I know we don't really have an eBay thread anymore, but I just wanted to say: Is this the new way to rip people off on eBay?

Some PoS is listing items out of Russia for $1.00 seemingly with the price rolled into the shipping.

I'm assuming the purpose of this is to make it impossible to get your money back via returns?

I HATE everybody who supports the "Friends and Family" only trend that is going through the retro community right now, its just an excuse to rip some one off by misrepresenting your item, and to have no liability if you sell garbage.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-03-08, 23:14:

I know we don't really have an eBay thread anymore, but I just wanted to say: Is this the new way to rip people off on eBay? […]
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I know we don't really have an eBay thread anymore, but I just wanted to say: Is this the new way to rip people off on eBay?

Some PoS is listing items out of Russia for $1.00 seemingly with the price rolled into the shipping.

I'm assuming the purpose of this is to make it impossible to get your money back via returns?

I HATE everybody who supports the "Friends and Family" only trend that is going through the retro community right now, its just an excuse to rip some one off by misrepresenting your item, and to have no liability if you sell garbage.

No, the purpose is to pay less in fees.

If the item is not as described or doesn't arrive, the seller has to refund the full amount including shipping.

BTW am thinking of getting rid of some old AT stuff like a few 16bit RLL controllers after doing some testing on them or at least make sure I have the docs. I have no use for 6 of them so is there any interest in WD based RLL controllers ? They all worked last time I tested all back 2001-2003 and have been stored properly. Just wondering if there is a market or maybe just donate them to members here. Just curious.
And while looking thru my boxes of junk found this: Whoopy !

ShovelKnight wrote on 2020-03-08, 23:39:

No, the purpose is to pay less in fees.

If the item is not as described or doesn't arrive, the seller has to refund the full amount including shipping.

Shipping cost has been rolled into the fee for quite a while now. Maybe last 10 years.

I've been messing around with my Athlon XP 2400+ / KT133A build, which I use for both 98SE and XP. Right now trying out different GPU and sound card combos.

I use Ghost 2003 to image the disk after installs, like this one for Catalyst 10.2 and a Radeon AIW X800 XT. Takes about 30 mins to burn the image, a little less to restore.

Took my Powerbook G3 "Pismo" out of storage, since I needed it to convert a Mac disk image. Guess what? It still works without any flaws. I think it was in storage since 4 or 5 years. During this time, half of my other old Powerbooks died or needed at least some repair.

Today I configured a dosbox testbed to compile the original Wolf3D DOS source code to see if I can add "always-run" and "mouselook" (plus WASD control) to it. I already did that with the SDL port, but SDL does not work on DOS.

Did some more work, on my AT/XT to Amiga keyboard convertion. And before anyone asks, then yes, the AT keyboard was dead in advance.

What I did today, was to finish up the mounting on the base of the keyboard shell. This way, the heavy Amiga500 keyboard will not move and slide around inside it's new house.

Next, I need to finish up the top shell. Then I need to create a new data cable.

Horun wrote on 2020-03-07, 17:38:

Jed118 wrote on 2020-03-07, 05:21:

Unpacked the 2nd to last package from Europe I will likely receive. In it, a beautiful Kompakt Serie III case, with (as always […]
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Unpacked the 2nd to last package from Europe I will likely receive. In it, a beautiful Kompakt Serie III case, with (as always with these cases) anything but a 386 SX inside. Instead, a DX-40 386. The 7 segment was set to 40 as well, so I am not sure if VOBIS quality control just got lazy or wtf.

Again, the original hard disk came in one of those caddy cases. This is like the 3rd or 4th one I receive like this. Replaced with a CDROM.

I also added 4Mb of RAM for a total of 8, erased most of the German software that was on there, put in a soundcard, removed the mobo and took out the battery (almost no corrosion!!) and replaced it with an external cell. The hard disk was moved to the mounting point beside the power supply, I cleaned up the insides, loaded Windows 3.11 and put on the proper drivers for everything.

Wow, nice looking 486. Good job ! Ahh red wine, is it a cabernet' or pinot ?

Hungarian Bulls Blood 😉

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-03-08, 04:54:

The shiners can be converted to glow-er by replacing the empty space or directly to the LED (partially cut off to make room for) […]
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Jed118 wrote on 2020-03-07, 07:07:

https://i.imgur.com/hT3J43d.jpg […]
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I gotta do something about that Turbo LED. I recall over a decade ago I redid my first wife's HVAC controls on her Tiburon. The answer was: Sand the LED down.

Fast forward to now - I'll use a grinder.

The shiners can be converted to glow-er by replacing the empty space or directly to the LED (partially cut off to make room for), with diffuser by using any white translucent material. Can be a off white translucent hot glue, translucent white epoxy etc.

Diffuser is what scatters the direct beam into light-glow that you can see. Sanding helps very little.

Or replace the water-clear LED with 5mm diffused LED of same color.

Cheers,

I have an LED holder and I found an amber and yellow LED - will try these out later, they will look more era-correct. Thanks!

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-03-08, 23:14:

I HATE everybody who supports the "Friends and Family" only trend that is going through the retro community right now, its just an excuse to rip some one off by misrepresenting your item, and to have no liability if you sell garbage.

So, everyone on the Computer Reset facebook page? 😜

Curiously, the video card costs the same to ship to Poland as it does to the USA.

Avoid.

I decided to dismantle this Toshiba Libretto 50CT / 70CT battery that I bought that didn't seem to work at all.

2 of the cells were down around 3 volts, so they should be usable when charged up. Sadly one of the cells was down at 1.5 out of its 3.7 volts, so it's a dud.
It looks like it's now impossible to find lithium ion cells in the 17mm wide and 67mm tall (17670) format any more, so I'm thinking of trying a 14650 in its place; lower capacity but it should give a more usable battery 😀

Who at Toshiba thought that a computer with no internal CD ROM or floppy drive, and no USB boot support was a good idea? To add insult to injury their SD Card formatting tool for making bootable SD cards doesn't work with my SD card adapter.

The only way I can realistically get an OS onto this mofo is to start the install on one PC, then swap the IDE drive into another. Fuck this dumb.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-03-11, 01:39:

Who at Toshiba thought that a computer with no internal CD ROM or floppy drive, and no USB boot support was a good idea? To add insult to injury their SD Card formatting tool for making bootable SD cards doesn't work with my SD card adapter.

The only way I can realistically get an OS onto this mofo is to start the install on one PC, then swap the IDE drive into another. Fuck this dumb.

You could try setting up a remote install server in a VM and use that. Yeah I know its a major pain to do it that way but if needs must. Assuming that Toshiba has a built in NIC that is PXE compliant of course.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-03-11, 01:39:

Who at Toshiba thought that a computer with no internal CD ROM or floppy drive, and no USB boot support was a good idea? To add insult to injury their SD Card formatting tool for making bootable SD cards doesn't work with my SD card adapter.

The only way I can realistically get an OS onto this mofo is to start the install on one PC, then swap the IDE drive into another. Fuck this dumb.

Which Tosh ? My sis-in-law has an older Asus slim lap that would not allow a USB cdrom to be bootable. Just curious....

Fired up a few non vintage PC's that I got from thrift stores during the week. One a Dell Vostro 200, the other a Dell Studio XPS 9100. Paid $30 for both including an original MS Sidewinder game Pad. All work just fine ! Never owned a i7 socket 1366 before so the 9100 was a bit interesting...
There just is no real vintage stuff in my area anymore 🙁

Horun wrote on 2020-03-11, 02:26:

Which Tosh ? My sis-in-law has an older Asus slim lap that would not allow a USB cdrom to be bootable. Just curious....

I'm sure you guys know better, but just in case - some laptops don't allow USB boot when the current OS is hibernated. No helpful message is presented.

Booting from USB was something that came quite late to the PC. I have many systems from the early 2000's that still can not boot from USB CD-ROM drives. Booting from USB floppy was introduced first, from other media much later. Probably because USB 1.x was way too slow for that and it took some years before USB 2.0 was widely addopted, so BIOS makers didn't care much.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2020-03-01, 21:37:

Last weekend was extremely busy clearing the flat since I might be moving soon - but this weekend I had a chance to catch up on […]
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Last weekend was extremely busy clearing the flat since I might be moving soon - but this weekend I had a chance to catch up on some of my projects.

I've got a whole bunch of Toshiba floppy drives, around half of which had bad drive belts. I bought some cheap TPU filament and printed some 65mm, 0.5mm thick, 0.8/1.4mm tall belts to replace them. All the belts are replaced and only one of the drives is bad! (heads)

Initially I was trying to get hold of *a* slimline toshiba floppy drive for my Toshiba Portege 3010CT , then ended up with 5 of them because of a job lot. It spirralled from there. I've found that the later belt driven drives are actually comparatively easy to repair - the drive's tray mechanism lifts out for easy belt replacement.

floppybelt-repair-station.jpg

Here are my thoughts on each drive:

• Citizen W1D thin floppy drive - very easy to work on, works nicely with 0.8mm tall belt
• Matsushita EME 279TD - also qute easy to work on, works well with 0.8mm tall belt.
• Matsushita EME 278TB - hellish to work on, didn't even need to replace the belt in the end but re-fitting the belt was horrible. The drive is essentially designed upside-down and then riveted together 🙁
• Mitsumi D353F2 - comparatively easy to work on, needs a 1.4mm belt and 3d printed belts don't work because the belt guides aren't well designed. Got this one working by running the belt over IPA+Q-Tip
• Teac FD05 - not a belt drive, it just works!

Got one of my 5 1/4" drives working - I think it's one of the last ones made? A Teac FD55GFR with datecodes suggesting it was made in 1995.

Reinstalled Windows 95 on my Dell XPi CD P150ST because it started refusing to boot from the 1.6GB hard drive, now it has a 4GB CF card, so much faster 😀

Hello,

I'm trying to contact you through PM about W1D belts.

Cheers,

The Toshiba Portege M200 S838 is the spawn of satan. Here is how to reinstall Windows on one for whomever it might concern in the future:

You shall need:

* USB Flash Drive, formatted with Windows XP install media with RUFUS
* A 1.44MB IBM Formatted Floppy Disk
* A USB Floppy Drive (the more standard/generic the better)
* A 2nd PC
* A Program to write .img files to floppies (Google "Floppy Image 2.4" for a 14 day free trial of that program. There is also a freeware version out there that is really hard to find)

STEPS:

1.) Download PLOPs Boot Manager
2.) Extract the archive
3.) Use the imaging program to write the PLOPs .IMG file to a floppy disk
4.) Connect the floppy drive to the Portege
5.) Invoke the boot menu and select the Floppy Disk option (you might need to try a few times with different USB ports connecting the drive)
6.) Once it loads go to setup
7.) Set "Force USB 1.1" to "Mode 1"
8.) Unplug your floppy drive
9.) Plug in the USB drive to the same port the floppy drive was on
10.) Select USB, press enter
11.) Wait patientely for Windows XP Setup to load
12.) Install Windows XP as normal.