Found an old 14" CRT monitor in the attic while cleaning out my parents' place. One of those generic tube monitors from the mid-90s, no brand on the back that I can find, just a service label with some numbers. Powered it up after a proper clean and it actually works - slight convergence issue on the left edge but otherwise fine.

I am thinking of pairing it with a 486 DX2 box I have been putting together. The only question is whether it is worth chasing an old sound card for it, or just use whatever comes onboard. In my time we had no choice anyway - Sound Blaster 16 if you were lucky, or the beige nothing that came in the box.

Good to see this thread still going after all these years.

darry wrote on 2026-10-14, 23:50:

dominusprog wrote on 2026-10-14, 18:55:

Cooking some cables 🍜

The attachment IMG_20261014_221149.jpg is no longer available

Any recommended seasoning and accompaniment suggestions ?

More seriously, while I have heard of boiling rubber belts in an attempt to restore elasticity, I am a bit at loss trying to guess why one would want to boil power cords, for example.

Retrobright, of course. Like you said, there are two reasons for boiling these cords, restoring elasticity and retrobright.

Modified my VLB 486 motherboard for some voltage control. By default it will do 5v and 3.4v by way of jumpers.
So My AMD 5x86 133 now runs at 160mhz no problems with 3.6v but the 2nd level cache will not boot at 40mhz.
So it's either the tag ram or the ISSI cache I got from Aliexpress a few years back. Probably the ISSI cache as it's been relabelled 10ns
which is likely bogus. Probably 15ns or 20ns.

So... is this now a super retro (6502-based computer) or modern (today's software)?

Anyways, got my simulator in a state that I'm not too embarrassed to show it in public.

Re: Modelling digital hardware in C# (I'm creating a simulator with 6502 CPU)

Today's retro activity frustration - I wanted to do a quick simple test with my old IBM XT build (5160 XT motherboard in a generic PC case) but upon turning it on, it lit up for a few seconds and then did nothing. It was last working in March this year.

Looks like the old AT PSU has finally given up. I measured the voltage on the power switch terminals and there's nothing. 🙁

I don't have any spare AT power supplies, so I'll probably just replace it with an ATX PSU of which I have a few older working ones in my collection to choose from. I already have an AT to ATX converter sitting in my drawer, so that will come in handy when I get around to doing this repair.

bakemono wrote on 2026-10-14, 22:04:

I saw this thread, realized I have a working S7 board, GeForce 4 MX PCI card, and an array of CPUs, and then found an HDD with Win98 on it to boot up. Unfortunately the nvidia drivers don't work on this setup. I tried 3 different versions and they just cause a windows protection error or a reboot-loop. No time to install Win2000, if that would even work on a VIA chipset with BIOS from 1998.

Windows 2000 installed and booted once. After that, only safe mode, or else BAD POOL CALL. No idea why, since no minidumps are created despite being set to create minidumps, and I can't do remote kernel debug because I don't know where my cardbus serial port card is. I guess 3D is not happening on this board...

Today's activity - repairing my XT IBM 5160 build.

I'd assumed that the old AT power supply had failed, but a replacement PSU also wouldn't work.

To cut a long story short, the culprit was the infamous C58 tantalum capacitor on the motherboard, shorting -12V to ground. I've just removed the capacitor for now and might consider replacing it, although I've read that it's not strictly essential. I might just replace it anyway at some point, but for now the PC lives again!

Finished modding Voodoo4 PCI today. DVI output works fine 😀

Continuing my TI-99/4A trip down memory lane...

Got my PicoPEB setup how I want it, and made a case for it. (https://github.com/hexbus/ppebcr-docs)

Got a TI / Atari joystick adapter so I could use a standard CX40 joystick, and made a case for it. (https://texelec.com/product/ti-994a-to-atari- … ystick-adapter/)

Now I'm just waiting for the Pico9918 I ordered to arrive so I can drop than in place of the TMS9918 chip so I can get F18 emulation as well as high quality video output. No more composite. (https://github.com/visrealm/pico9918)

Yeah, I'm having a blast! 😜

StriderTR wrote on Yesterday, 00:59:

Continuing my TI-99/4A trip down memory lane... […]
Show full quote

Continuing my TI-99/4A trip down memory lane...

Got my PicoPEB setup how I want it, and made a case for it. (https://github.com/hexbus/ppebcr-docs)

Got a TI / Atari joystick adapter so I could use a standard CX40 joystick, and made a case for it. (https://texelec.com/product/ti-994a-to-atari- … ystick-adapter/)

Now I'm just waiting for the Pico9918 I ordered to arrive so I can drop than in place of the TMS9918 chip so I can get F18 emulation as well as high quality video output. No more composite. (https://github.com/visrealm/pico9918)

Yeah, I'm having a blast! 😜

TI-99 is awesome.

RetroLizard wrote on Yesterday, 01:59:

TI-99 is awesome.

It is indeed. The TI-99/4A was my first computer back in 1981, so it holds a particularly special place in my nostalgic brain. 😀

I'm working on maxing out the machines capabilities, once I get the Pico9918 in there, that should about do it.

I had the TI-99 myself at one point, though that was several years ago.

I added another Toshiba hard drive to the dead pile.

Of course, the user (not me) wants the data off of a 24-year-old drive, but I don't think there's anything you can do with a click-of-death drive. I was told that the computer was shut down safely, and when it was turned back on, the drive was suddenly dead. Based on my past experience with Toshiba drives and this particular user, I think that's possible.

I am cataloguing my "old stuff" and looking into throwing together a Windows XP gaming desktop, since I have a pile of old parts from that era and a now useful 10-series Geforce that needs a new home for it's gaming duties. I also saw that ReactOS is making a lot of progress lately and just now has released a fully-working NTFS implementation, so perhaps I will look into using that as a base for an XP gaming machine.

Glad the XT is alive again, PTherapist. That C58 cap is a quiet killer on those boards - mine sat dead for years before anyone pointed at it. This week I finally got my 486 DX2 box posting next to the CRT from the attic; DOS boots clean, only the sound card is still missing, so for now it is all beeps and silence.

Trying to get PCI USB card working in a Dell Dimension Win98 system.

My involuntary retro activity today was crawling around on the floor looking for a tiny bit of plastic, I inverted a laptop floppy drive that belongs to my actionnote and the eject button fell off and went seemingly into another dimension. After thoroughly scouring a section of floor, I discovered numerous small screws that I didn't know I had lost, or forgot about... but gave up when I was sure I should have seen it if it was there.

10 minutes of racking my brains as to where the hell it could have gone, and I see I have a baggie of random internal case wiring sitting open near where I dropped it... check in there, yup, found it, damn thing caught a bounce with enough height and reach to drop in that. Really glad I found it though, would have been hard to make a strong replacement for it.

What I started out doing ,which I thought would divert me a mere 5 mins, was looking at whether I could make a special combo drive that fit in a 5.25 half height bay. All the things in one bay! So then, using a thin media bay thing that was part of a case at one time (never had the case arrived with parts) and a laptop optical drive, which have adapters on the cheapie etailers, and a laptop floppy drive, it looks like the stack comes in at half 5.25 height. The media bay thing has a metal cage under it, that seems to be extra bulk for fastening it in the top of a 3.5 cage where it sat on the bottom of the 5.25 cage, weird arrangement. But that means it's hollow and either the floppy might mount nice into it with a hole cut, or it might get removed almost completely and the media bay can be wherever in the stack. Media bay has SD/MMC, Compact Flash and USB. The ribbon connectors that laptop floppy drives have turn out to be a standard. Not sure at the moment though whether I will be making an adapter for the ribbon or whether I will be using a low profile external USB drive in there. Depends on what age of machine I decide to put it in.

I do actually have a faceplate surround for the media bay too, but it will need scrubbing off and carving up a bit, then repainted.

I got the laptop with the dead hard drive fixed by robbing an SSD and IDE to SATA bridge out of my old HP laptop. The only affordable IDE to mSATA or M.2 bridge boards were "designed" by a moron who used a through-hole IDE header instead of surface mount like every 2.5" HDD ever made (along with the plastic case being slightly larger than a real drive), so I had to spend some quality time trimming the pins off flush with the PCB to get it to fit. I loaded a disk image that I made of the original drive six years ago, and for some reason, Windows XP didn't BSOD on its first boot from a freshly imaged drive like it usually does. This computer's ICH3-M southbridge seems to get along with the JMicron bridge chip and gives me good disk benchmark speeds, but it still feels a little sluggish. I was surprised that Device Manager showed that it was using UDMA6.

Now I need to get a hard drive in the HP. I found the drive I pulled out of it and replaced with the SSD (another Toshiba, and of course, it has hundreds of bad sectors), but that drive doesn't boot anymore. Even in safe mode, it hangs at the light blue Windows XP splash screen (the one that normally appears for a fraction of a second before the "Welcome" screen). I shouldn't be messing with old failing drives like that, but I'd have to buy old drives off eBay or something. I don't like those mSATA to IDE bridge boards, and I didn't look at how expensive small mSATA SSDs are.

I'm building a Richard Burns Rally VR simulator setup. The thing with RBR is, it's quantum technology: it's vintage and contemporary at the same time and you influence which it is by playing it. Just like the setup on which I'm running it. Yes, it has an RTX2070 which is modern(ish, to some). But it also has a Razer Tiamat V1. Which, agreed, is not exactly 80286 territory but then again who still uses one today (or ever had one!). I must say though, with a Quest 2 over your face, a Tiamat over your ears, and a raceseat to cover the rest, sensory deprivation of the real world is a factor. But it's replaced by something nice.

Oh, I'm also further configuring the P200MMX DOS rocket after selling the 486 DX50. It's my third P200MMX and this one stays!

Got the MU90, listening to Descent is 😁
Had to pay £44 for import duties/taxes so nearly £200 total for the unit. Was it worth it, on the fence with this one, although the doom and descent midis sound epic. Tested with fidelio x3 woox, klipsch promedia 2.1 thx and cambridge soundworks 2.1. Sounds good on all