dominusprog wrote on 2025-07-11, 14:52:

Locutus wrote on 2025-07-11, 14:06:

Got myself a very nice XT JUKO board with 8MHz V20 CPU and C8087 FPU 😀

The attachment IMG_1680.jpg is no longer available

That ceramic 287 looks very nice.

Yup, but it is C8087 😉

This little Aptiva has had an interesting life!

I've been keeping my eye out for "original" IBM Aptivas since I first got interested in retro PCs. My first ever PC was a tower format Pentium 120 Aptiva in 1997, but I remember that even then I saw the illustrations of the desktop format version in the manuals, and thought it looked much sleeker and nicer (even though the tower had the great fun sliding drive bay cover). So when this P133 desktop 2134 model came up on eBay at a high price, I watched it for a while. The seller dropped the price a few times, and I finally bit when it came down again - still kind of expensive for what it is, but a "birthday present to myself"!

It was described as having been bought at a garage sale 15 years ago, and left in the loft ever since.

I checked it over and cleaned it up, and tested the PSU (this thread was useful for working out the custom soft-power on). To my surprise, absolutely everything worked - even the CD-ROM drive not only ejected, but read, and the PSU fan was so quiet that I could barely tell it was working! Even more of a surprise when I booted it from the original IBM FRU marked 1.2Gb hard drive ...

It booted into DOS, via a program called "Pause" that just said "Press any key to continue" - then straight into this bespoke industrial control app for Guinness in Runcorn (Cheshire, England) - the menus have all kinds of valve control options. Also amazingly, "ABM Ltd" still have a web page live with a press release from 2004 about their having renewed all of the "CIP" packaging plant at Guinness Runcorn. So I'd wager this little Aptiva had been sat there controlling Guinness bottling plant from 1997 until 2004? Which kind of fits with the eBay seller having bought it at a garage sale "15" years ago!

The inside of the machine was amazingly clean, considering - a fine layer of very dark dust on everything inside, but no big dust bunnies or seriously caked fans - either it had been in a very clean room, or had maybe been a spare machine that hadn't actually been used for that long?

Interesting choice for an industrial installation though - why an Aptiva, rather than an IBM PC series machine? I had been surprised it didn't have the usual mWave sound+modem card, but an empty slot. Perhaps it had had some kind of bespoke control card installed in place of the mWave?

I'll definitely back up the hard drive, and for now I've swapped in a 4Gb CF card as boot drive - I'll see if I can use the official IBM restore CD for a similar model Aptiva from Archive.org to get that full nostalgic experience!

Check out that white colour! Must have been hidden from the sun pretty well) If you can find time for that, could you please post a picture with the front panel open? It does open by touching that dimple on the left, is that correct?

justin1985 wrote on 2025-07-11, 17:27:

This little Aptiva has had an interesting life!

Btw, is your Dell sound bar still ok? I have one, but the speakers' cones degraded beyond redemption. They're like dried out and cracked gelatinous shells.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-11, 12:33:

Alesia wrote on 2025-07-11, 11:19:

That's too bad, I really feel like I got to this one in the nick of time, knowing how often things get overpriced in that shop and sit for months/years. I'm coming around to the idea of assembling some sort of socketed replacement for this PRAM battery situation but I'm unsure if a 3v coin cell would work in a spot that normally takes a 2.4v battery. I know all these assemblies protect the coin cells from charging but I don't know of one that tries to prevent the new battery from pumping too much voltage into the computer.

Hmm, would not a diode in series both protect it from charging and drop the voltage by exactly as much as needed?

Also Ni-Cd nominal voltage is 1.2v, but they are charged to ~1.4-1.45 IIRC, which would be 2.4 and 2.8-2.9 respectively for 2S battery. Jump from 2.8-2.9 to 3.0-3.2 for lithium cell should probably be fine...

The original Not-A-Varta replacements (the ones that are flat and use a 1220 battery) use a MAX40200AUK+T to prevent the charging voltage from reaching the battery, so that is exactly that is done as best as I can tell. I'm not versed in the function of electronic parts though, I just see a 3v lithium battery being used in place of a 2.4v Ni-Mh and get worried. https://github.com/wiretap-retro/Not-A-Varta <- the design I'm considering using due to space constraints.

Nexxen wrote on 2025-07-04, 11:36:

ChrisK wrote on 2025-07-04, 10:51:

The balls itself should be ok as far as can be seen. It's mainly the most upper layer of the package that was lifted.

Push it down with a finger and turn it on.
Worst case it doesn't POST, best, it works only when pushed down.

This has absolutely worked for me when troubleshooting a board. It's helpful to feel around for overheating chips to look for a short and to press down on components to test for cracked solder joints. I have diagnosed problems successfully with this technique before. I'm not certain that it will work for a cracked via, but you can still try.

Halofiber86 wrote on 2025-07-11, 17:38:

Check out that white colour! Must have been hidden from the sun pretty well) If you can find time for that, could you please post a picture with the front panel open? It does open by touching that dimple on the left, is that correct?

Correct! It's not as dramatic as the sliding cover on the towers, but it's great to see IBM went to the trouble of fitting a damping mechanism - press the dimple and it very gently rolls open.

The general Aptiva Restore Disk worked once I realised my CF card wasn't being detected because it was formatted with FAT32, so threw an "invalid drive specification" error. Great to see all the custom animated icons and everything again!

vstrakh wrote on 2025-07-11, 18:40:

Btw, is your Dell sound bar still ok? I have one, but the speakers' cones degraded beyond redemption. They're like dried out and cracked gelatinous shells.

I've not noticed any problems... It's the wrong one for this monitor (which is newer and the clips don't fit). The correct one is not only USB powered but only functions as a USB sound device. So this is one of the older ones with 3D printed replacement clips glued on the top. I'm powering it from one of the cheap USB to 12v barrel jack step-up adapters. Pretty ideal solution in my book ... So I hope they're not destined to disintegrate!

Goodies arrived yesterday.

- P3B-F works, slotket surprisingly supports 100FSB but it desperately needs a BIOS update
- FireGL V7200 works, currently in process of flashing to X1800
- AOpen i855GMEm-LFS works, I just need to get around setting up a XP HDD 🤣, and maybe a Pentium M 780. Has latest R1.08bn BIOS that I submitted to TRW. Also gotta restore the Apevia case.
- got a SL-75KAV double. Rev F1 as opposed to the F5 I previously got.

Alesia wrote on 2025-07-11, 19:07:

The original Not-A-Varta replacements (the ones that are flat and use a 1220 battery) use a MAX40200AUK+T to prevent the charging voltage from reaching the battery, so that is exactly that is done as best as I can tell. I'm not versed in the function of electronic parts though, I just see a 3v lithium battery being used in place of a 2.4v Ni-Mh and get worried. https://github.com/wiretap-retro/Not-A-Varta <- the design I'm considering using due to space constraints.

Well, they are using a fancy chip specifically to get as low voltage drop as possible, because it is intended to replace 3S battery (single cell voltage for this batteries is 1.2V, yours is 2 in series so 2.4V, one that is intended to be replaced by that design is 3 cells in series, 3.6v). Technically if you replace that fancy chip with simple regular diode, like 1N4148, it will cause ~0.6-0.7v drop, which is exactly what you need.

Also nominal voltage for this batteries is generally somewhere in the middle of actual operational voltage range. Like for li-ion we are all used to it is usually specified as 3.7v or 3.6v, but actual operational range is 2.5-4.2V. For Ni-Cd chemistry used in this batteries operational range is not defined as precisely, but it is something like 0.9V-1.45V. Obviously circuitry used has to be able to handle whole range, not just nominal voltage, usually with some margins. High end of this range is very close to 3V, so it should be fine. Though those 3V battery is not exactly 3V either, it will be around 3.2V when new and drop as it discharges.

I am pretty sure it should work fine because it is so close, but if you want to be absolutely sure you can look up clock chip datasheet (if that's even possible) to see what voltages it is rated for, or just replace those MAX40200AUK+T with a simple diode like 1N4148 and then voltage which reaches the clock chip will absolutely be within range of what original battery had. The diode will have a different footprint than those chip though, so that'll require either modifying the PCB or just finding a way to solder it in there as is...

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-12, 00:43:

Well, they are using a fancy chip specifically to get as low voltage drop as possible, because it is intended to replace 3S batt […]
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Alesia wrote on 2025-07-11, 19:07:

The original Not-A-Varta replacements (the ones that are flat and use a 1220 battery) use a MAX40200AUK+T to prevent the charging voltage from reaching the battery, so that is exactly that is done as best as I can tell. I'm not versed in the function of electronic parts though, I just see a 3v lithium battery being used in place of a 2.4v Ni-Mh and get worried. https://github.com/wiretap-retro/Not-A-Varta <- the design I'm considering using due to space constraints.

Well, they are using a fancy chip specifically to get as low voltage drop as possible, because it is intended to replace 3S battery (single cell voltage for this batteries is 1.2V, yours is 2 in series so 2.4V, one that is intended to be replaced by that design is 3 cells in series, 3.6v). Technically if you replace that fancy chip with simple regular diode, like 1N4148, it will cause ~0.6-0.7v drop, which is exactly what you need.

Also nominal voltage for this batteries is generally somewhere in the middle of actual operational voltage range. Like for li-ion we are all used to it is usually specified as 3.7v or 3.6v, but actual operational range is 2.5-4.2V. For Ni-Cd chemistry used in this batteries operational range is not defined as precisely, but it is something like 0.9V-1.45V. Obviously circuitry used has to be able to handle whole range, not just nominal voltage, usually with some margins. High end of this range is very close to 3V, so it should be fine. Though those 3V battery is not exactly 3V either, it will be around 3.2V when new and drop as it discharges.

I am pretty sure it should work fine because it is so close, but if you want to be absolutely sure you can look up clock chip datasheet (if that's even possible) to see what voltages it is rated for, or just replace those MAX40200AUK+T with a simple diode like 1N4148 and then voltage which reaches the clock chip will absolutely be within range of what original battery had. The diode will have a different footprint than those chip though, so that'll require either modifying the PCB or just finding a way to solder it in there as is...

I took it up to design a custom solution for this using 2x 1.2v rechargeable ni-mh batteries in series. I'll probably post about it once I get details more settled (mostly dimensions determining what batteries/battery mounts can be used) so that people can double check the work. Keeping the chemistry and voltages all the same lets me keep the design simple, at least. I really appreciate the thoughts, very much helped me decide which direction I wanted to try and go with finding a replacement solution for this powerbook.

Went out of town to a big flea again... Somewhat dissappointing, there was a bit of PC stuff, but it was in the "too old to be useful, not old enough to be interesting" range for me, of about 05-15. I have good coverage in that era for future needs. Would have been a great day for any thinkpad collectors in that range though, saw about a dozen. I think maybe I used up all my luck on one thing...

Timex 16kB RAM pack! It's almost unbelievable that I would find one so soon after getting the Timex, like a million to one. I wasn't even going to bother looking, was just gonna do an internal mod. Also wasn't gonna pay fleabay prices for one, this cost me about $2. Two 80s joysticks also. The Atari compatible one will of course work with other 8bits and Amigas. The Apple/Atari/IBM one is a bit weird with a configuration array on the bottom. Only has the AppleII adapter with it though, lead has a 9 pin male, need the adapter for each system. The fan, just there to fill pic out, but it's a good old Rotron 115V "portable jet engine" moves air real good.

Edit: Heh, turns out fleabay isn't allllll that terrible on those, was sure I'd seen closer to $100 in the past.

Well, the P3B-F joy was shortlived. Now it won't power up unless I run my finger inbetween the ASUS monitor chip and southbridge.

I swear, my luck with P3B-F is absolutely nonexistent at this point.

PcBytes wrote on Yesterday, 11:24:

Well, the P3B-F joy was shortlived. Now it won't power up unless I run my finger inbetween the ASUS monitor chip and southbridge.

I swear, my luck with P3B-F is absolutely nonexistent at this point.

That sounds like something that could be relatively easily repairable, though. Cracked solder joint on the chip legs or some components.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-07-12, 21:47:

Went out of town to a big flea again... Somewhat dissappointing, there was a bit of PC stuff, but it was in the "too old to be useful, not old enough to be interesting" range for me, of about 05-15. I have good coverage in that era for future needs. Would have been a great day for any thinkpad collectors in that range though, saw about a dozen. I think maybe I used up all my luck on one thing...

Timex 16kB RAM pack! It's almost unbelievable that I would find one so soon after getting the Timex, like a million to one. I wasn't even going to bother looking, was just gonna do an internal mod. Also wasn't gonna pay fleabay prices for one, this cost me about $2. Two 80s joysticks also. The Atari compatible one will of course work with other 8bits and Amigas. The Apple/Atari/IBM one is a bit weird with a configuration array on the bottom. Only has the AppleII adapter with it though, lead has a 9 pin male, need the adapter for each system. The fan, just there to fill pic out, but it's a good old Rotron 115V "portable jet engine" moves air real good.

Edit: Heh, turns out fleabay isn't allllll that terrible on those, was sure I'd seen closer to $100 in the past.

In the 80s and even up to late 90s or so there was quite a lot computer accessories without zero branding, which I find somehow incredibly hilarious nowadays. And if there is no branding, the names of the products are always as unimaginative as possible like "PRECISION JOYSTICK". And of course you might aswell slap "NEW" on the box, because the company had zero plans to manufacture and sell it for more than a year 🤣

mv_cz wrote on 2017-06-12, 06:19:

Well actually I'm not sure :-D I planned to keep both socket7 and supersocket7 systems. The first mainly with P233MMX for dos w […]
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Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

mv_cz wrote:

Finally bought (sort of.. :blush: ) a 3dfx card on a local discussion board, the seller didn't want anything for it, only a bar […]
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Finally bought (sort of.. 😊 ) a 3dfx card on a local discussion board, the seller didn't want anything for it, only a bar of chocolate, so I bought him two large ones 😁 Got a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee PCI (CT6760) with original drivers CD and with it came also SB Live! CT4670 card (although I have a modern revision CT4830 with digital out, it will come in handy).

DSC02113.JPG

I've only had a Voodoo1 card back then, friend of mine had similar creative banshee card, but it was an AGP version with SGRAM and paired with celeron333 it was quite capable system. Today also came new old stock AMD K6-III+ 400 MHz which I've ordered on ebay for 20 euros. So I have some hardware to complement my socket7 systems.

DSC02114.JPG

Nice. So you've just completed your entire system in a single buy, have you? Banshee is a quite capable card; in single-textured games it's faster than a Voodoo2. The 2D image quality doesn't disappoint either.

Well actually I'm not sure 😁 I planned to keep both socket7 and supersocket7 systems. The first mainly with P233MMX for dos with PCI graphics (where should banshee go) and the ss7 setup with K6-3+ and AGP graphics for 98SE and slightly modern games. But I don't have proper AGP card at the moment, either they are too slow (TNT2 M64, GF2MX - actually this card seems most appropriate now) or too fast and modern (GF4Ti4800, FX5900) for ss7 system and none of them are 3dfx cards of course.
With mobile K6's ability to clock itself down on the fly I feel like the first setup being more or less redundant, but if i put pci banshee in ss7 then it will become bottleneck 😢

dondiego wrote:

AKA trident blade xp5, also had only dx 8.1 support.

The XP5 was sold under the "XGI" brand if my memory serves well, but it is more or less rebranded Trident XP4 card. Because in my Toshiba centrino laptop I have XP4m32 card and I have managed to modify XP5 graphics driver from dell to work on my XP4 card. I needed to try some newer revision of drivers for my chip, because it has somewhat slow scrolling in modern windows apps in WinXP. And since XP4 drivers I have are already the most recent, I used the XP5 and they work.
After all the XP4 is not that bad for time of it's release. Sure my laptop could have obligatory Intels's extreme graphics in form of 855GM chipset, but trident is faster, power efficient and brings directx 8.1 support. In 3Dmark2001SE performance is good and the card was clearly optimized to run it well, It reaches nearly the score similar to Mobility Radeon9000. In games it is not that good, fps drops here and there, but the picture quality is OK, I had never problem with trident cards regarding to picture quality (same story was with Trident Cyberblade e4-128 card I had in laptop too).

So maybe VolariV3 = XP5 = XP4 which gives me idea to try volari drivers 😊 Shame those XP4/5 cards are not supported in Windows Vista/7 😢

Hi there,
would you mind sharing this XP5 driver?
I am the proud owner of a Toshiba Tecra M1 with CyberBladeXP4_32M, but the driver v6.4823-123.22_1 lacks a lot.
Quake 3 1.32 does not run at all, but Quake 3 1.32e "runs" somehow with some slowdowns.
I would hope to have a working OpenGL driver for UT, because UT 4.36 looks funny, but unplayable.

Thank you in advance,

M4cke

I have been toying a 386 build for a some time. I want to make a system that has a mobo from late 80s, 1990 etc, that is from a time when 386 was practically at the top of the world and 486 wasn't either released or was still extremely rare and expensive thing. In other words, I have no interest in 386 budget era boards with soldered QFP CPUs or those hybrid boards using 486 chipsets, just as an example. There are probably zero valid practical reasons why I should skip those later boards, but they just simply don't interest me. Today I got a neat board that I think is exactly what I need, Octek Jaguar 386:

In TRW there is one bios dump dated 3/3/89, so this board fits perfectly for the period I wanted. It has SiS "Rabbit" chipset, which should make it one of the better performing 386 boards. It came with 33MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, 64KB L2 and with 8-bit serial/parallel IO card, of which I didn't bother to take picture. Other positives for the mobo is that it uses only external battery, so no leaky Varta issues. TRW also has full scanned manual, so documentation for the this is pretty much as good as it gets. I'm really happy for this as it is getting increasingly difficult to find these kind of 386 mobos and if you do, it is often a coin toss how much repairs they need from the leaked battery damage.

The manual of the board states that this supports 8MB on the mobo and 8MB more on the external unobtainium RAM card using 1MB modules. I'm completely fine for 4-8MB for this system, but I definitely need to get 4MB modules and try them out as I think the chipset should support them. I think I currently have only 1MB and possibly 256kB 30-pin simms.

Then I have this, Easy Options by IBM AC525, still in shrink wrap. It is a Thunderboard variant, but it also supports MPU401, probably through the MVD121 chip this has and original Thunderboard lacks. This is probably the soundcard I will use with this 386 build, although I'm also tempted to slap it into my IBM PS/2 model 35SX. As this is full retail package, I hope to find some information who is the manufacturer of this card. AFAIK the software bundle is same or very similar that came with original Thunderboard, but I don't think MediaVision made this card. If it would have, it would've probably been just a rebranded original Thunderboard. But there doesn't seem to be any other known Thunderboard variants which are identical to this, so it is its own thing in that sense.

Edit: Thunderboard was my first sound card back in the day, so I'm happy to have this too. I do have Pro Audio Studio (PAS16) 650-0060 with the bundled SCSI CDROM purring in my Compaq Prolinea 4/50@66, though, and those do use MVD201 for SB compatibility.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on Yesterday, 15:31:

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-07-12, 21:47:

Went out of town to a big flea again... Somewhat dissappointing, there was a bit of PC stuff, but it was in the "too old to be useful, not old enough to be interesting" range for me, of about 05-15. I have good coverage in that era for future needs. Would have been a great day for any thinkpad collectors in that range though, saw about a dozen. I think maybe I used up all my luck on one thing...

Timex 16kB RAM pack! It's almost unbelievable that I would find one so soon after getting the Timex, like a million to one. I wasn't even going to bother looking, was just gonna do an internal mod. Also wasn't gonna pay fleabay prices for one, this cost me about $2. Two 80s joysticks also. The Atari compatible one will of course work with other 8bits and Amigas. The Apple/Atari/IBM one is a bit weird with a configuration array on the bottom. Only has the AppleII adapter with it though, lead has a 9 pin male, need the adapter for each system. The fan, just there to fill pic out, but it's a good old Rotron 115V "portable jet engine" moves air real good.

Edit: Heh, turns out fleabay isn't allllll that terrible on those, was sure I'd seen closer to $100 in the past.

In the 80s and even up to late 90s or so there was quite a lot computer accessories without zero branding, which I find somehow incredibly hilarious nowadays. And if there is no branding, the names of the products are always as unimaginative as possible like "PRECISION JOYSTICK". And of course you might aswell slap "NEW" on the box, because the company had zero plans to manufacture and sell it for more than a year 🤣

Yah I think there were a ton of not very computer related firms that jumped in with a quick "cash cow" product when they saw home computing taking off, that didn't really have plans for the long term... some of them made a quick buck and went back to their bread and butter, some of them went "hmmm, something actually in this..." and turned into brands we might have heard of.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on Yesterday, 15:26:

PcBytes wrote on Yesterday, 11:24:

Well, the P3B-F joy was shortlived. Now it won't power up unless I run my finger inbetween the ASUS monitor chip and southbridge.

I swear, my luck with P3B-F is absolutely nonexistent at this point.

That sounds like something that could be relatively easily repairable, though. Cracked solder joint on the chip legs or some components.

I've resoldered all SMDs that are between those ICs. Same behaviour.

PcBytes wrote on Yesterday, 17:24:

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on Yesterday, 15:26:

PcBytes wrote on Yesterday, 11:24:

Well, the P3B-F joy was shortlived. Now it won't power up unless I run my finger inbetween the ASUS monitor chip and southbridge.

I swear, my luck with P3B-F is absolutely nonexistent at this point.

That sounds like something that could be relatively easily repairable, though. Cracked solder joint on the chip legs or some components.

I've resoldered all SMDs that are between those ICs. Same behaviour.

Damn. Have you checked it under the microscope if there is some cracked SMD cap or resistor there besides reflowing the solder joints? It may be difficult to see those with a naked eye. It definitely sounds like there is a contact issue of some sort that prevents it from powering on.

A VRM for the Kayak came in today, works like a charm.

The one thing left to do, is fixing that cracked little LCD ont the front. I sourced the spare part for 25 USD, but the shipping is 100 USD! Not going to spend that...