Worked on repairing an Alesis Nanosynth sound module today.

The original ribbon cable connecting the main board to the outputs had broken. I removed it and replaced it with a ribbon cable with headers on side and soldered to the output board on the other.

This unit also has some pretty rough scratches on the outside. Figure it might make a good candidate to try powder coating on, should I give that a try in the future.

Recorded a bunch more Let's Plays for old consoles - Atari 2600 and NES, to put on my channel. Plus I fixed up the recording rig, found out I could record off of RF using the Betamax Player/Tuner/Timer getup I got the wife a few years back. Might be time to dust off the Betamax tapes and watch those as well.

Installed Windows 98 on an IBM Point-of-Sale Machine.

Got rid of the old mechanical drive and put in a Disk-on-Module SSD. It has 1 PCI slot which I filled with a cheap-o Radeon 9250, also added a fan to the video card

The video card fan just BARELY clears everything once closed up.

Then found and installed all the necessary drivers.

Performs reasonably well, though the Soundblaster emulation in DOS games is pretty much garbage. Posted a 3dMark99 score of about 6800.

Also installed SpeedFan to control fan speeds as they're quite loud. The motherboard had an unused fan header which was where I connected the video card fan. Luckily SpeedFan detected and was able to control both this fan as well as the CPU fan. Noise level now much more tolerable.

Today was a quiet day at work so I spent some time making an interlink cable.

At home I wanted to start seriously testing my FX5700, first with Quake 1 and 2. And I just couldn't turn off Vsync. Whatever I tried it stayed locked to 60. I know it can be done, I did it not long ago when I tested my Ti4200 as reference. Maybe still a driver issue? I've spent all my afternoon trying to solve this and all I got was annoyance.

bmwsvsu wrote on 2022-05-10, 14:11:

Installed Windows 98 on an IBM Point-of-Sale Machine. […]
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Installed Windows 98 on an IBM Point-of-Sale Machine.

Got rid of the old mechanical drive and put in a Disk-on-Module SSD. It has 1 PCI slot which I filled with a cheap-o Radeon 9250, also added a fan to the video card

The video card fan just BARELY clears everything once closed up.

Then found and installed all the necessary drivers.

Performs reasonably well, though the Soundblaster emulation in DOS games is pretty much garbage. Posted a 3dMark99 score of about 6800.

Also installed SpeedFan to control fan speeds as they're quite loud. The motherboard had an unused fan header which was where I connected the video card fan. Luckily SpeedFan detected and was able to control both this fan as well as the CPU fan. Noise level now much more tolerable.

I keep seeing these cheap on eBay and keep *nearly* buying one but so far have resisted 😀

Yep, they've been around, sometimes even nos. Generally they only run earlier pentiums and celerons, maybe p3, the ones I've seen. I have a dual p3 server, and a (not yet functional) quad p3 server board. A flakey athlon xp 2600+ box. 4 pmmx sbc's. A wyse eden thin client. Yeah I'm resistant also. Quadruple+ vaxxed.

And how could I forget. My late model Asus eeePC 900a, in shambles, but a bona fide 32 bit machine. Bought in 2009. My Thinkpad t61, with issues. My non working Sony 16" p4 laptop, that sucka is getting a working over real soon. And an ECS p4 mainboard that is a literal abortion and will require a veritable miracle to get working. I got connections.

I've been tempted to snatch one of these up:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/354007287986

That one is socket 775, Core2Duo, 4GB of ram

Per the user manual (see page 36), the motherboard has both a PCIEx16 slot and an older PCI slot as well.

https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/SOL/fai/ret … X_IM_Manual.pdf

If that's an ICH7 chipset, this may well run Windows 98, XP, and possibly even DOS audio with a compatible sound card.

They're selling for $45 shipped.

Looks like a bit of a beast, though.

This is a bit puzzling to me, the fact that you say it may run 98, xp,...

Do you mean in legacy mode? I had a dual socket 771 mobo, an Intel s5000vsa4dimmr, and it somehow was able to boot off a win2k dvd. I thought the uefi wouldn't allow that, apart from enabling legacy boot. Which I don't believe I did, don't think I ever had the option, as I may never have even owned a computer who's bios had that option. Somebody help me.

Being socket 775 running DDR2 ram, this is certainly going to be using a legacy BIOS. And in fact, if you browse to towards the end of that user manual I linked, it indeed is legacy.

The manual also confirms that this supports running a SATA drive in IDE mode. Based on my experience with OEM Lenovo boards, this is probably using an ICH7 chipset, in which case, you simply need thse modded Intel ICH drivers for that chipset. The only issue you may run into is that of not having enough system resources for all the hardware, which may or may not cause problems depending on exactly what the conflicts are.

Bottom line is throw in a PCIE video card (Radeon x600 through x850 or nVidia GeForce 6xxx) and a PCI audio card and my guess is you could get Windows 98 running on here no problem.

I'm not going to look through the manuals for the board I had, not now, but I had suspected it was a uefi bios as some early linux distros would choke. I really didn't know enough about any of this back in 2018. Perhaps that board only had an old style bios? I guess maybe it did. And if so it was an unparalled bargain, as it had every style of pci slot, including pci-e x4. But no agp. A guy was selling them off for 15$ shipped.

Today I posted on Vogons for the first time in a long time. Is that retro enough? 😀

Otherwise I've been spending time playing with my Mister FPGA. Having quite a bit of fun playing with a the AO486 core and a MT-32pi.

I finished my Toshiba Satellite 220CS project today. Previously I removed the CMOS battery to prevent future leaking, I drilled holes and made a custom FDD mounting system of copper, and I made a copper HDD cover. Today I cut up a Satellite 110CS battery cover a bit to make it somewhat compatible with the 220CS. My solutions for this laptop aren't great but they will do the job and make the laptop complete.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-05-10, 18:08:

Today was a quiet day at work so I spent some time making an interlink cable.

At home I wanted to start seriously testing my FX5700, first with Quake 1 and 2. And I just couldn't turn off Vsync. Whatever I tried it stayed locked to 60. I know it can be done, I did it not long ago when I tested my Ti4200 as reference. Maybe still a driver issue? I've spent all my afternoon trying to solve this and all I got was annoyance.

I can confirm the vsyc issue and observe it in Unreal Gold. I don't know what causes it.

laxdragon wrote on 2022-05-11, 16:30:

Today I posted on Vogons for the first time in a long time. Is that retro enough? 😀

Otherwise I've been spending time playing with my Mister FPGA. Having quite a bit of fun playing with a the AO486 core and a MT-32pi.

All I can see is a "No Entry" sign

debs3759 wrote on 2022-05-11, 19:00:

laxdragon wrote on 2022-05-11, 16:30:

Today I posted on Vogons for the first time in a long time. Is that retro enough? 😀

Otherwise I've been spending time playing with my Mister FPGA. Having quite a bit of fun playing with a the AO486 core and a MT-32pi.

All I can see is a "No Entry" sign

I can see the picture but get that "No Entry" sign when viewing it separately.

It shows running Lost Secret of the Rainforest on a widescreen LCD monitor with aspect ratio correction set to 4:3.

Strahssis wrote on 2022-05-11, 17:57:

I finished my Toshiba Satellite 220CS project today. Previously I removed the CMOS battery to prevent future leaking, I drilled holes and made a custom FDD mounting system of copper, and I made a copper HDD cover. Today I cut up a Satellite 110CS battery cover a bit to make it somewhat compatible with the 220CS. My solutions for this laptop aren't great but they will do the job and make the laptop complete.

Nice! As you seem to be into modding: have you ever researched if the screen of these Toshibas can be replaced with a more modern one? I have a CDT-version and even the active matrix is only mediocre by today's standards. If that could be upgraded to any kind of newer display it would make the machine even better than it already is.

Setup a triple boot on my IBM A20M with System Commander 7

- Windows 98SE
- Windows 3.11 ( on top of MS-Dos 6.22 )
- Ms-Dos 6.22 alone

I preferred to do it that way so I can have different setup of MS-Dos 6.22 for Windows and alone.

There's no MS-Dos only drivers. need to install Windows drivers to get MS-Dos drivers. And Windows 3.x drivers for the sound card are not working that well under pure DOS.
So for MS-Dos alone I'm using Windows9x Drivers grabbed from Windows install.

NyLan wrote on 2022-05-12, 11:46:

Setup a triple boot on my IBM A20M with System Commander 7 […]
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Setup a triple boot on my IBM A20M with System Commander 7

- Windows 98SE
- Windows 3.11 ( on top of MS-Dos 6.22 )
- Ms-Dos 6.22 alone

I preferred to do it that way so I can have different setup of MS-Dos 6.22 for Windows and alone.

There's no MS-Dos only drivers. need to install Windows drivers to get MS-Dos drivers. And Windows 3.x drivers for the sound card are not working that well under pure DOS.
So for MS-Dos alone I'm using Windows9x Drivers grabbed from Windows install.

That is one clean looking Thinkpad, would love to own one that clean myself, but .. the clean looking ones usually end up having that terrible rubber cover they used ...so deceptive.

Right now, I'm ripping the QuestStudios MIDI files from the WebArchive, so that I can have a fully copy of what was on there, including the digital audio files. I'd like to see the MIDIs all rendered and recorded properly, using the best respective Roland GS and Yamaha XG high-end hardware modules, along with MUNT for the MT-32 files, to create a digital archive that everyone can enjoy. I only have access to the basic GS and XG soft-synths at the moment, so I can't do much there. There also seems to be some old AGI-era music files in there too, which is a whole different plate of nachos, so I'll avoid that for now.

HanSolo wrote on 2022-05-11, 23:35:

Nice! As you seem to be into modding: have you ever researched if the screen of these Toshibas can be replaced with a more modern one? I have a CDT-version and even the active matrix is only mediocre by today's standards. If that could be upgraded to any kind of newer display it would make the machine even better than it already is.

I do understand the problem, the screen is definitely a downside of these laptops. Sadly I have never tried to put in a modern replacement screen, so I can't tell you if that would work unfortunately. Finding a compatible screen would be difficult as well, because of the small size and the 4:3 aspect ratio. The only thing I know is that the TFT screen can be modded in the DSTN laptops, although I haven't done such an operation either. I may try that if I come across a cheap faulty TFT-variant some day. Toshiba isn't really my specialty, I am more into Compaqs. 🙁