Trashbytes wrote on 2024-01-28, 04:40:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-01-28, 04:39:

Demetrio wrote on 2024-01-27, 12:49:

This morning I went to a pick-up point to get the italian version of Half-Life 2: Raising The Bar […]
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This morning I went to a pick-up point to get the italian version of Half-Life 2: Raising The Bar

hl2-raising-the-bar-it.jpeg

I bought it from a local seller for 40€.

Considering that the only insertion I saw, other than this one, is on Amazon for over 300€ and that the italian version is very rare, I think I made a good deal 🙂

The used book market is often worse than the eBay market for vintage computers. Your book is listed at $465 on Canadian Amazon. I sometimes see guys in thrift stores that are scanning all of the books with their phone to see if they can scalp them. That really ticks me off because a lot of low income people shop at thrift stores to save money.

Scalpers are a fucking plague, not sure how you would go about stopping such activity either.

I agree. The thrift stores could put a limit on how many books someone could purchase at once. I've seen guys fill up entire shopping carts with books, so even a ten book limit would have an impact. It wouldn't eliminate it entirely, but at least they wouldn't be able to clear out the entire book selection. Another thing is that I doubt these guys are even making much money doing this, especially in Canada with our high postage costs. They would probably make more money taking on an extra job a few hours a week for minimum wage.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-01-28, 04:39:

Demetrio wrote on 2024-01-27, 12:49:

This morning I went to a pick-up point to get the italian version of Half-Life 2: Raising The Bar […]
Show full quote

This morning I went to a pick-up point to get the italian version of Half-Life 2: Raising The Bar

hl2-raising-the-bar-it.jpeg

I bought it from a local seller for 40€.

Considering that the only insertion I saw, other than this one, is on Amazon for over 300€ and that the italian version is very rare, I think I made a good deal 🙂

The used book market is often worse than the eBay market for vintage computers. Your book is listed at $465 on Canadian Amazon. I sometimes see guys in thrift stores that are scanning all of the books with their phone to see if they can scalp them. That really ticks me off because a lot of low income people shop at thrift stores to save money.

I found a new insertion on eBay for the italian version, for ~60€: https://www.ebay.it/itm/386287844148

It's really strange that the original version is much more expensive, considering that the italian one is rarer (maybe it's because HL2 is "underground" in Italy compared to the USA).

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-01-28, 04:39:

The used book market is often worse than the eBay market for vintage computers

Don't know much about used book market, but yeah, vintage PC market prices have gone up too much.

I remember watching this video from LGR, where he mentions that he paid 20$ for the IBM PC 5150... well, now insertions are over 1000$ 😁

Dug out this Chaintech 9BJA0 w/ a 2.5GHz P4 Northwood inside, IIRC bought somewhere near winter last year.

Suggestions for a build? I'm kinda at a loss of what to pair with it. I do have a PSU with that AUX connector (though I recall it can go unused, from prior test experiences with the board.), a Seasonic 400W (that I jokingly stuck an LC-B400ATX sticker on 🤣)

I was going to upgrade my 486 to an Am5x86-P75 only to discover that the one I got from eBay has a broken pin. It's not that I couldn't fix it if I absolutely wanted it, but it's not my job as it doesn't match the product description.

Well, first time that I will need to ask for a refund.

It'll more than likely run just fine without it, and I would just repair it, but I do live in Australia and I cant be fucked trying to return shit internationally and eBay is more hassle than I can be bothered with if the CPU works ok even with a broken pin.

Only time I would bother with a refund or contacting the seller if it was local or was expensive.

That pin is Address line 17, essential for normal operation.

Tiido wrote on 2024-01-28, 11:55:

That pin is Address line 17, essential for normal operation.

In that case I would just repair it, no biggie. I feel that as a retro part collector it doesn't matter to me if the part I buy needs minor simple repairs, parts get damaged during shipping all the time and this repair would restore it to full working order. It would certainly be easier and faster than trying for a refund and return on such a small part with a pretty simple repair. Sadly returning this CPU would very likely see it being tossed to e-waste rather being repaired by the seller.

Now if it was something that cannot be repaired, is expensive or requires repairs outside my capabilities then yes I would be letting the seller know, that said I do live in Australia so returning stuff is rather expensive, but if I was in the US or EU I could see myself returning stuff more often.

For me it is no brainer, I fire up the soldering iron and fix it. It is a pain to solder stuff on a ceramic package however, good heat is necessary from a soldering iron or the tip cools down and may even get stuck on the chip 🤣

Tiido wrote on 2024-01-28, 12:18:

For me it is no brainer, I fire up the soldering iron and fix it. It is a pain to solder stuff on a ceramic package however, good heat is necessary from a soldering iron or the tip cools down and may even get stuck on the chip 🤣

A little Pre-Heat or a hot bed will help with that !

Sure the CPU can handle that, its built for heat 🤣.

Today I have finally once again a working SNES. This has been a bit of a project that started last week.
It started when I saw some cheap DC-DC switching regulators on Aliexpress. I have been curious about these for a while and the price was right. So I bought a couple of 7805s just to test:

I have some Sinclair ZX computers that I would like to run a little cooler but for my experiment I chose my SNES that has a badly broken case.
First I just took a photo of the screen with the normal 7805:

And then I changed it to the DC-DC variant. Well it worked but now I had these horizontal lines on the screen which honestly was anticipated:

So now I tried to add some filter capacitors of different capacitances and somewhere around here it all went wrong. I don't know if it was ESD, a charged capacitor that I shorted to something or just that the SNES didn't like the treatment but suddenly the SNES was dead. I did all the checks I could but the console was completely dead. I let it sit for 10 minutes and felt all the chips and the only one that was hot was a clock chip. It was of course a Nintendo branded chip so I had to look around for a spares console online and so I got one "untested" the same evening for 6 euros. As you can imagine it was dead on arrival but now I could change the chip, so I did and no change. Well I did some more experiments with the new board and found that it would actually boot with a multicart. Great, but no games were working, some started to load and froze but most just gave me a black screen. What threw me off was that Rareware games seemed to work perfectly, it played Donkey Kong country 3 without problems and some other Rare-games worked to some extent. I still cant understand why they worked as well as they did. There are diagnostic carts for the SNES but I couldn't get them to load through the multicart (later I found out that you have to change some settings in the menu to get it to work).

Somewhat perplexed I started researching a bit more and found that the old SNES-consoles have primarily CPUs that go bad, but the other proprietary
chips too. I have never in the PC world seen that CPUs can be partially working. Either they work or they don't, but it seems that the SNES CPU, which is an improved version of the 65c02, can execute some code despite being broken. The failures seem to happen at an alarming rate which is somewhat worrying. There are also some SMD-caps that leak on these consoles and destroy traces, one of them because Nintendo actually used a polarized cap instead of non-polarized one.

Anyway, for a last hail Mary I changed the CPUs between the boards and wouldn't you know it, the new board starts working!

I'm an amateur at best at soldering so I was really surprised and happy that it worked. I used hot air for desoldering and then drag soldered them. First I tried solder paste but that was just a mess.

Reading PC World (January, 1990), lauging.

Tiido wrote on 2024-01-28, 12:18:

For me it is no brainer, I fire up the soldering iron and fix it. It is a pain to solder stuff on a ceramic package however, good heat is necessary from a soldering iron or the tip cools down and may even get stuck on the chip 🤣

It's difficult but can be done!

CPU pin repair of an Intel 486DX-50

I want to build my own Z80-based computer, with lots of RAM (through memory banking) and whatnot.
Big inspiration for me is John Winans and his Youtube channel, specifically this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oekucjDcNbA&l … AEdgSQ4cz7HQZX5

I have few ideas what i want to do differently, but it will be mostly the same design probably.

But i hate the idea of adding pile of 74-series chips for bunch of AND, OR, NAND, XOR and whatever else logic on the board.
So i started investigating how to program GAL chips. Found some scrap board in cellar that had bunch of them on it (both 16v8 and 22v10 variants) and just now i did my first logic programming! A xor B with separate output-enable pin feature. It works!

All my glue logic will be inside those chips!

Been working on my Asus TX97-EX DOS 6.22 build.

Getting it setup to use both the AWE64 and OPTi 82C930 sound cards (batch files FTW!), and getting it setup to use as a "test bench" for other PCI/ISA hardware of that era so I can test cards on a known good system. Oh, and having a blast with the GoTek Floppy Emulator, such a great tool. 😀

Dug up this grim reminder to society.

IBM Deskstar 60GXP, 20.4GB. You'd be surprised to find this thing still works and is as fast as ever.

I'm thinking of pairing it with a ceramic Duron. Just to see how "cheap" can I go.
Any GPU suggestions for a KT133 based ECS K7VZA and a 850MHz Duron?

For the better part of a week I have been fighting god IBM. For what reason? Well I managed to snag a PS/2.

And not just any PS/2, a fancy one that has a speaker on the front, a 2.88MB Floppy drive and a debilitating tumor SCSI Caddy CD Drive.

It's also a somewhat better version of the M57, as it has an XGA-2 card, and a funky little 486 instead of the 386.

This really just means 60MHz instead of 20. The reason I have been fighting it for a week is that I don't have any CD caddies, and I have to scrounge the internet for the restore disks and the 2.88MB images for the bootable floppies that accompany them. I was only able to get the system going my booting a DOS 6.22 installer disk, using DISKCOPY from freedos to make a floppy, then loading EDIT from the DOS floppy, switching back to the OS/2 boot floppy and editing the config.sys to ignore IBM's CD driver not wanting to work with anything but an approved vendor list from 1992 for CD drives. All of this so I could use the ZULUSCSI that bounces between my macintoshes to load and install the OS. Of course, only the oldest version of the CD images worked, so I am working with OS/2 2.0.

Now I just need to figure out how to get a somewhat more up to date version of OS/2 2.11 on to it, then figure out if I can manage to get some software going beyond just my 3.5" copy of Wing Commander, which I am yet to actually try.

Welcome to the battle, soldier.

Went to the VCF System Source Repair Workshop event this weekend and picked a few things up. Met a lot of fellow retro enthusists. Was a good time!

Is it an Asus K7M?

On my side I:
- Finally got an adapter for my Voodoo 3 3500 (I didn’t get the blue squid cable with the card), and it’s the first time that I can see something 😅 The card works perfectly fine and it’s now in my K6-3.
- Tested 4 CF cards from aliexpress, they all seem to work correctly
- Tested 2 IDE to CF adapters on my 486. One of the adapters (Delock, bought locally) works fine and is detected by the BIOS. The other adapter (cheap Aliexpress) works on a more modern computer but the 486 doesn’t auto-detect the disk (with the same CF card)
- The seller from my 5x86 with a missing pin will send me another one, and I can just keep this one

A good day tinkering. As I’m new to Compact Flash altogether I now need to investigate why one card works and the other not, and how the cards report their « geometry ».

The brown fan headers, that BIOS sticker and the RAM holders point to ABIT VA6.

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/abit-ab-va6