2.88 floppy drive. And more of that - pack of floppies for it 😀

That will be the second one drive, the first one I bought for a really small price. The one from IBM with power driven from FDD data cable. Luckily works with help of Sergey's Kiselev adapter. And the new drive of Matsushita from year 1995 has standard power connector.

rkurbatov wrote on 2023-07-19, 20:58:

2.88 floppy drive. And more of that - pack of floppies for it 😀

That will be the second one drive, the first one I bought for a really small price. The one from IBM with power driven from FDD data cable. Luckily works with help of Sergey's Kiselev adapter. And the new drive of Matsushita from year 1995 has standard power connector.

Wanna share any pics? 🙂
1995 is, iirc, fairly late for a 2.88MB drive. The 2.88MB drives with standard power connector were much harder to find than the IBM ones, good find I'd say 😀

Sure.

The first drive was really cheap, so I got it on local shop without even noticing it did not have power connector.

But then I found this adaptor and got it working - it has special jumper providing power to such type of drives (has to be unset for ordinary drives)

So when I tested it and it was working, I could not resist to get the second combo - drive + floppies. That's quite expensive - $175, but judging on rarity of such things - yay 😀

Managed to snatch this beauty, I consider this the best looking card of all time. And I don't have even a computer to put it in (yet), but it looks oh so fancy in the box so I could not resist...

I got an oscilloscope, finally. It is not much, but it is mine..

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-07-20, 19:57:

Managed to snatch this beauty, I consider this the best looking card of all time. And I don't have even a computer to put it in (yet), but it looks oh so fancy in the box so I could not resist...

Juli@, my love. I bought it back in 2007 and was using until the very last build but now my both working/gaming PCs don't have PCIs (micro ITX builds), so I have planned special build for this little one.

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-07-20, 19:57:

Managed to snatch this beauty, I consider this the best looking card of all time. And I don't have even a computer to put it in (yet), but it looks oh so fancy in the box so I could not resist...

I really can't argue that. That's one beautiful card!

rkurbatov wrote on 2023-07-20, 20:34:

Juli@, my love. I bought it back in 2007

I remember drooling for it back then but ended up buying a cheaper M-Audio instead, so finally I can have one, just 15 years late 😀

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-07-20, 21:12:

rkurbatov wrote on 2023-07-20, 20:34:

Juli@, my love. I bought it back in 2007

I remember drooling for it back then but ended up buying a cheaper M-Audio instead, so finally I can have one, just 15 years late 😀

I suppose most of us are such droolers from the past. From Pentium Pro to SCSI hard drive, from Voodoo to extra 8 megabytes of that stupid SIMM memory.

Like they say, you can become a billionaire, but you remain the boy without the bicycle. I feel such a boy after all these years 😒

rkurbatov wrote on 2023-07-20, 20:34:

doublebuffer wrote on 2023-07-20, 19:57:

Managed to snatch this beauty, I consider this the best looking card of all time. And I don't have even a computer to put it in (yet), but it looks oh so fancy in the box so I could not resist...

Juli@, my love. I bought it back in 2007 and was using until the very last build but now my both working/gaming PCs don't have PCIs (micro ITX builds), so I have planned special build for this little one.

If drivers permit, you can also use one of those PciE to PCI adapters.

weedeewee wrote on 2023-07-20, 21:54:

If drivers permit, you can also use one of those PciE to PCI adapters.

It belongs to Win98 and GigaStudio.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-20, 20:26:

I got an oscilloscope, finally. It is not much, but it is mine..

Aside from my 4 channel 200MHz bench scope I also have this exact same handheld model. It can be really handy that it's powered from batteries and is floating if you're measuring on switching PSU's for instance.
As long as you're aware of the exaggerated specifications and know the limitations it's really a quite usable device that works well up to 20-25MHz.

rkurbatov wrote on 2023-07-20, 08:51:

Sure. […]
Show full quote

Sure.

The first drive was really cheap, so I got it on local shop without even noticing it did not have power connector.

But then I found this adaptor and got it working - it has special jumper providing power to such type of drives (has to be unset for ordinary drives)

So when I tested it and it was working, I could not resist to get the second combo - drive + floppies. That's quite expensive - $175, but judging on rarity of such things - yay 😀

Oh, lordy, I have one of those PREHISTORIC Mitsubishi floppy drives.

Is that thing OLD or not, idk 😁

Salient wrote on 2023-07-21, 05:06:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-20, 20:26:

I got an oscilloscope, finally. It is not much, but it is mine..

Aside from my 4 channel 200MHz bench scope I also have this exact same handheld model. It can be really handy that it's powered from batteries and is floating if you're measuring on switching PSU's for instance.
As long as you're aware of the exaggerated specifications and know the limitations it's really a quite usable device that works well up to 20-25MHz.

I'm kind of hoping it is useful up to 40MHz.. Beyond is not my concern at this point 😀

appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-21, 06:11:

Salient wrote on 2023-07-21, 05:06:

appiah4 wrote on 2023-07-20, 20:26:

I got an oscilloscope, finally. It is not much, but it is mine..

Aside from my 4 channel 200MHz bench scope I also have this exact same handheld model. It can be really handy that it's powered from batteries and is floating if you're measuring on switching PSU's for instance.
As long as you're aware of the exaggerated specifications and know the limitations it's really a quite usable device that works well up to 20-25MHz.

I'm kind of hoping it is useful up to 40MHz.. Beyond is not my concern at this point 😀

For sine waves it's reasonably usable up to around 60MHz, where the 3dB point will be reached. However, the stability of the waveform starts to seriously suffer from 25-30MHz and up.
For square waves it's fairly usable up to 15-20'ish MHz until they start looking like sinewaves.
I do still like it though because of it's portability and a lot of times there is really no need for such high bandwidths when doing some repairs on old stuff like 8 bit machines or so.

Recent adventures in 3D graphics card collecting.

* Bought an ATI X1300 AGP. Didn't work, returned and refunded. Seems to be the median card buying experience on eBay lately. I'd say every other card I buy shows up dead. Annoying but the X1300 is well the X1300 so another will show up a good price at some point. I already have it in PCI and PCIe flavors.
* Bought a Radeon 8500DV All in Wonder for $30, waiting for it to show up. 230/190mhz part, down from the 8500s 275/275 but for $30 given the fact that full 8500s seem unobtainable now I'm not complaining. Assuming it works.
* Then earlier today a Radeon 9100 128MB got listed in another group I'm a part of for $25 shipped. Its a 250/250 part but it uses the full speed 3.3ns memory of a normal 8500 so I'm hoping I can OC it to full 8500 clocks. This is actually an interesting card. In theory its the lowest man on the totem pole in terms of the 9000 series family, but by all available hardware specs it should be faster than a 9200 series card, albeit lacking DX9a support. It seems not a great number of these were ever made.

Anyone else noticing eBay sellers seem to have a much higher DOA rate than a few years ago? I'm wondering how much of it is sellers becoming less ethical, and how much of it is cards aging out into the non working category due to bad caps, weakened solder joints, etc. It just occurred to me today that even these relatively "modern" vintage GPUs that I collect are all over 20 years old now. Like for a minute I've just kind of assumed they were lying about testing stuff more, but now I wonder if theyve always been lying but stuff used to just be more likely to work.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-07-21, 19:23:

Anyone else noticing eBay sellers seem to have a much higher DOA rate than a few years ago?

If it's untested: it's tested but it was faulty so they're just offloading junk.
If it's tested: it works but they cheap out on shipping materials so it arrives dented and cracked.
If it's tested and arrives in pristine condition: finally a decent seller, no extra Xanax for me today, yay!

Mandrew wrote on 2023-07-21, 19:46:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-07-21, 19:23:

Anyone else noticing eBay sellers seem to have a much higher DOA rate than a few years ago?

If it's untested: it's tested but it was faulty so they're just offloading junk.

Take a look at their other listings for clues about that, if they are selling low value items tested, and this usually higher value item untested then you gotta wonder why it "wasn't worth their time" when tested it would have made $40 or $50 more and they're testing $5 stuff.

I do give them a pass if their other stuff looks like modern era, and the untested part is stuff that won't plug into the same stuff the rest of the stuff they are selling does, and have been lucky with that so far.

I am very glad that i got this guy last week.

PC-Engineer wrote on 2023-07-21, 20:41:

I am very glad that i got this guy last week.

Do you mind me asking what is that? Looks like Pentium MMX but clearly isn't, curious.