Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-25, 04:46:

I would not use them if they're leaking. I always throw those away. My vintage gear is worth more than the cost of a CR2032.

Oh wow... you know, I just looked at them again after being stored in the package for about a year and a half here and several of them are definitely leaking! They have a gray crusty film creeping out around the edge. What the heck? How does this happen?? They are being stored in my office... not some dank dungeon. Heat in the winter, AC in the summer... 🙄

I've been pretty disappointed with the quality of some items being sold by DigiKey. Two 50-packs of these MuRata batteries are junk on a level which I have never even seen before, and I just had to get a refund on some Sunon vapobearing 40mm fans that vibrated so bad that I went back to using 20 year old sleeve bearing fans to massively reduce noise.

Between the batteries I have to throw away and the $5 in shipping I lost on the fans, I have gained piles of stuff that I won't use and lost around $30 to digikey in about two years. This is very strange, considering their reputation.

My batteries were stored in bin in my apartment, both temperature and humidity controlled. No idea why mine leaked either. Although I did buy cheap Chinese ones, so it wasn't entirely surprising for my stock.

It must be a bad formula from cheap manufacturers.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-25, 05:41:

My batteries were stored in bin in my apartment, both temperature and humidity controlled. No idea why mine leaked either. Although I did buy cheap Chinese ones, so it wasn't entirely surprising for my stock.

It must be a bad formula from cheap manufacturers.

Yeah, this is what mine did.

Not cool!!!

These were made in Indonesia... at least that's what they're telling the resellers.

What I wouldn't give for some Japanese coin cell batteries like the one in my ~1991 Roland MT200 that still kept time and settings as of ~2018. No corrosion there! 🙄

I have just contacted DigiKey again, just to see if they will even say anything. $30 is peanuts to them, but it's just enough to me for it to be annoying that they have just kind of eaten that money and I have nothing usable to show for it. I think I have lost less money to Amazon in all the years and many dozens of orders I have placed with them.

At least you didn't pay $7.99 per battery like peak grocery store ripoff pricing.

A while back, I used my old HP shitbox laptop to test that Windows 98 update pack on archive.org. Today, I realized that something in the update broke audio again. Audio on that laptop has always been a pain in the ass with varying levels of distortion based on which driver version was used (except Linux, which always had clear sound). I thought I finally had it solved when changing the graphics driver magically gave me totally clear sound, but now it's the worst it's ever been. Game audio is distorted to "Metallica Death Magnetic meme" levels, and basic Windows sounds play too slow. I guess I'm going to use USB audio forever.

At least the same update compilation fixed the shutdown problems that my Gateway Solo 2500 has always had. Contrary to what the modern enshittified Internet says, there was more than one shutdown patch.

I used to buy my coin cells at Dollar Tree in packs of three for $1. Now they come in packs of two for $1.25, so I buy in bulk from China now instead. Even if some of them are defective, I still come out on top. I rotate through them eventually as they are what is it used in my bathroom scale, two at a time.

If you have somewhere a 386, which didn't allow you to do much, which instead for a 486 it was possible, well many of those 386s, could be up-to-date, with a special update kit for the CPU, stuff like evergreen Kingston etc..., many remember them because they were available to update the 486 or subsequent Pentiums, but I discovered that there was a fairly large offer for 386 PCs, we talk about it in detail here:

https://www.ardent-tool.com/CPU/386_upgrade.html

I hope you like it, unfortunately today it is very difficult to find one, apart from the price discussion, there is the rarity of some models, to be the main insurmountable obstacle (!!!?)

I just finished replacing the bulging electrolytic capacitors of an ATX power supply, a Delta Electronics Model GPS-300AB, Peak power 300W and rated 250W.

It would be the usual ATX for not very dated PCs, in fact it has a 24 PIN socket and molex SATA, so let's say that if you don't have a PC that's too powerful, a power supply like this shouldn't have any problem, but it's still very useful, if you need one to try the MB, except in special cases, you can use it on the vast majority of MBs, the only thing missing is the -5V, in any case I think this is better than any other power supply with a strange brand and higher power (accong to what is written on the label 🏷).

I had to replace three swollen electrolytic capacitors, they were on the secondary, they had high ESR, and two were at a loss, the other instead had a reduced capacity from 2200uF to less than 400uF.

I haven't done the boot test yet, but usually replacing the swelling capacitors makes the power supply work again, at least in the vast majority of the time it's like that.

Writing an enabler for ISA PNP card in Z80 assembly. I'm running CP/M on a board with two ISA-like slots. One slot has a video card and I want the other to be a sound card with an IDE port. I have a few such cards but they are all PNP, so nothing works without going through the resource allocation process. My first choice of card, since I'm not using it for anything else, was an OPTi931. I have PNP-ISA-v1.0a.pdf (which is quite disorganized and doesn't seem to render quite right in any PDF reader) and so I coded the isolation routine and tried to read out resource data, but the OPTi card does not respond. Very uncooperative. Then I swapped it out for an ESS1868 and was able to read 300 or so bytes of resource data with no problem. It has three logical devices, #0 is all of the audio stuff lumped together, #1 appears to be the joystick port, and #2 is the IDE port. The IDE port takes the 'quaternary' port addresses 0x168 / 0x36E. Now I have to see if I can set the registers properly to enable everything. I would like to have at least IDE and FM sound...

Thanks to Vetz help in "Deep Thought" was able to get my old steam games working (most from 2006-2009) on my older XP box.

PC@LIVE wrote on 2024-12-25, 14:42:

I just finished replacing the bulging electrolytic capacitors of an ATX power supply, a Delta Electronics Model GPS-300AB, Peak […]
Show full quote

I just finished replacing the bulging electrolytic capacitors of an ATX power supply, a Delta Electronics Model GPS-300AB, Peak power 300W and rated 250W.

It would be the usual ATX for not very dated PCs, in fact it has a 24 PIN socket and molex SATA, so let's say that if you don't have a PC that's too powerful, a power supply like this shouldn't have any problem, but it's still very useful, if you need one to try the MB, except in special cases, you can use it on the vast majority of MBs, the only thing missing is the -5V, in any case I think this is better than any other power supply with a strange brand and higher power (accong to what is written on the label).

I had to replace three swollen electrolytic capacitors, they were on the secondary, they had high ESR, and two were at a loss, the other instead had a reduced capacity from 2200uF to less than 400uF.

I haven't done the boot test yet, but usually replacing the swelling capacitors makes the power supply work again, at least in the vast majority of the time it's like that.

Excellent work! Do you plan to do any kind of "burn in test" or load test to verify the new capacitors? I've yet to recap a PSU but I have a small stack of AT supplies I'd like to test out so I know if they can be used for future builds

I'm at my in-laws for the holidays. Naturally I couldn't resist being away from my dear retro PCs, so I connected my 486 DX2-66 box to my home server via null modem serial cable. I used `cu` on the server to connect like this:

1# cu -l /dev/cuaU0 -s 9600
2Connected to /dev/cuaU0 (speed 9600)

And I created some simple .BAT files in %PATH% that emulate common Unix commands so my muscle memory can continue working in DOS:

1C:\SCRIPTS>ls
2
3 Volume in drive C is B
4 Volume Serial Number is 5752-7D92
5 Directory of C:\SCRIPTS
6
7.            <DIR>         12-12-94   6:42p
8..           <DIR>         12-12-94   6:42p
9LS       BAT            43 12-08-94   4:12p
10BENCH    BAT            79 12-09-94   9:38a
11LESS     BAT            27 12-12-94   9:18a
12PWD      BAT            15 12-12-94   6:33p
13CONCOM2  BAT           131 12-23-94   1:04p
14CAT      BAT            28 12-25-94   3:01p
15CLEAR    BAT            18 12-25-94   3:01p
16        9 file(s)            341 bytes
17                     649,920,512 bytes free
18C:\SCRIPTS>cat concom2.bat
19@ECHO OFF
20ECHO Configuring COM2...
21MODE COM2:9600,N,8,1
22ECHO Redirecting to COM2...
23CTTY COM2
24ECHO To restore, run: CTTY CON
25C:\SCRIPTS> 

Good times 😁

Cosmic wrote on 2024-12-25, 20:58:

PC@LIVE wrote on 2024-12-25, 14:42:

I just finished replacing the bulging electrolytic capacitors of an ATX power supply, a Delta Electronics Model GPS-300AB, Peak […]
Show full quote

I just finished replacing the bulging electrolytic capacitors of an ATX power supply, a Delta Electronics Model GPS-300AB, Peak power 300W and rated 250W.

It would be the usual ATX for not very dated PCs, in fact it has a 24 PIN socket and molex SATA, so let's say that if you don't have a PC that's too powerful, a power supply like this shouldn't have any problem, but it's still very useful, if you need one to try the MB, except in special cases, you can use it on the vast majority of MBs, the only thing missing is the -5V, in any case I think this is better than any other power supply with a strange brand and higher power (accong to what is written on the label).

I had to replace three swollen electrolytic capacitors, they were on the secondary, they had high ESR, and two were at a loss, the other instead had a reduced capacity from 2200uF to less than 400uF.

I haven't done the boot test yet, but usually replacing the swelling capacitors makes the power supply work again, at least in the vast majority of the time it's like that.

Excellent work! Do you plan to do any kind of "burn in test" or load test to verify the new capacitors? I've yet to recap a PSU but I have a small stack of AT supplies I'd like to test out so I know if they can be used for future builds

Thank you ☺️ very much friend, I usually check the lines, before starting, in this way I see if there are short, if everything is normal, I connect some lamps on the +12V and +5V lines, sometimes also an old HD, after turning it on, I check the various voltages, leave it on for a while, and if they are within the tolerance values, for me it is enough to connect a MB.

Cosmic wrote on 2024-12-25, 21:05:

I'm at my in-laws for the holidays. Naturally I couldn't resist being away from my dear retro PCs, so I connected my 486 DX2-66 […]
Show full quote

I'm at my in-laws for the holidays. Naturally I couldn't resist being away from my dear retro PCs, so I connected my 486 DX2-66 box to my home server via null modem serial cable. I used `cu` on the server to connect like this:

Copy code to clipboard

1# cu -l /dev/cuaU0 -s 9600
2Connected to /dev/cuaU0 (speed 9600)

And I created some simple .BAT files in %PATH% that emulate common Unix commands so my muscle memory can continue working in DOS:

Copy code to clipboard

1C:\SCRIPTS>ls
2
3 Volume in drive C is B
4 Volume Serial Number is 5752-7D92
5 Directory of C:\SCRIPTS
6
7.            <DIR>         12-12-94   6:42p
8..           <DIR>         12-12-94   6:42p
9LS       BAT            43 12-08-94   4:12p
10BENCH    BAT            79 12-09-94   9:38a
11LESS     BAT            27 12-12-94   9:18a
12PWD      BAT            15 12-12-94   6:33p
13CONCOM2  BAT           131 12-23-94   1:04p
14CAT      BAT            28 12-25-94   3:01p
15CLEAR    BAT            18 12-25-94   3:01p
16        9 file(s)            341 bytes
17                     649,920,512 bytes free
18C:\SCRIPTS>cat concom2.bat
19@ECHO OFF
20ECHO Configuring COM2...
21MODE COM2:9600,N,8,1
22ECHO Redirecting to COM2...
23CTTY COM2
24ECHO To restore, run: CTTY CON
25C:\SCRIPTS> 

Good times 😁

Those are batch files not scripts 🤣

After messing around with my MU440EX I decided to tidy up a bit. One thing I came across was a "USB MIDI cable". No instructions, no controls, just USB A at one end and 2x DIN-5 at the other. So plugged into my Win11 machine to see what happened. No messages but it showed up in Device Manager as "USB2MIDI". OK, stuck the MIDI out into the in of my Kawai GMega, fired up MidiPlay, loaded CANYON.MID, hit play and... it played 😀

Hadn't expected it to be this painless to get my main system doing MIDI.

That also let me rule out any problems with the rest of my MIDI setup, so now I need to troubleshoot why nothing was coming out of my MPU-232 when connected to a DOS system running softMPU piped to COM1...

After 48 hours of frustration, finally managed to get my SparcServer 5 to network boot from a Raspberry Pi server, and managed to do a clean install of Solaris 2.6. Yay!

So, thanks to way too many kinds of adapters and emulators, I am finally getting XP put on to my Dual Pentium 3 system. All it took was a Molex-to-sata adapter for powering the SATA drive I have connected to a Maxtor 150 SATA card, a ZuluSCSI with the XP ISO set to SCSI ID 3, and a FlashFloppy powered Gotek to load the Maxtor driver before installing XP.

I am also using a DVI-to-VGA adapter for the CRT, for extra adapting goodness.

Decided to do some testing my PAS16 with recently acquired Asus PVI-486SP3 MB sporting am486DX4-120.
I did not have back in days such card - I have to admit it does have impressive build quality, clean layout, shielded ISA connector, metal audio jacks...
One of the goal was to test if PAS16 is really that speed sensitive. I'm using modern ATX PSU with adapter so no -5v. One Must Fall at least makes some "chipmunk" type of noise w/o -5v rail. To my surprise thundeboard part does not care about -5V.
So for the moment I thought that 120MHz CPU is too much since it made some noise before recalling that I need to find my Voltage blaster to provide -5V

So I start working on the super socket 7, and I encountered a couple of issues. One, the BIOS detect the hard drive as UDMA-82, which is got fixed by downgrading the BIOS. But no matter which version I put into ROM, installing the VIA chipset driver and enabling the DMA for HDD will cause the Windows to freeze during boot. On top of that, the throughput of both RAM and HDD are lower than expected, so is it the fault of Windows ME or the Apollo chip?

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/a-tren … c-5200m-v1#bios

dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-28, 16:06:

So I start working on the super socket 7, and I encountered a couple of issues. One, the BIOS detect the hard drive as UDMA-82, […]
Show full quote

So I start working on the super socket 7, and I encountered a couple of issues. One, the BIOS detect the hard drive as UDMA-82, which is got fixed by downgrading the BIOS. But no matter which version I put into ROM, installing the VIA chipset driver and enabling the DMA for HDD will cause the Windows to freeze during boot. On top of that, the throughput of both RAM and HDD are lower than expected, so is it the fault of Windows ME or the Apollo chip?

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/a-tren … c-5200m-v1#bios

You have to go with Via as well. UOSP is worth installing (+kernel enhanced+EIDE UDMA addon/repair).
At me:
Epox MVP3G2/2x128MB SD @112MHz CL2-3-3-6/AIW Radeon9800Pro@398/351/Awe64/IDE-SD-8-32GB/Maxtor 33GB/LG DVDR/DTK 300W/RIG

DarthSun wrote on 2024-12-29, 00:09:

You have to go with Via as well. UOSP is worth installing (+kernel enhanced+EIDE UDMA addon/repair). At me: Epox MVP3G2/2x128MB […]
Show full quote

dominusprog wrote on 2024-12-28, 16:06:

So I start working on the super socket 7, and I encountered a couple of issues. One, the BIOS detect the hard drive as UDMA-82, […]
Show full quote

So I start working on the super socket 7, and I encountered a couple of issues. One, the BIOS detect the hard drive as UDMA-82, which is got fixed by downgrading the BIOS. But no matter which version I put into ROM, installing the VIA chipset driver and enabling the DMA for HDD will cause the Windows to freeze during boot. On top of that, the throughput of both RAM and HDD are lower than expected, so is it the fault of Windows ME or the Apollo chip?

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/a-tren … c-5200m-v1#bios

You have to go with Via as well. UOSP is worth installing (+kernel enhanced+EIDE UDMA addon/repair).
At me:
Epox MVP3G2/2x128MB SD @112MHz CL2-3-3-6/AIW Radeon9800Pro@398/351/Awe64/IDE-SD-8-32GB/Maxtor 33GB/LG DVDR/DTK 300W/RIG

The attachment sandra_8g_sd.jpg is no longer available

The attachment 1_cse_ideMaxtor-sd8g.jpg is no longer available

So I found an unofficial patch, but files were removed. Can you provide a link?

https://www.mdgx.com/web.htm#ME1