I think most of you agree that IDE is not really "retro" therefore I focus on MFM drives. I bought this ST-225 one as defective:

But thanks to SpeedStor I got it revived:

Not bad for the beginning, maybe I do another LowLevel Format:

How does it sound?

oeuvre wrote:

How does it sound?

Annoying loud 🤣 🤣 🤣

The Idle-Sound is that loud that you barely can hear the heads moving. Thats why I was thinking its dead at the beginning...but I put my finger on the stepper motor and realized its moving 😎

As I've said before, that sound of an old noisy hard drive spinning up is music to my ears. I love that sound.

I've modified my MIO VLB card model TK8237 chipset UMC UM8672F.
The IDE VESA controller didn't work properly with my 3.3V CPUs AMD Am486DX4-100 and Am5x86-P75. It just detected a hard drive (volume and geometry) but MS-DOS wasn't booted (the system hung). Altough it maybe could work with 5V 486 CPUs I haven't got such models. In Internet I saw photographs of the same controller but with a factory mod. So I decided to reproduce. The mod has really helped!
The mod is easy - just 3 scratches and 2 diodes 1N4148 (DIP). The scratches have been done with dremel. They prevent 5V power supply to direct into the chip. The diodes drop voltage to 4.4V.
Before:

After:

oeuvre wrote:

for... science!

I too would like to procure the image, but for wholesome christian reasons 🤣

Actually I think IDE is exactly retro. MFM is vintage. 😀

SMD is actually antique.

I have had a very frustrating evening!

I have recapped the Socket 8 adapter I bought from Ebay,

The adapter from Ebay managed to post 3 or 4 times out of perhaps 200 tries in a motherboard that is known to work with an identical adapter. I also retested that working other adapter a few times during troubleshooting, it never failed to post once.

I poked around with my multimeter and most of the times the mosfets would output too low voltages, once in a blue moon the voltage was enough for a successfull post. The blue moons became rarer with time and I finally gave up. One cap on the adapter was clearly bloated, one was looking a bit suspicious and the other 3 while looking fine were probably bad aswell I reasoned. NKCON caps are known to be shit.

I decided to not return the expensive adapter as they are rare but to do a full recap. Because the adapter had posted a few times I reasoned it was not beyond saving and would work better after a recap. Today I did the recap.

I started with the bloated cap. After replacing it I tested the adapter and it posted at the first try but then it would never post again. For some reason the power supply wouldn't even turn on again after that first successful post. I tried two different PSUs with the same result, when I tried my other Socket 8 adapter the system started normally again. I switched back to the adapter from Ebay and once more the PSU failed to turn on. I had no idea why the PSU wasn't getting the power good signal as there were no shorts or the like. I decided to do the full recap at this point.

After the recap I once more tested for shorts. If I measure resistance over the caps from + to - I get a few hundred ohms at first but quicky rising. 5V to GND reads higher initial resistance and also rises quickly. I'm pretty confident everything is perfectly fine when it comes to the soldering and the caps.

When testing in the Gateway branded VS440FX the PSU still refused to turn on regardless of my efforts. Time to start looking for another motherboard, I found 3, all with AWARD BIOS, the rest are in storage. Motherboards with an AWARD BIOS won't support the Socket 8 to S370 adapter (known limitation) but as two of the board were ATX I decided to test them to see if they would behave like there was a short. Both motherboards started normally with the adapter in the socket. The boards wouldn't show any post codes but the result was the same with the known to be good adapter so I guess that's normal with an AWARD BIOS.

This is where I gave up for today. The adapter could very well be working and the VS440FX motherboards worn out ZIF socket could be the culprit. The adapter from Ebay has many pins that isn't perfect and a somewhat worn LIF socket. Now the adapter is missing a VCCs pin as I managed to bend a few pins while working on the adapter and one of those pins broke off directly when I tried to align it eventhough it wasn't very bent at all. My guess is that this adapter has been through alot during its life. The now missing VCCs pin shouldn't matter at all for the adapters function.

I can only hope for the best as returning the adapter with new caps and one less pin is out of the question. I wish retro computing was all smooth sailing but these kind of days when nothing works tend to occur now and then.

Saving as many of the new old stock ALR (Advanced Logic Research) dual Pentium Pro server motherboards as I can from battery damage. So far no casualties thank goodness. All the three legged batteries had started to leak, but luckily I picked up this lot in time. A few more years or possibly even months and a lot of these boards would have been doomed or at least damaged.

While I was working on one of the motherboards the battery snapped quickly and threw battery acid powder into my face. Immediately washed it off. Luckily none got in my eyes. Why such expensive (at the time) motherboards would have these large barrel batteries on them is beyond me.

liqmat wrote:

As I've said before, that sound of an old noisy hard drive spinning up is music to my ears. I love that sound.

Yup. For some, it is music. And for others it is noise pollution. 😀

I spent a good deal of the day yesterday cleaning one of my newer purchases, a Compaq Deskpro EN-SFF.

I have not altered the configuration I found it in yet:

Proprietary i815 (B0 Tualatin capable) Socket 370 motherboard
Pentium III 1000 Coppermine
256MB (2x128MB PC133) RAM
Intel i752 O/B Graphics
ADI Soundmax AC-97 AD1885 O/B Audio
Seagate Barracuda 20GB UATA IDE
Creative 24x CD-ROM*

This unit is particularly of interest to me because I can easily tuck it under my modern monitor and use as a 'daily driver' Win9x/Win2k Retro-PC. That means hooking it up to a wireless bridge and accessing ISO images over Wi-Fi to mount them (which should be fast enough for CD/DVD-ROM kind of speeds I want). I was going to use my Dell Optiplex GX110 for this job, but this is a much more compact and silent computer.

Now I have to decide on how to update its configuration. I've tried using 256MB sticks in it but it posted with none of the sticks I had, so adding one more 128MB stick for a total of 384MB is the best I can do (unless a BIOS update changes things). I don't feel I need a Tualatin P3 in there for this build, but I do have Celeron 1000A, Celeron 1300 and P3-1200 to use. Considering I have 3 PCI slots only, I have to decide what to do in terms of expansions. 1 slot will likely be used by a USB 2.0 PCI card. The other two will host a graphics card and sound card.

For graphics I can choose from (in order of performance):

- Radeon 9250 128MB (Passive Cooling)
- Radeon 7500 64MB (HP Alpha, Active Cooling)
- GeForce 2 MX 400 64MB (Active Cooling)
- Radeon 7000 32MB (Passive Cooling)
- Matrox Millennium G450 32MB (Passive Cooling)
- Riva TNT2/M64 32MB (Active Cooling)
- Riva TNT2/M64 16MB (Passive Cooling)
- Riva TNT 16MB Passive Cooling
- 3dfx Voodoo 2 12MB

For sound, I can choose from:

- Creative Ensoniq PCI
- Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 SB0100
- Aztech PCI 168 (AZF3328)
- Terratec 128i (ES1938S+ESTech 3MB SWWT)
- Terratec 512i (FM801-AU+Yamaha S-YXG50 SWWT)

I will install Win98SE on it (but I may also install Win2K as a dual boot OS for using better productivity software..)

What I hope to do with this: Play 1994-2000 DOS(under Win9x)/Win9x games. That means I need decent SB Pro/16 emulation as well as a decent software wavetable in Win9x/2k. Performance target is playing Quake 3 Arena comfortably at 800x600x32 or 1024x768x16.

What I'm leaning towards doing:

- Keep the Coppermine 1GHz
- Upgrade RAM to 384MB
- Add a Matrox Millennium G450
- Add a Terratec 512i (S-YXG50 Software WT)

I know that G450 and 512i are not the best choices, but with limited space in such a small case I'm not very eager on using the Radeon 7500 or MX400. The Radeon 9250 seems a bit of an overkill for this system but I may revert to that if G450 proves too slow for my liking. As for the sound card, I realize FM801 does not have an OPL3 implementation that is as pleasing as ESFM but it has EAX and A3D support so I will try it out anyway.

uhh I made a soundfont in Viena and just dumped a bunch of Link voice sound effects from Ocarina of Time...

ran it through some MIDIs, came up with these monstrosities.

Chip's Challenge http://k003.kiwi6.com/hotlink/gkpyf28137/ChipLink.mp3
Dance of the Sugar Plum Link http://k003.kiwi6.com/hotlink/7plgnd9nlo/Danc … garPlumLink.mp3
STARFM.MID (a CMF to MIDI conversion) http://k003.kiwi6.com/hotlink/c1afshuzq1/StarLink.mp3
Super Mario 64 Cool Cool Mountain http://k003.kiwi6.com/hotlink/xi16yngk6q/LinkSnow.mp3

I upgraded the PSU in my Socket AM2 AMD Hackintosh and installed a spare AMD Radeon HD 5450 PCIe Graphics Card. This replaced a slower Nvidia GeForce 7300LE that was previously installed.

I was quite amazed when Mac OS X just booted up straight away with full Graphics support on the new card. It certainly was a case of "it just works" even on a Hackintosh.

Only issue I have remaining is that the PC takes about 30 seconds to POST with the new card installed. I'll have to try a CMOS clear later.

Modded a small case to make a BIG heatsink fit. Needed some extra holes cut for the ends of the heatpipes to stick through so I can close the side panel. 😀

This is a semi-retro XP build.

Bought 100% working dell gx1 for 30$

Pretty good shape as well.

As I go through the Pentium Pro haul I am finding some old sealed utility software. Don't know if this needed archiving, but I did it anyway. You will find the floppy image below the photo.

liqmat wrote:

As I go through the Pentium Pro haul I am finding some old sealed utility software. Don't know if this needed archiving, but I did it anyway. You will find the floppy image below the photo.

It's pretty easy to find old hardware and never be able to find the software (looks askance at Dialectron Smart Answering Machine).

Storage stuff especially might turn important for data recovery. It's very easy to get a setup with backups and a dead HD and an obsolete tape archive, and the only copy of the backup SW is on the HD.

I found a 4U server with an unknown chip on a Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 w 512MB of RAM.

I reset the CMOS and still nothing. I'm going to pull the NIC and sound card tonight to see if that helps.

I'll probably order a new PSU and a GF2. I don't have any other vintage gear after my fire, but I hope it will make into a nice 1999/2000 box.

Someone has a 286 for sale locally for $20... PC, monitor, kb, dot matrix printer. I don't need it. 🤣

JodieC wrote:

I found a 4U server with an unknown chip on a Tyan S1854 Trinity 400 w 512MB of RAM.

I reset the CMOS and still nothing. I'm going to pull the NIC and sound card tonight to see if that helps.

That's a great board with some major 'personality' which might be relevant here...

I have one for my main test system as it is about the most universal board imaginable from its era, with universal AGP, PCI 2.2, support for every unbuffered 168p DIMM out there, slot 1 + So370 FC-PGA *and* an ISA slot to boot.

However I'm seriously considering moving it to other duties as soon as I find even a remotely similar board (i.e. any Via 694X/D/T board with ISA slot) due to one particular issue: whenever I add or remove any cards, at the next boot attempt it either hangs completely or boots with a BIOS checksum error, asking for a floppy to re-flash from bootblock. Nasty stuff. To recover from this I usually need a single CMOS clear, but sometimes (like this afternoon when I swapped out a Voodoo3 3000 AGP and replaced it with a Voodoo3 1000 AGP) it takes multiple CMOS clears mixed with ESCD resets (press power button for >5 sec with mains disconnected) to get it back to life.

My first suspicion was a bad BIOS EEPROM, but a re-flash on a different known-good EEPROM gave identical results. New CMOS battery didn't help either. Regardless, if it doesn't boot for you, try repeated CMOS clear & ESCD resets.

I'll probably order a new PSU and a GF2. I don't have any other vintage gear after my fire, but I hope it will make into a nice 1999/2000 box.

My feeling is that it will be rock-solid if you don't actually touch the insides once it's running...