Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-08-14, 22:02:

I got some cool looking 'ears' for my laptop :D […]
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I got some cool looking 'ears' for my laptop 😁

IMG_0139 (2) (Custom).JPG

It's an IBM Portable Stereo 20x CD-Rom drive - a PCMCIA CD-ROM with an integrated ES1688 soundcard. It came boxed and accessories are all there although it's clearly used, lots of cables to connect up the power and the speakers all at once.

The sound is working in Windows with the original driver disk and it sounds pretty good! Sadly the support for games is pretty abysmal in my experience so far:
- It has a DMA emulation driver in Windows, so sound works in Windows and it can play wave files.
- It can and midis in Windows 95, nice! ESFM sounds pretty good on these speakers.
- But it doesn't map the FM 0x388 port at all so there's no real adlib / fm support in games. Maybe general midi could work but I haven't got that working with anything yet.
- And I haven't yet been able to get digital audio working in any games yet, but that might be dos4gw and Windows games could work

Has anyone else tried out the soundcard features on the 1969-111/011 or 1969-109/009?

edit: ah, the readme files clears it up, at least they were honest:

8. Sound with the 20X Max Portable Stereo CD ROM Drive is
supported in a native Windows 95 environment. Sound is
not supported in a DOS application within Windows 95.

That reminds me of something:)

Just won this Matrox RT2500 on eBay for £15 - complete with a G550 AGP card. I actually own Adobe Premier legally now then 😀 Was $1000 when new 20 years ago!

And staying on the Matrox theme, picked this DualHead2Go (VGA) up for a tenner from eBay too - I always wondered how these work

I looked up what this does, and it appears to be a display resolution doubler that allows you to connect two monitors to a single output. Does this mean that the two monitors appear to the device as a single monitor?

This sound awkward if you wanted to maximize a window on one of the two attached displays. Would it then maximize across both screens, since the operating system it sees only a single display from this device?

SteveC wrote on 2022-08-15, 13:51:

Just won this Matrox RT2500 on eBay for £15 - complete with a G550 AGP card. I actually own Adobe Premier legally now then 😀 Was $1000 when new 20 years ago!

You are lucky since most of the RT2500 series sold now has premiere stripped out for upgrades.

thecheese2022 wrote on 2022-08-13, 19:53:

could you extract bios dump using rom reader and upload?

I don't have a ROM reader, but if you want the BIOS chips, they're yours for the shipping fee 😉 If you're truly interested, PM me and I'll send you pics. Absolutely no guarantee they work, I pulled them from a computer in 1996 😜

Snagged a motherboard today that I have been wanting for the test bench, a Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 Motherboard! also comes with an Athlon X2 3800+ and 4gb of DDR400, this one has also had its VRM recapped with Rubycons but ill examine the others on the board too.

It'll be setup along side the 4CoreDual-Sata2 Rev 2 I got a few months back, hopefully I can eventually find the AM2 upgrade board for it but that board is exceptionally rare.

It is rare, never seen one!

meljor wrote on 2022-08-16, 07:50:

It is rare, never seen one!

I have just once, a Vogons member has one but its for the 775 version of this board turning it into an AM2 board IIRC, but I believe the board doesnt care which mainboard type its put into. (That Yellow PCIe looking slot is where the upgrade board goes)

Im happy I got this, as these dual AGP/PCie boards are hard to get in working condition, the 939 version is the hardest as the caps on it were from the Capacitor Plague era, the 775 versions stand a little better but they too need a recap, all I need now is the Asrock 775Dual-VSTA to have the set 🤣

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-16, 07:56:

meljor wrote on 2022-08-16, 07:50:

It is rare, never seen one!

I have just once, a Vogons member has one but its for the 775 version of this board turning it into an AM2 board IIRC, but I believe the board doesnt care which mainboard type its put into. (That Yellow PCIe looking slot is where the upgrade board goes)

Im happy I got this, as these dual AGP/PCie boards are hard to get in working condition, the 939 version is the hardest as the caps on it were from the Capacitor Plague era, the 775 versions stand a little better but they too need a recap, all I need now is the Asrock 775Dual-VSTA to have the set 🤣

I would be very surprised if an s775 board could be made into an AM2 board by an adaptor, unless the slot also contains a chipset?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-08-16, 09:11:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-08-16, 07:56:

meljor wrote on 2022-08-16, 07:50:

It is rare, never seen one!

I have just once, a Vogons member has one but its for the 775 version of this board turning it into an AM2 board IIRC, but I believe the board doesnt care which mainboard type its put into. (That Yellow PCIe looking slot is where the upgrade board goes)

Im happy I got this, as these dual AGP/PCie boards are hard to get in working condition, the 939 version is the hardest as the caps on it were from the Capacitor Plague era, the 775 versions stand a little better but they too need a recap, all I need now is the Asrock 775Dual-VSTA to have the set 🤣

I would be very surprised if an s775 board could be made into an AM2 board by an adaptor, unless the slot also contains a chipset?

The Upgrade board contains essentially an entire AM2 setup on it (CPU, Ram and Chipset) excluding the IO which the mainboard has, you plug the card in and it disables the mainboard CPU and chipset including the ram and the upgrade board just uses the mainboard PCIe/AGP and PCi slots along with the other IO.

You can see the Jumper Bank for it just above the Yellow slot, I have never had one so I can only go by the small amount of information about it on the web. Id love to have one just so I can play around with it.

This is the version of the upgrade board for this motherboard, it doesnt have the chipset as the one on the motherboard is used.

Edit - Im wrong about the 775 to AM2 one ..got my wires crossed due to the little information there is on this.

I already have a Soundblaster X-Fi Platinum... but its in the original box and i dont want to take it out of its box.
So i got another one without box. It arrived 3 days early and the seller threw in some random RAM wich is nice.
The price was pretty good too with 25 Euros + 5 Euro shipping.

Okay... Bit ugly picture, but the focus should be that huge blue card there.
Ladies & gents - a 3Com 3c500-based card from 1984. It's honkin' big, heavy, and so clean and unspoilt I really do think it has never seen an ISA slot.

And the colour! I mean .. I could have gotten a green variant, but why would I ever?
Looks good next to that GUS, methinks.
(Anyone got ideas for other cards in funky colors I should have in this 286?)

This chip, and the successor 3c501 can best be described as lessons in how not to design an Ethernet controller. The author of the Linux driver stresses that one should not purchase one, even as a joke. The driver also has other very amusing observations throughout.
Even so, using a regular AUI-TP transceiver, I've been IRCjr-ing using it over the weekend, after transferring some 700MB of MOD+S3M files to it using FileZilla -> FTPSRV.EXE. Not fast, but once I tuned down TCP and file buffers in mTCP (4K seems to be just fine for both) it worked splendidly. Also stable, deals nicely with link loss (rebooted the switch last night).
It has a ROM socket which can fit a 4Kbyte ROM, which is just enough for XTIDE-tiny.

Behold.

Well that's something you don't see every day 😀

kixs wrote on 2022-08-16, 13:57:

Well that's something you don't see every day :)

Isn't that the case for most things posted here? ;)

ltning wrote on 2022-08-16, 13:42:

(Anyone got ideas for other cards in funky colors I should have in this 286?)

You should really get a yellow graphics card 😁

I got this wonderful looking AGP video card.
Does anybody know what video card this is?

Toriessian wrote on 2022-08-16, 14:57:

I got this wonderful looking AGP video card.
Does anybody know what video card this is?

Some kind of SiS video card based on the "SiS003" marking. I bet someone here will get it quick but turn it for another shot at identification.

I've nabbed another MISB Vortex 2. Unlike the last this one is completely sealed; so much so it is crushing the thinly constructed box. The seal has a couple of the 'Diamond' brand stamps inked onto the wrap along the bottom seams.

Toriessian wrote on 2022-08-16, 14:57:

I got this wonderful looking AGP video card.
Does anybody know what video card this is?

My guess would be a SiS 305 with 16MB of VRAM.

Could also be a 315E, the chips are from early 2002.