I recently acquired a Toshiba T5200 portable from eBay, and today was spent opening it up to replace the dead CMOS battery and in anticipation of replacing the floppy drive (Due to arrive next week) because the current one has failed. I might also upgrade the 40MB hard drive to 100MB, but I haven't decided for sure yet. Of course, this is assuming I can even find a compatible drive that still works and is available at a reasonable price, my research suggests the T5200 literally only accepts two specific models of hard drive despite being standard IDE. Otherwise it still boots and runs, so I took the time to back up the hard drive in its current state to a Zip disk. Lastly, I connected the T5200 to my Toshiba T3100 portable with a null modem cable, and used the T5200 to back up the T3100's hard drive to Zip disk as well (The T3100 has a faulty parallel port and the Zip drive doesn't work on it). Looking forward to the day when I can have the T5200 fully reassembled and in proper working condition!

Now if only I could find a 2MB memory upgrade and a 20MB hard drive for the T3100 at reasonable cost, which I highly doubt will ever happen. Unlike the T3100e and the T3100SX, the base T3100 has 100% proprietary parts, so unfortunately I can't just slap in some 30pin SIMMs and a larger IDE hard drive and have it work. :p

Robin4 wrote:

meljor wrote:

Haha! I'm sure....

Isn't there a clinic for people like us? 🤣

I thought vogons.org is the clinic. 🤣 You will cure if you sell your stuff to us. 😵

Keep watching marktplaats then robin! You have to pay extra for the emotional stuff though 🤣

3dfx stuff and other gems are only leaving the house when it's on fire..... 😎 (the cat has to wait)

Hey what happened to that 3dfx collector who sold everything recently? Did anyone grab stuff?

There was a user in Australia who recently sold up as well. I got a V4 and V5 from him. Not cheap but it's so rare to get two such cards from someone looking after them locally.

Im still tinkering with my semi modern not very retro hardware.

I was thinking the E6700 I was going to test in my Pentium D vs X project would not be here for another couple of weeks so yesterday I built a new test system but with another CPU.
Today the E6700 arrived.

The E2xxx will be a nice addition to the test, im thinking of benching a E4xxx aswell to make the Conroe lineup complete. There is a Celeron Dual Core series (built on the 0.065 micron Conroe 2M) with only 512 kb cache but it wasnt released the Summer 2007 so I think I will skip those.

A funny thing with the MSI P35 board is that it uses jumpers to set the lowest FSB available. I diddnt check any jumpers and put the E2160 1.8 Ghz CPU in the board and powered up...3GHz wtf... load bios safe defaults... still 3GHz... Installing Windows went fine and the system is stable at 3GHz with bios optimized defaults so this will be the "stock" setting for this CPU in my tests. I do not think many who bought this CPU the summer 2007 and used it for gaming ran the CPU at stock anyhow. There is still plenty of headroom for further overclocking.

I sank a battleship in Wings of Fury yesterday. I am hoping to receive my newest addition: an IBM NetVista Pentium III today to play WarCraft III this weekend. I also played a great game of Age of Empires 2 HD The Forgotten Empires yesterday evening. 🤣

King_Corduroy wrote:

Yesterday I got a new Sound Blaster 16 sound card. It's a CT2910 with OPL on board and it sounds freaking amazing, I installed it in my Packard Bell Platinum 55 and made a quick video of it playing Handel's Watermusic - Air from a mid file.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zSlHgRWxIk&feature=youtu.be

Actually that is a "Air on a G String" by Johann Sebastian Bach. 😊 They must have had it mislabeled in your midi file.

Oh my gosh you're right! 🤣 Ok I'll correct that. thanks! 😁

Hoping to get my PCMCIA gameport cards in today, so I'm able to play stuff like Star Wars X-Wing.

Also, not retro, but the first of the parts for my upgraded main comp should also be in today.

meljor wrote:

Never had a problem with p3b-f boards. I have one working nicely and a good one for backup (and had one back in the day, new).

I do not overclock these boards because they are old (and probably have had a life full of overclocking before, since they were flagship enthousiasts items).

I did however get one DOA not too long ago. Seller said it was working but after a lot of attemps i had to trash it: absolutely dead.

Over/underclocking is the fun part of 440BX IMO, it's super easy, and nearly impossible to actually fry anything (unlike with Athons, for example)

And what the F. I just tried this board with the bad I/O chip again and now all of a sudden it just boots like nothing ever happened. Oh well, I'll replace the Winbond chip now, see if that'll make the floppy interface work.

Replaced the I/O controller a second time. Floppies now work again, and booting Clonezilla no longer breaks the keyboard! 😀

I think I'll recap this board since it doesn't crash every 5 minutes like the other one. But then, some new caps might just fix that too...

Good for you! The more of these boards survive, the better.

Besides, since you are fishing in the same lake as i am for parts (both from fryslan!), stop breaking stuff! 🤣

philscomputerlab wrote:

Hey what happened to that 3dfx collector who sold everything recently? Did anyone grab stuff?

There was a user in Australia who recently sold up as well. I got a V4 and V5 from him. Not cheap but it's so rare to get two such cards from someone looking after them locally.

Nitrox infinity you mean? I asked him for a voodoo4 (been looking for years now to find one at a reasonable price) but he was all out of v4's...

He did state that he would be posting stuff on a 3dfx forum for sale but only a 3dfx loadtest board was sold there, nothing else from him popped up.

But since he was a collector for years (with a BIG collection) he knows a lot of 3dfx people so i think insiders took the stuff 🤣

Last week i was offered a boxed v4 4500 but the price was too steep for me... i just want the card to complete the collection, i like the v5 way better to actually use and as you know: v3 3500 is even faster than v4 4500 in most games.

I prefer the V3 3500, that cheap Compaq TV-less version. I have so many of them now and only one of each V4 and V5. The image is nicely centred on the V3 which makes capturing really easy. V4 and V5 somewhat shifted to the side.

I went ahead and got the Tandy 1000 TR/2 system out and played with it a bit. Installed Silpheed onto it.

Also I found out the external 3.5" drive I got with the system is 1.44MB, so this opens the doors for me since the internal 3.5" drive is only 720k.

Picture here: https://twitter.com/ReeseRiverson/status/551914382041825280

philscomputerlab wrote:

I prefer the V3 3500, that cheap Compaq TV-less version.

Interesting, never knew of a non-TV 3500

Yesterday i was being busy on the laser 8086 system. I had rebuild it to a working system again. But this build isnt finalized yet, for now iam using it for testing my other XT goodies with.. I have some other HC FDD controller cards i need to find out what the jumpers actually do, because i dont have a manual for it or cant find one anymore.. If i know more iam make my own written manual for those cards.. I have also some vintage harddisk drives to test if i can get them to work again. I have also a problem with the EMS side of the board.. Actually i didnt fill up the whole 1MB because i need to wait on the last shipping iam waiting on..
I also got the EMM.SYS driver working and it sees all of the ram windows.. But if iam test it with a program called checkit 3.0 it gave me 80 errors on the RAM part.. (why i really dont know) but maybe its a better idea to verify if these chips arent bad.. But for now i have laid my attention to other things i need to do.

The biggest problem now is space to work on.. The table i was currently using is occupied with one of my latest build. So i need to arrange to more tables here.. One table goes to my hobby room where iam currently in..
The other table goes to a room lower, where some other things are housed currently. But i need to make some room there. I had planned to stack up some stuff there to create some empty space..
That room i will use to going solder and repairing those items thats need to have a repair..

Cleaned up, tested and played with an Atari 130XE which I found last Tuesday:
Before:

After:

Thats really an atari reincarnation!! Looks as new..

I played Civilization today. I need to use the keyboard. It does not work with my 25PIN mouse on COM2 with the OEM Philips mouse driver. CTMOUSE does not work with COM2 on my 286.

I also played Wings of Fury, Milieu (a NL environment educational game) and Jones in the Fast Lane. 🤣

Cool Tandy & Atari guys! Good luck with the tables! I know what that is like. 😀

torindkflt wrote:

Now if only I could find a 2MB memory upgrade and a 20MB hard drive for the T3100 at reasonable cost, which I highly doubt will ever happen. Unlike the T3100e and the T3100SX, the base T3100 has 100% proprietary parts, so unfortunately I can't just slap in some 30pin SIMMs and a larger IDE hard drive and have it work. :p

I restored a T3200 recently. Of course the HDD was dead, but I was able to retrofit a 3.5" SCSI HDD fairly easily.