Bancho wrote on 2022-10-07, 14:01:

Today I switched out the PSU in my 233mmx and the 120mm Fan. […]
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Today I switched out the PSU in my 233mmx and the 120mm Fan.

The one on the left is the new one I switched in (250Watt) and the right one is the one switched out (230watt) The 250watt felt far better quality.

Before fitting it, I switched out the loud fan. I had a really quiet Sharkoon fan lying about so swapped that in.

The 120mm fan was a slim Asaka model and I swapped it out for a Corsair one out of my 5000D Case. Its far quieter.

All buttoned backup and tested its ok

Very nice case u got there.. I have seen many old AT cases from the Pentium/ Pentium II era, but never have seen one with front panel like urs.. That Corsair fan there 🤣, maybe change it with something from the time of the machine..

I got my 486 system almost where I wanted it before work, but got stuck on TES Arena refusing to display the title screen. No matter what I do, it just hangs the system. Could this be the fault of my ATi Mach 32 VLB? I'm kinda lost otherwise.

Prepping to modify a Toshiba T2130CT motherboard replacement. I could only get a T2110CS (dead from corrosion & refunded) and a T2100CS. Since I'm trying to make this CS (DSTN) motherboard into a CT (active matrix) motherboard and want the faster CPU. I need to swap the graphics chip, the CPU and a few components around the graphics chip. Lots of fine pitch QFPs, yikes.
Sure do wish parts were easier to get for these things - but at least the motherboards are the same across all of these models. The T2100CS board has the same external floppy connector footprint that only was used on the T2150CS/CDT models.

Of course I'm doing a few other things alongside that. I'm kind of going through my collection of laptops and deciding which ones I really want to keep - this FMA9500 mono screen laptop is one of my favourites because it's such an oddball, but the mouse pointer's controller is broken so I've been trying to re-route it to an external mouse.
Now I've modified it so that there's a PS/2 cable for the mouse that goes through the PCMCIA bay's gaps, I didn't even need to cut the plastic housing to add the PS/2 mouse port. And it can just fit into the slot when I put it away 😀

Bancho wrote on 2022-10-07, 14:01:

Today I switched out the PSU in my 233mmx and the 120mm Fan. […]
Show full quote

Today I switched out the PSU in my 233mmx and the 120mm Fan.

The one on the left is the new one I switched in (250Watt) and the right one is the one switched out (230watt) The 250watt felt far better quality.

Before fitting it, I switched out the loud fan. I had a really quiet Sharkoon fan lying about so swapped that in.

The 120mm fan was a slim Asaka model and I swapped it out for a Corsair one out of my 5000D Case. Its far quieter.

All buttoned backup and tested its ok

Love that case! Our first 'family' PC was in one of these, a P75 bought from Tottenham Court Rd in London 😀

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-10-08, 15:16:

Of course I'm doing a few other things alongside that. I'm kind of going through my collection of laptops and deciding which ones I really want to keep - this FMA9500 mono screen laptop is one of my favourites because it's such an oddball, but the mouse pointer's controller is broken so I've been trying to re-route it to an external mouse.
Now I've modified it so that there's a PS/2 cable for the mouse that goes through the PCMCIA bay's gaps, I didn't even need to cut the plastic housing to add the PS/2 mouse port. And it can just fit into the slot when I put it away 😀

Don't often see Win95 on a monochrome display!

I need to go through my laptop collection and thin it down too, but I can't bring myself to do it!

It came with that OS already installed but the hard drive failed and this install is a homage to it. The original owner seems to have been okay with win95 on a monochrome screen for a while, probably since it would be full colour with a CRT.
It's not going great since I acquire more quite often, but some just don't fit the eras I want to cover or the screens are messed up - my other mono laptop, the AST Bravo NB 4/25's LCD polarisers broke down and I can't get it looking right anymore so I'm wondering now why I have 2x mono laptops. The AST is a Sharp LCD where the polariser failing seems to be a common fault, I hope it never happens to my FMA9500 which has an Epson mono LCD.

Spent the evening once again wrestling with my Tandy 1000 TL/2.

I had originally thought that using the Blue Lava Systems XT-IDE adapter had solved my problems. The adapter and stock boot CF card they included appeared to work.

However, I tried playing Space Quest I this evening and started running into periodic freezes when loading new screens. I then noticed that CHKDSK, FDISK and Norton System Info would all cause the system to lock up. So clearly something was not right.

After a bunch of troubleshooting, I ended up installing a brand new Lo-tech XT-IDE card and set up a new CF card with MS-DOS 5.0. After doing this all the above utilities now appear to work. We'll see if this configuration ends up being more stable.

Due to minor differences in geometry translation and there not really being an official standard until midway through the 1990s, minor differences meant that not every HDD formatted on given controller, with given BIOS and chipset, could necessarily be read on a different machine with a different controller/BIOS/chipset. The problem seemed to go away totally after ~27GB limit was sorted out, existed in edge cases in the post 8GB days, and everything before that, 90% of the time it worked all the time, though things get worse the further back you go. Maximum reliability on anything older than about 1998ish is best achieved by formatting your IDE drives on the machine you're gonna use them on... even though XT-IDE code and hardware is later you've still got original BIOS and chipset quirks that might pee in your cheerios. Some of it might be due to lack of care in making certain timing operations independent of processor execution speed.

I've been trying to resurrect a Toshiba T2130CT laptop and it's proving tougher than I would have hoped. This is replacement motherboard #2 and until a few minutes ago, it was broken. Troubleshooting a laptop motherboard wasn't what I wanted to do but getting replacement parts means even more waiting.

I'd seen a blog post here a while back about the Toshiba LED code reader that connects into the parallel port: https://nielssp.dk/2019/09/fixing-410cdt/
So I made my own, can't find schematics but it's pretty simple to put together, just connect some LEDs to pins D0 to D7 on the parallel port. I used 150 ohm resistors so they wouldn't burn out and then covered it all in hot glue. Now I've got a special Toshiba password removal dongle and this post code reader dongle.

In action it blinks through some codes as a binary counter:

On my dead Toshiba T21xx board it was doing still nothing and I was gonna give up and contact the seller to get another one. It would just light up all the LEDs at once.

Poking around I found that the biggest chip on the board, a QFP-240 had some loose pins that I tried resoldering by hand under the scope, but it still didn't boot. As a last ditch effort I went over the CPU, the RAM, all the big QFPs on the underside of the board with my Quick 861DA hot air station at 330c for a while. That worked? I didn't expect that to work! Being able to see the post codes on a laptop is really handy and I can see myself using this dongle in future potentially.

I'm a bit disappointed since I bought this board as tested and working, but the last board I bought (that was refunded) was also sold as working and had tons of visible corrosion and battery damage. The one I'm using here I think must have taken a knock to the middle of the board either in storage or during shipping, I'm really glad it works now though.

I'm running it on my bench PSU instead of the built-in mains PSU, but still at the voltage that PSU was running at which was 18.3v. It only uses 500ma when running with this DX2-50 and it'll be interesting to see how much more power the DX4-75 uses when I install that on this board 😁

That Toshiba pre-load I mentioned a few days ago, that was on this hard drive appears to somehow be an actual complete pre-loaded hard drive that's not even registered? I'm confused how this could be since the T2130 predates recovery CDs.

Today I, potentially, got my Autoexec and Config set up for the two flavors of 486 that I wanted. There's three options in my config, one for DOS games, one for going in to Windows directly, and one for just booting DOS cleanly.

I am sure that I messed something up in there, and I am more than willing to admit that the windows section is just the old config that Memmaker created after i got windows installed. Hopefully it works out.

Replaced my vortex 2 for ct4700 pci128 because I wanted the cyan volume thing in the taskbar and to experience similar sound setup I had on my first PC with onboard creative sound. Not impressed, 🤣. Midi is terrible but sc-55 covers that. Can't get access to irq dma settings because boot screen whizzes past on athlon 2600+ setup.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-10-10, 00:15:

I'm running it on my bench PSU instead of the built-in mains PSU, but still at the voltage that PSU was running at which was 18.3v. It only uses 500ma when running with this DX2-50 and it'll be interesting to see how much more power the DX4-75 uses when I install that on this board 😁

Wouldn't it use even less with the DX4 being a 3.3V CPU? or is the DX2 that as well?

Welp, as it turns out the Arena freezing was not solved at all. I'm again at a loss.

Swapped out the CPU on my 'ultimate' Windows XP machine going from an E8400 to an E8600 processor. Not a huge change, but faster is faster. 😜

Also did some cable management tidying up. I think I'm finally done tinkering with this computer and it's set up the way I want it.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-10-10, 18:27:

Swapped out the CPU on my 'ultimate' Windows XP machine going from an E8400 to an E8600 processor. Not a huge change, but faster is faster. 😜

Also did some cable management tidying up. I think I'm finally done tinkering with this computer and it's set up the way I want it.

Nice, klipsch promedia. Hard to get those in the UK nowadays.

I am probably gonna put the 486 away for a while while I try to figure out why it just refuses to play TES Arena. At this point I've swapped out sound cards, grabbed the ATi VESA utility, all sorts of things. I've got more functional systems that I can futz around with and actually enjoy myself.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-10-10, 18:27:

Swapped out the CPU on my 'ultimate' Windows XP machine going from an E8400 to an E8600 processor. Not a huge change, but faster is faster. 😜

Also did some cable management tidying up. I think I'm finally done tinkering with this computer and it's set up the way I want it.

Looks good. I had an idea of this similar setup but a 486 inside.

BetaC wrote on 2022-10-10, 21:39:

I am probably gonna put the 486 away for a while while I try to figure out why it just refuses to play TES Arena. At this point I've swapped out sound cards, grabbed the ATi VESA utility, all sorts of things. I've got more functional systems that I can futz around with and actually enjoy myself.

Given an early review claims acceptable frame rate on a 386sx33, I'd figure on sticking whatever ISA VGA you can scratch up in there and testing that. The Mach32 and 64 were meant to have some unfortunate deficiencies with a couple of modes.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-11, 04:30:

BetaC wrote on 2022-10-10, 21:39:

I am probably gonna put the 486 away for a while while I try to figure out why it just refuses to play TES Arena. At this point I've swapped out sound cards, grabbed the ATi VESA utility, all sorts of things. I've got more functional systems that I can futz around with and actually enjoy myself.

Given an early review claims acceptable frame rate on a 386sx33, I'd figure on sticking whatever ISA VGA you can scratch up in there and testing that. The Mach32 and 64 were meant to have some unfortunate deficiencies with a couple of modes.

Sadly the only ISA video cards that I know are available in my general area are XT class cards. I'll just put up with using the pentium slowdown option next time I go through it until I can figure that out. Thanks for the advice though.