Trying to figure out the pinout of the vga passthrough connector on this Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics (aka Panasonic) MKE-SR8581 DVD decoder card which was sold only as an add-on to one particular Hitachi Flora Prius model in 1997, finding the drivers was hard enough as you can imagine!

lolo799 wrote on 2025-10-19, 15:23:

Trying to figure out the pinout of the vga passthrough connector on this Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics (aka Panasonic) MKE-SR8 […]
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Trying to figure out the pinout of the vga passthrough connector on this Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics (aka Panasonic) MKE-SR8581 DVD decoder card which was sold only as an add-on to one particular Hitachi Flora Prius model in 1997, finding the drivers was hard enough as you can imagine!

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From the picture it kinda looks like a Dreamcast or PS1/PS2 video connector.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2025-10-19, 16:30:

From the picture it kinda looks like a Dreamcast or PS1/PS2 video connector.

No, it has 2 rows of 8 pins, one appears unused, no friction mark on it.

Needed something for a 3.5 bay and wanted something "weird" so got this tape backup drive and tested it today. Looks like it works! At some point I'll probably get a floppy drive to better match that early 90s dark beige.

sunkindly wrote on 2025-10-19, 19:13:

Needed something for a 3.5 bay and wanted something "weird" so got this tape backup drive and tested it today. Looks like it wor […]
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Needed something for a 3.5 bay and wanted something "weird" so got this tape backup drive and tested it today. Looks like it works! At some point I'll probably get a floppy drive to better match that early 90s dark beige.

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That looks great! And it's working? Personally I wouldn't replace it, only if you need a second drive. This gives that pc just that bit extra looks imho.

octopus wrote on Yesterday, 05:12:

sunkindly wrote on 2025-10-19, 19:13:

Needed something for a 3.5 bay and wanted something "weird" so got this tape backup drive and tested it today. Looks like it wor […]
Show full quote

Needed something for a 3.5 bay and wanted something "weird" so got this tape backup drive and tested it today. Looks like it works! At some point I'll probably get a floppy drive to better match that early 90s dark beige.

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That looks great! And it's working? Personally I wouldn't replace it, only if you need a second drive. This gives that pc just that bit extra looks imho.

Yeah! Oh I meant replacing the light beige floppy drive with a darker one to match the tape drive. I know there’s a certain charm and inevitability to have mismatching beige, but I can’t help but want synergy haha.

Sedrosken wrote on 2016-06-05, 00:06:

I bought the soundtrack to an old game from my childhood and gave it a listen today. It's from Masterworks' Flux, released in 1999. One of the first puzzle games to use Direct3D to my knowledge. I have the game and like it well enough but the soundtrack is what interested me more than the game. To get the soundtrack I bought Rudolf Clausius's Helix album on CDBaby, but I think this guy plagiarized the music from the game because the music is the same (although the titles are different, I recognize the music as being ripped from the game) but the artists (who are given proper credit in the game) are not given proper credit. Kind of a bad thing to support by buying it but I wanted that soundtrack since I played it in the early early 2000s as a young child, so...

It's late 90s techno music at its best IMO.

Website for the game is still up, at http://planetflux.com, but I'm not sure that you can download the game anymore... For some reason my version of the game refuses to run on Windows 98, but it will run on 2000-7 just fine. Doesn't work at all on 8/10.

Hello! I hope years later you still check this forum. I have been looking for this album for so long. It doesn't seem to be available anywhere to purchase.. I would appreciate if you could share the mp3, or any other directions you have for me to find the album..

Thank you in advance!

Oh boy, kind of amazed that this has worked out, but I picked up a Radeon X850 XT AGP a while back and just kind of forgot about it because I'm so used to Radeons from this era being damaged from neglect, failed components or overheating. I didn't pay a lot for it and it was fairly dusty... I figured it'd just end up in the "to fix" box with a dozen other Radeons from the mid 2000s.

I decided to at least throw it into my tester PC for 30 seconds to see if it would even display the BIOS properly and it actually did! I didn't want to run it too long without knowing what the state of the thermal paste was, so I dismantled the whole thing, deep cleaned the heatsink and fan shroud, dismantled the fan and replaced both the bearings, cleaned all the thermal pads for the RAM and applied some Thermalright TF7 to the core... and... holy smokes, it works!

As I type this it just finished a full pass of 3dmark2001SE. It scored 16231 on my old trusty Athlon XP 1700+@2Ghz under Windows XP. Not sure how accurate it is, but Rivatuner says the core temp tops out in the high 50C range and the fan doesn't even really spin up much above idle. The sound is a bit obnoxious just because of the type of motor it is (and the side panel is open with the system on the desk in front of me) but with the fresh bearings it probably is the same sound it had originally. This is, after all, most similar to the 5800 Ultra's dustbuster type cooler since it pulls air from inside the case, through the heatsink and shoots it out the back.

After cleaning it up, it looks nearly brand new. I wasn't planning on doing this today, but I'm glad I did. What a beast of a card. 😁

BTW, I think the hardest part of the whole process was carefully peeling the crusty old paper backing off of the black ATi sticker without tearing a hole in it, cutting strips of double sided tape to reattach it without it looking like a mess and applying a white circle of paper behind the ATi logo so that it wouldn't look all nasty and transparent. I think it came out pretty well. A little lumpy, but it absolutely had to come off so I think this was an acceptable result. 😀

(...and I know it looks a bit crooked... that red rectangle on a black circle is cursed to ALWAYS look crooked on that funky shaped heatsink. It may just be an illusion. Yeah... That's it. I tried three times to align it and that was the best I could do. 🤣 )

Worked on the newly acquired IBM PC Portable 5155 - replaced the CGA card (that somehow wasn't straight but surprisingly works fine) with an ATi EGA Wonder card and fixed the broken guide rails since they broke off via transit.

It has a floppy drive that is not an original, so I'll definitely will get an original for that and give it a good detailing. That and get some parts to make it have more RAM, add a sound card, etc.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 01:14:

Oh boy, kind of amazed that this has worked out, but I picked up a Radeon X850 XT AGP a while back and just kind of forgot about […]
Show full quote

Oh boy, kind of amazed that this has worked out, but I picked up a Radeon X850 XT AGP a while back and just kind of forgot about it because I'm so used to Radeons from this era being damaged from neglect, failed components or overheating. I didn't pay a lot for it and it was fairly dusty... I figured it'd just end up in the "to fix" box with a dozen other Radeons from the mid 2000s.

I decided to at least throw it into my tester PC for 30 seconds to see if it would even display the BIOS properly and it actually did! I didn't want to run it too long without knowing what the state of the thermal paste was, so I dismantled the whole thing, deep cleaned the heatsink and fan shroud, dismantled the fan and replaced both the bearings, cleaned all the thermal pads for the RAM and applied some Thermalright TF7 to the core... and... holy smokes, it works!

As I type this it just finished a full pass of 3dmark2001SE. It scored 16231 on my old trusty Athlon XP 1700+@2Ghz under Windows XP. Not sure how accurate it is, but Rivatuner says the core temp tops out in the high 50C range and the fan doesn't even really spin up much above idle. The sound is a bit obnoxious just because of the type of motor it is (and the side panel is open with the system on the desk in front of me) but with the fresh bearings it probably is the same sound it had originally. This is, after all, most similar to the 5800 Ultra's dustbuster type cooler since it pulls air from inside the case, through the heatsink and shoots it out the back.

After cleaning it up, it looks nearly brand new. I wasn't planning on doing this today, but I'm glad I did. What a beast of a card. 😁

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BTW, I think the hardest part of the whole process was carefully peeling the crusty old paper backing off of the black ATi sticker without tearing a hole in it, cutting strips of double sided tape to reattach it without it looking like a mess and applying a white circle of paper behind the ATi logo so that it wouldn't look all nasty and transparent. I think it came out pretty well. A little lumpy, but it absolutely had to come off so I think this was an acceptable result. 😀

(...and I know it looks a bit crooked... that red rectangle on a black circle is cursed to ALWAYS look crooked on that funky shaped heatsink. It may just be an illusion. Yeah... That's it. I tried three times to align it and that was the best I could do. 🤣 )

Excellent job cleaning and restoring that card. It looks brand new again.

I've been busy with the 5170 mentioned earlier. The main goal for now is to get a hard drive detected, and that has been quite the challenge so far.
What I've done yesterday and today:
- created a working AT Diagnostics disk and booted from it
- diagnosed the hard drive
- booted dos 3.20
- ran debug and found out I can't connect with the hard drive on a low level

A bit more in detail:
AT Diagnostics

So the thing here was that the AT diagnostics is a boot disc. An image was quickly obtained (thank you internet, especially dosdays in this case), however the image is for a 5.25" floppy. I have a few, but how to write to them?
Luckily I have a socket 7 pc with a floppy connector on the mainboard. And this 5170 came with an external 5.25" floppy drive (yes, that is what that thing in the picture (page 1516) is). So I hooked the external drive to the socket 7 pc and wrote the image. Or planned to, but failed, because it turned out the socket 7 will not write discs.
Quick fix: hook on my 486 and write the image. And fail, because all my floppy's turned out to have gone bad over the years (I have 8 and they are in one box).

Now what? Turns out the 3.25" disc drive has the same data cable connector as the 5.25" drive. I swapped them, and tricked the AT into thinking the 3.25" drive was actually the A drive (normally it's B) so that it can boot from that one.
Then I tried writing the image to a 3.25" disc. And failed again, because the image is for a 360kb floppy and not a 1.44MB disc. Winimage wouldn't write at all, rawrite did write the image but the 5170 refused to read it.
Now the (to me) best part: use tape. With a bit of tape I covered the hole in the 1.44 disc, so it would be recognized as a 720kb disc. Rewrote the image with rawrite and lo and behold! The 5170 accepted the solution and gave me the diagnostics!

I'll be short on the next bit: a hard drive is recognized, I set it to type 2 (it's a Seagate S225) , but the diagnostics failed to read the drive. Something with MFM and old hard drives. If you are curious I can explain, but for now I'll spare you the details. Conclusion: low level format and the drive should work fine.

Low level format would be done from DEBUG in DOS, and for that I needed a bootable DOS disc. Luckily I have a DOS 3.20 / GWBASIC set on floppy (yes, 5.25" floppy). Long story short: swap the drives back, insert floppy #1, boot, insert floppy #2, run DEBUG.

Debug prompt: G=C:800:0
And crash. So trouble.
Reboot, start Debug again and now prompt: D C:800:0
That gave me a lot of SSSSSSSSS output. That could mean the ROM is not working properly, but my MFM card has no ROM onboard (it's this one https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/ibm- … floppy-diskette ).

That's where I'm at right now.
Thoughts and feedback are welcome.

Also: should I make a separate topic for this 5170 journey? Or stick to these sort of daily updates?