I'm pumped... I bought a brand new looking Everex EV659 8bit EGA card with a parallel port, in its original box with all the packaging, booklet and QC card (no disk for some reason) on ebay for $16 shipped. I tried it in my IBM 5150 in place of the EV653 I have (no parallel port) and the system wouldn't turn on with it installed... the PSU fan would move slightly but I'd get no power at all.

I figured it was something electrical... a short somewhere... most likely a bad tantalum cap, since it hadn't had power through it in years. I read a thread online where someone had a similar card (EV659A) start shooting sparks out of a tantalum in a similar place to where my board had one. I'm no good with circuits and I can't read schematics, but I'm learning here and there... so my best guess was to just get out my DMM and test each tantalum cap for continuity. I know this isn't a guaranteed thing since they are in-circuit, but sure enough, the one that I had suspected was the only one that was shorted.

I dug through my bin of misc old electronic parts and managed to find a Rubycon electrolytic with a similar rating. Being that this part seems to be related to the (unused) feature connector, I wasn't too concerned about whether it'd perform exactly the way it was meant to with a tantalum... I just wanted to fix it! I busted out my trusty vacuum desoldering station and removed the part with ease. Tested it out of circuit with my DMM and it was still shorted! Woohoo!

I put the new (old) replacement cap in, soldered it, tested the card and it works perfectly! This is a great card. It has TONS of options for various display types. It allows me to have 16 color EGA graphics (other than 640x350 10h mode) on my IBM 5153 CGA monitor. My EV653 did as well, but for the price of the card in its box, I couldn't pass it up, and this one provides one more expansion option (parallel port) in an extremely port-limited system.

I couldn't be happier with this. Now I'm wondering if I should revisit my dead IBM Model F, because it had a few caps that showed as shorted in-circuit and I didn't think anything of it. I may have to try swapping them out, just in case.

Written down ratings on all 47 cap's on the IBM that I wish to restore.
It turns out that 68uF-16V are nowere to be found, so I need to find a substitude, as I need 4 of these.
I can probably get a complete set of caps for around 100 Danish Kroners (15 US Dollars)

brostenen wrote:

Written down ratings on all 47 cap's on the IBM that I wish to restore.
It turns out that 68uF-16V are nowere to be found, so I need to find a substitude, as I need 4 of these.
I can probably get a complete set of caps for around 100 Danish Kroners (15 US Dollars)

You can use caps of the same value but rated for higher voltages too if they're easier to find.

Still been looking for a PS/2 capable mouse that I know I had around the house. I did pull out another complete system I picked up awhile back to take a closer look inside. It's a whitebox Baby AT tower case. The main parts included an Epox EP-68LXR motherboard with a Pentium II 266, Diamond Riva 128 AGP, and a Soundblaster AWE64 Value. Spent some time digging around for a user manual on the mainboard and turns out it has a PS/2 mouse header that I found the pin-out for and a USB header. From the manual I imagine the USB and PS/2 backplates were supposed to be included in the box but of course they aren't with it now.

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^^^ Pics please!

Played Deus Ex this evening. Yet another alltime great I never finished. Enjoying it so far.

I thought i would try for myself and see if it's possible to get Sound in Pure Dos from a later motherboard. I have an ASUS P4P800 deluxe, Intel 865 chipset.

The 3 PCI cards I have to play with that offer Dos Soundblaster emulation are Aureal Vortex 2, Sblive (I have a couple of these), and a Yamaha YMF724 based card.

So far I have only tested the Aureal Vortex 2, and after some software installation and configuration challenges got it working no problems at all.
I had to manually create the AU30DOS.ini file, and found contents to paste in in a forum post here somewhere. Then after reserving IRQ5 in the bios
it worked.

Doom, Raptor, and Xwing are the only games I have tested so far and all sounded very nice for fm and sound affects.

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Imperious wrote:

I thought i would try for myself and see if it's possible to get Sound in Pure Dos from a later motherboard. I have an ASUS P4P8 […]
Show full quote

I thought i would try for myself and see if it's possible to get Sound in Pure Dos from a later motherboard. I have an ASUS P4P800 deluxe, Intel 865 chipset.

The 3 PCI cards I have to play with that offer Dos Soundblaster emulation are Aureal Vortex 2, Sblive (I have a couple of these), and a Yamaha YMF724 based card.

So far I have only tested the Aureal Vortex 2, and after some software installation and configuration challenges got it working no problems at all.
I had to manually create the AU30DOS.ini file, and found contents to paste in in a forum post here somewhere. Then after reserving IRQ5 in the bios
it worked.

Doom, Raptor, and Xwing are the only games I have tested so far and all sounded very nice for fm and sound affects.

🤣 doing almost exactly the same thing, setting DOS to test PCI card compatibility on P4-era machines. My testing though will be more specific, limited to motherboards that have SB-Link. So far used a i850 motherboard with a YMF744 card, have trouble running Xwing. More testing to follow. I also have a i845 mobo to test, and a i848 is on the way. I found a i865 also that seems to have PCPCI, but my funds run low after purchasing much hardware recently, and it's located on the other side of the world (in other words, in your neck of the woods :p)

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Scouted out some old machines at my work that are ready to be retired. One looks like a W2K Dell Optiplex P4 and the other is a big black tower of some kind with XP. Oh and a fully functional Cyber Power battery backup with a good battery!

Finished my Duel Voodoo2 proof of concept rig, it has a neat party trick where I can change the LED colour with a remote...

Specs are as follows:

256MB Ram
1.4Ghz Taulatin Celeron via Powerleap slotkit
Gigabyte Geforce 256
1x Creative labs 12mb Voodoo 2
1x Diamond 8MB Voodoo 2
120GB Western Digital IDE

Future Changes:

440BX Motherboard
Swap Taulatin Celeron for Regular Taulitin
ATI Radeon 9700pro
2x 12MB Voodoo 2

Edit: The board it currently has is extremely sucky, its a Via 133a , but if you run it at 133mhz you need to downclock the memory (-33mhz host clock) els the system doesnt post even tho the memory thats in there can do 133mhz easily.

Received the final piece of the puzzle to get my tape drive up and running today. Or rather test it. Tried to insert the clowning tape. Surprise, surprise, what did i find? Tuesday of course! No wonder the drive was cheap. Now I'm wondering what I'll find on the tape if i get it working.

Oh man! Tuesday is my favorite!

Went mining in my mountain of isa modems and pci nics for the past two days (got from trade like two years ago) and found some 8 bit goodies including a ATI ega wonder. Was disappointed that I pulled out a massive card only to discover that it was a useless token ring nic (same size as a IBM graphics card from a 5150 series).

PeterLI wrote:

Pirates! Gold does not work on the Pentium 120 or 233. 😀

What does it even work on? I tried it on 386SX-40, 486DX2-66, P75, P166MMX, P233MMX and never succeeded 😀

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Worked on both a retro and a modern Dell today.

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