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.

Most common failure is commuter shorting in the 2 wire permanent magnet motors. Dirt and brushes build up in the commutor gaps and shorts out made them hard to start. Best solution is replace with new since the bushings the shafts turns in them wears out.

The 3 phase brushless are very reliable and is desireable to have, look for these in optical drives, and only thing that fail is bushing wear.

Second, LG is what I know best they tend to have longest life laser. All other I had failed way before their time is run out. Literally after 20 to 30 burns.

Cheers,

Back up to my madness again...

Unpacked the 486 I was going to put on e-bay, trying that one out. It's the Moondog computers 486 DX4-100 tower. Currently building it to boot into DOS/Win95 and Windows 3.1x maybe as a third option (seems to be causing it to hang). Using a tower seems to lead to a much better setup for my neck as I've been staring UP at all my desktops with a screen on top. I'm also trying it out because it seems faster than my old one.

Put 9 items on e-bay - 4 got bought within minutes of posting them....hehehe, nice. Now I just have to figure out combining shipping - might not be so hard since I have a couple items in boxes bigger than they need.

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-11-03, 19:46:

Was making backup image of a demo cd yesterday and it smashed into pieces in my dvd drive. Wowsers!

IIRC, it was a thing back in the day, that CD-ROM drives at 52x speed could do just that, and that was the reason most manufacturers backed down to 48x and not pursuing higher speeds ...

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-11-03, 19:46:

Was making backup image of a demo cd yesterday and it smashed into pieces in my dvd drive. Wowsers!

Happened to me too once back in the early 2000s.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-11-07, 11:39:

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-11-03, 19:46:

Was making backup image of a demo cd yesterday and it smashed into pieces in my dvd drive. Wowsers!

IIRC, it was a thing back in the day, that CD-ROM drives at 52x speed could do just that, and that was the reason most manufacturers backed down to 48x and not pursuing higher speeds ...

Yup had a 52x eat my Anachronox game CD back in the day, pretty sure the drive simply went over its rated speed slightly and the disc disintegrated in the drive, made quite the mess and totaled the drive. It was surprising how much damage to the drive the disc shards did, ended up opening the drive to find out what got damaged and yeah teh drive was full of the aluminum backing with tiny plastic shards right through the drive head mechanism.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-31, 03:25:

Was there a definable solution to that, or "I just screwed around with stuff and suddenly it started working." ... which happens a lot, I swear computers are just needy little buggers, just want the attention, pat them on the head more when they do stuff right or some crap.

Indeed, I covered it all here: Re: Windows 98SE + Lotus III?

I wanted to come up with a solution where I can replicate it on other games without modifying the original files with a patch, because there will be quite a few games out there which would be in the same position but have no active patch at all.

Last week I received an ACSI2STM, ACSI Hard Drive Emulator + SD Card solution for my Atari ST. Today I finally got around to properly setting up the 4GB SD card to use with it, with all of the games installed + game selector menu & GAMEX etc. I also started experimenting with installing some other software, such as Atari Works & Timeworks Publisher - for no particular reason, other than fun 🤣. Aside from that, I've just been playing a few games on it to test how well it is working.

I'm quite impressed with it, the Atari ST is definitely much more usable with a Hard Drive and the loading speed of games & software from the ACSI2STM is a vast improvement over loading from disk images on the Gotek!

Today I played Virtual Pool 3, as I can't get Virtual Pool 2 to work.

Testing boards that was purchased long ago. 486dx 33 motherboard, two SBC boards and few video cards. Need to set up floppy and some disks with test programs on it

Changed the jumpers on SBC to use pentium 133 was a spare CPU from my parts stash. The jumpers are incorrectly *labelled*!? BF0 and 1 is actually frequency, CLKo and 1 is actually multiplers.
Re-centered the label on the fan. Much quieter and less vibration.

Seller didn't say what memory was installed with this 486dx motherboard and turns out it is a gem. Four sticks of 4MB x 9 at *60ns*! I was redoing this board to use sixteen 1MB x 9 sticks. So have to buy more sticks as I ran out. Taking my time with that for now, running 12MB, two banks is 70ns and one bank is 80ns. Plan is all 1MB x 9bits all 70ns. DOS only is the goal.

The motherboard turned out to be was from some type of Unisys computer model. Very beautiful motherboard with very rare few jumpers.

Need to set up floppy and some disks with test programs on it.

Cheers,

Package from Land of the Rising Sun arrived today! As result my midi mountain increased by another layer - Roland SC-55k

I recently picked up a couple of thin clients to do some retrogaming on: a Wyse Cx0 and an HP T5710. Both were covered on Phil's Computer Lab, so many of you will be familiar with them. I picked up some cheap IDE cables off AliExpress, along with a couple of adapters to use with SD cards.

I started off with the Wyse and things went pretty smooth. It is really easy to take apart and it had no trouble recognizing my IDE to micro SD card adapter. The only challenge was getting things unplugged or plugged in to it's IDE slot. I haven't worked with IDE for about 15 years, but I don't remember the connections being so tight. Maybe it's the cheap cables/adapters that I bought from AliExpress. I also didn't work much with 44 pin in the past.

I installed Windows 98 and it's actually pretty quick. Unfortunately, I think the graphics and audio hardware is too new to have Windows 98 drivers, so I have been using VBEMP 9x and a $5 USB sound card. I have been able to run a lot of DOS games from Windows and the built-in SB emulation worked a lot better than I expected. Apart from being stuck with PC speaker sounds, pure DOS works well. Despite these limitations, I really like the device. It's also really small and the cutest little computer. Here's it next to the HP and a can of peas for scale:

I had a lot more trouble with the HP. First of all, it was a lot harder to access the IDE slot. It's situated right next to the case and I had to take the entire board out to plug in an IDE cable.

I first tried using a compact flash adapter with a CF to SD adapter in it. The bios recognized it, but Easy2boot kept on locking up when I tried to boot to a USB drive. I also booted into a Linux distro, which wouldn't recognize it. I tried changing a few bios settings and different USB ports, but gave up after awhile. I ended up taking the adapter from the Wyse, but it also failed with Easy2boot. I was starting to worry that there might be something wrong with the thin client, but I decided to try installing Windows 98 using the Linux method described at Parkytowers (https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/projects/win98.shtm). It ended up working! I haven't gotten around to playing around with it yet, but I've heard good things about it.

Finished rebuilding as much as I could from this PSU.

Considering I spent a whole night rebuilding this and topping off with Fresh Prince reruns, I'd say it came out well.
Might need to install some thermal control for the fans as they run at full 12v, it seems. Otherwise, they're both relatively silent (Yate Loon on the back, came from a FSP, and the front one is a Deep Cool branded fan that's also silent.)

I got some stuff from a coworker to test and see what works and fix if something can be easily fixed.

https://ibb.co/0qfqVcd
Sound Blaster SB100; Radeon 9250; Radeon 9600
All seem to be good at first glance.

https://ibb.co/bdg5Bm6
Athlon 2000+; K6-2/500; Celedon D 2.5GHz; Celeron 1.7GHz(x2); Celeron 700
The Celeron 1.7 needed some pin straightening.
Otherwise only the Athlon and the K6-2 has any kind of meaningful value, but the rest are good disposable test processors for the boards.

https://ibb.co/d6k1n0j
https://ibb.co/Ctv73BM
https://ibb.co/CWbDgXT
https://ibb.co/t383hr3
https://ibb.co/hfCwLdF
An MSI looking s370 board with Universal AGP. Seems to be a passable test board or budget Win9x board.
An ASUS A7V266-E, decent Socket A board, but with some bulging caps. It had a missing chipset cooler.
AsRock K7VT4A Pro, decent looking Socket A board, don't seem to have any visible faults.
ASUS P4P800 SE, decent Socket478 board with cooler and unknown CPU. Don't seem to have any damage.
ASUS P5S-MX SE, seems to be a worthless budget board S775, but doesn't have any visible damage, only a missing chipset cooler.
ABIT BD7II, either non-RAID version with only a missing chipset cooler or the RAID version with also missing some IDE connectors. Probably the former.
Some Spacewalker (?) S478 board with no visible damage or missing parts.
ASUS P5E3 Pro, decent looking late S775 board with no visible damage.

I can keep an item or two as payment and help sell the rest. If the ASUS A7V266-E can be reliably fixed, this one has connector for my ASUS iPanel, I'll take it as payment. If not, i'll likely go with the AsRock. The K6-2 would be good too, but I don't have a board for that so I can't even test it. Otherwise not a lot of value here.

I find it funny that the BD7-II has an orange retention system. Pretty sure that's from a Gigabyte board - they're about the only I know of that loved using orange and yellow P4 retention systems.

Yeah. It was also missing that retention thing. I took that from a Gigabyte board which already had caps from the CPU VRM and some other parts missing. I think it's from the same board where the chipset heatshik came from on the A7V266. There were 3 or 4 dead Giga boards with lots of missing parts. There were some in black, but I think this orange is more stylish 😁

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-11-09, 11:39:

An MSI looking s370 board with Universal AGP. Seems to be a passable test board or budget Win9x board.

That's an MS-6323, an OEM, non-retail MB made by MSI: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/msi-ms-6323-v1.x-va3
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/dr … ket-370.253380/
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/ms … 3-ver-2.114562/

The big capacitor right under "N1996" tag seems to have bulged.

dormcat wrote on 2022-11-09, 13:03:

The big capacitor right under "N1996" tag seems to have bulged.

On closer inspection the three identical caps on the left side of the ATX power connector are also bulging a little.

I took apart the (dead) battery that came with my recently purchased Dell Inspiron 3000 (a P2-266 machine). It's so old it was still "made in Canada" 😁

Unfortunately, the cells in the pack were packed _very_ tight, glued together, and connected with a thin metal strip that's "welded" on to the poles. I don't think I can ever manage to put it back together with new cells 🙁

Are they lithium or NiMH cells?