rkurbatov wrote on 2022-02-03, 16:44:

"Hope no one gets offended by "Soviet Bloc" not sure where to place all the countries from that area of the world since some of them are not EU members." - no, that's ok. Post-Soviet countries, that's what we are.

Comparing prices I see we still have lot of stuff that is cheaper. Or better to say WAS 😀 Seems like this source has dried up.

My wife is from "soviet bloc" and she wouldnt be offended.

Law212 wrote on 2022-02-03, 17:57:

My wife is from "soviet bloc" and she wouldnt be offended.

In this particular context I can't see something offensive here. We all are interested in the same period (something like 1985-2005) and due to historical reasons the situation with hardware is pretty same for all exUSSR countries and quite different from European, American or any other market. There are some devices that were sold here specially or were popular (or unpopular). There is the same amount of interest of hobbyists. Even prices are the same - they are lower, than 'western' ones while the amount of stuff is also lower.

IBM Model F AT arrived yesterday. After cleanup, it looks great. It came from some Exxon refinery, so it was covered in greasy dirt. But, the inside and plate is nearly pristine.

Before:

After:

Nice work. One of my least favorite jobs. A fully involved keyboard disassembly & clean. Extremely time consuming, but so worth it in the end.

My MPU-232 serial port MIDI adapter arrived in the mail today, in good order and well-packaged, as I've come to expect from Serdashop.

I'm going to have some fun this weekend, using this thing with SoftMPU and some of Cloudschatze's patches to hook up my Roland MT-32 and natively play some DOS games in their full musical glory on a system that's supposed to be waaay too modern to support that. 😁

Thanks dreamblaster and Cloudschatze!

Made an offer on this motherboard: a Jameco JE1007 with PDIP RAM and a CR2032 battery holder instead of the leaky NiCd battery.

Speaking of Quantums - the PC I bought came with a Quantum Fireball SE 4GB - they seem to sell for quite a bit on eBay, is there a particular reason for this?

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-03, 23:55:

Speaking of Quantums - the PC I bought came with a Quantum Fireball SE 4GB - they seem to sell for quite a bit on eBay, is there a particular reason for this?

Because some people like the sound of specific HDDs and don't care if they could have solid state storage for much cheaper?

rkurbatov wrote on 2022-02-03, 18:11:

Law212 wrote on 2022-02-03, 17:57:

My wife is from "soviet bloc" and she wouldnt be offended.

In this particular context I can't see something offensive here. We all are interested in the same period (something like 1985-2005) and due to historical reasons the situation with hardware is pretty same for all exUSSR countries and quite different from European, American or any other market. There are some devices that were sold here specially or were popular (or unpopular). There is the same amount of interest of hobbyists. Even prices are the same - they are lower, than 'western' ones while the amount of stuff is also lower.

I guess its more from people getting offended at the weirdest of things, you just cant be sure anymore.

Several years back I had two guys on another forum get rather upset with me for even mentioning that their country was part of the former USSR, why .. dont know, but they got quite aggressive about it.

I've been looking for something like this for a while. Dual socket 370 with DDR memory (which I have plenty) and Tualatin support, agp 4x with onboard lan. Got it really cheap with dual Tualatins 1.13Ghz. The MSI pro266td master-lr.

Also finally got a roland sc55 mk1 for cheap (for some reason it has no GM logo), but it does need some loving and someone soldered additional mic inputs to it (was used by a musician), have to take that off and somehow fill the holes. If anyone has an idea on how to make this look good, please help.

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-02-04, 00:07:

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-03, 23:55:

Speaking of Quantums - the PC I bought came with a Quantum Fireball SE 4GB - they seem to sell for quite a bit on eBay, is there a particular reason for this?

Because some people like the sound of specific HDDs and don't care if they could have solid state storage for much cheaper?

The only "special" thing about the HDD is the sound? That's a weird reason to ask €150 for a 4GB hard drive. I thought maybe they were known to be very reliable or something like that.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2022-02-03, 21:19:

Made an offer on this motherboard: a Jameco JE1007 with PDIP RAM and a CR2032 battery holder instead of the leaky NiCd battery.

Very nice board! But that looks like some slow ass memory, 120ns if I'm not mistaken. I'd try to get at least 70ns memory on it with a 16Mhz 286 (instead of the 10Mhz installed). You'd obviously have to change the oscillator but it looks like they are easily swappable on this board. Hell, everything seems to be nicely socketed. I'd call this board a beauty 😀

sirotkaslo wrote on 2022-02-04, 06:56:

Also finally got a roland sc55 mk1 for cheap (for some reason it has no GM logo), but it does need some loving and someone soldered additional mic inputs to it (was used by a musician), have to take that off and somehow fill the holes. If anyone has an idea on how to make this look good, please help.

The older models with the GM logo will have the 1.x firmware. This is more desirable due to a change in the 2.x firmware which changed some instruments.

Find out which firmware version is has and get back to us.

Doornkaat wrote on 2022-02-03, 15:44:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-03, 15:43:

Doornkaat wrote on 2022-02-03, 15:39:

Ooorrr 12 Quantum Bigfoots. Please!🤩

Uhh thats a bold assumption there .. that there are still 12 bigfoots functional.

😄Sad but true!

RAID 12 x ZIP drives - how many will have click of death before windows finishes installing?

dr.ido wrote on 2022-02-04, 10:46:

Doornkaat wrote on 2022-02-03, 15:44:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-03, 15:43:

Uhh thats a bold assumption there .. that there are still 12 bigfoots functional.

😄Sad but true!

RAID 12 x ZIP drives - how many will have click of death before windows finishes installing?

Is the click of dead a thing in the internal IDE ZIPs? I never researched that (I was aware of this problem in the "blue" external units).

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-04, 08:30:

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-02-04, 00:07:

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-03, 23:55:

Speaking of Quantums - the PC I bought came with a Quantum Fireball SE 4GB - they seem to sell for quite a bit on eBay, is there a particular reason for this?

Because some people like the sound of specific HDDs and don't care if they could have solid state storage for much cheaper?

The only "special" thing about the HDD is the sound? That's a weird reason to ask €150 for a 4GB hard drive. I thought maybe they were known to be very reliable or something like that.

As I recall, the Fireball was like the pinnacle of IDE disks at some point in time. That might be a factor in those high prices today?

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-03, 16:22:

Use in 486 PCI board with 486 SX clocked to 50mhz and an FPU emulator implemented in lookup tables.... get 30 FPS in Quake.

No chance. At best you'll get close but probably not quite to 10 FPS with DX2-80. Also, from my experience anyway, 486SX chips will not even boot at 50MHz. The UMC U5S-SUPER40 does, but I've yet to test if that is stable or not. And it might just be my limited experience with 486 PCI mobos but I'd say the ISA performance on these sucks, and PCI is usually fast but problematic with some cards. Anyone willing to set some Quake 486 recodrs would problably need a VLB mobo with VGA card that actually works at 50MHz.

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-04, 08:30:

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-02-04, 00:07:

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-03, 23:55:

Speaking of Quantums - the PC I bought came with a Quantum Fireball SE 4GB - they seem to sell for quite a bit on eBay, is there a particular reason for this?

Because some people like the sound of specific HDDs and don't care if they could have solid state storage for much cheaper?

The only "special" thing about the HDD is the sound? That's a weird reason to ask €150 for a 4GB hard drive. I thought maybe they were known to be very reliable or something like that.

If you ever owned a Quantum BigFoot or Fireball, you know. Otherwise, you would never understand. Dumb as it sounds, that's what it is..

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-02-04, 11:52:

red_avatar wrote on 2022-02-04, 08:30:

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-02-04, 00:07:

Because some people like the sound of specific HDDs and don't care if they could have solid state storage for much cheaper?

The only "special" thing about the HDD is the sound? That's a weird reason to ask €150 for a 4GB hard drive. I thought maybe they were known to be very reliable or something like that.

As I recall, the Fireball was like the pinnacle of IDE disks at some point in time. That might be a factor in those high prices today?

There were many lines of Fireballs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fireball), CR was indeed a pinnacle of performance at one point (I still have my 8,4GB CR from late 90s - I dropped it recently, fortunatelly it seems it survived without any damage).
I know some old HDDs sell for ridiculous prices for a reasons you may not expect - legacy hardware repair/data recovery.

I don't really see a point in buying used HDDs for such horrendous prices (unless it's something really rare like ESDI or XTA) - HDDs are consumables. You don't really know how much down in it's life cycle it is.

I do use HDDs in my machines only for the sake o full experience of using vintage hardware (sweet sweet noises of ST-157A are unexpendable!) but nothing beats CF cards (no, SD cards don't beat them either) when it comes to flexibility and ease of use.

PS: Last night I removed a BigFoot from my Amiga 2000 - I couldn't stand the noise (it's loud even without it as it has IBM SCSI HDD and PSU fan is also noisy but in a good way) and vibrations it produced... I still have a BigFoot in my 286 which is a build I use the most.

Deunan wrote on 2022-02-04, 12:11:

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-03, 16:22:

Use in 486 PCI board with 486 SX clocked to 50mhz and an FPU emulator implemented in lookup tables.... get 30 FPS in Quake.

No chance. At best you'll get close but probably not quite to 10 FPS with DX2-80. Also, from my experience anyway, 486SX chips will not even boot at 50MHz. The UMC U5S-SUPER40 does, but I've yet to test if that is stable or not. And it might just be my limited experience with 486 PCI mobos but I'd say the ISA performance on these sucks, and PCI is usually fast but problematic with some cards. Anyone willing to set some Quake 486 recodrs would problably need a VLB mobo with VGA card that actually works at 50MHz.

About 1 in 5 SX33s will do 50mhz, most of them do 40. U5-S will do 60mhz.... the joke however was, that the storage speed would be so impressive, that gigabyte huge lookup tables would return a result faster even than a pentium FPU, which isn't listed here https://dougx.net/gaming/coproc.html#timings but gives you an idea of how slow FPUs are for being "fast".