jwt27 wrote:

shock__ wrote:

That soldering looks incredible. Drag soldering I suppose?

Thanks! And yes, I used the normal drag soldering method, though I never add solder to the pins directly but just drown the board in flux and carry a small drop of tin on the iron.

In other news, I finally put my Amstrad CPC6128 back together this afternoon. Only to find out, the floppy drive still doesn't work...

Exchanged the belt already I suppose? Pretty much every 6128 I got had a gooey belt that either shed to pieces or left a big pile of black chewing gum inside the drive.

On my end ... finished setting up the P120 I got for my GUS project, tested some more software with the GUS PnP Pro (Star Control 2, Z) and fixed the annoying keyb.com issue with various keys not working under DOS (but strangely under windows) when setting it to a German layout by using an alternative driver.

Caluser2000 wrote:

I've got OS/2 v3 Warp on one of my 486s on my home network. It's an interesting OS.

I've been messing around with OS/2 Warp 3 on one of my old laptops (my ThinkPad 755CD, to be precise) over the past week or so. It really is an interesting OS to play around with. I've mainly been trying to get some old OS/2 games working on it. 😎

Cool. The system I've got mine on it was the only OS which install on it's particular hdd for some reason so left it there. Sorta OS of last resort 😉 Added the Warp 4 server network client which has a few added extras compared to v3 Connect, such as dhcp support. Runs quite well. That system has 16megs of ram, 30 pin simms, and quite picky on what it will take..

Putting together a free Core2Duo machine out of scrap parts. E6300 at 2.25ghz thanks to some easy OC features, 4x512mb sticks of DDR2 clocked at a whopping 400mhz! Scrap Scorpio Blue 160gb laptop HDD and it ALMOST ended up with a x300 pcie card (eeeew) but is rocking a HD4650. The 450watt antec psu is worth more than the rest of the parts put together 😊

The wifi usb stick started playing up so fitted a pci wifi card, after a bit of a search, to this linux box. Worked straight away on the next start up.

Put the 10mtr Cat 5 cable back to were it belonged, hooked up to the switch in the "lab" were my old boxen reside. IRCd into the vc chat room on my previous mentioned OS/2 box to test everything is working ok.

It's running in 3DFX mode. Those weird vertical bars appear on the screen for some reason, but I am unsure if it's a crappy DAC, shoddy analog circuit or just the crappy LCD monitor I now have to use because my last CRT is dead*. Sucks, I forgot how horrible the color reproduction was with LCD - before you say anything, I know, they're better now, but I'm still not buying one, will have to go down the Sunday market and see if anyone has an old I guess. I could kill the dickhead who stole my Packard Bell one with built in speakers.

* I have two left running, but I need them both and so can't transplant them to this desk, in fact, I need them more now as I was using this LCD with them to put the toolboxes of my image editor on so as to free up more of my main CRT display.

Someone stole a computer of yours?! D: Who the hell would do that?

Check out recycling centre drop off areas and see if you can't scrounge up a CRT for nothing.

Back when I was in social services, things getting stolen or broken was a regular occurrence. Somebody actually went to my house and stole a variety of things, most notably a few Panasonic KX-P2624 accounting edition printers and my first printer, a KX-P1121 (I think, was a long time ago and it may have been a similar model, was one of their smaller color dot matrix printers). The same asshole also stole a brand new dual AMD Opteron machine I had used for literally five minutes. I do not know what they did with this stuff, given they were an environmentalist hippie pieceashit who didn't have much use for it, my guess would be that they sold it.

We don't have a recycling center locally, all we have is the council dump from which it is illegal to remove things. This wouldn't normally stop me, but CRT displays are probably a bit too heavy to run away with. Annoying really, given that the place is close enough that I can see and smell it from the back windows of my home.

Yolo. 🤣 Seriously though we aren't supposed to take things from the recycling centre either but that doesn't stop me from grabbing a computer and throwing it in the bed of my truck. 😜 Just do it when no one is around. Besides if you don't think other people are picking over the dumps all the time then you are crazy, I bump into people scavenging all the time at the recycling centre. Usually people grabbing things like large screen LCD TVs that need to be fixed or scrappers grabbing TVs and computers for the copper and gold.

That really sucks about the computers / printers. People are so fucking strange.

People don't rob things much here, it isn't easy to do because they breathe down your neck the whole time you're there. Also, most computer stuff comes from companies and local policy seems to be to smash everything so nobody else can ever use it. The amount of skips I have seen over the years where they have smashed a bunch of screens to "Protect their data" is sickening.

It's only technically robbing, it doesn't hurt anyone and as far as the recycling centres look at it I'm pretty sure they are just happy to not have to pick it all up. 🤣 I mean they threaten you for dropping things off when they are closed but it never stops anyone, I've never been threatened for grabbing something though.

That really sucks though that there isn't a way for you to get something, I guess the only other option is to go to as many flea markets / Garage sales (I think you guys call them boot sales) as you can and see if you can't score something. All I've been seeing lately is crappy LCD screens. 😒 (At sales I mean)

But yeah the smash everything corporate bullshit is getting old, I really hate that big business basically forces you to buy new with bullshit tactics of destroy everything mildly usable.

shock__ wrote:

Exchanged the belt already I suppose? Pretty much every 6128 I got had a gooey belt that either shed to pieces or left a big pile of black chewing gum inside the drive.

Yep. And I actually got it to work a few years back, with a rubber band. Since I finally found a monitor for it now (GT65) I replaced the drive belt, and took it apart entirely to clean while I was at it. Also replaced the ROMs with socketed EPROMs so I can try a custom OS sometime. And made this cool picture: http://i.imgur.com/DNbq1ik.jpg

Now the floppy drive starts spinning right away once the monitor is switched on, then stops when the CPC is switched on and the activity led lights up dimly. When I type CAT it starts spinning again and the led lights up completely, but then says "missing disc" less than two seconds later.

But yeah the smash everything corporate bullshit is getting old, I really hate that big business basically forces you to buy new with bullshit tactics of destroy everything mildly usable.

^ This. The only thing that might be worth destroying is the disk drive and even that is largely unnecessary after a multi-pass wipe.

Hey, I don't feel bad about stealing rubbish, that's why I do it, they always tell us we need to recycle more anyway. I don't even mind stealing from big companies when it isn't rubbish, given they'd probably do the same thing to me in some way or another.

One thing that's been on my stealing list for years though is Toys R Us, I really hope they don't smash their machines when they upgrade them. The local branch to this day uses some modified IBM 5160 and 5170 systems in-store. They have a non-standard IBM keyboard and the original monitor, they run some strange OS, looks like Xenix, most of them seem to use a ROM that boots this from the network they use. If I ever got wind that they were throwing those out I'd be jumping over that back fence quickly, I could make a fortune on that stuff.

I think, when a big company exchanges it's hardware, that this decision is made in two steps: First of all the IT-Manager has to define, that the hardware is to slow or whatever and deploy this to the companys head. Second this head will decide to refurbish or renew. IT will know the difference of a computer and a hdd. The head of the company won't know it and is only interrested in destroying all sensible data that maybe can be found somwhere inside those 'computing things'. So it is more save for them to hire other companys to destroy it then bring it to a recycling center. That means, that if somehow somewhere any sign of that sensible data comes to the sunlight, the problem and responsability is outsourced to that company, that had to destroy it.
To get beyond a fence and to a fully loaded container (with hardware of course) might be a problem, considering the written lines before...

But:

HighTreason wrote:

Hey, I don't feel bad about stealing rubbish, that's why I do it, they always tell us we need to recycle more anyway. I don't even mind stealing from big companies when it isn't rubbish, given they'd probably do the same thing to me in some way or another.

Yeah - for the first part i agree, although, i guess, we both know the difference between 'feeling bad about' and 'act against the law'.
Thinking of it digs out a question: Is collecting garbage an act you can call 'stealing'? (see above) If anyone throws away unused hardware in unknown condition (nobody cares about it at this time) to our recycling center i often collect it with that sort of thoughts: 'I will recycle it better than you...' and i don't feel bad about it too. What about asking? Did you made bad experiences?

The second part i will comment with a 😵

p.s. What about that black machine: Did the ViewPoint II Video Card transform into 'garbage'?

If I ask them at the tip they usually answer "Yuwot dikkedd? Amtranawork 'ere, fukoff." and further requests land in them either repeating the F word with increasing anger or else attempting to destroy whatever it is you want and calling the cops, which sucks as they are usually under the illusion they have a right to detain me until those cops get there and I can become violent quickly when people repeatedly try to grab me without good reason. Only once did this not happen and some guy let me smuggle a C64-C out. The only option is to grab hold of something and either try blagging them into thinking it's yours when they say something - I got by with this once by telling them my girlfriend had thrown it out after an argument and I wanted it back * - but that rarely works leaving you only able to run off, throw a quick insult at them and hope like hell the police are not nearby or else have better things to attend to.

I remember one time about ten years back, me and a friend walked up a railway line, jumped the fence at one of these places and tried to rob it of any decent electronics, unfortunately it was all modern (at the time) so we just sold off what worked or gutted it for spares. We didn't get that much anyway because the security guard came up the ramp after a while so we had to quickly climb up the metal container and scale the fence again, we wrecked our hands quite bad on the barbed wire and couldn't get his coat back off it (we put it there to stop the barbs piercing our skin so much) - of course, this was before my prints and DNA were on file.

The ViewPoint II is fine for the most part, but it artifacts in some scrolling games, plus I never got the MPEG side working and then got my heart set on that and wanted a TSeng card anyway. I'm replacing it with a WinFast T230. Like this one. I am also adding a RealMagic VCD Decoder card as I can't resist trying to do that on this platform now.

The 3DFX is installed in my K5.

* Needless to say, not a single part of this had any ground in truth, my girlfriend is made of silicone rubber and is incapable of throwing things out.

Oh man... Seems that there are some idiots working at the recycling center! For what reason somebody would reject a question to take away 'rubbish'? (Can not and will not imagine anyway)

Is the system (POD83) strong enough to do video capturing and also has the space necessary for all the data? I always thought everything slower then a PIII would make that kind of interest on a pc a 'waiting for godot'.

Most recycling of items from large organizations is done by huge companies. They processed thousands of tons annually. And you will never get inside their facilities. They have huge shredders and sorting lines to separate secondary market material (palletized and shipped for resale overseas) from raw materials (plastic / metal / gold / CRT lead).

Sutekh94 wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

I've got OS/2 v3 Warp on one of my 486s on my home network. It's an interesting OS.

I've been messing around with OS/2 Warp 3 on one of my old laptops (my ThinkPad 755CD, to be precise) over the past week or so. It really is an interesting OS to play around with. I've mainly been trying to get some old OS/2 games working on it. 😎

That's an interesting point, the bios battery does seem to lose time and date when the power is unplugged. the onyl good thing is that it does retain the time and date in the battery of when the machine was last on however.. So it's just slowly degrading I gather.. Regardless, it's easy to replace as it is not a cylindrical type yay!

Indeed it is a querky OS.. I would like however to put my TurboLinux 6 (retail box from years ago..) on the machine to see how bad (read slow) the machine would be compiling all things I might need for certain browsers or packages.. I think I got netscape 6. And even though the kernel was high enough to support netscape 9 (and therefore firefox 3) i needed so many packages and dependancies that i just gave up after hours and hours. Some of them I just couldn't install because the newer releases didn't support the old Kernel, but I couldn't find the old releases.. Typical..

Anyway. My issue at the moment is that this machine cannot seem to detect a HDD over 2gb. I have a 2.5gb that I tried to assign to 2gb using hard disc configuration in the BIOS but it just won't have it.. I would love to get a 10gb hard disc in it so that i wouldn't have to worry about space regarding the dual boot between OS/2 (when I eventually get around to getting at least warp 3) and TurboLinux..

The particular board is an ASUS VL/I-486SV2G. It happens to have a 486 sx @ 33mhz and 16mb ram just to throw that out there for anyone's interest.. 😊

I certainly understand the wasted hours getting things up and running 😉 I had RH 6.x/ Mandrake on my Compaq all-in-one 486DX2/66 until the hdd died. Opera 8.5 static might work, albeit a bit slow. That runs ok on my P200mmx system though. You can use a boot disk to initialize the linux boot process on larger hdds on systems the support smaller drives if need be. I've got Turbo Linux retail Server and Workstation. I collect old retail OSs includeding Linux distros. I think Turbo Linux Workstation was released after server. A lot of RH/Mandrake 6.x stuff will run with it, even early 7.x stuff. I'd imagine Debian could be the go though, ok not cutting edge, but hey. Always like the way you just added an entry to the sources.list and install it. Most modern distros have adapted that style of adding applications. I'm certainly no expert using Linux but do find it useful doing day to day tasks.