AppleSauce wrote on 2023-01-08, 08:12:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-01-08, 06:35:

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-01-08, 02:00:

Got my gotek finally installed on my Amiga 500 , managed to get some stuff to load , my tank mouse is faulty tho so ill need to get it repaired.

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Is that a switch for using memory expansion as chip mentoring
Memory?

It gives me the option to either use 1mb chip ram or 512k onboard + 512 slow trapdoor ram. I read that some early programs don't like the extra chip ram and only want the trapdoor ram. So I did it for compatibilites sake.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Auto correct apparently made me write it somewhat different 🤣

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-01-08, 14:14:

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-01-08, 08:12:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-01-08, 06:35:

Is that a switch for using memory expansion as chip mentoring
Memory?

It gives me the option to either use 1mb chip ram or 512k onboard + 512 slow trapdoor ram. I read that some early programs don't like the extra chip ram and only want the trapdoor ram. So I did it for compatibilites sake.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Auto correct apparently made me write it somewhat different 🤣

Auto correct always annoyingly has a mind of its own.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-01-08, 12:42:

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-01-08, 10:09:

Dog merchant was present however wrapped into a blanket. The weather was a little chilly. No pics of her, sorry.

The dog was present AND wrapped into a blanket, and you didn't take a picture.

Son I am disappoint.jpg

Yes, I am ashamed of my negligence as well.

I have a chance of buying an AWE32 CT2760 in box with all original manuals and disks + a Roland SCB-55 WT card in original box with all manuals + 3 boxes of Soundfonts for €110. Think I should go for it ?

Yes, it's a very good deal. Especially with that Roland SCB-55 daughterboard which is very hard to find.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-01-08, 20:11:

Yes, it's a very good deal. Especially with that Roland SCB-55 daughterboard which is very hard to find.

I was wondering about that - let's hope it all still works.

1. Installed new batch of silent fans on various CPU coolers:

2. Upgraded BIOSes and tested few retro boards:
* upgraded GA-5AX rev. 5.2 to F4 with support for K6-3+
* upgraded Asus P2L97 to latest non-beta BIOS (interestingly, it uses pflash.exe istead of aflash.exe -> does not recognize BIOS chip).
* managed to brick AOpen AP5T rev 3.1 with modified 1.82 BIOS. Friend of mine finally flashed it to latest BIOS using TL866 programmer, a very useful device to own in such situations 😉. Board is very interesting. Baby AT format and 430TX chipset, but supports K6-2+/3+ and 2.0V voltage to run them. Also, great build quality from AOpen (SANYO caps).

Well I tried to start the Pentium II Compaq Deskpro, and apparently something has failed because it doesn't want to boot. No display. Its just been sitting in its home on a desk for the last year or so. I noticed it was taking a second to turn on about a year ago. Had it turned on about 3 months ago and it booted. Now, no boot.

Very frustrating, that system is a pain open up.

Wasn't today, but at the weekend I was working on replacing the digitizer on a Nintendo DS Lite. Is it retro yet? 🤣

Ever have 1 of those jobs that you just wished you'd never started? Should have been a simple job, but it quickly became a pain in the backside lasting hours. I accidentally broke the clip that holds the digitizer ribbon in place so had to bodge it with some hot glue and card to press the connection into place once the case is screwed together. Then my hot glue gun decided to explode, so had to get a replacement.

Finally got that sorted, played on the DS for a while and then went to charge it, but it wouldn't charge. I'd only gone and blown 1 of the fuses inside, so had to open it all back up again and bridge the F1 fuse. It's working again now, but for all the time and effort I put in, probably would have been easier to just buy another DS since they sell for so little.

So I finally got my Windows 98 system back up and running, and I'm not surprised to learn that a Geforce 2 Ultra can give me an almost doubled score in 3DMark2000 when compared to my PCI Voodoo3. This is in an AGP2x slot even.

Got myself a ISA network card, flashed eprom chip with XTIDE BIOS and put it there, works. Swapped 40MB Conner to 850MB Maxtor and installed Windows 95. Machine is 486DLC/40 with 16MB memory.

Found me a nice Compaq Presario 1240 notebook today for free... look what little surprise was waiting inside.... a nice Socket 7 266 MMX.... Here I thought anything above a 233 MMX was in a different form factor and all those golden heatsink ones were just converting them to socket 7 format.

So on a Gigabyte GA-5SMM (flashed with retail BIOS) it identifies it as a Tillamook CPU in the BIOS string, but not as an Intel Mobile MMX. Default 4 x 66 shows it as a 133MHz CPU. Setting it to 2 x 133 shows up as a 180MHz CPU. I was able to do 3 x 100 and it boots to Windows 98 at 300, and CPUz also confirms it at that speed. Guess I will have to modify the BIOS if I want it to read back the CPU correctly, and I will have to do some testing as well.

Got up to a few things actually , I ended up swapping my ABIT BF6 mobo (450 mhz 256mb ram) for a ASUS P3B-f 1.04.
The ASUS had a 800 mhz 100 fsb pentium 3 with 384 mb of ram.

I figured it would be kind of dumb because I heard some horror stories of windows nuking itself after a motherboard swap.
Luckily aside from windows having to reinstall the drivers again it all went off without a hitch and I managed to migrate seemingly okay ,
might have helped that the mobos were very similar and I kept all the rest of the configuration the same expansion card and storage wise.
I'll need to do some more tests but so far so good.

My amiga tank mouse that I had wasn't working on the X axis after checking that the amiga was fine and after measuring the resistors realized that they were fine and it couldn't be that ,
so I figured it must be the photosensors.
I did some more research and found a YouTube video where the poster explained that the sensors could fail and how to open up the clip holding them in and what model to replace them with.

https://youtu.be/XUjqIohxCrA?t=660

It turns out there was an ebay seller near me who sold them so I could get them very soon and for cheap but they were all precut and the legs were on the short side. So I ended up finding some old scrap leds and cutting the legs off them and after much swearing and shouting managed to solder the legs on to extend them , one of the legs was a bit on the loose side solder wise but I managed to put the rotating light slot back in and the sensors and very carefully soldered them back in and reassembled the mouse.

I loaded up a mouse test program on the amiga and amazingly even with my dodgy hack repair job the mouse was suddenly working.

Had a bit of fun after that playing some lemmings , cannon fodder and hired guns so the mouse is working for the most part though the left click is a bit dodgy , I might replace the crappy Bremen metal caps for some microswitches at some point.

But yeah I'm glad I can play a few mouse games now , and I've got a game pad on the way so hopefully then I can play most stuff.

My Gravis gamepad also had weird drift issues , after opening it I figured I might try rotating the contact pad and reassembling , somehow that fixed it maybe I didn't line everything up the last time I opened it for cleaning.

Anyway I had a pretty productive 2 days I'm glad I got a lot of stuff working , seems like most of my gear has been bodged or fixed in one way or another.

Mounted a delidded Celeron 1300 to replace my old dead one in order to continue my PowerVR testings.

It looks like Friday 13th arrived late for me - I played around with my DIY mt32-pi rig and managed to choose 12V power profile by mistake on my bench power supply...
So now I have new nice Rasbperry Pi 4 shaped paperweight. 😁

While it looks like Pi4 is still unobtanium I can get Pi3a+ with reasonable price in EU.

I recently purchased some Kickstart 3.1 ROMs for my Amiga 1200, which I fitted today. The main reason for doing so is that I wanted to use the Boot Menu + Arcade Game Selector but Arcade Game Selector didn't play nicely with the original 3.0 ROMs.

Immediately after fitting the new chips, it refused to boot into Workbench. I tracked the problem down pretty quickly to a piece of installed software - Surf Squirrel, which I use for mounting CD-ROM discs and for CDTV/CD32 emulation. After a lot of trial and error, I found a different version of Surf Squirrel/Squirrel SCSI which plays nicely with the 3.1 ROMs and set it up on the CF card on my PC using WinUAE.

Once I confirmed it was working in WinUAE, I transferred the CF card back into the Amiga 1200, where I'd left a CD32 disc in the attached drive and it booted straight into the game! Back in Workbench and it's happily mounting CD & DVD-ROM data discs once again.

I just need to repeat the same install process on a new 16GB CF Card containing Arcade Game Selector and a new install of ClassicWB and I'm good to go.

The brittle plastic on my Epson Equity III+ continues to be an issue.

My initial acetone repair didn't hold as both the front struts between the disk drives broke (again!), along with the front grill. In addition, the plastic would chip in the process with small pieces flaking off.

Instead of just acetone, I decided to try epoxy as well.

I initially set the pieces again using acetone. Then I applied a 2-part epoxy (JB Weld) to fill in the missing chips and add some more structural support. I also filled in the backsides of the struts. I'm hoping this provides some additional reinforcement to these pieces, as they seem quite brittle.

It took a few rounds to build up an epoxy layer around the joints. Once that was done, I sanded everything and finally applied some light airbrushing to blend the surface colors.

The end result doesn't look too bad. Close inspection reveals there was definitely some work done. I did want to leave some extra epoxy around the joints, so it's not properly squared off.

I'm hoping this is the last I have to repair this case. Really wish this thing wasn't so fragile, but I guess it's the consequences of really old plastic.

Bit more work on the Epson this evening. I wanted to figure out a way to mount my CF card for external access. All expansion slots are full, so that wasn't an option.

Fortunately, the Epson had this lower slot on the back which was unused. I was able to repurpose it for rigging up a CF card bracket.

It's a bit janky; I hand cut and shaped a couple metal bits to hold it in place. But it is extremely secure and works quite well.

I suppose I could eventually try to fabricate a nicer looking bracket, but for now this works.

Sorting some new cpus.