I got really annoyed by how loud the cpu fan was on my K6-2 550. So I went through my parts, found 3 different SS7 HSFs, took the fans all off, and picked the one with the lowest AMP rating. SO MUCH QUIETER NOW.

You can also mod a large 80 or 120 mm fan if you don't mind the ghetto look.

I can't find anything decent on Netflix lately, so I'm binge watching The Outer Limits 🤣

I designed a small PCB to eloquently turn ON and OFF an ATX power supply using the stock momentary power button most ATX cases have. The circuit is based off of the "CMOS Toggle Flip Flop Using Push Button" on this page http://www.bowdenshobbycircuits.info/page9.htm, due to the fantastic debounce and decoupling approach it takes.

This will be especially useful when using an ATX case and PSU with an AT motherboard so you don't need to hack a latching switch in place of the stock momentary button.

I still need to order the components to populate them, but the PCBs came out nice. It's small enough that it should fit in a large piece of heat shrink tubing with angled headers poking out of one end.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

You can also mod a large 80 or 120 mm fan if you don't mind the ghetto look.

I can't find anything decent on Netflix lately, so I'm binge watching The Outer Limits 🤣

Some Netflix suggestions (if you haven't already seen them):
Limitless
Stranger Things
The OA
Travelers
My wife and I both liked all of these a lot. Sci-fi, smart, entertaining, and more on the family friendly side.

We also just started watching The Expanse. It's on SyFy, which we don't have, but the 1st season is free on Amazon Prime, so we're watching it there. We're a few episodes in and it's starting to get really good. The first couple of episodes were really hard to follow, and some of the actors are hard for us to understand (accents). But if you can get through that, things slowly start to make more sense and the action ramps up quite a bit.

I watched ALL of that already 😁

Plus some other ones like Zoo and Van Helsing.

Try seeing if sneakers is on Netflix.

The movie pretty good, lots of retro computer references and they even talk about NSA spying on Americans computers and internet, and that's all the way back in 92. 🤣

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I watched ALL of that already 😁

Plus some other ones like Zoo and Van Helsing.

Maybe you can recommend some shows to US then. 🤣.
Family friendly is important. We have a 12 yr old that can walk in anytime when we're watching a show. One show that really disappointed in that regard: we started watching Mr. Robot, and we found the gratuitous sex scenes pointless, tasteless, and WAY too graphic.

some good oldies and are family friendly.
War of the worlds.
forbidden planet
Sneakers

The twilight zone movie is ok, but not quite a family movie.
Not quite syfi but young Frankenstein is good, not 100% family friendly although.

I played with the old Soyo P4 board again today. . .(why do I keep doing this to myself) it is working for now. Got all 3gb of DDR 266 recognized, have a 3.06/512/533 HT chip installed and recognized w/o HT. Found out my cheap chinese ATI 9550 bit the dust. Oh well, not big loss. Oh currently binging Samurai Jack in preparation for the new season!

FesterBlatz wrote:

I designed a small PCB to eloquently turn ON and OFF an ATX power supply using the stock momentary power button most ATX cases h […]
Show full quote

I designed a small PCB to eloquently turn ON and OFF an ATX power supply using the stock momentary power button most ATX cases have. The circuit is based off of the "CMOS Toggle Flip Flop Using Push Button" on this page http://www.bowdenshobbycircuits.info/page9.htm, due to the fantastic debounce and decoupling approach it takes.

This will be especially useful when using an ATX case and PSU with an AT motherboard so you don't need to hack a latching switch in place of the stock momentary button.

I still need to order the components to populate them, but the PCBs came out nice. It's small enough that it should fit in a large piece of heat shrink tubing with angled headers poking out of one end.

IMG_1650.JPG

I'm surprised it wasn't done with a J-K flip flop as it's easier to implement that way. The referenced design seems somewhat overwrought.

Started cleaning up the 486's hard disk installations last night, and experimenting with DAW's, and putting that new CPU, RAM, and L2 Cache to good use.

TESTING PERFORMANCE
- Quake now runs almost like Duke Nukem 3D did as a DX2-66 with 64MB of RAM and no L2 Cache, rendering is quite speedy with minimal frame drop making the game a joy to play
- Duke Nukem 3D feels super smooth and clear now regardless of which O/S or Hard Disk I run it under
- Postal Plus Raw & Uncut runs on this thing under 95 okayish, better than my PC-330 did 10 years ago, but I still have to remove a tiny bit of screen real-estate to smooth it out
- AfterDark screensavers no longer hang and seem to animate and run at full speed, maybe a little faster now, Flying Toasters Pro under 95 with full detail is smooth and quick now
- Diablo feels like when I was running it on my P233MMX back in 2002. Load times for the dungeo and town are fast, and battles are a piece of cake. Need to try Battle.Net next
- Doom 95 is better than I remember it
- Atari 2600 Emulation runs at full speed now (now that's some good tweaking), except maybe Pitfall II but that game needs some caveats to work on any emulator TBH
- Retro City Rampage 486 feels like GTA 2 now, both the Beta Win31x version AND the DOS version

DAW STUFF
- I upgraded the driver for the HDD controller under Windows 95, it was noticeably missing and using a generic driver, so I put the Winbond VL-EIDE driver on there found through much web surfing, Windows 95's load time has gone down considerably (<20 seconds), transferring files over the network is a LOT faster (about 14MB takes about 2 minutes - which is very fast for a 486), and disk performance is just a lot better
- I adjusted the Buffer settings in QuartzAudioMaster Freeware, now it no longer throws that error for "your PC is too slow" - we'll see once I put 4 tracks of WAV audio in it though, I'm testing using empty tracks for now
- I installed N-Track studio and tried it out, seems that looks to be better performance than QAM and Might be worth getting it activated so I can use that full time, it stutters more disk-wise than Quartz Todes though
- I ran my guitar through it, the tone the AWE64 has is pretty good coming from running my Blackstar IDCORE 10 through it direct to Line-In in stereo

OTHER STUFF
- I need to make my website public and put the drivers I used on this thing up, it was a royal b**** finding all that crap, and I don't know how long places like "Metropoli" are going to be up
- My next experiments will involve Windows 98 SE, Linux, Windows 2000 Pro with some real tickery to get XP Apps to run, and a sick experiment involving Five Nights at Freddy's (because I can)
- I might take FreeDOS for a spin because I quite well like supporting free software, and I like what FreeDOS has to offer
- Looking for some good Linux distributions to try out on this thing - especially since I have god high-res pictures of my hardware so putting any dependancies in the Kernel or at least getting the RAMDACs right for X11 or whatever it's called now will be possible.
- May try some OS/2 fun as well, not sure I want to use 40 Floppies....

The other two computers only have a few things to do now
- 286 = install Expanded RAM card
- 8088 = V20 and 8087, I'll be doing that during the summer because it generates less heat than the other two do

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I can't find anything decent on Netflix lately, so I'm binge watching The Outer Limits 🤣

Family guy, if you can watch that. I know content varies from country to country.
We only have less than 50% compared to the US.

Found my self 2 brand new old digital keyboards without win key for my 486 😀

Placing BGA balls on tiny DDR1 chip without proper hardware 😜

video https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2rbHIj6SMlF … 0wtTjkxaG8/view

Bidding a TI 486SXL-40 on ebay. Got sniped 4 seconds before auction ending.

Well.....I just started testing the things I've been wanting to for quite awhile on the 486 DX4-100 system now......

Behold - I have apparently created the first DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) capable 486 that I've ever heard about. I'm running N-Track Studio on Windows 95 OSR2 - and recording using a Roland Juno Di and a Blackstar IDCore 10 amp daisy chained through auxilaries and run through the LIne-in. Just adjusted the buffers and got up to being able to run at least 3 tracks of audio at the same time.

If Only I'd known about N-TRACK something 15 years earlier, I maybe could have started recording my stuff to MP3 earlier.

Next will test against Quartz Audiomaster Freeware - see what happens.

creepingnet wrote:

May try some OS/2 fun as well, not sure I want to use 40 Floppies....

Last time I looked OS/2 v3 was on CD with 2 floppies to start off the installation process.

adalbert wrote:

Placing BGA balls on tiny DDR1 chip without proper hardware 😜

video https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2rbHIj6SMlF … 0wtTjkxaG8/view

😲

That earns my deepest respect. I can't even solder SMD resistors.

creepingnet wrote:

- I upgraded the driver for the HDD controller under Windows 95, it was noticeably missing and using a generic driver, so I put the Winbond VL-EIDE driver on there found through much web surfing, Windows 95's load time has gone down considerably (<20 seconds), transferring files over the network is a LOT faster (about 14MB takes about 2 minutes - which is very fast for a 486), and disk performance is just a lot better

I wonder how it compares to my DX4

IIRC, I transfered duke nukem 3D (which due to a mistake is ~50MB instead of 23/25) and it only took me 1 minute
Though maybe your network card is a 10Mbps and not a 100Mbps like the one I use

adalbert wrote:

Placing BGA balls on tiny DDR1 chip without proper hardware 😜

video https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2rbHIj6SMlF … 0wtTjkxaG8/view

To do, this takes balls!

... serious skills, and a good eye.

If I dropped one of those balls on the floor... I'd be down there for weeks trying to look for it!