badmojo wrote on 2021-05-05, 11:28:

The scroll patch worked A-OK and no need to fix the palette here (233MHz socket 7 machine + Matrox Millennium 1) - amazing! Thanks again for sharing this, it's always bothered me.

Glad to hear it worked!

vad4r wrote on 2021-05-05, 05:25:

Talked with a friend who also collects...
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What.. the..

Cleaned up a tar filled Asus V9950Ultra I purchased. I absolutely abhor the heatsink and cooler assembly, if I tighten the screws to make sure the heatsink makes good contact with the memory chips and the GPU, ends the card warps to a point where I fear for its life.

I've removed one washer from the three screw assemblies, and I'll keep it like this until I find a Arctic cooler assembly at an affordable price.

I'll pit this 5900 Ultra up against the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro when I start the P4 chipset competition.

At least it looks better...

Those heatsinks look like they still need a good deal of IPA and scrubbing 😀

vad4r wrote on 2021-05-05, 05:25:

Talked with a friend who also collects...
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Oh my! I thought my collection was ott, but mine is mostly boxes full of parts 😀

yourepicfailure wrote on 2021-05-05, 03:13:

Yeah, the T4800 I have suffered the same fate (resume batter leak), and it was clear the previous (not the seller) found out and […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2021-04-21, 22:43:

~snip

Yeah, the T4800 I have suffered the same fate (resume batter leak), and it was clear the previous (not the seller) found out and removed it. There wasn't much damage, would need a serious cleaning. Just powder everywhere.
But I do agree, the proper glass covering just makes it look different compared to plastic covered. It's also much easier to clean.

But yeah the 4400's have a proper socket. Shame they don't have the expansion abilities (or even integrated sound) because with a x5+voltage shim and a recelled, higher capacity battery they would have been killer portable DOS gaming machines.

Today's retro activity: I am true to my word. I went ahead and stuffed the 63MHz Overdrive in my T4400C.
stuffing.jpg
itworks.jpg
Sadly I didn't take a picture of the underside to show the rigging, but it was essentially this: Re: This 486, can mount the pentium overdrive?

I selected the Overdrive not for performance, but for the full Pentium compatibility. In this case the fan was removed so it would fit in there (not much space) as well as to disable the multiplier as it isn't being supplied through enough power pins. I didn't want to risk it with this portable (by pulling too much amps through the pins supplying power). Not to mention the lack of airflow in this laptop.
Running at 25MHz isn't stellar. It's still a wee slow, but there is a noticeable performance increase in certain areas. I just need more ram.

That's interesting. I almost got my POD83 to work on my J-Mark OPTI495SX 3/486WB board with the MR BIOS, except the MR BIOS isn't working well (almost worked).

Use splash of bleach and hot water on heatsink. Comes out clean.

Now that I know what Asus's design of heatsink looks like from inside with covers and fans removed; now I understand why, this is still poor design of cooling. Too far from the hot spots to the fins. Aluminum?

Best way is retro-fit a good heatsink with heatpipe or two from quadro 2000 or K2000. These uses heatpipe under it.

Cheers,

Not exactly retro, but the main character in this story is already discontinued since a long time ago (its exact brand does not even exist anymore) so I guess it fits. Got out of storage an old wireless mouse (logitech V450 laser). Exactly like this one:

However when I connected it to my laptop, it would not move the pointer, or receive any clicks. Linux detected the receptor as a new USB device, it identified it correctly, but that was it. The LED on the mouse blinked like once every three seconds. Could not find what that blink meant, but it was not normal at all. Disassembled it, found it had corrosion inside, near a 16MHz oscillator. No clue where it got the corrosion, since it was stored without batteries, but anyway, I cleaned it with alcohol, yet the problem persisted. At first, I thought a couple teeny tiny capacitors and a teeny tiny resistor near the oscillator had been damaged, however I decided to try and desolder the oscillator. Had more corrosion under it, cleaned it with alcohol. After soldering it again, the mouse magically worked. No idea what the problem was in the first place, but now my old logitech mouse works again, yay!

Nice job fixing the mouse. My wife has a very similar mouse for her laptop and she really likes how comfortable it is in her hand.

Sending this off to my trading bud RadRacer as I clear out my collection. Nifty piece of IBM history. Unused IBM 4MB bubble sticker. There are various versions of it like the 1MB sticker at the Computer History Museum in California. I told him you have three whole megabytes more than they do.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-06, 01:13:

Nice job fixing the mouse. My wife has a very similar mouse for her laptop and she really likes how comfortable it is in her hand.

Thanks, it is very comfortable indeed but what I like the most about it is that since it uses 2 AA batteries (as opposed to just one, like most wireless mice) it has more weight to it, which makes it more satisfying to use, at least for me.

So my 2 "untested" motherboard arrived today:

I was quite worried because another member had pointed out that it looked like they had been worked on before. The seller is indeed selling of bucketloads of old "untested" gear so could possibly be returns or broken parts from and old IT company...

I tried the interesting one first and sure enough it was dead. Only went through 2 or 3 post codes then stopped. Something about "cache or memory count".

I took 1 of the included sticks out and it did the same. However when I swapped it into the other slot we got much further with the posting!

It was now stopping on "init display" but it was actually outputting a blank screen to my monitor now.. I tried a few things before thinking that if it had memory issues before, and the display uses that memory also then perhaps a different stick would sort it out...

Great success!!

Oh and during the fault finding I did have to peek under the heatsink to see what I was dealing with. I wast thinking P100 or similar as I could only see the ceramic edge but:

That will do nicely! 😀

Going to try and grab one of those NOS Biege MATX cases and make a nice little MATX win95/DOS machine.(Although installing 98 on it now for stress testing)

The other board actually worked straight after a bios reset. Generic intel board with a 1.8ghz P4 CPU.

You find the hidden loot 😀

I wasn't happy with my 486 graphics card, so I digged around in the attic and found this beauty:

Started building out the Win98SE install for my NECs. This is the one that will have Norton Wireless Security 4.1 and WPA support on it....so I can run around on my home WiFi with these things without having to use my Cell Phone to tether.

Leaving the V/50 at work. Out of the four, that's turning into the most cantankerous one. I think it has some strange motherboard issues with PCMCIA and the HDD controller and/or CMOS. That one will be my utility laptop/packet sniffer/lunchtime buddy/monitor tester/ancient data retrieval device (so if I need Floppies - which oddly enough, sometimes I do, I have something that can write/read them). Also, the screen casing is beginning to crack again.

Today I finally replaced the weak laser/laser assembly in my Sony PS1. My 2nd attempt, after the first arrived damaged last month - spindle stuck and shattered when I tried to remove. This time the 2nd one arrived in perfect condition from Aliexpress and I fitted it with no problems.

But for the sake of about £3, I also ordered a replacement spindle for the damaged laser assembly (a metal one, as the plastic ones are crap), which also arrived today. So I now have 2 working replacement laser assemblies and in fact ended up using the one with the fixed spindle, as its laser was slightly stronger reading backup copies. I haven't tweaked the pot on any of them and probably won't unless I have any major disc reading issues.

Also today I received the SDrive-Max for my recently acquired Atari 65XE, so I've been testing that out too. So much better than trying to run stuff through the cassette player and much higher compatibility. I can pretty much run everything now except for Cartridge games, which should generally cover 99% of everything I'd want to play on this Atari 8-Bit.

vad4r wrote on 2021-05-05, 08:28:

gex85 wrote on 2021-05-05, 08:19:

vad4r wrote on 2021-05-05, 05:25:

Talked with a friend who also collects...
001.jpg03.jpg

Holy crap... that's a lot of computers. I might show this picture to my wife when she complains about me piling up too much retro stuff (around 15 machines currently). 😁

You can buy some IBM, the warehouse is only ~60km away from you ^^

Looks like you should introduce me to your friend some time 😁
But I need to move into a bigger home first (we actually bought a new home, but it's going to take a few months before we can move in).

And now for the progress on my ATX-64 machine. I am halfway through the solder work. Missing few components on the mainboard, and then I need to solder the two stackable riser cards. Need to buy some componentes more.

It is actually an interresting machine. There are access to the system bus, through the expantion cards. It can run with old and new SID as well as NTSC or PAL VIC (two crystals onboard), it has build in Lumafix and there are solderpads for hooking up an internal PI-1541 drive. There are S-Video port, Composit port and the old standard Video port. It can run with two SID's and there are Phono plug's for sound output....

I hope that I succeed in making a working ATX-64 machine.

Note... The standoff's are only temporary there, because it help me get the components more straight. Once the board are done, I will remove them. Else this is the best I can do, in terms of placing components straight.

LewisRaz wrote on 2021-05-06, 14:02:

So my 2 "untested" motherboard arrived today: […]
Show full quote

So my 2 "untested" motherboard arrived today:

I was quite worried because another member had pointed out that it looked like they had been worked on before. The seller is indeed selling of bucketloads of old "untested" gear so could possibly be returns or broken parts from and old IT company...

I tried the interesting one first and sure enough it was dead. Only went through 2 or 3 post codes then stopped. Something about "cache or memory count".

I took 1 of the included sticks out and it did the same. However when I swapped it into the other slot we got much further with the posting!

It was now stopping on "init display" but it was actually outputting a blank screen to my monitor now.. I tried a few things before thinking that if it had memory issues before, and the display uses that memory also then perhaps a different stick would sort it out...

Great success!!

Oh and during the fault finding I did have to peek under the heatsink to see what I was dealing with. I wast thinking P100 or similar as I could only see the ceramic edge but:

That will do nicely! 😀

Going to try and grab one of those NOS Biege MATX cases and make a nice little MATX win95/DOS machine.(Although installing 98 on it now for stress testing)

The other board actually worked straight after a bios reset. Generic intel board with a 1.8ghz P4 CPU.

Hah I just started a thread about a similar Cyrix. Are they any good?

Here's what I did yesterday - I recently picked up a beat up 486 off eBay for a good price. It more or less worked, some components were missing, but the ones left over were great. (Honestly someone took out a NIC and some other ISA crap and left a Mach32 2 Mb video card and 16 Mb RAM, as well as the original hard disk - CDROM too, I found drivers for it on the drive, but left the floppies in!)

Well, after a month of work on it, including retrobrite, respray of the case, corrosion removal, and a custom LED setup among others, several live streamed vids, and a completed 486 benchmark (20 or so CPUS, 486 SX-20 to the ODPR, through some odd ball 40 MHz Bus CPUs that didn't really get far), I'm ready to see it off:

Fixed the pain in the NEC Versa M/75 floppy drive (the one I got from eBay) and the one that was in there originally died on me when I attempted to fix it using machine oil to lubricate the head shafts since they were stuck (the original died after buttoning it back up and I wasn't missing a screw or anything).

Up next: finding a sound card for it so I can play some DOS games or find out if it's possible to put a P/75 board in the laptop.

Also did a CMOS battery upgrade using 2x ML2032 batteries and 2x CR2032 battery holders with the original CMOS battery connector from the NiLeakium battery. It keeps the date correct this time and not smoking either.

Jed118 wrote on 2021-05-07, 03:32:

LewisRaz wrote on 2021-05-06, 14:02:

So my 2 "untested" motherboard arrived today: […]
Show full quote

So my 2 "untested" motherboard arrived today:

I was quite worried because another member had pointed out that it looked like they had been worked on before. The seller is indeed selling of bucketloads of old "untested" gear so could possibly be returns or broken parts from and old IT company...

I tried the interesting one first and sure enough it was dead. Only went through 2 or 3 post codes then stopped. Something about "cache or memory count".

I took 1 of the included sticks out and it did the same. However when I swapped it into the other slot we got much further with the posting!

It was now stopping on "init display" but it was actually outputting a blank screen to my monitor now.. I tried a few things before thinking that if it had memory issues before, and the display uses that memory also then perhaps a different stick would sort it out...

Great success!!

Oh and during the fault finding I did have to peek under the heatsink to see what I was dealing with. I wast thinking P100 or similar as I could only see the ceramic edge but:

That will do nicely! 😀

Going to try and grab one of those NOS Biege MATX cases and make a nice little MATX win95/DOS machine.(Although installing 98 on it now for stress testing)

The other board actually worked straight after a bios reset. Generic intel board with a 1.8ghz P4 CPU.

Hah I just started a thread about a similar Cyrix. Are they any good?

Seems very underwhelming in windows98 so far. For some reason the sims1 is my first benchmark and it was unplayable despite technically meeting/exceeding the requirements.
I will do some of the DOS tests from phils pack later. I have a graph to compare against all of my other systems pre P2.