VOGONS


Reply 23940 of 27171, by bjwil1991

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Added a speaker to my newly acquired Walkman WM-FX40 by soldering it to two of the 3 pins on the worn out and broken headphone jack. So far, it works without issues.

kQfjWAAXpd9NqJxKgBKpeNIg2o48f4s028YrRRgXbvMIkQTRuZdjrsF_VXvjlRPZl_VzFNDv-R3z3GOMBfsKcHR_2o77oc7_PrO_bVhCY5eDDjnDfRk52JtRIpr8NtaWGwORDl0fgTg=w2400

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 23941 of 27171, by Ydee

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TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-03-11, 04:18:

Well the Radeon R6 AIW showed up.

Another tested DOA card. The thing is I actually believe them when they said its tested this time because the seller has multiple and appears to be a dedicated computer goods reseller. The 2 main 470 @ 10v caps seem to be vented, probably the problem.

Wiating to hear back on if the seller wants to do an exchange or refund, if he goes for refund and doesn't ask for it back I'll swap the caps then report back.

It´s PCI or AGP version?

Reply 23942 of 27171, by Thermalwrong

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Today's my birthday but I'm more stoked about my most recent fix. I got a VAIO F801 laptop which is an AMD K6-2+ equipped budget desktop replacement from around 2000-ish with Windows Millenium edition. This one was being sold so cheap I was worried that it was going to just get put into ewaste so I went ahead and got it even though I don't particularly need it - the audio and video aspects of this laptop aren't that special, but it's built like a tank and looks cool.
It didn't come with a hard drive or the special caddy connector but in my stash I had the right one, since I bought another dead F801 in the past.

Putting it together it would sort of detect a drive or CF card but FDISK showed "No Fixed Disks Present" and it would show the wrong name - "CF CARD" became "AF CARD" and TOSHIBA MK1016GAP became "TOQHIBA MK1016EAP". I like clues like that, I think I recall Adrian doing something similar in one of his repair videos to work out where the problem was.
Looking up the ASCII > binary table, it was changing G into E and S into Q:
Q 081 01010001
S 083 01010011

E 069 01000101
G 071 01000111
The difference there is the seventh bit, so I started probing around the HDD caddy connector to see if all the data pins were present. It turned out that the seventh (DD6) and ninth (DD8) data bits were missing - that makes sense. Maybe the DD8 being missing isn't possible to spot this way because the ASCII table doesn't use such a high number (>127).

They were both broken on the flex cable where it got flexed wrong so I patched them with some enamel wire ~0.1mm:

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Did all that without much magnification and it turned out pretty well. Now the drives detect properly and I can start installing OS soon. Of course, it's too old to read a 10gb drive over the 8.4gb limit so I probably need to swap out the drive again.

In the process I put thermal paste on the CPU since it never apparently had any, just one of those aluminium sheet things - that's backfired terribly since the thermal sensor is on the heatsink and now the heatsink gets hotter than stock because it's actually doing its job. It's running cooler but the fan never stops now, ah.

Reply 23943 of 27171, by pentiumspeed

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Yes retro. I swapped in a i7-4790K from my unused spare PC into family's computer. Was i5-4590 which went back into that spare PC and might sell it to fund other my computer purchases. Nearly 9 years old now.

Next time when family needs a new computer to meet windows 11 requirements once windows 10 ends in 2025, I'll make sure they have 2,000 this time and they did object to that when I broke the announcement to them. That PC was about 400 when purchased. What made me unhappy was clerk at computer store chose different board which was lesser one than one I chose without me knowing. This ended up hindering the PC upgrades and fan rpm control was non-functional on second fan header, no it was not defect. Also motherboard only had 3 phase VRM and 2 DIMM slots, uATX. Basically very low end board.

They objected that too much, saying that PC is good enough. Nooo, it is utterly obsolete by 2025 rolls around. I had to crank down details to low on god of war due to R270X 2GB. Should be on GTX 1070 or 1080.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 23944 of 27171, by BitWrangler

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oh you didn't get the memo, we're all defecting to haiku OS in 2025 🤣

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 23945 of 27171, by Nexxen

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Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-03-12, 17:51:
Today's my birthday but I'm more stoked about my most recent fix. I got a VAIO F801 laptop which is an AMD K6-2+ equipped budget […]
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Today's my birthday but I'm more stoked about my most recent fix. I got a VAIO F801 laptop which is an AMD K6-2+ equipped budget desktop replacement from around 2000-ish with Windows Millenium edition. This one was being sold so cheap I was worried that it was going to just get put into ewaste so I went ahead and got it even though I don't particularly need it - the audio and video aspects of this laptop aren't that special, but it's built like a tank and looks cool.
It didn't come with a hard drive or the special caddy connector but in my stash I had the right one, since I bought another dead F801 in the past.

Putting it together it would sort of detect a drive or CF card but FDISK showed "No Fixed Disks Present" and it would show the wrong name - "CF CARD" became "AF CARD" and TOSHIBA MK1016GAP became "TOQHIBA MK1016EAP". I like clues like that, I think I recall Adrian doing something similar in one of his repair videos to work out where the problem was.
Looking up the ASCII > binary table, it was changing G into E and S into Q:
Q 081 01010001
S 083 01010011

E 069 01000101
G 071 01000111
The difference there is the seventh bit, so I started probing around the HDD caddy connector to see if all the data pins were present. It turned out that the seventh (DD6) and ninth (DD8) data bits were missing - that makes sense. Maybe the DD8 being missing isn't possible to spot this way because the ASCII table doesn't use such a high number (>127).

They were both broken on the flex cable where it got flexed wrong so I patched them with some enamel wire ~0.1mm:
flex-repair.jpg
Did all that without much magnification and it turned out pretty well. Now the drives detect properly and I can start installing OS soon. Of course, it's too old to read a 10gb drive over the 8.4gb limit so I probably need to swap out the drive again.

In the process I put thermal paste on the CPU since it never apparently had any, just one of those aluminium sheet things - that's backfired terribly since the thermal sensor is on the heatsink and now the heatsink gets hotter than stock because it's actually doing its job. It's running cooler but the fan never stops now, ah.

Happy birthday!
Great job!

I had the same issue, putting thermal paste and all goes haywire because it's actually working 😀
I had it recently with a Duron mobile and now it's impossible to hold it on my legs... unlaptopped!

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K

Reply 23946 of 27171, by Veeb0rg

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Spent the weekend working to get my HP Apollo 9000 735 Workstation functional again.

Found out a relatively new Dell lcd P2018H accepted the 1280×1024@72Hz signal which meant I didn't have to drag the 70+lb CRT monitor out of storage. Moving the 45+lb workstation around is bad enough.

RISC based workstations from this era are so very different from PC's. I did succeed in getting HPUX 10.20 running on it.

Reply 23947 of 27171, by Kahenraz

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Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-03-12, 17:51:

They were both broken on the flex cable where it got flexed wrong so I patched them with some enamel wire ~0.1mm:

Did all that without much magnification and it turned out pretty well.

Bravo! I don't think I could have done this without magnification. That's some fine work.

Reply 23948 of 27171, by Merovign

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Had to hold off work on my Mega Retro Station project because of various emergencies due to weather and failing hardware in other areas (like phones). At some point this week I hope to 3D print in PETG an adapter I designed to put a Wraith Spire on a socket 1150 board (just because all my 1150 hardware is in use and I have two NIB Wraith Spires). A 4790K doesn't run that hot. So this part isn't retro per se - but it will be soon enough.

The goal is to take a retro Sony flat panel with fairly excellent inputs and image quality (4:3 20"), and hook up a machine with a ton of emulators on it (PCemu, dosbox, I am consolidating emulators for Macs, Atari, X68000 (maybe), C64, Amiga, various consoles, various early Z80 machines... I still haven't found an AS/400 emulator (or for that matter both OSes for my separate planned ASCI RED microclone with 2 mobos and 3 PPros). I don't even know why I want an AS/400 emulator. I can get a VAX tho. I will probably only use more mainstream things. For most purposes that machine with a 98 machine, XP machine, and Win7 machine (possibly in some combination, I have an excellent SFF Win7 machine and a slightly flaxy tiny USFF XP machine) should fit on my shelf next to my desk and give me 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s *software*... I will keep some machines (most of my early machines) for the hardware bench.

I have a KVM but I need a more elegant solution. I built a pfsense router, I wonder if there's something I could do over a gigabit network that would include Win98 and XP machines with relatively high performance remote access? I need to remember to look that up.

It would be nice to be able to run systems like the VAX or PDP or old IBM mainframes in a VM and be able to network into them with a terminal emulator, I admit I haven't tested this so it may work fine. I also admit I probably would not use them much, I'm just feeling completionist.

But even after clearing a few machines and various parts out, I find I still have more than I can manage in my space. Been swamped and tired recently but hoping Spring will be better for projects.

I still intend to do a giveaway in the giveaway thread if I get a first pass done on this cleaning. I do finally have a stock of NOS floppies for PC and C64. I need to make a PSU for the C64, all I have is the original. I need to get parts for a BlueSCSI for the Mac LC as well. Mostly low-end like SBLives and TNTs and if any masochists want things like X300s or X1300s (I bet there's some kind of window where those are useful). I did some work on a list of my GPUs and systems for benchmarking, starting with ISA cards and going up to PCIE, but bottlenecking/cielings are all over and I need to build a late AGP system for testing, but I think my one 4-digit speed P3 is toast (and the Soyo mobo has some bad caps, so maybe not).

So, looking at what I've typed, I've accomplished *almost* nothing. 😀 Star Trek Online is practically retro, though, given it's 13 years old. So I did *something* retro.

Oh - one retro thing and I need to look around to see if we have a section here for this... I have an LG VX9900 phone - the one with the flip-out keyboard with larger screen. Service long gone, servers long gone, but apparently it could play shockwave games if set up properly. There appears to be very little in the way of retro support for these old phones, I'm hoping to find a way to get it running any old (probably version-limited) shockwave games, and there were some apps available as well. I don't have the proprietary USB cable, so the point may be moot.

Anyway, hope everyone else is feeling more productive than I am.

*Too* *many* *things*!

Reply 23949 of 27171, by Katmai500

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I upgraded the GPU in my Inspiron 8200 from the 32 MB GeForce2 Go to a 32 MB GeForce 440 Go. I was hoping to find a 64 MB card, but the 32 MB was extremely cheap and available. 3D Mark 2001 SE score doubled. Now I just need a Radeon 9000 card to complete the set for this model.

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Reply 23950 of 27171, by PD2JK

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Nice work!

The Compaq LTE Elite 4/75cx sprung to life. I just reassembled it, so I think it was a loose contact.
Unfortunately I wrecked the front LED flat cable. 🙁

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i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 23951 of 27171, by TheAbandonwareGuy

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OK so I think I found why the R6 Rage Theater isn't posting. There is a resistor that's been knocked off on the back, and worse yet its one of the resistors for the GPU core itself.

Tiny resistor, should be interesting to try to replace this.

Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone: https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c
I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction

Reply 23952 of 27171, by Kahenraz

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PD2JK wrote on 2023-03-13, 20:55:

Nice work!

The Compaq LTE Elite 4/75cx sprung to life. I just reassembled it, so I think it was a loose contact.
Unfortunately I wrecked the front LED flat cable. 🙁

That's not good. Out of my two units, only one has a working LCD cable. The one that failed was from my childhood, and wa failing even back around 1995 or so. The screen would get messed up and I had to jerk the screen open and shut for it to work right.

Let us know if you can find a suitable replacement.

Reply 23953 of 27171, by OMORES

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Just installed Windows 98SE on a Intel 9th gen platform...

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Reply 23954 of 27171, by H3nrik V!

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OMORES wrote on 2023-03-14, 15:56:

Just installed Windows 98SE on a Intel 9th gen platform...

That's pretty cool! Did you patch something to make only 512 megs visible to the OS? I don't expect ddr3 to exist in that size?

[Edit] DDR4, I guess

Please use the "quote" option if asking questions to what I write - it will really up the chances of me noticing 😀

Reply 23955 of 27171, by OMORES

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H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-03-14, 17:37:
OMORES wrote on 2023-03-14, 15:56:

Just installed Windows 98SE on a Intel 9th gen platform...

That's pretty cool! Did you patch something to make only 512 megs visible to the OS? I don't expect ddr3 to exist in that size?

[Edit] DDR4, I guess

After the first restart -> edit C:\windows\system.ini -> under [386enh] insert this line MaxPhysPage=20000 This will limit ram to 512MB. Usually I use MaxPhysPage=10000 ~256MB.

This move was enough for most hardware <2018. The problem is that - with newer configurations - after this step you enter into "Windows protection error" territory - which is not easy to troubleshoot. In fact I don't know any Windows 98 installation on newer Intel hardware than this. Even for gen 9 I didn't find any video when is used real hardware. (there are tons with emulation)

Reply 23956 of 27171, by PcBytes

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Does converting a pair of 1973 Pioneer SE-205 headphones from 6.3 to 3.5mm jack count? 😁

file.php?mode=view&id=159836

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"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 23957 of 27171, by TheAbandonwareGuy

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PcBytes wrote on 2023-03-14, 20:56:
Does converting a pair of 1973 Pioneer SE-205 headphones from 6.3 to 3.5mm jack count? :D […]
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Does converting a pair of 1973 Pioneer SE-205 headphones from 6.3 to 3.5mm jack count? 😁

file.php?mode=view&id=159836

You know they make an adapter for that right?

Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone: https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c
I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction

Reply 23958 of 27171, by PcBytes

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I do. Unfortunately the original cable was showing corrosion internally - the ends were fine, but the middle of the cable was leaking green substance (which looked similar to VARTA corrosion on286/ 386/486 mobos) when I cut it open out of curiosity after the 3.5 conversion.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 23959 of 27171, by davidrg

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Been fixing up some old SPARCs lately. This one is fast enough to run a web browser!

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