Huh, "the more you know." 😀

3 people, though? I don't know anything about that kind of thing, but 3 people sounds kind of small to deal with encrypting all of the 3DO games (if that's what happened).

Repaired this 286 board and some others:
Re: 80286 BIOS image collection

Had a broken CPU socket and cap. Replaced with one I had in spare:

Was not able to figure out the value of the destroyed cap and took a random one...

Indeed my new CGA card..
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
...is very useful for diagnostic purposes! Supersoft/Landmark ROM works perfectly with it. These ROMs are not only for IBM, it even worked in a 386 I tried and that was dead so far...

Finally got my Compaq Presario 9232 working properly with the Dreamblaster S1.

Video: https://youtu.be/WkHGFm3NsJs

Pics:

Beautiful Compaq. Looks great! Do some recordings for us when you get a chance.

Today I played Wipeout 2097 for the first time after an IRC friend told me about it. I suck at it.

Thanks. Yea it is in really good condition. No yellowing, no scratches, etc. I'll try to get some better recordings soon.. I have a few other projects I'm working on at the moment. 😀

I've been working on refurbishing some hardware for someone I recently met locally. Turns out he's got more Amiga gear than I could've ever expected!

I pulled the battery out of the A2000, but it took me a while longer to figure out how to make the mouse/joystick DE-9 ports behave properly (left and right were ignored, up was up-left, down was down-right) due to some trickle-down corrosion from that pesky Varta NiCd barrel battery. At least it's not like my own A2000, which has damaged CPU traces and won't run reliably right now.

As for the A4000, it was initially a sight of dismay, as it had some slight battery leakage and initially started with a yellow screen. I took another crack at it tonight, though: reseated the SIMMs (and they're really tight in there, resting right against each other), and it boots and runs fairly reliably once they're latched down properly, with a full 16 MB of Fast RAM. However, it's already frozen and yellow-screened on soft reset at least once, which coupled with the hints of corrosion around the SMD caps, all suggests that this one needs a full-on recap before it's too late.

This is just scratching the surface, too. I've got another one or two A4000s to look at, possibly a CDTV and CD32 as well, as well as a ton of 1084(S) monitors I was informed about but haven't seen beyond this busted-up one that won't even power on with a held-down switch.

the_ultra_code wrote:

Huh, "the more you know." 😀

3 people, though? I don't know anything about that kind of thing, but 3 people sounds kind of small to deal with encrypting all of the 3DO games (if that's what happened).

I was exaggerating a little, but as far as I understand the process really was something like that. I got the story from someone who did a ton of work on the 3DO so I assume she knows well how it worked. In the end they only had to encrypt 286 officially licensed games over the whole run of the system; I guess you don't need a huge team to do that. 😉

(Still) speaking of 3DO, now that I tidied up my game cabinet I spent a liiiiiitle too long making replacement jewel case inserts for some games I only had loose discs of. Some of these are the actual labels from scans, other ones I had to make up 'fantasy labels' for because there wasn't a good scan anywhere or they came in a long box & didn't get a jewel case release. Yes, they're printed on cheap office paper in B&W for now, but I'll run them off on nicer card stock in colour eventually.

I'm not going for any kind of authenticity or collector value here, I just wanted them to look a bit nicer on my shelf, and I think I accomplished that:

Still have some more to do but I'm tired of this project at the moment. Also, I probably shouldn't have used my dining table as a cutting surface. 😜 These are all legit discs; for burned CDs I don't care as much.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

I've been working on refurbishing some hardware for someone I recently met locally. Turns out he's got more Amiga gear than I co […]
Show full quote

I've been working on refurbishing some hardware for someone I recently met locally. Turns out he's got more Amiga gear than I could've ever expected!

I pulled the battery out of the A2000, but it took me a while longer to figure out how to make the mouse/joystick DE-9 ports behave properly (left and right were ignored, up was up-left, down was down-right) due to some trickle-down corrosion from that pesky Varta NiCd barrel battery. At least it's not like my own A2000, which has damaged CPU traces and won't run reliably right now.

As for the A4000, it was initially a sight of dismay, as it had some slight battery leakage and initially started with a yellow screen. I took another crack at it tonight, though: reseated the SIMMs (and they're really tight in there, resting right against each other), and it boots and runs fairly reliably once they're latched down properly, with a full 16 MB of Fast RAM. However, it's already frozen and yellow-screened on soft reset at least once, which coupled with the hints of corrosion around the SMD caps, all suggests that this one needs a full-on recap before it's too late.

This is just scratching the surface, too. I've got another one or two A4000s to look at, possibly a CDTV and CD32 as well, as well as a ton of 1084(S) monitors I was informed about but haven't seen beyond this busted-up one that won't even power on with a held-down switch.

marry him

Yesterday had an old friend over for beer and testing NX586 CPUs. Unfortunately my CPU seems dead (or the NxVL boards don't like the large heatspreader NX586 CPUs even with the latest BIOS). At least the beer was good.

Slow start today (beer+late night does that), but ran a laundry load. On-topic as it contained two pillow cases filled with Model M keycaps. Gave one of my boards a complete clean, fixed the dead space bar (just a badly placed stabilizer bar). Now clicking away as new.

Did another IBM-related thing too - the Edifier speakers on my main system had died (completely inaccessible connector for right speaker came loose) and as it was all glued shut getting access would mean demolishing the poor thing. So bought a pair of Microlab B73s as a replacement. They arrived yesterday and turned out to be much bigger than expected - bigger that I have room for. Also, they had a second input, which made them ideal for in the retro room - one input for the sound card, one from MIDI (MT-32).
So I moved the speakers I had down there up to the home office. They are a set of IBM/Infinity 20L2168 speakers from my late mother's 1996 IBM Aptiva. I'd never actually listened to any music on these, which I should have years ago. Powerful, great definition - all-round excellent audio, coming close to those Microlabs, but at 1/3 of the size 😀

Getting all kinds of Retro Activities done this weekend. 😀 Finally got around to pulling apart & de-capping my original Xbox. Also confirmed it has a 1.2 or 1.3 board, like I thought - fully moddable and the easiest revision of all to deal with. Nice.

Aside from some white goop on the PSU (WTF?) I was pleased to find it supremely clean on the inside. Even the notorious clock cap was still intact, although I suspect it was getting ready to. All the others looked perfect.

I was going to make the TSOP writeable "while I was in there", but holy balls are those solder pads tiny. That's gonna have to wait until I get some better gear.

Aside from some white goop on the PSU (WTF?)

That is to prevent buzzing sounds from the components.

I finished restoring an old Mitsumi FX400E quad-speed CD drive from 1995 today. That will go into my Pentium 75 I'm currently building.

I have started rebuilding my 486dx4-120 machine. Different case, VLB Controller and S3-805 VLB.
The harddrive is SCSI and the CD-Rom is an SCSI as well, that uses Caddy's.
The system has 32mb Ram and the soundcard is an AWE64 Value/Standard.

Yesterday I visited an old friend for a beer and testing NX586 CPUs. Unfortunately his CPU seems dead (or the NxVL boards don't like the large heatspreader NX586 CPUs even with the latest BIOS). At least the beer was good.

The NX586 with small heatsink worked flawlessly, however 😀.

I also scored a very nice 15" Compaq V55 CRT monitor for my P100 DOS machine 😀.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

https://s22.postimg.cc/8t3qtcrdd/Amiga_4000_and_2000.jpg […]
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Seeing photos of this kind is soul shattering.. That sinking feeling of knowing I will never own one of these is a sadness I can't explain..

486dx4-120 is finished being rebuild. It seems as the SCSI controller is not working correctly, and I need to test it further. So I went back to the onboard IDE controller and CF-Card. Not a big loss, as the onboard is a vesa controller. Anyway. It is finished and ready for storage. Next up, is to move the DX2-80 into the old DX4-120 case, and use the old DX2-80 case for a DX-33 ISA build. This has all been long overdue.

appiah4 wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

https://s22.postimg.cc/8t3qtcrdd/Amiga_4000_and_2000.jpg […]
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Seeing photos of this kind is soul shattering.. That sinking feeling of knowing I will never own one of these is a sadness I can't explain..

I agree... Big box Amiga's are a nice thing. At least I have my 500 and my 600.
Amiga's are a different world and have their own special soul.

Project “resurrect Geforce 4 Ti” was a success. Might post pics later, but not at home now. I thought it was
a Ti4800 because that is what the sticker looked like. However it is a 4600. The label is pretty small and
the 6 looked like an 8.
It was missing a cap on the back of the card in the GPU area. I pulled a cap
off of a dead low end pcie card and put it on this card. Also swapped the heatsink
Because the one on ths card was missing the fan. May have to replace the fan because
the fan on the heatsink seems to have issues initially spinning up.

Me not much.. But iam being busy to wait on a new table to have more space for soldering and fixing hardware.. So over 2 days i have more space to work on the old computers and hardware i have bought over the last 10 years..

The table will getting a monitor stand with old monitor to use for troubleshooting the old pcs and getting them running.. And also have the space to check every thing i bought.

First iam going to try some solder project to getting better soldering skills.. If i have more skill i will trying to fix some cheap hardware.. After that i will work on the higher value hardware.

^^ Good luck. 😀 Nothing more satisfying than taking something broken and fixing it yourself. If you don't know how to solder already there are some great tutorials on Youtube.

Finally formatted a few Rainbow compatible disks and booted a DOS 2.1. Still need to see if I can get the HDD to function. Maybe next year...

Slight screen rot on the corners there, but meh.