stoof wrote on 2020-05-30, 14:05:

maverick85 wrote on 2020-05-30, 09:37:

Purchased a can of brake cleaner fluid on amazon which will be arriving tomorrow. I will be hosing down a grimy Abit AS8-V motherboard, which will be the test subject

Whoa there, brake cleaner is nasty stuff. I'd be worried it would remove more than just dirt and grime.

I've used it for really caked boards before, immediately rinsing them off with water after it evaporated, so I don't think there's much danger there.

Brake cleaner is very, extremely aggressive chemicals on molded plastic but not for sockets which is different formulations and lung-wise doesn't go well indoor due to fumes is so choking. I rather use varsol, more milder. 99% Alcohol straight is best for final clean up.

If the mess is organic, chemical-wise will not move easily. I use distilled water and 99% alcohol 50/50 mix to do this cleaning for organic mess. This mix is what we use at work cleaning phones and tablets and computer, consoles. Safe on electronics specifically.

When we have to wash circuit boards (ultrasonic speeds up the cleaning process), due to said nature of the what phones get wet in first place by accidents by customers, after the wash then final two rinses is water (either tap water or distilled water), then final rinse by soaking in tub of; or poured over of 99% alcohol then gently heated with hot air or special low temperate up 70C hot air oven for awhile. Works great. Of course not your regular oven, please don't go that route!

Cheers,

obviously go for the brake cleaner without acetone ^^, and yeah obviously only use them outdoors.
at least my cans specifically state they're safe for rubber and plastics.

works well for boards that are caked in dirt, cleaning them off just with alcohol would take forever and you can't easily get into every little crease, unless you have a motherboard sized ultrasonic cleaner ^^ then yeah... (can I have it?)

Did some boring maintenance stuff. Updated the BIOS on my Packard Bell, tried to test out a Quantum Bigfoot drive that proved to be at least partially functional but also very annoying, and installed a Zip 100 drive in my Gateway G6-200.

computerguy08 wrote on 2020-05-28, 07:51:

I stripped this 386 motherboard for spare parts.

20200528_104319 (Phone).jpg

No 386 boards were harmed for this photo, the battery leaked near the CPU and ruined the board.

How did you strip everything off so cleanly? I have a parts board I wanted to harvest the PCI slots & chip sockets (BIOS, etc.) from, but the idea of going at that with my hand solder sucker & wick is less than appealing.

Making CD Images out of the GOG games i bought that come with one.

So do you guys bother to patch games on DOS systems, or do you just install them off the disk and leave it at that? I find myself getting a bit anxious over un-patched games ^^;

But then again, im also lazy, and don't feel like taking out a CF card just to download a patch for every single game i own X)
I guess i cooouuuldddd just move the entire fully patched gog game onto the card instead of installing of disk but.....CDs! Man!

..atleast if it was a game that came on CD in the firstplace 😁

Tried to get a BIOS image from my stupid 5284. UniFlash only got the first 128kb from it even though it's 256kb, and flashROM says no EEPROM available. No idea how the heck I can extract it without a SPI programmer.

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-05-31, 05:01:

So do you guys bother to patch games on DOS systems, or do you just install them off the disk and leave it at that? I find myself getting a bit anxious over un-patched games ^^;

Depends on the game, but usually yes. Patches sometimes offer significant improvements.

For example, games like the first Command & Conquer have some important bug fixes for the single player campaign, and I remember downloading that patch on my 14.400 modem back in the day. The original Quake offers much better performance with patch 1.08. Crusader No Remorse has a patch which adds native support for Ensoniq and GUS cards. And so on.

I always patch them. I lived through the nineties. It taught me that most games come out with crashing bugs, save-corrupting bugs, compatiblity bugs, how-did-this-pass-QA bugs and so on. A trend that did not stop at all today.

Also, there were a lot of times patches to enable 3DFX compatibility, which is always a worthy addition.

brian105 wrote on 2020-05-31, 05:06:

Tried to get a BIOS image from my stupid 5284. UniFlash only got the first 128kb from it even though it's 256kb, and flashROM says no EEPROM available. No idea how the heck I can extract it without a SPI programmer.

Presario 5284?
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp11501-12000/sp11599.exe

xjas wrote on 2020-05-31, 01:25:

computerguy08 wrote on 2020-05-28, 07:51:

I stripped this 386 motherboard for spare parts.

20200528_104319 (Phone).jpg

No 386 boards were harmed for this photo, the battery leaked near the CPU and ruined the board.

How did you strip everything off so cleanly? I have a parts board I wanted to harvest the PCI slots & chip sockets (BIOS, etc.) from, but the idea of going at that with my hand solder sucker & wick is less than appealing.

A heatgun and some sharp pliers 😀

It took no more than 20 minutes for the entire board.

Dumping all my original Xbox 360 games to the hard disk of my modded 360. Still about 20 games to go...

Played Descent II for the first time today, and wow, is it good. Wasn't able to hear the potentially rocking soundtrack though, likely because I was using a USB CD-ROM drive that the game didn't like.

I used D2-XL to play it ( http://www.descent2.de/ ) which brings modern looks and the ability to read music from the local storage instead of the CD.

D2 XL looks very nice and plays better.

Even if after a while I missed the retro looks and the whole DOS experience so I went back to DOSBox. I'm weird.

It's weird, because as much as I enjoyed my initial experience with the game, the slow mouse movement was kinda odd. Something to get used to.

Spent most of the day making more Windows 95 icons, then running into a roadblock. I was trying to determine if I could backport more user directories into Win9X, such as Pictures, Videos, and Music, and stuff them into the My Computer set, but then I was put into a... very, very bad mood that will take a long time to get rid of, so I stopped at the point where I was determining if I absolutely needed certain registry values, like the InProcServer32 stuff.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-05-21, 12:26:

amontre wrote on 2020-05-21, 11:57:

Today, I had my MiSTer with Minimig core installed on my candy arcade cabs (using a jamma adapter), I'm having a blast playing amiga games on the arcade.

Could you please give me a brief rundown on what makes a MiSTer different from a MiST?

It basically like steroid version of MiST, It has bigger FPGA and faster processor. In term of development of the cores, MiSTer are much more active almost weekly update of the cores.

Received 3.96mm pitch female connectors with pigtail of wires. Cut off the protruding bits and cut the latch off and I was able to plug these into power supply pins on the Compaq Deskpro 386/25e motherboard. Now searching to find ATX connectors and make adapter to power the motherboard.

Cheers,

xcomcmdr wrote on 2020-06-01, 06:49:

I used D2-XL to play it ( http://www.descent2.de/ ) which brings modern looks and the ability to read music from the local storage instead of the CD.

D2 XL looks very nice and plays better.

Even if after a while I missed the retro looks and the whole DOS experience so I went back to DOSBox. I'm weird.

How did you find D2X-XL to get going? I just set it up on my current rig for my source port archiving project and found it was an enormous finicky mess to even get running. ONCE everything was set up exactly how it's written in the manual, and you've worked out all the config stuff that has been changed but not documented, it runs "OK" but it's still littered with issues. Framerate varies from 400+ to sub-20FPS in the same room if you max out the settings (especially "smoke".)

I check it out every couple years or so - the author's put a bunch of really cool features and mods in that I would love to explore further - but I always have so many issues I go back to Rebirth ... or vanilla.

Spent the whole evening playing RoadRash which is not the most intellectually stimulating game, but great fun.