Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-07, 17:22:

andrea wrote on 2023-11-07, 06:46:

I'd still use a bigger heatsink if I could. With a Pentium 100 (your P75 seems jumpered to run at 100, as they all did) the regulator it's dissipating about 5W as heat. A Pentium 100 is about 10W, and if you think at the size of a typical Pentium sink, using that STB cooler for 5W seems a little weak.

I hear you. The challenge is trying to fit something in the footprint available on the motherboard. Most typical heatsinks used on other motherboards just won't fit.

I suppose I could try to fit something with a vertical orientation. I'll have to search up some heatsinks and see what would work.

You have that monster work bench. I'm sure you can saw something in half to fit! 😁

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-11-07, 17:22:

andrea wrote on 2023-11-07, 06:46:

I'd still use a bigger heatsink if I could. With a Pentium 100 (your P75 seems jumpered to run at 100, as they all did) the regulator it's dissipating about 5W as heat. A Pentium 100 is about 10W, and if you think at the size of a typical Pentium sink, using that STB cooler for 5W seems a little weak.

I hear you. The challenge is trying to fit something in the footprint available on the motherboard. Most typical heatsinks used on other motherboards just won't fit.

I suppose I could try to fit something with a vertical orientation. I'll have to search up some heatsinks and see what would work.

A relatively low profile copper heatsink with an oversized fan mounted nearby seems like a decent option .

It's a laptop. I'm a being a moron.

Not sure anymore. I'll go have some coffee and hope my brain shifts into gear enough to follow a thread.

Dead PSUs might offer some options in heatsinks. Though they usually "go long" with 2 or 3 devices in a row mounted so you might have to cut one in half.

CrazyCatman wrote on 2023-11-06, 12:44:

Pickup up a little something for my Digital Venturis 575 which I am giving a Creative touch; sound card and optical drives are b […]
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Pickup up a little something for my Digital Venturis 575 which I am giving a Creative touch; sound card and optical drives are both from Creative Labs - so why not add joystick?

pic7813723-1.jpgpic7813727-1.jpg

It looks like a QuickShot Warrior 5 but had the adjustment sliders in the bottom blinded offpic7813728-1.jpg

Sadly I haven't been able to find the exact name of the model. It may not be the best joystick in the world, and it does not have the right colour to the computer, but at least it is Creative 😉

I think I saw another Creative joystick back in the 1990s, knew someone who got one that was paler colored, light beige/offwhite and looked like some of the early Logitech Wingman designs in a lighter color.

Did some socket 370 "reconciling", in some notes I had celeron 400 and others 433, and I couldn't remember if I had actually seen them both on the same day or was lazily writing 400. Likewise for PIIIs I had some noted that I wasn't sure were misnames of others... So finally had THE DAY OF RECKONING, and looked at all my s370 hidey spots to get a proper list. So turns out I DO have two mendocinos, a 433 and a 400 and one more PIII than I thought I had. Though potential for another also, which is buried in a midtower system I built ages back. Think that's either a PIII 933 downclocked a little, or a Celeron cumine clocked up. But still got a decent number to play with now, now I'm not reserving one here and another for the same thing there thinking I remembered it wrong. Anyhoo, 10 CPUs divides into 5 or 6 working boards quite easily and I have testers left still for getting others going or playing around with slotkets.

So this might get Dustin the DOStin moving again, I was held up waiting to make sure I wasn't robbing headers from the m571, but that finally turned up with it's own headers, then I got all perfectionist about wanting a nice set of buttons, but I've got some that will do. Then finally I was holding off because I thought I needed to keep my worstest celeron out for testing, but seems I can commit one, yay.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-11-07, 09:25:

Restored this Gericom Masterpiece 25360XL (ECS Green G732) to its former glory.

Ah lovely. This one's been on "the list" for me. What do you think of them? WinBook sold these as the J4, that's the variant I've been looking for but other people obviously sold them too.

Very nice, the 1400x1050 display really makes them shine, and while at first hearing it uses a SiS chipset (the variant I got is SiS 645DX, not 650 as the J4 supposedly uses), the DDR RAM really helps greatly over the 845's SDR.

A bit of shame ECS hadn't opted for a 4th better combo by giving the 845 DDR memory and using a Geforce 2 or 4 MX, kinda like how Dell did with the C840, sort of. (C840 uses mobile P4 instead of desktop).

Also gotta love the black variant the US model (Winbook) uses. Would have loved to do a black/silver combo with the Gericom case but eh, there aren't many out there unfortunately (even Gericoms are hard to find... I only have 3 classics so far - a Pentium M/SiS iGP based one also made by ECS, this Masterpiece/G732 and a FIC OEM'd Supersonic M6-T with a full blown Tualatin 1.2 no less).

I'll probably bump the RAM up to 2GB as I have some Kingston heatsinked DDR SODIMMs from a defunct Acer, slap a newer 80GB drive and pimp out a XP SP3 install to the max. And hopefully find a way to silence the ear-shattering GPU fan.

EDIT: Sniped a interesting classified for an even more OP version of it that actually bears ECS badging. G736 is the model and while IDK what P4 it uses, a Mobility 9600 doesn't sound bad at all.
BIOS wise, it's similar to the G731 it seems - AMI BIOS instead of Phoenix that G730 and 732 use.

Interesting, not looked into ECS branded laptops much, are these Desk note A 980 any good? http://ixbtlabs.com/news.html?00/90/25 seeing one kinda local.

Though I've got a glut of A64 and Centrino machines that overlap performance wise, so I dunno if I should bother.

The only reason I'd pass that up is the charger using a proprietary socket. Oh, and no internal battery - from what I saw in the article , it was in the form of a external brick similar to the one used for the AC adapter.

ECS' laptops are good, though you have to cherrypick them - avoid iGP stuff like the plague, and you should be good.

WinBook actually shipped both colors. I'm avoiding the black one - they coated the top in soft-touch rubber that will all rot out with age and become a mess. I'm vaguely aware of the G736 but WinBook didn't ship them. I do believe the highest end J4s suffered from failures due to an underspecced CPU fuse that could blow with the fastest P4s installed. I'm actually after all the ECS-made WinBooks, the J1, J4, X1, X4, and the 330/331. I currently only have an X4, which is a pretty decent system (P4M, G550-based, no good for gaming GPU, but still nice). It had an SXGA+ option but mine doesn't have it. The X4s look really nice though, blue and silver. Well built.

There's some good info on the J4s and other WinBook stuff here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/doc … inbook.1242548/
As well as on my website, but I don't have J4 pages up yet: https://www.macdat.net/pc/winbook_home.html

3lectr1c wrote on 2023-11-08, 18:34:

WinBook actually shipped both colors. I'm avoiding the black one - they coated the top in soft-touch rubber that will all rot out with age and become a mess. I'm vaguely aware of the G736 but WinBook didn't ship them. I do believe the highest end J4s suffered from failures due to an underspecced CPU fuse that could blow with the fastest P4s installed. I'm actually after all the ECS-made WinBooks, the J1, J4, X1, X4, and the 330/331. I currently only have an X4, which is a pretty decent system (P4M, G550-based, no good for gaming GPU, but still nice). It had an SXGA+ option but mine doesn't have it. The X4s look really nice though, blue and silver. Well built.

There's some good info on the J4s and other WinBook stuff here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/doc … inbook.1242548/
As well as on my website, but I don't have J4 pages up yet: https://www.macdat.net/pc/winbook_home.html

G736 is an model that I haven't seen covered at all by anyone else than ECS - it does look pretty robust over the G732 (which would be the top notch of the J4 line) given the 736 offers a 648FX, similar SXGA display as the 732 (which my Gericom Masterpiece 25360XL has) and so far, a supposedly 7200RPM HDD (which was surely unheard of in a laptop of that time).

I'll be documenting it soon enough if it helps. I have replacement case parts off a G730-based Gericom for the said 736 by the way.

I'd enjoy seeing the 736 documented. I'll be doing ECS documentation on my site at some point (goal is to build the ultimate vintage laptop resource, with a focus on obscure brands).
Worth noting that the GreenXXX laptops were originally made by AlphaTop, who were bought out by ECS/Elitegroup in 2001 thereabouts.

Here's some more info on the entire series: https://web.archive.org/web/20080212025929/ht … tops.com/j4.htm

A few weeks back I bought this Data Expert OPTI-495SX motherboard: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
I don't need another 386 but this is a 386DX40 / 486 motherboard with cache, VLB slot and a conveniently positioned keyboard controller which happens to be PS/2 mouse capable.
I had tried installing a native PS/2 mouse PCB on it but couldn't get it working, the keyboard would stop working when I ran PS2SUPPC which lead me to think it just couldn't work on this system.

Today I had another go, finding that PS2SUPPC seems to be speed-sensitive and sometimes fails if the system isn't in de-turbo mode.

That did confirm it works though, from there I followed the detailed instructions in this thread: AMI Color BIOS (1993 and earlier) modification in hex editor
'ahyeadude's great python script allowed me to fix the checksum so I could modify the BIOS to support PS/2 mouse, that was awesome. For reference what I did was:

• Opened the BIOS in a hex editor and searched for the string "ouse" to find where the Mouse Support string was
• Modified the value "11" to "91", which is changing the first bit to 1 instead of 0 to unhide it. Excel is handy for this:
  The attachment 2023-11-08 22_24_20-.png is no longer available
• From command prompt ran the python script as "amichksum.py 409LBA.ROM" and it showed what value I would need to set in empty space to get the checksum right, I chose 0xDA00 to edit
  The attachment AMIbios-changes.png is no longer available
• Found that editing just the menu does not enable the PS/2 mouse so on the PC, I followed the debug commands shown in jakethompson1's first post. Found that the value and location were the same as the original post, with 0x8280 having a value of 2F which was changed to 3F to enable it
• Did the checksum thing again, this time the mouse works 😀

But I didn't want to use the original BIOS this board came with which was from 1992 and had almost no real performance configuration options. The RetroWeb let me find other boards that use this chipset and I found a Shuttle HOT-409 BIOS from 1993 also works nicely on this board with the original 386DX-40 processor, it's got many more options to set and to my surprise this 3.0 BIOS for a HOT-409 adds LBA support!
So now I have a 386 that now supports both PS/2 mouse natively and can auto detect hard drives on boot - even booting successfully from a 4GB CF card.
Since it can auto detect storage on boot the CMOS battery doesn't matter too much, though I've bodged on a CR2032 holder that hooks into the external battery which will make it easier to use in future.

I've attached the modified BIOS if anyone wants it, it should work on lots of OPTI 495SX motherboards since they mostly seem to use the same keyboard controller and chips.

Went to our storage unit yesterday to find my Ti4200 card for the "Willamette aiming for the stars" thread. After some searching, I hid a lot I'd forgotten all about ... 😀

GF4 Ti4200 (I knew about that)
GF3 Ti200
GF5 FX5200 in the form of an ASUS V9520/TD/256 (Felt really lucky until I found out how it performs in comparison to the Ti4200 🤣)
Quadro FX1100
Matrox G400 AGP
Matrox G200 PCI (I knew I had this)
Matrox G200 PCI (who'd know I had 2)
Matrox Millenium PCI (not sure if it's a Mill2, though - MGA2064W)
Elsa Gloria II (seems to be some Quadro of some sorts)
And - an All-In-Wonder Radeon (7000 or 7500 IIRC) including all breakout stuff 😀

Installing XP on my (lucky Ebay find) Athlon XP 2600 system in a totally normal fashion: 😅

I didn't have a reliable/working "real" optical drive, so on a whim I wondered if it could boot off my USB one. Apparently it can! For some reason the only USB 2.0 on this board is through the one mb header. But apparently it doesn't get enough juice to power the drive which has that double plug situation, so I tried it in one of the onboard ports and it worked. yay. 👍

Still a little freaked out by this X1950 Pro I'm using with it. It seems so different from any GPU I remember using then. It just seems so weirdly huge and.. inelegant.

I mean, I know what's going on here:

So I guess this is what the end of the APG cards were like and maybe I'd already moved on. 🤔

Oh, and the mobo has at least one bad cap:

So looks like I'm up for my first recap job.

Anyway, it's looking good so far - I think I have the perfect case for this one. 😈

Wait wait wait, since I've already got one silly big card from the early 2000's, figured I had a better way to add SATA to this system:

Did some diagnosing and resolving the Emerson VT-1920N's picture problem. It needs the overscan fixed and might need a recap in the future (I cranked the brightness and contrast to 0, which is dead center or 50%) and it looks better than before.

All's that's left is to get acetone on the sticker residue and clean the glass off. Then, I'll diagnose and fix the VCR. Getting closer.

I'm having a friend around next week for a Retro LAN Party, so have been busy setting up 6 retro PCs & testing them out ready for use, I haven't used them in over a year. Thought I'd start a week early, to give me time to sort any issues.

Surprisingly it's all gone mostly smoothly. A few niggling issues on 2 PCs where I'd set many games to output at a particular resolution and then connected them up to a monitor/TV that doesn't support it. Annoyingly many of those games either just outright crash or refuse to open if they can't launch at their set resolution and offer no easy way to change this. So to avoid having to reconfigure multiple games I just switched monitors for those 2 systems. I'm going to have to invest in a couple of cheap/used 1080p monitors for next year.

The only PC itself that threw a tantrum this year was 1 of my AMD K6-2 "1998" builds - dead BIOS battery and random stability issues at boot. Managed to sort those problems fairly quickly and everything is now ready to go.

My friend prefers to use gamepads, so I tested an array of USB controllers and had to laugh at how all of the buttons on each pad are ordered completely differently. He's gonna have fun configuring those per game hahaha, I'll stick to my trusty Keyboard & Mouse. 🤣

Welp, so much for spending a whole hour getting the G736 running.
Not sure if it's the GPU or the VRAM in this case. Might try a reflow but I have near zero hopes to have it running.

At last played through a fully configured WfW 3.11 installation.

Use 86Box for emulation.
Installed DOS 6.22 and WfW 3.11.
Installed all kinds of WfW 3.11 updates. (Mostly replacing bunch of .386 files)
Installed 386max 8.03 - Gave very good results!
Installed bunch of programs from MS Entertainment Pack to Netscape Navigator and Office 4.3.
All the disk caching, 32bit file and disk access, all is configured.
Replaced shell (progman.exe) with WinBar.

All keyboard, mouse, sound etc. drivers are loaded. Network is installed (including TCP/IP) and is even usable through dos prompt. MTCP as alternative is set up as well.
I have 628kB free conv memory in dos before windows. In windows command prompt, i have 616kB free conv memory and in 386 special prompt (graphics not allowed) i have 680kB free conv memory. (Yes, over 640!)

Now, at last, i have a blueprint of tried&tested setup that i can use on real hardware. 😀