BitWrangler wrote on 2021-11-30, 16:08:

BetaC wrote on 2021-11-30, 09:11:

Well, I attempted to get my 486 system to recognize any drive over 503MB, which it has failed to do. Sure, when auto detecting the 1992 dated BIOS can see up to 8GB and properly define up to ~8063MB, but once in DOS, I am unable to do anything beyond the 503MB Barrier.

I did try Ontrack, but I wasn't able to access the drive outside of the DOS machine, making it useless for how I transfer files. After that was EZ-Drive, which seems intent on crashing the moment it tries to install. My speaker constantly beeps, and the screen seems to display random text from the program and my BIOS. I do have a 3Com ethernet card that has an open ROM slot, so I may end up biting the bullet and trying to somehow find an EPROM, and figure out how to flash it through my ethernet card

"anydrive" is supposed to be the magic word in drive overlays, but I have not messed with it lately. I don't think most NICs have a programming voltage provision for programming EPROM or EEPROM, might need to try using a video card to flash it.

I'll give it a look, thanks. It's just kind of infuriating to see the BIOS properly define the drive then fail to do translate that in to a full size drive.

Put the NEC Versa 40EC back into action to try and get the Nogatech Nogavision/VersaVision card going. Now it kinda works under 3.1 - at least the software loads, but the "fulltv" DOS program now shows lines instead of no signal regardless of if the card is installed or not...heh, oh well. Took the screen out of the V/50.

I also think I found a bug with the VersaVideo using Win95 DOS. My M/75 running Windows 3.11 For Workgroups over Win95 DOS states that "Windows is the incorrect version" when running VersaVideo app in 3.11, but in the same scenario on 7.01 MS-DOS (unofficial distro), it works just fine in WFWG. Very odd. I'm guessing maybe the win3xstart program breaks whatever VersaVideo does to authorize the Windows version, either htat or the way DOS functions in 95 as opposed to plain causes it to think it's running on an older application than it is. I also found Ultima 7 runs on that setup (!!!) so maybe I should move to the Versas all running DOS 7.01 with WFWG - which is pretty close to factory, just with 80GB of disk space instead of 250MB.

Also found another 40EC to buy up....maybe I'll make one last attempt at fixing the Versa V with the screen from that (or but the EC screen on the V and the V/50's original screen back in. Then make an attempt to repair the V/50 one last time before I decide it's not worth it. It's not picking up hard disks reliably.

Today I had my first "I regret this hobby" day. It started with attempting the circumvent the 504MB limit imposed by my BIOS by using EZ-DRIVE. Sure, everything worked up until the program decided that it should just boot to the HDD despite being told to boot to the Floppy drive, so I couldn't install DOS 6.22. After that, I went and picked up a completely different brand of mouse, and again managed to somehow get one that can be detected by CTmouse and windows, but can't move. At all. Even when directly rolling the rollers, there's zero movement. I am at a total loss as to how I can fix the issue, as both my VLB and ISA IO cards have the exact same problem with both mice. I also can't google the issue, as I only get completely unrelated questions.

Repaired and cleaned my PS2 SCPH-50001 completely. The PITA was finding a spot for the CR2032 holder I installed that got swapped from the 3-hour labor one (taking hundreds of screws out to replace a battery is painful) so it doesn't short anything or cause the clock to lock at 1/1/2000 12:00:00 AM and the CD/DVD laser assembly was a challenge. Adjusted the lens to no avail and I discovered one small detail: the ribbon wasn't secured all the way (the clip wasn't pressed in to the locking position) and after that headache along with the EEPROM overwrite for the KHS-400C laser assembly using the lens changer ELF application, it boots up my PS1 and PS2 titles.

There was a lot of dust in the system, even the fan was running loudly.

Recently I was very lazy with my retro activities. Today all I did was replacing the band on my Nano 6.

The leather one I had looked more stylish, but got eaten up by sweat. I used the old silver aluminium case instead of the new black one that came with the rubber band. It matches the color of the Nano and feels sturdier than the new one. I would have preferred a NATO strap, but couldn't find one wide enough.

It'll be interesting to see how long the rubber one will last before it starts to break down. The rubber band on my Mi Band 3 lasts little over a year.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-12-01, 08:24:

Repaired and cleaned my PS2 SCPH-50001 completely. The PITA was finding a spot for the CR2032 holder I installed that got swapped from the 3-hour labor one (taking hundreds of screws out to replace a battery is painful) so it doesn't short anything or cause the clock to lock at 1/1/2000 12:00:00 AM and the CD/DVD laser assembly was a challenge. Adjusted the lens to no avail and I discovered one small detail: the ribbon wasn't secured all the way (the clip wasn't pressed in to the locking position) and after that headache along with the EEPROM overwrite for the KHS-400C laser assembly using the lens changer ELF application, it boots up my PS1 and PS2 titles.

There was a lot of dust in the system, even the fan was running loudly.

Haha, I got a PS2 slim for relatively cheap that had the same problem - wouldn't read discs because the DVD drive flex cable was dislodged 😀
I just finished up installing a 'hard drive' (SD to IDE) adapter on that same PS2 slim, yikes that's some tough soldering. I really need to get a desoldering gun, I made a real mess of the SD to IDE adapter in taking the pins off - which I didn't even really need to do in the end.

I got sick of my Toshiba laptops having sticky left mouse buttons, where the rubbery buttons that were good in the 90s, have now dissolved into a gooey mess.
So I got some grey TPU filament and printed out replacements - now I've got one for the 410CDT, which was all sticky and nasty. And another one for an unpictured T2130CS, which had a similar affliction. I think I'll make these for most of the Toshiba laptops I've got, lots of them have this problem and Toshiba don't like standardising things. Then put them up on thingiverse - really gotta get around to sharing more of my designs.

janih wrote on 2021-11-29, 22:08:

Changed the display panel of my Libretto 100CT. It was a bit tedious and I was scared that I might break the old plastics but so far so good. Next I'll replace the original spinning disk and cmos battery for something newer 😀

The panel for this 100CT is Sharp LQ71Y03

Ooh that's looking good 😀 Did you have any trouble getting the display mask off? I found that on some of the 98-ish Toshibas, the display bezels thin plastic just kinda breaks like chalk now

BetaC wrote on 2021-12-01, 08:05:

Today I had my first "I regret this hobby" day. It started with attempting the circumvent the 504MB limit imposed by my BIOS by using EZ-DRIVE. Sure, everything worked up until the program decided that it should just boot to the HDD despite being told to boot to the Floppy drive, so I couldn't install DOS 6.22. After that, I went and picked up a completely different brand of mouse, and again managed to somehow get one that can be detected by CTmouse and windows, but can't move. At all. Even when directly rolling the rollers, there's zero movement. I am at a total loss as to how I can fix the issue, as both my VLB and ISA IO cards have the exact same problem with both mice. I also can't google the issue, as I only get completely unrelated questions.

Hmm, is that serial or PS/2? check the voltages on the serial port / isa pins. I seem to recall on this forum that people have had similar problems and it turned out to be corrosion that had damaged the -12v line which disrupted serial comms.
If it's getting as far as detecting, the pinout should all be good at least.

janih wrote on 2021-11-29, 22:08:

Changed the display panel of my Libretto 100CT.
The panel for this 100CT is Sharp LQ71Y03

Would you please share where you got a replacement panel from? I've a 100CT with flickering vertical lines on the left side, a common spot, I could clamp it all down and hope for better but a replacement panel would be rather good.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2021-12-02, 00:42:

janih wrote on 2021-11-29, 22:08:

Changed the display panel of my Libretto 100CT. It was a bit tedious and I was scared that I might break the old plastics but so far so good. Next I'll replace the original spinning disk and cmos battery for something newer 😀

The panel for this 100CT is Sharp LQ71Y03

Ooh that's looking good 😀 Did you have any trouble getting the display mask off? I found that on some of the 98-ish Toshibas, the display bezels thin plastic just kinda breaks like chalk now

I was a bit optimistic. I broke two small "hooks" that keep the bezel in place but I was able to glue the pieces back and it seems to hold together well enough. I hope I don't have to open it again 😀

Byrd wrote on 2021-12-02, 01:05:

janih wrote on 2021-11-29, 22:08:

Changed the display panel of my Libretto 100CT.
The panel for this 100CT is Sharp LQ71Y03

Would you please share where you got a replacement panel from? I've a 100CT with flickering vertical lines on the left side, a common spot, I could clamp it all down and hope for better but a replacement panel would be rather good.

I bought the panel from a Chinese online store called "abctay.com". Paid 50$ (+shipping, taxes, customs..) so not cheap, but I was unable to find these from European sellers or locally.

It was bit of a gamble to buy from some random shop, but the panel is working and seems to be new old stock. I was searching for the lowest price for LQ71Y03 that I could find. There are also several sellers in AliExpress that also have this panel for sale.

That is pretty cheap, I paid something like £60 for a replacement panel for my portege 610ct, thanks for the pointer 😀 Usually I just use aliexpress, so it's good to know that it worked out well for you,

I've never liked EAX. While the positional audio was often nice, for some reason developers all too often went completely overboard with echo effects making games sound like echo chambers to me. I also never liked what the positional audio did to sound sometimes, sounds coming from behind often sounded unnatural to me like it was coming through some kind of thin wall that absorbed and warped some of the audio frequences.

But when I came across a cheap OEM Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium I realized I've never tried EAX 3.0 and later versions, so I figured what the hell, lets give them a try.

That didn't go too well. After installing the card to my WinXP machine the first thing I noticed was the crackling carbage sound coming through every single time I moved the mouse. After some troubleshooting I managed to fix it by disabling CPU C1 and C3 power saving states in BIOS forcing the CPU to run at 100% speed at all times. I have no idea why that caused such an issue but it didn't exactly fill me with confidence about compatibility between my motherboard and the sound card.

Which turned out to be warranted. While the mouse movement audio issue was fixed now every time the GPU was being used it caused all kinds of distortions, beebs and carbage sound. I hoped that was caused by electromagnetic interference so I whipped up a makeshift EMI shield with cardboard and aluminum foil, didn't help at all.

The Sound Blaster X-Fi wiki page says "Since its release X-Fi has caused several unsolved problems with sound glitches on various motherboards" Welp 😒

Sombrero wrote on 2021-12-02, 10:07:

But when I came across a cheap OEM Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium I realized I've never tried EAX 3.0 and later versions, so I figured what the hell, lets give them a try.

Nice! In my experience, EAX 3.0 and later provides a fairly substantial improvement over the older versions. Some games that showcase this well are Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Doom 3, Quake 4 and Unreal Tournament 2004.

Which turned out to be warranted. While the mouse movement audio issue was fixed now every time the GPU was being used it caused all kinds of distortions, beebs and carbage sound.

Do you have the PCIe version of the X-Fi? I know that some OEM models came in plain PCI versions (such as Dell's SB0770) and those supposedly suffer from interference a bit more.

Out of curiosity, does the X-Fi possibly share an IRQ with your graphics card? This really shouldn't matter under WinXP, but you never know.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-12-02, 10:27:

Do you have the PCIe version of the X-Fi? I know that some OEM models came in plain PCI versions (such as Dell's SB0770) and those supposedly suffer from interference a bit more.

Out of curiosity, does the X-Fi possibly share an IRQ with your graphics card? This really shouldn't matter under WinXP, but you never know.

Yeah, PCIe version with no shield. The one I made should have been enough, made it from a case fans retail box. Basically put the whole card in there and covered the outside with aluminum foil.

I did check the IRQ just to rule it out, no conflicts there. I think the whole BIOS power saving thing points to the motherboard being the issue here.

I had an x-fi. It would have audio issues like popping and cracking. This was fixed, at least in my case, by changing the audio quality settings in the windows area to match the cards output.

It felt like an installation oversight, and thankfully you only had to do it once.

Another old timer saved from the bad fire - finally got round to recapping my old Abit BE6 (Caps Replacements). Only replaced the main Tayeh caps FTM with Panasonic FR series, but did get some others in just in case the rest start to show. Board now working & stable to 1GHz 😀

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2021-12-02, 12:22:

Another old timer saved from the bad fire - finally got round to recapping my old Abit BE6 (Caps Replacements). Only replaced the main Tayeh caps FTM with Panasonic FR series, but did get some others in just in case the rest start to show. Board now working & stable to 1GHz 😀

Abit BE6 Recap.jpg

Nice!

I also have a BE6, it was my first slot 1 board, so it is a bit special for me. Unfortunately it is very unstable! Do you think a full recap would help?

Thanks

Snagged a V00D00 4 4500 off eBay for the price of a VooDoo 3 3000, got it sitting here waiting for its new home a P III 1.4s Tualatin system I also snagged. Tho I'm debating if a TnT2 Ultra with SLI Voodoo 2 would be a better fit for a P III, but Im excited to get that V4 up and running.

I think I got lucky with the P III, its a SiS635t board with DDR so it should be quite a fast little retro box when finished 😁

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2021-12-02, 12:22:

Another old timer saved from the bad fire - finally got round to recapping my old Abit BE6 (Caps Replacements). Only replaced the main Tayeh caps FTM with Panasonic FR series, but did get some others in just in case the rest start to show. Board now working & stable to 1GHz 😀

Abit BE6 Recap.jpg

I had a BE6-II, it was the most unstable POS Slot-1 board I ever used to be honest. When I got it all caps were shot, and even after a recap (to be fair I did use cheapo caps for the job..) it was flaky as hell. It frustrated me so much that I simply junked it.