brostenen wrote:

After looking at my new stuff today, I simply realised that the Cherry keyboard was dirty and not really nice. Old dirt and old […]
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After looking at my new stuff today, I simply realised that the Cherry keyboard was dirty and not really nice.
Old dirt and old grease was on it and between the key's. So I took it apart and cleaned it the old fashion way.
Lot's of universal cleaning soap and lot's of really hot water and a used toothbrush for hard to get places.

Yeah.... 20 years of dirt, yuk....

I had a choice between soap's. So I went for the green one.

Keys taken off. Was really easy and I just let them soak for a half hour.
I used a lot of that green stuff.... And made the keys smell like a clean bathroom. 🤣

The top part of the keyboard "casing", was soaked in the clear type of soap.
This is just pure soap, no water. Not that healthy for my fingers I guess.

After cleaning and assembly, I only had to re-fit it with the key's.
They had to be dry at first, and I used cotton tips, to get the last drops of water out of them.

Finished, and clean... Smelling good too. 😀 I have a clean looking 20 year old keyboard now.
It even comes without the euro-sign. I like it.

I bought a K6-2+ 500 system in a very nice AT desktop case a couple of weeks ago. I posted some pics showing the inside after a large Socket-370/Socket-A cooler had come loose during shipping and damaged some components slightly. I actually paid 100 euro with shipping for the system and it was not only for the case, the nice Epox MVP3 motherboard (now with one small cap less) and the rest of the juicy bits in the system. Also included in the price was a very nice Cherry G81-1157 keyboard, German keyboards are interchangable with Swedish ones as the layout is very similar.

As the Keyboard is from ~1989 I thought it was a bit old for the Socket-7 system but for my 1988 286-16 system it seems perfect.

Cherry G81-1157 with German layout. The keyboard has a Schneider logo but it has been taped over by the former owner. 😀

Skyscraper wrote:

Cherry G81-1157 with German layout. The keyboard has a Schneider logo but it has been taped over by the former owner. 😀

Cherry_G81-1157.JPG

I typed on one of those, back in the late-late 80's on my parent's Unisys 286.
They wore that keyboard out, as my father was working as a history and geography teacher at the high school in the nearby city.
So he practically typed a cherry to death in less than 10 years. They bought an Keytronic after that alongside an P133.
I have both that machine and the keyboard. As it turned out, the keytronic are more durable.
As he used it from mid-90's and well into 2014.

The keytronic, was another keyboard I refurbished this way. Only using soap for washing machines instead.
It turns out, that it just eats the gue and dirt better, wich are left on the keys from years of usage.

philscomputerlab wrote:

*snip*

Lotus on the Amiga on the Mist?

oerk wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

*snip*

Lotus on the Amiga on the Mist?

Yup that's right 😀

Well, work has begun on the ol' Compaq Portable 486c

Found out I MIGHT be wrong about the CPU - it's got a 486 DX-33 in there according to SYSCHK 4.7 - runs strangely well for a DX33 though - either that or my DOS memory management tweaking skills have finally matured. Duke Nukem DID run like total crap compared to my DX2-66 I'm using for game dev though.

I learned these things HATE aftermarket (and very large) hard disks - though I DID find out the pinout for for miniscule weirdo power connector for the hard disk and wired up my own adapter using the power connector from spare crap I had laying around and some tape - works great! Was able to get a bunch of drives to spin up....but.....

PINOUT FOR COMPAQ PORTABLE 486 POWER CABLE
0-----+5v (Pin1 - facing screen side)
0-----+12v (Pin2 - center)
0-----GND (Pin3 - facing back of machine)

These are the results of changing out the hard drives....of course the original drive works flawlessly and is rather quiet, amazing considering it's age. However, I do want to put a BIGGER drive in there someday. My 540MB Seagate ST3660 is dead. That leaves a bunch of ATA-100/133 HDD from the early-mid 2000's - a 20, a 80, a 75, a 160, and a 200GB monster. I tried those with varying results - most, if not all of them, caused some sort of EISA ROM Configuration error when trying to set them up in the BIOS. I understand now why Compaq started to lose popularity in the early 90's - you can't even set the CHS for the drives and then put a DDO on them - at least, not to my knowledge. Because you can't manually configure the disk drives, you can't use anything aside from what COMPAQ wanted you to use. So I'm stuck with the biggest drive offered for the machine (for now)...I guess that's already, I will likely be removing the Windows For Workgroups 3.11 and using Mike Brutman's MTCP suite instead on this one, making it a pure DOS machine - and a somewhat portable one at that. Change of plans...

After that I proceeded to load the following onto it.....using up over half the hard disk and leaving some wiggle room for savegames and whatnot...
- Lemmings
- Sim City
- Monkey Island 1 & 2
- X-Wing
- Tank Wars
- Scorched Earth
- Ultima VI: The False Prophet with Doug The Eagle's Add Ons from IT-HE.ORG on it
- NESTICLE and LoopyNES with Dragon Warrior, Zelda, and Ghost Lion
- Wheel of Fortune (sharedata)
- Zentris
- and surprisingly quite a few more games that fit on that 238MB HDD.
- I also loaded on WP51 and GRAF-X II onto it as well as Windows Entertainment Pack which I might remove should I decide to go pure DOS (which I might)

Then I did some testing on my SoundBlaster Pro II CT-1600 that I found at the bottom of the Keyboard rack at Goodwill - I found out the Compaq Portable 486 series IS designed for sound cards - right under the expansion slots is a "Music Input" port, just use a 1/8" to 1/8" Phono Stereo cable about 1.5" long to patch the soundcard into the Compaq's internal speaker/op-amp/volume control - and now we have full blown SoundBlaster/Adlib support. This is going to be nice spending Summers on the Patio with this thing. I setup my Ethernet card as well - a Linksys EtherFast 16 TP PnP - which was causing havoc when I was testing large HDD as the EISA controller was picking it up as an EISA device (probably because of the PnP feature) and started trying to add it to the configuration, which then would fail and cause the BIOS EISA ROM to get corrupted.

So some new things were learned
- I don't need to hack the audio subsystem, Compaq already provided that for me 😁
- I can now patch in normal HDD into the machine, should I find one that does not aggravate the EISA Option ROM
- I have a 486 DX-33 - time to invest in a pair of 486 DX2 or 2 DX4 chips with 3.3v interposters on them.
- I have 20MB of RAM, and forgot thinking it was 48.....my brain is turning to mush I swear!
- I can't use large hard drives (540MB +) as they are not supported - might find a hack around that, I can disable the HDD controller by removing the drive and using a Hardcard, but I need a multi-Hardcard to do it (like a NIC/Hardcard or SoundCard/Hardcard combo).
- It might pay to go plan ole' DOS on this one
- I also learned I'm limited to VGA video, oh well

The only thing left to make it a functional machine on it's own now is to replace the LCD for it, which I'm ordering tonight. Then I can carry that puppy around the house - looks like dinenr table DOS game night with the family might become a reality.

Installed a SB16 PCI in my IBM NetVista. Got it to work after disabling the ECP/EPP port and onboard audio. I then tested a MID on the CM-32L via the game port MPU-401 OUT. Works great. 😀

Warlords II flies on this machine.

Not strictly retro - more like facilitating retro. I got seriously hacked off with all the system builds I have been doing recently, particularly installing and reinstalling Windows (mostly XP for my graphics card benchmarking project and repairing Windows 7 laptops) in particular the friggin' updates. So I decided to re-employ an old scheme and build myself a Windows 2003 server. I have wanted some kind of network-attached storage solution for ages anyway so when I ordered a NAS online last week and it was broken when it arrived it was the last straw.

Had a spare 775 motherboard lying around (currently running a Celeron D but I'm seriously considering swapping it out for a E5200) and inherited a bunch of 500GB hard drives recently so now I've got 2TB storage instead of 1TB. I can also use Windows Deployment Services to install and capture OS images, and use Windows Update Services to speed up the updating process. Takes some setting up but it'll be worth it...

After narrowly avoiding golf ball to tennis ball sized hail here today, I decided to fit a switch to the cpu pins at rear of my KT7-RAID motherboard to enable selection of multipliers
from 5 to 12.5 as well as 15 to 24 with the switch in the on position. A tricky solder job and I need a head magnifier for next time I think. All worked fine and had my Barton 2400+
Mobile chip running from 500mhz to 2400mhz. I ran some benchmarks afterwards. Tried Whiplash with my voodoo1 in Dos but it doesn't get on with the sblive, so might try either
a real sb16 in the ISA slot or a Aureal Vortex 2 or a YMF724 and see how they go.

Kudos to you brostenen, that's the actual proper way to clean a keyboard!
I really don't like the "throw it into the dishwasher" thing. I real cleaning demands a full disassembly and cleaning piece by piece! Well done.

Those keyboards (Or the PS2 version of them at least) used to be the go-to board for the City Council's Pentium III boxes some years ago. At some point they must have changed the design and build quality because the earlier ones were pretty good, the very last ones on the other hand, were some of the most unreliable things I have ever seen because the logic in the keyboard used to stop working for unknown reasons and do random things with LEDs as well as ignore key presses. Then again, knowing the city council, they might have switched to cheap knock-offs that looked the same and hoped nobody would notice. Wouldn't surprise me. Everything else was lacking with those machines, they had no upgrade options at all thanks to their shitty Intel motherboards and they had µATX PSUs, such things proved problematic in some environments. They did, however, use 2-button Microsoft mice which were decent too.

I still have one somewhere, one of the earlier ones. Seem to think the only reason I don't have it out is from when it was wired to a system I was recording DOS games from and I didn't much like it as a keyboard for gaming with for whatever reason. As a general purpose keyboard it was certainly sufficient though and it is the last surviving part of the machine...

Anyway. Today, I will test a SCSI CD Burner i got from another YouTube user as my cable is here. I was going to order the transistors to fix my PAS16 and hopefully get my POD finished (Which the PAS16 and SCSI drive are for) but found someone appears to have run off with my Flight Unlimited disc, so I might end up having to track one of those down instead. A cost I do not need when I am trying to buy a brand new motherboard for other, non-retro things.

Unsealed a NIB SB Live! 5.1 Platinum box. I picked this up not long ago for a reasonable price and was thinking about keeping it for my sealed collection. But I'm so frustrated by not knowing which driver disk goes with which model SB Live! that I thought I would take out the guesswork. If this model (SB0060) gives me problems on 98SE with its own bundled driver, then I'm done with SB Live!

EDIT: Unbelievable! It worked without a hitch. The first time that I installed a Live! on any system without some kind of hiccup or glitch. I'm convinced this is the way to get a Live! card working on a 98SE system: make sure the install CD comes with the card.

The sealed/unsealed thing on eBay never fails to crack me up - having worked for an unsavory retailer nearly a decade ago I can tell you that it's not rocket surgery to reseal a box in such a way that no one could ever tell. 😀 😜

Spent more time working on this and collaborating with a few people:
http://mamedev.emulab.it/undumped/index.php?title=Discrete
It's going to be nearly bulletproof! 😀

Also, (related) spent some time today working on bringing this back to life:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030621142947/htt … cade/index.html
(The Internet Archive's copies were woefully incomplete!)

[EDIT] Oh yeah, over the last few days I checked in a bunch of comment fixes to MAME (nothing impressive, and I did in ten updates what I could have done with one, but I was just popping onto github.com to make these changes as time allowed): https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commits?author=stilett0

Nice work Stiletto!

Rebuilt my second retro box for the umpteenth time, now sporting:

Athlon 700 in Slot A motherboard
Hercules Prophet 4500 [Kyro II]
Voodoo 2 SLI
3c905 NIC
AWE32 CT2760 + DB50XG

En route I seem to have destroyed 2 CD/DVD drives, both of which had been in storage a while, but they go nicely in the rubbish pile with a couple of Voodoo Rush cards I tested [the process of doing which killed them too recently].

I did possibly manage to save another DVD drive - though it's NO I WANT TO STICK MY TRAY OUT psychosis may yet recur - it's been in constant use for 10-15 years so I guess it's number may be up.

Some of the hardware deaths might have been caused by a worn PSU, an FSP Blue Storm that I've used for my main rig for 10-15 years and which ended up in this test system after a case change [so yeah, it's time that PSU was overhauled, but annoying if it had turned killer].

ratfink wrote:

Rebuilt my second retro box for the umpteenth time, now sporting: […]
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Rebuilt my second retro box for the umpteenth time, now sporting:

Athlon 700 in Slot A motherboard
Hercules Prophet 4500 [Kyro II]
Voodoo 2 SLI
3c905 NIC
AWE32 CT2760 + DB50XG

En route I seem to have destroyed 2 CD/DVD drives, both of which had been in storage a while, but they go nicely in the rubbish pile with a couple of Voodoo Rush cards I tested [the process of doing which killed them too recently].

I did possibly manage to save another DVD drive - though it's NO I WANT TO STICK MY TRAY OUT psychosis may yet recur - it's been in constant use for 10-15 years so I guess it's number may be up.

Some of the hardware deaths might have been caused by a worn PSU, an FSP Blue Storm that I've used for my main rig for 10-15 years and which ended up in this test system after a case change [so yeah, it's time that PSU was overhauled, but annoying if it had turned killer].

I'm much the same way. I don't get rid of my hardware unless it's actually gone dead to the point it doesn't work and isn't worth fixing. I never move on with stuff while it's still functional.

creepingnet wrote:

Well, work has begun on the ol' Compaq Portable 486c

This machine looks great! How's the screen, is it a TFT?

Smashed things (Worthless things like brown cardboard boxes) because I wanted to listen to 50s music... Most of what I found was "Digitally Remastered" bullshit. I hate that shit, it needs to be fucking outlawed. If I want to listen to music from a certain time period it is because I like what it sounded like, I don't want my 1950s songs to sound like a shitty 90s cover band (despite being the original artist).

People who do that shit seriously need to develop serious medical conditions and die slowly on a cold floor in a puddle of their own fluids. Oh, well, guess I will have to drag my own archive out complete with unbelievably crappy bit rate and the memory of when I owned it on Vinyl before dickheads stole or smashed them all.

Either that of find the ones that are not remasters and are instead just cleaned up... But that means spending hours with a cassette deck and wires I don't have because I wanted to use them for something and the aged sound is very important for that purpose.

Shit like this is why I pirate music before even thinking of actually buying it.

Edit: My archive works. Sounds better than I remember actually, guess I encoded the older songs in higher quality for whatever reason.

HighTreason wrote:

Smashed things (Worthless things like brown cardboard boxes) because I wanted to listen to 50s music... Most of what I found was […]
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Smashed things (Worthless things like brown cardboard boxes) because I wanted to listen to 50s music... Most of what I found was "Digitally Remastered" bullshit. I hate that shit, it needs to be fucking outlawed. If I want to listen to music from a certain time period it is because I like what it sounded like, I don't want my 1950s songs to sound like a shitty 90s cover band (despite being the original artist).

People who do that shit seriously need to develop serious medical conditions and die slowly on a cold floor in a puddle of their own fluids. Oh, well, guess I will have to drag my own archive out complete with unbelievably crappy bit rate and the memory of when I owned it on Vinyl before dickheads stole or smashed them all.

Either that of find the ones that are not remasters and are instead just cleaned up... But that means spending hours with a cassette deck and wires I don't have because I wanted to use them for something and the aged sound is very important for that purpose.

Shit like this is why I pirate music before even thinking of actually buying it.

Edit: My archive works. Sounds better than I remember actually, guess I encoded the older songs in higher quality for whatever reason.

One of the random 20GB hard drives I had bought used from a thrift store recently, had about 8 GB of mp3's on it, and they all came from "the napster era" and were essentially songs that came back a long time ago before the "remastering thing" became so wide-spread and common. So of course I copied off every one of them and saved em in a special folder. Just for reasons you outlined above. And I also have a working sony cassette deck here on my in-room home stereo stack on top so I can record original tapes to mp3 when I find ones I like, just to get that old sound back.

EDIT: If you like old sound, here's a 1977 cassette I found sealed brand new in a thrift store locally last month. Recorded direct from tape to sound card in to mp3 at 128 Kbps. Big one.. about 38 minutes of it though. "The Ozark Country Jubilee (Live) 1977: www.outfoxed.net/mp3/Cassettes/The%20Oz ... 201977.mp3

Edit #2: I have no idea what the ---- happened with this forum and my editing got all jumbled up.. had to edit it three times. It's right now.

What upsets me is when the artists get old and then start faffing about remastering their 30-year-odd-old work themselves. It's as bad as fiction writers re-editing their work from yonks ago. They are imposing a 60/70 year-old's hindsight on a 30/40 year-old's creation. Grrr.