RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-07, 13:00:

I prefer my drives to be easily swapped so for a SATA SSD I'd either have to buy a SATA IDE adapter to use it in my current HDD rack or buy a new SATA drive bay.
An IDE drive is just around 5$ or less and I'm also concerned about the wear on the SSD under Windows XP even if most people say it's not an issue with modern drives and limited use.

Honestly, as you can already tell, I think you should be more concerned about how much life those old IDE drives have left. I use SSDs under 9x and XP, no issues so far. Then again, after the initial install and setup, I'm not writing too much to the SSD when in use. And the speed they provide is no joke. Makes the OSes fly. As long as the SSD has a DRAM cache, you should be set. But, if you prefer that "it just 'works'" approach with all of the caveats it comes with, power to you. I've moved away from HDDs in general except for in my NAS setup. Speed, reliability, and size of modern 2.5" SSDs are just too good, M.2 SSDs even better.

If you want a pure IDE flash experience, a CF card is a good choice, although I think anything beyond 9x is going to be too harsh on such drives. I only use them for DOS/Win9X.

While I find it very cool and interesting that such options exist, I still use 15 years old HDDs. It just works.
I don't have the time or energy to tinker with my retro systems. Now, my goal is to I enjoy and preserve them.
I had my share of retro build that would not work anymore when one tinker with them too much.
25 year old motherboards can be grumpy. I don't want to have to reflow them or worse after too much stress.

the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-12-07, 13:30:

Honestly, as you can already tell, I think you should be more concerned about how much life those old IDE drives have left. I use SSDs under 9x and XP, no issues so far. Then again, after the initial install and setup, I'm not writing too much to the SSD when in use. And the speed they provide is no joke. Makes the OSes fly. As long as the SSD has a DRAM cache, you should be set. But, if you prefer that "it just 'works'" approach with all of the caveats it comes with, power to you. I've moved away from HDDs in general except for in my NAS setup. Speed, reliability, and size of modern 2.5" SSDs are just too good, M.2 SSDs even better.

If you want a pure IDE flash experience, a CF card is a good choice, although I think anything beyond 9x is going to be too harsh on such drives. I only use them for DOS/Win9X.

I'm moving over to CF for setups where less then 4GB capacity is enough. It's more about accessibility when it comes to working hard drive than the reliability of those working hard drive. And it's also makes it more convenient to move data over. But for Pentium 3 or newer builds, I'm firmly sticking to the old-school hard drives. 10GB and larger drives are cheap and abundant. Also, for the same reason I prefer my games on CDs and DVDs, the sound and sluggishness of the hard drives are I think part of the charm.

So I beat StarCraft on my Budget '99 Retro PC. Installed off the original CD I bought 22 years ago in April 1998.

Victory Screen

I've beat a couple games on this build. Some I'd beaten before, some that were games I'd overlooked at the time. One thing that is constantly blowing my mind is that I totally forgot in 1998, when I was 14 years old, I almost always beat games with cheat codes. Especially strategy games. Playing them without now makes me realize how much I was missing.

Not sure what my next main focus will be. Been slowly playing through Unreal, and dabbling in Syndicate as well.

Hey Guys

found an old DFI Board at my attic.
Nice Color and true cool PCB Design for 2007 😀

That's a nice board. I've always liked the DFI lanparty boards.

After fixing 3 laptops had to tidy up little bit to do some tests (benchmarks!) and post it later on 😉
Siemens 486 (PCD-4ND)
Toshiba 486 (t4850ct)
Toshiba P120 (700CT)
2nd Toshiba P120 (Tecra 510CDT)
Toshiba P133 (430CDT)
Toshiba P166 MMX (300CDT)

Dragged 3 dot matrix from out of the ceiling that have been stored there for over 25 years. A Super 5 24pin line feed printer, Panasonic KX-1191 and Pansonic kx-p-1180. I'll make a good printer out of the Panasonic ones as internally they share the same component using the KX-1191 body as that has not yellowed like the KX-P-1180. Shouldn't take long.

I replaced DR Dos 6.0 on my Redstone Computers XT Turbo system with IBM Dos 5.02. IBMs first version of Dos for consumer use on non IBM systems. It seems to run a faster than DR Dos 6.0 when executing programs. Also fitted the blacked HDD floppies in it. It looks rather smart.

Are Biostar 486 boards any good, or should I avoid them?

I can't speak to their 486 boards but I've never had any issues with BioStar motherboards in general.

Ordered an Atari BASIC cartridge to troubleshoot the ROM BASIC issues in my Atari XE GS. I still haven't ordered (physically) smaller capacitors for my Gigabyte P4 board. Motivation for this stuff is in critically short supply.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-12-07, 22:25:

I can't speak to their 486 boards but I've never had any issues with BioStar motherboards in general.

Their 486 VLB boards are built well, have a few and they are as good as an Asus, DFI, Giga or FIC of the same period imho

Got a new TL866ii plus BIOS programmer and have been playing with it. Also made a pdf of a manual for a old PcChip motherboard, going to make another after I scan/photo the pages of the Opti 495 SX cache manual (Artek board).
And going to drink a few American beers from a company opened in 1852 here, if that is not vintage then what is 😀

Is this a good board?

Or this?

Spent the weekend trying to get BeOS installed on my single-spindle Thinkpad 240. The T21 is still down (somewhat) due to the blink-of-death issue, and it doesn’t really have a caddy that can be used for SD-to-IDE adapters. What to do? The Compaq Evo N600c to the rescue. It’s a Tualatin P3m laptop, one of the last machines with both AC97+Legacy SB Pro hardware support (albeit with software wagetable FM synth).

It also has a HDD mounting rail that works well with SD2IDE setups - this is something often overlooked when working with 2-spindle vintage laptops.

Rail in...

MicroSD is great for testing like this. It’s (relatively) cheap and easy to work with.

Rail out...

Although for heavy write situations this really need to be swapped out with an mSATA SSD and an adapter.

Was able to get the BeOS R5 Installer image working - too bad not much drivers are available.

What about Haiku?

For some reason Haiku refused to boot up on the Evo n600c (freezing up on GPU init) but running the SD card as the virtual drive in VMWare player seemed to have worked. Not that it mattered that much, mind you. Haiku doesn’t work well on vintage hardware like this - on Beta1 r2 it’s missing drivers for Pre-AC97 audio, PS/2 trackpoint support is DOA, and apps like NetPositive requires SSE2 (which implies at least a P4/Pentium-M). It worked “okay” on the Tp240, but not enough for me to actually want to retain it.

Had to swap the DVD Reader/CD writer on the Evo to another unit that burns DVDs - not that I need the DVD burning capability. Actually, I was more miffed that the default drive does not read the DVD-Rs I burn. I swear, someone needs to make a JAE50 compatible optical drive emulator or something.

Oh well, swapping out the original in its caddy isn’t difficult. Just not that great for the machine cosmetically speaking. And at the end, not really needed.

I was just scrapping an older budget PC case for not particularly valuable, but convenient parts to have, like the front panel, buttons 5.25-3.5" bay converter when I thought, I always wanted a test bench, but I think 30$ for a piece of uATX sized plexi board and twice for an aluminium one with 6 motherboard stand-offs are shamelessly overpriced so I drilled out the full ATX sized motherboard tray.

Built MCE2VGA, which required me to solder this SRAM IC, I think I never soldered anything this small so it was 'first time' for me, but I think it came out nicely...

Now I need to find somebody to program Altera FPGA for me as the cheap clone of USB Blaster causes bluescreens in my system (or maybe there's some solution to this problem?).

Also built some Atari 8-bit (XEGS/65XE/800XL) carts which use Flash ICs to store software, designed (some time ago) and printed enclosures as well...

Swapped the black front facia of an unreliable Sony 3.5" floppy drive and fitted it to a reliable TEAC 3.5" floppy drive. A bit of filing was required but I got there in the end.

Did some slight modifications to a Commodore Plus/4 today. I was missing the Commodore key on the keyboard, plus the key plunger was damaged and spare parts for the Plus/4 are a little harder to get hold of.

So I bought a replacement key from a C64 keyboard from eBay. Of course the keys differ in fitting & size on the Plus/4, so some modding was required to make it fit -

I got out the hand saw and cut the key down to the correct size, then sanded the bottom to make it smooth & level.

I cut and mashed up the underside of the key, to remove the C64 fitting and then I cut up a small plastic tube and super glued it in place (tube is a little longer than normal Plus/4 fitting, this was because I intended to retain the broken plunger, don't want to be opening this up again to replace it). Then I found a spare spring and cut that down to size to fit the Plus/4 keyboard.

It may not be the prettiest looking, but it's a close enough fit for now and most importantly it works and fills a hole on the keyboard!

I'm still keeping an eye out for a replacement keyboard though, so I probably won't bother to try and retrobright this one.

PTherapist wrote on 2020-12-09, 16:38:

Did some slight modifications to a Commodore Plus/4 today. I was missing the Commodore key on the keyboard, plus the key plunge […]
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Did some slight modifications to a Commodore Plus/4 today. I was missing the Commodore key on the keyboard, plus the key plunger was damaged and spare parts for the Plus/4 are a little harder to get hold of.

So I bought a replacement key from a C64 keyboard from eBay. Of course the keys differ in fitting & size on the Plus/4, so some modding was required to make it fit -

I got out the hand saw and cut the key down to the correct size, then sanded the bottom to make it smooth & level.

I cut and mashed up the underside of the key, to remove the C64 fitting and then I cut up a small plastic tube and super glued it in place (tube is a little longer than normal Plus/4 fitting, this was because I intended to retain the broken plunger, don't want to be opening this up again to replace it). Then I found a spare spring and cut that down to size to fit the Plus/4 keyboard.

It may not be the prettiest looking, but it's a close enough fit for now and most importantly it works and fills a hole on the keyboard!

I'm still keeping an eye out for a replacement keyboard though, so I probably won't bother to try and retrobright this one.

That's the type of repair I like. Thinking outside the box...