I can't help myself, is it a Sony GDM-FW900?

Transferred my son's retro system from one InWin ATX midi tower case to another very similar one. Why? Because the original one had one of those awful U-shaped covers. The new one has nice easy side panels. Of course everything has a price - this one doesn't have a removable motherboard tray. But I suspect I'll be messing around inside the case more often than removing the motherboard, so the move was justified. Of course the floppy and DVDRW drive in the new case were both dead, so transferred the old ones too.

Had a rather frustrating experience on the local Craigslist-variant this week. Someone was selling a huge pile of - mainly - crap, but there were a few jewels in there, in particular an Adaptec VLB SCSI adapter and a Promise VLB cached IDE controller - with *dual* FDD controllers, as well as some OK-ish ISA stuff. I did a lowball offer, as I didn't really need any of it. Got a reply a day later that a slightly higher but still very reasonable amount would be accepted. I was just going into a meeting at work when I got that reply. After getting out of the meeting I replied that I accepted, but turned out he'd sent the same message to someone else with a lowball offer and he'd accepted sooner. Oh well, too bad... in fact the seller was great, asked me if there was something specific I wanted and would check with the buyer if he was interested in that part of the lot or not. Buyer said he was. So, that was that. Until I checked the site again this evening. Every single one of the potentially interesting cards was back up for sale. Looks like he hadn't kept anything at all for personal use, the lowlife 🙁

Dragon Caesar wrote:

I can't help myself, is it a Sony GDM-FW900?

Ding ding ding! That's it.

Can't believe I actually got my hands on one of these. Sadly, its just too large and heavy for me to be able to reasonably keep and use since my office is on the third floor of our house... and I already have a ~65lb HP P1230 CRT on my workbench, plus a few other CRTs in storage. I doubt I'll have any trouble finding a home for it, but it took some cosmetic damage in shipping, so I'm waiting to hear from FedEx before I decide what to do with it.

Thankfully, the picture is very nice and the screen, controls and inputs are all intact. I get a little bit of intermittent display wobble at certain resolutions and refresh rates, but my HP does this too some times so it could be some kind of EMI or interference issue. This house has some 100 year old wiring left over that makes diagnosing things like this a bit harder.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Ding ding ding! That's it. […]
Show full quote

Dragon Caesar wrote:

I can't help myself, is it a Sony GDM-FW900?

Ding ding ding! That's it.

Can't believe I actually got my hands on one of these. Sadly, its just too large and heavy for me to be able to reasonably keep and use since my office is on the third floor of our house... and I already have a ~65lb HP P1230 CRT on my workbench, plus a few other CRTs in storage. I doubt I'll have any trouble finding a home for it, but it took some cosmetic damage in shipping, so I'm waiting to hear from FedEx before I decide what to do with it.

Thankfully, the picture is very nice and the screen, controls and inputs are all intact. I get a little bit of intermittent display wobble at certain resolutions and refresh rates, but my HP does this too some times so it could be some kind of EMI or interference issue. This house has some 100 year old wiring left over that makes diagnosing things like this a bit harder.

Sorry to hear about the cosmetic damage, but excellent find! Would you mind if I shoot you a PM about 100 year old wiring? To keep in topic, I've been working on a recently acquired Packard Bell PB386 Supreme. The original hard drive is toast but I had a spare XTIDE board from texelec collecting dust so I'm trying to figure out which DOS I want to go with.

100 y/o wiring sounds a bit hyperbolic to me. Unless you are talking about knob and tube... The wires will be okay, its just the insulation that goes down the shitter.

luckybob wrote:

100 y/o wiring sounds a bit hyperbolic to me. Unless you are talking about knob and tube... The wires will be okay, its just the insulation that goes down the shitter.

My old house was built in the 1920's by a farmer. We found that when we redid all the electrical that the rodents had managed to completely strip the cotton insulation off throughout the entire house 😊

luckybob wrote:

100 y/o wiring sounds a bit hyperbolic to me. Unless you are talking about knob and tube... The wires will be okay, its just the insulation that goes down the shitter.

100 y/o is somewhat hyperbolic... The house we're living in was built in 1909 and has a mix of knob and tube, slightly less ancient wiring with fabric insulation (thank goodness because the rubber part would disintegrate without the fabric holding it together) and recently added wiring. The vast majority of homes in my area are between 80 and 120 years old and are so huge and hard (expensive) to update that mixed messes like this are very common. My office has all up to date wiring but I can't help but be suspicious of the rest of the house... and I'm not lugging the 98 pound FW900 up three flights of stairs when I have nowhere to permanently keep it. 🤣

Well since we're on the topic now, I won't feel bad for asking in thread. Did you swap out the two prong outlets with GFCI for your office or did you end up going all out for replacement/upgrade?

My home's wiring is so old that it KILLED ME when I was plugging in an HDMI cable and touched the metal shielding on the plug. Catching 120V across the heart with God knows how many amps doesn't feel good, but neither does being revived. Found out how badly the house wasn't grounded when I hooked up a surge protector to the coaxial cable in my office, and the ground light on the surge protector finally lit up.

Mister Xiado wrote:

My home's wiring is so old that it KILLED ME when I was plugging in an HDMI cable and touched the metal shielding on the plug. Catching 120V across the heart with God knows how many amps doesn't feel good, but neither does being revived. Found out how badly the house wasn't grounded when I hooked up a surge protector to the coaxial cable in my office, and the ground light on the surge protector finally lit up.

Whoa, really?!?

Mister Xiado wrote:

My home's wiring is so old that it KILLED ME when I was plugging in an HDMI cable and touched the metal shielding on the plug. Catching 120V across the heart with God knows how many amps doesn't feel good, but neither does being revived. Found out how badly the house wasn't grounded when I hooked up a surge protector to the coaxial cable in my office, and the ground light on the surge protector finally lit up.

Was the house inspected prior to you getting it? I know home inspectors aren't perfect but that is a big thing to miss.

Dragon Caesar wrote:

Well since we're on the topic now, I won't feel bad for asking in thread. Did you swap out the two prong outlets with GFCI for your office or did you end up going all out for replacement/upgrade?

We actually had a whole second breaker box added to the "attic" of the house to convert it into something useful. It's a 16x30 foot mostly open space with 9 foot ceilings and only had two outlets hooked up to knob and tube wiring. Now it is a bedroom, living room, office and kitchenette and has plenty of fresh wiring for these tasks. Because we have so much going on up here though, I still notice odd issues with electrical devices interacting with one another in ways they probably shouldn't. Like, when our half size fridge kicks on my white noise generator slows down, and they are on different circuits up here.

Anyway, the updates we did here (as well as some updates to the second floor) were quite expensive but made it possible for my wife and daughter and I occupy some previously unused space in this house, which we're sharing with relatives.

Keeping this on topic.... I have actually considered using the old knob and tube outlets (left in because they work fine) for my IBM 5150 to make it even more authentic...

Ended up taking the two CRT monitors outside since they were beyond repair and not working very well (the picture would turn pink or nothing came on the monitors). On top of that, those things weigh more than my wheel hub on my car. Also put a worn down LCD HDTV and 19" LCD TV (non-HD) that lost its sound and started to play tricks (not turning on or off) to the curb and someone picked them up before the garbage people got to them in case they would like to repair them.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Ding ding ding! That's it. […]
Show full quote

Dragon Caesar wrote:

I can't help myself, is it a Sony GDM-FW900?

Ding ding ding! That's it.

Can't believe I actually got my hands on one of these. Sadly, its just too large and heavy for me to be able to reasonably keep and use since my office is on the third floor of our house... and I already have a ~65lb HP P1230 CRT on my workbench, plus a few other CRTs in storage. I doubt I'll have any trouble finding a home for it, but it took some cosmetic damage in shipping, so I'm waiting to hear from FedEx before I decide what to do with it.

Thankfully, the picture is very nice and the screen, controls and inputs are all intact. I get a little bit of intermittent display wobble at certain resolutions and refresh rates, but my HP does this too some times so it could be some kind of EMI or interference issue. This house has some 100 year old wiring left over that makes diagnosing things like this a bit harder.

What's your take on the HP P1230?

Any NFL fans here? Terrible pun.

amadeus777999 wrote:

What's your take on the HP P1230?

Fantastic monitor. I bought mine refurbished for $150 back in 2007. It was manufactured in 2005 so it was an amazing deal. I used it for a few years before switching to an LCD, but I switched back to the CRT for a while in 2015 - 2016 when I started to learn about and notice (understatement) sample and hold display blurring that affects all non-CRT displays. Then I bought a BenQ XL2720z which is about as close as you can get to CRT clarity and flexibility while maintaining best compatibility with modern stuff. The HP had been in my test bench for use with older systems for most of the past 6 years .

As with any CRT, clarity suffers at very high resolutions and refresh rates, but I played some games at 2048x1536@85Hz and basically never needed antialiasing because the dots were so small. Screen geometry inconsistencies can be irritating once you notice them, but this is the same in any CRT really. For pixel perfect graphics I'd still use an LCD, but for older games or fast competitive gaming the P1230 is among the best monitors ever made.

Interesting.

I only use mine for low res stuff(Dos Editor + some 320x200 gaming) but got a similar, very positive, impression during testing. Ended up buying three of these 1230s which enabled me to put some less desired tubes in the attic.

appiah4 wrote:

Whoa, really?!?

Dragon Caesar wrote:

Was the house inspected prior to you getting it? I know home inspectors aren't perfect but that is a big thing to miss.

It's a rental, since the bank refused to give me a loan to buy a better house, claiming that my job that paid over $50,000 in rent over 8 years wasn't stable enough to pay back a $15,000 loan. Reminds me, I need to find a hardware store that still carries fuses, because I ran out of spares over the summer when the air conditioners and refrigerator would kick on at the same time.

Maybe you can lever them down on the rental price now that you know the wiring is a safety hazard.

Also, your bank is evil.

Just happy, to live in a country with a well regulated law, regarding installation. Who are alowed, what are alowed to be used and so on. We got a stable power grid, and we are warned by text messages one week or more in advance, if they will shut the local grid down for service.

Regarding shock. Well... 125 is nothing. I have had numerous shocks from our grid over the years. And we ran 220 back in the 90's and before that. Now it is 240 volt. Volts are nothing, yet the outlets can deliver 10amps before the fuses go south and then we have a RCD breaker as well, just in case someone got shocked and shortcircuited it all. I have even seen the results of someone getting 350volts at a school, back in 1995. Now that was some serious shit. Deep soars on each hand, and the man was on the hospital for an 24 hours observation. Someone just forgot to shut the power off, when they practised wiring in their class at the school. I guess it helps, if you are 35 and have been working on the docks all your life, unloading cargo and using your body for hard work. Amazingly he survived. And he even smoked 40 filterless cigarettes a day.