A001 wrote on 2022-06-25, 17:11:

Odd-looking passive SECC2 heatsink, came with a 600/100 coppermine.

What kind of a machine is this from as it (heatsink) doesn't quite fit slot1 with the standard retention mechanism on? There are no notches on the sides.

643_2.jpg

As @Standard Def Steve posted on the previous page, its from a Compaq SFF system

Interesting, an angled Slot 1 connector!

PARKE wrote on 2022-06-26, 08:39:

A001 wrote on 2022-06-25, 17:11:

Odd-looking passive SECC2 heatsink, came with a 600/100 coppermine.
What kind of a machine is this from as it (heatsink) doesn't quite fit slot1 with the standard retention mechanism on? There are no notches on the sides.
643_2.jpg

These heatsinks are meant for 1st generation SECC retention brackets:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/324156840012

Good catch, it did fit a 440FX board even if the board is not from a Deskpro.

Some Diamond cards.

Speedstars 64:

And a nice Viper Pro:

With a video coprocessor unusually present on the solder side of the PCB:

This Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 with PCMCIA floppy. It works and it's in good shape. Also it has a dead Duracell battery pack which looks fitted with 4 x 18650. This type of battery was introduced in 1994.

TabWorks from Xerox it's the default Windows 3.1 interface. (I like it!!!)

What a handsome little laptop.

mpe wrote on 2022-06-26, 11:14:

With a video coprocessor unusually present on the solder side of the PCB:

I've never seen such a thing! It must have been very expensive to do this. I wonder if each one had to be hand soldered and inspected after the top side had been wave soldered.

What do the pins look like? Does it look mass produced or less than perfect, indicating manual labor?

I also wonder what all of those little orange chips are.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-06-26, 16:17:

I also wonder what all of those little orange chips are.

Those look like resistor arrays to me. especially with an RP identification on the PCB.

OMORES wrote on 2022-06-26, 15:25:

This Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 with PCMCIA floppy. It works and it's in good shape. Also it has a dead Duracell battery pack which looks fitted with 4 x 18650. This type of battery was introduced in 1994.

That's a really beautiful baby compared to what I found five months ago.

Being the center of major foundries, chips and PCB manufacturers, it's really ironic to see retro computing has become a very niched hobby here. 🙄

OMORES wrote on 2022-06-26, 15:25:

This Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 with PCMCIA floppy. It works and it's in good shape. Also it has a dead Duracell battery pack which looks fitted with 4 x 18650. This type of battery was introduced in 1994.

TabWorks from Xerox it's the default Windows 3.1 interface. (I like it!!!)

Those should be NIMH 17670 cells, might be worth measuring to be sure. I think the Contura pre-dates lithium ion batteries which were first a thing in the Toshiba Portege T3400.
The upside to that is, rebuilding the battery pack if it hasn't corroded all its connectors away is pretty easy! Just put some AA NiMH cells in place of the big cells with solder or welded tabs to have a working battery with period-correct battery life of 'about an hour' 😀

I took a big gamble! I saw a box of 'gold scrap' advertised and looking at it, there was so much ISA stuff I reasoned it must have some 386/486 stuff in there - sadly that didn't pan out. It set me back ~£100 with an ebay discount at the time, pricey for this junk but it was well packed.
Almost so well packed in fact that this 12KG parcel nearly wasn't accepted by the collection place I got it delivered too, 100g more and it would've hit the 15kg limit with packaging.

Some really cool stuff in here, 4x ISA VGA cards one of which is a Tseng ET4000ax made by STB which I Really hope it works. There's also some non-PnP ISA modems, ISA super-IO cards, 4x ISA network cards.
On the PCI front, some relatively nice Diamond S3 cards, a Savage 4, loads of the average PCI S3 / Cirrus cards and one of those Matrox cards with a PCI bridge.
Then on the AGP front, a Ti4200 without its heatsink in unknown state and a couple of TNT2 cards, nothing great.

For motherboards, a FIC VA503+, a PC Chips M919 that has the fake cache and no cache module in sight, with a Cyrix 5x86 100 😀 Then an MS6119 Slot 1 board, a couple of P4 boards and 2x Abit AV8 boards - one of which had a very dirty Zalman CNPS-7500Cu in filthy condition.
Now to figure out how I can store all of this and start testing it - the corrosion / rust on some of these means I can't be too hopeful, but some interesting stuff

edit: oof, I thought I'd have a go at cleaning up the 5x86 and upon light brushing, the A28 pin fell off. I think that's a good indication of how the mainboards were stored. Kinda weird, most of the expansion cards are in much better condition.

Those Cyrix 5x86 chips are known to have pins fall off due to whatever they used corrodes/breaks down pretty easily.

Got this in the mail recently. I need to get round to testing it. Hoping I won the lottery and got a chip capable of 4x multiplier.

Just bought a SONY PCG-SR17, pentium 3 700mhz, Yamaha 7x4 soundcard and s3 savage ix 8m. Screen is old and leaking but okay in graphics mode. HDD was replaced with a 40G one. It's small and light, 2.99lbs. Gonna use it as daily retro laptop.😁 Original system was replaced with XP and I'm replacing it with win98 right now.

BTW the PCMCIA cdrom probably needs DOS driver, The boot CD can boot but ironically cannot recognize the CD itself after booting, which leaves a ram disk of A: and nothing else.🤣

UPDATE:
It's a shame that I tried several win98 sound drivers but they are not working. The modified DOS driver with YMFIRQ is working good (even for 16bit sound but the Sony official driver is not) and detect a ymf754, but I tried drivers from Sony (vogonsdrivers), Yamaha, even from Toshiba but they don't work.
UPDATE2:
Managed to install the WDM driver form SONY recovery CD 2, it's infs without setup exe, just using device manager to make it work. Now win98 have sound (but dosbox no music) and DOS mode OK, next step is to try the VxD drivers.
UPDATE3:
I gave up for the VxD drivers. Searched the web and found only WDM drivers (https://members.driverguide.com/driver/device … SUBSYS_8096104D)
the sub system id of 8096 104d could be seen at the bottom of the SETUPDS. I have tried modifying the inf from Toshiba (Tecra YMF754) and it installed OK detecting the sound card but no sound.
UPDATE4:
I managed to make the VxD drivers work, now its perfect. Besides the device ID and SUBSYS, I copied the registry entry from the WDM inf, the control words except volumes, to the Toshiba YMF754 inf and finally it has sounds. Note that the WDM and VxD has different registry entries but similar meaning, just copy the values only. DOS games are working good with FM and digital sounds. 😁

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-06-27, 21:38:

I took a big gamble! I saw a box of 'gold scrap' advertised and looking at it, there was so much ISA stuff I reasoned it must have some 386/486 stuff in there - sadly that didn't pan out.

i'm tempted by these sometimes, part of the fun is in seeing what turns up and trying things out. I would be interested in the rough proportion of scrap that actually works - though delicate in some ways electronics can also be robust enough to survive a few knocks and even a little rust

Took a gamble on a rather dirty looking SoundBlaster ,the dirty PCB made it hard to identify what model it was at the time, when it arrived I gave that soundcard a good wash. Turns out its a Vibra16 CT2810 which is a rather nice little soundcard, its not the PnP model but does come with IDE and Wavetable, have tested the card and aside from arriving filthy it works just fine, both IDE and WT header also work fine. (Even has a PC Speaker connector)

Should be a good little DOS soundcard!

Not a bad score for 20 bucks and a little cleaning.

Now if I can only run across a CT4500/4520 in such a deal, I dont even want the gold model just a nice Value option at a not insane price.

I got this Commodore branded MPEG-1 decoder last weekend.

Hah, I think I remember seeing those in the Escom store back in the day, $200 or something though. I bought a Commodore PS/2 mouse back then, dunno where it is now though, and I think the C= logo wore off.

Found this fun little gadget for 2€: Gemtek Wizard Radio (WR100), no cables
Looks like a 25-pin serial FM radio receiver (came with an 9pin adapter) with a 16bit control software which can run on Windows 3.1/9x.
It has two 2.5mm jacks, one for antenna and the other for line out (goes directly into the line input of the sound card).
Came with no cables or disk. I was able to find its software on archive.org and on vetusware. A more recent but swedish version (2.0 SV) of the driver is here. I bought an FM antenna and swapped the BNC connector for a 2.5mm mono plug, and a really short 2.5mm<->3.5mm stereo cable for the audio output.
Tested it on a Pentium system with an ISA Philips PCA721AF (OPTi 82C924-based I think) on Windows 3.1, seems to work pretty well! It has OK reception, auto seek for stereo stations, presets and MCI wave recording up to 44.1/16!

With some digging, I found an even more recent English version of PCFM (2.02 iirc) but it's for ESS ISA soundcards equipped with Gemtek's tuner. This application is configured in C:\WINDOWS\RADIO.INI. In the early version, the installer tries to find the proper COM port and writes it there, so I wonder if PCFM 2.02 does actually still support COM port radios and if I can get it to work with the WR100 just by editing the .INI file; apparently there is still a Port= key in 2.02's .INI. To be attempted tomorrow hehe

UPDATE: Found 2.02B in all languages, as well as a DOS tool and a NT (32bit?) build, in Gemtek's download area archived in 2007.

gerry wrote on 2022-06-28, 07:13:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-06-27, 21:38:

I took a big gamble! I saw a box of 'gold scrap' advertised and looking at it, there was so much ISA stuff I reasoned it must have some 386/486 stuff in there - sadly that didn't pan out.

i'm tempted by these sometimes, part of the fun is in seeing what turns up and trying things out. I would be interested in the rough proportion of scrap that actually works - though delicate in some ways electronics can also be robust enough to survive a few knocks and even a little rust

It varies massively. Sometimes basically everything that is not physically damaged just works, other times even with TLC you can hardly get anything running at all (well, apart from the analog modems, ISDN cards and Realtek NICs...)

Generally, the more clueless the seller the better, as someone who knows his stuff will be dumping what he can't (be bothered) to sell in any other way. Someone with no idea won't have cherry picked the nice parts and only dumped back the dead ones into the box. Unfortunately, the more clueless, generally the worse the packaging through, not to mention tendency to cut off components and bits of PCB 😦

One thing with motherboards though: a lot, particularly the less ancient ones, are dumped because of bad BIOS flashes. Frequently no one tried recovery procedures. Older ones invariably have bad jumper settings. NEVER EVER trust jumper settings or CPU orientation in a board you haven't actually seen running. If a 386 is inserted the wrong way in a 486 socket and you power it up, magic smoke will be liberated. Oh, and visible repairable damage is good. If you see bad caps, its highly likely that's why the board was dumped. If you can replace them competently, you have a very good chance of getting a working board.

dionb wrote on 2022-06-28, 23:06:

One thing with motherboards though: a lot, particularly the less ancient ones, are dumped because of bad BIOS flashes.

And remember the BIOS erasing viruses (like CIH) that generations of motherboards were vulnerable to.
Apart from daredevil "hotflashers" very few had the tools required to restore the BIOS.
I wonder how many motherboards were junked because of that.

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2022-06-29, 00:25:

And remember the BIOS erasing viruses (like CIH) that generations of motherboards were vulnerable to. Apart from daredevil "hotf […]
Show full quote

dionb wrote on 2022-06-28, 23:06:

One thing with motherboards though: a lot, particularly the less ancient ones, are dumped because of bad BIOS flashes.

And remember the BIOS erasing viruses (like CIH) that generations of motherboards were vulnerable to.
Apart from daredevil "hotflashers" very few had the tools required to restore the BIOS.
I wonder how many motherboards were junked because of that.

Despite having funded pretty much my entire computer hobby ~20 years ago with dredging through discarded stuff, fixing it up and selling what worked, mainly then-current motherboards, I don't think I ever encountered one of those in the wild. I was a "daredevil hotflasher", although usually the plain old bootblock recovery worked without needing to resort to that. Still, my fat lazy old self now is very grateful for his TL866.