Started off today by cleaning some cases. My XT build's case had quite a few marks & blemishes, but is now looking quite clean and renewed after only a few minutes with some Isopropyl Alcohol, a light cloth & a toothbrush for those small stubborn areas. 🤣

Another bit of retro activity -

I decided to venture into the loft and retrieve my untested iMac DV (Summer 2000). The case was damaged when I bought it about 12 years ago, so I was terrified lifting it down the ladder in case it fell apart in my hands. It survived intact and it's staying on ground level for the foreseeable future just as a precaution.

I was dreading switching it on after it being laying on it's side in non-ideal conditions, with dodgy casing. I flicked the switch and awaited the smoke.... but thankfully it reared to life. Some issues present, such as: a potentially failing HDD (or it might just need reinitialising), the slot loading CD drive is extremely flakey inserting & ejecting discs and the speakers show signs of the infamous speaker rot, though sound ok for now.

The specs:
PowerPC G3 400MHz
512MB RAM
10GB IDE HDD
ATI Rage 128 Pro 8MB Graphics

Was running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

My records indicate it was originally dual booting with Mac OS 9.1 and had a VirtualPC install with Windows 98SE emulated.

Some pictures of it's war wounds:

I'm going to try wiping the HDD and reinstalling Mac OS 9, followed by OS X 10.4 Tiger. Hopefully this thing will keep on functioning as it has been so far.

He got Worms running with sound!
(and then wanted to pose with a screwdriver even though all assembly was finished yesterday evening 😉 )

^Nice way to spend Koningsdag! Congrats to your son!

dionb wrote:

He got Worms running with sound!
(and then wanted to pose with a screwdriver even though all assembly was finished yesterday evening 😉 )

Pretty cool that you're getting him interested at such a young age.

Just curious, how much of the actual assembly do you let him do himself?

PTherapist wrote:

dionb wrote:

He got Worms running with sound!
(and then wanted to pose with a screwdriver even though all assembly was finished yesterday evening 😉 )

Pretty cool that you're getting him interested at such a young age.

Just curious, how much of the actual assembly do you let him do himself?

Pretty much all of it.

He mounted CPU and RAM on the motherboard and figured out HSF orientation. Actually getting the heatsink on the socket took a bit more strength than he could accurately muster, so I did that. He put the motherboard in the case, with a little help aligning the I/O ports. Then he screwed the board in, figured out the HDD alignment (which end the cables go...) and screwed that and the DVD in. The PSU was a bit more of a challenge as this is a case where it is sort of 'hanging'. He plugged the cables in (with a bit of help pushing in the ATX 20p), I held the PSU in place and he screwed it in. After that the VGA and sound cards were easy, although I had to help push in the ISA sound card.

The only really difficult bit was the screw to fix the sound card in place, as it was in a place where he needed to use his left hand instead of his right one. But after about 6 tries he managed that too.

Admittedly I was giving him instructions all the time, but you could see him catching on as time went by. It really helps he's genuinely interested in the stuff though. I tried something similar with his sister years back, but even though she went through the physical motions, it went in one ear and out the other - which is a shame as she's 1500kms away and her mother is even worse when it comes to computers, so they're frequently both stuck with dead machines waiting for the next time I'm there...

Backed up the S3 Velocity 3D and Adaptec AHA-2930UA Mac BIOS EPROM chips with my new EEPROM reader/programmer that I got from Amazon. My plan is to buy a couple of EEPROM chips and make an XTIDE Universal BIOS for my 3Com EtherLink III 3c509-TP Ethernt card, backup BIOS for my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus with the original BIOS, and a backup BIOS for the S3 Velocity 3D card

bjwil1991 wrote:

Backed up the S3 Velocity 3D and Adaptec AHA-2930UA Mac BIOS EPROM chips with my new EEPROM reader/programmer that I got from Amazon. My plan is to buy a couple of EEPROM chips and make an XTIDE Universal BIOS for my 3Com EtherLink III 3c509-TP Ethernt card, backup BIOS for my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus with the original BIOS, and a backup BIOS for the S3 Velocity 3D card

So I have a question. I have never used an EEPROM reader before. Is it difficult to use and will it read any BIOS chip? What reader do you recommend, etc. I am interested in backing up the Cardinal SNAPplus BIOS chip for archival reasons. Thanks.

liqmat wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Backed up the S3 Velocity 3D and Adaptec AHA-2930UA Mac BIOS EPROM chips with my new EEPROM reader/programmer that I got from Amazon. My plan is to buy a couple of EEPROM chips and make an XTIDE Universal BIOS for my 3Com EtherLink III 3c509-TP Ethernt card, backup BIOS for my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus with the original BIOS, and a backup BIOS for the S3 Velocity 3D card

So I have a question. I have never used an EEPROM reader before. Is it difficult to use and will it read any BIOS chip? What reader do you recommend, etc. I am interested in backing up the Cardinal SNAPplus BIOS chip for archival reasons. Thanks.

It's not that difficult to use, and it's my first time using one myself. It'll read any kind of BIOS chip you insert (make sure the chip' notch is facing the end of the ZIF socket) from DIP to SMD (the ones on Pentium 4 boards and higher) and make sure you select the right one by looking at the manufacturer and model number. I purchased the MiniPRO TL866CS programmer and it comes with a Mini CD (not recommended for the slot loading CD drives) with the program and drivers.

In the program, go to Select IC > Search and Select IC. Once you search for and select the chip, click Select, then go to Device > Read to archive the (E)EPROM chip, go to File > Save, and save accordingly.

Go to File > Open to open a BIN file, then go to Device > Blank check to see if the new chip is blank (must be either a new EPROM or EEPROM, and note the EPROM chips are OTP --> One-time programming), and if it's blank, click cancel, then go to Device > Program to program the new BIOS chip. Shouldn't take that long.

bjwil1991 wrote:

and note the EPROM chips are OTP --> One-time programming),

You can get UV EPROM Erasers. Pretty much anything that outputs proper UV light should do the trick too. I got an EPROM eraser off eBay and it pretty much only takes about 5-10 minutes to blank the chips. They're a bit of a pain compared with the ease of EEPROMs, but can certainly be programmed multiple times.

liqmat wrote:

xjas wrote:

Is there a high quality scan up somewhere?

Here. I scanned in the glossy cover of the Tempra Show 2.0 manual. Same exact graphic as the box. 600dpi in 24bit color. It's 30MB so Google drive it is.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1B4qwHE9xB42 … _mHRJ-Gv35vGWhP

Oh, awesome. I absolutely love this for some reason, it's so surreal & bizarre for a professional application. A couple weird-ass "birds" on a mediterranean-style veranda, against an alien sky, with no relation to the software in the box. The font & the colours are PERFECT too. Thanks for the scan!

xjas wrote:

liqmat wrote:

xjas wrote:

Is there a high quality scan up somewhere?

Here. I scanned in the glossy cover of the Tempra Show 2.0 manual. Same exact graphic as the box. 600dpi in 24bit color. It's 30MB so Google drive it is.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1B4qwHE9xB42 … _mHRJ-Gv35vGWhP

Oh, awesome. I absolutely love this for some reason, it's so surreal & bizarre for a professional application. A couple weird-ass "birds" on a mediterranean-style veranda, against an alien sky, with no relation to the software in the box. The font & the colours are PERFECT too. Thanks for the scan!

Yep, Tempra Show even includes a FLIC file of that bird, which they call a Toucan, as a rotating 3D model. I attached the animation that i converted from FLI to GIF. I know, that looks nothing like a Toucan, but hey, I didn't make this stuff up.

PTherapist wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

and note the EPROM chips are OTP --> One-time programming),

You can get UV EPROM Erasers. Pretty much anything that outputs proper UV light should do the trick too. I got an EPROM eraser off eBay and it pretty much only takes about 5-10 minutes to blank the chips. They're a bit of a pain compared with the ease of EEPROMs, but can certainly be programmed multiple times.

Guessing it's physically impossible to erase a standard EPROM chip that doesn't have the UV window, correct (unless I hack the chip, but I don't want to do that since the one is for my S3 Velocity 3D card, and the other one with the UV window is for the Adapted AHA-2930U (Mac) SCSI card)?

Most of my time this past week post-VCF was spent toying around with my new-to-me Amiga 2000, and quickly finding out that it has some serious stability issues, perhaps stemming from the clock battery corrosion getting to some of the CPU pins. The fact that I don't have a PLCC extractor for the Fat Agnus or a desoldering gun for the 68000 socket (some of the pins in there are clearly corroded) is driving me crazy, as the former demands I wait for snail mail while the latter is hideously expensive.

Also, I finally got my Gotek on Friday, so I just took it apart, flashed the FlashFloppy firmware (I already had the necessary serial adapter from needing to run WinDAS on FD Trinitron monitors), slipped on an OLED screen, and sure enough, it works, making whichever Amiga I install it in a heck of a lot more usable. Too bad I don't have an external floppy adapter for the A500 for making physical DD floppies out of my ADFs, and the A2000... well, see above.

However, I still can't actually do much with the A500, because the replacement keyboard membrane I ordered still hasn't arrived from the UK yet. I'm guessing it'll suddenly show up in the middle of next week, but if it's like the A500 itself, it'll probably wind up taking three weeks for some stupid reason. It wouldn't be too hard for me to circumvent this if I just had a DIN-5 female socket; this way, I could connect my A2000 keyboard to the header on the A500 without much fuss, since the keyboard protocol's the same.

With my wannabe-Amigan efforts at a standstill, I turned my efforts to the Power Macintosh 9600, which was a bit quirky. Having an XLR8 ZIF adapter with a G3 at 400 MHz in a Tsunami board without the cache enable resistor jumper removed and no system extension to disable the G3's speculative execution/branch prediction/etc. would seemingly do that, but it also turned out that of the six 64 MB DIMMs, two were bad, just not coming up at all, and sadly, they weren't a matched set of failures. That leaves me with 256 MB that doesn't seem to be going into interleaved mode.

This system was also a hell of a time to get running properly, because as it turns out, I can't just pluck the IDE HDD I had in the Power Macintosh 6500 it just replaced, hook it up in the 9600 with an ATA controller, and expect it to mount. In fact, the installed PATA DVD drive (not the original SCSI CD drive) wasn't bootable, either. I had to break out an external SCSI drive just to install the Mac OS properly!

Except even when booted from CD, the HDD connected to the internal drive controller wouldn't mount. Apple System Profiler saw it, it just didn't want to mount it for some stupid reason. The DVD drive would mount discs just fine, but it still wasn't bootable no matter how many times I held down that C key upon startup.

I could have tried initializing an IDE drive connected to the PCI Acard controller that was installed, but I had a different idea: slip in a Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA card that I also got at VCF and use a SATA drive, thinking that would be the way to go with my MDDs not having much space to route SATA cables around the optical drive cage. I was right.

One Hitachi 80 GB SATA drive later (which has the handy perk of retaining a Molex 4-pin connector for power, sparing me the need for one of my SATA power adapter cables), and I had Mac OS 9.1 up and running on the 9600. It still won't permit SATA optical drives to be bootable, though, so I guess I'm gonna have to keep that external SCSI CD drive for now, even if 4x is painfully slow on a Power Mac.

As for the 6500 HDD issue, I luckily also got a FireWire IDE drive enclosure with the rest of the stuff, so I could just throw the drive in there, connect it via the OrangeLink FireWire/USB combo controller card that was installed, probably be good to go - NOPE. The system just locked up in mere seconds every time I connected the drive, responsive to the mouse but little else. Forced me to try some Zip 100 shenanigans with the iBook G4 (which didn't act up with the same drive and enclosure, so it was known good), 100 MB at a time...

...until I thought to rearrange some cards in there. I had this Sonnet Tempo Trio card that came in the MDD, presumably for USB 2.0, but seemed like a waste in that machine compared to chucking it in my 6500 bereft of USB and FireWire. Well, I pulled it from the 6500 prior to putting it up on consignment, knowing how valuable it is for adding modern interfaces to an old Mac like that, put it in slot A1 in place of the old Acard IDE card since the Tempo Trio is also an IDE adapter, and pulled the OrangeLink card entirely.

Now the FireWire enclosure with the 6500 HDD in it just works - no hangups, no fuss, just fast file transfers. What the heck? If it were THIS easy before, I would've saved myself a lot of time getting this system up and running!

So here I am, moving everything I can over to the 9600 so I can put it through its paces as my new Classic Mac OS gaming machine. Sure, I have an MDD (actually two MDDs; I scored another one at VCF as a parts unit for my FW800 1.42 GHz system, but it turns out that this second FW400 2003 system just needs a new PSU to work) to use for the more demanding games like anything Unreal Engine 1-based (UT and Deus Ex really demand a lot from the CPU and GPU to maintain 60 FPS), but the MDDs also lack an ADB port for my Thrustmaster FCS/WCS/gameport pedal setup - something that Flying Nightmares and A-10 Attack!/Cuba! support directly, while also being too old for InputSprocket (which is required for USB controllers).

Tested out the Seagate ST32550W I got in the mail yesterday. Works like a charm! Pictures

https://imgur.com/a/b6jcuxI

Been trying to fix the 3.5" floppy drive in my Teac FD-505-000 combo, but ATM it looks like its kaput 🙁

Had the cover off and cleaned the R/W heads with iso but it refuses to read, write to or format any disks I give it.

Reinstalled Mac OS 9.2.1 & Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on the 400MHz G3 iMac DV I recently recovered from my loft. I had to burn another copy of 1 of the 4 Mac OS X installation CDs, as the disc was in poor condition, but otherwise it went smoothly.

The slot loading CD drive on this iMac also seems to be behaving itself a bit better now, I guess it was just a little stiff due to years of not being used.

I encountered lots of freezing and random reboots whilst using this system and figured that there might be some serious hardware issues on account of the poor state of this iMac's case. However it turns out that the problem was a bit more benign - a faulty cheapo USB mouse that must have been shorting the USB ports. I replaced the mouse and it's been working great since.

The iMac obviously needs a new PRAM battery, which I'll sort in due course.

Just been playing some music to test out the speakers on it, no sign of any foam degradation yet but I'm not cranking the volume too high just in case.

Also installed TenFourFox on Mac OS X and used it to come here and post this. 😎

Got a few more things to do, such as updating Mac OS 9 to 9.2.2 and installing some other software before I can finally start playing some games on this thing.

Testing testing testing again.

All my BX boards work, except the Tyan Tsunami which lacks OC options, they all run solidly at 133MHz FSB.
All my So370 CPUs work, and all the 100MHz Coppermines (P3-600E, P3-700E) happily run at 133MHz FSB too.

But the older two boards (aforementioned Tyan and an AOpen AX6B Plus) simply refuse to do anything with slockets. It's not lack of Coppermine support as they are fine with the 600E (which the AX6B Plus will run at 800MHz too), but regardless of whether I use a Celeron 667, P3-700E or P3-1000EB, they simply refuse to even start POST. The converters and CPUs themselves are fine, as all run flawlessly on my MSI MS-6168. And it's not a compatibility issue with a specific converter, as I have three different kinds, including two of the best-regarded and -documented ones out there: MSI MS-6905 Master and Abit Slotket III.

Everything's running the latest available BIOS, although that's not saying too much with any of them. Not sure I can be bothered to investigate further - the only one I have long-term plans with is the MS-6168 and everything works there.

Also I wonder what people are thinking sometimes when inserting RAM into these boards. The AX6B Plus had four DIMMs installed for a total of 768MB. Impressive. But in fact it had 1.5GB installed - 2x 512MB double-sided, 2x 256MB single-sided. All with 256Mb chip density, where the BX can only handle 128Mb. What a waste... then again, if you only have 256Mb DIMMs at least this is better than nothing.

I modded a Dallas RTC. To expose the pins, I used a small hacksaw, which worked very well. It was dead as a doornail- I measured 0.04V across the battery! I know it's not strictly necessary, but I sawed through the top of one of the pins until I read 0V to the bottom. Messy and annoying, but simple enough.

I didn't have a battery holder, so I bought some LED tealights- $2 for 4, with batteries. To my dismay, there's no easily hacked circuit board- the LED pins are the battery terminals. In the end I chose to hack one the easiest and dumbest way. I cut the top of the LED off, and ended up with a really nasty uneven surface. No problem, I'll file it down. Didn't have a file. Sand it down? Couldn't find my sandpaper. I ended up using the concrete outside my front door. Soldered some wires on and the deed was done.

It's probably the hackiest Dallas hack around. Everything reads good, but I probably won't have time to test it in operation until tomorrow. If it's stupid and it works...

I built a 486 system for testing CPUs (I have a thread I will update when I test the Cx 5x86-133 I am testing for a friend). No idea whether it works, as one of my spare monitors is dead, and the other needs a special power supply, which I can't find. Going to have to hook it up to a modern monitor to make sure it all works before I splash out on an NOS VGA monitor. I sometimes wish I had a cheaper hobby 😀

My collection of graphics cards, motherboards and CPUs fills approx 15 cubic meters in my one bed house, and no spare monitor to test things with! 😀

I was outbid in the Kingston 512MB auction, so I resorted to a less expensive alternative: an Empaq 512MB PC133 module "VIA Chipsatz". I know very little about this brand and the reviews about their modules are very discordant. I'll have to keep my fingers crossed, I suppose.

On the other hand, after five months of apparent death, my Genius GM-6000 serial mouse sprung back to life. Now that's interesting: I stopped using it because suddenly, if you left it unused for a couple of minutes and then used it again, the Y axis wouldn't work and the cursor would only move horizontally (what the heck?); I tried to clean up the traces on the board, the sensors, but no dice. Now, after all this time, the mouse works properly once again.

Nothing would prevent me to use it again if it wasn't for two issues: serial mice won't work in XP Safe Mode even by tweaking the Windows registry, and for some unknown reason, Altdrag, the program I use to scroll windows that are larger than the viewable area, moves windows in a choppy motion with the serial mouse, while they move perfectly smooth when I use the PS/2 one. It only happens with AltDrag. I've been checking the CPU overhead of both mice in the Task Manager and they have the same impact on the CPU, around 1-2%. I think it might be due to the overclock I have done, but surely it's an interesting phenomenon...