To go with my KT600-A ECS board in the DVD Drive I found the original Driver disk, how cool

I found a fully working G4 700mhz Apple eMac on the side of the road today. It is in pretty good shape. Looks like someone let their young child loose on it, as everything is named odd random characters and the color settings are quite.. questionable.

rkrenicki wrote:

I found a fully working G4 700mhz Apple eMac on the side of the road today. It is in pretty good shape. Looks like someone let their young child loose on it, as everything is named odd random characters and the color settings are quite.. questionable.

Find yourself a copy of Apple Hardware Test for that machine and run that (alternatively, make it run some graphics-heavy application for a longer time period). Post results. These systems are very prone to bad caps, usually leading to boot issues, graphics corruption and kernel panics. If everything is named odd random characters, that points towards file corruption. Furthermore, the color schemes available in Mac OS (8.x, 9.x or OS X) are more or less fixed, not customisable as in Windows, so odd color settings might indicate a graphics or monitor issue (unless they really managed to screw up the color profile used).

Also, try enabling the sound and listen to the start-up chime (won't sound if speakers are turned off). If it's anything else (multiple beeps, popping sounds, distorted) than the default chime, that indicates hardware problems.

yawetaG wrote:

rkrenicki wrote:

I found a fully working G4 700mhz Apple eMac on the side of the road today. It is in pretty good shape. Looks like someone let their young child loose on it, as everything is named odd random characters and the color settings are quite.. questionable.

Find yourself a copy of Apple Hardware Test for that machine and run that (alternatively, make it run some graphics-heavy application for a longer time period). Post results. These systems are very prone to bad caps, usually leading to boot issues, graphics corruption and kernel panics. If everything is named odd random characters, that points towards file corruption. Furthermore, the color schemes available in Mac OS (8.x, 9.x or OS X) are more or less fixed, not customisable as in Windows, so odd color settings might indicate a graphics or monitor issue (unless they really managed to screw up the color profile used).

Also, try enabling the sound and listen to the start-up chime (won't sound if speakers are turned off). If it's anything else (multiple beeps, popping sounds, distorted) than the default chime, that indicates hardware problems.

I didnt go through any extensive testing, but it did start up properly and everything did seem to function correctly. Honestly, I do not think I am going to do anything at all with this computer, since I just bought a 1.33ghz iBook G4 last week (for only $29 shipped!) for my PowerPC desires. But, the menus and windows were fine, it was more that the background was set to a lime green with a light blue background picture, so the desktop file names had an eye-watering color combination.

rkrenicki wrote:

I didnt go through any extensive testing, but it did start up properly and everything did seem to function correctly. Honestly, I do not think I am going to do anything at all with this computer, since I just bought a 1.33ghz iBook G4 last week (for only $29 shipped!) for my PowerPC desires. But, the menus and windows were fine, it was more that the background was set to a lime green with a light blue background picture, so the desktop file names had an eye-watering color combination.

In that case, have fun! And should it break down anyway, the memory, CD-drive, and hard disk can all be used in a regular PC (everything else is unfortunately soldered to a all-in-one mainboard).

I went to local recycling center and scavenged couple of things from their discard pile. Basically it's prohibited here in my country and the workers will tell you so if you ask them but at the same time they don't personally care about few junk items. So I just quietly grabbed one promising looking desktop and a loose graphics card while I discarded some other stuff. I haven't tested yet if these work:

The desktop is an Olivetti Xana 53-120, a Pentium 120MHz unit. Case is a bit rugged but otherwise it looks to be nice little machine (if it's still functional).

Xana has an odd style sound card, SB Vibra 16C with a 60pin connector and pins in the motherboard just for it:

The GPU is an Asus V9520-X GeForce FX-5200 (AGP x8). I hope the huge amount of dust in the middle of the fan is the only reason it was dumped...

Quick edit: I tested the Olivetti Xana. It works, sort of. CD and floppy drive light up on the power switch and stay on so there's something strange about them. The machine has Win98 installed on it (not formatted by previous owner) and it works just fine. But I can't enter BIOS (lseems to be AmiBios on this one). Bootup encourages you to "press space button to enter setup" but if I do I get blank screen. What gives? 😕

A Pentium Classic with AGP, how odd. I know Socket 7 boards with AGP are a thing, but why did they throw in a Pentium 120 instead of like a K6-2?

EDIT: Derp, didn't realize the machine and the GPU were separate. 🤣

I too thought they were together and tried to imagine an owner upgrading it for long enough to end up with a 5200. That's like, nearly 8 years or so of upgrades only to end up with a low end trash Geforce FX AGP card and a processor bottlenecking so hard it wouldn't even get warm.

Someone was throwing away some old disks. When i collected them I found a 250mb USB Zip drive with a bunch of Zip disks of varying capacities, a buttload of NOS floppy disks, some Apple Mac LCIII installer disks and these:

brassicGamer wrote:

Someone was throwing away some old disks. When i collected them I found a 250mb USB Zip drive with a bunch of Zip disks of varying capacities, a buttload of NOS floppy disks, some Apple Mac LCIII installer disks and these:

20161118_1400302.jpg

Those are some awesome floppies! Are they blank?

brassicGamer wrote:

Someone was throwing away some old disks. When i collected them I found a 250mb USB Zip drive with a bunch of Zip disks of varying capacities, a buttload of NOS floppy disks, some Apple Mac LCIII installer disks and these:

20161118_1400302.jpg

Wouldn't by any chance contain the Simpsons DOOM mod would it?

Found this horribly mangled Digital Prioris XL 590 server under a pile of trash abandoned on the side of a road. I tried salvaging what I could.

There was a 3com Etherlink III EISA network card in there, and I was going to take it but didn't in the end. I've NEVER seen anything with the name EISA before or with such a weird format.

I tried taking the 4x CD-ROM drive out but the screws were welded to the case from the rust.

I also tried taking the hard drive out, but the part it was kept in was partially crushed in and I couldn't get it out, it was stuck so firmly. Also it used a weird IDE sort of connector but a lot longer than a standard IDE connector 😕

I was able to take out the 6 sticks of 72 pin memory. Have yet to test those.

I also took what remained of the Pentium 90 CPU, even though 95% of the pins were gone. I'm not sure why I even took it honestly 🤣

I took the cracked part of the bezel with the logo, and was able to pry a Cirrus Logic ROM chip from the board before I decided to set it back in its resting place.

If I go by there again, I might just take it and with more than just a Philips head screwdriver try to fully disassemble it.

First, the EISA format is a 32 bit extension of ISA (what was used for expansion cards before the advent of PCI), so it offered double the bandwidth. Typically, this was featured on server systems for network cards and disk controllers. The disks (including the CD-ROM) are most likely SCSI devices. SCSI was again something commonly featured on servers instead of IDE due to the greater performance and expandability it offered.

^^ Wow, that's bad. I've seen some filthy trashed computers but that one tops anything I've found. Good luck saving what you can. 😜

EISA stuff is pretty rare, shame the mobo is such a goner. That RAM might be ECC BTW.

gdjacobs wrote:

First, the EISA format is a 32 bit extension of ISA (what was used for expansion cards before the advent of PCI), so it offered double the bandwidth. Typically, this was featured on server systems for network cards and disk controllers. The disks (including the CD-ROM) are most likely SCSI devices. SCSI was again something commonly featured on servers instead of IDE due to the greater performance and expandability it offered.

EISA and SCSI stuff is all worth salvaging, assuming it's not a case of paper beats rock, rock beats card.

Last weekend I saved a few more computers:
someone trashed an i3-2100 with 4GB of RAM... they removed the hard drive, everything else is still there. The only thing wrong with this computer is the power supply with is broken. Also rescued from the trash a working Pentium II machine based on Abit BX6 motherboard 😀

brassicGamer wrote:

Someone was throwing away some old disks. When i collected them I found a 250mb USB Zip drive with a bunch of Zip disks of varying capacities, a buttload of NOS floppy disks, some Apple Mac LCIII installer disks and these:

20161118_1400302.jpg

I really liked the USB ZIP 250MB drives. They somehow look very modern and mine worked perfectly fine with Win7 and WinME for some easy file transfer (Yes, I used sneakernet 🤣)

Half-Saint wrote:

Last weekend I saved a few more computers:
someone trashed an i3-2100 with 4GB of RAM... they removed the hard drive, everything else is still there. The only thing wrong with this computer is the power supply with is broken. Also rescued from the trash a working Pentium II machine based on Abit BX6 motherboard 😀

So I connected that Abit machine up and turned it on. At firist there was some noise from the power supply fan then, 5 seconds later, something inside promptly exploded 😀

I replaced the PSU and luckily everything still works 😀

One thing an abandoned, crushed and deserted computer is good for besides parts is photography opportunities 🤣

Looks like the scsi cable is salvagable. I wonder how twisted that poor mobi is 😢