Refurbed the the rechargeable battery pack on my NEC PC-8201A today. Pretty straight forward. Use bits and pieces I had laying about the house. Worked out well using only my cheap soldering iron.. The ol dear was predstine inside.

Does anybody know if this is a good 486 board?

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-11-27, 16:41:

Does anybody know if this is a good 486 board? https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/G5QAAOSwRBpehgo4/s-l1600.jpg […]
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Does anybody know if this is a good 486 board?

It looks like an early board with a Weitek socket. Not sure whether the jumpers near the CPU are for different CPUs, but with only 30-pin SIMMs and ISA slots it certainly isn't high end. If you are looking for Weitek support, it may be OK, but if you want to run a range of 486 CPUs it probably won't be so good.

the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-11-26, 18:38:

Finished cleaning and updating the BIOS on my Asus A7V880 Socket A motherboard, and I've run into a weird issue. https://i.imgur […]
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Finished cleaning and updating the BIOS on my Asus A7V880 Socket A motherboard, and I've run into a weird issue.

I get this error from a "slow boot" (i.e. not a Quick Boot) when I populate all 4 DIMM slots on the motherboard with 1GB sticks of DDR-400 (I've tried both G.skill and Corsair kits). According to the manual, the board supports 4GB of RAM, and the chipset technically supports 8GB, so I don't think I'm using too much. Each pair of DIMM slots works normally individually, but when all 4 are used I run into this error, with detected RAM maxing out at 2.5GB. I'm testing with a Sempron 2000+ that came with the board.

Any ideas?

The user manual says to use only 2 DIMMs when using DDR400, or else you can get unstable performance. Try 4 DIMMs of slower RAM and see if it works.

Fancy doing this for holiday season? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpAnV8SLzh4

Download: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/holiday_lights.html

Runs on: XP and later

I remember I used to do that on Windows 98, but I couldn't find a version for that one.

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-11-26, 23:30:

Hmmm...that’s an RU28 TSSOP with 0.65mm pitch - did you use solder paste, and if so, which brand did you use? Did you follow any Pre-heating procedures? I was aiming for 5 ADP3421s off a reel from a reputable dealer instead of junk pulls...

I just use regular flux, because I bought a big bottle of that many years ago (noname from eBay) and flux paste is pretty expensive.

Every time I remove a chip like that it pretty much goes like this:
- Putting Capton tape around the chip if there are very small resistors so I don't blow them off the board
- Filling up a small syringe with a bit of flux and gently applying it under the chip
- Setting my hotair station to around 280°C - 320°C with a small nozzle and moderate airflow. It only has one knob to control it and 50% of power seems to be enough. Setting it higher makes components fly off, setting it lower and the chips don't want to move.
- Directing the heat only onto the chips surface/legs and tapping it with tweezers until it moves

For soldering in the new one I don't use hotair afterwards. I clean up the board with solder wick and use the iron to solder in the new one.

Sometimes when a chip is struggling I adjust the heat a little higher and/or put more flux on the chip again and that pretty much makes it work then.
One day I will try BGA reballing, a big package of various stencils is already on its way here. Now I just need a machine with a broken BGA chip... 😀

debs3759 wrote on 2020-11-27, 17:03:

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-11-27, 16:41:

Does anybody know if this is a good 486 board? https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/G5QAAOSwRBpehgo4/s-l1600.jpg […]
Show full quote

Does anybody know if this is a good 486 board?

It looks like an early board with a Weitek socket. Not sure whether the jumpers near the CPU are for different CPUs, but with only 30-pin SIMMs and ISA slots it certainly isn't high end. If you are looking for Weitek support, it may be OK, but if you want to run a range of 486 CPUs it probably won't be so good.

I concur. The 82C493 is limited to 33 MHz, supporting Writeback cache. It'd be better to start looking for SiS 471 or newer based motherboards if you want a good 486 experience.

Fired up the SHARP PC-1500 from 1983. Haven't fired it up in six or so years. Absolutely no problems at all. Has nice ali front too.

Even back then portable computers had battery power saving features. Believe it or not....

wiretap wrote on 2020-11-27, 17:26:

The user manual says to use only 2 DIMMs when using DDR400, or else you can get unstable performance. Try 4 DIMMs of slower RAM and see if it works.

I tried running the RAM at 333Mhz, no die.

Got a rando PII board out of an auction a couple weeks ago, and I finally had a time to look at it.

Bulging caps. POST and even boot no problem, but since this is a category 2 machine for me, I invested the $9CAD and ordered the right caps for it.

Here are the old ones, popping the tops and nothing I am unfamiliar with. Actually, this exercise ameliorated my soldering techniques - it was basically a swap of soldering tips, one that could go through the hole in the motherboard directly to the other side where my solder sucker waited - 9/10, it was met with success, 9 capacitors were replaced with ease.

One beer was consumed.

Success!! (for now)

So I screwed the motherboard in. I had to use the pliers to make adjustments to the case, as the standoff seemed like it would interfere with the board. Got the I/O shield in , mounted the board, and then I realized that the harness would have to be taken apart.

Another beer was consumed.

I returned and realized that I have to do something with this harness, at least slip the power button leads out of it and connect them to the motherboard so as to not act the savage and randomly touch jumper headers together with a screwdriver in order to power on (which is clearly what I was doing when I snapped the POST picture 😁 ) and in my screwdriver manipulations, NAILED the motherboard with it.

Shit.

Turns on, no sounds, no video.

Put in analyzer on ISA - getting -- --

OK. Isolate - take out the video card (PCI), turn on. 8 beeps.

Sweet.

Put PCI video board into another slot.

Nothing.

Slightly panic - look over at 486 SCSI project. Has 8 bit ATI VGA tester card. ISA. This PII board has ISA.

POSTS. Nice!

Next step, try a different bus:

POSTS. Wicked.

It was my intention to use AGP anyhow. To test the PCI bus, I will put a known good PCI video card in it. Then, rebuild an NEC system 😁

Bonus picture of an 8 bit 1988 ATI Wonder POSTing a Celeron 533

A third beer was consumed.

That board is an MSI MS-6309 v2.0. Good little Coppermine/Tualatin motherboard.

Dmetsys wrote on 2020-11-28, 07:10:

That board is an MSI MS-6309 v2.0. Good little Coppermine/Tualatin motherboard.

Great news! I don't have a Tualatin, but I do have a 1GHz CPU kicking around here somewhere. And a nice CPU cooler for it. Thanks for the info 😁

Trying to fix a retrobright that ran wild...

Sooo... I managed to rip off the biggest capacitor on my Voodoo 5 AGP when i was inserting the Molex. Its the 470uf one. Of course the pads went also 🙁
The positive side is connected straight to the +5V of the Molex. Is this just a filter cap, and the negative is connected to ground? I cant see where i should connect the negative otherwise.

"Revived" old ASUS P5A with a new BIOS (1007.bin) - diagnose card was showing 0xffff but no picture so I assumed it must be the BIOS since it was the last step in the procedure.
Happy news aside the board's cache is nonetheless smoked but I'll use it without and instead up the fsb. Good enough for a 586 era test board.

Finally got myself a working Commodore Plus/4 yesterday. The keyboard wasn't working correctly, several keys not working and other keys doing things they shouldn't. So I opened it up and found the culprit - a deteriorating keyboard ribbon cable.

But I did manage to get it working again by reseating the cable, then bending it one way followed by folding it another and then pressing the case back down onto the cable to hold it in place. Did the trick, keyboard is now fully functional. I'll be leaving it like that for now and I'm going to keep on the look out for either a replacement keyboard or a broken spares/repairs Plus 4 on eBay to strip for parts. My soldering skills are nowhere near advanced enough to try replacing the ribbon cable itself, plus the keyboard is missing a key and spare keys for the Plus/4 are pretty hard to come by.

Keyboard issue aside, I cleaned the computer and applied IPA to the expansion ports and I've spent most of today playing games on this Plus/4. Trying out the games that I got with it as well as those on my SD2IEC.

My next maintenance job is to try and restore the 4 joysticks I have for it into some sort of working order, they all have issues with the fire button or certain directions. If I can at least repair 2 of them, that'll be a bonus. But in the meantime I have a DB-9 adapter to use proper microswitched joysticks instead. 🤣

I finally played Daggerfall through to the end. I was bouncing from save spot to save spot at times, but I enjoyed myself a lot.

The new table is installed today.. So soon i can relocate my hardware and other stuff to it..
Maybe iam going it to use for some days to build my systems on, and after that using it to store my stuff on in.

Obtained a few different retro linux distributions today. Will post images later.

RetroLizard wrote on 2020-11-28, 23:56:

Obtained a few different retro linux distributions today. Will post images later.

We have a thread for old Unix/Linux Re: *nix software and systems