Decided to update the ancient maps on the navigation system built into my 2012 Corolla. Don't ask me why, since I never use it anyways (the navigation that is, the Corolla is OK). The multimedia is some FlyAudio crap (cool stuff, BTW, let's you watch videos while driving). It's running WinCE. I actually had no idea where it even keeps the maps.

Eventually I discovered that these device ship with a microSD card, which has the iGo app + maps. I thought it would be a matter of popping the card into a PC and getting updated maps... somewhere. Well, the thing got stuck in the slot, I had to use pliers to pull it out. Can you imagine a microSD card being damaged when you try to pull it out from the slot? Neither could I, but somehow it happened. It got a tiny bend which apparently broke the contacts inside, since no system recognized it ever again. OK, well, so now I have to also redownload the app itself... somewhere.

It was not really difficult finding iGo Primo (the WinCE version), but the first one I tried never picked up any GPS satellites. Turns out it's best to get the one customized for your country, unless you want to try some settings voodoo with sys.txt. Anyhow, on the second or third try I found a version that worked, so now I have a bunch of maps that are probably 2-3 years old (and not 10-12 years old), on a slow and clumsy navigation system which I will probably only use out of boredom.

Tiido wrote on 2024-12-11, 16:26:

That is not nixies but VFDs. One has lost its vacuum unfortunately. If nothing lights up you'll have to see that filament supply is in order and that its bias circuit with system ground is still good (usually a zener is used for that). Anode voltage must also be present of course, 20...50V, depending on particular tubes used and whatever the multiplexing rate is.

Apologies, I guess I didn't look that close (segments should have given in away) - I built a lot of stuff with nixies back in the day
(don't want to even think how long since I've even seen one live) - and I guess I still tend to think of tube displays as nixies. (kinds
miss these full digit elements)

Agreed, if no segments are showing at all, I'd suspect one of the supplies first!

Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal

Swapped my 8 port KVM for a 16 port KVM.... That should be enough right?

Also I tried installing Tombraider 2 on a Pentium MMX 200Mhz and a Pentium III 550Mhz. The 200Mhz machine could barely play it even at 320x200 resolution. The 550Mhz machine with 3D Rage Pro was far better. But still had periodic stutter.

Finally I swapped my 4.77Mhz 8088 CPU for a 10Mhz 8088 in my Pocket 8086. So now I can choose to run it at XT or turbo XT speeds. I had previously removed the NEC V30 that it came with the laptop as I want this machine to run close to XT performance. The V30 is much faster.

Fixed two CRT TVs. One was a Philips with two bad caps (2x 47uF 160v) and the other was a Magnum with too high G2 voltage.

Got into a box of weird crap... I was looking for my "ye olde ram chip stashe" with hopefully a few 1x64s and didn't find it in that box, what I turned up though was...

A generic desktop to tower stand, the 8 bit parallel port sampler I built from CU Amiga schematic for my A1200, possibly an original Mitsumi interface cable:- just two plugs and a green stripe instead of red, 2.5" IDE cables, 2.5"to 3.5" IDE adapter, 2x 40MB 2.5" HDD, several DE type connectors, including one wide one, maybe I can make an external floppy drive that plugs into one of the IBM floppy controllers??? a few random logic chips, a few random transistors, enough germanium transistors to build about 5 fuzz pedals or something, found some "fat" resistors and high voltage caps too which might be useful when I get into monitor repairs.

Vaguely wondering if I should search up a util to use a basic ADC sampler on a PC parallel port, but can't think of a point, since there's prolly 20 soundcards in the house that would do a better job.

Long time ago, I got this HP NetRAID SCSI controller, but it is also known as:
-HP part number D4943 600003
-American Megatrends series 428

What a beast. 😀

DELL flashed the PERC II BIOS in this thing and labeled it as such.
Because of that I figured that PERC stands for PowerEdge RAID Controller. Captain obvious arrived late here.

So the controller was hanging at a blinking 'Firmware Initializing' message and after a long time it was saying 'Adapter at Baseport E810h is not Responding' and 'No HP NetRAID adapter'.

Since the card had BIOS VER A.04.00 (Jun 12, 1998) I looked for a new one. After about an hour, the filename came up, but a dead link to the HP FTP repository. After replacing the ftp:// with https:// it worked. Thanks HP for keeping the old stuff online. But it would be nice to have the legacy stuff categorized or indexed..
I attached the disk image for future use. When you extract the *.zip and after that the *.img floppy image, you'll find the actual megaraid.img BIOS rom for the (in my case) CAT28F020 EEPROM.

Some pictures configuring a Fujitsu MAU3036NP, a very nice and quiet drive.

Hopefully the Dallas will hold up, and configure a RAID5 array to get that Intel i960 to work.

What a beast. I love seeing all that silicon on a single board. It's incredible what we can fit now into a single chip.

Found out that my VLB IDE controller in my 486 has 2 names:
* Promise VG4
* Promise EIDE2300plus

The latter one has newer drivers, so i tried them. Works as good as my old drivers. Old drivers' version was 2.6, new drivers' version is 3.31.
The old drivers had some Windows 95 beta drivers included from 1994. The new drivers have proper/stable Windows 95 drivers included.
Works on Windows 95, too. All good. 😀

It might be that the EIDE2300plus has bios extensions ROM while the VG4 does not. But it is optional anyways and is not relevant from drivers point of view as the card itself seems to be identical.

That sounds like the Promise VLB card I have. I think I recall though that mine is my VLB i/o card that likes going higher than 33Mhz the least. Maybe I can pair it with a VGA it can be friends with at 40Mhz though and run it with the POD. Otherwise it is my fast "slow" card. Though it would be fine if I just had it in a classic DX2/66, but there are two other competitors for that role with onboard I/O. But if it does good in w95 pairing it with POD might be pretty good for early 95 system.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-12, 14:40:

That sounds like the Promise VLB card I have. I think I recall though that mine is my VLB i/o card that likes going higher than 33Mhz the least.

Mine runs beautifully @50MHz and 0 added waitstates on VLB. 😎

Cool, maybe mine just doesn't like cirrus logic graphics, or UMC motherboard chipsets, because way back when I last ran it, that was the only boards I had. I can try it with ATI VGAs and SiS and other chipsets now.

Since I have the day off, and it's currently -2F (-19C) outside, I'm going to spend the day going through more of the sizable donation of goodies I received a few days ago. The first system on the list for the day is a "Cisco Systems BBSM Hotspot" (D51S/C2A/40/K/256c). So, a branded/custom Compaq D51S. Going to see if it still works, poke around the drive and see if there's anything left from it's past life, then wipe it out and set it up for it's new life.

I definitely prefer this branded look to the base Compaq D51S color scheme. 😀

StriderTR wrote on 2024-12-12, 18:12:

Since I have the day off, and it's currently -2F (-19C) outside, I'm going to spend the day going through more of the sizable donation of goodies I received a few days ago. The first system on the list for the day is a "Cisco Systems BBSM Hotspot" (D51S/C2A/40/K/256c). So, a branded/custom Compaq D51S. Going to see if it still works, poke around the drive and see if there's anything left from it's past life, then wipe it out and set it up for it's new life.

I definitely prefer this branded look to the base Compaq D51S color scheme. 😀

Wow, that color scheme makes it look so much nicer!

The silver Compaq ones always looked super cheap to me. With the teal color it reminds me of an SGI Indigo 2.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-12-13, 00:13:

StriderTR wrote on 2024-12-12, 18:12:

Since I have the day off, and it's currently -2F (-19C) outside, I'm going to spend the day going through more of the sizable donation of goodies I received a few days ago. The first system on the list for the day is a "Cisco Systems BBSM Hotspot" (D51S/C2A/40/K/256c). So, a branded/custom Compaq D51S. Going to see if it still works, poke around the drive and see if there's anything left from it's past life, then wipe it out and set it up for it's new life.

I definitely prefer this branded look to the base Compaq D51S color scheme. 😀

Wow, that color scheme makes it look so much nicer!

The silver Compaq ones always looked super cheap to me. With the teal color it reminds me of an SGI Indigo 2.

That's exactly what I thought too! 😜

I also took a closer look at the build in the cool Antec Microfusion 350 HTPC based system. It seems to have an MSI 7093 motherboard and an Athlon 64 3200 processor. I'm thinking since it won't be setup as an HTPC again, it would make a cool WinXP machine.

It does have the orignal LCD display, but since it would not get used in anything but an HTPC setup, I'm going to replace it with a dot matrix LED array to display custom info and images. I can max out it's 4GB of RAM and put the best LP GPU for XP I can find in my limited stash.

So.. one of these three.

XFX GF 7200GS 256MB DDR2
Asus EN210 GeForce 210 512MB DDR2
Visiontek Radeon VT4350 512MB DDR2

Drop a nice SSD in there and call it good.

I don't have a reliable XP machine yet. 😀

Today I got a "Beta Systems Supercharger" up and running. This is a hardware PC/XT emulator for the Atari ST. It uses a NEC V30 and has by default 512k of ram but can be expanded to 1MB. Comes with DOS 4.01. CGA and Hercules Video. I had to make a cable for it since it was missing. Unfortunately it uses DB19-plugs which are hard to find but since it's wire "straight" I could use an old DB25-extension cable, add a gender changer, cut off the excess pins/metal shield and that was that, no rewiring needed. For the PSU I just used a 5V universal adapter.

I could run Topbench but the score was maybe not so great 😄. I don't know if it's a compability issue or if it's just slow - maybe an overclock is possible? It also has an internal header which an old ad says is for future expansion - what are the odds that it is just an ISA-bus?

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-03, 14:18:

Living wrote on 2024-12-03, 11:51:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-03, 04:26:

Oh man my spanish sucks, I thought you wrote an organiser program and were trying to turn a black and white TV into something useful until I clicked translate.

SPANISH? north americans learn some language in school? thats portuguese...

See, that's how bad my Spanish is, 🤣 ... kind of almost a repeat of the time I told a Dutch guy his German was awful. There are monoglots and polyglots, I am a sesqui-glot, speak English and halfass know a couple of others.

But to reallocate the besmirch-ment of education systems, I schooled in the UK, they only tried to teach me French and German.

Afinal és do Canadá? Aqui no Brasil é comum o meio-glota (nem mesmo a língua materna, a criatura usa direito). Encontrei o termo 'sequilingue', que se refere ao falante de uma língua e meia. Isso é o legal de um fórum, sempre dá pra aprender alguma coisa nova, mesmo depois de mais de vinte e cinco anos navegando a web, e após todas as mudanças que já vimos. Minha intenção de escrever em português, era realmente gerar algum apelo com os conterrâneos, ou mesmo gerar a curiosidade nos amigos do mundo todo. Tem uma música aqui que diz algo como, 'sei de tudo um pouco, mas quase tudo mal' (I know a little about everything, but almost everything is wrong).

Cleaned and refurbed a good ole' backwards compatible PS3 I undervolted, which was up for sale.
I already have three of them and a 4th waiting to come, so I figured I'd get rid of a PAL duplicate unit.
(the other two are sort of NTSC dupes... one is USA (CECHA01) and the other is Japan (CECHB00)

This morning I started work on the Gigabyte 478, I removed the swollen electrolytic capacitors, plus another one that got in the way, it prevented me from freeing the holes from the tin, I couldn't put down the tin sucker, in any case after the removal I checked it, and it seems fine, while the other five are all at a loss, they are Nichicon HM 3300uF 6.3V, I think they are among the first products, and they gave problems, later it seems that the problems have been solved, however just out of curiosity I checked them, they have a high ESR, as you can see from the pictures.

I did one of my favourite retro tasks today. I stripped down a recently acquired Lian Li PC60 to its component parts for a thorough cleaning and restoration. I find this an incredibly satisfying process to go through, to take a dusty dirty case and to bring it back to like new condition, with just a bit of time and the right cleaning products. This is one of the best condition ones I've come across and it's complete apart from the foam intake filter (which disintegrated as usual). I've got far too many of these things already so I can't wait to get this into the hands of a new owner 😀

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-12-15, 20:12:

I did one of my favourite retro tasks today. I stripped down a recently acquired Lian Li PC60 to its component parts for a thorough cleaning and restoration. I find this an incredibly satisfying process to go through, to take a dusty dirty case and to bring it back to like new condition, with just a bit of time and the right cleaning products. This is one of the best condition ones I've come across and it's complete apart from the foam intake filter (which disintegrated as usual). I've got far too many of these things already so I can't wait to get this into the hands of a new owner 😀

Damn, that thing looks out-the-box, nice work! Also my favorite task. I cleaned a dozen computers (6 were also PC60) in the last two/three weeks and it doesn't get old.

My retro activity today was actually cleaning a "broken" Dell Dimension XPS "333" as well. It said "no Power, no CPU". I gutted it, cleaned it and it works fine.

The best thing about it so far, is the onboard Yamaha sound system. Sounds absolutely great.