aha2940 wrote on 2021-09-12, 14:50:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-09-08, 18:41:

Installing Lubuntu 10.10 on my AMDk6-2 400 rig with 256megs of ram. Why? Because I bloody well can.....😉

Just out of curiosity: what do you use an old Linux distro for? I understand using old Windows for games, but what can you run on an old Linux that you can't on a new one? honest question.

Test that old hardware is functioning correctly and it takes far less time that install Windows and a few applications. Generally I just use my hdd wih Xandos version 2 installed on it. It is great for picking up the details of hard ware systems from around 2004 back. Including nVivia video cards. Don't even need to open up the case sometimes. Just put the hdd in a usb enclosure an commect it to a usb port and set the bios to boot from that.

Also demonstrate under the hood there is not much difference between old and new Linuxs. You see *nix applications do not bloat out like MS Windows application. For evample the WindowMaker wm Is not much bigger the the version from the 2000s. And that goes for al ot of *nix applications not just Linux.

And because I can...😉

Edit:I can't remember why I had to edit this one.

Meanwhile, Win32S programs compiled with MSVC++ 4.1 still work on Windows 11 x64.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-09-12, 18:22:

Meanwhile, Win32S programs compiled with MSVC++ 4.1 still work on Windows 11 x64.

Old Linux progvams will work on new linuxs if the source code is recompiled as well.

Try running Windows 10 in my AMD K6-2 rig.................................

An example of the is KDE 1 being recompiled for for use on more current/modern systems not long ago.

Did you miss that?

Edit: I wont provide a link in this post.
Edit: It is somewhere on the internet.
Edit: I hope that will be helpful.

I drilled some holes into the bottom plate from a borked floppy drive to build a 2.5" to 3.5" hard drive adapter. Followed by some more adapters for maximum adapterception.

dormcat wrote on 2021-09-12, 15:45:

Tried to salvage a file from a friend's floppy dated all the way back to 2003. Scandisk, chkdsk, NDD all failed, only Diskfix from PC Tools partially made the disc readable (barely). Still keep getting messages like either "Sector not found reading drive A" or "File Allocation Table Bad" (sigh). I wouldn't expect the "fixing" result of .chk or .fix files could be useful.

Try VGAcopy. All programs mentioned by you are not very good for handling damaged floppies. Hope you had the write protection on?

Will have to get pics soon, moderately successful.... dumpster dive? Not sure what to call it, will probably post on the relevant thread. Lots of testing this weekend, some hardware is borked but that's half the fun (if it seems fixable, that is).

Teaser: 5" CRT.

Today's activity was probably one of my least favourite parts of collecting retro hardware, but had to be done -

I completely disassembled the Dragon 32 computer I recently purchased and started to clean it all up. Soap & water for the case & keys, removing various dead spider and other associated debris from the case and general dirt & grime from the keys. Next some compressed air for the dust on the motherboard & power supply and some IPA & cotton buds for the keyboard itself. Took a few hours, but the Dragon is looking pretty nice now and feels nice to the touch. Some slight yellowing to the case, but I'm not going to retrobright as it generally looks pretty nice as it is.

Just waiting on a joystick adapter to arrive, so I can test this thing out fully.

Built a 486 DX-4 into a modern ATX case, had to use the dremel and grinder a bit, fixed up a DX-40 386 with a multimedia package (need to retrobrite the VGA CRT for it, an older Hyundai one from 1990), added a 5.25 for another 486,DX-2 and I gotta prepare another DX-40 386 for shipment - I found rails for it, so the new owner will also get those installed.

Tonight - I will upgrade a P120 to at least a 133 (I think I might have a 166), and I have a socket 7 case into which someone tried to drill a hole into. There's some kind of machine in there, I think it's a Pentium or an AMD K6. That's gonna need some body work and a new CDROM (which works, but the tray face is badly damaged). Then I gotta repair some keyboards 😉

I tried to disable my math coprocessor to see what a hypothetical Core i7-SX would perform like. 🤣 I don't think it worked, because everything seemed to be as fast as before, even after restarting windows. Does anyone know if disabling the coprocessor in device manager ever worked? I'm legitimately curious.

65C02 wrote on 2021-09-14, 04:04:

I tried to disable my math coprocessor to see what a hypothetical Core i7-SX would perform like. 🤣 I don't think it worked, because everything seemed to be as fast as before, even after restarting windows. Does anyone know if disabling the coprocessor in device manager ever worked? I'm legitimately curious.Untitled.png

Don't think it can work. I don't think there is a processor feature to turn off random instructions.

PTherapist wrote on 2021-09-13, 18:25:

Today's activity was probably one of my least favourite parts of collecting retro hardware, but had to be done -

I completely disassembled the Dragon 32 computer I recently purchased and started to clean it all up. Soap & water for the case & keys, removing various dead spider and other associated debris from the case and general dirt & grime from the keys. Next some compressed air for the dust on the motherboard & power supply and some IPA & cotton buds for the keyboard itself. Took a few hours, but the Dragon is looking pretty nice now and feels nice to the touch. Some slight yellowing to the case, but I'm not going to retrobright as it generally looks pretty nice as it is.

Just waiting on a joystick adapter to arrive, so I can test this thing out fully.

hopefully it'll work after all your efforts!

most software was tape loading wasn't it? got a tape player to match, and any tapes for that matter - or maybe not needed

gerry wrote on 2021-09-14, 08:29:

PTherapist wrote on 2021-09-13, 18:25:

Today's activity was probably one of my least favourite parts of collecting retro hardware, but had to be done -

I completely disassembled the Dragon 32 computer I recently purchased and started to clean it all up. Soap & water for the case & keys, removing various dead spider and other associated debris from the case and general dirt & grime from the keys. Next some compressed air for the dust on the motherboard & power supply and some IPA & cotton buds for the keyboard itself. Took a few hours, but the Dragon is looking pretty nice now and feels nice to the touch. Some slight yellowing to the case, but I'm not going to retrobright as it generally looks pretty nice as it is.

Just waiting on a joystick adapter to arrive, so I can test this thing out fully.

hopefully it'll work after all your efforts!

most software was tape loading wasn't it? got a tape player to match, and any tapes for that matter - or maybe not needed

Yes thankfully it does still work after all that.

I'm currently using a CASDuino device to load .cas files from an SD card. I might get a CoCo SDC for it next year.

At some point in the future I'll probably get a cassette player too as I don't currently have a working one for any of my micros (except for Commodore computers & other systems with it integrated) and it would come in handy for loading original cassette games.

Decent tape machines seem harder to find than the 8 bits these days. When I get around to playing with my CoCo 2 I'll probably try using an MP3 player, or an old android phone to keep the miles off the capstan of the single tape mechanism in the house I know works.

canthearu wrote on 2021-09-14, 04:23:

65C02 wrote on 2021-09-14, 04:04:

I tried to disable my math coprocessor to see what a hypothetical Core i7-SX would perform like. 🤣 I don't think it worked, because everything seemed to be as fast as before, even after restarting windows. Does anyone know if disabling the coprocessor in device manager ever worked? I'm legitimately curious.Untitled.png

Don't think it can work. I don't think there is a processor feature to turn off random instructions.

Aww that's too bad. It would have been fun to see how the lack of an NPU would affect modern, "every day" programs like web browsers and office suites.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-14, 12:59:

Decent tape machines seem harder to find than the 8 bits these days. When I get around to playing with my CoCo 2 I'll probably try using an MP3 player, or an old android phone to keep the miles off the capstan of the single tape mechanism in the house I know works.

Watch out for the lack of REM support though. You can probably get away with it for most games, but from my testing so far on the Dragon there are certainly a few titles which make heavy use of the relay to stop/start the tape whilst loading.

That's why I opted for a CASDuino over the alternative of an old phone/MP3 player, it lets the computer control the playback.

I've been working with a different i430HX build. The board is AMI Atlas PCI-III. Today I soldered a battery on the boards RTC.

I've looked for a case that has enough space on under HDD drive bays because this board has VRM on a silly place (upper right corner). Then I found & bought this stupidly large server case. It eats midi-towers for breakfast, have to be careful. Power supply is 400W and got this manual statement is covered -> "Use at least a 400 watt power supply, which should have built-in filters to suppress radiated emissions". Yes, those are SCSI CD-ROM drives.

I thought space would not be an issue with this case, but AMI says NO! VRM is too tall and doesn't fit. Not by much, but there's no loose so have to work it out.
I have two choices:
1. Take a saw and cut a hole to drive bay
2. Modify VRM connection so that it would mount flat, not vertical.

Because I don't want to make any case modifications I ordered some angled dual row female pin headers. We'll see how it works in the end.

So I was gonna do a whole big thing, but I've had little time, so I figured I would throw a few pics up. Tested a ton of RAM and a few HDs and CDs/DVDs.

And then there's a brace of these:

They don't power up, but I haven't had time to take them down and check. Missing a few minor bits but nothing apparently critical. One has a very small crack on the screen, so I don't know what to do about that yet.

On the other hand, this works:

AST Pentium 133 from the "funky proprietary backplane design" era, in this case apparently not to make the case smaller, but just because, hey, backplanes! CPU is good, RAM is good, replaced optical drive, was missing PSU and I have to get a switch that works properly with this case. Has built-in S3 Trio64 V+ "Turbo," Turbo apparently meaning "with less RAM" in this context. I even found out that if you go back to Hiren's boot CD version 5.0, it will boot on these 90s machines.

Seriously, this case was designed by a maniac. It's got more interdependent parts in its assembly than a Volvo. Easy 9-step processes everywhere! I'll get more detailed pics later.

I'm also glad I got a picture of this label before I found out that it's basically watercolor (or early inkjet printed on plastic film), because one swipe while cleaning wiped half of this out and it was gone.

So a reminder that just because it looks solid and it lasted 25 years doesn't mean it *is* solid. Also it was apparently never cleaned before.

Miraculously, drive rails were included, and this is my first attempt at reproducing them. I chose a 2-part design because of the shape of it, and the fact that the "arm" has to bend. I planned on using screws, and still might, but on looking at it I could probably print a pin and use it to reinforce superglue - I wasn't confident that just superglue on the flat surfaces would work that great.

I didn't get pictures yet, but I got an Athlon XP-based HP as well. Had planned to do something else today, but here I am playing with my train set.

Attempted to fix the CFW on my PSP-2001 and it decided to not boot anymore and the display is a mess (got it cleaned off internally, but I'm not sure if it works due to the system not working ATM).

Pandora battery, here I come.

Merovign wrote on 2021-09-14, 23:27:

AST Pentium 133 from the "funky proprietary backplane design" era, ....
...
Seriously, this case was designed by a maniac. It's got more interdependent parts in its assembly than a Volvo. Easy 9-step processes everywhere! I'll get more detailed pics later.

Heh yeah, AST sneered at the clone makers back in the day, saying "The best technology they've got is a screwdriver" meaning they just used standard parts and screwed them together. So I guess they were out to prove they had 10 screwdrivers for every one the competition had 🤣 But yeah, designed and made their own platforms basically. They did seem to integrate stuff well and their machines tended towards faster and smoother than contemporary machines of same spec. But Holy. Freaking. Screws. though, assemblies needed assemblies to fit them to other assemblies, brackets and lugs were not part of these and were screwed on separately, and brackets had sub-brackets. It's almost like AST was originally a small metal pressings company and just requested manufacturers send them "some kind of motherboad" "some kind of PSU" etc then they fitted together all what they got with eleventy one little bits of metal. Back in the day, I got an AST 386 with a burned board, and due to repair/replacement being uneconomical as it was obsolete, you weren't randomly gonna come across anything that had a hope of fitting, I stripped the thing out entirely. I think I got a full cup measure of screws and small hardware out of it.

First attempt at retrobriting... Being hindered by the great british weather but it seems to be working slowly.