My retro activity is that I'm still posting to this forum nearly 20 years later. Thanks for keeping this going for all these years!

Other than that, my retro collecting has slowed, I just enjoy what I have. The last major thing I did was build a Mister Multisystem for loading old games on. It is fantastic. I'm very fond of the 486 core on it, and regularly load up old games on it.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-08-21, 17:03:

DSC_5787.JPG […]
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DSC_5787.JPG

Replacing the chips on my MS-6168 V2 board to get 16MB of video memory.

First boot:
DSC_5789.JPG
Oops. Somewhere a loose contact, when I press a chip, the output changes.

Need flux paste. Without this you will have dry joints and difficult to solder.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-08-21, 18:11:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-08-21, 17:03:

DSC_5787.JPG […]
Show full quote

DSC_5787.JPG

Replacing the chips on my MS-6168 V2 board to get 16MB of video memory.

First boot:
DSC_5789.JPG
Oops. Somewhere a loose contact, when I press a chip, the output changes.

Need flux paste. Without this you will have dry joints and difficult to solder.

Cheers,

I used No-clean liquid flux. Maybe paste is better. Thanks!

Finished the main story of Privateer on my 486 DX2-66. I believe I never finished it back in the day after I got the alien gun as I didn't know how to proceed
Now on to Righteous Fire!

PD2JK wrote on 2023-08-21, 18:30:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-08-21, 18:11:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-08-21, 17:03:

DSC_5787.JPG […]
Show full quote

DSC_5787.JPG

Replacing the chips on my MS-6168 V2 board to get 16MB of video memory.

First boot:
DSC_5789.JPG
Oops. Somewhere a loose contact, when I press a chip, the output changes.

Need flux paste. Without this you will have dry joints and difficult to solder.

Cheers,

I used No-clean liquid flux. Maybe paste is better. Thanks!

Hi,
Liquid flux is *less* flux and not as good. No clean flux paste works so much better and gives you lot more flux. Much is better than little since you will clean up the flux anyway. Get genuine Amtech 559 or consumer version but still is 559 in different tube, from ebay. Less smelly, easy to clean up and resists high temps. Only one seller has them real deal. Get these from this auction. 10g syringe.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/175803200551?hash=ite … cYAAOSwZxFkpMSv

Chinese is much smelly and noxious stench.

Cheers,

Performed a successful experiment with the antique plotter today.

Reloaded some Pentel RSVP pens with diluted ink (diluted with glycerol), to get 50% and 25% value pens.

1453minutes and 33 seconds later, I had this.

A day to print that? Glad I never used a plotter as my primary printer 😀

wierd_w wrote on 2023-08-21, 21:17:

Performed a successful experiment with the antique plotter today. […]
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Performed a successful experiment with the antique plotter today.

Reloaded some Pentel RSVP pens with diluted ink (diluted with glycerol), to get 50% and 25% value pens.

1453minutes and 33 seconds later, I had this.

Oh that is super cool! Love it! 😁

wierd_w wrote on 2023-08-21, 21:17:

Performed a successful experiment with the antique plotter today. […]
Show full quote

Performed a successful experiment with the antique plotter today.

Reloaded some Pentel RSVP pens with diluted ink (diluted with glycerol), to get 50% and 25% value pens.

1453minutes and 33 seconds later, I had this.

This is awesome. Now I want one!

If you ever need ideas for stuff to print, you might want to check out various pictures made using generative art. This type of art is made using computer algorithms and mathematical formulas. The actual art pieces that I've seen in books are often described as having been printed using a pen plotter, so I think some of them would be suitable.

Here's a website that aims to recreate some of the classic images from the 70s:
http://recodeproject.com/

The images posted on the website aren't the highest resolution, but you can use the filter to find recreations that run in a browser.

If you are interested, here's a website with lots of modern examples:

https://www.generativehut.com/

I started testing this ECS UV486 motherboard and DX4-100 overdrive processor I got recently.

The board worked fine with a DX-33 and DX2-66 processors. However, when trying the DX4-100, during bootup into DOS it would halt with a "parity error".

On a whim I decided to try a newer BIOS chip from another ECS board that uses the same chipset. That worked, and the system was able to boot just fine.

However, it doesn't detect the L2 cache. Doing some research apparently this is an issue with this chipset that can be solved with a different BIOS. So I've order some EEPROM chips and will hopefully be able to try flashing a new BIOS once I receive those.

I was testing out the GamePort PCMCIA card on my Toshiba Satellite Pro T2150CDT and decided to try to use the bottom slot. Long story short, the pins got bent and when I tried to get them straightened out, they snapped off.

I have a dead 400CDT that's unrepairable that I can remove the PCMCIA slots off of that one and place it in the T2150CDT unit.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2023-08-22, 05:03:

I was testing out the GamePort PCMCIA card on my Toshiba Satellite Pro T2150CDT and decided to try to use the bottom slot. Long story short, the pins got bent and when I tried to get them straightened out, they snapped off.

I have a dead 400CDT that's unrepairable that I can remove the PCMCIA slots off of that one and place it in the T2150CDT unit.

The PCMCIA part is soldered to the board on the T2150CDT and it's a different part from what's on the 400 series, you need a dead T21xx board as a donor. It'll take a while too, the PCMCIA on the T21xx is through hole soldered from what I recall. The front eject pins can be split from the back pins, but the pins require soldering to swap out.

The 400 series uses surface mount and I think a fully removable/replaceable pcmcia slot.

Well the 3rd 9700 Pro arrived, same story as the others, massive artifacting. Refunded.

I give up, I actually don't think there are any working 9700 Pro cards left in the wild. Unless I find a fellow enthusiast selling one, this is clearly a waste of time.

Back to the drawing board... To be certain the memory chips are good, I got a fresh G400 on the way which I will be testing first.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-08-22, 12:53:

Well the 3rd 9700 Pro arrived, same story as the others, massive artifacting. Refunded.

I give up, I actually don't think there are any working 9700 Pro cards left in the wild. Unless I find a fellow enthusiast selling one, this is clearly a waste of time.

Wasn't there some flaw in these where the heatsink ended up floating above the die?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-08-22, 12:53:

Well the 3rd 9700 Pro arrived, same story as the others, massive artifacting. Refunded.

I give up, I actually don't think there are any working 9700 Pro cards left in the wild. Unless I find a fellow enthusiast selling one, this is clearly a waste of time.

They're from probably early in the lead-free soldering era with a high pin count, lots of electronics from ~2003 broke because of that. They'll maybe work with the GPU & RAM reballed. 😀
But then again, it was a decent enough graphics card that people would've used it til the day it stopped working, so who knows. I do think it's solder + hot components though. Probably 100% of them will eventually need re-work.

I was testing out my ISA VGA card collection which I didn't realise had so many items in it at this point! The Oak OTI087 result really surprised me, I thought it was a really slow card and had it paired with my 386SX-40 computer, but that's a waste of it. Tempted to try putting the extra 512KB of RAM on it now.

Good thing I did this too, I found a load of corrosion on the Trident 8900CL-B card's RAMDAC that caused the display to go all crazy. It turns out this is also a fast ISA card once the 0-wait states setting is enabled, pretty good for a VGA card that can do 8-bit too.

See how well it does in Doom as well. I found that ISA cards can be both fast in Quake and slow in Doom at the same time.

Why is Doom slow but Quake fast on my Tseng Labs ET4000?

Hard Drive Organization and Installing Programs. Copying stuff over from the Versa M/75 to the NanTan FMA3500, and trying some sick experiments on the M/75's Win95 install (Running The Sims.....hehehehe). Also, setup a VM for my newer Windows games that don't quite cut the mustard in Wine.

Today I fixed the dell 5820 boot sequence & cleaned the salvaged Pac_man pc

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-08-22, 15:38:

They're from probably early in the lead-free soldering era with a high pin count, lots of electronics from ~2003 broke because o […]
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TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2023-08-22, 12:53:

Well the 3rd 9700 Pro arrived, same story as the others, massive artifacting. Refunded.

I give up, I actually don't think there are any working 9700 Pro cards left in the wild. Unless I find a fellow enthusiast selling one, this is clearly a waste of time.

They're from probably early in the lead-free soldering era with a high pin count, lots of electronics from ~2003 broke because of that. They'll maybe work with the GPU & RAM reballed. 😀
But then again, it was a decent enough graphics card that people would've used it til the day it stopped working, so who knows. I do think it's solder + hot components though. Probably 100% of them will eventually need re-work.

I was testing out my ISA VGA card collection which I didn't realise had so many items in it at this point! The Oak OTI087 result really surprised me, I thought it was a really slow card and had it paired with my 386SX-40 computer, but that's a waste of it. Tempted to try putting the extra 512KB of RAM on it now.
QuakeBenchmarks-ISA-VGA.png

Good thing I did this too, I found a load of corrosion on the Trident 8900CL-B card's RAMDAC that caused the display to go all crazy. It turns out this is also a fast ISA card once the 0-wait states setting is enabled, pretty good for a VGA card that can do 8-bit too.
IMG_1750 (Custom).JPG

Hello, could you please specify the jumper you changed to enable 0-wait states on the card? I have a Trident Quadtel TVGA8900CL 1MB 16-bit ISA but didn't find a jumper for that option in the manual. Thanks!