VOGONS


Reply 16280 of 27182, by SodaSuccubus

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Been fiddling with a 286H-12MHZ board all day, spent most of this morning cleaning up its horrible corrosion. The worst iv seen yet. Thankfully it looks like it didn't eat too far.
Got it for a really sweet price online of only $50 CAD from someone local. I honestly didn't think i needed a 286 after putting together a nice 486, but now im just so enticed by them!

Still looking for a 20/25 mhz board 🙁

That being said though. Does anyone else feel bad when you make a post here and then forget to respond to it? 😜

Reply 16281 of 27182, by creepingnet

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Messing around with DOS HX Extender tonight on my 486s. Seeing what crazy stuff I can get running, 🤣.

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 16282 of 27182, by Bancho

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Today I've been testing out my Compaq Armada 7792 DMT Laptop. I've found that unfortunately the in-built speakers don't work, so in the mean time i have these cool battery powered Sound Blaster speakers so I am using those. This laptop has a ESS 1878 sound chip with wavetable and sounds pretty good. Sound appears to work natively in dos along with the wavetable. I can't seen any loading of drivers at start up. The screen moves nicely with no perceived blurring or ghosting. It doesn't handle scaling very and doesn't fill the screen but its usable.

I need to fix the FDD Drive (Citizen W1D) which i suspect the belt has gone in it and i would like to get the speakers working again. I'm also preparing to try a fresh install of Win 95 as this has what looks to be the original install! If anyone could offer help I have a thread in software Compaq 7792 DMT - Installing WIndows 95 without working media drives. Advice please

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Reply 16283 of 27182, by Horun

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SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-07-25, 03:25:
Been fiddling with a 286H-12MHZ board all day, spent most of this morning cleaning up its horrible corrosion. The worst iv seen […]
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Been fiddling with a 286H-12MHZ board all day, spent most of this morning cleaning up its horrible corrosion. The worst iv seen yet. Thankfully it looks like it didn't eat too far.
Got it for a really sweet price online of only $50 CAD from someone local. I honestly didn't think i needed a 286 after putting together a nice 486, but now im just so enticed by them!

Still looking for a 20/25 mhz board 🙁

That being said though. Does anyone else feel bad when you make a post here and then forget to respond to it? 😜

Nice ! I like the small sized 286-12 and 286-16 motherboards, have 2 that run very well thanks to help from members here.
I forget to check posts all the time, good thing the notifications tell me when I been quoted 😉

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 16284 of 27182, by gex85

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Yesterday I quickly slammed together a build with my repaired MS-5169 mainboard. Turned out pretty well, actually. Specs:

- MSI MS-5169 Ver. 2.1 Super Socket 7 board
- AMD K6-2+ 550@600 MHz
- Voodoo 3 2000
- SB Live
- Opti ISA sound card with genuine OPL3
- 3Com Ethernet Adapter
- WD 6.4GB drive
- some random CD-ROM drive
- InWin S500 case

Basic Windows 98SE installation went finde, looks like this machine will be great fun!

Now I'm on two weeks vacation however, so not much retro activity...

My retro computers

Reply 16286 of 27182, by Joseph_Joestar

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gex85 wrote on 2020-07-25, 19:29:

- SB Live
- Opti ISA sound card with genuine OPL3

Excellent combo.

SBLive gives you soundfont-based General MIDI and SB16 compatibility, while the OPTi card provides SBPro and Windows Sound System compatibility as well as genuine OPL3 for FM synth. You have a lot of options covered with just two cards.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 16287 of 27182, by creepingnet

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It came in.......the Versa M75 that is.....

So here's the assessment

Working/Good
- CMOS battery is good
- runs NESticle at full frame rate
- runs most DOS games perfectly
- came with 2 batteries (no floppy)
- the batteries are the newer smart batteries
- looks to have latest BIOS (1997)
- original NEC NL6448ac30 panel is not cracked

Broken/Missing
- digitizer is cracked and not working, plus blurry (hard to see through).
- can't figure out the words+ thing yet
- need to change driver setup in FreeDOS for sound and wifi
- missing the pen for touch screen (1/8" phono connector)
- have not figured out words+ thing yet
- lots of adhesive to remove (words+ was velcroed to bottom)
- no smartbay floppy (my other might work).
- doors for pcmcia, rear ports, and Dock gone
- hinge casing BADLY cracked

My plans.....
- replace digitizer, get pinout for pen and make my own if I can't find one.
- hinge cover rebuild
- replace doors
- get proper Floppy drive

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~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 16289 of 27182, by PTherapist

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Been tinkering with my 8088/XT PC for most of the day. I was running out of HDD space on the installed 20MB MFM HDD, so I decided to add a 30MB virtual D: drive via XTIDE's Serial Drive capability. I would have added an additional 30MB E: drive, but DOS 3.30 doesn't like more than 2 drives and I don't fancy upgrading to DOS 5. I reconfigured the XTIDE ROM to automatically scan the COM ports & mount the virtual D: drive at boot. This setup will suffice for the time being, eventually I'll probably buy one of those XTIDE IDE 8-Bit ISA cards.

Added a bunch more games to the new 30MB drive and have been testing them out and playing some stuff. Just had to see what Lemmings was like on 4.77MHz + CGA, it's slow & monochrome but I'd consider it playable. Also installed GEM Desktop 3.13 and a bunch of GEM apps that I used to use back in the day.

Additionally I did some web browsing using this PC. Ok, well I cheated - used mTCP's TELNET client to login to my Ubuntu server and run Links. 🤣

Reply 16290 of 27182, by Horun

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Played around with one of my 386DX-40 boards, a C3404 Rev B (MH2212, TH99 32212) found the ext. battery uses pin 4 for + and pin 1 for -, opposite of most 286/386 boards.
Also figured out some jumpers on my Holtek LCMEIO-2A (Holtek EIO-2 v1.1) ISA IDE/Floppy/multi card based on Holtek HT6550A. Found the datasheet and J10 needs to be on 1-2 or else the card does not work proper. There is good silk screening on the card for most jumpers but not J10 and nothing anywhere on the net mentions it (I could find nothing). Also the datasheet has jumper settings if the chip is a HT6552. Included a picture of card and of the jumper settings.

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Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 16291 of 27182, by aha2940

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Helped my sister's boyfriend to replace the old 10GB HDD on his OG xbox with a newer SATA 120GB one. We spend almost all day on that (had to read a lot of documentation / do many testing) but in the end it worked fine.

Reply 16292 of 27182, by BetaC

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aha2940 wrote on 2020-07-26, 04:49:

Helped my sister's boyfriend to replace the old 10GB HDD on his OG xbox with a newer SATA 120GB one. We spend almost all day on that (had to read a lot of documentation / do many testing) but in the end it worked fine.

It'll be easier in time, and if they eventually get to the point of installing BIOS Mods, it becomes even easier.

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Reply 16293 of 27182, by LewisRaz

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I got time to test my pc chips m912 and VLB I/O controller that both arrived from different sellers but packed the same way.

1 layer of bubble wrap and then wrapped in paper...

Incredibly they both still work.

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Reply 16294 of 27182, by wiretap

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Got the A2000 yesterday. It has a GVP SCSI card with 4MB RAM. Battery leakage will need to be cleaned up, along with a socket/CPU replacement which I have on order. PSU is dead, so I'll refurb that as well. Traces seem to have continuity still, just the solder mask is discolored and makes it look like traces are eaten away. I'll take out the removable disc and probably add a SCSI CD-ROM, as well as convert the SCSI HDD on the GVP card to PCMCIA-->CF since I already have an adapter.

I'll be removing the battery and taking the whole motherboard out for a full cleaning and cap replacement soon. I have an ATX PSU adapter on the way so I can thoroughly test the unit.

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Reply 16295 of 27182, by wiretap

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Soldered a QFP ultra fine pitch Trident TVGA9000i-3 chip for my ISA Super VGA. Used hot air and solder paste. It turned out pretty good, but I need some higher quality paste.

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Circuit Board Repair Manuals

Reply 16296 of 27182, by mrau

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Horun wrote on 2020-07-26, 02:27:

Also figured out some jumpers on my Holtek LCMEIO-2A (Holtek EIO-2 v1.1) ISA IDE/Floppy/multi card based on Holtek HT6550A.

this thing has 16 data bits but only 11 address bits on isa connector - how come?

Reply 16297 of 27182, by Horun

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mrau wrote on 2020-07-26, 14:18:
Horun wrote on 2020-07-26, 02:27:

Also figured out some jumpers on my Holtek LCMEIO-2A (Holtek EIO-2 v1.1) ISA IDE/Floppy/multi card based on Holtek HT6550A.

this thing has 16 data bits but only 11 address bits on isa connector - how come?

Good question ! I also have a Maxtor ISA 16bit IDE/floppy card (with Goldstar chips) and it has all 16 data but only 11 address lines also. Ahh found this:
"ISA was the basis for development of the ATA interface, used for ATA (a.k.a. IDE). Physically, ATA is essentially a simple subset of ISA, with 16 data bits, support for exactly one IRQ and one DMA channel, and 3 address bits. To this ISA subset, ATA adds two IDE address select ("chip select") lines and a few unique signal lines specific to ATA/IDE hard disks.."

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 16298 of 27182, by Arbuthnot

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Today I made a quick and ugly BIOS battery holder for my 486.

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Reply 16299 of 27182, by aha2940

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Today I configured the PCMCIA ethernet card on both: my thinkpad 560X laptop (dlink DFE-690TXD) and thinkpad 360CE (3Com 3cxe589et) to work on DOS. The d-link was a bit different than the 3Com because before using the packet driver, I had to install the cardsoft drivers (for the PCMCIA slots) and also use an "enabler" software provided by DLINK, which seems to detect the card and assign resources to it. In the end it works well and I like this card: it works on anything from DOS to Windows 7, it requires no "breakable" or "loseable" dongle (contrary to 3Com PCMCIA cards) and it's 10/100 which is fast enough for all my retro needs. The bad side is that the ethernet connector is like a big "tail" on the card, so if I use it on the lower PCMCIA slot, the upper one gets blocked, but so far, so good. The 3Com card is a standard 10Mbps, which only requires the 3c589pd.com packet driver to work. It's not fast, but then again it's on a 486/DX2 50MHz.

BetaC wrote on 2020-07-26, 05:25:
aha2940 wrote on 2020-07-26, 04:49:

Helped my sister's boyfriend to replace the old 10GB HDD on his OG xbox with a newer SATA 120GB one. We spend almost all day on that (had to read a lot of documentation / do many testing) but in the end it worked fine.

It'll be easier in time, and if they eventually get to the point of installing BIOS Mods, it becomes even easier.

Yes, much time went into the locking part of the hard drive, plus the cable replacement required for the SATA drive (original 40-thread PATA cable would not work, had to use an 80-thread one), plus the eeprom.bin thing. We learned a bit, though. We had to softmod the xbox because it's one of the later ones which are harder to have the BIOS modded.