Well I'll be darned. Neither Varta leaked. I can't believe it!
430CDT is working perfectly. Needs an OS reimage and the CD-ROM drive won't stay shut, but those are minor things. I'll attach images later tonight, I'm super pleased!

All this time and I didn't think the battery on my Gericom Webgine MSW would be keeping this much. It's been a whole week since I last charged and it barely flinched.

I mean, I've seen old laptops still have working batteries but this is just downright ridiculous, to the point where I wonder if Uniwill actually designed the battery or they just asked Nokia to make it 🤣

(btw mine came with a 1200 Tualatin P3, not the 900MHz Celeron found through searches. I suppose I could install a Coppermine since it did POST with one as a test (800EB), as long as I hack an Athlon 64 IHS over it.)

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-02-27, 01:20:

Woah what a find, I've put a 3dfx card in my big toshiba dock for a laugh but I guess I'm not the only one to consider that

I've got a Toshiba Desk Station V Plus with a Tecra 8000. Might just throw them in there for fun!

Found this fancy PCI POST card. Can't find much info on it. It has a serial port!

I need to hook it up and see what it outputs to the terminal.

So I grabbed this potential beauty today! It's a InWin A500 case with Pentium 120, HOT 557 motherboard, 32mb sdram, S3 Virge DX 4mb and a Sound Blaster 16 Prelude (Yuck!!).

I'll clean and retrobrite the case, but most of the work will be inside... Of course I need to replace the Dallas CMOS battery, but I plan to make it a 1988-1994 DOS machine... For this, I'll replace the SB 16 with an Audician 32 with OPL3 but I was wondering if trying to swap the P120 for a P75 or P90 would help for speed sensitive games??

That S3 Virge DX with 4mb seem to be a very capable card! I was wondering if I should swap it with my Rage II+DVD 2mb in my P233MMX... This way, the most powerful card would be paired with the most powerful system...

kingcake wrote on 2024-02-28, 04:17:

Found this fancy PCI POST card. Can't find much info on it. It has a serial port!

I need to hook it up and see what it outputs to the terminal.

IMG_1764.jpg

Not much info really...

https://uxd.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/3 … uickPOST-Series

https://uxd.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/3 … ides-References

Added a few CPUs to my collection, a rare 2Ghz 423 Willamette, and two AMD 486 CPUs, a DX2-66 and a DX5-133 both have 16Kb Write Back L1 cache so should be quite fast in their respective classes. The 2Ghz 423 is one of my WANT to haves as now I own both the slowest and fastest 423 cpus, itll be fun to see just how much better the 2Ghz is over the lowly 1.3Ghz on the same hardware.

Satellite Pro 430CDT up and running well with Windows 98!

Bought this RT235BTW for $1. It looked completely unused and is *heavy*, especially for a keyboard from this era. Not mechanical but not bad typing feel.

Grabbed a "blue" Intel 486 SX759 Overdrive today for my 486 VLB build. Never seen a blue one before. Not sure how rare they are but I love the color.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-02-28, 10:51:

Added a few CPUs to my collection, a rare 2Ghz 423 Willamette, and two AMD 486 CPUs, a DX2-66 and a DX5-133 both have 16Kb Write Back L1 cache so should be quite fast in their respective classes. The 2Ghz 423 is one of my WANT to haves as now I own both the slowest and fastest 423 cpus, itll be fun to see just how much better the 2Ghz is over the lowly 1.3Ghz on the same hardware.

I'd be reading that comparison for sure! 😀

The 2GHz Willamette s423 is almost unobtanium, price-vise; I'd want one as well, but not ready to pay those prices they are going for at the moment.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-02-29, 07:52:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-02-28, 10:51:

Added a few CPUs to my collection, a rare 2Ghz 423 Willamette, and two AMD 486 CPUs, a DX2-66 and a DX5-133 both have 16Kb Write Back L1 cache so should be quite fast in their respective classes. The 2Ghz 423 is one of my WANT to haves as now I own both the slowest and fastest 423 cpus, itll be fun to see just how much better the 2Ghz is over the lowly 1.3Ghz on the same hardware.

I'd be reading that comparison for sure! 😀

The 2GHz Willamette s423 is almost unobtanium, price-vise; I'd want one as well, but not ready to pay those prices they are going for at the moment.

yeah, Grabbed this one at 100 USD which isnt the craziest price I have paid for a rare CPU, normally see these going for 150 odd sometimes higher.

eindbaas wrote on 2024-02-26, 13:45:

Today I'm gonna party like it's 1992! Thanks to a great friend I was able to buy a long wanted treasure. It will stand perfect a […]
Show full quote

Today I'm gonna party like it's 1992! Thanks to a great friend I was able to buy a long wanted treasure. It will stand perfect and very nice next to especially my MSX FS-A1 ST and Acorn 3010 which are also from the early 90's 😀

The Commodore Amiga 1200!

The 1200 came in it's original box and with some nice goodies too:

- Mouse
- MIDI interface
- All the cables and powerbrick
- Blizzard 1220/4 accelerator and ram expansion board

Also it's already recapped.

IMG_20240226_142334.jpg

IMG_20240226_142430.jpg

IMG_20240226_142805_HDR.jpg

IMG_20240226_142911.jpg

IMG_20240226_142941.jpg

Congrats....
I got mine as a DIY project, in parts and non recapped. Were sold to me as a gentleman's sale, basically resulting in I had to investigate what was wrong and then pay a fair price compared to market value. And yes, I held my part of the deal. The bad part, was that I first had to pay for a recap, then pay for spare parts. At the end, I used two years to refurbish it and paid a total of the market value that were at the time of purchase.

You will have a great time with that machine. My recommendation is to upgrade to an 030 with a good amount of Ram. Get Kickstart 3.1 if it is not already in it, and get one of them scandoublers with HDMI. Just the basic stuff you know. Then get some CF card sollution and have it set up with som sort of WHD Loader installation. Ready to go HDD immages can be found if one know were to look. But I am not going to tell were to find them.

Anyway.... Happy computing.

zuldan wrote on 2024-02-29, 03:35:

Grabbed a "blue" Intel 486 SX759 Overdrive today for my 486 VLB build. Never seen a blue one before. Not sure how rare they are but I love the color.

It is in a CPGA package, but it is not an overdrive.
Nevertheless it will dissipate some heat.

Today I received a new (at least new for me) server! Let's get acquainted with the:

Acer Altos 900

Quick specs are:
Pentium 150MHz cpu
S3 Trio 64 pci video card
16 MB ram
WD 4.3GB scsi hdd
1.44 MB fdd
Some Tandberg tapestreamer 5000MB

brostenen wrote on 2024-02-29, 12:43:

Congrats.... I got mine as a DIY project, in parts and non recapped. Were sold to me as a gentleman's sale, basically resulting […]
Show full quote

eindbaas wrote on 2024-02-26, 13:45:

Today I'm gonna party like it's 1992! Thanks to a great friend I was able to buy a long wanted treasure. It will stand perfect a […]
Show full quote

Today I'm gonna party like it's 1992! Thanks to a great friend I was able to buy a long wanted treasure. It will stand perfect and very nice next to especially my MSX FS-A1 ST and Acorn 3010 which are also from the early 90's 😀

The Commodore Amiga 1200!

The 1200 came in it's original box and with some nice goodies too:

- Mouse
- MIDI interface
- All the cables and powerbrick
- Blizzard 1220/4 accelerator and ram expansion board

Also it's already recapped.

IMG_20240226_142334.jpg

IMG_20240226_142430.jpg

IMG_20240226_142805_HDR.jpg

IMG_20240226_142911.jpg

IMG_20240226_142941.jpg

Congrats....
I got mine as a DIY project, in parts and non recapped. Were sold to me as a gentleman's sale, basically resulting in I had to investigate what was wrong and then pay a fair price compared to market value. And yes, I held my part of the deal. The bad part, was that I first had to pay for a recap, then pay for spare parts. At the end, I used two years to refurbish it and paid a total of the market value that were at the time of purchase.

You will have a great time with that machine. My recommendation is to upgrade to an 030 with a good amount of Ram. Get Kickstart 3.1 if it is not already in it, and get one of them scandoublers with HDMI. Just the basic stuff you know. Then get some CF card sollution and have it set up with som sort of WHD Loader installation. Ready to go HDD immages can be found if one know were to look. But I am not going to tell were to find them.

Anyway.... Happy computing.

Thanks for the useful tips! It already has a CF internal and for data transfer between the Amiga and other computers I have a pcmcia CF adapter. Have to take a serious look in the WHD loader stuff. What Amigas considered I'm not very experienced yet 🤪

eindbaas wrote on 2024-02-29, 16:04:

Today I received a new (at least new for me) server!
[...]

Nice beast! Really interesting combination of ALi northbridge with Intel southbridge.

Got myself something of similar vintage too today. Normally I avoid LPX or proprietary form factors but this one was too interesting to ignore:

VLSI Super core 590 chipset is interesting enough, but take a look under that VRM - it's an So4, making this a hybrid So4/So5 board.

This will let me do a comparison I've been wanting to do since owning an So4 CPU as daily driver - do an apples with apples comparison between a P60/66@60/66MHz FSB and P75/90/100@50/60/66MHz FSB.

One extra surprise: Boards with this chipset tend to come with a proprietary COAST-like cache module with async cache. This one does too but with a little surprise:

The other pics I've seen were of modules with a single tag chip limiting the cacheable area to 64MB. This one has two, potentially allowing 512MB to be cached (if I can find suitably large FP SIMMs...)

Edit:
I'm going blind. The right most chip is an 8kx8 SRAM, but the one to the left is a buffer chip, not a second SRAM.

Are we past peak-3dfx now? I saw a "working" V3 listed for £15.99 and bought it immediately. It's here. It looks pristine. What's the catch?

Big Pink wrote on 2024-02-29, 20:05:

Are we past peak-3dfx now? I saw a "working" V3 listed for £15.99 and bought it immediately. It's here. It looks pristine. What's the catch?

You caught it 😜

There are always things being sold for low prices by people who either don't know what stuff is worth or don't care and want to keep things accessible to the community - and they get snapped up quick - in this case by you. The only prices that stay online for a long time are the prices which are higher than people are prepared to pay.

I was wondering that though, because V3s seemed to be headed for $200 but they seem nearer $100 now, and you can get some fixer upper or take a chance deals at $80 or so.