I'd love to know where everyone is getting these 22" CRT displays.

I've never managed to find a 19" (I really just want a flat front beige CRT that can do 1600x1200 well. I already have a Dell M702 that can do 1600x1200 well for newer setups) much less a 22". I wonder if they even ever bothered to sell them here in rural bum**** nowhere Southern IL. I keep telling myself eventually I'm going to pony up $3-400 or so to buy (and ship) one from another enthusiast.

In related news: The iMac has magically revived itself to full working order. No really, its working better than before it started having issues. Apple stuff is weird.

I have a 19" Medion MD-1998 OF CRT that I got for $20 at a thrift store last year and in good shape (cosmetically looks ok, and the screen needs a cleaning, but looks sharp). I used to have a 20" Mitsubishi DiamondScan 20 that used the VGA to RGB BNC breakout (always a pain figuring out which one was vertical or horizontal sync) and that thing was heavier than the 3.5L V6 DOHC engine in my car, and my dad and I dropped it off at the Salvation Army years ago before they outlawed CRTs to be donated, but some people do drop off CRTs still (irony).

Installed the MS-DOS drivers for the Sound Blaster Live! card from the vogonsdrivers site and the sound card is 100% functional in MS-DOS games from FM Synthesizer to GM (except for some MIDI player programs).

Also, can someone please help me figure out why Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius won't work with my nVidia GeForce2 MX400 card? It works with the TNT2 card easily, and I believe it's a driver issue.

amadeus777999 wrote:

Skeletor is on holidays so I had to fire up DoomII - the IIyama is running with a BNC cable now and the picture is somewhat "neutral". Overall the magenta hue is always there, besides in windows where one can tune the color components. Why the monitor has no capabilites to modify the green channel on a display of semi-premium class is beyond me.
Nonetheless 22" of goodness.

Very nice, that's the XL version of my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 😀

I purposely went for a 15" this time because I prefer smaller CRT monitors, still a trinitron though. I didn't like how desks would end up bowing from the weight of my 19" VMP.
---

Yesterday I got hold of a Roland MT-90s, which I'm enjoying some midi tracks on, already upgraded to a Gotek USB drive because I didn't like the noise the floppy drive made (though it does work).
I had been using Arachno soundfont to listen to some of my favourites and some of the compositions definitely sound more correct on an actual Roland, so now I can actually understand all the fuss about these things 😀

It's a bit awkward though, I like the integrated OPL4 more for some music, like Descent sounds a lot better on the yamaha imo.

Thanks very much to the guy that made this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib1qC7yRIoI
Sadly, the caps might be bad on this MT-90s - the audio distorts badly if I let it play through its internal speaker for long (headphones are okay though), I suspect it's a fault similar to this thread because they're a similar age:
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electronic-mu … fault-help.html

Did POST Testing on a few video cards. 2x 7950GX2 and 2x Quadro FX4500.

I Initially thought that they might be bad, but since none of them were posting I figured it may be a compatibility issue with the system I was trying to test them on which was an ASUS Crosshair Formula IV with an AMD FX 8320e.

Turns out that the board just didn't like them as an ASUS P6T board with an i7 POSTed just fine... woohoo.. Going to do some actual testing tomorrow if I get a chance.

Yes.. the systems tested with are not really retro though LGA1366 is getting there (10 years old now), but the video cards definitely are.

Thermalwrong wrote:

Very nice, that's the XL version of my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 :) […]
Show full quote

amadeus777999 wrote:

Skeletor is on holidays so I had to fire up DoomII - the IIyama is running with a BNC cable now and the picture is somewhat "neutral". Overall the magenta hue is always there, besides in windows where one can tune the color components. Why the monitor has no capabilites to modify the green channel on a display of semi-premium class is beyond me.
Nonetheless 22" of goodness.

Very nice, that's the XL version of my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 😀

I purposely went for a 15" this time because I prefer smaller CRT monitors, still a trinitron though. I didn't like how desks would end up bowing from the weight of my 19" VMP.
---

Yesterday I got hold of a Rolant MT-90s, which I'm enjoying some midi tracks on, already upgraded to a Gotek USB drive because I didn't like the noise the floppy drive made (though it does work).
I had been using Arachno soundfont to listen to some of my favourites and some of the compositions definitely sound more correct on an actual Roland, so now I can actually understand all the fuss about these things 😀

It's a bit awkward though, I like the integrated OPL4 more for some music, like Descent sounds a lot better on the yamaha imo.

Thanks very much to the guy that made this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib1qC7yRIoI
Sadly, the caps might be bad on this MT-90s - the audio distorts badly if I let it play through its internal speaker for long (headphones are okay though), I suspect it's a fault similar to this thread because they're a similar age:
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electronic-mu … fault-help.html

Does your screen have a hue/tint to it or is it neutral? I observed that many crts are kinda bogged "perfection-wise" from the years we used to play on LAN where one could have a look at many of them next to each other... but it's kinda strange for former "expensive" one.

@TAG:
it's pure luck.
Just keep looking, albeit a metropolitan area may be more frugal than a rural one... maybe.
The 22" was the largest one and all others were 21's. 19" seems to be most common and 24" are rare. There's a Sony 24" screen to be had here but it goes for €400... it's a beauty though.

Cleaned the CompuMate for the Atari VCA 2600 and made new labels for it, as the crappy ones used here in Germany ("Universum") were just ugly and worn.

amadeus777999 wrote:

Does your screen have a hue/tint to it or is it neutral? I observed that many crts are kinda bogged "perfection-wise" from the years we used to play on LAN where one could have a look at many of them next to each other... but it's kinda strange for former "expensive" one.

My "new" CRT is the Sony CPD-100ES, not so high end - I haven't seen many small trinitrons apart from this one and that beige Gateway monitor.
This one seems to be in quite good condition apart from the patchy yellowing of the casing, there's a small convergence / purple fringing issue in the lower left corner but it's not very significant, all the colours are good on this thing 😀

This Sony is a fairly low-end aperture grille screen, the menu options and colour adjustments on it are all pretty basic compared to the Iiyama. Sadly the glass was damaged on my VMP 450 a long time ago, which was why I let it go.

Set up my Socket 7 rebuild with the Tyan S1590S motherboard that arrived this week. Just using a P233 MMX CPU since I currently do not have anything else to make better use this motherboard. Going from 3.5x 66Mhz to 2.5x 100Mhz, I was only really expecting a small bump in performance that would probably only be noticeable when comparing benchmarks. However I ended up being pleasantly surprised... overall the system really does feel noticeably snappier. Even more demanding games (for this system) like Unreal show a noticeable improvement. It's not a massive difference of course, but it definitely went a long way to smoothing out some of the annoying and frequent slowdowns. Looking forward to seeing the difference with a K6-2 or K6-3. 😀

Also was feeling pretty lucky that the seller of this motherboard included the original serial cables that came with the motherboard. I didn't think anything of it and just always assumed that the connector was standard across all motherboards and used the ones that were already in my case. Was confused when my serial mouse wasn't detected. Eventually came back to the manual and noticed a little note: "Remember: Only TYAN cables will work on this motherboard. If you are using an existing case with old cables, your system will not function properly." Indeed. Seems the pinout on the motherboard's connector is different then most other motherboards.

If you don't need the upper level performance, I suspect that P233 will be much more flexible than a K6-x (especially if you switch mod the FSB/Multi jumpers).

I'm assuming by "switch mod" you're referring to hooking up e.g. the currently unused Turbo button on my case, to the FSB and multiplier jumpers to allow toggling low/high speeds? Hadn't considered that actually, that would be an interesting project!

But yeah, I don't actually need the speeds of a K6-2/3 in this build and had always really intended to use the P233MMX. However, I did kind of want the ability to use a 75Mhz or 83Mhz FSB speed (just for a tiny bump, and to give me an excuse to tweak a little bit 😉 ).

But really, for anything that needed that extra performance I'd use my partially complete AMD Duron build anyway. Getting a SS7 motherboard was just a result of my wanting an Socket 7 motherboard for a baby AT case that had decent amounts of expansion possibilities. It feels like lots of AT Socket 7 motherboards position the PCI sockets and CPU socket rather poorly making it difficult to fit in longer cards when you have a CPU heatsink + fan installed... and those that don't usually only come with at most 2 ISA slots, and/or at most 3 PCI slots. Or some other little piddly thing is wrong with them, heh.

I tried to fix my 2011 Macbook Pro's AMD GPU chip yesterday after a failed attempt to get it fixed by Apple. They called my laptop VINTAGE, so don't tell me it isn't retro. 😜

There is a trick to heating the GPUs in hopes of fixing it. So why not? I tried 130 Celsius, but that didn't work. Then I tried 180 Celsius and it worked! But only for a few hours.. There are arguments to whether or not reflowing is the fix or if something in the chip's substrate is messed up. Maybe it's tin whiskers.

I'll try a higher temperature on the lead free solder some day. But for now I got the integrated graphics working and the AMD disabled. I also ordered a new MBP. One without an AMD GPU. This is my second MBP with a dead AMD GPU.

Also, this video on tin whiskers is interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUvF_Sjxwus

Does Windows XP count as retro yet? Upgraded one of the kids computers with my main machine's graphics card, and replaced it with something just old enough to have XP drivers. Managed to negotiate the AHCI minefield and now have a dual boot between Windows 10 and XP on a 4.6GHz Core i7 😜

On a related note, has anyone noticed that Windows XP activation lets you get away with basically anything now? I've not had them refuse to activate anything in a very long time. I needed a spare XP key and tried a random old HP key than once upon a time would've never activated with normal OEM media.

Tried ZSNES on a old Compaq Armada E500 - P3 650MHz (mobile), 128MB PC100 (won't take PC133), 20GB IBM Travelstar HDD that still works to this day and of course, our good old friend, Windows 98 SE! Although customized using 98Lite to remove IE (which is useless anyway now that HTML5 reigns nearly everywhere) and patched whatever bugs were left from 98Lite using 98SE SP3. Also, crimson red PSone controller because it's sexy and because it's easier to play with it.

Upgraded another Armada 110 I had (256MB PC133/1GHz P3 in PGA370 package/10GB HDD) from 98SE to 2000 using a pendrive and its HDD. Yes folks, there is such a notion of a discless Pentium 3 notebook. 🤣

Grumble... having fun with computers at my ex's in snowy subarctic Sweden. I'm there for a few days every year around my daughter's birthday and it's always the same story when it comes to the computers: before I come, I get some completely unspecific complaints about their computers and I have to guess what is really wrong and try to fit what might be needed to fix it into my cabin luggage on the plane. Then I arrive and find out that the description was wildly out and that I of course don't have the right bits with me, and that the local (45km away...) computer shop of course doen't have them either or charges more than I am prepared to pay.

As my ex is an unemployed humanities academic, there's no budget for or interest in new stuff, to the point that it's on-topic here 😜

My daughter's problem this year was 'dead and noisy fans'. So I dragged along some fans. Turns out the fans were fine, but somehow one of the cables fouled the case fan, rattling like mad, and when she tried to do something about that she pulled a SATA cable into the CPU fan, completely immobilising it. After routing SATA under the motherboard and using a tie-wrap for everything else, that was fixed. She also complained about coil whine, which was coming from the PSU and I was not able to fix (the coil in question was already covered in dampening gunk), and the PSU is completely (mITX) case-specific, so I'll bring her a new case next time I'm here.

My ex's laptop (an HP with Celeron M...) was 'dead'. She couldn't tell me anything about error messages. So booted it. Immediately got a SMART warning at the top of the screen warning of imminent HDD failure. Nope, no error messages at all... 🙁 If I'd known that, I would have brought a known good 2.5" SATA drive along. But I didn't so I didn't. The drive sometimes got detected, sometimes didn't. If it did, it occasionally managed to boot to desktop, but usually BSOD'd on the way there. Booting from USB and doing a badblocks test gave thousands. And it did the same in my laptop, so this drive is just plain dead. Now what? She also had two external 2.5" 500GB HDDs. And it turned out that despite both drives having over 300GB of crap on them, only about 175GB in total was needed. So consolidated that - and got a few 'cannot read source file' errors. Oh oh... sure enough, the installer died on me and this disk was full of bad blocks too. So: two dead 2.5" disks. Great. Tomorrow I head off to the local thrift shop, but I'm not very optimistic.

Why can't people just read the error messages on the screen in front of them and report them verbatim, even if (particularly when...) they themselves don't understand them? 😦

Well, on Wednesday of 2 weeks ago the Tandy 1000 and 286 + all my keyboards -1 and pointing devices made the 724 mile drive to their stop before their new home with me in another state. I did this as I had some family business to tend to while there. All hardware made it including my NEC MultiSync II CRT. I decided to spare the 486 for the load with the laptops and the main desktop because that machine is one that I care about more than the other two in a way so it gets special treatment.

Went to RE-PC in Seattle and Tukwila in search of the ever elusive 15" CRT in White/Beige on Saturday and came up empty handed pretty much. The closest finds were a 17" E-Machines and a 17" Dell that I would need to Krylon to have be that color. However, I did find Tukwila is starting to cater to us Vintage Computer/Vogoners.........on the edge of the work-area for PC's, I saw a STACK of Beige cases including a Macintosh II XI/CI/whatever, a bunch of Pentium 1 Era Dell OptiPlexes, and quite a few whiteboxes - I sure hope they put those out as complete systems for us. But the hugest glimmer of hope was the 4 bins of Motherboards they had nearby out for us to buy from - they had everything from 386 DX/SX stuff to Pentium II/Slot Pentium III in there.

I probably spent about 45 minutes just digging in that pile of motherboards to find a good spare for my 486 and a good replacement for the wonky Intel in the Gateway so when I give it to my friend he can trust it'll last awhile, and boot-up!

I found probably 6-7 Socket 3 486 boards in there - I started to drool (486 is my favorite era), I'd not seen a motherlode like this since 2002!!!! I bought only one because I know other people are looking for these things too (PC Chips M919, with the fake Cache 🤣, I like cantankerous hardware for my own stuff), and also to save cash on it (only $20). A few had CPU still in them, and some of them I tried to determine the CPU in them based on the jumper settings.

Quite a few 386's as well, 386 DX-20 full AT board, and a PSU for a full AT case to go with it (two actually), skipped on those, as I'm trying to force myself to learn to FIX these darned things rather than just replace them, and I already have a spare power supply (I need a spare XT for my 486 though - but that's further down the road). Lots of 386 SX boards, including some familiar ones I think I've owned before. Lots of Socket 5s including a dual CPU Socket 5 AT monster in a anti-static bag. There were some boxed motherboards including ONE Socket 3. Boards were going for everywhere from $25.00 to $150.00 depending on make and what they were going for online.

The Socket 7 dig I skipped ANYTHING socket 5, after my previous experiences with Socket 5, Socket 7 truly is super Socket 7. Socket 5 just feels like a glorified 486 to me performance wise, but with the added problems of flakly pre 1996 Plug N' Play. So I picked up a $50 PC Chips M571 with integrated sound and video.

Last night after a very dramatic weekend (wife got injured on Friday, no bites from job applications in my new home, lots of tenseness and arguing with family over family stuff....a bad scene all around) I FINALLY got some time to test these buggers.

The M919 does not POST but I figured out it's because the BIOS chip somehow is corrupted and is now looking for it's recovery diskette. It will be my first time doing a recovery. If the PC Analyser card is right - it's looking for a Track 0 on a boot floppy so I can load an AMIBIOS.BIN file off of it and re-flash the board. Nice opportunity to update this 486 board. Might be neat to see if it takes 128MB of RAM better than the FIC-486 PVT does. It has my DX2 66 in it right now, which had several bent pins.

The M571 is already up and running. Had to make some small tweaks to standoffs and other stuff inside the Gateway as it was not designed for this board (particularly one Leg under the DIMM slots and another under where the CMOS circuit is). LOTS of Jumpers - I think the #1 most annoying thing about PC Chips is the sheer number of jumpers they use (but it's kind of a benefit too). Spent upwards of an hour setting everything for the Pentium 100 chip - using several online guides. Then it roared to life with the VGA card in it, then I found the jumper settings for the on-board video BACKWARDS - so I switched that jumper and got it to boot with the internal video - so no more video lag in Windows 95 (albeit it's only in 16 color mode right now and I have not updated the drivers). Seems the PC Chips has a better Dynamic fan control than the Intel did, it makes the system much quieter when at idle. The performance is night and day though - boot time went down from about 55 seconds to more like 10. Plus bootable CD-ROM support is built-in. I set the video to 4MB - which is fine, it has 64MB of RAM - 60 is more than enough for the rest. Plan to get some USB and a PS/2 Mouse header installed in this beast and it's done hardware-wise, and it's finally happy. Been on overnight for burn-in - STILL no reboots on IDE activity or any other weirdness.

I'm selling the Intel board to offset the cost. And still continuing some purge of hardware. And I'm STILL looking for a bloody beige/white CRT monitor in 15"/17" - I'm even considering an older LCD panel at this point just because it might be easier to find.

Programmed 2 EEPROM chips with the Turbo XT BIOS for use on my XT build. Works fine, though not sure what else it really offers me aside from a faster POST memory count. 🤣

I received a UV EPROM Eraser today and set about erasing several 512K EPROM chips ready for use. I now have plenty of spare chips to play around with.

Also dug out of storage an SiS 6326 4MB PCI Graphics card. Couple of loose capacitors that need soldering, which I'll do tomorrow. Not a great card, but as it's the last PCI Graphics card I have in storage, I can use it in my Pentium MMX 233MHz build, should I ever get around to getting a case for it.

creepingnet wrote:

Went to RE-PC in Seattle and Tukwila in search of the ever elusive 15" CRT in White/Beige on Saturday and came up empty handed pretty much. The closest finds were a 17" E-Machines and a 17" Dell that I would need to Krylon to have be that color. However, I did find Tukwila is starting to cater to us Vintage Computer/Vogoners.........on the edge of the work-area for PC's, I saw a STACK of Beige cases including a Macintosh II XI/CI/whatever, a bunch of Pentium 1 Era Dell OptiPlexes, and quite a few whiteboxes - I sure hope they put those out as complete systems for us. But the hugest glimmer of hope was the 4 bins of Motherboards they had nearby out for us to buy from - they had everything from 386 DX/SX stuff to Pentium II/Slot Pentium III in there.

I probably spent about 45 minutes just digging in that pile of motherboards to find a good spare for my 486 and a good replacement for the wonky Intel in the Gateway so when I give it to my friend he can trust it'll last awhile, and boot-up!

You are giving me the temptation to take a look at Tukwila's new RE-PC just to see what kinds of vintage computer stuff they have in store.

I could've used that 17" Dell CRT (assuming it was black) years ago when I needed one, but now that I have two of them, that's not important to me anymore. I once had a beige 15" Apple Multiple Scan CRT that I ended up donating to Value Village, I should have asked if you wanted it if I knew you were going to need a 15" CRT (I'm not a mind reader so I didn't know back then, plus it was a DB15 model so IDK how useful it would've been to you).

Not retro-y, but, close enough, I guess. Yesterday, I flashed the appropriate Null_ 23 ROM (basically like Stock ROM + Android 4.2.2 combined) for my Samsung Galaxy Gear watch (SM-V700), installed Bluetooth File Transfer from Google Play using my phone's Bluetooth tethering to get temporary Internet access, transferred the Galaxy Gear SMS Client APK file and installed it, and installed the server version on my Galaxy S7 Edge still running Android 7 (my dad's phone has 7.1.1 which is a mid-range at best).

As i am a bit temperature sensitive on older hw i've modded my verite 2200(it was getting a bit toasty) and added a small 5V fan to it. I don't have the case bracket from the video card so i used simple zip tie method to attach it. Then i just connected 5Volts to it through USB port by connecting cable with dupont connectors and chaining another dupont cables to them to reach to the 5V fan connector.

as always, you can click on pictures to open in album.