PcBytes wrote:

Not sure if it fits here, but I bought some tapes

Sure, falls under magnetic storage. 😀

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I found a second 478 cooler. Which cooler do you think is better?

Well. In my experience look for, in combination and in no order:

1) heavier heatsink
2) more surface area (particularly thinner and more fins)
3) Copper over aluminum
4) Larger area for airflow / fan interface
5) more polished and even interface with CPU

Ultimately measure load CPU temps with either, if you can.

I have been thinking about upgrading older heatsinks, like trying to mount a modern heatpipe cooler and run fanless or just make mounts for 120mm fans on older heatsinks.

PcBytes wrote:

random wedding movie (1995, and I'll admit it's kinda nicely and interesringly spliced together)

Not interested in the last one footage wise but the tape itself is a true gem - 6 hours tape, so I got 3 more hours of recordable footage!

Watch it all, who knows, maybe there is first night recorded in there as well?

CarlHopkinsUK wrote:

Not exactly retro, but built a quick and dirty floating desk, trying to make space to have at least 1 retro machine setup.

And I thought I was running low on space! Well played with the floating desk bit.

* * *

As for yours truly, I didn't have much time for retro activities recently for various reasons. That said, last week I spent some time talking to Viktor Antonov, the guy responsible for looks and design of "Dishonored", "Half-Life 2" and "Kingpin: Life of Crime" (including cities in these games). He was a guest speaker on Digital Cultures conference in Warsaw, Poland, and I had the pleasure to conduct an interview with him. We talked about virtual cities that he designed and literary inspirations in these games. I guess it does qualify as retro activity, a little bit?

SItting between two Pentium 4s.
A Prescott on my left playing a 720p60fps video in software, on my right a Northwood doing a long virus scan.
I feel warm.

OldCat wrote:

PcBytes wrote:

random wedding movie (1995, and I'll admit it's kinda nicely and interesringly spliced together)

Not interested in the last one footage wise but the tape itself is a true gem - 6 hours tape, so I got 3 more hours of recordable footage!

Watch it all, who knows, maybe there is first night recorded in there as well?

Went through all of it - it's on the span of 4 different dates. One is showing the city where I live (wow, didn't even expect that.) actually, and also how the man finds his girl, the second date shows him going to the girl's apartment, then the following two are simply the wedding itself, going to the church then, and finally a party.

One thing I noticed though, the beginning and ending has a logo from some foreign home video company repeated a few times, just enough that it doesn't show the name.

The Rambo: First Blood (Part 2) tape has probably one of the most rare gems - the original 1985 Carolco Pictures logo, in CinemaScope. As far as I've searched, no full footage of it was ever uploaded on the internet. Sadly it's SECAM, so I had to spend a good time restoring color to it. Did a nice job on that though.

EDIT:

Here it is, restored.

Played around with this.

I got impatient waiting for a new cooler to arrive for my newest frankenstein Socket AM2 system, so I improvised with a quick & dirty job.

I took a broken Zalman cooler, removed it's dead fan and then tied some generic piece of crap fan that I had in storage to the Zalman heatsink with twine & garden wire (which I found after doing the bottom bit with twine). This fan only has 2 wires & a 2-pin plug that wouldn't fit the motherboard, so after splicing together the fan connector cable, off we go - 🤣

I didn't expect much from this contraption and sure it's quite noisy, but it's keeping the CPU (an AMD Sempron 3000+) quite cool and allowing me to test this motherboard out more thoroughly.

I might take it apart when the new cooler arrives and then do a more cleaner/neater job on attaching the fan to the heatsink, since it seems to work well.

Aside from playing around with the fan above, I also ran Xbench on my Hackintosh with it's new Athlon 64 X2 5000+ CPU. Based on those results alone, it's now easily faster than my fastest real Mac - a PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0GHz. With a graphics card upgrade, I could probably squeeze even more performance out of this system.

I haven't gotten up to it yet, but this afternoon I was planning on taking my Pentium III PC and downgrading it from Windows XP to Windows 98SE since I plan to use it in real DOS more than I planned.

My main issue is going to be the sound card. I'm currently using one of those not-so-great Dell OEM SB Live! cards (the second revision, not the first), and I'm not sure I want to fight with getting it to work in DOS mode - nor am I ready to shell out $100 for an AWE32 or AWE64. At least the other parts should all work fine.

So I actually went ahead and did the downgrade I originally planned. There's a local store that specializes in selling old, weird gizmos and electronics down the road from where I work, and I bought a non-Dell SB Live! from them for $5. (They also had a very sweet full-tower 486DX2-66 for sale, but $330 was more than a bit ludicrous). I was able to get all the drivers (sound/network/video) set up and I was able to confirm that the SB card works in pure DOS mode.

Not hardware specific, but from the same store I also bought two DOS programming books to add to my collection - one on graphics programming using Microsoft C, and one on SVGA programming. I probably won't look at the former much since it mostly sticks to documenting the Microsoft C-specific graphics libraries, but the latter could be interesting. I now have close to 2 dozen books covering DOS-era programming that I've scrounged up over the years.

The storage was smelling funny for a few months now, it's a damp place that gets no sunlight, so I always thought that was normal.. But two days ago I noticed a brown mold growing on the wooden bookshelf I use to store things in. When I pulled it aside, the wall it was against was knee high black/brown mold. In shock I went around checking the things, and found out that pretty much all cardboard boxes were covered with brown/white mold, all the walls were molded and the paint was peeling away, and some of the boxes had mold IN THEM, the most heartbreaking was to see that the boxes containing my big box games were infested and the games themselves had molds on the box covers...

So last night, I put on the gloves and dove right in, took most of the stuff out. Half the cardboard boxes were disintegrating, so I binned them and their contents. I think I threw away maybe 100 lbs of (non-retro) stuff that were impossible to clean. I then did a general clean up of the room, and the cardboard boxes. Then I spent two hours individually wiping down each game I own, and placed them in double zip-lock IKEA plastic bags (I even had the disks ziplocked inside the ziplocked boxes in some cases). I went to bed at 3 in the night, feeling very sore but slept peacefully for the first time in the last few days..

I also have five 50l plastic storage boxes on order, they will replace most of the cardboard boxes that remain. Then this weekend, I will go back in, move everything out and do a THOROUGH bleacking of the whole place.

TL;DR: My storage was infested with mold, I had to throw away a lot of stuff but secured my game collection. Check your storages for mold, it's disgusting, gets everywhere and spreads incredibly fast.

appiah4 wrote:

TL;DR: My storage was infested with mold, I had to throw away a lot of stuff but secured my game collection. Check your storages for mold, it's disgusting, gets everywhere and spreads incredibly fast.

Whatever you do do not use bleach, black mold in particular will seem like it works at first, but will feed on the bleach and come back worse. If I recall correctly Vinegar water is a good cheap easy solution. Iv lived in 70's mobile homes all my life and black mold was always a constant battle around window sills.

Shit, mold feeds on bleach? You learn something everyday. White vinegar and water it is then. Let us trade one terrible sickening smell for another.. FML.

Woot, got my sound blaster 2.0 clone today.

So I have finally completed my HP Vectra PC-305 retro machine:

Specs with original hardware
7.18mhz V20 CPU (8088 equivalent)
640KB ram
XT MFM controller (non-BIOS, must be HP specific)
20meg MFM hard drive (working nicely, only a couple of bad sectors)
360KB 5.25 inch disk drive
720KB 3.5 inch disk drive (is actually 1.44meg drive, but XT floppy driver doesn't like it)
VGA card (Paradise card in 8-bit mode)
Realtime clock
HP-IB card with 68000 CPU on it (not really sure it works, will need to test more)

Newly added hardware:
XT-IDE v4 card (hand assembled by myself)
4gb CF card
Sound Blaster 2.0
Honeywell switchable XT/AT keyboard. (I had to repair some of the internal traces, conductive pen works great here.
Old style 3 button rectanglar Genius Mouse (my original mouse, kinda nostalgic for me)

Awesome to get such old hardware working nicely 😀 I can now easily copy software to it using the CF card and don't have to worry about running out of space.

I've got some slightly moldy boxes, but for now it didn't spread anywhere (I bought them that way). Maybe because the temperature in the room where I'm storing them is stable, air is dry and it gets ventilated.

I'd like to get it off though, but I have no idea how to do that, if that's even possible ...

Also it looks like mold tend to like floppy disks, so make sure these are ok too. Maybe I'll add these small de-humidifier bags you find sometimes when you buy stuff new and put them in the boxes

Going through the damp dark basement phenomenon myself. Drylok is worth it's weight in gold on basement cinder block walls. The before and after is noticeable. We even noticed we're emptying the dehumidifier less now. That's good for the PCs!

whipped this up

All this talk about humidity makes me real happy I live in a desert area.

oeuvre wrote:

whipped this up […]
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whipped this up

Huh. I have the SZ957 variant (DX4ODP100) that I won last year on eBay (perfect shape, had a couple of bent pins, but, I fixed that and it still works).

Now that I have moved to my winter digs and have all that PPro gear to inventory I needed a good retro chair to sit in. Yep, that's coming with me and it works! Hacker chair with A/C!

Did a full maintenance on a very squeaky CD-ROM drive of a Philips CD-i 470. Now it's quite again and opens/closes fluidly. 😀