My X1950 Pro has bitten the dust 😢 the card starts artifacting after doing anything that requires hardware acceleration, from 3D graphics to video playback. I tried to reflow it with a hot air gun but no dice, so I put it in my big box of faulty cards and put my 6800GT back into my Tualatin, stable and rock solid as always, if it wasn't for the VGA port I accidentally broke it would've been even better, but I'm using it on DVI so I'm not worried. At least, I finally got 8514/A mode to work on that card, thanks to Powerstrip. Now I can finally get 1024x768 to display properly on my CRT!

wiretap wrote:

I've found that Google Books downloads often are missing pages -- usually you can download from different regions and combine them sans the dupe pages in order to get the full copy. How did you get around that? Another alternative is using "Archive Downloader" Chrome plug-in on something like Archive.org where there are magazine scans uploaded.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/arc … enmngphliikoace

The magazines I was interested in had all pages viewable, just not freely downloadable. Checked Archive.org first with no luck 😵

Reason I did my own little program for it was multithreaded downloading, automatic PDF conversion and selectable resolutions per book. None of the others I found had what I wanted.

I haven't had to look at anything that is a "true" preview so I never really looked into it. 🤣

Vegge wrote:

Spent the last 3 nights putting together 3 systems. K6/2-475 running at 6 x 75, in an old at case as a sort of sleeper. […]
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Spent the last 3 nights putting together 3 systems.
K6/2-475 running at 6 x 75, in an old at case as a sort of sleeper.

IMG_2723s.jpg

Ppro 200/256 in one of the Aopen HX45s I picked up.

IMG_2733s.jpg

An without picture a 200mmx just because.

Nice collection you have there @Vegge.

dionb wrote:

Got around to testing my Panasonic CR-562-B and CI-101P 8b ISA interface card at last. […]
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Got around to testing my Panasonic CR-562-B and CI-101P 8b ISA interface card at last.

No go under Win98SE with the built-in drivers, but after 26 years this 1993-vintage stuff still works perfectly with DOS drivers. It even reads CDR 😀

Also dumped the BIOS of a Morse P1 486 board for a fellow Vogon.

Now time to enjoy my Fire & Cane dram 😀

Dear Dionb,
I have been given a CI-101P card but I cannot find anything on the web... I understand this is a CD-ROM card, right?
Why the two RCA jack, does the card also work as a sound card? Is it a Panasonic card?
I read you can use it... do you have the drivers?
Thank you much and sorry for disturbing you...

its a cheap cd interface card. At first glance, it appears to be basic IDE.

The RCA jacks are for CD audio out and have zero other use.

Spent a bit of the Easter weekend on tinkering with my PowerEdge 2650 again. It's been laying dormant in the garage for a long while now, simply because I kind of bought it on a whim and then started realizing tinkering with it in the house means everyone gets to enjoy the sounds of jet engines 🤣 It's equiped with two Prestonia 2.8GHz Hyperthreading NetBurst Xeons, and two gigs of memory, upgradable to twelve. I might at some point invest in 3.2GHz/533MHz Gallatins, which this system supports, for that extra clockspeed and L3 cache.

Fired it up, the two 72GB Ulta320 SCSI drives it was equiped with still fire up fine despite being stored in the cold garage during winter. Might make it a thing to pull those out during the cold months. I only had two caddies, the rest were blanks, but I still wanted to add two more Fujitsu 18GB Ultra160 drives without spending money on caddies (they are still just pieces of metal + plastic, no electronics involved). So I took two of the blanks, and kinda eyeballed how the hard drive should be placed in it, and secured it with some ductape 🤣

Image removed for copyright reasons.

Ended up not going in far enough to properly plug into the connectors on the backplane, so I took the top of the server off, and carefully pushed the drives in by pushing a flathead screwdriver against the side of one of the visible screws on the drives. Seems like it'll stay in nicely, but the ductape probably still has enough leverage that I can pull the drives out again should the time come.

Image removed for copyright reasons.

Made a RAID 0 of the two 72GB drives (livin' on the edge!), installed Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4 on it, and then messed around with pre VT-x virtualization. Unfortunately, my plan of assigning the physical 18GB drives to VMs failed, as I couldn't find a way to set the drives offline. 2000's Disk Management doesn't have an option for it, neither did the DiskPart Resource Kit I installed, and VMWare just starts erroring out as I assume it's trying to set the disk offline but can't. Might be a NT 5.0 thing? Anyways, it's good to give this neglected beast a spin again, I might try obtaining a cheap rack for it, or building something that functions as one for it 🤣

Image removed for copyright reasons.

Just came across 4 old ClientTec Citrix ICA terminals. At first I mistooked them as old AT keyboards, but at a closer look I immediately identified as all-in-one thin client, the looks of like I hadn't yet seen.

Probably using it as intended would be fun enough (http://toastytech.com/guis/remotecitrix.html), but I had to dig deeper into this "rabbit hole". It turns out that the PCB that integrates all functions of the thin client has at is core a AMD486-66 integrated SoC.... So, a 486 + a vga from CHIPS + NIC from crystal, 4MB ram and 4MB flash.

Researching the known applications of AMD SC410 I discovered what once was (probably) the world smallest 486 (http://www.reviewsonline.com/articles/962097916.htm).

Obviously all software is contained on the Flash 28F320, and probably also the bios, at the top addresses. After trolling a bit whit it I noticed this:

....... B:\int.stu ..?!?! Maybe somehow there's an emulation of a floppy or better yet 2.

Ordered this from china for my programmer:

Let us see what treasures are hiding in that flash, and ultimately, if we can put the damn thing running something more appropriate for Vogons taste 🤣

Just been testing out games for my Amstrad CPC 464 all weekend. Separating piles of cassette tapes into working & not working games. Happily the "working" pile outranks the non-working pile. No big deal for any faulty cassettes though, as I can grab the .cdt file replacement in seconds and load it in via a Cassette adapter. I might even create working backup copies at some point, to replace the faulty tapes.

I ordered a Scart Adapter for the Amstrad CTM 644 monitor, to allow me to connect other devices to it, such as my ZX Spectrum and possibly even my Sega Master System & Mega Drive consoles.

Also ordered from eBay an old 2nd hand faulty DVD Recorder. Same model as a broken one I already own (I damaged a couple of ribbon cables inside), but the replacements' only fault appears to be that it can't read DVD discs. That problem is easily fixable, but the main reason I wanted it was that it takes Composite & S-Video inputs and outputs them to RGB Scart. Should be handy, ie. for connecting up a Commodore 64 to my Amstrad monitor in the future, plus I can always output from PC via S-Video too for emulation purposes. 😎

Xicor wrote:

Just came across 4 old ClientTec Citrix ICA terminals. At first I mistooked them as old AT keyboards, but at a closer look I immediately identified as all-in-one thin client, the looks of like I hadn't yet seen.

Probably using it as intended would be fun enough (http://toastytech.com/guis/remotecitrix.html), but I had to dig deeper into this "rabbit hole". It turns out that the PCB that integrates all functions of the thin client has at is core a AMD486-66 integrated SoC.... So, a 486 + a vga from CHIPS + NIC from crystal, 4MB ram and 4MB flash.

...

Nice find, those look pretty cool!

Spent all day trying to decide whether to buy new graphics cards for my Pentium II machine, reading old reviews, watching YouTube videos.

Currently has a Voodoo 3 3000, but I've found a cheap 3D Prophet 4000XT on eBay. 3D Prophet was the first card I ever bought back when I was 12, but I think my Pentium II 350MHz might be too slow for it.

Finally finished my all in one DOS build - mainly thanks to posts on this forum.

It's a VIA VP3 based machine powered by a 500 MHz AMD K6-II. The maximum speed the K6 can be run at on this mainboard is 400Mhz (66x6) and the lowest - 8 MHZ. By tinkering with the motherboard's undocumented jumper settings, I got the PC to boot at 8MHz (ISA Bus speed). It can emulate pretty much any PC - 286, 386, 486 and of course Pentium. I use SetMul to change the multiplier on the go, but to run it at 8MHz I wired the a couple of jumpers on the maiboard to the case's turbo and blue S/B buttons. Pushing the turbo button will make the machine post at 20MHz, and pushing both the turbo and S/B button will make it post at 8MHz. At that speed it's comparable to a 10MHz 286.

Inside I have a PCI 3DFX Voodoo Banshee, a 8GB Seagate drive (mostly for the noise it makes) witch it boots off, and a 40GB WD drive. It has both 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives, and the sound card is a Guillemot Maxi Gamer 64 with built in Dream Wavetable Synth. I've been working on this build for the better part of 2018, and now it's finally completed.

Sadly most of my projects take this long, mainly since my job takes so much of my time and energy, and partly because of budget constraints and availability of parts.

@Socket3

I really want that top case. Its perfect from what I see.

Bought an Asus GeForce256 SDR (V6600 Deluxe) on Ebay for dirt cheap a little while ago -- seller listed it as "For Parts or Not Working". I messaged him and he said it wouldn't display video -- blank screen.. wouldn't work at all. So today after work I felt like giving it a repair attempt. It is in kinda rough shape. Dirty, a little bit of corrosion here and there, some even on the AGP gold fingers. Well, I cleaned it up, installed new thermal paste and it booted just fine. I was like pffffft maybe it artifacts. Nope, it works just fine in Half-Life and Quake 3. hah! I finally have a working GeForce256 SDR. $20 well spent. Now to get my DDR version working with the dreaded 3-beep no-VGA found.

luckybob wrote:

@Socket3

I really want that top case. Its perfect from what I see.

That case used to be as yellow as the Hyundai XT under it, but some 20% hydrogen peroxide and a lot of time in the sun has removed most of the yellowing. As soon as the weather clears up I'm doing the CD-ROM and the 5.25" floppy drive.

The 3.5" drive, the IDE HDD caddy, the PSU and the mainboard are new (new old stock), but the rest of the parts, needed some TLC and I put a lot of work into this machine.

The case seems to have been made in the early to mid 90's, and it's surprisingly well built for a no-name case. No stickers or stamps on the metal anywhere unfortunately so no clue about it's make or model.

@wiretap - good job fixing that Geforce 256 - these things are pretty rare. I've been looking for a DDR version for some time now with no luck.

Just finished creating this little thingy...... 😜
Games saved as Turbo loader, so I have placed ABC-Turbo as the first. So far 16 titles are on the SideA.

Just to make it awesomme, I used a real Commodore64 and a program to copy.
Everyone else, seems to be using tape deck recorder and a Windows machine.
I wanted to do it on a real C64, and to prepare the files, I used a Linux machine.
Midnight Commander are so cool, as I can extract PRG, as if D64 were a Zip file.

brostenen wrote:

Everyone else, seems to be using tape deck recorder and a Windows machine.
I wanted to do it on a real C64, and to prepare the files, I used a Linux machine.
Midnight Commander are so cool, as I can extract PRG, as if D64 were a Zip file.

Does this datasette really eat chromdioxide tapes well?
Back then on the PET 2001 I had to take care that it were normal fe tapes.
As the cr tapes were like HD diskettes to "normal" density drives, sometimes too hard to magnetize them sufficiently marginally.

And yes, MC is cool. Though I wish it could use the shortkeys of original NC, like alt+letter or ctrl-pgup.

Today I continued clearing out my retro inventory.
I found I had about 10 AGP cards! This made me feel insane.
Will dump into the bay all except of one, two good ones that I can use for hardware testing.

retardware wrote:

Does this datasette really eat chromdioxide tapes well?

I don't know what is called what. It is Type-1 tape, so I think it is what Hifi owners refer to as low grade.
As for me, then I had no issues with the recording quality on my system.

Replaced most of the capacitors on my Shuttle HOT-591P. It worked beforehand, but the 1200uF caps were gross. It booted to the BIOS, so I'm pretty happy about that.

I also fixed some of the cold solder joints on my 7950gx2, which didn't fix what's wrong with it.

Have to take care at these few positions to my old COLANI Tower.
It's little corroded, and i have to handle this with some rust remover.
It's my first corroded case i've bought the last time. Hope it will be better later.

flaviosr wrote:

[...] […]
Show full quote

[...]

Dear Dionb,
I have been given a CI-101P card but I cannot find anything on the web... I understand this is a CD-ROM card, right?
Why the two RCA jack, does the card also work as a sound card? Is it a Panasonic card?
I read you can use it... do you have the drivers?
Thank you much and sorry for disturbing you...

Sorry for not spotting this post sooner.

- It's a CDRom controller card.
- The RCA jacks are for analog CD audio (the 4-pin connector on the back of the CDRom drive hooks up here). No other sound functionality.
- Yes it's for the Panasonic standard, so very few CDRoms work with it. It resembles IDE, but allows for up to four separate devices on one bus.
- DOS drivers here: http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … &menustate=35,0
(Panasonic = Matsushita)
Not been able to get it working under Win98SE, although TBH didn't try very hard either. There are built-in drivers you can install manually but they didn't detect the drive.

Yesterday at last got around to testing a pile of crap again:
- internal and external (parallel) ZIP100 drives work. ZIP250 sadly shorts out the IDE bus...
- ALS100 card is dead. I hadn't realized it was supposed to be ISAPnP. Absolutely no PnP detection by OS (Windows) or DOS PnP tools. It's dead, Jim.
- Musicquest MQX-32m and Yamaha MU50-XG work together beautifully, and messing around with different presets on the MU50-XG is much easier/more intuitive than on Roland devices IMHO.
- i430TX ATX board runs perfectly, but doesn't take the 128MB SIMMs I wanted to try in it - they physically don't fit (much too wide, conflict with caps & other components).
- found the problem with my Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 board. It had long shown erratic behaviour, needing CMOS clears regularly. Recently it completely failed to boot. Messing around with the BIOS EEPROM got it booting again - sometimes. Time to flash a new EEPROM.

Then tried to get a Disk-on-Module working with my Cx486SLC system. Despite trying different adapters, I couldn't get one to work. HDDs worked mechanically but were much too big for the 1992 BIOS. Finally a 512MB CF card seemed to work but kept getting corrupted. I gave up and installed a Cx387SX FasMath instead. At leat that worked, even if I have absolutely no sensible use for it in that system 😉