I played around with a C64C (250466 board, VIC-II Kawari Mini, Pi1541, Kung Fu Flash 2, a 1571 drive, Keelog PSU and a CRT TV).

The Kung Fu Flash 2 had a cold solder joint on the SD card slot, but that was easily fixed.

The 1571's internal Mitsumi PSU was apparently in-spec (5v and 12v rails were with 5%, less than 30mv of ripple assuming I can trust my scope and my methodology) even without load. I forgot to check whether the drive mech is a D502, which purportedly has the same head death issue as the D500 (looks like it from the front), but at least the single side used in 1541 mode works. The 1571 was in storage in one of my closet for about 29 years until I tried it again. Fun fact : it was either sold or serviced at Datashack ( VG Datashack ), based on the stickers on it. Not surprising, as their old location is a walk away from where I live.

I also have a 1541 with I think is an Alps mech, but that is still untested. The 1541 had been sitting in its original packaging for a probably for 10 to 20 years or so on a shelf (seem to recall seeing it many times over the years ) at a local flea market stand when I eventually bought it.

I have another pi1541 hat on order that supports option b (IEC bus daisy chaining). I accidentally bought the wrong one.

The Kung Fu Flash II's REU emulation works fine with Sonic.

The VIC-II Kawari Mini works great in NTSC mode and NTSC 50Hz mode on my 13-inch Disney princess CRT TV. I need to look into seeing if I can Y/C , YPbPr or RGB mod it (it has an integrated DVD player that shows no dot crawl or other composite artifacts, so I expect to be able to tap into that).

My time is very limited these days, so that is likely all for a while.

EDIT: Sorry if I am doing something "sacrilegious" in the opinion of C64 fans. This is my first C64 ever. I low key wanted one since I first experienced one, on a black and white TV, at friend's place, in the mid 1980s. Only ever toyed with emulators since, until I bit the bullet at VCF Montreal this year.

Took the old XT out and ran it through its paces for the first time since covid. Got some old stuff posted

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/zoom … dem-pc-rev-3-11

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/ast- … x-pak-plus-mica

Retro gaming is not the only thing to do on old hardware!
Today I did some music synthesizer sequencing on Windows it was flawless recording MIDI on anvil studio with windows Me to playback using Yamaha's Softsyth XG100 Plus and mix I think it sounds better than my Yamaha Keyboard! (PSR-530)
Here's a link to a track called Café on archive if anyone's curious https://archive.org/details/cafe_20260320

Today I replaced the whole connector header on this Raptor X with one from a WD800JD donor drive, thanks to PcBytes for the tip.

It was TEDIOUS. But I can read and write from/to it!

Not my proudest fap soldering job.

Brought this super socket 7 DFI P5BV3+ (https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/dfi-p5bv3-plus-rev.b) with 1MB cache back to life. Got it for pretty cheap as "untested". I have revision "B5" but the sticker on the ISA slot on the side says "C". So that's strange. Not sure how rare this revision is but I'm pretty happy to have another SS7. Lots of information about this board here https://www.udo-richter.de/DFI/index.en.html#Update2006. There is even a mod you can do to stop voltage problems (voltage supply overloads) with hungry graphics cards https://www.udo-richter.de/DFI/DFI_GeForce.html

On closer inspection one of the voltage regulators had a lot of black discoloring around it. I figured something was up with it so tried to remove it then realised it had burnt away the pad it was sitting on. Probably from an internal short. I recreated the pad using solder braid and ordered a new voltage regulator from Aliexpress.

Installed the new voltage regulator. Going to do some cleanup and install some solder mask after testing.

To my surprise, she booted up.

Lots of nice BIOS options to play with.

I was tinkering with my GRIDCase 1530 yesterday and it was having some power related issues (again). I was able to get it to turn on by switching the power on and off several times and I used it for a while, but after shutting it back down it was dead and would not power back on.

Today I opened up the power supply and found an old Nichicon PC series capacitor (metallic blue) that looked fine but the solder joints were clearly corroded. Sure enough, a little research revealed that this series is known for having a bad electrolyte that leaches out over time. Desoldering it revealed that familiar dead fish smell and I knew it was likely to be the cause of the problems. So, I swapped that out with something modern.

I am happy to say that it is now working fine again.

Since I got the machine back in 2020, the tiny little power supply (which is removable) has managed to have the "Big Three" of vintage 80s to early 90s capacitor issues:
1. Shorted tantalum that sparked and died - one of only three tantalums I have ever had fail.
2. Rifa X "safety" capacitor that popped and dumped out a cloud of noxious smoke when the system wasn't even turned on - the first and only time I would experience this since I check for and replace them immediately now.
3. Intact-looking but leaking aluminum electrolytic "dead fish" capacitor, likely because of the use of quaternary ammonium salts in the electrolyte - seen this from time to time, but overall it is uncommon on the stuff I normal work on.

Also, I found this really interesting...

There are some United Chemicon SXE 25v 1000uf capacitors inside the same power supply. The machine is from 1989 and these all seem to be original. I was curious as to how they were holding up, so I took one out and measured it with my LCR meter. Here is what it measured:

Capacitance at 100Hz = 924uF
Dissipation Factor 100Hz = 0.065
Series Resistance at 100kHz (ESR) = 0.066ohm

I'm not terribly surprised, because this has been my experience with most old capacitors. If they haven't outright failed because of some well documented defect in the cap itself or due to heat\bad circuit design, it seems like most high quality caps just don't measurably degrade all that much. I'm not saying they are as good as new, and they probably show age in some way that isn't as easy to measure... but it is still interesting.

Anyway, since I had it open I decided to drop in an Intel 387DX 16Mhz to run alongside the Intel 386DX 16Mhz that comes in it. Because... I had it on hand, so why not? I really wish I had some SIPP memory on hand to upgrade it because it only has 1MB, but realistically that is probably enough for most things I would actually use it for. It is limited to CGA which is displayed on a monochrome red plasma screen that attempts to provide 4-color CGA compatibility by using a clever flickering checkerboard thing to create some shades of red. Not exactly a graphics powerhouse... but looks incredibly cool! I really like this machine a lot and I'm happy to be able to keep it running.

I have had success with 30 pin SIPP boards with just jamming 30 pin SIMM sockets into them and using SIMMs. Though I am not sure you will have the clearance in a form factor like that. It's not too hard to tag down a pin header to a SIMM either.

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 03:36:

I have had success with 30 pin SIPP boards with just jamming 30 pin SIMM sockets into them and using SIMMs. Though I am not sure you will have the clearance in a form factor like that. It's not too hard to tag down a pin header to a SIMM either.

I was actually just doing research on that. 😀

I definitely don't have room in there for a SIMM header, sadly, but I think these round pin headers will fit well and should be fairly easy to trim and solder to some very low profile SIMMs. I measured the SIPPS that are already in this board and they are barely 12.5mm tall, not counting the pins. So, I have to use the type of SIMMs that have just two chips (sometimes + 1 for parity) that are placed lengthwise and have the absolute minimum height possible.

I would love to put a 486SLC or something into this machine but they are just way too tall. I'd settle for 4MB or 8MB of RAM and a 16Mhz 386DX + 387DX... I don't think I'd gain much from higher specs than that with only monochrome or CGA graphics available. It also has no ISA slots so it might be a candidate for an external sound device aside from just using the PC speaker.

On that note, I wonder how many MDA or CGA games there are that actually have sound or music via COVOX, Disney Sound Source, etc.. And I wonder how many would be playable with this plasma display's CGA mode that consists of three "shades" of red plus black. Honestly, I would take this over cyan, magenta, white and black any day... it's just a matter of whether it is too hard to see things in actual games.

Tested my 1983 vintage Commodore 1541. It has an Alps drive mech, a light stale old cigarette smell, linear regulators and a lot of volume and weight.

But, most importantly, it works! Since the PI1541 hat I have only works if it is the only device on the IEC bus (option b one is in the mail), I had to find a way to write a d64 image to a physical floppy using only a Kung Fu Flash 2. Dracopy works to copy prg files to floppies, but not whole disks and everything else I tried is similarly limited (probably due to limited compatibility of the Kernal vector based floppy emulation that the Kung Fu Flash versions 1 and 2 provide over the cartridge port). The solution was in this thread https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/15449 … kopierprogramm/ . kff-to-f1541.d64 is actually able to copy from a mounted Kung Fu Flash emulated drive to a physical floppy. Once that is done, one can mount a d64 image on the Kung Fu Flash, run the prg from the kff-to-f1541 physical floppy, swap out the physical floppy in the drive and run the copy operation.

EDIT: 11-year-old me would never have conceived of one day being able to use multiple floppy drives on a C64 ($ factor), let alone virtual/emulated ones. I almost feel like like I am belatedly able to access a dreamscape-like realm of the kind I might not even have even been able to imagine back in the day.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 04:06:

I was actually just doing research on that. :) […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 03:36:

I have had success with 30 pin SIPP boards with just jamming 30 pin SIMM sockets into them and using SIMMs. Though I am not sure you will have the clearance in a form factor like that. It's not too hard to tag down a pin header to a SIMM either.

I was actually just doing research on that. 😀

I definitely don't have room in there for a SIMM header, sadly, but I think these round pin headers will fit well and should be fairly easy to trim and solder to some very low profile SIMMs. I measured the SIPPS that are already in this board and they are barely 12.5mm tall, not counting the pins. So, I have to use the type of SIMMs that have just two chips (sometimes + 1 for parity) that are placed lengthwise and have the absolute minimum height possible.

I would love to put a 486SLC or something into this machine but they are just way too tall. I'd settle for 4MB or 8MB of RAM and a 16Mhz 386DX + 387DX... I don't think I'd gain much from higher specs than that with only monochrome or CGA graphics available. It also has no ISA slots so it might be a candidate for an external sound device aside from just using the PC speaker.

On that note, I wonder how many MDA or CGA games there are that actually have sound or music via COVOX, Disney Sound Source, etc.. And I wonder how many would be playable with this plasma display's CGA mode that consists of three "shades" of red plus black. Honestly, I would take this over cyan, magenta, white and black any day... it's just a matter of whether it is too hard to see things in actual games.

I think custom is gonna be the way then, all the SIPPs I have come across are more like 15-20mm, so shorter ones must be super rare, but I've seen ~10mm high SIMM. There are angled SIMM slots though, but if you haven't got horizontal clearance those will be out too.

For games, if you've got an inverse function key or button, that makes things easier, I have seen some that let you cycle the colors/greyscales. Maybe also there is a TSR for that. The Wolfenstein3D CGA mod will probably run nice on current RAM. FastDoom has gained CGA modes, but needs 4MB. Other stuff, there was some 1987ish to 1990ish games that came out with CGA but then in budget rereleases 90-93 only had VGA. Some stuff I can think of in CGA is StarGoose, Outrun, Elite, Prince of Persia... there's also that big thread on here about CGA games on Mono. But yeah, apart from FastDoom, I can't think of anything that demands more than 1MB. I don't suppose you noticed the video chip when you were last in there? If it's a paradise or something you might get more than plain CGA out of it, not that you'll notice too much benefit, but there's maybe a game or two that had a mode between CGA and VGA.

edit: thread Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 12:02:

I think custom is gonna be the way then, all the SIPPs I have come across are more like 15-20mm, so shorter ones must be super r […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 04:06:

I was actually just doing research on that. :) […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 03:36:

I have had success with 30 pin SIPP boards with just jamming 30 pin SIMM sockets into them and using SIMMs. Though I am not sure you will have the clearance in a form factor like that. It's not too hard to tag down a pin header to a SIMM either.

I was actually just doing research on that. 😀

I definitely don't have room in there for a SIMM header, sadly, but I think these round pin headers will fit well and should be fairly easy to trim and solder to some very low profile SIMMs. I measured the SIPPS that are already in this board and they are barely 12.5mm tall, not counting the pins. So, I have to use the type of SIMMs that have just two chips (sometimes + 1 for parity) that are placed lengthwise and have the absolute minimum height possible.

I would love to put a 486SLC or something into this machine but they are just way too tall. I'd settle for 4MB or 8MB of RAM and a 16Mhz 386DX + 387DX... I don't think I'd gain much from higher specs than that with only monochrome or CGA graphics available. It also has no ISA slots so it might be a candidate for an external sound device aside from just using the PC speaker.

On that note, I wonder how many MDA or CGA games there are that actually have sound or music via COVOX, Disney Sound Source, etc.. And I wonder how many would be playable with this plasma display's CGA mode that consists of three "shades" of red plus black. Honestly, I would take this over cyan, magenta, white and black any day... it's just a matter of whether it is too hard to see things in actual games.

I think custom is gonna be the way then, all the SIPPs I have come across are more like 15-20mm, so shorter ones must be super rare, but I've seen ~10mm high SIMM. There are angled SIMM slots though, but if you haven't got horizontal clearance those will be out too.

For games, if you've got an inverse function key or button, that makes things easier, I have seen some that let you cycle the colors/greyscales. Maybe also there is a TSR for that. The Wolfenstein3D CGA mod will probably run nice on current RAM. FastDoom has gained CGA modes, but needs 4MB. Other stuff, there was some 1987ish to 1990ish games that came out with CGA but then in budget rereleases 90-93 only had VGA. Some stuff I can think of in CGA is StarGoose, Outrun, Elite, Prince of Persia... there's also that big thread on here about CGA games on Mono. But yeah, apart from FastDoom, I can't think of anything that demands more than 1MB. I don't suppose you noticed the video chip when you were last in there? If it's a paradise or something you might get more than plain CGA out of it, not that you'll notice too much benefit, but there's maybe a game or two that had a mode between CGA and VGA.

edit: thread Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games

Yeah the SIPP sockets are very cramped in this system.

I have a decent assortment of very small 1MB SIMMs, so I'm hoping I can use some of these.

The ones on the right are around 12.7mm tall, but given the CPU and video limitations I really don't think 8MB would provide much more functionality than 4MB, and I would prefer not to break up a matching set of 8. So I am leaning toward using this set of 4, which are around 14.5mm tall.

These IBM branded memory chips seem uncommon and I cant find a datasheet for them but according to this page these should be 1MB sticks. Of course I will have to install them to find out if they are compatible, but don't think it will be too hard to solder some pins to them. I will try to figure out beforehand if I actually have an extra 2mm of space in there... but I might be able to install four sticks at a slight angle even if they are a bit too tall.

I am looking forward to this though. I don't know why, but having a system upgraded to the point that it is as balanced and as useful as it realistically could be makes it seem "complete" and gives me a good feeling. Even if it works okay with 1MB and no 387, having 4MB and a 387 installed just feels right.

As for the video chip, it is visible in the first picture above. It is a Yamaha V6366C-J, similar to the one here. It is apparently MDA, Hercules and CGA compatible. I didn't look into it too much, but Checkit said that the system has 16KB of video memory available, so it seems limited to CGA.

The biggest limiting factor in the system I think will be the tiny hard drive. I think I have around 18MB free right now with hardly anything on it. That doesn't leave a lot of room for activities. For me, part of this computer's charm is that it is still running what is likely its original hard drive from 37 years ago, and it sounds cool... Of course, it would be nice to have a CF card or something in there to give more space, performance and reliability. For all I know this drive could be riddled with bad sectors or have other problems... I just haven't used it enough to know.

Interestingly, in the years since I got this machine back in 2020 a TON of work has been done by others to overcome several limitations. At the time there was no reliable way to use a CF card with them due to some BIOS bugs, but this guy seems to have figured out a way to patch the bugs relatively easily. I will consider doing this at some point and switching to a CF card. The rabbit hole is getting deep quickly though. All this started with me just digging this thing out of storage to show to my daughter a few days ago... 🤣

Opened this PSU, it was pretty clean.
P-II was inside along with it.

Installed windows millennium on 500gb disk on an 80gb partition and partitioned remaining space as NTFS. Then I installed paragon NTFS for win98 to access the NTFS filesystem. It worked but had a bug. PC health and restore weren't compatible so I removed them from disk and registry replacing pc health with system file checker from windows 98SE.
Now when I want to check and defragment a massive filesystem on win9x I boot from a Hirens boot CD based on windows XP to do so its much more efficient to have NTFS with win9x on large disks with enough memory to defrag and check. Next up is doing similar to a 2TB disk. Oh of course you can't do it without the 48bit LBA patch.
Some apps need PC health to install for that direct x setup routine even if direct x is already superior like so best to install stuff before nuking pc health! because to re-enable pc health and restore is to reinstall windows Me too!

Have set up two contenders for my alternate-timeline-2006-second-hand-cheapo-PC.

The MESH has an ASUS A7V-E - Socket A (VIA KT133). Athlon 1100, 256MB SDRAM.

On the right in that lovely tacky case, we have a Gigabyte GA-8SIMLH - Socket 478 (SiS 651). Pentium 4 2.0 (Northwood), 512MB DDR (in single-channel for the jank).

Which would you pick?