HanJammer wrote on 2023-02-24, 00:36:

Got another load of cr*p... It was everything or nothing kind of deal, so I had to take even the stuff I didn't wanted, but the […]
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Got another load of cr*p... It was everything or nothing kind of deal, so I had to take even the stuff I didn't wanted, but the offer was really good as it usually is with these sources (basically computers parted out in the recyclers)...
All motherboards work just fine, beside the MSI one which is unstable due to the caps. There is a cool DFI Super Socket 7 board with my beloved MVP3 and ASUS P2B-F but I think I already have some of these. Also PVI-486SP3, but I believe I already have like two of them as well. Interestingly enough both ECS Socket A boards work just flawlessly. Not something I would expect from an ECS of this era ;D

I will test the cards on weekend.

Another packages of this guy are on my way with similar stuff.

1/2

I'd defo keep the K7VZA I see there. These are absolutely bonkers once you flash the Shuttle AK12A BIOS on them. I have one, and it ripped with Win98SE. Heck, even running WinME proved to be hassle free - and that's with a Radeon 7500, a Duron 1600 Palomino (at that time I was believeing to have the only Palomino chip in my collection - Iblater figured out that wasn't the case, 🤣), nearly a gig of PC133 SDRAM, as well as a few other goodies. Just replace the caps and BIOS, and it's a pretty strong KT133 mobo, IMO.

As for the K7SOM+, don't bother with it. My dad had to work with one of these and it was a horrible nightmare. I wouldn't touch a ECS mobo with soldered CPU unless it's a M810 w/ SDR and as long as someone fixes the M810 BIOS to a degree.

I'm not sure what use it'll have other than filling an empty slot on my Tandy 1400 LTE but it's pretty neat to have.

Asininity wrote on 2023-02-24, 08:07:

I'm not sure what use it'll have other than filling an empty slot on my Tandy 1400 LTE but it's pretty neat to have.

Keep it for the Apopcalypse, when the internet has died and they have to blackboot the entire network again and we are set back to 1980 levels of speeds.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-02-24, 07:20:

I'd defo keep the K7VZA I see there. These are absolutely bonkers once you flash the Shuttle AK12A BIOS on them. I have one, and it ripped with Win98SE. Heck, even running WinME proved to be hassle free - and that's with a Radeon 7500, a Duron 1600 Palomino (at that time I was believeing to have the only Palomino chip in my collection - Iblater figured out that wasn't the case, 🤣), nearly a gig of PC133 SDRAM, as well as a few other goodies. Just replace the caps and BIOS, and it's a pretty strong KT133 mobo, IMO.

As for the K7SOM+, don't bother with it. My dad had to work with one of these and it was a horrible nightmare. I wouldn't touch a ECS mobo with soldered CPU unless it's a M810 w/ SDR and as long as someone fixes the M810 BIOS to a degree.

Well, even my Pentium 233MMX machine rips with Win98SE (and 98SE is pretty fast even on something like Pentium 133 as long as it has 16MB of RAM or more) so no wonder that Windows XP era machine is very fast.

Since early 2000 upto something like 2004 I had ASUS K7M (later rev with SuperBypass support) - first with Athlon 600MHz, then I switched to Athlon 1GHz (Orion core) and with 384MB of RAM it was pretty quick in the 98SE as well and later even in the XP I had no performance issues (at least I don't remember I complained - that's why I skipped the Socket A CPUs entirely and the next CPU I bought after the Slot A Orion was Athlon 64 using Socket 939). Hence I don't have extensive knowledge of this platform - I bought alot of them back in the day at work, with KT333 and KT400 chipsets, but I never had a love for socket A - it always occured to me as problematic platform, perhaps likely because most machines I had experience with had MSI motherboards and it coincided with the capacitor plague. Only motherboard I keep for Socket A CPUs is K7D Master for dual Athlon MPs...

I used to tweak the hell out of myK7M and it's still one of my favorite platforms I used to have (perhaps third in line - first being my current setup with Gigabyte X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming, and second my - previous setup with AsRock 990FX Extreme 3). I still have this very motherboard, both CPUs and RAM modules. Although unfortunatelly motherboard is no longer stable - once the coils/VRC gets hot - it will crash on boot. There are some caps located near the VRC that are heated by the mosfets and the coils and I suspect maybe that's the reason... If I turn the power of and let it cool down for a minute it becomes bootable again, but then the cycle repeats...

BTW - What's the advantage of using Shuttle AK12A BIOS in this motherboard? Lack of ISA slot on this motherboard is a big turn off for me anyway...

Shuttle fixed the BIOS that ECS put out. I had both the ECS BIOS and Shuttle's. ECS' BIOS was (unsurprisingly) an hot mess of garbage. Shuttle's BIOS was practically them fixing ECS' mess of BIOS - it works as it should.

HanJammer wrote on 2023-02-24, 00:36:

Got another load of cr*p... It was everything or nothing kind of deal, so I had to take even the stuff I didn't wanted, but the […]
Show full quote

Got another load of cr*p... It was everything or nothing kind of deal, so I had to take even the stuff I didn't wanted, but the offer was really good as it usually is with these sources (basically computers parted out in the recyclers)...
All motherboards work just fine, beside the MSI one which is unstable due to the caps. There is a cool DFI Super Socket 7 board with my beloved MVP3 and ASUS P2B-F but I think I already have some of these. Also PVI-486SP3, but I believe I already have like two of them as well. Interestingly enough both ECS Socket A boards work just flawlessly. Not something I would expect from an ECS of this era ;D

I will test the cards on weekend.

Another packages of this guy are on my way with similar stuff.

1/2

Nice hardware you got! Also I have a ECS K7VZA 3.0, i plan to recap it, because it fried a keyboard and mouse. Oddly my ECS K7VZA 3.0 is stable.

OMORES wrote on 2023-02-23, 22:02:

lolo799 wrote on 2023-02-23, 19:13:

I received an unusual "graphic" card:20230222_213809.jpg

PC Weasel 2000 was a line of graphics cards designed by Middle Digital Incorporated (Herb Peyerl and Jonathan Levine) which output to a serial port instead of a monitor. This allows servers using PC hardware with conventional BIOSes or operating systems lacking serial capability to be administered remotely.

The product was introduced in 1999 and began shipping January 20, 2000.

PCI and ISA models are available. The PC Weasel is also connected to a PS/2-compatible keyboard port and effectively emulates a keyboard by converting characters obtained from the serial port to keyboard scancodes. The card may also be connected to the reset pins of the motherboard and reboot the machine on command.

To add to that, there were a later ISA card supporting MDA and VGA and a PCI card supporting VGA, textmodes only of course.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020214213528/ht … .com/intro.html

Predator99 wrote on 2023-02-20, 10:33:

I am very surprised and happy the seller accepted my price proposal. This lot seems to very interesting (sellers photos): - gold […]
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I am very surprised and happy the seller accepted my price proposal. This lot seems to very interesting (sellers photos):
- golden TIGA
- IBM CGA
- Schneider EURO XT
- 286, 386, 486...
...
Will report when it arrives 😀

l1.jpg
l2.jpg
l3.jpg
l4.jpg

Arrived...looks good and seems to be worth every single cent. This is not only a TIGA but a Matrox PG-1281, should be even more interesting 😀

Does anyone else love the sight of these old boards that are practically wall-to-wall slots and sockets? It makes me feel excited for the expansion possibilities.

Nowadays, it's extremely hard to get a board with ample PCIe slots. Every time the standard is pushed to a new generation, they use the faster slot, often with fewer overall lanes. We've lost even more recently with all of the onboard NVMe.

I wild actually prefer a board that's one generation older of PCIe standard, to provide me with double the available lanes. Does anyone know if this is possible, without the use of a PLEX chip?

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:01:

Nowadays, it's extremely hard to get a board with ample PCIe slots. Every time the standard is pushed to a new generation, they use the faster slot, often with fewer overall lanes. We've lost even more recently with all of the onboard NVMe.

I don't mind losing them as they are hardly used nowadays outside of specific needs and most of the consumer hardware that isn't a GPU doesn't need more than x1 or x4 PCIe lanes.

I wild actually prefer a board that's one generation older of PCIe standard, to provide me with double the available lanes. Does anyone know if this is possible, without the use of a PLEX chip?

Look for HEDT platform as they have plenty of PCIe lanes, but they are more expensive and tend to have the CPU microarchitecture one or two generations behind.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:01:

Does anyone else love the sight of these old boards that are practically wall-to-wall slots and sockets? It makes me feel excited for the expansion possibilities.

Nowadays, it's extremely hard to get a board with ample PCIe slots. Every time the standard is pushed to a new generation, they use the faster slot, often with fewer overall lanes. We've lost even more recently with all of the onboard NVMe.

I wild actually prefer a board that's one generation older of PCIe standard, to provide me with double the available lanes. Does anyone know if this is possible, without the use of a PLEX chip?

Check out the ASUS and other workstation boards for up to 7 x16 PCIe slots. They do use PLX switches but you get the slots at least.

As was said above, the multi-CPU boards will have more lanes. The newer AMD stuff can have a massive number of PCIe lanes but are going to be expensive... 🤤

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-02-24, 21:01:

Does anyone else love the sight of these old boards that are practically wall-to-wall slots and sockets? It makes me feel excited for the expansion possibilities.

Nowadays, it's extremely hard to get a board with ample PCIe slots. Every time the standard is pushed to a new generation, they use the faster slot, often with fewer overall lanes. We've lost even more recently with all of the onboard NVMe.

I wild actually prefer a board that's one generation older of PCIe standard, to provide me with double the available lanes. Does anyone know if this is possible, without the use of a PLEX chip?

NVME pcie lanes can be reused with an adapter and for all other purposes, there's always the server boards & cpus like the Xeon W9-3495X which has 112 pcie 5.0 lanes

Exactly. As server chipsets show, it's perfectly possible to pair modern CPUs with lots of slots and I/O bandwidth- which is how you can get it if you want it today - but you simply don't need it. Bus bandwidths have so massively outstripped everything except GPU and (to a far lesser degree) SSD that a single lane is enough for everything else, usually via USB 3.0. So it's not modern board & chipsets limiting expansion, but limited expansion making more on consumer boards pointless.

When buying my Slot 1 and Socket A boards, having 6 PCI slots was a very relevant metric because I needed every one of those slots. But my previous daily driver with i7-2600 lasted for 10 years on an mITX board with just a single PCIe 16x slot.

Let's run down what I put in that 1999 board with 6 PCI slots:
- 56k modem - no need, we have had broadband for decades.
- 10/100Mb Ethernet - great then, 1GbE onboard on mITX (and 2.5GbE on current board)
- SB64 PCI - modern onboard audio easily better than *that* (I was young and ignorant - although puzzled why it didn't sound better than my old GUS Max...)
- TV Card - CATV no longer even exists in my country, video content available over internet
- Voodoo 2 - as they say in Germany: Das war einmal.
- Free slot in case I needed Firewire, USB 2.0, maybe an ATA-66/ATA-100 IDE controller etc - in 2012 I already had USB 3.0 and SATA-600

So how many of those would I need today? 0.

I replaced the i7 on mITX board with a Ryzen on an uATX board, purely because I wanted a bigger, quieter case (and my youngest was getting frustrated with his old PC so needed my i7). There's still only a single GPU in a single PCIe16x slot...

I got "Schroedingers" LCD monitor today... it's actually a 10" photo frame by Fidelity, and I noticed it seemed to be 4:3, thus an earlier one, and fairly thick front to back, leading me to suspect it was an older less integrated model assembled from commodity components. Get into it and YAY, appears to have a Sharp made (or near clone) screen that does 6:6:6 RGB, 640x480 ... DOeS that sound useful or is it just me? ... The Schroedinger part is, that it ain't actually a monitor for retro hardware yet without some work. There may be several possibilities, retrobodgemod it into a 386 laptop maybe. Configure a CL or Trident card/monitor combo that could go in whatever motherboard. Be lazy and plug it into a Pi or similar and run emulators on it. Though the last may happen first as it might be the best way of determining all quirks of the screen.

Predator99 wrote on 2023-02-24, 20:34:

IMG_1410r.jpg IMG_1412r.jpg IMG_1411r.jpg IMG_1409r.jpg IMG_1408r.jpg […]
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IMG_1410r.jpg
IMG_1412r.jpg
IMG_1411r.jpg
IMG_1409r.jpg
IMG_1408r.jpg

Aaaargh (bottom pic) another baby baby AT board taunting me, where the actual heck did I put mine???

Bought an untested (probably genuinely, seller seems to mostly deal in antiques and knick knacks) GeForce FX5700VE for $30

We'll see how that goes. Probably poorly based on prior experience with GeForce FX series cards.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-02-24, 23:24:

I got "Schroedingers" LCD monitor today... it's actually a 10" photo frame by Fidelity, and I noticed it seemed to be 4:3, thus an earlier one, and fairly thick front to back, leading me to suspect it was an older less integrated model assembled from commodity components. Get into it and YAY, appears to have a Sharp made (or near clone) screen that does 6:6:6 RGB, 640x480 ... DOeS that sound useful or is it just me? ... The Schroedinger part is, that it ain't actually a monitor for retro hardware yet without some work. There may be several possibilities, retrobodgemod it into a 386 laptop maybe. Configure a CL or Trident card/monitor combo that could go in whatever motherboard. Be lazy and plug it into a Pi or similar and run emulators on it. Though the last may happen first as it might be the best way of determining all quirks of the screen.

Woah, that's what I do too - they can pop up cheap and they're TFTs. So far each one I've got has been 640x480 but I usually verify by reading the manual first if it can be found and it's mostly the chunky ones that are the lower res.
I've got a Toshiba LTM10C209 industrial panel that was obviously recycled out of one, and with some adaptation I was able to use my Advantech SBC with it. Another one I got out of a little DVB tv to improve my Toshiba 400CS laptop: Re: Upgrading a Toshiba laptop from DSTN to TFT panel - The Satellite 400CS becomes a 400CDT

They're not too bad to hook up, but can the pi run parallel TFTs? I thought I read something about that using the GPIOs but haven't tried it. If you've got a laptop with a Chips VGA then there are BMP utilities to modify the BIOS to suit different LCDs, but I haven't got very far with that.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-02-25, 04:07:

Woah, that's what I do too - they can pop up cheap and they're TFTs. So far each one I've got has been 640x480 but I usually ver […]
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BitWrangler wrote on 2023-02-24, 23:24:

I got "Schroedingers" LCD monitor today... it's actually a 10" photo frame by Fidelity, and I noticed it seemed to be 4:3, thus an earlier one, and fairly thick front to back, leading me to suspect it was an older less integrated model assembled from commodity components. Get into it and YAY, appears to have a Sharp made (or near clone) screen that does 6:6:6 RGB, 640x480 ... DOeS that sound useful or is it just me? ... The Schroedinger part is, that it ain't actually a monitor for retro hardware yet without some work. There may be several possibilities, retrobodgemod it into a 386 laptop maybe. Configure a CL or Trident card/monitor combo that could go in whatever motherboard. Be lazy and plug it into a Pi or similar and run emulators on it. Though the last may happen first as it might be the best way of determining all quirks of the screen.

Woah, that's what I do too - they can pop up cheap and they're TFTs. So far each one I've got has been 640x480 but I usually verify by reading the manual first if it can be found and it's mostly the chunky ones that are the lower res.
I've got a Toshiba LTM10C209 industrial panel that was obviously recycled out of one, and with some adaptation I was able to use my Advantech SBC with it. Another one I got out of a little DVB tv to improve my Toshiba 400CS laptop: Re: Upgrading a Toshiba laptop from DSTN to TFT panel - The Satellite 400CS becomes a 400CDT

They're not too bad to hook up, but can the pi run parallel TFTs? I thought I read something about that using the GPIOs but haven't tried it. If you've got a laptop with a Chips VGA then there are BMP utilities to modify the BIOS to suit different LCDs, but I haven't got very far with that.

Hey thanks that looks like useful encouragement. Panel turns out to be a LQ104V1DG83 so very similar to one you had there. Think I'll check out the chipset on a Zenith machine I have, that might have the C&T controller. Damn forgetting the model of it, has one of those 386/486 clock doubled cyrix chips in, and is so damn fugly I can only improve it. (i.e. yellowed, scratched and cracked) Might be a Z-star 486SL or something like that, or maybe Znote.

edit: ah specs more easily had for it's Packard Bell badged sibling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Statesman so turns out it has the 6553x class C&T ... will have to see if that's as "persuadable" as the later model.

editII: at quick scan of datasheet from here (might need to turn on translate to see the download button) https://pdf.ic37.com/icpdf_datasheet_8/F6553_ … /F6553_151.html seems I might get 5:5:5 mode or 5:6:5 mode... looks hopeful, lots of nitty gritty to plow through.