ChrisK wrote on 2025-01-23, 12:59:

Finally finished the VGA out cable for my Radeon 9600Pro AiW I'd begun here: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today? an […]
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Finally finished the VGA out cable for my Radeon 9600Pro AiW I'd begun here:
Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?
and here:
Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

All that was necessary was to make a 3D-printed shell for the card end of the cable.
Took just roughly two years to complete...oh dear.

👏 👏 👏 Well done, considering I haven't even managed to get my card out to mess around with and stick a wire in in the intervening time, that's like lightning fast 🤣

edit: well that hand clapping emoji we've got is a bit crappy. Have an apple tomato 🍎

G-X wrote on 2025-01-24, 17:17:

dominusprog wrote on 2025-01-24, 12:36:

After a week of work, finally finished recapping this AWE64-Value card. Working with these multi-layer boards is a nightmare 😓. Anyway, the purple 47uF caps in the center are Nippon, the two green 470uF on the right are Sanyo and the rest made by Elna. Also installed a heatsink on the main chip 😁.

The attachment IMG_20250124_143143.jpg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_20250124_143217.jpg is no longer available

Looks mint! What did you use to attach the heatsink? Thermal epoxy or tape?

Asking because for some reason while sorting through my cards i picked up a X-FI card and the heatsink was loose in the anti-static bag ... thing just fell off. No idea what Creative used but its very thin .. almost zero residue on the card or heatsink on the area of contact.

I've used a double-sided tape on the top and bottom and put a small dot of thermal paste in the center.

Looks great indeed. AWE64 has a warm spot in my heart, even though I later understood its deficiencies.

I still have a CT4520 and I think it might also be in need of a recapping, but I don't care as much since there already is a sound card in that computer, and the computer itself has been decommissioned. 🤣

dr_st wrote on 2025-01-24, 18:01:

Looks great indeed. AWE64 has a warm spot in my heart, even though I later understood its deficiencies.

I still have a CT4520 and I think it might also be in need of a recapping, but I don't care as much since there already is a sound card in that computer, and the computer itself has been decommissioned. 🤣

Thanks 🙂. It really makes a different, replacing these aging caps with the high quality ones.

dominusprog wrote on 2025-01-24, 12:36:

After a week of work, finally finished recapping this AWE64-Value card. Working with these multi-layer boards is a nightmare 😓. Anyway, the purple 47uF caps in the center are Nippon, the two green 470uF on the right are Sanyo and the rest are made by Elna. Also installed a heatsink on the main chip 😁.

The attachment IMG_20250124_143143.jpg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_20250124_143217.jpg is no longer available

Well done - I dig the color aesthetics of some of the caps.

I finally sat down with the ASUS P60 board(P/I-P5MP3) I have acquired some time ago.
Unfortunately it needs a controller card on which the floppy and mouse does not work. On top of that the Adaptec 2940W does not boot with the board... it's recognized, BIOS installed but then it pauses and "no boot media"... what a letdown.

On a more positive note I got to play around with the board for hours and it was crazy how much fun I had... even without a mouse.
I'll update the onboard crystal to 66, 75 and 80 mhz - might be interesting what'll happen... I did a similar thing to a Siemens based P60 board years ago.

I finally got around to completing the "genuine counterfeit of a fictitious Chinese knock-off of a Covox Speech Thing" that I'd have made a year ago if I'd realized sooner that it was the capacitors that had gone bad in the speakers I was testing with, not my soldering.

(Don't worry. There's a label on the inside explaining what it is so it won't confuse any potential future historians whose hands it falls into.)

Now I've got another option for if I want to experiment with DOS stuff on machines incapable of proper SoundBlaster compatibility.

It only outputs to one audio channel, but I'm too un-motivated right now to fix that. If I care enough later, I'll fix that. Right now, I'm just glad to finally be rid of that TODO note.

Does creating software to help us "old guys" use our retro systems count?

I've always been a more "command line" oriented guy, preferring DOS over Win etc...
but as I age (and a serious head injury), my vision/co-ordination isn't what
it used to be, and sometimes I find "getting a command right" trickier
than it used to be.

I've been using DDLINK "local mode" (no server) often, to more easily
copy/view/manipulate files ... but it can't do other operations/run programs
etc. because it accesses files via it's own methods (allows local, lan, serial
or parallel) and doesn't present them as a general file system.

So... I've just created DDCM (DaveD Command Menu) - with virtually the same
split-screen directory list format user interface as DDLINK but ONLY operating
on the local system, and allowing many user pre-defind (and enter-able) commands
to be invoked, accessing 0, 1 or 2 files as selected via the on-screen UI.

For me it really makes it easier to do a lot of "the common/usual" stuff with
far less typing, getting command and filenames right etc.
(think of it as a simple text-mode/keyboard "windows" for DOS);

Just in case anyone else wants something like this...
I've make it available on my site. Initially I just stuffed it into the DDLINK
archive, but may eventually make it "it's own thing" if/as I enhance it further!

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

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-01-15, 03:48:

*sigh* The other day I found that the repair I did on my Toshiba Tecra 730CDT was not working. The keys that are broken are quit […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2021-08-15, 23:47:

I didn't just have one laptop that had a bad keyboard. I bought a Toshiba Tecra 730CDT recently to get hold of a Toshiba DeskSta […]
Show full quote

I didn't just have one laptop that had a bad keyboard. I bought a Toshiba Tecra 730CDT recently to get hold of a Toshiba DeskStation V - both were horribly rusted and corroded, but both mostly work.

The dock likes powering off after a few minutes of use, I'm still wondering where to start diagnostics, could it be heat since the fan by the PSU doesn't appear to be doing anything, or maybe capacitors somewhere, either on the board or hte integrated power supply?
I've so far dismantled it, put it back together and removed the pins in the dock's lock so it can be put between regular and emergency eject mode without a key.

The Tecra 730CDT was so badly corroded that I had to fully dismantle it and carefully remove the electrolyte corrosion from the magnesium frame. It's been working but the keyboard's Up key and maybe some others weren't working. A replacement keyboard would cost £30 and I'm not interested in paying that, especially having fixed one keyboard, so I've worked to fix this one too.

These '90s laptops have nice big keyboard frames that use plastic stakes (sometimes screws) to hold in the membrane to the keyboard's backplate.
I pulled the keyboard apart, this time using the soldering iron at 200C on each of these pegs so that they could deform without breaking, for later use.
Took apart the keyboard and started following the traces on both sides but doing it just by eye is more work than it's worth. I taped it to the desk to get it flat then took a picture of both sides and drew a layer over the top with lines to visualise it. Nothing wrong with the bottom side:

The attachment keyboard-repair-underside.jpg is no longer available

The topside is much more complex to follow - notice those little black traces connecting each pad, each one is about a 10k resistor. Following it, the discolouration was visible from my picture, one of the top traces at the upper edge of the keyboard has discoloured and the connection has gone from 20 ohms to 60k ohms:

The attachment keyboard-repair-topside.jpg is no longer available

I tried using the conductive paint again, but it didn't do much good. I found a better way this time - the self adhesive copper tape is sticky on one side and conductive on the other. Stick the conductive tape over the part that needs replacing and a few mm longer, fold over the ends so the conductive side is touching the membrane trace at each end. That bridges the connection and provides a trace that's held in place, but maybe a fresh conductive ink pen would be better.

The attachment IMG_11589.jpg is no longer available

Then put Kapton / polyamide tape over the top which keeps it connected. Then I put some extra Kapton tape over the copper just in case it could short on anything.

The attachment IMG_11579.jpg is no longer available

Tested it one last time and the up key now works, no random key presses so it's all melted back together, again using the soldering iron to press on them but with a bigger round tip to squish it nicely:

The attachment IMG_11599.jpg is no longer available

Yay! now the Tecra 730CDT is back to 100% working. I've got quite a full set now - Tecra 730CDT, Tecra 740CDT and Tecra 750CDT 😁

*sigh* The other day I found that the repair I did on my Toshiba Tecra 730CDT was not working. The keys that are broken are quite important so I had to take the keyboard apart again, using the soldering iron to undo all the heat stakes so I could check out what was wrong.
In hindsight, the repair I did here may not have been the fault, I think, because there was a break further up the line where corrosion damage eventually killed some more of the trace. Quite possible the conductive adhesive for the copper wasn't making good enough contact any more. Conductive paint is much better but harder to apply.
I pulled off my copper tape repair which resulted in ripping the membrane on the edge. 🙁 So I had to clean off and re-route three keyboard traces through the smaller area.

The attachment IMG_5093 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

At least now I've learned some very efficient methods for doing keyboard membrane trace repair. Now I use the cheap silver conductive paint that you get from china in a syringe, but to apply it I take off the needle part and use a rubber thermal paste spreader nozzle thing as a brush to get a nice even coat. To lay down the new traces I use some cheap polyimide tape (which has poor adhesion) as masking tape to get the lines, then paint on the new trace.
This conductive paint has to be heat cured though, so I use my USB-PD hotplate with a thermal pad on top to bring it up to 100c and that then starts conducting and I can then check for crossover with other traces, scraping off paint where that occurs.
This method works really well, having the thermal pad and hotplate keep the membrane in place makes it easier to work on.

i take it you managed to sort it, does it work well? ive got a problem with a couple of the traces on my 300CDT where the keyboard plugs into the mainboard, it looks black inside the cable like they've burnt out, i was looking at these paint pens from RScomponents that look pretty good, seems the paint can be soldered to as well.
https://docs.rs-online.com/fc09/A700000006909960.pdf
ive got an amiga i picked up 20 years ago, looks like the previous owner tried to repair a large section of traces on the keyboard membrane with conductive paint which didnt work, may have just been shitty paint.

dominusprog wrote on 2025-01-24, 12:36:

After a week of work, finally finished recapping this AWE64-Value card. Working with these multi-layer boards is a nightmare 😓. Anyway, the purple 47uF caps in the center are Nippon, the two green 470uF on the right are Sanyo and the rest are made by Elna. Also installed a heatsink on the main chip 😁.

Looks great. Curious to know what issues you were experiencing and what improvement did hear after the recap?

zuldan wrote on 2025-01-26, 10:30:

dominusprog wrote on 2025-01-24, 12:36:

After a week of work, finally finished recapping this AWE64-Value card. Working with these multi-layer boards is a nightmare 😓. Anyway, the purple 47uF caps in the center are Nippon, the two green 470uF on the right are Sanyo and the rest are made by Elna. Also installed a heatsink on the main chip 😁.

The attachment IMG_20250124_143143.jpg is no longer available

The attachment IMG_20250124_143217.jpg is no longer available

Looks great. Curious to know what issues you were experiencing and what improvement did hear after the recap?

A recap would be likely due to extra noise being generated by caps that had fallen outside their specs or had dried up internally. Not sure how useful the heatsink would be since I doubt the EMU chip would get terribly hot but it does look pretty nice and cant hurt.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-01-26, 11:31:

A recap would be likely due to extra noise being generated by caps that had fallen outside their specs or had dried up internally. Not sure how useful the heatsink would be since I doubt the EMU chip would get terribly hot but it does look pretty nice and cant hurt.

I found it interesting an AWE64 needed a recap. I have 7 of them (they are like cockroaches) and all have zero issues. Was just curious if there was something other than noise he was trying to resolve.

In other news I managed to grab another 3700+ (754) for super cheap on eBay. The guy who listed it had the CPU in bubble wrap so you couldn’t read the model number. I guess everyone thought it was a 3700+ (939). So I’ve paired the first 3700+ with a 5950U and the second 3700+ with a 9800XT. Very lucky to get the only 3700+’s on eBay ever sold.

Sent ya a private PM a while back but no reply 🙁

zuldan wrote on 2025-01-26, 12:02:

I found it interesting an AWE64 needed a recap. I have 7 of them (they are like cockroaches) and all have zero issues. Was just […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-01-26, 11:31:

A recap would be likely due to extra noise being generated by caps that had fallen outside their specs or had dried up internally. Not sure how useful the heatsink would be since I doubt the EMU chip would get terribly hot but it does look pretty nice and cant hurt.

I found it interesting an AWE64 needed a recap. I have 7 of them (they are like cockroaches) and all have zero issues. Was just curious if there was something other than noise he was trying to resolve.

In other news I managed to grab another 3700+ (754) for super cheap on eBay. The guy who listed it had the CPU in bubble wrap so you couldn’t read the model number. I guess everyone thought it was a 3700+ (939). So I’ve paired the first 3700+ with a 5950U and the second 3700+ with a 9800XT. Very lucky to get the only 3700+’s on eBay ever sold.

Sent ya a private PM a while back but no reply 🙁

It could also have been simply replacing the stock cheap caps with better quality ones, higher quality caps can with some skepticism improve audio quality...I honestly cant tell the difference with Audiophile gear but they swear by it. Its a lot of work for a Value version of the AWE64 though, not something I would do as that's better left to the Gold version.

Well not the only ones ...I have a few that were sold in boards but not listed as such, If I didn't reply it was likely due to me checking stuff at work on the phone and forgetting to reply later at home. The old noggin aint what it used to be and I seem to have inherited my dads horrible memory 🤣 sorry about that.

Just checked and the last one was about turning that Quadro into a full Ultra, nice work there!

zuldan wrote on 2025-01-26, 10:30:

dominusprog wrote on 2025-01-24, 12:36:

After a week of work, finally finished recapping this AWE64-Value card. Working with these multi-layer boards is a nightmare 😓. Anyway, the purple 47uF caps in the center are Nippon, the two green 470uF on the right are Sanyo and the rest are made by Elna. Also installed a heatsink on the main chip 😁.

Looks great. Curious to know what issues you were experiencing and what improvement did hear after the recap?

Thanks 🙂. The issue was that I couldn't use my 20W solder iron since these multi layered boards needs a higher temperature iron, and the tip of my 40W iron is worn out. Something that I notice by recapping these sound cards is treble got improved and sound is more clear than before. And the reason for installing a heatsink is the NIC card is very close to the card, so I've installed a heatsink 😁.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-01-26, 03:00:

i take it you managed to sort it, does it work well? ive got a problem with a couple of the traces on my 300CDT where the keyboa […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-01-15, 03:48:

*sigh* The other day I found that the repair I did on my Toshiba Tecra 730CDT was not working. The keys that are broken are quit […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2021-08-15, 23:47:

I didn't just have one laptop that had a bad keyboard. I bought a Toshiba Tecra 730CDT recently to get hold of a Toshiba DeskSta […]
Show full quote

I didn't just have one laptop that had a bad keyboard. I bought a Toshiba Tecra 730CDT recently to get hold of a Toshiba DeskStation V - both were horribly rusted and corroded, but both mostly work.

The dock likes powering off after a few minutes of use, I'm still wondering where to start diagnostics, could it be heat since the fan by the PSU doesn't appear to be doing anything, or maybe capacitors somewhere, either on the board or hte integrated power supply?
I've so far dismantled it, put it back together and removed the pins in the dock's lock so it can be put between regular and emergency eject mode without a key.

The Tecra 730CDT was so badly corroded that I had to fully dismantle it and carefully remove the electrolyte corrosion from the magnesium frame. It's been working but the keyboard's Up key and maybe some others weren't working. A replacement keyboard would cost £30 and I'm not interested in paying that, especially having fixed one keyboard, so I've worked to fix this one too.

These '90s laptops have nice big keyboard frames that use plastic stakes (sometimes screws) to hold in the membrane to the keyboard's backplate.
I pulled the keyboard apart, this time using the soldering iron at 200C on each of these pegs so that they could deform without breaking, for later use.
Took apart the keyboard and started following the traces on both sides but doing it just by eye is more work than it's worth. I taped it to the desk to get it flat then took a picture of both sides and drew a layer over the top with lines to visualise it. Nothing wrong with the bottom side:

The attachment keyboard-repair-underside.jpg is no longer available

The topside is much more complex to follow - notice those little black traces connecting each pad, each one is about a 10k resistor. Following it, the discolouration was visible from my picture, one of the top traces at the upper edge of the keyboard has discoloured and the connection has gone from 20 ohms to 60k ohms:

The attachment keyboard-repair-topside.jpg is no longer available

I tried using the conductive paint again, but it didn't do much good. I found a better way this time - the self adhesive copper tape is sticky on one side and conductive on the other. Stick the conductive tape over the part that needs replacing and a few mm longer, fold over the ends so the conductive side is touching the membrane trace at each end. That bridges the connection and provides a trace that's held in place, but maybe a fresh conductive ink pen would be better.

The attachment IMG_11589.jpg is no longer available

Then put Kapton / polyamide tape over the top which keeps it connected. Then I put some extra Kapton tape over the copper just in case it could short on anything.

The attachment IMG_11579.jpg is no longer available

Tested it one last time and the up key now works, no random key presses so it's all melted back together, again using the soldering iron to press on them but with a bigger round tip to squish it nicely:

The attachment IMG_11599.jpg is no longer available

Yay! now the Tecra 730CDT is back to 100% working. I've got quite a full set now - Tecra 730CDT, Tecra 740CDT and Tecra 750CDT 😁

*sigh* The other day I found that the repair I did on my Toshiba Tecra 730CDT was not working. The keys that are broken are quite important so I had to take the keyboard apart again, using the soldering iron to undo all the heat stakes so I could check out what was wrong.
In hindsight, the repair I did here may not have been the fault, I think, because there was a break further up the line where corrosion damage eventually killed some more of the trace. Quite possible the conductive adhesive for the copper wasn't making good enough contact any more. Conductive paint is much better but harder to apply.
I pulled off my copper tape repair which resulted in ripping the membrane on the edge. 🙁 So I had to clean off and re-route three keyboard traces through the smaller area.

The attachment IMG_5093 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

At least now I've learned some very efficient methods for doing keyboard membrane trace repair. Now I use the cheap silver conductive paint that you get from china in a syringe, but to apply it I take off the needle part and use a rubber thermal paste spreader nozzle thing as a brush to get a nice even coat. To lay down the new traces I use some cheap polyimide tape (which has poor adhesion) as masking tape to get the lines, then paint on the new trace.
This conductive paint has to be heat cured though, so I use my USB-PD hotplate with a thermal pad on top to bring it up to 100c and that then starts conducting and I can then check for crossover with other traces, scraping off paint where that occurs.
This method works really well, having the thermal pad and hotplate keep the membrane in place makes it easier to work on.

i take it you managed to sort it, does it work well? ive got a problem with a couple of the traces on my 300CDT where the keyboard plugs into the mainboard, it looks black inside the cable like they've burnt out, i was looking at these paint pens from RScomponents that look pretty good, seems the paint can be soldered to as well.
https://docs.rs-online.com/fc09/A700000006909960.pdf
ive got an amiga i picked up 20 years ago, looks like the previous owner tried to repair a large section of traces on the keyboard membrane with conductive paint which didnt work, may have just been shitty paint.

Yep, the repair works. Since I'd traced it all out when I did the last repair I was able to just check for shorts between those traces with the multimeter while it was all still apart and once there were no shorts and all 3 traces were repaired, the keyboard's dead keys started working - tested by installing the keyboard's aluminium plate with the membrane sheets on top, while manually holding the membrane sheets together plugged into the computer and tested. Awkward to press the keys but it worked 😀

Could you share a picture of what the blackening looks like? Just checked a couple of Satellite 300 keyboards and the ends that go into the connector are supposed to be a dark graphite colour. But looking at the back of the flat cable where it's not got the green tint, the traces are all a uniform gunmetal / dark silver colour. If yours show organic / non-uniform colour change then maybe they're damaged. What's the fault with the 300CDT keyboard?
That darker colour on just the ends may be some harder material that makes the conductive paint more robust.

Regarding the conductive paint, wow that's rather pricey - the syringe of basically the same stuff is maybe £5 although the syringe is useless for applying it. A pen form might work well but what if it dries out... Anyways, I think the heat curing is the important bit now from the testing I did a couple of years ago and my recent experiences.

PD2JK wrote on 2025-01-24, 07:04:

PcBytes wrote on 2025-01-24, 00:43:

Got an VGA-HDMI adapter that finally works. Currently testing it out with a MSI 6168 mobo.

Yeah HDMI enabled Voodoo3!
Still have to fix my board, it doesn't have SGRAM at the moment. 🫢

Hope you have it working again soon 😀 If you have memory trouble with it still, I can give some pointers with tracking down video memory faults on the MS6168 v2

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-01-26, 15:27:

Yep, the repair works. Since I'd traced it all out when I did the last repair I was able to just check for shorts between those […]
Show full quote

DudeFace wrote on 2025-01-26, 03:00:

i take it you managed to sort it, does it work well? ive got a problem with a couple of the traces on my 300CDT where the keyboa […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2025-01-15, 03:48:

*sigh* The other day I found that the repair I did on my Toshiba Tecra 730CDT was not working. The keys that are broken are quit […]
Show full quote

*sigh* The other day I found that the repair I did on my Toshiba Tecra 730CDT was not working. The keys that are broken are quite important so I had to take the keyboard apart again, using the soldering iron to undo all the heat stakes so I could check out what was wrong.
In hindsight, the repair I did here may not have been the fault, I think, because there was a break further up the line where corrosion damage eventually killed some more of the trace. Quite possible the conductive adhesive for the copper wasn't making good enough contact any more. Conductive paint is much better but harder to apply.
I pulled off my copper tape repair which resulted in ripping the membrane on the edge. 🙁 So I had to clean off and re-route three keyboard traces through the smaller area.

The attachment IMG_5093 (Custom).JPG is no longer available

At least now I've learned some very efficient methods for doing keyboard membrane trace repair. Now I use the cheap silver conductive paint that you get from china in a syringe, but to apply it I take off the needle part and use a rubber thermal paste spreader nozzle thing as a brush to get a nice even coat. To lay down the new traces I use some cheap polyimide tape (which has poor adhesion) as masking tape to get the lines, then paint on the new trace.
This conductive paint has to be heat cured though, so I use my USB-PD hotplate with a thermal pad on top to bring it up to 100c and that then starts conducting and I can then check for crossover with other traces, scraping off paint where that occurs.
This method works really well, having the thermal pad and hotplate keep the membrane in place makes it easier to work on.

i take it you managed to sort it, does it work well? ive got a problem with a couple of the traces on my 300CDT where the keyboard plugs into the mainboard, it looks black inside the cable like they've burnt out, i was looking at these paint pens from RScomponents that look pretty good, seems the paint can be soldered to as well.
https://docs.rs-online.com/fc09/A700000006909960.pdf
ive got an amiga i picked up 20 years ago, looks like the previous owner tried to repair a large section of traces on the keyboard membrane with conductive paint which didnt work, may have just been shitty paint.

Yep, the repair works. Since I'd traced it all out when I did the last repair I was able to just check for shorts between those traces with the multimeter while it was all still apart and once there were no shorts and all 3 traces were repaired, the keyboard's dead keys started working - tested by installing the keyboard's aluminium plate with the membrane sheets on top, while manually holding the membrane sheets together plugged into the computer and tested. Awkward to press the keys but it worked 😀

Could you share a picture of what the blackening looks like? Just checked a couple of Satellite 300 keyboards and the ends that go into the connector are supposed to be a dark graphite colour. But looking at the back of the flat cable where it's not got the green tint, the traces are all a uniform gunmetal / dark silver colour. If yours show organic / non-uniform colour change then maybe they're damaged. What's the fault with the 300CDT keyboard?
That darker colour on just the ends may be some harder material that makes the conductive paint more robust.

Regarding the conductive paint, wow that's rather pricey - the syringe of basically the same stuff is maybe £5 although the syringe is useless for applying it. A pen form might work well but what if it dries out... Anyways, I think the heat curing is the important bit now from the testing I did a couple of years ago and my recent experiences.

PD2JK wrote on 2025-01-24, 07:04:

PcBytes wrote on 2025-01-24, 00:43:

Got an VGA-HDMI adapter that finally works. Currently testing it out with a MSI 6168 mobo.

Yeah HDMI enabled Voodoo3!
Still have to fix my board, it doesn't have SGRAM at the moment. 🫢

Hope you have it working again soon 😀 If you have memory trouble with it still, I can give some pointers with tracking down video memory faults on the MS6168 v2

thats cool you managed to get it working, i wasnt sure how effective it would be, i havent got my laptop with me at the moment as its in storage, ill pick it up in the next few days and get a photo of it, the damage is just maybe 5mm up from the connector, the traces are silver from what i remember down by the copper connector, theres 1 or 2 connectors/traces that dont go anywhere and its the two along from that that are black inside, the black spots are maybe 2-3mm long, theres a noticable colour change so its definitely not right, for the repair it will just be a case of scraping back the membrane to get down to the traces and hopefully should be a fairly simple fix.

those paint pens are quite pricey from RScomponents ive seen the same ones on ebay for about £45, theres some cheaper nickel ones for half that on CPC which may be just as good
https://cpc.farnell.com/chemtronics/cw2000/co … l-9g/dp/SA02343

being from RS it must be a reputable brand and higher in silver content, i expected it to cost a bit more than the chinese ones, but if they are conductive enough to fix your problem they should be fine for what i need, as with the keys only half work, ive found if i hold down a working key then the non working keys will work, so one of those traces maybe a ground.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-12-02, 16:27:

Hmm, I was going to say that your slotket adapter wouldn't be able to work with an FC-PGA CPU. From what I recall there's a rese […]
Show full quote

/MZ wrote on 2024-12-02, 11:04:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-12-02, 08:55:

It might depend on the stepping.

I have a Coppermine Celeron 600 which is officially supported by my Abit ZM6 and works just fine. It's of the cB0 stepping, and I specifically bought it because of that. Some old forum posts on Anandtech indicated that only the Celeron 600 variants of that stepping will work in that board.

It seems like I got the wrong stepping, but will try it in an PGA Adapter anyway. All my other Coppermine CPU are 700mhz or faster, but with this FC-PGA adapter they should also run on an old 440BX board.

Hmm, I was going to say that your slotket adapter wouldn't be able to work with an FC-PGA CPU. From what I recall there's a reset pin in a different place to stop PPGA and FC-PGA being interchangeable. But it looks like your adapter specifically states that it's an FC-PGA adapter, very nice 😀

PD2JK wrote on 2024-12-02, 15:18:

Began restoring the Highscreen 08/15 bigtower. First things first, getting that bomb off the UC4915-A mainboard. […]
Show full quote

Began restoring the Highscreen 08/15 bigtower. First things first, getting that bomb off the UC4915-A mainboard.

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(After cleaning with vinegar and alcohol) Could've been worse!

Wow, lucky! It always seems like Nickel Cadmium cells don't corrode as destructively as Nickel Metal-Hydride. Looks like that board would be a tough fix if it was more corroded.

I got this great Toshiba SCSI 4x Caddy-type CD-ROM drive for cheap, the one below. The one above is my XM-3301 that needed entirely re-capping to work and the power supply replaced: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

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But this Toshiba XM-3501 4x external drive worked playing an audio CD for half an hour or so then broke, looping audio? Checking with the multimeter the voltages were going crazy, 12v was going from 3v to 17v and back again, similar for 5v.
This drive used to be used with a Mac SE/30 and has clearly lived in a shed for a looong time since the connectors have rust spots. The power supply board seems to be the fault since the drive is thankfully still working fine after those voltage spikes. With the XM-3301 drive I couldn't figure out what broke the PSU board and replaced it with a 12v input with a step-down 5v board in there. With this Toshiba made external drive I really really want to get the original PSU working this time.

When powered the 'Skynet Electronic' CID-0503 PSU just makes a ticking or clicking kind of sound and the voltages on the output side fluctuate wildly up and down.
I found a couple of bad caps on the PSU board but they weren't important ones and there's not much evidence of caps leaking except for some weird fluid I found on that big diode in the front, which I think might have come from the adjacent cap but those caps are good quality matsushita / panasonic ones, they still all test as good when removed from the circuit. That diode also tests as good after being cleaned.

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The opto-coupler was showing voltages on the receiver side so it looks like the feedback circuitry is working from what I can tell.

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Checking the thermal camera this small diode at the front, a Littelfuse P6KE82 TVS diode is getting really hot as soon as the power supply is powered up. From what I've briefly read, a TVS diode is there as part of the circuitry to prevent overvoltage / voltage spikes and it tests properly as a diode when out of circuit. I don't think this is the fault but is definitely another symptom of the main fault. So I've looked at what that connects to and the main thing I can see in its path is the main MOSFET which is an FEC brand 2SK2003 N-channel MOSFET, which is testing really weirdly for a MOSFET, so I think it's broken:

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But I've never fixed a switch mode power supply before that's more complex than just bad capacitors, so I'm kind of lost. It's an old part too so the replacement MOSFET with the same part code costs as much as a I paid for the CD-ROM drive itself. I'm wondering whether I can trust the sites that say that recommend alternatives based on the MOSFET specifications, I have no idea what most of those specs mean.
Should I check the SK-8085 controller to see if that's driving the MOSFET properly or is the odd MOSFET enough of a 'smoking gun' to conclude that's the fault?

So this... perhaps it was the controller, I don't know. I gave up when I realised I could buy a new power board for £8 which was modern and has almost the same quality as the original PSU. It fits 2 out of 4 screw holes and the original connectors & led with little work.

It's old stock / PCB design but there's a real website for the product and it's got most of the components I think one of these power supplies should have (with my limited knowledge). Integrating it and getting the power LED to match the original connector and power output wasn't too tough.
And in place:

So now I have a working XM-3501B CD-ROM drive 😀

Beyond that, the other day I got another Toshiba Satellite 4270 laptop in but this one had completely floppy hinges. Do you know how rare parts for the satellite 4200 / 4300 series are? No Hinges Available
It's not the first Toshiba Satellite 4200 / 4300 series I've got with completely floptacular hinges though, I previously got another one but with a DSTN screen so on that one I just took the screen off - I thought I broke that one too but it turned out that just the CPU was bad... and I got that laptop with a bad CPU so do CPUs just go bad on that particular one? Right now it's got my 800mhz pentium 3 laptop cpu because it's the last one left, if it kills that too I will be quite upset.

But the hinges, the hinges. Having two broken ones gives me an opportunity to understand how they work and how it all fits together, then determine where the fault is and see if I can fix it. This is a problem that I've also seen for the Dell Inspiron 8000 / 8100 / 8200 laptops which also use this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcA009jtyZU
Essentially there's a steel shaft that has the screen part of the hinges with grooves in the end which are supposed to stay permanently attached to the larger metal hinge body that attaches to the laptop's top case. The metal hinge body on the laptop is what seems like cast pot metal to me, that's supposed to have the grooves of the hinge pin held permanently in place in the body but on mine they just slide out and are loose. It seems that the soft metal of the laptop body hinge part wore away from some action. I reckon that someone tried moving the hinges really quickly / forcefully a few times and eventually the metal parts started wearing away.

My solution to fix it was going to be like the Inspiron 8000 hinge repair method but I didn't want to get out the glue and don't expect glue will hold as well as metal can. Maybe JB weld type stuff but I haven't got any of that.
Instead, I realised that the hinge shaft was not fixed in place to the friction hinge part which is the side that the LCD attaches to. That meant that I was able to put the hinges back in place but used pliers to press the hinge shaft further into the lower part of the hinge where the metal had worn away, seems there was enough room for the shaft to go in a bit deeper and push into fresh metal which could hold the grooves on the shaft in place.
Here's an explainer - the shaft doesn't stick out from the LCD friction hinge part:

Yay, now the hinges are functional again and able to hold up the laptop screen with no money spent 😁

dreamblaster wrote on 2024-12-29, 09:37:

Finally picking up effects processing project again
the past years i made several prototypes (such as FX1 FX1 : USB audio, midi interface, and live multi effects )
but never released anything. It still itches to complete and release something, but is there a use case for gamers ? i think not

Would be interested if it could be used with the usb port on my Toshiba 320CDT running some mt32 based point and click adventure games 🙂🤔

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-01-26, 12:19:

It could also have been simply replacing the stock cheap caps with better quality ones, higher quality caps can with some skepticism improve audio quality...I honestly cant tell the difference with Audiophile gear but they swear by it. Its a lot of work for a Value version of the AWE64 though, not something I would do as that's better left to the Gold version.

Well not the only ones ...I have a few that were sold in boards but not listed as such, If I didn't reply it was likely due to me checking stuff at work on the phone and forgetting to reply later at home. The old noggin aint what it used to be and I seem to have inherited my dads horrible memory 🤣 sorry about that.

Just checked and the last one was about turning that Quadro into a full Ultra, nice work there!

You were very lucky to get those boards with a 3700. Did you figure out what CPU the board had before purchasing or was it a surprise?

I forget to reply to people all the time 🤣. No worries.

zuldan wrote on 2025-01-27, 09:07:

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-01-26, 12:19:

It could also have been simply replacing the stock cheap caps with better quality ones, higher quality caps can with some skepticism improve audio quality...I honestly cant tell the difference with Audiophile gear but they swear by it. Its a lot of work for a Value version of the AWE64 though, not something I would do as that's better left to the Gold version.

Well not the only ones ...I have a few that were sold in boards but not listed as such, If I didn't reply it was likely due to me checking stuff at work on the phone and forgetting to reply later at home. The old noggin aint what it used to be and I seem to have inherited my dads horrible memory 🤣 sorry about that.

Just checked and the last one was about turning that Quadro into a full Ultra, nice work there!

You were very lucky to get those boards with a 3700. Did you figure out what CPU the board had before purchasing or was it a surprise?

I forget to reply to people all the time 🤣. No worries.

One I could see the CPU so I knew before but the other I took a gamble on it, it was going very cheaply so I just hit buy it now and waited for it to arrive it was bundled with a nice looking Sapphire 4890 which is what drew me to it. (I love the HD4890, its a solid GPU for its era, I doubt it was used with the 3700+ there is 6 years between them)

I released Kermit 95 3.0 beta 7 not just for modern Windows, but everything going back to Windows NT 3.50 and IBM OS/2 2.0 as well on all possible CPU architectures. This meant firing up some exotic hardware to help with the build:

An AlphaServer 800 5/500 to do the three DEC Alpha builds (one for NT 3.50, one for NT 3.51/NT4/Win2k RC2, and one for 64bit Windows 2000ish):

And an IBM RS/6000 43P type 7248 to do the PowerPC build for NT 4.0:

The AlphaStation 200 4/166 (visible under the monitor above) also helped out to test the DEC Alpha builds on NT 3.50 and NT 3.51: