My IBM Netvista went from a crippled 815E mobo to a pretty slick Epox EP-3VCM.
That thing can take any mATX board, so in theory I could go oeuvre's way and stick a powerful SFX PSU in and just go bonkers with a 1156 build w/ either a HD7870 or a GTX670.

Then there's a Gateway GP6-400 done in the flat/desktop format. That's going to be a quite powerful Katmai machine disguised as a Pentium II. The only issue I have to adress though, would be the front panel wiring, as it's horribly short.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-14, 22:48:

Thanks all for the well wishes, sympathy and support as regards the monitor problems. If it was lightning related last time, it nearly got to be again today, we had a storm blow in fast and there was a near miss, or near hit down the street this morning, felt the heat of the flash on my skin through the blinds. So far, touch wood, everything okay.

After that had left me in peace, I got back to the BX-6VP2, just stick the flash stuff on a disk hook up a floppy and reboot.... nah... didn't see the disk as bootable... tried another drive... nope, another cable... nope... double check the disk, all good, try a MSDOS 6.2 boot disk, no-go... well what then you POS??? ... okay... strip it all back down... visual inspection with a magnifier... hmmm floppy header lines go past first PCI slot, is the vid card I'm sticking in there too noisy?... then get to the i/o chip, there's a patch of dust all over it... I thought it had just got missed with the air duster, but nope, it was stuck there, something a touch sticky, okay, cleaner and brush and scrub, get most of it off, odd dust, short fibers, reminds me of some types of wood dust, or what happens to the parcel shelf in a 1970s car when it's had too much sun. That seems really stuck and packed, scraped it out from between the pins on the i/o chip with a sharp point. It's a little humid lately, so if it's an organic kind of dust I wonder if it had swelled with moisture and got low enough resistance tight between the pins to pull pins high or low when they shouldn't be. Get it all out, still looks a bit dull around those pins, which aren't just any part of the i/o chip but are the floppy lines... hokay, give this a try, fire up a micro torch and run it over the pins briefly, see a few orange sparkles as a last few specks of that stuff burn up, and the pads turn shiny instead of dull. Well whatever, that looks better now. Then popped out the BIOS chip, cleaned pins and reseated just in case.

Now reassemble the test configuration, but just to be sure, stick the PCI vid and POST card in the slot furthest from the floppy lines... and fire it up and it boots off the floppy, yay.... but awdflash says the bin file ain't right.. and the keyboard isn't working to manual launch/override... gah... so swap keyboards around retry, retry, doh, there's another capless header I missed, it's the keyboard voltage selection, 3 pin, one or the other, just get some volts to keyboard (Standby or regular 5V) ... yes, keyboard working.... awdflash 7..37 don't like that file though, might be because it saved as a longname ... okay fix that... also, you know what, get the awdflash off the redfox archive since that should be mor guaranteed, turned out to be 7.33 so you thin 7.37 would be fine, but anyhoo, okay. got the flash floppy reconfigured got the kb working, rebooted again, flash chugged away happily, appears successful, is it? YISSSSSS, 3 boards out of 4 now, and what a cool logo, almost worth the trouble 🤣...

Just my personal choice, but you would probably have had less headache flashing it using flashrom or Uniflash, assuming there isn't any flash protect jumper for the BIOS.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-15, 06:23:

Fantastic progress today. […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-15, 02:41:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-14, 23:51:

Because the mobo on my first full Linux box has turned up it toes I've decided to repurpose it's chassis. Did all the component location and figure out what needs a bit of a trim up for the PGA370 mobo and 155 watt psu has to go last night while whatching the telly. This morning it was straight in to cut n tuck mode with the Fuller rotery grinder. I've never done anything this drastic before but it has be terrific fun.

The mod is coming along very well:

Ah took me a moment, forgot images post in reverse, thought you went from neat machine to chaos, now I see pic 2 is measuring up, and pic 1 is fairly neat result.

Been a while since I did similar. "Back in the day" for values of "the day" between about 23 and 19 years ago, the city where I'd turned up, seemed to be living in the relative stone age, as regards penetration of personal computers of any description, at least judging by what was available used. Now I'd got some decent boards but nothing to put them in. I carved up an innocent little NEC powermate 386sx, almost got a board in that, didn't finish the project and it was sitting open for a time, just using the base as it were. Then later I found an AT desktop case with PSU mounted flat and high, so there was room under it to carve out space for an ATX backplate, so that was the machine I had a K6-2 and Voodoo 3 in for quite a while. Cooling in it wasn't exactly optimal though. Probably I still have most of the parts of that powermate come to think of it, but I doubt it will go back together right after I hacked chunks out of it.

Fantastic progress today.

Optical drive/ffdd cage trimmed up and mounted. Hdd cage trimmed and secured. PSU has had its' original fan removed to reduce thepsu housing height by 12mm. Altered the psu housing to put a slightily smaller fan from a slot 1 cpu unit. Also added another fan to the back, now right hand side, grill.

Things to do:

Mark out then drill holes for mobo stand offs and attach them.
Lengthen the psu loom and attach to power output socket to the rear of the systems chassis.
Put a fuse holder in the psu for easy fuse fitment/removal.
Put more ventilation holes in the psu housing and system chassis.
And a few minor things to tidy the rear end up.
Need see if I can locate a pci 90 degree riser for the peripherals. Failing that use peripheral blanks to make smaller plates to mount small form factor goodies fitted to the pci slots as is. Manufacture a mounting cage for those if needed.

Take care all...😉

Goodness I forgot the pics:

Nice job getting that motherboard in there. What's the plan for the expansion cards since the slot openings are horizontal for a riser card setup?

Looks to me like he has a choice of using low profiles or maybe 3/4 profile cards that don't extend over top of normal bracket. OR finding a PCI riser card. But I'm thinking PCI doesn't work like ISA in that all signals for however many slots are on the bus, each slot has it's own 2 or 3 unique lines or something. The proprietary risers use more lines than regular PCI does anyway. Maybe it works but only one card in master mode and with limited IRQ pool. IDK still waking up, rambling while half my neurons still asleep.

PcBytes wrote on 2021-07-15, 07:38:

Just my personal choice, but you would probably have had less headache flashing it using flashrom or Uniflash, assuming there isn't any flash protect jumper for the BIOS.

Yeah maybe, not sure how limited an environment it is when you boot in bootblock recovery mode, so I wasn't gonna try anything off script in that situation. Think I was using uniflash when I was last having a spate of hot swap flashing. Might try that for the CUV4X* when I've got a board set up with the BIOS on an easy corner. AF 7.37 could have been right, in that the BIOS didn't have BX-6VP2 code in it at the time, or that it might not have been the right board version. When I was putting it away I found Ver F printed small on a corner of the board, however, all the layout and jumpers match revision C in the manuals online, and are different from rev D, so I don't know if this was a later version than the interwebs knows about, or whether it was a PCB revision irrelevant to the system revision number. You'd tend to expect though that one revision would be an evolution of the last so an F would look more like a D than it did a C, but who knows.

*I think the CUV4X which is the 4th dead board I was going to give up on, came in the same batch as the BX-6VP2, which showed signs of "BIOS messed with" and the symptoms on the POST card are similar (Random error every time it's powered up), and also has the Award sticker on the BIOS chip moved to show part number of flash chip, that therefore the BIOS on the CUV4X is suspect, so I could try hot flashing new code and see if it comes alive. Used to see a lot of flash failures around the time these boards were current, I blame the likes of Scisoft Sandra and other utilities that would flag BIOS date with a warning triangle and exclamation mark if it was a year or two old "WARNING BIOS OUT OF DATE!!!111" and n00bs would panic and download and flash whatever they first found. Some of them seemed to think it was more important to have a BIOS with a recent date than one that actually matched their system, so if their boards latest BIOS was 2 years old, they'd just flash anything that was newer. "Talking them down" was often tedious, they're all OMG I NEED A NEW BIOS RIGHT NOW... no, you probably don't, is everything working? ... Yes but xxxxx said I need a new BIOS... you have the latest BIOS for your board.... But xxxxx says it's too old... ignore it... No, it has to be right, my BIOS is a problem, I'm gonna flash this one... don't it'll kill your board... ... ... (3 days later when they get back online on a friends machine or at library or something ) IT KILLED MY BOARD!!! Why wouldn't you help me get the right BIOS in the first place!!! ... *sigh*

Well so far i just installed a lovely lil P3, 933mhz CPU in my Fujitsu-Siemens Win98 PC 😁
BIOS complains about a missing patch (which i do have installed...i think??) but it ACTUALLY works! woo 😁

Did the same hinge mod to the Versa V/50 last night that I've done to the 40EC, except a bit more preventatitive. Works great, and I did not over-loosen the hinge too much this time so the screen tension is dead-on - almost effortless, yet holds position even if banged into.

Then had some quality time with the M/75, installed "Abuse" on there.....kind of neat - but I think I might remap the keys for WASD or a similar layout to make it a bit easier to control the aim with the VersaTrak while running. Going to look into how to hack the sound setup to use the WSS Drivers from Blood and Magic or one of the other systems - I've been doing this with a lot of my games lately (adding WSS support by grafting in drivers from other games).

I am going to work on my Win-95 gaming computer.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-15, 12:59:

Nice job getting that motherboard in there. What's the plan for the expansion cards since the slot openings are horizontal for a riser card setup?

As BitWrangler stated but we'll see what happens. I'm enjoying doing this. Never done it before at all.

I'll pop into our local second hand computer shop which opened a yer and a half ago to see if they have any two PCI slot PCI ricers like the one in my slimline Compaq/HP 3.0GHz HT P4 system.

Some pics of the difference between the old cpu fan height and the new psu height.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-15, 19:12:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-15, 12:59:

Nice job getting that motherboard in there. What's the plan for the expansion cards since the slot openings are horizontal for a riser card setup?

As BitWrangler stated but we'll see what happens. I'm enjoying doing this. Never done it before at all.

As long as your enjoying the build that's truly all that matters in the end. Once you get it all setup you'll have something unique and fun to play around with.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-15, 20:04:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-15, 19:12:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-07-15, 12:59:

Nice job getting that motherboard in there. What's the plan for the expansion cards since the slot openings are horizontal for a riser card setup?

As BitWrangler stated but we'll see what happens. I'm enjoying doing this. Never done it before at all.

As long as your enjoying the build that's truly all that matters in the end. Once you get it all setup you'll have something unique and fun to play around with.

Certainly. And have the added benefit of being able to swap the ATX mobo if needed. I've kept the i/o blanking plates of all the ATX systems I've pulled apart in the past ....😉

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-15, 19:51:

I'll pop into our local second hand computer shop which opened a yer and a half ago to see if they have any two PCI slot PCI ricers like the one in my slimline Compaq/HP 3.0GHz HT P4 system.

Some pics of the difference between the old cpu fan height and the new psu height.

One thing I've thought about... Are PCI risers proprietary? Or can anyone work in any system? Maybe the motherboard&bios must be prepared for one?

Joakim wrote on 2021-07-15, 20:44:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-15, 19:51:

I'll pop into our local second hand computer shop which opened a yer and a half ago to see if they have any two PCI slot PCI ricers like the one in my slimline Compaq/HP 3.0GHz HT P4 system.

Some pics of the difference between the old cpu fan height and the new psu height.

One thing I've thought about... Are PCI risers proprietary? Or can anyone work in any system? Maybe the motherboard&bios must be prepared for one?

Unsure, but we'll find out...😉

Not computer related, but vintage related, was disassembled a stopwatch with hands spinning wildly when wound to find out why, was a loose bushing for the pallet lever pressed into mainplate that mangled metal bushing fell out. Was botched repair attempt which I'll replace this with a jewel salvaged from junk watch parts. But the shelf collapse meant watchmakers' tools is scattered in boxes meant waiting and find them.

Cheers,

I've gone to a three tiered approach for cpu cooling. Decent sizes finned ali heat sink, largest fan I could fit on top and reuse the original case fan on the vertically on one side. I'll splice the power leads together thus using only one fan power connector on the mobo.

Should be plenty of air moving over the unit and it appeals to my seance of humor. An AMD labelled fan cooling a Pentium III 933 cpu....😉

Finally found a new case for my Win98 rig, my old beige Aopen model was boring me so bought this nice Ultra model
unused still in box. Added some be quiet! fans front/back for cooling "just because".

Today I finished off tinkering with my 286 and put it all back together, I'll come back to that another time.

Then I decided to turn my attentions towards my Olivetti PCS11 (386SX-16) instead. This should happily do what I originally intended the 286 to do - play EGA-era games (with a VGA card of course).

I opened it all up to check everything was still connected and seated properly and then powered it on - nothing! The PSU made some spluttering attempts to switch on before giving up. I tried a couple of times, as well as disconnected and reconnecting cables etc and still nothing, switching on and off several times.

At this point, fearing that the proprietary PSU was dead I got annoyed and hit it with my first- it came back to life. 🤣

It's working as good as new again now, cranky old thing.

Working on my Win95 build. No rush to finish.
I just take my time. Need to order some components.
This is the only project I am currently working on.

I am working on another PC from my collection, even if the AT case is missing, I have everything necessary for its operation at the bench, it is a PINE MB (if I'm not mistaken today it has become XFX), the model is PT-429, this model and I think others like it have a special green card connector, basically a special card that I don't really know what it is for, unfortunately I don't have that special card.
Currently I have 16MB of RAM, but in reality there are 20MB installed, maybe you need to change the jumper setting, but I still haven't figured out how to set them from the manual.
It has 3 memory banks, one is made up of four 30PIN modules, the other two have 72 PINs each.
The BIOS is AMI and the CPU used was initially an AMD 486-DX2-66, after running the program I replaced it with an Intel 486-DX33, I wanted to see if it was working (and indeed it was), but by the bench I have seen that the other MB with L2 cache disabled and DX2-66 gets similar results to DX-33, so if the L2 cache works it gives a nice improvement by increasing the performance.
The video card is VLB, Genoa Model 8500VL brand, has 1MB of RAM expandable to 2MB (adding 2 chips), the graphics chip is CL-GD5428.
Soon I will change the CPU again, after finishing with the DX-33 bench, I will install an Intel Overdrive DX4-100, it is a specific CPU for the old MB without the voltage reducers, I have never tried it but I think it is still working, other positive thing is that it integrates both the voltage reducers and the heatsink.