I don't know if it's good for this to be here or not. Only tech adjacent. It's probably better suited topic for Milliways, but at the same time definitely retro activity.

I started scanning the old family photos left after my grandparents. There were some from when my great grandparents moved to the US some time in the 1920s for a couple of years (well great gramps and great granny separated and she moved home).
Could someone identify that piece of retro tech great granny gets out of for me please?

Could be a Ford Model A

RandomStranger wrote on 2025-08-24, 09:04:

I don't know if it's good for this to be here or not. Only tech adjacent. It's probably better suited topic for Milliways, but […]
Show full quote

I don't know if it's good for this to be here or not. Only tech adjacent. It's probably better suited topic for Milliways, but at the same time definitely retro activity.

I started scanning the old family photos left after my grandparents. There were some from when my great grandparents moved to the US some time in the 1920s for a couple of years (well great gramps and great granny separated and she moved home).
Could someone identify that piece of retro tech great granny gets out of for me please?

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I am going to guess at a Durant Motor Corporation, Star Cars (brand/line) Improved Four Coach.

Both look similar, but I couldn't find the exact same looking model. Anyway, I found 2 Christmas postcards which imply I knew it wrong all my life. One is addressed to Aldersyde, Alberta, Canada, though I have great granny's passport so I know they definitely went through the US to get there. The other has no address, it might have been sent in an envelope. One mentions my grandma's elder sister being home schooled because the school only teaches English, half the post card was written by her. They ended up much further west than I imagined. I believed they were both born here, not in the US or apparently Canada. I wonder what happened with great gramps after they separated. Aldersyde seems to be small community, but this was a century ago.

I suddenly decided to disassemble my Casio CT-360 last night/morning. Man, such a pain in the as$. Many ribbons, all soldered, so I had to juggle the boards around to get the thing shelled. I couldn't figure out out the keyboard comes out, so I cleaned it all as one piece. Turned out great, thing looks brand-new (almost).

I got the thing in a free pile and it mostly worked (dirty pots), but it had a broken switch for the "Casio Chord" system. While I was in there, I decided to do something about it. I initially thought the switch was just physically broken, but the chord system didn't seem to work correctly and this is explained now that I've seen the inside. There were just pads on the board that were supposed to line up with the switch-part on the casing - broken.

I other retro news, I got a "broken" Dallas RTC to work! It was totally operator error. When I acquired the chip, it had all the pins, two up for battery, two up for crystal. I finally noticed how most of my other ones have two more pins folded up. Datasheet says that pin 21 is RTClr, which would explain why it didn't work.

I have another one that might actually be broken, too. It doesn't boot the computer it goes in (Epson AN-4C50, gives video card beeps), it makes another test system go kooky (doesn't know what CPU is present), and of course, gives no sh*t about what time it is. Haven't tried a third system, but I'm pretty sure it's kaput.

RandomStranger wrote on 2025-08-24, 15:33:

Both look similar, but I couldn't find the exact same looking model. Anyway, I found 2 Christmas postcards which imply I knew it wrong all my life. One is addressed to Aldersyde, Alberta, Canada, though I have great granny's passport so I know they definitely went through the US to get there. The other has no address, it might have been sent in an envelope. One mentions my grandma's elder sister being home schooled because the school only teaches English, half the post card was written by her. They ended up much further west than I imagined. I believed they were both born here, not in the US or apparently Canada. I wonder what happened with great gramps after they separated. Aldersyde seems to be small community, but this was a century ago.

Century old births marriages and deaths are usually easier to get hold of than anything 100-20 years ago. Canada has old census info up, and WWI recruitment cards, you can find if great grandpappy registered for service.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-08-24, 21:47:

Century old births marriages and deaths are usually easier to get hold of than anything 100-20 years ago. Canada has old census info up, and WWI recruitment cards, you can find if great grandpappy registered for service.

A quick search on myheritage says there was a guy roughly the right age with the same name in 1950 in Bronx. He had a a family name uncommon even at home. Maybe I'll look deeper into it later, but it's a topic I wouldn't continue discussing in general old hardware.

Wife came across a small stack of old PC game manuals at her parents house the other day while cleaning out a room.

Call me old, call me nostalgic, call me silly, but I truly miss big-box games with big manuals and physical media in general. 😀

Digital is fine, it's what we've got, but at least it felt like our purchases back then had substance. Literally. 🤣

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-06-03, 07:30:

Sadler2010 wrote on 2025-06-03, 06:27:

Spending hours looking for the right PSU for my pending retro build with an XP 3000+, on an MSI KT6V, with GF4 TI 4200/4400 up to a 6800 Ultra(if it still lives inside my old Dell P4 Northbridge system) but for now my old PCs EVGA 750 G2 is getting it running(24A on 3.3v and 5v and its current Sempron 2400+ and an AGP + molex powered 7300 GT isn't too thirsty for amps as far as I am aware).

That board has the supplemental 12v P4 power connector on the motherboard along with a 12v VRM so it doesn't need a high AMP 5v rail PSU unlike earlier 462 boards that don't have either. So any good modern ATX PSU that has the P4 4 pin power connector would work just fine for it.

Earlier 462 boards got stuck with a 5v VRM and no supplemental power and needed the extra AMPs to power everything else along with the motherboard, later boards 462 like yours are no different than modern ATX boards that run off the 12v rail.

Well I found that out after reading all over that Socket A needed big amps on 3.3V and 5V rails. Last time I messed with Socket A we only had the PSUs of the day. Of course now I have a vintage new PSU that happens to have come the worst Caps of the capacitor plague era(or after) Fijjiyu or whatever Antecs PSU maker was fond of using when they made the SP-500.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-08-25, 23:50:

Wife came across a small stack of old PC game manuals at her parents house the other day while cleaning out a room.

Call me old, call me nostalgic, call me silly, but I truly miss big-box games with big manuals and physical media in general. 😀

Digital is fine, it's what we've got, but at least it felt like our purchases back then had substance. Literally. 🤣

You mean when we actually owned them forever VS only as long as we're allowed to... And I see you're in WI also, where are at? I'm in Racine.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-08-25, 23:50:

Wife came across a small stack of old PC game manuals at her parents house the other day while cleaning out a room.

Hah. I also keep a stack of loose manuals at my parents' place. For games for which I didn't keep or never had the boxes. It's a nice feeling perusing them from time to time.
Several months ago my mom accidentally found one manual that I knew I had, but had considered lost for over a decade.

dr_st wrote on 2025-08-26, 07:56:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-08-25, 23:50:

Wife came across a small stack of old PC game manuals at her parents house the other day while cleaning out a room.

Hah. I also keep a stack of loose manuals at my parents' place. For games for which I didn't keep or never had the boxes. It's a nice feeling perusing them from time to time.
Several months ago my mom accidentally found one manual that I knew I had, but had considered lost for over a decade.

After I moved out of my parents house in my early twenties, it wasn't until many years after that I learned that my mother had simply dumped all my stuff in the garbage. Two Olivetti PCs (monitors and all), loads of boxed games, all my 80s Star Wars figures (and I had loads!), and much much more. Thanks Mom...

luckybob wrote on 2019-05-01, 18:39:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/404433 … 0501_002718.jpg […]
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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/404433 … 0501_002718.jpg

Today I saved a Trenton TR-P6V pentium pro board from the bin. I had actually bought this board 10+ years ago and it never worked right, the bios would hang and could never finish posting. Well, I stumbled across the board last night when i was goofing around in the garage and gave it another go.

Still had errors, but this time I was armed with a eeprom programmer, and sure enough, the bios chip was wonky. Not enough the system wouldn't post, but enough where it couldn't finish. So I contacted the people that made the board: https://www.trentonsystems.com/ and they were quick to respond and happy to provide a manual and updated bios. So in addition to the board now working properly, I now have a manual!

There still is a borked memory slot (or a bad simm) but I can fix that easily enough.

I'll post both over onto vogons drivers for the people that google sends here. Also if anyone has a TR-DP6 version of this board (dual cpu), shoot me an message as I'd love to get it from you.

Hey. Do you have the BIOS and manual for this still?

Today, I introduced my 19-year-old son to the vanilla version of Doom 2.

Despite him being a fan of many FPS games, he had never played their "grandfather." It took him a while to get used to the old mechanics, especially the lack of jumping and crouching.

We even played a little deathmatch, which was a good opportunity for me to test the ipxbox server I have deployed on my NAS.

For some reason, we kept respawning in the same spot, which was strange.

That was fun.

Fired up my recently acquired Abit BH6. So sweet to own one again, I had one back when it was new. Starting out with memtest, too ensure stability - but must find a 100Mhz FSB CPU for that rather than the current Celeron 333, which doesn't respond well to more than 75 FSB.
Hoping to use the board for binning some 400 MHz Celerons, hopefully finding a pair that will run 600 for my BP6 board 😎

megatog615 wrote on 2025-08-26, 15:21:

Hey. Do you have the BIOS and manual for this still?

the Trenton TR-P6V? Does the pope defecate in the woods?

I don't have the board at hand right now, but I saved everything: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/trento … technolo-tr-p6v

I submitted it to TRW so if you see this on a Garglier search, it should be updated " SOON™ "

It's arrived, my PB Club 30 with the right speakers!!

Spent an evening coaxing a very dirty and neglected P2B-DS back to life.
The board would not even post before cleaning, it now works fine =)
And while I was testing the board I took the opportunity to test a bunch of other stuff in it.
A bunch of SCSI disks and CDROM's, memorysticks and a few soundcards.
Only one item was not working correctly, an old TEAC 6-speed CDROM.
But since it spins and tries to read I hope its just the usual cap problem.

It's binning time! 😁

Sadler2010 wrote on 2025-08-26, 01:31:

You mean when we actually owned them forever VS only as long as we're allowed to... And I see you're in WI also, where are at? I'm in Racine.

Heh yeah. At least with physical media and no online DRM, you were free to play the games as long as you want without worry.

A fellow tundra dweller! I'm just outside Green Bay. 😀

pan069 wrote on 2025-08-26, 09:37:

dr_st wrote on 2025-08-26, 07:56:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-08-25, 23:50:

Wife came across a small stack of old PC game manuals at her parents house the other day while cleaning out a room.

Hah. I also keep a stack of loose manuals at my parents' place. For games for which I didn't keep or never had the boxes. It's a nice feeling perusing them from time to time.
Several months ago my mom accidentally found one manual that I knew I had, but had considered lost for over a decade.

After I moved out of my parents house in my early twenties, it wasn't until many years after that I learned that my mother had simply dumped all my stuff in the garbage. Two Olivetti PCs (monitors and all), loads of boxed games, all my 80s Star Wars figures (and I had loads!), and much much more. Thanks Mom...

These were left over from her brother, who has been a PC user/gamer for most of his life, like me. MY wife also found a stack of SNES games, and some of their boxes, in the same storage room.

Back in the day, my wife's family owned and operated one of the local video rental stores. Some of those things survived buried in storage.

Kinda cool to find these little treasures from the past. 😀