Finished the NES game theme by swapping the original shell to the TMNT custom painted shell I got off of eBay. That and I also installed the genuine 72 pin edge connector (ordered 3 of them all refurbished and shiny) since the cheap one from Amazon was at a low reliability rate.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-09, 20:40:

No MickySoft Windows NT though. But is that really a bad thing.

Actually, there is a technical reason why NTOS never supported ARM until very recently, aside them being underpowered compared with the MIPS, PPCs and Alphas of the era.

"Originally it was designed for ARMv5 and ARMv4, but these cores have an MMU that is incompatible with ReactOS/Windows multiprocessor requirements, and lacks instructions needed for synchronization done in user-mode, so currently the port targets ARMv7 compatible cores."

https://reactos.org/wiki/ARM_Port

That was discovered by ReactOS guys, but the same limitation applies for WinNT.

Been pulling G-Luxon caps off a socket 370 Shuttle. Good thing I decided to do them all, some of them perfectly flat on top... and blown out at the bottom. Component tester doesn't even recognise them as trying to be capacitors, one of them must have corroded plates touching internally though, it thought that one might be a diode. Noticed something else amiss on the board though, a gouge across the serial port lines, and the spacing on them is hairlike, as are the traces, don't think that board is having onboard serial again. Unless maybe I ugly-fix it, with that set of lines "jumpered" with a bit of ribbon cable, they spread out either end, so would be MUCH easier to solder.

Edit: Oh you know what might work on those traces, individual strands of headphone cable, and soldering them staggered, like 5mm between solder points, so I don't blob two together by moving the soldering iron 5 microns too far one way.

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-09, 22:29:

How does it sound at shutdown?
Make some recording, there is a lack of hdd noises collection thread on the forums!

I'll do that this weekend.

babtras wrote on 2021-07-09, 20:19:

Got a 386 desktop going, with a genuine AdLib card in it. Installed the AdLib Jukebox and enjoyed grooving to the tunes. Now I can start working on how to play music from a Turbo C++ program.

Adlib ?
You got to play Dune on it ! 😀

Been running spinrite on my 39gb maxtor diamondmax 8 i got on ebay it was running like it was faulty but its in denial like theres nothing wrong.
I am at day 3 of 4 days waiting for it to complete.
I've used spinrite 5 on many of my old disks one is a quatum fireball a 5gb model with a weak cluster spinrite gets it going again but eventually i have to run it again.
If I just went with a bad mark on it throughput would drop down so slow its like pushing a broken car in cmparison really.
So all my healthy units get the spinrite once a year they havent failed two such units i got in 2003 Maxtor diamondmax 8 40gb(gamer edition) they still running like new today and don't fail at all in RAID 0 but I always break the raid, format them run spinrite then build a new RAID for software refresh.
Oh and my old 250mb WD Caviar from 1995 (manufactured 1994) i used to run on windows 95 1st edition vlb controller in 1996 - 1998 got the spinrite treatment sometimes i will run that disk just as a browser cache for a giggle (a whole hard disk for a broswer cache & emergency coffee cup coaster)
I recommend spinrite above all other hard disk regeneration tools and try get your disks in working pc's not in the mail because although they may be cheap they get shock treatments on their way to their new home without fragile handling but notebook / laptop disks do well.
If i decide to sell disks they would be magnetically underwritten (factory surface condition) then run through spinrite to ensure proper even surface read / write tracks amplification then smart tested with victoria. DiskFresh is a signal tool that runs in idle windows time I like that too. I typed in for everything retro to today magnetic preservation society wise if one exists

1https://alternativeto.net/software/spinrite/

But anyway back to the job at hand the pc build of 2001 is holding out terrific in doing this process and that means future jobs for it but on a disk controller with ATA133 than ATA100 it should cut back the hours a little.
Was thinking of doing a promo to get people sending their disks for rejuvination I mean it takes a long time the convenience 😀

Recapping an AV11... annnd it's half alive... Got it in a box lot of boards some 15 years ago, got no history on it, was sitting there with it's bloaty caps waiting for me to get desperate enough for an s370 board. So, we go through the POST tests, and get to FF annnnd nothing happens, well the screen is lit, the monitor turned on, and the CPU fan is spinning from the board header, but nothing more happens at FF... no VGA BIOS splash, no BIOS splash, system summary, nada. Too late now, might try different CPU tomorrow, but wondering if the BIOS is good or not. Tried a SiS 6326 and a Riva 128 for vid so far, same with both.

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-09, 22:29:

How does it sound at shutdown?
Make some recording, there is a lack of hdd noises collection thread on the forums!

Here's the recordings of my HDD, since that definitely counts as a retro activity.

This one is with the fan and speaker disconnected, and the case open.

Fan and Speaker connected, still open.

Closed up as apple intended.

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-09, 22:29:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-09, 20:11:

He! he! he! Absolutely love it 🤣!

The 20meg scsi hdd on my Mac SE is quite loud but still seems to chug along quite nicely after all these years...😉

Same, make some recording^

Being a grumpy selfish old man I'd rather saver the experience all by myself thanks. Just in cast one of those pesky "get everything old in emulation" types get hold of it ...😉

BetaC wrote on 2021-07-11, 06:43:

Here's the recordings of my HDD, since that definitely counts as a retro activity. Just_HDD.ogg This one is with the fan and spe […]
Show full quote

Here's the recordings of my HDD, since that definitely counts as a retro activity.
Just_HDD.ogg
This one is with the fan and speaker disconnected, and the case open.

Open.ogg
Fan and Speaker connected, still open.

Closed.ogg
Closed up as apple intended.

The shutdown is way smoother on yours.
Been looking at the various revisions of the SCSI2SD, I guess external is the easiest way to go to swap it between different machines or an internal model and an old style scsi case.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-11, 09:54:

Being a grumpy selfish old man I'd rather saver the experience all by myself thanks. Just in cast one of those pesky "get everything old in emulation" types get hold of it ...😉

That's understandable, you wouldn't want to scare the last dodos nesting in your hdd boxes!

BetaC wrote on 2021-07-11, 06:43:

Here's the recordings of my HDD, since that definitely counts as a retro activity. Just_HDD.ogg This one is with the fan and spe […]
Show full quote

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-09, 22:29:

How does it sound at shutdown?
Make some recording, there is a lack of hdd noises collection thread on the forums!

Here's the recordings of my HDD, since that definitely counts as a retro activity.
Just_HDD.ogg
This one is with the fan and speaker disconnected, and the case open.

Yeah, reminds me of my old quantum fireball drives. Nasty noisy those are. (or lovely noisy, depending on opinion!)

Going through all projects, cleaning up my lab, moving retired projects to a Museum page: https://www.serdashop.com/Museum
it brings back nice memories, but time to move on to next projects,..
while listening to midi music playing on X2GS 😀

canthearu wrote on 2021-07-11, 10:37:

BetaC wrote on 2021-07-11, 06:43:

Here's the recordings of my HDD, since that definitely counts as a retro activity. Just_HDD.ogg This one is with the fan and spe […]
Show full quote

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-09, 22:29:

How does it sound at shutdown?
Make some recording, there is a lack of hdd noises collection thread on the forums!

Here's the recordings of my HDD, since that definitely counts as a retro activity.
Just_HDD.ogg
This one is with the fan and speaker disconnected, and the case open.

Yeah, reminds me of my old quantum fireball drives. Nasty noisy those are. (or lovely noisy, depending on opinion!)

It isn’t a fireball, but it is a Quantum drive.

Last night I started a list of all the old hardware I've acquired thus far. When going through one of my boxes I was pleasantly surprised at a few things I had forgotten about. I re-discovered a Gigabyte GA-6BXC slot 1 motherboard brand new in the box, and remembered I got it for a steal, and when I bought it the lady messaged me and said she had another one if I wanted it. For some foolish reason I declined.

I also noticed the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro video card I bought awhile ago looks like the anti static bag has never been opened, so that's interesting. It could have just been resealed very well though. Not sure I want to open it, on the chance it is new and sealed.

I finally got around to making a floppy-less installation CD for Windows NT 3.1 (for IDE/ATAPI optical drives) using these instructions:

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28570

The CD boots on real IDE/ATAPI hardware, but the ATAPI driver I'm using in the CD's boot sector doesn't like having two optical drives on the same channel during the text-mode phase of setup. Once I unplugged the slave drive, the installation went through as usual. Now I have a way of performing a Windows NT 3.1 clean install using the installation CD-ROM start to finish.

Just tidying some rust on the the metal cage of my K6-2 400 Linux box. Once sanded flat I'll aply some black guard rust nutraliser then paint. Most likely primer light grey which seems the closest match. And I have a couple of sprey bombs I need to use up....😉

fosterwj03 wrote on 2021-07-11, 18:27:

I finally got around to making a floppy-less installation CD for Windows NT 3.1 (for IDE/ATAPI optical drives) using these instructions:

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28570

The CD boots on real IDE/ATAPI hardware, but the ATAPI driver I'm using in the CD's boot sector doesn't like having two optical drives on the same channel during the text-mode phase of setup. Once I unplugged the slave drive, the installation went through as usual. Now I have a way of performing a Windows NT 3.1 clean install using the installation CD-ROM start to finish.

Thank you for sharing that link. Must give it a shot sometime....😉

Today I cleaned up a recent Socket 775-based PC that I was recently given for free, which is going to become a rough 2007-era gaming PC.

Installed a Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU and setup Windows 7 (no way in hell I was putting Vista on there!). It currently has a GeForce 9500GT graphics card installed, but this is soon going to be replaced with an 8800GT.

Finished installing a remotely accessible DOS machine, dubbed the BoilerPC. Runs Carbon Copy Plus and hides behind the boilers in a 100 year old building. Spent the last month and a half just trying to find the appropriate furniture to match it with.

For a Good time, modem dial Extension 708. 😉

CelGen wrote on 2021-07-11, 22:20:

Finished installing a remotely accessible DOS machine, dubbed the BoilerPC. Runs Carbon Copy Plus and hides behind the boilers i […]
Show full quote

Finished installing a remotely accessible DOS machine, dubbed the BoilerPC. Runs Carbon Copy Plus and hides behind the boilers in a 100 year old building. Spent the last month and a half just trying to find the appropriate furniture to match it with.

For a Good time, modem dial Extension 708. 😉

Looks good...😉