Sombrero wrote on 2023-06-05, 06:56:

BetaC wrote on 2023-06-05, 06:17:

After feeling the need to play through TIE Fighter again, I finally moved my UMAX mac clone out of the way, and set up my DOS machine again. This, in turn, led me to figuring out why windows 3.11 wasn't happy with my sound setup, and figuring out that I had accidentally set both sound cards to using the same DMAs and IRQs. Now that those issues are cleared, and my system has been downgraded to a 100MHz Pentium 75, I can play TIE fighter without the speed issues that even 233MHz can introduce.

I've noticed CPU speed affects even mouse sensitivity in TIE Fighter, the faster CPU the more sluggish the mouse gets. No idea does it affect joysticks but if you are using one and it feels like you aren't turning as fast as you should, then 100MHz is still too fast.

Seems like I'm currently going through a period of planned obsolescence, all my stuff is breaking. First 6800 GT croaked, then Voodoo3 2000 and now Sound Blaster Z I had in my "modern" PC (that just had its 9th birthday) continued the streak. What's next in line, my apartment burns down and I get leprosy?

I usually use TIE Bomber historical Mission 2 as a way to test if my machine is good. at 100MHz, the station immediately starts to fire at me as I get close enough.

I went thru a bag of random 72pin memory modules to find something for one of my next projects.

And found 2x8mb FPM... not much but enough to boot a system that doesn't run with EDO.

Last week I took a peek inside the PSU and it looks ok from what I could see.

And to make everything as eay as possible... a huge motherboard with lots of fun stuff on it 😀

I somehow created a card that blew out the AGP port on my test rig by attempting to reflow the VGA port on a GF2Mx that had a dead blue channel.

There are no solder bridges I can find... I'm honestly more dumbfounded than angry. Like how does reflowing the VGA port cause the card to blow up the AGP port? As soon as I turned the PC on I got the magic smoke from near the front of the AGP port. Now it doesn't even recognize when a AGP card is installed, still boots off the integrated graphics.

Kind of sucks, the nForce2 with Integrated GF440Mx graphics motherboard in that thing is kind of rare, but I have another one held as spare so no big loss to me personally and that IS sort of the job of the test rig, to fall upon its sword in place of a more unique machine if something goes horribly wrong.

Bummer.... any of those small SMD electrolytics near it that could have cooked to a short?

I had a try at burning something on the graphics side myself today. Acer SFF box, again forgot the rule of "If you didn't build it yourself go through it with a fine tooth comb before you power it up." ... because it had no video .. well not out of either onboard nor Gt710 15pin VGA, after turning it on and off enough times to mangle the windows install (maybe... it might have been improperly set up or halfassed) I realised the GT710 didn't have it's VGA header plugged properly, it was on a single row of pins, gah... so risked blowing something there maybe with less forgiving monitor.... anyhoo, sorted that, booted... munched windoze.

I wrote a PCjr cartridge ROM with some DOS commands.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-06-06, 01:58:

Bummer.... any of those small SMD electrolytics near it that could have cooked to a short?

I had a try at burning something on the graphics side myself today. Acer SFF box, again forgot the rule of "If you didn't build it yourself go through it with a fine tooth comb before you power it up." ... because it had no video .. well not out of either onboard nor Gt710 15pin VGA, after turning it on and off enough times to mangle the windows install (maybe... it might have been improperly set up or halfassed) I realised the GT710 didn't have it's VGA header plugged properly, it was on a single row of pins, gah... so risked blowing something there maybe with less forgiving monitor.... anyhoo, sorted that, booted... munched windoze.

Not that I could see with the motherboard in the case.

Going to pull the board at some point. I think it actually burnt out the traces for the +12v on the AGP port though, so likely not fixable.

OSkar000 wrote on 2023-06-05, 19:22:

found 2x8mb FPM... not much but enough to boot a system that doesn't run with EDO.

You can mod any EDO module to FPM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk8uEFpYbBw Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-06-05, 19:55:

There are no solder bridges I can find... soon as I turned the PC on I got the magic smoke from near the front of the AGP port. Now it doesn't even recognize when a AGP card is installed, still boots off the integrated graphics.

doesnt have to be visible, might have happened in the connector or inner PCB, most likely shorted power and blew up regulator powering AGP slot on the board

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-06-05, 19:55:

I somehow created a card that blew out the AGP port on my test rig by attempting to reflow the VGA port on a GF2Mx that had a dead blue channel.

There are no solder bridges I can find... I'm honestly more dumbfounded than angry. Like how does reflowing the VGA port cause the card to blow up the AGP port? As soon as I turned the PC on I got the magic smoke from near the front of the AGP port. Now it doesn't even recognize when a AGP card is installed, still boots off the integrated graphics.

Kind of sucks, the nForce2 with Integrated GF440Mx graphics motherboard in that thing is kind of rare, but I have another one held as spare so no big loss to me personally and that IS sort of the job of the test rig, to fall upon its sword in place of a more unique machine if something goes horribly wrong.

You probably did not reflow it smoothly enough. With an uneven solder surface on any voltage rail of the edge connector it would have created a loose connection between the card and the slot, which would in turn create a point of near infinite resistance between the card and the voltage source. V = i x R so the card will try to draw that current through the infinite resistance and cause both overloading of the PSU and overheading of the port destroying the card, the port, and the PSU or some combination of them.

So far I patched the burnt trace,replaced a funny looking cap, with a needle went through between the legs of the ES1868F chip and checked if there is any shorts between them, then made some turn-on tests with an expendable PC, but without monitor. Based on the boot sounds and beeps the card doesn't make a difference in an obviously bad way, nothing blew up.

Not my best soldering job, but seems to be alright for now.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-06-06, 07:55:

OSkar000 wrote on 2023-06-05, 19:22:

found 2x8mb FPM... not much but enough to boot a system that doesn't run with EDO.

You can mod any EDO module to FPM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk8uEFpYbBw Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Thanks! I will give that a try! I have some 16mb EDO modules that I could use for experiments 😀

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 08:31:

You probably did not reflow it smoothly enough. With an uneven solder surface on any voltage rail of the edge connector it would have created a loose connection between the card and the slot, which would in turn create a point of near infinite resistance between the card and the voltage source.

? infinite resistance means open circuit means no power draw at all

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 08:31:

V = i x R so the card will try to draw that current through the infinite resistance and cause both overloading of the PSU and overheading of the port

voltage never goes up, bigger R means smaller i

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-06-06, 11:03:

? infinite resistance means open circuit means no power draw at all […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 08:31:

You probably did not reflow it smoothly enough. With an uneven solder surface on any voltage rail of the edge connector it would have created a loose connection between the card and the slot, which would in turn create a point of near infinite resistance between the card and the voltage source.

? infinite resistance means open circuit means no power draw at all

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 08:31:

V = i x R so the card will try to draw that current through the infinite resistance and cause both overloading of the PSU and overheading of the port

voltage never goes up, bigger R means smaller i

It's OBVIOUSLY not effectively infinite, and I never said it was INFINITE, I said it was NEAR INFINITE, which means it would be a (possibly intermittent) VERY, VERY, VERY high resistance area in the voltage circuit.

I also never said Voltage would go up, I said the card would try to draw the current through that resistance regardless. It would result in a huge thermal issue at the contact area, and as the heat builds it would eventually overload the PSU and destroy the slot/card.

I really think you either have a reading comprehension problem or are just an overall asshole.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 12:02:

It's OBVIOUSLY not effectively infinite, and I never said it was INFINITE, I said it was NEAR INFINITE, which means it would be […]
Show full quote

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-06-06, 11:03:

? infinite resistance means open circuit means no power draw at all […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 08:31:

You probably did not reflow it smoothly enough. With an uneven solder surface on any voltage rail of the edge connector it would have created a loose connection between the card and the slot, which would in turn create a point of near infinite resistance between the card and the voltage source.

? infinite resistance means open circuit means no power draw at all

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 08:31:

V = i x R so the card will try to draw that current through the infinite resistance and cause both overloading of the PSU and overheading of the port

voltage never goes up, bigger R means smaller i

It's OBVIOUSLY not effectively infinite, and I never said it was INFINITE, I said it was NEAR INFINITE, which means it would be a (possibly intermittent) VERY, VERY, VERY high resistance area in the voltage circuit.

I also never said Voltage would go up, I said the card would try to draw the current through that resistance regardless. It would result in a huge thermal issue at the contact area, and as the heat builds it would eventually overload the PSU and destroy the slot/card.

I really think you either have a reading comprehension problem or are just an overall asshole.

Near infinite or 100,000 ohms across a power rail, or in series circuit to load is gonna do practically nothing. I = V/R

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-06-06, 13:23:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 12:02:

It's OBVIOUSLY not effectively infinite, and I never said it was INFINITE, I said it was NEAR INFINITE, which means it would be […]
Show full quote

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-06-06, 11:03:

? infinite resistance means open circuit means no power draw at all

voltage never goes up, bigger R means smaller i

It's OBVIOUSLY not effectively infinite, and I never said it was INFINITE, I said it was NEAR INFINITE, which means it would be a (possibly intermittent) VERY, VERY, VERY high resistance area in the voltage circuit.

I also never said Voltage would go up, I said the card would try to draw the current through that resistance regardless. It would result in a huge thermal issue at the contact area, and as the heat builds it would eventually overload the PSU and destroy the slot/card.

I really think you either have a reading comprehension problem or are just an overall asshole.

Near infinite or 100,000 ohms across a power rail, or in series circuit to load is gonna do practically nothing. I = V/R

Depends on the power rail, the ISA slot has 2 5V rails for example, and if both are being used and one is intermittently going up to 100KR and then dropping to 0R, well.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 12:02:

It's OBVIOUSLY not effectively infinite, and I never said it was INFINITE, I said it was NEAR INFINITE, which means it would be a (possibly intermittent) VERY, VERY, VERY high resistance area in the voltage circuit.

Your tongue has "NEAR INFINITE" resistance (~1Mohm), if you lick 5V power rail you will feel whole 5 uAmps flowing thru you (micro, 5 zeroes after the dot).

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 12:02:

I also never said Voltage would go up

ok, so voltage stays the same, resistance is "NEAR INFINITE" meaning amps are "INFINITESIMAL". Where does the energy come from to cause "huge thermal issue"?

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 12:02:

overall asshole.

some people interpreted being factually correct in weird emotional ways 😐

Finished soldering of this beauty from Labs. If somebody is interested - more details in his topic (BlasterBoard 2.0). Very nice card, perfect match for 80386.

OSkar000 wrote on 2023-06-06, 10:48:

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-06-06, 07:55:

OSkar000 wrote on 2023-06-05, 19:22:

found 2x8mb FPM... not much but enough to boot a system that doesn't run with EDO.

You can mod any EDO module to FPM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk8uEFpYbBw Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Thanks! I will give that a try! I have some 16mb EDO modules that I could use for experiments 😀

Good luck with it, the two sticks I modified are still working happily and pass memtest on that 486 board 😀
Apparently it can work for the larger 16-bit 42-pin SoJ modules too, you just have to link the nearest !CAS line to the !OE pin.

I have had such an ordeal! I've been trying to get a working screen for my Toshiba Satellite 400CDT since the lower 1/4 row of pixels didn't work - I bought a 'new' replacement LCD from focus_memory on thebay and that replacement LCD had the same fault and had some really weird flickering problem. They sent me a new one which worked for almost a whole game of solitaire then it blanked out never to work again.
I just can't deal with getting either of these sent back or replaced again and I bet the seller would hate me for it too. The return was about to close anyway so I dove into both displays.

Display 1: Taking the metal front off, there was some weird black tape over one of the row-segment drivers - this LCD isn't new or old-stock at all and has been repaired! unlike my first display where the row-segment was corroded off from a drink spill, this one's row segment driver was a clean break on the actual pins that are soldered to the controller rather than the part that's glued onto the LCD panel. So I put the fine tip on my iron and used a PCB scrap to push down the flex PCB of the row-segment driver onto the control PCB and soldered it down. Now LCD #1 is working! if I'd opened it up before I could've saved weeks and the LCD is really nice now that it works.
The flickering problem? This LCD panel has 3x control boards, one with the main processory chip and the row-segment drivers, one with the column-segment drivers and a PCB that looks like it generates some voltages and other signals. The broken LCD panel that was in this laptop to start with I kept the parts of it for future use, good thing I did because they fixed two LCD panels... The voltages board has 6x small variable resistor trim-pots and adjusting them while the laptop is on can do some odd things, reduce/increase flickering, brighten/darken the panel, introduce ghosting. The parts-panel I had, I swapped the voltages-board from that and the display looked great.
But I don't want to waste this part on this LCD, so I initially measured the trimpot values and tried to match on this LCD's original voltages-board. That worked, but what worked better was just visually matching the positions. I guess there are enough capacitors and other things in the circuits that measuring values in circuit won't work. But these are 1x turn tiny trimpots so just matching them up visually meant the original voltages-board from this LCD can be used.
At least with the refurbishing they fit a new front polariser so polariser-breakdown is a long way away for this panel and it looks fantastic.

Display 2: Looking at the back of this LCD that turned white mid-use, it appears to have been in the ocean for a while. All of the chips on the 3x control boards and their board-to-board connectors have corrosion. And the plastic part of the LCD was all smashed up. Really glad I kept panel 0 for parts.
At this point I'm very familiar with the LTM10C021 panel from Toshiba. It's way less integrated than later panels and uses 2x board-to-board connectors, lots of failure points where corrosion gets. So again I used the parts from the broken display panel to make this one work, taking the voltages-board and replacing a board-to-board connector which ugh, actually required using the microscope. It worked after I cleared all the shorts.
Of course my work on it was a bit heavy-handed and the chip-on-film connector for one of the column-segment drivers got separated from the glass a little, so there's a bunch of funny coloured strips on the right-most columns of the panel, but it works again!!
So to fix that, I used some of the rubber strip that from the parts-panel that's used to stop dust-ingress. Cut that up to fit the last column-segment driver and layered a few of these little rubber strips, now with the metal front in place, that presses down the mylar flex-pcb onto the LCD glass's contacts and the rightmost part of the display looks good again.

An ordeal, but at the end of the day I bought one panel and now I have 2x working panels, so okay. Focus_memory handled my complaint pretty well but the selection of available parts for old computers is getting rather limited.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-06-06, 08:31:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-06-05, 19:55:

I somehow created a card that blew out the AGP port on my test rig by attempting to reflow the VGA port on a GF2Mx that had a dead blue channel.

There are no solder bridges I can find... I'm honestly more dumbfounded than angry. Like how does reflowing the VGA port cause the card to blow up the AGP port? As soon as I turned the PC on I got the magic smoke from near the front of the AGP port. Now it doesn't even recognize when a AGP card is installed, still boots off the integrated graphics.

Kind of sucks, the nForce2 with Integrated GF440Mx graphics motherboard in that thing is kind of rare, but I have another one held as spare so no big loss to me personally and that IS sort of the job of the test rig, to fall upon its sword in place of a more unique machine if something goes horribly wrong.

You probably did not reflow it smoothly enough. With an uneven solder surface on any voltage rail of the edge connector it would have created a loose connection between the card and the slot, which would in turn create a point of near infinite resistance between the card and the voltage source. V = i x R so the card will try to draw that current through the infinite resistance and cause both overloading of the PSU and overheading of the port destroying the card, the port, and the PSU or some combination of them.

PSUs fine
AGP interface is clearly OK as the Integrated 440MX still works
Board otherwise works.

So just the physical port itself. I suspect the card too but its a card with a value of $10, so needless to say I'm not offering up another board to the GPU gods to find out.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-06-04, 18:22:

Say does anyone remember what this game is? I asked on Reddit a few years ago but nobody ever could tell me what it was. This is a either DOS or early Windows game I played when I was really young

The main things I remember are that it had a ludicris number of discs, and that the discs came in a binder sort of like the binder like Phantasmagoria or the software bundles new PCs used to come with.
The very first thing that I remember happening in the game was some sort of escape or maybe chase sequence that if you failed you blew up. I want to say you were re-entering a planets atmosphere in an escape pod. Right after that your in some sort of industrial base/military looking area with a lot of lava.

Is it Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair from Disney? Remember ing it large , 1CD back when evrything was floppy....

or Dragon Lore II: The Heart of the Dragon Man ? (3xCD's in 1996)

or how about Dragon's Lair from 1993 (1 full CD)

I replaced 1MB of DIPP memory with 4MB of SIPP memory in my 286.

I had been looking for 4MB of SIPP memory and came across it a few weeks back for not to expensive of a price, so I grabbed it. Not much software for a 286 makes use of it but its cool nonetheless to have it installed. 😀

Some info about the set up for those interested, the board is a run of the mill 286 but it is in really good condition, the battery was literally pulled off by the looks of it (I still need to clean that up). It has an ET4000 based video card and an original Sound Blaster 2.0 with CM/S. It probably my favourite machine as I like to program graphics and sound stuff in assembly language specifically for the 286.

In the last photo you see the case it is in. It's a low profile case and I managed to get two of them at the time, new old stock. As you can see in the line-up, I use a "slide in, slide out" system where when I want to tinker with a machine I slide it out and hook it up. When done (or weekend is over) I unhook and slide it back it it's place. It's pretty good system as I used to have a KVM system, waaaaay to many cables etc.

Against the wall, from front to back there is a 386DX-40 based system (same low profile case) with a Cirrus Logic VGA and a Sound Blaster Pro 2, next a 386SX-20 based system Trident VGA and PAS16, then a 486DX-100 with an S3 VGA/PCI (but can run VLB as well), a GUS and SB16 VT1740. Finally a case for what is going to be a Pentium based system (TBD).

Pictures or it didn't happen...