Versa 40EC is fixed now, - killed the MoBo video circuit - luckily could order a third (where the heck are these guys getting all these Versa E/V motherboards from - they had 2 in 2019 - now they have FIVE in stock for only $20 e/a.). though it still needs an LCD panel. I'm ordering some FFC connectors and cables for a "best of parts" panel I'm putting together. I may still order another one from China as well though, and keep trying to fix the -12 version. I did some diagnostics on that panel and it looks like a component is shorting something out in the controller board.

Versa M/75 is almost done being all setup with the 80GB drive. I set it up to triple boot to DOS (7.0), Windows 95 OSR 2.5, and Windows For Workgroups 3.11 - as this one has WSS audio and also can emulate a SoundBlaster via WSS - although without the OPL. In some ways, I favor the M/75 because I can game on it while watching TV and I don't have to go the extra step to shut the music off, and it has a 640x480 LCD Panel instead of the letterboxed 800x600 one on my P/75 (which I like better for emulation because it does not get cut off - plus the Pentium is better for MAME and NESticle). I just put SHSUCD and OMI on it, and got mTCP all setup for the DOS Portion. WFWG is working and I'm making new tiled backgrounds for it, and kind of rediscovered the joy of Zsoft/Win31 paint in the process.

Left the P/75 on standby all day, still had a full battery 12 hours later - man, I'm ordering another one of those batteries! And get the dumb version for the 40EC.

What's also nice is all this activity is making a GREAT cloak for the Wife's birthday gifts - she won't suspect a thing! Never saw what I ordered for her because I used the Motherboard as a cloak (slipped the gift inside the box while I was outside). This is how you be a good husband and still keep the train of Vintage Computing rolling.

I may also have line on the other one I Could not get ahold of - so maybe I'll wait on the history/benchmark/comparison video for awhile.....I'd LIKE to get a full collection together for that one.

Spent the day helping my mom, she is 84 and not in good health. If that not working with vintage then guess someone who was born before WWII is not old 🤣.
Other than that am re-working some old archives off way-back to create a few file libraries usable locally of some old web site info that can not be found the same anywhere else.
Also worked on some old .DOC's trying to build PDF's but not much luck yet. Got the Word5 coding to help on one but am getting too old to figure it out yet 🙁

I finally got my elaborate setup working to "dial" to a TCP connection. Now I can connect to telnet BBS'es and such from real hardware by using a standard modem. Hearing the modem sound again after all these years was definitely a special moment 😁

It was quite a hassle to get everything working reliably. In the end, this was the winning combination:

(Internal) modem in DOS machine -> Linksys PAP2T (provides analogue phone line and SIP conversion) -> Asterisk -> another modem via a serial-to-USB converter -> modem-tcp (with some modifications[1]) -> some TCP host

So far I've only tried 19200 baud but the full 56k should be possible, assuming my serial-to-USB converter supports hardware flow (the specs say it does).

[1] On answering the RING it reads twice from the serial port where it should do it only once, at least in my case. Also made things compatible with Python 3.

Today I booted a PCChips M747 with a Celeron 300A (Slot1) 128MB (PC133), the card booted up smoothly and displayed the BIOS screens.
The integrated VGA is an 8MB SIS 6326 (AGP), the chipsets are SIS 5600-5595 (BXPRO), the integrated audio is a CMI8330 branded as Sound Pro.
The format is Baby / AT, but it also has an ATX power supply connector.
As HD I temporarily used a 512MB IDE-CF adapter, as OS I installed Win98SE. Soon I will do some bench, and if I want I can test other PII and P CPUs !!! from 300 to 500MHz.

Ah SIS 6326! I remember going to a LAN game round some kinda friend's house and I had an SiS 6326 graphics card - I think my first AGP card - and I was absolutely destroyed by all the proper 3D cards in the house 😁

Went through one of my boxes of stuff that had some old hardware and found two semi-broken Promise RAID cards... in addition to the one working one. They are all Promise FastTrak S150 TX2 cards that I modded to be TX2plus units.

Back then in 2011, the two were recognized when installed in a test board, but now... one of them no longer worked, and since the functional one of the two had a busted SATA port, I replaced it with one from the now dead card. Neither of the semi-broken cards had any SMD electrolytic capacitors on them as they were broken off when I got them (I bought them in broken condition for cheap to begin with), so I will have to order some at some point next month.

Regarding the one working one, that one went to the main webserver with a set of Maxtor MaXLine Plus II HDDs (2x 250GB EIDE and 2x 250GB SATA) installed on an Intel SAI2 dual Pentium III board and ran for years until it was retired in 2017.

--

In addition to the RAID card stuff, I'm going to order some more EPROMs, as it's going to my Sega Genesis setup. I currently have a set of 9 EPROMs of different capacities. With some of them, I'm going to make a few Sega Genesis test cartridges.

Finally opened up the "quarantined" large package to check out the latest vintage computer facebook purchase: One of early but quality ATX/AT beige chassis that was mostly used with early slot A athlon white box back in the day.

I had this particular chassis back in the day and really liked it. Took me nearly 5 years of looking.

Cheers!

I'm about a week late with this update ...

I purchased another IBM PC Compact printer from eBay to have another spare. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it is a small serial printer running at 1200 bps that prints on fax paper. The print quality is atrocious but it never needs ribbons, so that is a plus. Originally designed for use with the PCjr, these could be used on PCs with an adapter cable. They were also often found on C64s after IBM dumped a load of them onto the secondary market.

These printers are not all bad. Here is a sample of a JPG that I printed on it:

This particular printer had a D shell 25 pin male connector on it wired as DTE (Data Terminal Equipment) which is wrong for interfacing with a computer. The original PCjr connector had been hacked off and crudely replaced. I corrected the gender and the wiring so now it has a D shell 25 pin female connector wired as DCE (Data Communications Equipment). I used an RS232 breakout box to do the debugging, which I found to be mesmerizing to watch while it prints. If you want to enjoy the blinky lights there is a video linked the page where I describe the printer.

That led to some fun with an oscilloscope trying to find bits on the wire. It was a little tricky with a 20 year old analog oscilloscope with no buffering, but I was able to clearly capture three full bytes at 4800 bps and decode by hand just by looking at the voltages on the scope.

("SOS" at 4800 bps, no parity, 8 data bits, one stop bit on an analog oscilloscope.)

It was a good day ...

I remember that printer fondly. My very first computer was a very decked out PCJr my uncle had given to me when I was 4 or 5 I had a blast with that system. It had a ton of games on disks as well as from cartridges.

SteveC wrote on 2021-01-31, 22:04:

Ah SIS 6326! I remember going to a LAN game round some kinda friend's house and I had an SiS 6326 graphics card - I think my first AGP card - and I was absolutely destroyed by all the proper 3D cards in the house 😁

I just came across one myself - 8 Mb AGP.

My 233 MMX has 16 Mb + 4 from a Voodoo II 🤣.

This came in from Poland today

At some point I'll put it in a NIC and place the mess into my 386 - hopefully that'll get that PC to recognize the CF card.

I also upgraded my ZIP 100 drive to a ZIP 250 in my 233 MMx

That computer also received an ATI 128XL 16 Mb PCI and the outgoing 4 Mb Rage II is in another computer. While I was at it, I put in a 128 Mb SDRAM module, and because I had a 64 Mb also from a recent haul, they both went in. 192 Mb RAM now 😁. At some point I have to get to cutting a hole in the side of the case to increase airflow.

I'd probably keep the Zip100 drive in - I was a beta tester for the Zip 250 and even though we all told Iomega they were awful they released them anyway! I found the drives and media unreliable. If you have a working Zip250 I'd treasure it and not wear it out using Zip100 disks 😀

Also I think there's some restriction on if you can format a Zip100 disk in a Zip250 drive?

Today I successfully tested another motherboard that I recently got. The Shuttle HOT-591P, a Baby AT Super Socket 7 board with Via MVP3 chipset.
Works like a charm and now has the latest BIOS on it, too. So now it supports K6-2+ CPUs with an official BIOS.
Interesting thing about this board is that it supports setting the CPU voltage via BIOS.

@mbbrutman : that pic may be okay for an old printer, while I sometimes like to complain about the price of printer ink I am actually thankful the days of slow noisy dot-matrix printers with chained paper are looong gone. Uh my retro activity? I have been trying to convert a game I wrote from Quick Basic to GWBasic...

Today I desoldered the bi-colored LED from my Tulip Vision Line DC Compact (TC36).
It looks like the anode/diode part responsible for the amber color is defective. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a replacement 5 Volt bi-color green/amber LED, so I ordered two seperate LEDs...

Also rewired the pc speaker, the small pcb turned completely green thanks to 30 year old AA batteries.

Tried out a bunch of soundfonts in various games. Came to the conclusion that Creative's GM35REVC.SF2 sounds the most balanced overall, at least to my ears. Also, it often beats much larger user-made soundfonts in terms of instrument quality.

For reference, that's the 3.5 MB soundfont which is installed by default when using the AWE64 Gold driver CD. Here are some music samples. I even like it more than the larger Creative soundfonts which came with later sound cards like the SBLive and Audigy.

- Taking a shot at getting a "V" model Versa. The Non-Removable screen model that is.
- Bought the FFC cables and connectors for the NL6448AC30-10 screen that I'm repairing.

I uploaded the 3 hour Baking Soda + Superglue fix video over the weekend. I don't think I'll be doing a YT video that long anymore.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-02-01, 21:25:

Tried out a bunch of soundfonts in various games. Came to the conclusion that Creative's GM35REVC.SF2 sounds the most balanced overall, at least to my ears. Also, it often beats much larger user-made soundfonts in terms of instrument quality.

For reference, that's the 3.5 MB soundfont which is installed by default when using the AWE64 Gold driver CD. Here are some music samples. I even like it more than the larger Creative soundfonts which came with later sound cards like the SBLive and Audigy.

If you are willing to pay a reasonable amount, the best 4MB soundfont, IMHO, is the Voice Crystal one . It was made by the people who made the official GUS patchset, among other things .

See here for a sample recording and a link to the official web page .
Re: How much ram do I really need sb32

and a link to the official web page :
Re: How much ram do I really need sb32

Today I burned a dual-layer DVD, using Nero Burning ROM, on a 15-year old IDE DVD writer. Surprisingly, it burned without any errors, even if the burning+verifying process took more than an hour. I'm glad this burner still works fine.

darry wrote on 2021-02-02, 00:56:

If you are willing to pay a reasonable amount, the best 4MB soundfont, IMHO, is the Voice Crystal one . It was made by the peopl […]
Show full quote

If you are willing to pay a reasonable amount, the best 4MB soundfont, IMHO, is the Voice Crystal one . It was made by the people who made the official GUS patchset, among other things .

See here for a sample recording and a link to the official web page .
Re: How much ram do I really need sb32

and a link to the official web page :
Re: How much ram do I really need sb32

Duke3D certainly sounds excellent on that one. But I would need to hear it in a few more games before making a decision, and I just haven't found enough recordings so far. To clarify, my main problem with most soundfonts is that they often sound great in mainstream titles (or rather their most popular tracks) but turn to crap in less prominent games.

This is why GM35REVC.SF2 seems so nicely balanced to my ears. It tends to sound decent (though not perfect) in a wide range of games, and not just in Duke, Doom, Heretic, Descent etc. Many fan-made soundfonts sounded awful when I threw something like Gabriel Knight, King's Quest VI or Stonekeep at them.

That said, from what I've seen on their website, Voice Crystal seems to be professionally made by experienced developers, so it would probably fit my needs as well. I would just like to hear some more game recordings with it.