More pictures of the damage.

That's a shame, it looks like a few of the PCI-e traces are scratched up or damaged as well as those components, I've got an X1950AGP in a similar state that came from a recycler / gold scrap lot. I haven't tried powering that up yet.

Today I was trying to make a flat flex cable that has contacts facing up on one end and down on the other. I didn't want to wait for them from China and I've got several cables that have both ends facing the same way. The solution turned out to be pretty cool literally. Heating the flat flex cable just destroyed it - it's 0.5mm pitch and the pins ended up all over the place. So instead, I got two cables and soldered them together using low-melt solder at like 140C instead of the usual 250+C. That stopped the cable from melting and the low melt solder is adhering the pins nicely.
Trying to troubleshoot why my GuS isn't making MIDI in games I was trying another one of my Advantech SBCs but it needed a new LCD adapter - I got 5x of them from JLCPCB for like £12 along with another design which is more than I'll ever really need. Those connect a parallel LCD via flat flex cable (and adapters sometimes) to the Advantech LCD connector, but the one that worked on my PCM-4825 did not work on my PCA-6145. It would display but it was just beeping? Then it locked up.
I should really check the pinouts of connectors before I power things up! 😁 I found the PCA-6145's 44-pin LCD connector has keyboard signals (??) where I'd put a ground pad and that was pulling one of the keyboard signals to ground and just messing everything up. The PCB looks far less nice than the unmodified design but at this rate every one of my Single Board Computers will be able to easily have an LCD natively connected to it.

Fixed up this other Radeon X800 Pro successfully. It might not be visible from the photos, but there was a lot of cleaning to be done. I also soaked the heatsink in vinegar and scrubbed it, applied new thermal paste and pads, and revived the scratchy fan with a few drops of oil.

Spent some time this evening tinkering with my 386 DX-40 and 486 DX/2-66 systems, still trying to figure out sound card options for these respective systems.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-11-05, 02:42:

Fixed up this other Radeon X800 Pro successfully. It might not be visible from the photos, but there was a lot of cleaning to be done. I also soaked the heatsink in vinegar and scrubbed it, applied new thermal paste and pads, and revived the scratchy fan with a few drops of oil.

20221104_043234_resize_4.jpg

That's a lovely restoration/cleaning. Looks almost brand new in that second pic.

I went back poking at the Vectra, installing some game demos, testing the limits of the on-board Matrox G200. It's a lot more disappointing than expected. I hear people saying it's the first half way decent gaming GPU from Matrox. I guess it's better than a Trio3D, it runs Quake 3 Arena at 17-18fps on default settings. On the other hand a lot of games won't start or freeze in 3D accelerated mode and Powerslide looks like this:

According to youtube, this -or at least discrete variants of this (1) (2) (3)- should perform much better. Even if it's slower than the discrete variants, it should at least run/display games correctly, is it not? Maybe the issue lies elsewhere? Or did I just pick an unlucky batch of games to test?

Edit:
Might be an issue of driver version? Booted into Windows 2k. Quake 3 is a little bit faster, ~21fps, Carmageddon 2 demo this time works and runs decently, Powerslide however does not launch. Returns to castle Wolfenstein also runs alright. About as slow as expected.

Tried to repair a Toshiba 6x CD-ROM today.

It seems to suffer from slipping the gears when trying to open the unit and consequently won't open.

Disassembled it to the point picture, cleared it up, reassembled but still have the same issue. I'm going to try disassembling again, but there is a lot of finnicky plastic so I'm a bit concerned about disassembling the motor and gear assembly.

Anyone else have tips on trying to repair a drive like this? Is it worth attempting or should I just opt for a different drive?

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-11-05, 18:34:

I went back poking at the Vectra, installing some game demos, testing the limits of the on-board Matrox G200. It's a lot more disappointing than expected. I hear people saying it's the first half way decent gaming GPU from Matrox. I guess it's better than a Trio3D, it runs Quake 3 Arena at 17-18fps on default settings. On the other hand a lot of games won't start or freeze in 3D accelerated mode and Powerslide looks like this:

I didn't have good results in OpenGL games until I used the g200icd.dll ICD from the XP driver. See here:

DirectX and OpenGL problems with my Matrox G200?

You also need to be aware that it does not support multitexturing at all, and still display bright or messed up textures in games like Unreal, unless it is disabled.

Replaced the 8 SDRAM ICs on Voodoo3 3000 with brand new ICs from USA seller on ebay and jailbars is gone! Now I can go on and test it but no windows 98se disc yet. Where to get one?

Cheers,

5 cpus I tested actually work.
From a left for dead batch of 20+ it's good.
I still hate socket A though, I hate it like Dr. Cox hated Dr. Kelso.

The cloud infrastructure directly above my house dumped a ton of snow on us today, so I stayed inside and did cozy computer stuff. My greatest accomplishment? Why, the yearly backup of my 486, of course! An up-to-date copy of both hard drives--that's 1.1GB of DOS gaming goodness--now safely resides on my file server.

It sure took a while (my my, is DOS networking ever slow!), but all I have to do now is blast off to the planet Tuul in my Bean w/ Bacon Megarocket and mow down some nasty goblins, baby!

Cloud delivery, what will they think of next, hopefully they will progress from various forms of H2O to beer at least soon.

it used to be yellow.

InWin A500 *Heart*

In recent month I didn't write about the monthly vintage market. I went to all of them, but they were pretty boring regarding vintage electronics. Today however I got to pick up something.

An ABIT Media XP 5.25" front panel. A little dirty and I don't have an ABIT *T MAX series mainboard, but the USB connectors seem to be standard so probably the card reader and USB ports work with non-compatible boards and I hope that at least the mic and headphone jacks can be used with a modded cable. The S/P DIF output and the IR receiver are probably out of the question without a compatible board. Not that I found it's remote controller. Otherwise it's a little dirty, but looks to be undamaged.

Revived an ASUS P5PE-VM. Turns out some of the MOSFETs got hot and desoldered themselves. A few hours later they started working.

Now, to rebuild that period correct Raidmax/Rhino RX-500Y PSU, and I might be on track for a nice retro build w/ a Pentium Dual-Core E2xxx 😀

appiah4 wrote on 2022-11-06, 11:39:

InWin A500 *Heart*

I swear these cases are breeding. I picked up five or six NIB units back in 2018 as you might remember. Then another guy picked another dozen or so in Texas about a year later. Another guy supposedly finds over a dozen from a Chinese seller. They just keep turning up. Only thing I can think of is they were late run cases when black cases were becoming more fashionable. I had to give my last one up a couple of years ago due to travel and the weight of the thing.

Overseas shipping is restrictive for me, I need to find one locally.. Long shot 🙁 At least I found an Elan Vital T10.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-11-06, 11:39:

InWin A500 *Heart*

Just a quick note, I bought it new for my first diy build back in the late 90s. While I've gotten rid of a fair bit of old gear over the years,for some reason I didn't get rid of the a500.

I'm kind of hitting a brick wall with what I want to do with the LCDs on my laptops and advantech SBCs, I need to figure out how to modify some registers or the VGA BIOS and there are many pre-requisites to that. Thankfully yyzkevin shared the code he used to modify the C&T 65535 registers to run a TFT instead of a DSTN panel, I can try to understand that to start with.

So I tried something else instead and was surprised by my luck - I got a job lot of CD-rom drives a couple of years back and tested them all playing audio CDs.
My favourite looking one of the lot, a Goldstar 8X speed (GCD-R580B) was busted though and didn't want to read discs. I thought it was a laser problem.
Taking it apart, I cleaned up some flux on the PCB and reseated the connectors on the drive's mainboard. It still didn't work but I ran it with the top off to see what it was doing and the disc wasn't spinning, so I gave it some manual assistance just span it round a couple of times.

Put another disc in and now it's reading and playing audio CDs! 😁 Gave it a clean and put it all back together, I should put this into a build or something, should probably test if it can read data CDs first but it's playing this CD-r audio alongside properly mastered ones so it's probably okay.

Cleaned off the dirt from the drive and had to use melamine foam on some bits to clean off some bad marks. Looks great now though.