Made another of these DC/DC converters using LM317 for the 486 build. It also provides 2.2V for the power LED.

Heh, little bit of overkill unless you took the power LED out of a 1000 Lumen flashlight

The seven segment itself sends 3.6V to the turbo LED. I believe these old LEDs have a higher tolerance when it comes to the voltage.

Some photos o the AM2 adapted cooler for 423.

Picked up my VYE weirdo thing for a play. It's a kind of convertible sub-netbook, UMPC kinda deally. Finally got CPU-z on it for a look and it's a Geode LX800, which sounds fancy until you know it's running at 500mhz, and seems to be a die shrunk Geode GX2 of Nat Semi origins. Which is supposedly an all new design in the noughts but might have Cyrix DNA. It's got 3D now and MMX *crickets while you wait for me to continue the feature list* It's got 3DNow and MMX! 🤣 not a sniff of SSE, but some AMD Castle instructions whatever the actual F those are, might be in there. And a crypto processor, doing all of AES 128, so probably an 8051 right. I/O being mostly inside the thing on it's embedded chipset is somewhat snappy keeping it from feeling super doggy, and the DDR helps but it's feeling like probably a middling P3.

Optimistically, I put the install files for Redfox, Palemoon and Seamonkey on there, only the Seamonkey version, one also suitable for 2k seems to work. Hardly surprising as it is SSE'nt. Maybe will go looking for a SSE free Palemoon version. Vogons barely renders, Google cheekily asks me if I'm having trouble after failing to load any results, bitch.

Gotta try some DOSbox, yiss, fired up fine, try loading FFE, Frontier First Encounters.... whoo boy, laggy, and the cycle needle is bouncing on the limiter, turn all fancy graphics off and it's still a dog, first estimate is it can manage 486DX33 speed, maybe.

Need to hack me out a chunk of disk and try a native DOS-ish install I guess.... will take some figuring if I can get any audio working or even if it supports DOS screen modes very well.

Edit: might have sounded a bit obscure about the machine and OS, OS is WinXP with SP2, Machine is Vye S18P https://www.mobilator.pl/eng/offer/umpc-vye-mini-v-s18-pb

Finished in these days the unofficial translation in italian of that little gem called "Harvester", 1996 - used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 model, patch and readme on my GitHub - forum post is at Harvester: finally in ITALIAN. As with many other projects, this platform is enabling me to work wonders by allowing me to independently create all the software I need—and that’s not all: it lets me open, reverse-engineer, improve, and even reinterpret my beloved MS-DOS gaming gems, just as I am already doing with the "Companion Web" for *Ultima VI*, *688 Attack Sub*, etc.

New to Vogons and I saw this thread and figured I did something retro today - I both unpacked a large box of retro items I bought from an online seller, which included:
* Turbo C++ 3.0 for Windows (boxed)
* MSDOS 4 (boxed)
* MSDOS 6 upgrade (boxed)
* Word Perfect 5.1 (boxed, 3.5" and 5.25")
* A large number of ISA/PCI cards
* A 5.25" disk drive, unknown if it's 360K or 1.2MB yet
* 2 full-size Seagate hard drives, condition unknown
* Various disks, CDs, etc.

I'm still in the process of indexing and finding out what it all is, but if you want to have a look, see my site at https://vintage486.com (click hardware). Everything that says condition "Unknown" is basically the cards I acquired today

Very nice site!

MattRocks wrote on 2026-10-10, 19:55:

Very nice site!

Many thanks! Lot of work to do, but getting there. It will take me some time to index everything I have

daanmsvl wrote on 2026-10-10, 19:37:

I'm still in the process of indexing and finding out what it all is, but if you want to have a look, see my site at https://vintage486.com (click hardware). Everything that says condition "Unknown" is basically the cards I acquired today

Fantastic site! I can see something similar to some projects of mine, do you use Claude Code too?

https://timrouter.dns.army/

Just seen now the footer "This site was built with Claude (Anthropic) — its code was written through AI-assisted prompts." - It's fantastic how it allows to make fantastic site like yours, I'm a *heavy* user of Opus 5.5 model, inside Claude Code

Indrid_Cold_ wrote on 2026-10-11, 07:08:

Just seen now the footer "This site was built with Claude (Anthropic) — its code was written through AI-assisted prompts." - It's fantastic how it allows to make fantastic site like yours, I'm a *heavy* user of Opus 5.5 model, inside Claude Code

So yeah, I used Claude to build the code (but not the content - that was 100% human-written and photographed) to make this site. But I can see the resemblance between our sites! Funny detail!

PcBytes wrote on 2026-10-09, 18:27:

Some photos o the AM2 adapted cooler for 423.

You used one of those "square" brackets from 754/939 with one side cut off and new holes to match 423?

How is the clamping force?

I may attempt to do something similar for 478. Actually the best thing would be to use the bracket from an asrock 754 as they used 478 holes to attach it to the board.
But unfortunately most of those boards were ewasted long ago.

andrea wrote on 2026-10-11, 14:00:

You used one of those "square" brackets from 754/939 with one side cut off and new holes to match 423? […]
Show full quote

PcBytes wrote on 2026-10-09, 18:27:

Some photos o the AM2 adapted cooler for 423.

You used one of those "square" brackets from 754/939 with one side cut off and new holes to match 423?

How is the clamping force?

I may attempt to do something similar for 478. Actually the best thing would be to use the bracket from an asrock 754 as they used 478 holes to attach it to the board.
But unfortunately most of those boards were ewasted long ago.

Nope, original 423 brackets! I just trimmed the clips on the sides so I could fit the 754/939/AM2 hook onto them. Of note that not all stock AMD coolers fit so it's quite trial and error.

Fiddling with the Vye again. I was quite surprised to find I was running a few things well in the NTVM mode of the terminal, fullscreened. Some seemed to have gfx problems at first but tabbing to desktop and back fixed it. I don't remember having much success with this in past on other machines, maybe because I've only had XP on 1.5Ghz++ with more advanced architecture, thus they were 4 or 5 times faster and got more timing problems. Though I gotta do some dickering with the timer settings to get Lost Vikings running as it is slow and laggy for some reason. Whereas Terminal Velocity is quite smooth. I have not quite figured out the audio, SBPro works for digital sound, but music seems a choice between adlib and software midi, which might be lagging a bit, causing slowdowns.

Also finding it real tiring to mess with at the moment, due to it sitting in a poor focus range for my current spectacles, due to tiny screen etc, can't have it at arms length. I might have to find some weaker ones from a couple of decades back so I can focus closer.

Does messing around with consoles count as retro here ? Setup a CRT TV and 6 different component cables all needing to be hooked into a Component AV switch hooked up to the TV, got several retro consoles that all need to use the same TV and it was getting to be a pain in the ass switching the component cables for each console ...I have already routed all the audio lines from each cable to the same 2.1 speaker setup via a box I built for it but needed to setup a AV switch for the video part.

Using component rather than composite due tot he better picture quality from component.

System hooked up to it so far are the PS1, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and Wii U ...got an OG Xbox, Game Cube and SNES still not hooked into it ...might need a different setup 🤣 since I'm looking at adding a NES and Dreamcast to the collection when I find them at a good price.

Might need to build a bigger component AV switch.

Edit - yeah I moved from mostly Retro PC to Retro Consoles, consoles turned out to be cheaper to collect for.

I think I broke my IBM 5151 monitor by selecting the wrong display output. After a few seconds turning the computer on, the screen displayed a bright green dot, right in the center. I quickly turned everything off, and the dot moved a bit to the upper-left. After that, nothing is displayed anymore. 🙁

PD2JK wrote on Yesterday, 12:07:

I think I broke my IBM 5151 monitor by selecting the wrong display output. After a few seconds turning the computer on, the screen displayed a bright green dot, right in the center. I quickly turned everything off, and the dot moved a bit to the upper-left. After that, nothing is displayed anymore. 🙁

Ouch that's not good.

Does software/web design count as retro? That's what I spent the morning doing.

RetroLizard wrote on Today, 02:54:

Does software/web design count as retro? That's what I spent the morning doing.

Depends what version of HTML/VML/JS/CSS you used? 😉

I'm a big fan of the sites that are JS-light (just the touch needed for functionality) before the web became JS-heavy (libraries on libraries of dependencies to do the same thing but slower).