Finished repairing the first of three Korg 05R/W units today.

Previous repair work on this unit included replacing a half dozen capacitors, and reflowing solder on a couple cracked solder joints.

Volume was still wonky on this unit, so I disassembled the potentiometer and cleaned out the grime that had built up. After reassembling it's working just fine.

One down, two to go!

After letting the Thinkpad R51 dry out after rescue it is dead. Not boops, doots, just a slow sizziling power noise. EDIT: After further testing it now is fully working and the battery briefly charged enough to not die in the bios if my hand moves from the tiny micro position the charger will charge from. Worn DC jack or charger plug. Have a Dell Centrino Pentium M with borked hinges Im going to finally decommission and snag hopefully a 2nd 512mb stick to get the R51 up to 1gb along with the CPU to get rid of the 1.3 Celeron.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-21, 22:53:

Volume was still wonky on this unit, so I disassembled the potentiometer and cleaned out the grime that had built up. After reassembling it's working just fine.

DeoxIT makes a specific kind of contact cleaner for this called Fader F100. I would recommend keeping a small bottle of this on hand for audio repairs. It's great for cleaning scratchy pots.

Completed my testing of dos 6.22 + Windows 3.11 on a 23mb hard drive. Using drvspace for compression still had about 13mb free after trimming down the help files and the lesser useful apps. My experience with this OS (Win3) was on a PS/2 for many years, so I never had networking or audio. This time around i learned about enabling SB support in Control Panel (that was easier than expected 🤣) and got networking to work too. Mapped network share in File Manager to my Pi running Samba and it worked pleasantly and immediately. The only issue I’m seeing is that I guess Linux isn’t managing dos 8.3 Filenames so files longer than 8 are a crapshoot and only the first letter appears to be reliable. Good news is the stuff I would need for that OS is limited and I could work on renaming those.

But I won’t. Had my fun learning but it’s just not worth using. Honestly even on a 486dx2 66 Windows 95 is plenty fast enough for me and frankly just more fun and flexible, and that’s about the lowest spec I have in my arsenal so I’m definitely sticking with it.

Zeerex wrote on 2022-04-22, 04:31:

Had my fun learning but it’s just not worth using. Honestly even on a 486dx2 66 Windows 95 is plenty fast enough for me and frankly just more fun and flexible, and that’s about the lowest spec I have in my arsenal so I’m definitely sticking with it.

yes, whilst it can be fun to run a machine of pre 486 vintage when it comes to actually using a machine i will always take a 486 or pentium 1 over a pre 486

and will always prefer win 95 (if machine has 16 or more mb ram) for ease of use, win 3.1 if spec is borderline. I suppose it's my lower limit for practical vintage use

This is my opinion as well. I think I works feel differently if the machine was all genuine vintage IBM, but otherwise it feels like a waste. I don't mind using Windows 3.1 though.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-04-22, 03:32:

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-21, 22:53:

Volume was still wonky on this unit, so I disassembled the potentiometer and cleaned out the grime that had built up. After reassembling it's working just fine.

DeoxIT makes a specific kind of contact cleaner for this called Fader F100. I would recommend keeping a small bottle of this on hand for audio repairs. It's great for cleaning scratchy pots.

Yeah, I should probably invest in some new contact cleaner. I do have some off-brand stuff, which I tried on this particular pot. It didn't help much.

When I took it apart, there was a lot of blackish gunk built up which I removed. Wonder if a better contact cleaner might have helped with that.

I wonder if that gunk was some kind of fader grease. I'm not sure why else something like that would be in there. If the component produces a lot of compression, it might be designed for grease and wear quickly with it cleaned off.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-04-22, 14:09:

I wonder if that gunk was some kind of fader grease. I'm not sure why else something like that would be in there. If the component produces a lot of compression, it might be designed for grease and wear quickly with it cleaned off.

There was some sticky black gunk on the device in various places (including inside). Not sure if it's all related, although it could ben an indication of the environment the unit was used in, or some type of past spill.

At any rate, the pot is lubed up so it should hopefully be fine. Since it's only used for volume, I don't think it would be used as frequently as if it was some multi-purpose encoder. I'm not too fussed about it.

I do have replacements if I ever needed to replace it.

Started recording some Game Midi's on a Miditech Pianobox USB Module and uploading them to Youtube.

Made a Playlist for Transport Tycoon and started uploading the recordings

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8qJAX … TuBJ1kEWP7yr8qj

Bancho wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:35:

Started recording some Game Midi's on a Miditech Pianobox USB Module and uploading them to Youtube.

Made a Playlist for Transport Tycoon and started uploading the recordings

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8qJAX … TuBJ1kEWP7yr8qj

Awesome, sounds like a great module!

Did you do any editing to the MIDI files first or are these stock GM files?

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-22, 20:52:

Bancho wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:35:

Started recording some Game Midi's on a Miditech Pianobox USB Module and uploading them to Youtube.

Made a Playlist for Transport Tycoon and started uploading the recordings

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8qJAX … TuBJ1kEWP7yr8qj

Awesome, sounds like a great module!

Did you do any editing to the MIDI files first or are these stock GM files?

I didn't touch the files. I downloaded the files from https://www.transporttycoon.net/music?recording=1

I plan on making recordings of other games and uploading them to my channel.

I've made a bracket - stand; I don't know how else would I name it, to prevent my graphics card from bending too much, due to quite heavy passive heatsink. It was time-consuming, but I like the result in my Windows XP build.

Replaced the socket plastics on a ECS K7VZA. Left is the old socket and right is, of course, the new socket.

Well done. How hard was it to desolder the socket?

I'm testing out the GM2 mode of the Roland VSTi from many years ago. It seems quite nice with the QuestStudios MIDI files.

Last night I built an tested a Dramarduino from these instructions. https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?t=1699

Found the arduino code has a bug (I use the version from this post specifically https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?p=26686#p26686) The bug is thatthe arduino code makes use of nointerrupt mode for faster processing of the memory testing cycles, but between tests it issues a "delay(1000)" (within the blink() function) while still in noninterrupt mode, so the test hangs waiting for the delay to come back, which it will never do. I fixed my copy of the code and I'm registering there to give feedback (or find out if there is a github for it these days)

This tester is stated to work with 4164 and 41256 chip for vintage computers. I have around 64 of M5M4257 memory chips that are compatible with 41256 and the first couple tested fine.

This morning I'm upgrading the protoboard with a 1602 I2c screen, ZIF socket and 3d-printed case. All this will make it more user-friendly for testing all of the chips. I'm also going to see if I can use it to test the external cache ram chips. "To the datasheets!!"

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-04-23, 14:13:

Well done. How hard was it to desolder the socket?

I didn't desolder it. Just followed @Robert B's guide from here:
Re: Hello, World! :D - Robert B's PC builds - oogle away freely :)
In my case though, the socket proved a bit tighter than the original ECS socket after installing.
Currently has a Duron 1100 (I think?) and 256MB of RAM in it as I plan on doing a ceramic AMD build for once (Morgan core btw!), hopefully the ever so slightly chipped core won't cause me horrible issues.

All in all, this could be a positive "warning" 🤣 - things will get crazier by each day for me, now that I'm fully recovered after a rather severe enterocolitis. Anything goes, from replacing Skt462 sockets to doing Tualeron mods on the cheap.

Interesting. I had no idea that the plastic housing could be pried free of the socket pins like that. How difficult was it to pull the base off?

Quite a bit. I had to pry in such fashion so that I went around the HSF mounting holes. The lever end was easier as I could rest the flathead screwdriver on the first DIMM slot and gently pry upwards.