Thank you. Got it to work with that software. Might as well backup my C drive to the 80GB HDD in case a bad driver causes a blue screen (happened before and I should've backed up the Windows directory and copy it over to my laptop's or desktop's HDD or onto a flash drive.

Finally got round to popping open my MU2000EX to replace the battery. After removing about 40 screws the undercarriage slides out to reveal the very well arranged interior. The battery was the original one, with the easiest/best removal mechanism I have come across in a long time - just press the battery up against the spring and it pops out.

Warning... Windows 2000 content ahead

GOG redesigned their website a while back, so that it only works correctly in Chrome (bah!) or the very latest Firefox&friends. I was running MyPal 27.9.4. The website had some problems. I found a newer release of MyPal (28.2.2) which ironically refuses to install because "needs Windows XP blah blah blah." I can't remember if the last one had that also. I hate having to waste time defeating these pointless checks. Anyway, 7ZA can extract the files from the installer.

At first, the new MyPal kept crashing. I saw a thread about browsers here on Vogons which mentioned a v29 Extended Kernel. I didn't have the latest one so I went to BWC's site and got that. After installing the newer Extended Kernel, then MyPal is working.

I also tried out some games which hadn't been working for me previously in Win2K. Jade Empire seems to be working now (had rendering problems before). And Hyper Dimension Neptunia could now run, but without sound. Agarest War failed with an error message "XA2Fail" which has something to do with XAudio (I had looked into a bit before). The Neptunia and Agarest series are from the same developers, so the fact that one ran with no sound and the other had an error about sound caused me to take another inventory of my DLLs. I was never quite sure if I had the right ones. But then somehow I came up with the bright idea of extracting the 2010-Jun DirectX cabs and picking through. 2010-Jun was the last one but it normally won't install on Win2K. I copied a few of the DLLs that were missing, and also ran "REGSVR32 XAUDIO2_3.DLL" and so on, for each DLL. I think I may have added some of them before and forgotten that step. Now the games are working fine. Agarest Zero and Neptunia ReBirth 3 are also working (didn't try part 2 yet because it's not loaded on this machine)

Tried to revive a C=Plus/4 with water damage. Had to clean lot of rust off during the past couple of days, from the logic board and from all the metal parts which I needed to desolder. Today I soldered in a temporary power plug to be able to use a C=64 PSU and resoldered the RF modulator. Unfortunately it's a gonner. At least as far as I'm concerned, because I have no spares to repair it. Usually it's the TED chip or the CPU, both unobtainium level parts.

Desoldered the batter form my ABIT AH4 mobo as well. There's more battery acid to clean off, but finally I can assess the damage and make plans for the repair.

_ar wrote:

Tried to revive a C=Plus/4 with water damage. Had to clean lot of rust off during the past couple of days, from the logic board and from all the metal parts which I needed to desolder. Today I soldered in a temporary power plug to be able to use a C=64 PSU and resoldered the RF modulator. Unfortunately it's a gonner. At least as far as I'm concerned, because I have no spares to repair it. Usually it's the TED chip or the CPU, both unobtainium level parts.

Desoldered the batter form my ABIT AH4 mobo as well. There's more battery acid to clean off, but finally I can assess the damage and make plans for the repair.

Hope you can revive it - maybe someone in the UK can help you out with spare parts?

SpectriaForce wrote:

<snip>
Besides I’ve tried to rescue a nice high quality socket 5 Intel motherboard, but the CPU socket lock tab is damaged (thanks to whoever did that) and it has a soldered Dallas battery that I can’t remove with my soldering iron, so that one is EOL. A shame for what should have been a bargain (cost me € 20). At least I was able to save a Pentium 90 and three SIMM’s.

Why can't it be removed? I love a challenge!

amadeus777999 wrote:

_ar wrote:

Tried to revive a C=Plus/4 with water damage. Had to clean lot of rust off during the past couple of days, from the logic board and from all the metal parts which I needed to desolder. Today I soldered in a temporary power plug to be able to use a C=64 PSU and resoldered the RF modulator. Unfortunately it's a gonner. At least as far as I'm concerned, because I have no spares to repair it. Usually it's the TED chip or the CPU, both unobtainium level parts.

Desoldered the batter form my ABIT AH4 mobo as well. There's more battery acid to clean off, but finally I can assess the damage and make plans for the repair.

Hope you can revive it - maybe someone in the UK can help you out with spare parts?

Just checked on Ebay, a CPU costs like 3-4x of what I paid for the complete system. I will try to find someone who can repair these and maybe swap it for a faulty 1541 for which I have plenty of spares. Both can be saved that way 😀.

Reading old late-80's and early-90's Amiga computer magazines, while drinking a couple of beer's. That time, when PC began to replace the Amiga here in Denmark, is the most wonderfull time. I mean. Looking at how the PC began to get faster and ultimately replaced the Amiga. Yeah... 1991 to 1993 are just that time period, in were everything was put upside down and flipped around. Fascinating era.

I was just getting into PCs at the time, having a very limited knowledge of the C64. I knew no other computer until about 1995 when I used a Mac IISi extensively.

I made some rails for a Vectra 486/33 (actually a DX2/50) from some scrap components, a dremel, a drill, and some know-how:

Re: HP Vectra 486 33VL question(s)

😁

Decided to do some testing in Windows 98 SE on my Dell Pentium III 897MHz laptop.

First of all the built-in Ethernet on this laptop is dead. Not a problem in Windows XP as I have a PCMCIA Wireless adapter. Of course I can't use that in 98 due to modern WiFi security, so I needed Ethernet.

I inserted a PCMCIA Ethernet adapter and of course had no drivers for it. I eventually got it working and then battled with finding drivers for the onboard audio - no luck as of yet, I'll get back to that.

But at least I got 98 onto the network, so that's a start. Installed Firefox 3.6.28 and came here to browse & post, just for fun. 🤣

Sold the Plus/4 to a guy who's into this sort of stuff. He already came back with a diagnosis. It was the CPU - of course - and one of the Plus/4 ROMs. I am happy that it is in good hands.

Tested my newly bought 6502 CPUs in a 1541 drive. Both CPUs are good, so a couple of 1541 drives are going to be very happy 😁

I finally managed to get my IndivisionECS V2 to display full screen, and border to border without stretching the aspect ratio that much. Here I am talking 4:3 versus 5:4... Oh man... That nut was hard to crack. I choose a setting that I would normally not use, and it kicked into full screen. The configuration tool is a bitch to use, to say it mildly, as the settings and menu's are rather difficult to use. I saved the configuration to a file, and rebooted the machine, in order to test games loaded from floppy. It worked perfect. Now I need to save the config to my PCMCIA/CF-Card and a couple of floppy disks, then report my settings on various forums and especially those that have asked for help on Individual computers support forum. Another owner of the IndiECS V2 have had luck getting full screen on 640x512-PAL. Mine is a bit higher. This issue has bothered me for the last 14 days or so.

Just finished doing some temperature tests on my Voodoo4 4500 and posting the results over here. Going to do some further testing once I get a Voodoo5 5500 I just bought in the mail.

So far, though, the good news is testing has shown that the stock heatsinks that come with the Voodoo4/5s (and I'm sure with the Voodoo3s) are perfectly adequate, so you don't have to feel like you have to mod your card to prevent it from burning up, since it never gets that hot. 😀

Sorry for rewinding a couple of pages..

blougaville wrote:

I've been putting more retro computers together lately and decided I needed a more era appropriate file server to load my drivers/software from. I have a modern Win Server 2016 machine with multiple guest VMs running so rather than building a dedicated retro server (which would have also been fun), I decided to see how hard it was to get Windows 2000/NT4 server running as 2016 Hyper-V guests...turns out it wasn't very difficult at all!

Installing these old server OSes brought back a lot of memories - mostly of me installing & reinstalling daily as a kid who was trial and erroring my way through understanding networking. I'm trying to think of more fun things that I could run practically on these VMs, but even if I just use them as file servers I'll be happy!

vms.jpg

Awesome!!
I have a pretty good amount of retro "infrastructure" on my network. I use a dedicated VLAN for old machines, and a Windows Server 2003 R2 server (in a VM, like what you're showing here) runs the show.
I've put a decent amount of time into a combination of RIS and PXELinux, so I can boot most tools from the network and install OS's either from scratch or from CloneZilla image.

For software and games, I mount .iso images from the file server and of course keep a driver repo.
Saves huge amounts of wear and tear on already aging optical and floppy drives.

UK South West Amiga Event last Saturday. My Amiga 1200. (And my SFF PC and Roland MT-32)

In the middle of testing lots of fast page and EDO memory sticks. 4MB sticks all the way up to 128MB sticks. About half way through. Mostly doing it on a P-II 300 machine I have sitting around with its cover off. Using an older version of Memtest86 for compatibility reasons.

On another note I ran across this article. Vogons member possibly? 🤣

https://www.fastcompany.com/90297443/this-guy … ng-spreadsheets

andrewreader wrote:

UK South West Amiga Event last Saturday. My Amiga 1200. (And my SFF PC and Roland MT-32) […]
Show full quote

UK South West Amiga Event last Saturday. My Amiga 1200. (And my SFF PC and Roland MT-32)

Ohhh man..... That is sweet. 😜

As I mentioned. Then I have my IndivisionECS V2 running full screen. Though version 1.9 of the setup tool have a lot of bug fixes, then it is still a complete b*tch to work with. I have taken a couple of pictures of the result. (If anyone want a copy of my config file, then please PM me.)

Here I am running with an IBM Thinkvision L170. The one out of my 4 flatscreen monitors, that produces the best picture quality.

This project had been slacking for quite a while.
I started with an Intel Premiere PCI II but due to an empty Dallas RTC and IDE problems, I abandoned this one and tried 2 Asus Socket 7 boards ( P/I-P55TVP4 but 2 different revisions). Still the same problem with the empty soldered on RTC. Since I can't do it myself, I didn't want to have them modded at that time so I bought a VTECH 35-8258-03 (MB520N). This solved my problems of settings not being saved.

Today I have a day off so I finally tackeled the 'mut' 😊

* The case is a mix of parts: chassis, tray and cover are from 3 different pc's that were too far gone. I couldn't get the power button from the PSU attached to the power button on the case so I mounted it in the back
* Motherboard: VTECH 35-8258-03 (MB520N)
* CPU: Pentium 75
* RAM: 64MB
* HD: Quantum Fireball LCT 8GB
* GPU: Tseng ET6100 with 4MB (was doubting between this and some S3 cards)
* Soundcard: SB Vibra 16 PnP CT2890 (I wanted to install a SB32 but it doesn't get detected)
* Drives: 1.44Mb floppy and a CD RW that sounds like a jet turbine
* OS: Windows 95B (going to install Plus! for fun)