wbc wrote:

Today I replaced "sleep" unlatched button on my case switch to latched and wired it to 3-pin header. I connected it to BF0 header for switching multiplier on my Pentium 200 MMX rig, just for slowdown purposes. Obviously it works 🤣

Wow! Awesome! Is there a Tutorial? I would like to do the same 😁

I am currently up to installing 98 onto a Celeron 500

Installed a Plextor ultrawide SCSI cd rom in my 486, and finally figured out how to get DOS 6.22 to see the drive. Works great.

HighTreason wrote:

Today, I put people off their McDonalds...
...by blasting Dead Kennedy's songs whilst playing Duke 3D and Terminal Velocity with the volume maxed out.

Yeah - has a bit of 'mullet man annoys hull' and that kind of social experiment....
Even the reactions here are part of it.

Ok well I've got my 440BX working again, and the celeron is out, the board has snow on the VGA, so I'm reinstalling 98SE onto my P3 800, though the install hangs with my USB 2.0 riser card installed.

Have decided to "downsize" a bit. I will be putting some hardware, software, and classic videogames on E-bay within the next month or so, whenever I get out of my walking-boot (broken ankle) and am walking 100% again. Lots of PC, Atari 2600, and NES stuff. I've got cards, drives, motherboards, cartridges that I hardly play, and so on.

Part of this is E-bay fundage is to get a new LCD for the Compaq Portable 486c - Part#128902-001, so I can finally get the ball rolling on that beast (and maybe put some pictures of it up here). Currently it's in the closet waiting for it's new part. I plan to make a mobile DOS gaming box out of it complete with a WiFi bridge to act as a WiFi card hidden in the case (an idea I got off another guy who did this with his original Compaq Portable 8088). The other part of downsizing is that I plan to move out of this crap-hole apartment I live in before too long and focus on saving up to rent/buy a house.

Found 2 monitors for my 286 to try out in the junk pile near the dumpster, an HP LCD, and a recent vintage IBM 14" CRT. I'm leaning towards using the IBM. Need to test those out and see if I need to junk them, might try that this weekend on Sunday with the 486 just to see how it turns out.

Threw out my MediaVision ProGraphics 1280, a bunch of tiny pins on the high-power GPU (the one for 1280X1024 res) were broken/bent, wish I saw that when I got it all those years ago, I would not have got it. Not like I want that high res now being as my 486 has a CRT instead of that crappy HP LCD it had (Which I'm wondering is the HP LCD I picked up).

Also tinkering with trying the "guitar string in pin A8" trick with the 486 DX4-100 chip in my 486 as the pin for A8 was broken off by a malfunctioning Socket 3 socket. The chip is the 3.3v non-write-back version, and it's a bit special as it was the first decent 486 chip that ran my first decent 486 box. Would be a pain to solder being as it sticks between 2 other logic gate pins.

creepingnet wrote:

Threw out my MediaVision ProGraphics 1280, a bunch of tiny pins on the high-power GPU (the one for 1280X1024 res) were broken/bent, wish I saw that when I got it all those years ago, I would not have got it. Not like I want that high res now being as my 486 has a CRT instead of that crappy HP LCD it had (Which I'm wondering is the HP LCD I picked up).

You should try to sell that as well, somebody would not mind or would fix it.

PeterLI wrote:

Shipped out another item today. My collection has been reduced considerably. I will truck the remainder south once my house is sold. I am flying south on Sunday to start my new job. 😀 I may not have the ability to do anything retro for months probably.

Good luck with the new job Peter. There's always DOSBox for your retro fix.

popper wrote:

HighTreason wrote:

Today, I put people off their McDonalds...
...by blasting Dead Kennedy's songs whilst playing Duke 3D and Terminal Velocity with the volume maxed out.

Yeah - has a bit of 'mullet man annoys hull' and that kind of social experiment....
Even the reactions here are part of it.

I once took an older Compaq Armada laptop (that works fine on battery for an hour!) to the IRS office while my mother was sitting in wait for several hours in queue, and some funny things happened. First, because it was old, the security officer running the x-ray thing thought it had explosives inside and wanted me to turn it on and show it booting before he would let me through.

Then I got in to the waiting area and sat down and opened it, booted MS-DOS and started playing DOOM II and even though I had earbuds in one ear (so the sound didn't annoy anyone) this one lady sitting beside me looked down and saw my screen and leaned in and whispered to me "You do know you are going to hell for playing satanic games like that, right?" And I looked at her like "It's just a video game, I don't like.. worship satan or anything like that". And she responded with "You enjoy those sorts of games?" and I was like "Well yeah, Doom was the the best of the first person shooter games in the `90's", and she looked at me with these big eyes and got up and spoke up "You.. SINNER! YOU'RE GOING TO HELL!" and moved to the other side of the waiting area and put a newspaper up in front of her face. But every so often she would lower it just to look over at me and see if I'm still playing on the laptop.

Then I got in to the waiting area and sat down and opened it, booted MS-DOS and started playing DOOM II and even though I had earbuds in one ear (so the sound didn't annoy anyone) this one lady sitting beside me looked down and saw my screen and leaned in and whispered to me "You do know you are going to hell for playing satanic games like that, right?" And I looked at her like "It's just a video game, I don't like.. worship satan or anything like that". And she responded with "You enjoy those sorts of games?" and I was like "Well yeah, Doom was the the best of the first person shooter games in the `90's", and she looked at me with these big eyes and got up and spoke up "You.. SINNER! YOU'RE GOING TO HELL!" and moved to the other side of the waiting area and put a newspaper up in front of her face. But every so often she would lower it just to look over at me and see if I'm still playing on the laptop.

I can confidently say she is one of those batshit crazy types.

smeezekitty wrote:

I can confidently say she is one of those batshit crazy types.

I don't know about that, but more than likely just one of those deeply-religious christian types. Remember this is the deep south down here (Texas) so... lots of christian view-ed folks here. Still I thought it was sort of comical myself and got a little internal chuckle about it.

As to the nature of this thread, and what I've been up to lately... yesterday I disassembled my second GTX 260 to re-do the thermal paste, and this one was in pretty bad shape worse than the first one. For a little background I bought both of these used on ebay in jan 2015, and apparently they had never been cleaned in quite some years, they had large clumps of dirt and fur in the heatsinks. The first one I took it apart and re-did the thermal paste on it's core and it dropped load temps by -15c, so I decided to do both and finally got around to doing this other one yesterday.

Shield your eyes young ones, nudity in here.. naked electronics!
Apart for the first time probably in it's life:

Larger view: http://www.outfoxed.net/gtx-260/DSC05305.jpg

Natural light without flash shows just how bad the dust build up was on this one:

Larger: http://www.outfoxed.net/gtx-260/DSC05306.JPG

And after some cleaning and preparing to put it back together:

http://www.outfoxed.net/gtx-260/DSC05307.JPG

I was mainly concerned with cleaning up the heatsink mating surface and the top of the core, and just a little bit surrounding it. The other parts of the circuit board I didn't touch much. That and.. I ran out of canned air and didn't have much else to clean it with. I tried a soft tooth brush but it didn't do much. Also yes, I re-used the original thermal pads for the VRM's and Ram chips. They're good enough, I'll get better when I Switch it to water cooling later.

Better keep on eye on the coils on that GTX260 (first gen cards), had a few GTX280s develop coil issues.

nforce4max wrote:

Better keep on eye on the coils on that GTX260 (first gen cards), had a few GTX280s develop coil issues.

What sort of "Coil Issues" ? Could you elaborate? premature death of the cards or something?

kithylin wrote:

I once took an older Compaq Armada laptop (that works fine on battery for an hour!) to the IRS office while my mother was sitting in wait for several hours in queue, and some funny things happened. First, because it was old, the security officer running the x-ray thing thought it had explosives inside and wanted me to turn it on and show it booting before he would let me through.

Then I got in to the waiting area and sat down and opened it, booted MS-DOS and started playing DOOM II and even though I had earbuds in one ear (so the sound didn't annoy anyone) this one lady sitting beside me looked down and saw my screen and leaned in and whispered to me "You do know you are going to hell for playing satanic games like that, right?" And I looked at her like "It's just a video game, I don't like.. worship satan or anything like that". And she responded with "You enjoy those sorts of games?" and I was like "Well yeah, Doom was the the best of the first person shooter games in the `90's", and she looked at me with these big eyes and got up and spoke up "You.. SINNER! YOU'RE GOING TO HELL!" and moved to the other side of the waiting area and put a newspaper up in front of her face. But every so often she would lower it just to look over at me and see if I'm still playing on the laptop.

That's funny 🤣
You should have told this lady that you are a HERO! - You are the last stand against monsters out of hell.....

Topic:

Got this one for free out of a school nearby (ACER 1125E without HDD):

I have no idea what this graphics card (256 KB, 16 Bit ISA, ACER labeled) is about...

Turned it on after installing an old conner drive and it worked fine! Now i have to get all the software i need on it - i think it can replace my old system, which died a while ago.

Today I played the hell out of Wing Commander with my two-year-old son on my lap going "pew pew!" He LOVES Wing Commander. I teach him well....

Oh, and I finally got my master 386 system up and running with everything I want except a genuine MPU-401 (coming in the mail soon). External 800MB tape drive, daisey chained to my ZIP drive, MT-32 hooked into my SBPro w/SoftMPU, 8MB of RAM, two hard drives (540mb and 420mb), a 4x CD-ROM drive and 5.25/3.5 floppy. I have my USB 1000 floppy emulator installed, but not sure if I'm going to keep it in there.

I'm also on my 323rd floppy disk image for my 1000-floppy USB image. Whatever software/game disk image I want, it'll be preloaded onto my USB flash drive for easy usage in the USB 1000 floppy emulator. I'm hoping to get to a maximum 1000. =)

Arctic wrote:

Wow! Awesome! Is there a Tutorial? I would like to do the same 😁

Just grab a PSW-1 latched switch with 6 pins (there are two switching groups), 3-pin BLS header and 3-wire cable. Solder left pin on button to left pin on header via cable (do not forget about matching order of wires 😀), middle to middle, right to right and here you go. 😀 Connect header to any jumper and you can switch it from the button.
You switch should look like:

of course you can use second swithing group.

Okay. Not retro but I did it today. My CPU temps have been creeping up so I cleaned the heatsink fan in my main rig.
4 cats 😲

kithylin wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

Better keep on eye on the coils on that GTX260 (first gen cards), had a few GTX280s develop coil issues.

What sort of "Coil Issues" ? Could you elaborate? premature death of the cards or something?

Maybe he means problems with coil whine i think?

Worked on a piece of test equipment I picked up last week. Video display Generator. Can display just about any resolution and supports multiple formats.

It's really just a specialty ISA card plugged into a 486 board but that was exactly the reason why it was free. It had one of those blasted drum batteries and it had leaked out. Power and clock was good but no POST.
I eventually managed to get it to make it go through POST after a heavy cleaning (the Bios EPROM socket was also unreliable) and the display fired up, only to tell me that while the keyboard blinked at POST it still needed work.

I tracked it down to rotten traces between the keyboard plug and the controller. It then passed all tests and let me enter into the BIOS to reset the parameters and then boot into DOS and the utility. Gave it a QA test by seeing if it could drive my field sequential NuColor monitor using the green channel on SoG mode. It could! 😁