This is vintage APPLE related. I have an Apple IIe that the power supply was bad. on Ebay there's a seller who has a kit of all of the capacitors to replace. Did that tonight in about 15 minutes, and tested it out. Apple IIe now works! Now just waiting for my Apple DISK II external emulator drive that uses SD cards and DSK files to start it up.

Decided to fire up my 286/12 Z286LP Plus and post this using Arachne 😉
It's quite neat what you can do on these old dears if you set your mind
to it. I'd be a laugh to see what the is the lowest cpu type that can
visit here and actually make a post without using an intermediary
system.

Off now to have some IRC goodness with some friends...

Caluser2000 wrote:

Decided to fire up my 286/12 Z286LP Plus and post this using Arachne ;) It's quite neat what you can do on these old dears if yo […]
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Decided to fire up my 286/12 Z286LP Plus and post this using Arachne 😉
It's quite neat what you can do on these old dears if you set your mind
to it. I'd be a laugh to see what the is the lowest cpu type that can
visit here and actually make a post without using an intermediary
system.

Off now to have some IRC goodness with some friends...

Talking about good ol' IRC, is there a #vogons channel anywhere?

Only a year ago I visited IRC channels using my AMSTRAD PC1512DD occasionally, an 8086 based machine. It was great! Also was a temporary FTP server.... Although with only a 20mb Hard disc that didn't last long. 😊 😊 Still cool though!!

brassicGamer wrote:

diyhw wrote:

Here is Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHewKqEQvM

Nice Day !

Welcome to the boards and thanks for sharing. I'd be interested in seeing a wider shot of your workbench. However, I'd like back the 2 minutes I just spent watching Quake 2 load considering the results once it finished. Nice rig though. Does it run Doom any better?

Doom (1993), Doom II (1994) runs much better ! Thanks for watching !

But in both Doom or Quake the 386 main problem is what? low clock, lack of L1 cache? Cause with a fast 387 coprocessor I would expect that it should (at least for Quake) have some computing power to move it faster. Ok these are Pentium games, but was the 486 at same clock so more advanced in internal architecture?

The floating point the game logic mostly relies on, and then there's the Pentium-loving tricks Abrash pulled for the span drivers (wall drawing functions) and the lightmap blending code used to build the surfacecache is particularly cache heavy as it's a lookup with interpolation going on at once. These things will also cause a high-end 486 to cry - and Cyrix 6x86s for that matter 😜

I'm not sure if a 386 would handle an integer-based rewrite of the renderer either like the Atari port someone's doing.

also that 386 video is unusually snappy for getting through POST and loading Win95 so fast with a hi-res win95 desktop instantaneously showing up with no crawl. it's rather uncanny

Indrid Cold wrote:

Talking about good ol' IRC, is there a #vogons channel anywhere?

I think it has been talked about but nothing came out of it as far as I'm aware. There's #cctalk on freenode and #vc as well as the new #retrocomputing channel on slashnet.

Im messing with my new ISA only 486 system 😀

The HOT-403 with all 8 slots filled with memory is no speed demon thats for sure but the system should be fast enough for any game released 1990 - 1993 😀

I started out with the DX33 that came with the board and I plan to test it again as I have bought a 48 MHz oscillator that with luck should be here before the weekend. I could not resist to see if the DX2-66 would run without issues as the BIOS is from early 1991, It did run perefectly. The CPU has never been changed on this board before thats for sure, I had to use an immense amount of force to get the DX33 out of the "Low insertion force socket". I need to find a cheap enough 40,42 or 44 MHz Crystal for the DX2 as I dont think it will like running at 96 MHz, I paid 1£ for the 48Mhz one 😀.

Here are some bench results with BIOS defaults loaded.

Speedsys DX33

Speedsys DX2-66, The disks read speed is worse but that could have to do with the fact that I ran speedsys from a floppy with the DX33.

PCPBench VGA mode DX2-66 with an ET4000AX. (I diddnt get a sharp image with the DX33 CPU but the score was 5.7 for comparison )

Caluser2000 wrote:

Indrid Cold wrote:

Talking about good ol' IRC, is there a #vogons channel anywhere?

I think it has been talked about but nothing came out of it as far as I'm aware. There's #cctalk on freenode and #vc as well as the new #retrocomputing channel on slashnet.

Thanks friend, I'll try 😉

I reactivated my old Toshiba Tecra 500CDT.
Now I need to try that EDO SIMM I had lying around and add a PCMCIA NIC 😀

I will post a picture later 😉

Tried my earlier recived disk on memory module in my p166. It has a capatity of 128 mb. Installed dos 6.22 onto the drive and it works like a charm. Now i need to find a 16bit isa hdd controller to test it out with my ibm model 30 286.

Arctic wrote:

I reactivated my old Toshiba Tecra 500CDT.

I actually really like my 740CDT. It's great for some bedtime DOS gaming. Just last week I was playing Indy 500 and Destruction Derby.

This evening I finally completed the watch battery hack on the NVRAM (almost identical to the Dallas hack) of my 1995 Sun Ultra 30 Creator 3D, which hasn't worked since I picked it up last month. If only I knew what to do next. Only last week I was feeling all smart for remembering how to make a DOS batch file menu and now I feel like a compete dumbass. UNIX hardware boggles the mind...

I have installed a new (old second hand thing) Psu in my pentium III 550Mhz system. ( I think that to older psu had an vibrating coil inside that would vibrate the whole chasis..
The new one has better quality components, the older one is litterly junk.. I will trash it.. (before removing some things from)

Last weekend i was going further with my windows 7 32-bit class machine, it needs these things: - a new keyboard, mouse, screen, and an OS ssd and floppy drive and dvd player.

brassicGamer wrote:

Arctic wrote:

I reactivated my old Toshiba Tecra 500CDT.

I actually really like my 740CDT. It's great for some bedtime DOS gaming. Just last week I was playing Indy 500 and Destruction Derby.

It's a great machine! Tomb Raider 1 runs well on it 😀

Skyscraper wrote:

Im messing with my new ISA only 486 system 😀*snip*

Hey, that's pretty similar to my "new" machine: Re: No POST on FIC 486-VC-HD

Except I get even worse memory speed on mine. Oh well.

Anybody know if it is possible to start AOL 3.0i and earlier? It says it is no longer supported and that sucks because I wanted to use it for the lulz.

Had a go on Version 4.0 and... well... here is a quick clip; https://youtu.be/pQg8XiMkysY

Be warned, I use horrible language... Ah, never mind, it is Ayohell, foul language was a given. As I don't doubt someone will wonder, this was on my Pentium OverKill machine... There is a burning smell when it runs, so I am going to have to take it to pieces to find out what that is before something serious develops but I am hoping it is just the case fan which already smelled funny when I put it in and tends to make funny noises. Could also be the CD-Drive, it's a bit rusty so who knows what happened to it before i got my hands on it.

Also got the new battery for my Nokia 1100 but don't want to post pics yet, I will some time in the not-too-distant future. In other news, I had a go on my PS2 and played my favorite game. Sadly, the PS2 is dying and won't read most of my discs.

Next retro projects; Continue the Athlon XP build. Fix Pro Audio Spectrum 16.

/\ if it is just the optics and you can just replace them. A year or two ago I replaced the optics of my brother's PS2 and it was really easy and cheap.

Unless they came down in price, they are the same cost or more than just obtaining another PS2. That's a good idea though and I'll look into it, as silly as it sounds, I rather like my PS2 and have been reduced to using my spare which is just made of parts from other systems.

The spare is the one that won't read some discs. My best one reads no discs at all and has a few other small problems, but I would definitely like to fix it because I have had it a long time and have grown attached to it. Despite it being ugly and noisy. I have a completely dead one somewhere with perfect casing though, so if I do fix it, I guess I will give it the nicest case of the bunch. As for the spare one, I think it has a few tweaks left that can be done before the optics give up.

- I just did look into it. The price has dropped dramatically. Look out world, my stinky old PlayStation is coming back!

Back when the oldest ones were first failing in 2005-2008, I actually made a lot of money buying job lots of dead PlayStation 2 systems, tweaking their optics to make them work, then replacing the warranty label with a plain black sticker and then selling them to GameStation for anywhere between £40 and £80 depending on what else was with it. Interestingly, some of the staff were aware of my scheme and actually approved of it. I miss that store being good, they used to let me help test systems out. Quite a few college lunch breaks were spent in the store playing Streets of Rage on a random Mega Drive with the staff and customers.

Of course, that was before the optics were too far gone and all you had to do was twiddle the white whatsit in the drive or bend the arm back onto the screw. The PS2 which needs repair is from that time, it is one I actually bought back off the store after accidentally selling them my modded system only to go home and realize I now had no PS2 there. I've had a few more, but always end up fixing that one for some reason, looks like the optical failure it has had now is no exception. Might still grab a slim one though so I can play backups, some of my games are rare and I don't want them to get broken - Rule of Rose for example is banned in my country and is hard to find without burning holes in your pocket.