Jed118 wrote on 2022-02-04, 04:45:

pinesal wrote on 2022-02-03, 16:18:

I had a few of people pop in but it wasn't a hugely successful stream. But I'd do it again. […]
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I had a few of people pop in but it wasn't a hugely successful stream. But I'd do it again.

My statistics were

Average Viewers: 2.7
Number of Unique Viewers: 10

LINK here https://twitch.tv/90snick_pinesal

Well, that's much better than I ever did - twice as good, actually. How do you do it? (scratches head)

A consistent schedule helps. I also pal around with other streamers and I get a lot of people migrating from streamers that I watch who are curious about my channel. Also, I like to think my stream is fun to watch maybe? Like the room is pretty cool right?

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-04, 21:26:

Wow, how did you find this thing? Magnet fishing in the canal? Dive on a 90s shipwreck? Dug out of a decades old mud slide?

It is for sale on ebay as "untested". I convinced the seller to send it to me to try and turn it on

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-02-04, 22:32:

It's ok, he has cotton buds. 😁

But seriously, that's a heck of a clean up to do.

I'd seriously consider one of those not so ultra...sonic cleaning rigs where you strap an orbital sander to the side of a tote filled with cleaning solution and let it simmer in that for a bit.

dataino.it wrote on 2022-02-04, 21:00:

PD2JK wrote on 2022-02-04, 15:38:

Nasty. Understatement. I can see why you needed a hammer and WD40.

I also had to use the dremell to be able to open it. the initial state of the power supply is to be framed

Pressure wash it. 😜

dataino.it wrote on 2022-02-04, 21:00:

PD2JK wrote on 2022-02-04, 15:38:

Nasty. Understatement. I can see why you needed a hammer and WD40.

I also had to use the dremell to be able to open it. the initial state of the power supply is to be framed

I had a few PCs almost as bad as that when a closing down mom & pop repair shop let me clear out their shed (before I started collecting more than just CPUs). I just cleaned them in the shower, and left to dry for a week. Wish I hadn't scrapped the bits I didn't want to keep at the time, dozens of XT and AT systems, a car full of motherboards up to 486 😀

Rinse as much of the dirt off with some water, then give it a long soak in a tub full of of vinegar. Then wash it in the sink again with a mild soap and let it dry. It will probably come out looking brand new aside from all of the rusted out pock marks. I wouldn't work on it at all without doing these things first.

You might want to remove the transformer first.

On my Pentium 200MMX, I switched my PCI Rage Pro Turbo 8MB for a PCI Rage Pro All-In-Wonder 128 16MB. It's not as big of an improvement as I hoped, but it's definitely a little faster everywhere I've tried it. Especially at 800x600. Still running benches. As a bonus it can natively do 1920x1200x32! The Turbo couldn't do that. Seeing Win98 at a native resolution of a relatively modern was a cool sight to behold...

I installed Dreams to Reality and Chasm the Rift on my pc to try out.

3Dfx mode works mostly okay with my voodoo 1 in DTR but there was some glitchyness with some menus and text , it's very bizzare game , you can fly around in a kind of fever dream world.
Definitely going to play some more.

Chasm works as well but for some reason my controller was drifting and the game has no way to calibrate it , I'm also not a fan of how it just autodetects stuff with no setup.
The games okay I guess , feels like a low budget quake clone.

dataino.it wrote on 2022-02-04, 21:00:

I also had to use the dremell to be able to open it. the initial state of the power supply is to be framed

I can see that working again, if the PCB still has copper on it. Even the fan migt spin again (though if the bearing got rusty it'll be very noisy). Getting that switch to work again, and reliably, is probably going to be tricky.

I tried to see if I could get a Winbook XP5 someone gave me to work. . .the big green lumpy tumor like VARTA battery had already unleashed it's fury. Disintegrated screws, support post melted through to the back of the laptop, soldered Pentium 120mhz is a mess. I'll keep the floppy, screen assembly , 800mb HDD, KB and proprietary memory/cache modules. Everything else is garbage 🙁 might desolder the CPU just for fun

ODwilly wrote on 2022-02-05, 17:17:

I tried to see if I could get a Winbook XP5 someone gave me to work. . .the big green lumpy tumor like VARTA battery had already unleashed it's fury. Disintegrated screws, support post melted through to the back of the laptop, soldered Pentium 120mhz is a mess. I'll keep the floppy, screen assembly , 800mb HDD, KB and proprietary memory/cache modules. Everything else is garbage 🙁 might desolder the CPU just for fun

Pssst .. got any pics of the carnage ?

Its always interesting to see the extent of damage these Varta batteries can do.

Couldn't get a good shot of the CPU because of lighting and the guts, but this post is right next to the CPU so it should give you a good idea.
EDIT: Who decided putting a Varta half an inch away from the CPU was a good idea?

Spent the whole day restoring this beautiful butterfly: vacuuming, cleaning, setting up Mhz display, lubricating bearings, installing DOS, troubleshooting interrupts, setting up sound, cleaning again, etc...

Turbo -> wrote on 2022-02-05, 21:01:

Spent the whole day restoring this beautiful butterfly: vacuuming, cleaning, setting up Mhz display, lubricating bearings, installing DOS, troubleshooting interrupts, setting up sound, cleaning again, etc...

A day well spent! Looks beautiful.

I'm getting dangerously sucked into the marvelous complexity of the Blue Lightning system I've created. It seems that using the AWE32 in DOS/Win 3.11 is not optimal (indeed, the drivers do not work properly for 3.11, each sound gets repeated quickly 10 times, then stops - MIDI doesn't work at all, some DOS games make popping noises and the sound slows down, DOOM doesn't play any SFX at all - only Settlers 2 Gold seems to work properly) so after making a complete resource map and finding out that 1) I needed a special VKD file due to keyboard interrupts specifically with Windows 3.11 and this computer and 2) My Etherlink's address was not correctly configured in 3.11 I was happy enough for the day... until...

SCSI2SD took up some of my time this afternoon, when it stopped responding to flash updates after it registered 2 extra "drives" and ousted my actual devices' SCSI IDs with unused IDs (that I deleted in the utility). I found out that I had to update the firmware, so 4.8 went on, then I couldn't CREATE any more drives, so I updated the firmware to 4.7 and made another 6 Gb partition as ID:1 (Adaptec autoassigns this one a D:\ letter - great) and created a partition and copied system files onto it. System Commander sees the drive and OS, but it hangs when it tries to boot from that partition. I will definitely have to read the manual to configure this properly. I'm also thinking of using scsi2sd-util to create a third drive (ID:3, the only one available) for an OS/2 disk in the future, although it may be wiser to extend the 6 Gb partition and make a logical drive there, and assign that one to OS/2 for System Commander to deal with.

Right now I want it to dual boot DOS from the C:\ drive (ID:0) and Windows 95B from the D:\ (ID:1) so I can take advantage of the advanced features of the AWE32. That and my Iomega Ditto doesn't work in DOS, and last time I did a data recovery I used Win98 (Box says a 486/33 with Win 95 will cut it, this PC performs as a DX2/66).

I think in the coming week or few days, I'll finally be able to put the cover on this beautiful PS/1000 and connect all the IBM stuff (CRT, keyboard, mouse, etc) to it and use it as an independent system, which would be nice 😁

Nothing special, dug out a NOS K7VTA3 that have had a few years? but not had time to test and my sister stopped by for an hour or two so halted plans but was good to chat with her since she had a birthday last week and barely talked with her then 😀

Shot some footage wit VersaVideo this morning, then this evening I've been going through stuff for e-bay. Also realized the FPU I bought for the Compaq is the wrong one (DOH) - should look for a 20MHz 386 SX FPU or something similar methinks, not the 4C87DLC (rolls eyes). Also decided to put the PC Chips up for bids (M590) since I'm trying to focus more on the systems I have than building more at this point, and if the board has issues, someone else may have more time to work on it than I do at this point. Also putting a bunch of cards n stuff up there as well.

My 1080p 32inch TV just died 🙁

ODwilly wrote on 2022-02-06, 07:06:

My 1080p 32inch TV just died 🙁

Years ago I got a free 50 inch (52?) and after messing with it, I saw that the LED bar stopped working. I took it apart very carefully and ordered a whole new set (12 sections) of LEDs - upon receiving them, I decided to see where the break was. Yeah, I could have bought just one section for a 10th of the price. No way to know that though without a complete set working - just like the old Christmas lights connected in series, pretty much. I had the TV in pieces all over any table I had, so the large screen diffusers and layers of polarizing film was laid out here and there, I didn't want to accidentally damage anything by having it open too long, so the whole LED kit was ordered. I kept the 11 good bars in case one ever fails in the future.

Anyways, 3+ years later I pretty much paid $120 for a nice Toshiba 50 inch LED backlit TV.

Tonight---- well tonight I messed more with the Blue Lightning, and I got the Iomega DittoMAX to recognize the high speed controller card in DOS! I know it works in WIn 98 because I made a data recovery rig using that device a couple years ago and successfully pulled data off a number of tapes for the client, but now it doesn't seem to want to do anything but not recognize tapes (it actually ate one) and crash the system. When it goes to format the tape, it does a tape position test and then crashes. Some research indicates that there's no way of assigning it an IRQ, DMA and address, which aside from 370h address interfere with other things. I'll see how it goes in Win 95 when I get to it. At the very least, it's not just a decorative piece in there 😉

I think I'm gonna take a break from non essential stuff on it and figure out the soundcard issues, maybe extend a partition or create another drive with SCSI2SD - that way I can get the cover on it. I'm very apprehensive of my 3 year old going down to the basement and messing with it - he loves putting my screws into the proper bin and handing me JB weld and screwdrivers when he's there with me. I gotta cover the PS/1000 ASAP! Then I can do all the software configurations, even play some games with him 😁

Bought dozens of old laptop processors just because I saw one Athlon XP-M 2500+ in the picture. In the end there was two of them and also couple of PIII-S tualatins (1.26 + 1.4) for my surprise.

Also found one S754 Turion 64 so I was able to test S939/S754 combo mainboard I got for free some time ago. Intel socket 478 cooler fits nicely in the bracket and takes contact to silicon. Proper S754 cooler left hanging too high due to bracket fasteners. I don't own a S754 build yet so this will become one.