PeterLI wrote:

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. 😀

Do you maybe know where i can get that `thuis in het milieu` game.. I know i had played it also back in the 90s.

Finally found a hard disk that my Compaq Cyrix media GX machine likes, an ancient fujitsu 540mb(£1 from car boot sale), got windows 95 up and running happily, now just need to get the cyrix graphics drivers in and working, first set i found are no good.

meljor wrote:

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! 🤣

Uh, sorry about that... 😊

Just finished up my new 99 build. Making a post about the build, including pictures. (lot's of pic's)

After years of trials and errors I have finally found the perfect process, settings and hardware to make near perfect (to my hears) recordings of my favorite video games' OSTs.
And I'm done for now with my GUS MAX, GS Roland SC-55 and practically with the MT-32.
Just started more than 24 hours of non-stop recording with my CBX-T3, next will be the AWE 32 CT3980 with its default EMU-8000 bank and last (for this time) an early OPL3 SB. 😎
A big thanks for Quest Studio for providing so much awesome MIDI files from even more awesome video games, that must have been a phenomenal amount of work. 😊
Hopefuly Mirsoft and many others places over the net contains nice collection of MIDI files.
I can't really imagine all the work it would be to record each MIDI files separatly from the games for all differents sound cards with the adequate settings 😵
It already takes more than enough time to post-process, name and sort all the recorded tracks 🤣

Robin4 wrote:

Do you maybe know where i can get that `thuis in het milieu` game.. I know i had played it also back in the 90s.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B54-3EPJkZ9SN … sp=docslist_api

I finished a Civilization game and only fired 1 nuke on Barbarians. 😀

Used up lots of thermal paste on my upcoming Athlon xp machine. For some reason the NB did not have a HSF on it like it is supposed to. Although I have read that the k333 chipset can run passively, I stole the one off my dead 440bx board and threw a dead SIS agp card's HS on the south bridge. Also if anyone has a Hercules 3D Prophet III I would advise applying new thermal paste, they were really cheap on the thermal paste and it has been over 10 years since it was applied. . .

I was futsing around in the shed and came across this NIB Philips 107Es that I've had stashed away, so decided to give it a try. It's not possible to get the edges of the image to be perfectly square despite a decent array of shape options, but it's a lovely image. Very bright and sharp. It cuts a handsome figure on top of my 486 SX33 too - the LG flatron I've been using was a little bit large and modern looking for a 486.

Is that.... A commodore watch?

Very nice badmojo!

Haven't seen a CRT in many years up where I live.

brostenen wrote:

Is that.... A commodore watch?

Nah, just a casio. I've started collecting them apparently - they're so cheap! I always wanted these as a kid, and they're actually very serviceable watches still. I wear them!

All but the swatch are recently made recreations of the classics. The swatch is an actual 1988 model.

I have that Philips monitor too, also got mine NOS recently. From what I can make out they were manufactured as recently as the mid-2000s for the Chinese market. As you say the geometry isn't perfect, but the general newness of them mean they're going to be good for a long time yet.

Still miss my 17" Eizo, but that one was from the 90s and the flyback bit the dust. Seems like CRTs aren't lasting anywhere near as long as other system components, I guess it's the heat & high voltage analogue circuitry.

Cool CRT! I love Philips. Dangerous Dave is a fun game. I never finished it though. Really difficult.

Yesterday I got the OEM IBM AGP VGA (nVidia TNT2 M64 32MB) in the mail. It makes WarCraft III run great. Not at 1024*768*32 but 1024*768*16 works fine. 😈

Nice watches, I still wear one of these as well. 🤣

I dislike jewellery. I used to own some Swiss mechanical watches but gave up on that. I find it very challenging to remember I was wearing one after using a restroom or after waking up in a hotel room.

bjt wrote:

I have that Philips monitor too, also got mine NOS recently. From what I can make out they were manufactured as recently as the mid-2000s for the Chinese market. As you say the geometry isn't perfect, but the general newness of them mean they're going to be good for a long time yet.

Yes from what I can tell, based on the labels on the box, mine was manufactured in 2005, and first purchased in 2007! I bought it from someone locally for 20 bucks, apparently they just never got around to needing it.

Are they shadow masks do you know?

I have one (or two?) of those 107E screens too, but it has some pretty bad moire and it's not very bright anymore. May need some adjustments here and there, but I still think they're a bit too "sharp" for DOS resolutions anyway.

Last CRT I bought new was a Philips 109B, also around 2007 😉

Remember that crummy Atari 130XE I cleaned up a while ago and how nice turned out? I have been playing around with it for the last couple of days when Murphy struck - the whole block of function keys (Help Start Select Option Reset) suddenly stopped working. I noticed something was wrong when most games failed to boot out of the blue, didn't take long to find out it was due to holding Option to disable the built-in BASIC not working anymore because of dead keys. Checked continuity on the membrane tracks and sure enough several of them went open circuit near the edge connector, corresponding to the block of keys I lost.

My usual method of going over the tracks with ordinary pencil lead didn't lower the resistance enough (several kΩ) and carefully taped strips of aluminum foil didn't make enough contact to get it working, some sort of conductive paint seems to be the only option. Went to a bunch of auto parts stores looking for a rear defogger repair kit containing said paint, but nobody seems to bother stocking it anymore. Argh!

Today I finally found something called Electric Paint at an expensive electronics store near me so I bought a tube and had a go at the keyboard membrane:

I have to say I'm not very impressed with the stuff. Looks and feels like Arctic Silver 5 without the stickiness, doesn't adhere very well to plastic (it won't survive more than one insertion cycle) resistance is quite high even when applying loads of it (400+Ω for short segments) and the package warns of a 6 month shelf life. But it conducts well enough to get the Atari to recognize the dead keys back. Yay!

Now let's see if it lasts... 😵
Also good to see them CRTs getting some love!

I finally got around to working out the pinout for the 5-pin PS/2 mouse header on my Lucky Star 5MVP3 mobo last night. I searched for weeks and couldn't find any pinout that worked. So I bit the bullet and went about it the long and systematic way - first I attached the VCC and GND pins of my port to an unused floppy connector to take those two out of the equation. Then it was a case of choosing a pin for CLK and DATA, then booting and see if CTMOUSE picked up the mouse or not.

After rebooting at least 12 times, and with the remaining combinations of pins for CLK and DATA dwindling rapidly, I was starting to think I was wasting my time. Then on the second-to-last combination that I had left to test, it worked! INSTALLED AT PS/2 PORT! I was ecstatic.

So with CLK and DATA worked out I thought it was trivial for GND and VCC - there were only 3 pins left. GND was easy and I found that one after a couple of reboots, but the VCC pin just didn't want to work at all - it would only work when I pulled 5V from the floppy connector, and testing the two remaining pins with a multimeter gave me nothing. Could my motherboard header be dodgy? That's as far as I got... but 4 out of 5 pins in 2 hours isn't bad. 😀

This is the retro activity I did... and I didn't seem to have to do anything but power it on after placing it into the socket. 😀