schmatzler wrote on 2022-10-25, 17:28:

I searched for a replacement DC power jack for my Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro. The old one just broke off. […]
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I searched for a replacement DC power jack for my Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro. The old one just broke off.

Spent over 4 hours searching for this damn SMD part, because it differs from most other ones and has its legs in weird positions.
I found it by accident on eBay just scrolling through the categories.

Microsoft used one from the German manufacturer Lumberg:
"Lumberg 1613 10".

At least Lumberg are good guys and also list the barrel connector I need to fix both sides up on their website:
https://www.lumberg.com/de/produkte/produkt/1613+10

This is why service manuals for devices should be mandatory.

That looks like through-hole, not SMD. You can replace it with any other DC barrel jack, so long as you get the positive and negative the right way around and can feel it the right voltage.

Yes I could jam some other connector in there but that wouldn't be stable if it's just held in by two leads. The correct part also has two pegs on the bottom and a third leg (that's electrically unconnected) so you don't rip the thing off when you plug the connector in.

Oh, I see. Those are just for grounding or mechanical strength.

schmatzler wrote on 2022-10-25, 17:28:

I searched for a replacement DC power jack for my Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro. The old one just broke off. […]
Show full quote

I searched for a replacement DC power jack for my Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro. The old one just broke off.

Spent over 4 hours searching for this damn SMD part, because it differs from most other ones and has its legs in weird positions.
I found it by accident on eBay just scrolling through the categories.

Microsoft used one from the German manufacturer Lumberg:
"Lumberg 1613 10".

At least Lumberg are good guys and also list the barrel connector I need to fix both sides up on their website:
https://www.lumberg.com/de/produkte/produkt/1613+10

This is why service manuals for devices should be mandatory.

In this tinkerer's life of workarounds and retrofitting, it's nice to - just once in awhile! - unexpectedly find the exact ready-made part that you need.

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-10-25, 19:28:

thanks, this worked. Using Abit AI7 Pentium 4 build, assigned irq5 as reserved from an old vogons post New owner of a Vortex2 so […]
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pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-24, 20:11:

not the P4 865 based chipset with ICH5 southbridge?

Cheers,

thanks, this worked. Using Abit AI7 Pentium 4 build, assigned irq5 as reserved from an old vogons post
New owner of a Vortex2 soundard; my experience so far
installed vortex 2 no pci detect and its ok so far -_-
probably because this has more pci slots being an ATX and rthe manual has details about which PCI are shared, its giving me less headache compared to the mATX P4i65g I was having issues with from memory :?
another thing is probably the use of ide to sata and reducing resources as much as possible. past P4 builds haad sata for seagate hard drive

tried my luck on the neo2 platinum socket 939 (nforce 3 ultra) hoping for success using 2041 no pci detect drivers. nope, no midi out to sc-55. installed into all pci slots, reduced resources as much as possible, removed nec usb card, on load up the irq is always shared with SMBus controller, e.g irq 7 or irq10. is there a way to decouple SMBUs controller from sharing resources with vortex 2?

I have that board, it hates everything, gotta mess round with it a whole weekend for any hardware change, until it just about works grudgingly. Really sucks for a flagship board, got other MSI OEM boards which can be a bit quirky, but that thing is worse.

Woohoo! the LCD adapter board I made actually works and my Advantech PCM-4825 is doing a great job driving this VGA LCD panel - which came out of an LCD tv that was being thrown out at work: https://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/freeview_lcd.html

This means I can now do some meaningful testing of these LCD panels that I'm getting weird results with on the Toshiba 400CS 😀 The original adapter cable I tried making by soldering a 44-pin IDE cable by hand onto an adapter board and the screen just displayed jibberish, now it displays meaningful and clear data. For tiny 0.5mm pitch stuff, I'm definitely just gonna make adapter boards and get cheap PCBs from JLC / PCBway, the hand soldered adapter cable took way too long.

Well this is a unique experience, playing GuS demos on a PC104 system with an LED backlit, pixel perfect VGA res, MVA LCD panel. The LED backlight wiring I put onto my LCD adapter also works although I missed off an electrolytic capacitor - the LED backlight kits have an ADJ line which goes from 0 to 5 volts. I used a variable resistor to control that but it is super sensitive to voltage fluctuations so an electrolytic capacitor smooths it all out.

I'm super happy that this is working, now I don't need to use the stupid and barely functional Digital Photo Frame and DVB TV boards to test out my LCD panels. The scaling on those was terrible.
I'm pretty tempted to build this Advantech PCM-4825 into some kind of 3d printed panel PC housing like I did with this thing: Re: Need driver for ExpertMedia MED1600 with 82C928 + 1848 - An alt version of OPTI MAD16 ?!
Can't get a Dolch? I'll make my own 😜

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-26, 15:44:

I have that board, it hates everything, gotta mess round with it a whole weekend for any hardware change, until it just about works grudgingly. Really sucks for a flagship board, got other MSI OEM boards which can be a bit quirky, but that thing is worse.

not my experience with this board. out of the three 939 boards i have, i've only tried two so far (all three have nforce3 ultra chipset unfortunately). the dfi lanparty one is a pita it keeps reminding you that you've missed scandisk with a beep at startup. this msi board is snappy and runs 98 like a charm and its quiet too after fitting noctua fan on it. i like 939 cool n quiet feature. only issue is no vortex 2 > sc-55 midi. the only remaining 939 board i have is a gigabyte k8 ultra. i prefer the athlon64 builds as the pentium4 builds are a hot mess

Maybe mine has a sucky BIOS revision or the caps are marginal. I can only spend limited time messing with it or I'll break it across my knee 🤣 It might get thorough attention for being a mid XP build up with SLI 9600GTs at some point.

Worked on configuring a 486 DX2/66 setup, installing a CF card and choosing some audio options.

I'm hoping the GUS Extreme (SB Pro / GUS) plus the MPU-401AT w/ a Yucatan FX wavetable should make for a solid DOS audio setup. These GUS cards can be finnicky in my experience;. I tried one with a 386 and could not get it working for the life of me. Hopefully it works with this 486 instead.

Not sure if I want to try to add in anything with genuine OPL, but we'll see how this goes as is.

That's a nice system and a beautiful case. Love it.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-27, 17:54:

That's a nice system and a beautiful case. Love it.

Thanks, I really do love this particular case design. It's strikes me as the quintessential 486 DX/2-66 style. 😁

--------------------------------------

Did the audio setup and it went incredibly smoothly. Everything worked from the get-go, GUS installed just fine, and got the MPU-401AT routed through the GUS's line-in.

Testing things out in a handful of games and everything is working: MIDI, GUS and Sound Blaster support.

I have never had a GUS card install this cleanly before. I am in shock.

Working on a SOJ to DIP32 adapter to install 1MB of SRAM (l2 cache) into my 486.

PCB is milled on a CNC router, two chips are double stacked and the 8 IO lines and chip-select line are wired to the pins for the 2nd socket without any interference with surrounding sockets.

Today was a repair day! Successfully repaired an excellent Socket 7 motherboard, with onboard S3 graphics, as well as an integrated Yamaha sound chip with General MIDI.

Re: Intel TC430HX Socket 7 motherboard repair

Today I launched my Windows 98 PC to install some new games I picked up, and it seems to not boot. Stuck at the W98 splash screen regularly blinking the HDD LED for 1s every 10s. It wouldn't boot into safe mode or even command prompt either showing the same symptoms. It didn't have any trouble and didn't show any sign of failure a week ago.

Leaving it on for a while ends with a "Data Error reading drive C" message.
It can boot from a floppy though and I can browse the contents of the hard drive.

Is it a failing hard drive? Or just W98 does W98 things?

Though now that I think about it, I did have a randomly dying W98 install on this same drive before, but with a different platform. Either a Pentium III-S or a Pentium 4.
Maybe my next upgrade should be an SSD?

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-10-28, 14:52:

Today I launched my Windows 98 PC to install some new games I picked up, and it seems to not boot. Stuck at the W98 splash scree […]
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Today I launched my Windows 98 PC to install some new games I picked up, and it seems to not boot. Stuck at the W98 splash screen regularly blinking the HDD LED for 1s every 10s. It wouldn't boot into safe mode or even command prompt either showing the same symptoms. It didn't have any trouble and didn't show any sign of failure a week ago.

Leaving it on for a while ends with a "Data Error reading drive C" message.
It can boot from a floppy though and I can browse the contents of the hard drive.

Is it a failing hard drive? Or just W98 does W98 things?

Though now that I think about it, I did have a randomly dying W98 install on this same drive before, but with a different platform. Either a Pentium III-S or a Pentium 4.
Maybe my next upgrade should be an SSD?

Doesn't sound like it gets very far into boot, see if booting with right version win98 floppy then fdisk /mbr and sys C: fix it.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-28, 15:56:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-10-28, 14:52:

Today I launched my Windows 98 PC to install some new games I picked up, and it seems to not boot. Stuck at the W98 splash scree […]
Show full quote

Today I launched my Windows 98 PC to install some new games I picked up, and it seems to not boot. Stuck at the W98 splash screen regularly blinking the HDD LED for 1s every 10s. It wouldn't boot into safe mode or even command prompt either showing the same symptoms. It didn't have any trouble and didn't show any sign of failure a week ago.

Leaving it on for a while ends with a "Data Error reading drive C" message.
It can boot from a floppy though and I can browse the contents of the hard drive.

Is it a failing hard drive? Or just W98 does W98 things?

Though now that I think about it, I did have a randomly dying W98 install on this same drive before, but with a different platform. Either a Pentium III-S or a Pentium 4.
Maybe my next upgrade should be an SSD?

Doesn't sound like it gets very far into boot, see if booting with right version win98 floppy then fdisk /mbr and sys C: fix it.

Nope, no change.

Edit: Also tried to reinstall from the D partition of the same drive. After/during "Copying files needed for Windows Setup..." the system locks up. No drive activity, no reaction to pressing num lock. My guess, if the drive itself is failing, some files might also have gotten corrupted there as well.

What a shame. Yeah, doesn't look real hopeful for that drive.

Soldered a new NiMH CMOS battery into my Toshiba laptop today.

Replacing the NiMH CMOS battery in my Toshiba laptop