Rebuilt an older machine I got for free from a friend a few years ago when I was in college.

Specs:
Epox EP-7KXA
Athlon 750MHz T-Bird - Slot A
384MB RAM
40GB WD Caviar
ATI Radeon 7500 64MB
Sound Blaster 16 CT5803
Realtek RTL8139C NIC
NEC ND-3540A
WinME 4.90.3000 w/KernelEX

Nice. I love slot A systems

Made a few Adlibs today.

Almost. Two are incomplete because I ordered too few logic chips and capacitors. Next week I'll fulfil them. And there's need to populate the second Yamaha chip - I need to find it in my basement. Plus add the goldpins.
Tomorrow I'll test them.

You see, I said to myself that I would go back and start reading this thread from the very beginning in my spare time. I'd run along through the thread and eventually catch up.

Five months later, I'm over halfway through! Kind of forgot to keep up with the current thread, though. Had a couple of recent hauls to go through, last time was a *mint* HP Phenom II, inside and out (apart from a removed label on the front which cleaned up nicely) and a not all that retro but nice i5 laptop, and another of the ubiquitous IP35 Pro motherboards (I have 3 and I sold one earlier). I also got hold of another Socket 423 Gateway P4 in working condition, this one a 1.3 GHz. Case is missing a piece though.

This time, apart from 4 dell I5s (sheesh), I got an apparently unused Seasonic PSU, a Dell Optiplex Pentium III 733, and an Asus P3V4X with a PIII 750, in a decent late 90s tower, but missing the side panel ( 🙁 ). It's about time I started 3D printing adapters for old case front panels on more recent "trash" cases, I now have two nice ones that don't have complete cases (and a nice desktop case with a terribly boring front panel I might trade to someone later). "Cases missing parts" seems to be a theme now.

Also included a few video cards including a Rage 128 and an AGP 7300 GT (I think that's my newest AGP card, 2006). Mainly SODIMMs for RAM, I am now desperately short on DDR3 (I have about 8 empty systems - most of which I will likely sell when I have enough RAM).

I still haven't done that video on the Great I-Almost-Missed-It Winter Liqmatrix Haul, but I did check out everything and move it to new containers. It's been kind of a rough, on-and-off winter and spring, health wise, but powering through it.

I'll get some more pics of other stuff soon. I also have some soldering to do, and I'm expecting a new set of shelves soon for a Big Reorganization to clear a space for my 3D printing workbench, thus clearing up the Wall O Shelves where most of my parts live, which is now blocked by the workbench. After that reorganization I will finally do my own mini-giveaway, I keep telling myself. Unless I get starting a build of a pi 1541 like PTherapist posted! I was looking at Ultimate II carts with no intention of buying recently. And I need to get/build a PC adapter for my 1571. So many plans, so little gets done on a daily basis! 😀

The sad thing is, I got rid of a LOT of stuff last year. I'm just a hoarder, I guess.

Merovign wrote on 2021-05-21, 01:28:

I still haven't done that video on the Great I-Almost-Missed-It Winter Liqmatrix Haul, but I did check out everything and move it to new containers. It's been kind of a rough, on-and-off winter and spring, health wise, but powering through it.

The sad thing is, I got rid of a LOT of stuff last year. I'm just a hoarder, I guess.

Great to see you man! Haven't heard from you in awhile. I pop into Dragon Caesar’s vintage hardware Discord server off and on. Definitely get a video together when you can. Would love to see your extensive collection as I am sure everyone would.

Been working on my AcerAcross 486DX2/50 system. Installed a DVD reader to access CDr/ws as Master on the second IDE channal.. Installed a second hdd, a Conner 406meg hdd as slave. Left the master 520meg hdd as fat16 for dos. Used Partition Magic to format the slave hdd as HPFS or OS/2. Installed OS2 v3 Warp Connect on the fat formatted hdd without network support as I'll install OS/2 v4 Warp Server OS/2 network client as that has a 32-bit tcp/ip stack and DHCP support which v3 Warp Connect doesn't have.

OS/2 v3 installed and was set up in 25 minutes or so from the DVD reader.. The reason I installed it on a fat partition is that I can switch between Dos and OS/2 without needing a boot manager. To boot to Dos I just choose the Duel boot icon the Command Prompts group. To boot back to OS/2 from Dos just type C:\OS2\boot /dos and press enter. The OS/2 v3 installation was less than 50 megabytes.

This system dedicated to os/guis except win9x

liqmat wrote on 2021-05-21, 01:46:

Merovign wrote on 2021-05-21, 01:28:

I still haven't done that video on the Great I-Almost-Missed-It Winter Liqmatrix Haul, but I did check out everything and move it to new containers. It's been kind of a rough, on-and-off winter and spring, health wise, but powering through it.

The sad thing is, I got rid of a LOT of stuff last year. I'm just a hoarder, I guess.

Great to see you man! Haven't heard from you in awhile. I pop into Dragon Caesar’s vintage hardware Discord server off and on. Definitely get a video together when you can. Would love to see your extensive collection as I am sure everyone would.

Thank you! I finally have proper video camera now, sort of. Good enough, anyway. It is time for a massive organizational effort, so I should probably start videoing the parts as I bring them out, to compile and edit later. I have a place to mount the camera over my workbench. When I clear the space I'll get footage of my Wall Of Cases, of which I posted a pic or two here. Configuration is somewhat different now.

Mind you, with this vast pile of junk, it would have to be a series of videos! Been meaning to do something like that for a while now, he keeps saying. 😀

Caluser2000 just gave me an idea for that Gateway Socket 423 P4 - I believe that was from the year the last version of end-user OS/2 was released. Hmmmm...

All this crazy planning is a least a good sign - I always get like that when my health improves.

Fitted a D-Link 10mbs nic to the AcerAcross with Warp v3 on it, installed the driver as well as the TCPIP protocol. Activated the nic and installed the EZIRC client then connected a network cable between the 10/100 switch and nic. Rebooted then at the OS/2 desktop ran EZIRC and logged in to freenode and then went in to the #win31 channel.

fool wrote on 2021-05-20, 18:12:

Today I repaired Gainward Geforce4 Ti4200. It was giving colorful pattern-screens and crashes during 3DMark2k.
Then I found this https://web.archive.org/web/20031104011507/ht … 15&pagenumber=1
It is a (old) known capacitor issue. Replaced 3x 1500uF caps with (overkill) Nichicon 1000uF low-ESR polymers. Removal of large SMD capacitors may be hard with an iron, but one trick is to GENTLY jiggle the capacitor with pliers until legs snap or pops out. After that it's easy job.

Interesting... I've got/had a GF4 card with wild behavior and inability to run anything without checkerboarding... if/when that turns up again, I'll have to check out the capacitors. Not sure it's a gainward, or a 4200, but it was 3 or 4 years after it was new, so maybe capacitor age/plague and a fuss was not raised because out of warranty a ways.

3D printing a fume extractor frame. Well, it relates to what I'm going to do with retro equipment! Using a filter from a robot vacuum and a 120mm fan.

Need to get a couple of laptops off my bench to make room for the next project. Already tested the new PIII.

Also cleaned up a Logitech Wingman Extreme. I need to find my circa 1990 CH Flightstick, if I still have it.

Got the new set of shelves in, will try to get it set up tomorrow... err, today. Also got more anti-static bubble wrap.

Did a retro modern activity with my Amiga 2000 this morning.

A little overclock on the Pistorm. Now it is as fast as my A4000. 😀

And got my RGB2HDMI CPLD limited edition running.

So, this is a frankenstein A2000.. how many Pi's will fit in it? 🤣

Specs:
Pistorm (RPi 3A+)
RGB2HDMI (Pi Zero)
Super Denise
1MB Agnus Chip RAM
ATX power supply conversion (300w)
USB keyboard CIA adapter
GVP A2000-HC+8
Ariadne II NIC
Plextor 40x SCSI CD-ROM
Dual floppies

MOTOROLLIN' indeed ! 😁

The Amiga is my favorite computer that I never had or even really used, and probably never will. 😒

If I really get my gumption up (retroing isn't just nostalgia for me, I want lots of stuff that I never had), I imagine I could probably emulate or even put an emulation machine in a fake case. I like the A3000 case best, it has kind of an 80s sci-fi vibe about it. It occurs to me if you were to make a case from scratch, you could probably just design your own with design cues from the originals.

I sometimes think about what might have happened in an alternate universe where, say, Commodore had gone on with the Amiga until today, or CP/M had evolved as a standard the same way DOS or Unix did and its descendants were in use today. Hey, it's a way to pass the time, right? 😀

That's the Wingman I cleaned yesterday. Potentially late DOS all the way up to Windows 10, though it will probably go on a Win98 system.

Fixed a Dallas DS12887A yesterday by cutting away parts of the side and soldering a CR2032 battery holder in place. The Dallas chip finds it's home onto a Soyo 5TC2 motherboard that I found in a system on a dump-location. The system would not go past the P.O.S.T. due the bad Dallas battery. On the 5TC2 the Dallas is socketed which makes life a lot easier.

Just configured my Slot A Thunderbird 750 build listed above for a dualboot config, which consists of Mandrake Linux 10.1 LE2005 and WinME. This means I had to split the HDD's partitions in two 20GB partitions (from a single 40GB partition under WinME), so that one runs Mandrake Linux and the other runs WinME 4.90.3000.

I replaced the 18GB LVD320 15K SCSI disk in my Windows 98 box with a more period correct Fujitsu 9GB 10K disc and rebuilt it. The 18GB is going on eBay unless anybody here wants it.

I also received the 'new' Pentium 200 MMX from eBay (£3.64 delivered 😂) to replace the one that caused system freezes. Seems spot-on so far, no freezes doing a DAT backup.

Merovign wrote on 2021-05-23, 00:01:

The Amiga is my favorite computer that I never had or even really used, and probably never will. 😒

If I really get my gumption up (retroing isn't just nostalgia for me, I want lots of stuff that I never had), I imagine I could probably emulate or even put an emulation machine in a fake case. I like the A3000 case best, it has kind of an 80s sci-fi vibe about it. It occurs to me if you were to make a case from scratch, you could probably just design your own with design cues from the originals.

The best ruote for that is to go with a Checkmate A1500+ or Checkmate A1500 Mini case. They are modeled after the A3000 style. You can mount almost anything in them.. Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX, Raspberry Pi, Mister FPGA, Unamiga FPGA, etc.

https://www.checkmate1500plus.com/

With the cheapest option being the Raspberry Pi, it works out pretty awesome when you use Pimiga or Amikit. You'll get an excellent Amiga OS experience.

Cool, really tempted to put one of my A500s in one. Though it might make more sense to put the A1200 in one as the CDROM and PSU lashup is a bit primitive. I have a hard time spending money though, dirt poor too long. Maybe I should round up some crap and try for a trade on Amibay 🤣

Replaced thermal paste in some video cards, I really don't like plastic clip mounting mechanism, so I bought bunch of small springs, M2.5 screws, metal washers, nylon washers and locking nuts. First I tried that with an old Geforce MX, and this is how the - i suppose - original thermal paste looked like... not even touching the heatsink (which is far from being flat). Anyway, putting screws with springs in place of original clips seems to work fine. Nylon washer insulates the PCB.

wiretap wrote on 2021-05-23, 11:29:

With the cheapest option being the Raspberry Pi, it works out pretty awesome when you use Pimiga or Amikit. You'll get an excellent Amiga OS experience.

I will have to check that out, thanks!