Tried retrobrighting for the first time, wasn't particularly successful though. Tested it on an old mouse, the upper half was kinda OK, the lower wasn't. Thought it would be good to just stick it into a 12% hydrogen peroxide solution from a chemicals dealer and use UV lighting (submersion). I'm going to try hair bleaching stuff wrapping next. Last resort would be to just paint the damn thing.

Retrobrighting can be accelerated by applying heat. Soaking isn't enough.

Peroxide + UV light are essential ingredients, you don't want to cook old plastics.

I used a fish tank thermometer to test first, then heated up some salon care peroxide on my coffee maker's hot plate to retrobright a few key caps. My Mr. Coffee gets to the perfect temperature without modification this way. I raised the caps a little bit off of the bottom and used a small, thick, Pyrex glass dish to keep a good distance between the plate and the plastic. It turned out great, but cooking time has to be carefully monitored or it will overbright and cause inconsistencies between the keys, if you need to do multiple batches.

I noticed that the peroxide was getting hot enough on the plate to steam a little, as evaporation is also accelerated from the heat. I just want to mention that this might be toxic to inhale, so be very cautious and wear a mask.

I did not use any UV (this was done in the kitchen). Heat takes the place of UV and performs the same function by activating the chemical reaction between the peroxide and the plastic. Basically, you can do UV or heat and get the same result. Heat has the added benefit of not requiring light from every angle, and can provide consistent results around an entire object and it's crevices, such as vent holes. It's also more consistent than sunlight, because you only have to account for the mixture and temperature. Any cheap hotplate with a temperature control can manage this. In my case, I just used my coffee maker.

Also, unless it wasn't clear, I heated up the peroxide on the hotplate. I did NOT run it through the coffee maker from the tank and evaporator!

Thanks for the hints, I will try to raise the temperature next…

schmatzler wrote on 2025-04-10, 20:57:

I started removing the rubberized coating of my Thinkpad 770E, because it's very sticky and needs to go. […]
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I started removing the rubberized coating of my Thinkpad 770E, because it's very sticky and needs to go.

Using 99% IPA and an old credit card I was able to get a lot of it off, already - but it's very painful to do so and needs multiple passes of soaking until it comes off.
IBM rubberized everything on this model. The inside of the battery bay, the lid, palmrest, bottom...even the damn DVD drive has a rubberized front panel.

This is gonna be painful. I feel like IPA is not the best solution for this - maybe I'll try the baking powder paste trick next or essentials oils. Otherwise I'll be rubbing until I get muscle cramps!

I have found that it helps to freeze the stuff you work on, the rubber sort of hardens up and becomes much more cooperative to mechanical removal, without any solvents needed, less messy too.
For the metal parts, acetone will work much better than isopropanol or other cleaning alcohols, but it definitely isn't usable on the plastic bits which will then get deformed.

I have lots of things in bins with decomposing rubber coating. I know how difficult it is to remove this stuff and I'm kind of putting it off. I wish there was a plastic-safe solvent that these things could just be dumped into. But they really do require mechanical effort to remove.

I've recently acquired a PS2 slim model and today I 've been playing around with booting "backups" wink wink, nudge nudge, using FREEDVDBOOT.

Full disclosure: I missed out on the whole fifth, sixth & seventh generation console boom back in the day mostly due to being poor 😜 I'm making up for it now I guess.

I installed OS/2 Version 2.11 on my Gateway 2000 low-profile 4DX2-50. OS/2 2.11 is definitely era appropriate for a computer originally assembled in the fall of 1993, but the Pentium processor (POD83), 32 MB of RAM, 8 GB of storage, 12x CD-ROM drive, Network card, and two sound cards (both hosting wavetables) I have in it now would have seemed obscene in late 1993.

OS/2 2.x is an OK operating system, but, if I had one complaint, it doesn’t have a lot of interesting compatible native software. Most interesting software for OS/2 requires version 3.0 or later. I usually end up installing a bunch of Windows 3.x software to get useful programs. The Windows experience isn’t great inside OS/2 even on really fast computers, so the poor Pentium feels like a real dog within WINOS2.

revolstar wrote on 2025-04-11, 19:49:

I've recently acquired a PS2 slim model and today I 've been playing around with booting "backups" wink wink, nudge nudge, using FREEDVDBOOT.

Full disclosure: I missed out on the whole fifth, sixth & seventh generation console boom back in the day mostly due to being poor 😜 I'm making up for it now I guess.

This is a great decision. I just got an XBOX and did the same thing with it. There are so many good games from that era. The PS2 has even more good games. If you do something like "list of games released in 2000," there were so many good games released in just that year that the last 5-10 years seem pathetic.

Does anybody know this model? Can I put a normal baby AT motherboard into it?

dominusprog wrote on 2025-04-12, 11:12:

Does anybody know this model? Can I put a normal baby AT motherboard into it?

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Looks like a model from the NEC Ready series... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB8EiB4-i-M

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2025-04-12, 13:38:

dominusprog wrote on 2025-04-12, 11:12:

Does anybody know this model? Can I put a normal baby AT motherboard into it?

The attachment a2297c6a-b5cd-447d-b595-695d8212af57.jpg is no longer available

Looks like a model from the NEC Ready series... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB8EiB4-i-M

Cool, thanks a lot 🙂.

TWIMC: Update on my A1000++ project...

TL;DR: Primed and sanded the parts, applied 3 coats of RAL 1013 acrylic paint, added water slide decals, then sealed everything with clear coat. First beauty shot of the case...

A New AMIGA for a 40-Year Legacy

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-07-23, 21:54:

Nice, I'll have to try something like that at some point (though I have no roland card or real GuS). What's the resource managem […]
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Nice, I'll have to try something like that at some point (though I have no roland card or real GuS). What's the resource management like, is it using the original software or something like unisound?

I bought an untested NEC Versa V/50 laptop the other week which had essentially destroyed its hinge, not plural, it only has a right hinge, the left just holds it in place:

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It has no power supply which was stated in the auction, but it didn't state that no hard drive was included. This NEC needs a special caddy and the pinout is unknown, there are a couple of them on ebay but they cost 5x what I paid for this computer, no thanks.

The power supply part is relatively easy - I got an NEC Versa 4000C recently too and in the service manual for that it's got the dock pinout listed.
Ground was easy to find, just see which pin beeps against a port's metal shield. To find positive I ran a multimeter in beep mode across the dock pins. In the service manual the pins it beeped with match up where it's got "12v-sys" compared to "12v-charge" on the other possible pin.
Cut up some LCD inverter plugs since they're a good fit for this size of pin and decently conductive, jammed them in and now I have a PSU adapter:

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To repair the hinge / LCD panel corner, which had broken up into 5 pieces and destroyed every screw mount; thankfully enough plastic was still attached that it could be repaired by:

1. Superglue the parts in the way they fit best
2. Melt some metal pins / staples into the plastic with a soldering iron (with ventilation, heating superglue makes bad fumes). Did this on front & back
3. Using a wedge tip on the soldering iron, melted some shapes into the flat areas on the inside, all around the broken bits. My thinking is that this gives much more texture for epoxy to grip onto.
4. Taped off where epoxy shouldn't go, then poured on epoxy to the inside of the LCD panel corner and installed the LCD hinge bits
5. Put some tape over the clip corner of the front facia and installed that so the epoxy would set around where that clip goes and the display still goes together nicely later
6. For where the hinge attaches to the top case I first got some longer screws (this laptop uses m3) and put some extra threaded inserts onto the longer screw, then melted that all into where the hinge plate used to screw into
7. Taped off and blutack/taped an area for epoxy go in the hinge area of the top case, then poured in epoxy around where the screws were
8. Once that had partially hardened I took the screws out and flattened the area where the hinge plate screws to
9. There was one standoff for the topcase that had sheared off where the top surface was accessible and not part of the palm-rest, so I melted in a threaded insert to that post. Then melted a hole through the top-case where that mounts and put in a countersunk screw

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Creepingnet's post on VCF made me aware that the hinge is so tight that it probably destroyed that plastic, so I loosened the hinge off slightly with some pliers and washed out the original grease stuff with some PTFE lubricant. It's a little floppy but the plastic now feels decently solid so it's operable and the screen works okay in this state.

I discovered that it could boot and the screen was good, but what to do with no fixed disk? It has an NEC floppy drive which is a really early and nice direct-drive floppy, no bad belts! And the system can boot off that, so I've set up DOS 6.22 with PCMCIA services on a floppy disk and I have a PCMCIA ATA flash card that is otherwise not used:

The attachment versa-v50-storage1.JPG is no longer available

This method actually works surprisingly well, DOS refuses to install on it through the installer - but Windows 3.1 will happily install onto whatever drive you point it to. It very likely would not be able to run Windows 95 though.
There's still one free PCMCIA slot so getting files on and off is easy, so I'm not sure I'll actually bother trying to get the hard drive caddy for it.

It can run Windows 3.11, and even ran DOOM but it has no soundcard (yet??) and with only 4mb of RAM, DooM must've been running from the Windows swap-file 😀

The attachment versa-v50-storage2.JPG is no longer available

One problem I do have is that the screen is sometimes flickering quite badly and that doesn't seem to be the backlight, but seems to change depending on what the computer's running, it's bad in DOS but looks fine in Windows. Weird, I wonder if it's capacitor related?

It's been a while but I found a couple videos on Youtube that piqued my interest for this again. I follow a couple of folks in Japan that share videos of their PC98 stuff so I don't feel much need to get a PC98 (a deep rabbit hole that I don't want to get into outside of emulation) and this popped up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk_7Jhpq2X4 and this shorter video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Orc59I0gPA
They're both NL6448AC30-10 which is the 9.5" TFT panel that's in my NEC Versa V/50 laptop, which had this weird thing it does where it flickers when displaying black and makes a straining noise while doing so. Displaying whiter stuff like Windows 3.11 stopped the noise / flickering.

Watching the video, I had originally thought that the NL6448AC30-10 LCD panel had no capacitors and it was all solid state - not so, there are caps hiding inside the display PCBs on the back sandwiched in place and held completely in place by the soldered down cables that connect up the column driver chips:

Those caps are all so crusty, thankfully I have some 33uF 25v SMD capacitors in stock since they're so common in LCD panels. I used the grip & twist method to remove these and they all came off with damage to pads, another year or two and the traces might've been damaged enough to let go with this force applied:

To clear these up, I just put on some fresh solder then use my solder sucker with a rubber tip (abeco flexivac 2008) to get the traces flat. Solder in fresh caps:

Then solder the connector back down being careful to avoid any shorts, thankfully the wire spacing gives a lot of room and there's lots of space to work. Nasty flux they left on the board too, but no corrosion which is good for ~31 years of age.

And we're done, the pictures look just like the last pic I took of the Versa V/50 with Windows 3.11 looking great on there. The floppy drive uses a voice coil instead of a stepper motor and the spinner is direct drive so it's so different for reading floppy disks compared to any other laptop I own. Now the screen no longer flickers when displaying black and no more weird noises 😀
Did some more plastic repair as well, since the disassembly inevitably broke a few more clips and parts of the casing. Not that the plastic is excessively brittle but I was able to do better this time re-melting the plastic around threaded inserts and stuff. My new favourite tool for plastic repair is just regular staples, they melt into plastic nicely and are stiffer than capacitor/resistor legs.

It's funny as well, the english speaking internet has no search results *at all* for the repair of this NL6448AC30-10 LCD panel but the Japanese internet, searching for "nl6448ac30-10 コンデンサ" which is 'kondensa', the japanese term for capacitors, has a ton of results. If only advancements in tech/AI could break the language barrier for search.

Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases.

Meanwhile, my workbench is an absolute mess which will be my next priority...

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-04-14, 12:45:

Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases. […]
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Bought some new shelving to try to organize some of my PC builds / cases.

The attachment PC Tower Rack.jpg is no longer available

Meanwhile, my workbench is an absolute mess which will be my next priority...

The attachment Workbench mess.jpg is no longer available

😂 looks like Doc Brown’s lab, love it 👍🏻

In process of recapping the ABIT VL6 from the scrapper lot. Lots of Jackcons.

Once that's done, up next is restoring the 6BXC.

I found an ancient board at work, and I could keep it ~

I extracted the thing that really caught my eye, which is my favorite CPU (although I prefer the PLCC and not the DIP version)

Here's a view of some ancient caked up dust 🤣

I got a Thinkpad 560X in perfect condition, with the original SCSI CDROM, floppy drive and recovery CDs.

Dumped those on archive.org, since no one had done it already: https://archive.org/details/etukfa-0
Such a great machine. No rubber anywhere, no pain. I only have to fix the hinges, because they are so stiff, they will break the case if not treated.