card in the bench system I could not get the card right to the bottom of the AGP slot because the new heatsink interfered with the slot, but only very little. The card seemed to work but the 45.23 drivers would not accept the card and forcing the install only resulted in freezes and bluescreens. I thought perhaps it was because the card was not seated correctly in the AGP slot so the first thing I tried was to remove the heatsink I just installed, easier said than done. Now I noticed that the mounting holes on the FX 5200 had a smaller diameter than the FX 5600 XT I had borrowed the heatsink from. Already irritated I used a little bit to much force and while I managed to remove the heatsink I also managed to crush two resistors just beside one of the mounting holes. Who the &!"##&#¤%/& decided to place tiny resistors >2mm from the mounting hole.

I hate Push-Pins especially if you happen to push them through a too narrow mounting hole and then need to remove them.

Then I was going to post this rant and got a bad gateway message... Good times.

edit

It keeps geting better, the lot of AGP cards I bought, "untested but taken from upgraded working computers" was a clear scam.
Out of 12 cards the FX5200 and a GF3 ti200 was the only working ones, well now the ti200 is the only working one.

All the other cards show the same fault. A screen full of artifacts, and yes I have tried them in two systems, some cards in 3 systems.
It would be nice if sellers could be a bit more honest, if cards comes from working systems 10 out of 12 should not be faulty.
This lot of cards were defently someones "broken card pile" with two cheap working cards added.

In Sweden we dont use paypal much so geting money back is a hazzle.
Im thinking perhaps the dead cards were worth the ~30 euro I payed with shipping, some of the cards will look great on the wall.

The lot included two x800xt, two x1650 pro, a 9600 pro a 9550, a 9800 pro, a 6600 GT, some Geforce 2 and a FX 5950 .

/edit

edit2

I could also add that my Desk Lamp collapsed and fell down on my test-bench right on the Zalman CPU cooler, totally bizzarre I was not even close to the test-bench when it happend.
It is just one of those days... the CPU did not get crushed but it could have been.

/edit2

Still messing with the QuickDisk drive...

I made a "proper" belt by cutting an old turntable drive belt to size and glueing the ends together. Yes, this is a bit tricky to do but not as impossible as it may sound. Getting the width right was the hard part, I had to cut about 1mm off the entire length of the belt. (Yes, I know I could've just ordered a new belt! But hacks like this are fun to waste time on 😀)

Found some markings on the gears, so at least there's some way to align them properly. There's an oval shaped hole in the aluminium roller disc that moves the magnetic head, and an identical hole in the chassis. These are clearly supposed to line up. On the underside there's also a square hole in the pulley/flywheel (which, after taking the drive apart again and reassembling, appears to be well-centered after all), but two round holes in the steel plate that goes on top of this. I'm not sure to which one the square hole should be aligned... or if it even matters.
Even if you were to line out all the gears correctly, the spindle hub can still be set freely to any possible orientation. There's a tiny, barely visible dent in the spindle itself, but I can't tell if this is an alignment mark, or if I accidentally made it myself by overtightening the hub screw.
Then there's also a screw behind the read/write head, to adjust the radial head alignment. I'm pretty sure all of these settings achieve the same effect: hub orientatien changes the disc orientation relative to head position, and the head screw changes head position relative to disc orientation.

So what I've tried so far, with the scope on the read signal (right after the amp): aligning all the gear marks and setting the hub to this "dent", and all 90* angles. None of these settings seem to result in a good signal. Then I tried rotating the hub in tiny steps (like 2-3°) and checking the signal quality. Then I tried the same with the head position screw, and now I finally have a near-perfect signal. Signal strength decreases a bit near the end of the disc but I think that's because the slider slots are worn, and the return spring pulls on the head slider diagonally, so the azimuth angle is a bit off near the end. Not much I can do about that, I guess.

Then there's the motor speed setting. On the MT100 circuit board I found a Fujitsu MBM87013 which appears to control the QD drive. I found that, on pin 36 of this chip, a clock signal appears when it's able to sync up with the floppy data. So I think the right way to set the motor speed is simply, by making sure this clock signal appears and doesn't look too "jittery".

So now, with the motor speed set correctly and with a near-perfect data signal... It still won't read any discs. Oh well. They're still floppies, after all. 🙁

Tweaked around with the 386 build and took apart the Toshiba Tecra 550CDT found last weekend to clean it and figure out the sound problem. Sound through the speakers is low, distorted and through the right side only, headphone sound is fine. Looking at the sound generating part of the motherboard I see some capacitors very reminiscent of the ones used in the Sega Game Gear, which is infamous for capacitor plague:

Even if they don't look bad I'm going to replace them all. Anyone had a similar experience?

EDIT: Never mind, the speakers themselves are bad!

I remove my SB128PCI from my old PC.
An SB AWE64 ISA is enough for DOS and Win9x Games when I got a Roland MT-32 and an SC-88 linked to the card.

Well, I decided to do a little chore that had been stuck in my head for years. Looking up all my GF MX cards one by one and this time instead of writing all info down on a sheet of paper that's gonna get lost half a year down the road, I decided to write the stats (GF2 MX 200 64bit etc) on the inside of the bracket with a cd writer pen, so I don't have to do it half a year down the road again 🤣

Not much lately.

Friend through work told me he has some old parts at another office and I checked it out.

Not much useful stuff but got a Pentium 100, two IDE removable drive trays, two SCSI cards, one ISA Adaptec and one PCI from Buslogic, an ISA graphics card with huge Paradise chip.

Got a 4 TB USB 3.0 drive from the post office for A$ 199, nothing retro, but to do with storing stuff, including Steam and GOG games. It connects into my PC next to my TV which is kinda my server.

Tetrium wrote:

I decided to write the stats (GF2 MX 200 64bit etc) on the inside of the bracket with a cd writer pen, so I don't have to do it half a year down the road again 🤣

I did the same last month with all my spare cards... It saves time!

Tried 2X 8MB IBM proprietary SIMMs in my 325T today. They do not work. I guess they only work in a PS/2 40SX. 🙁

And I played a game of Age of Empires II HD - The Forgotten today. Today I am ranked #559 out of 350,000.

Done around 100km to pick up 4 retro PCs only to get a total of 11 retro PCs range from 386sx to Slot-1. Some generic, some Siemens/HP and a bunch of boxes filled with VGA, Sound, I/O cards (ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP) also a few motherboards (486, Pentium) and to my surprise two Diamond Monster Voodoo cards and one old Soundblaster (maybe Soundblaster 2 or Pro or something). It will take days to sort and test everything. I just hope at least some of it actually work 😉

Desoldered some old NiCad batteries from a couple Socket 3 boards, cleaned up all the corrosion, and desoldered some broken CR2032 sockets from my Socket 7 boards. The all now have new CR2032 sockets and batteries 😀

been working on my Amiga600 build, quality time spent gaming and tweaking OS, the workbench screen on the pic is using a 8 color 640x512 screenmode and a custom palette - the result is stellar 😁

Played some Unreal on my 1999 build. It looks fantastic on the 3dfx card. I've only ever played the game in software. I ran into some issues with sound on the ESS card. 22050 sample rate plays on the card, but results in some clicks and pops. Bumping it down to 11025 solved the issue. This card also doesn't like 22050 in Duke Nukem 3D either. I want to free a PCI slot for my Turtle Beach Montego card, but I can't lose the NIC or the USB card in exchange.