PcBytes wrote on 2023-10-08, 21:20:

Speaking of ABIT... rebuilt this old one. BE6-II rev1 + P3 650.

I have 2 modified slotkets yet none are stable with Coppermine chips so I'll just stick to the normal slot variant.

Isn't it very close to the BH6 construction wise? I ran one of those with a 600 @ 900 Celeron on some generic slotket rock stable...

Today was a mixed bag of retro computing...

Thanks to vogons user @Balog i now have a second FastRAM Card and a 287 co-processor for my ast premium 286.

First good news:
The 287 co-processor works perfectly fine.

I removed the "jumper" co-processor and installed the new one. That was simple.

The FastRAM card itself works. It detects the 512k ram and works.
Now the Problem:
If i install both fast ram cards only one card works. You can set the switches for first/second card and give each one an address.
Each card for itself works (mine with 1MB and the other one with 512k). But i cant get the to work together.

My theory is that the first card has to be fully populated before the second card is used. But i have not enough memory chips (missing at least 36 chips to test this theory)...

At least i know the second card works.

Now the really bad news.
I think i have killed the 5 1/4 floppy drive.
While i was tinkering with the computer i wanted to boot from a 3 1/2 floppy.
I connected the floppy drive to the system but i reversed the data cable.
I noticed the drive lights are both on and turned off the computer.
I turned around the data cable and started again.
From that moment i can not get the 5 1/4 drive to read disks.
The drive seeks normal on bootup, and when i want to read from it it starts to spin , drops the head and after 5-10 seconds i get a general reading error.

Does somebody have an idea what could be blown? here are some pictures of the drive.

vutt wrote on 2023-10-08, 10:28:

Oh well, it's one of those days I knew it will come. I cant recall over past 6+ years hardware dying on me. Now it happened and […]
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vutt wrote on 2023-10-06, 16:15:

Playing around with recently acquired S3 VLB card. This is beast for 1994. So far ahead of time that it's not even VESA compatib […]
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Playing around with recently acquired S3 VLB card.
This is beast for 1994. So far ahead of time that it's not even VESA compatible out of the box. Compared to 1MB GD5428 I own clearly step up.
I mean 100Hz refresh rates across the board. With 2MB VRAM 1024x768x64k is possible. I could only imagine how expensive CRT monitor it required to drive back in 1994.
Well it turned out to be by far my most expensive ebay purchase (so far). There is always someone who wants it as well...

speas3.jpg

Oh well, it's one of those days I knew it will come. I cant recall over past 6+ years hardware dying on me. Now it happened and of course it's my most expensive purchase. 🤣
No picture today while booting today. Quick voltage check on BIOS and ram chips suggest no issue with power. I could not find RAMDAC datasheet, but it gets warm so power is present. S3 main chip is however cold.
Need to do more digging. Should probably try to read eprom chip externally...
I have no experience troubleshooting video cards... ...I guess now I have good opportunity to put my small home lab equipment into use and try to learn something new...

I had an issue with a VLB video card not outputting video that turned out to be a short on the crystal.

With luck, whatever failed on yours might be something simple to fix.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-10-08, 21:20:

Speaking of ABIT... rebuilt this old one. BE6-II rev1 + P3 650.

I have 2 modified slotkets yet none are stable with Coppermine chips so I'll just stick to the normal slot variant.

Have one of those boards. There is like 20+ caps around the slot, and most of them are junk.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-06, 21:36:

Sorted a bunch of hardware today in an effort to keep things better organized.

Very nice. Where do you source anti-static bags from? (*bay or ?).

stef80 wrote on 2023-10-09, 07:34:

Have one of those boards. There is like 20+ caps around the slot, and most of them are junk.

Mine is "polymodded" for the most part. I kept a few Panasonic caps from my first recap on it though.

can you share pics?

Sure.

stef80 wrote on 2023-10-09, 07:34:

Very nice. Where do you source anti-static bags from? (*bay or ?).

Amazon

I decided a while ago that I wanted to learn how to solder and I finally got around to it. For baby's first soldering project, I warmed up by fixing a broken wire on a PC speaker. Then for the thing I actually wanted to do: rewire the DB9 on a mobo serial port cable to switch it from AT/Everex to DKT/Intel.

So, I figured out a lot of things pretty quickly and managed to get something done that I was happy with and it works! (Not so happy to share a pic though 😉). I wasn't prepared for just how shaky my hands were! I def need some kind of stand to hold things while I work on them. Could also use a rec for a decent pair of wire strippers. I also need to learn more about flux - when to use it and how much, and if the little cute pen style I got is good enough for everything.

Spent a frustrating couple days trying to get sound cards to play nice in Windows 95.

I'm trying to build a 1997 period-correct setup and using a Diamond Monster MX100 as one of my sound cards. Unfortunately, after installing and testing the one I have, it has wavetable MIDI playback issues where it won't play back the left channel audio. It produces faint distorted audio instead. This only affects wavetable MIDI audio; digital audio is perfectly fine.

In contrast, the MX200 sound card works perfectly fine. I suspect the issue might be the SMD capicitor that sits between the wavetable header output and the AD1843JS chip. Alternatively, it might be the AD1843JS chip itself. But I won't know without further testing.

Then I tried to get a RAP-10 card installed and that also proved to be a disaster. While I could get the RAP-10 to work by itself, trying to install both a Diamond Monster Sound and RAP-10 resulted in a bunch of unresolvable hardware conflicts.

Making things more challenging is the RAP-10's lack of a proper Windows 95 driver (it only has a Windows 3.1 driver). After repeated attempts to remove the drivers, I ended up with no audio working whatsoever.

At this point, I nuked the entire Windows 95 install and will be starting over. 😒

ubiq wrote on 2023-10-09, 20:54:

I also need to learn more about flux - when to use it and how much, and if the little cute pen style I got is good enough for everything.

My experience is that good quality flux is worth it (I like ChipQuik's tacky flux). And if you're ever wondering if you need more, the answer is usually yes. 😁

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-09, 21:04:

My experience is that good quality flux is worth it (I like ChipQuik's tacky flux). And if you're ever wondering if you need more, the answer is usually yes. 😁

Good flux makes an enormous difference with the quality of solder joint. Can't get a good joint? You've probably evaporated all the flux. Add a dab, apply heat, bam! Now you've got a good joint.

I use ChipQuik's tacky flux as well. It's the only flux I trust to get the job done. It also removes very easily afterwards with rubbing alcohol. There are cheaper fluxes that may work as well, but sometimes they can be impossible to clean up or leave residue that clings to the board once it dries. Have you ever seen that solid white detritus on cheap PCBs ordered from China? This is from the flux that didn't wash off, if they washed it at all.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-10-09, 23:28:

Good flux ...

I am using liquid flux and i have to say its horrible. Maybe its just the brand i am using but i really do not like that.
It always runs everywhere, just not where it should help... even before the heat.
My the next one will be tacky again.

I tried liquid flux once and never again. Tacky flux is the only good kind of flux, in my opinion. Flux pens are alright in a pinch.

Liquid flux is really for BGA and even then it's not great, like you say it just gets everywhere. Most pros I've seen on Youtube do also use the tacky flux for most BGA stuff.
I'm on the fence about making a big Mouser order for supplies and flux - I've been using SMD291 which is a no-clean flux, but want to get some more powerful flux that isn't no-clean, the number of flux types just from chip-quik is mind boggling.

Today I remembered that I've been in posession of an original Creative Soundblaster 2.0 (or Pro 1/2, early soundblaster 16) bracket for a whole year and didn't copy the design of it! So I've updated my 3d printed bracket using the dimensions of the original, I was 0.8mm off 😁
https://www.printables.com/model/176794-creat … retro-isa-pc-so
Should be a much better fit on more cards now, my original the tolerances were unnecessarily tight, making them a tough fit on some cards.

Can also attest tac-flux is the way to go for BGA. I've tried using liquid and it didn't even do jack.

I managed to blow up my c:\ fat 😂

Look like if you fill all the XMS while on win3.1 (working on a memory tester for my chipset patcher application), Well, Win3.1 don't like that and acted extremely weird then crashed the system.

Upton rebooting, my DEV folder with my code was GONE (see DEV folder "loop" in screenshot, of course scandisk could not fix it as it insisted of fixing each "dev" subfolders in the infinite folder loop).

So I ended up doing some archeology...

1 - Booted Slackware 8.1 boot floppies (it have DD and can mount FAT partitions)
2 - I did run DD to dump my C:\ into a file in one of my other partition
3 - I then booted normally on the broken fat and proceeded to upload my dump to the network
4 - I opened the dump with a basic text editor, and used search functions to find sentences I did put in my code
5 - I managed to recover ALL my source code... It was literally all over the place, I would have thought that if you save, the identical part of the file would stay in the same location but I think it does save all the file over again at a different location, in many many many many chunks.

I should probably backup more often than the ~weekly "Ghost" to the network...
Now I think I will have to save my config.sys and autoexec.bat then restore the partition from the latest ghost image, I don't think it can be trusted anymore 🤣

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-10-08, 00:35:

creepingnet wrote on 2023-10-06, 22:40:

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-15, 03:13:

I wonder if it's already going to the modem audio pin and is just muted with no modem activity.

Just revisited this one today involving my M/75 and the KXL-D20 card. IT looks like pin 62 (pin for audio out to internal speaker) goes to a NEC 62522 Gate Array chip. Not sure what modem audio it would be using, since there is none, but could be a mixback of some sort too - but that'd mean possibly risking the laptop, or finding the pinout of the Qlogic FAS408 SCSI Controller chip and tracing the lines from there back to the connector.

So I did some more prodding around with a VOM in there, found that pin 62 (the pin for Speaker out in PCMCIA) goes to the fifth pin down on the right side of the NEC 62522 Gate Array chip. Tried looking at some datasheets for that chip, could not make heads or tails of it.....but I think I might be able to bodge it in with some careful soldering though to that pin - and then test with the laptop.

Thanks for sharing the pictures, I don't think I've seen the inside of one of those cards before.

Just found out that Deus Ex sounds pretty interesting when you play it on a Soundblaster Pro 2.0, the speech all sounds like Half-Life or a poor quality VoIP call 😀 Even the music sounds pretty wonky

🤣, I might have to try that. I remember certain Aztech cards from Packard Bell, like a Reveal card I had, used to have a bad version of the hanging note bug that made Stan's Previously Used Coffins in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge slowly degenerate into a cacophony of hilarious proportions. It seemed like each instrument was shuffling forward a measure and a half at a time until nothing made sense!

I don't think the mod worked out, I'm getting audio from it, but it stopped detecting with that jumper attached. May have to just wire up some kind of speaker(s) to make it work, maybe an audio port to line-in so it will output through the PC via hardware loopback. That'll be a bit more labor intensive TBH, but the NEC Versa M/75 it's going into is going to be one of my Forever Laptops (the NanTan FMAK9200C is my other one). I need to fix some plastic on the NEC again anyway. Been tempted to do a Bithead1000 acrylic Acrylic Versa build with it if the case gets too messed up. I'm also waiting for my finances to get a little better so I can order a touch screen panel from China to finsih the "touch screen" part of the Versa. Thinking some Bob-Ross style VGA artwork videos in Graf-X II might be fun on YouTube.

Rav wrote on 2023-10-10, 18:43:

I managed to blow up my c:\ fat :joy: 5 - I managed to recover ALL my source code... It was literally all over the place, I woul […]
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I managed to blow up my c:\ fat 😂
5 - I managed to recover ALL my source code... It was literally all over the place, I would have thought that if you save, the identical part of the file would stay in the same location but I think it does save all the file over again at a different location, in many many many many chunks.

I should probably backup more often than the ~weekly "Ghost" to the network...
Now I think I will have to save my config.sys and autoexec.bat then restore the partition from the latest ghost image, I don't think it can be trusted anymore 🤣

Nope even DOS can and does fragment files, is why they included Defrag.exe. If you Del a small file, that cluster can be written too by a Save or other app, if the file written is large it can be spread across many clusters scattered all over.
Probably got something wrong in pure description but that is what happens....

Horun wrote on 2023-10-11, 01:35:

Rav wrote on 2023-10-10, 18:43:

I managed to blow up my c:\ fat :joy: 5 - I managed to recover ALL my source code... It was literally all over the place, I woul […]
Show full quote

I managed to blow up my c:\ fat 😂
5 - I managed to recover ALL my source code... It was literally all over the place, I would have thought that if you save, the identical part of the file would stay in the same location but I think it does save all the file over again at a different location, in many many many many chunks.

I should probably backup more often than the ~weekly "Ghost" to the network...
Now I think I will have to save my config.sys and autoexec.bat then restore the partition from the latest ghost image, I don't think it can be trusted anymore 🤣

Nope even DOS can and does fragment files, is why they included Defrag.exe. If you Del a small file, that cluster can be written too by a Save or other app, if the file written is large it can be spread across many clusters scattered all over.
Probably got something wrong in pure description but that is what happens....

Yeah, fragmentation that I know, but I did not expect the same stuff all over the place at various stage of advancement.

I was thinking that DOS would reuse clusters when saving the same file instead of resaving the whole thing somewhere else. I assume it save from the beginning of the first free space hole and split the files when there is not enough space to save it. But the file is already there, is seam to just not reuse the file clusters.

It's just hilarious, I have like some wayback machines (until theses old fragments actually get overwritten).