oeuvre wrote:

Speaking of testing, got a 2.1GB IBM hard drive in the mail today. It's for yet another socket 7 build.

Interesting hard drive. Must be one of the older ATA (I'd say 33Mbps at best) or PIO standard? I have a 428.1MB Seagate HDD that I pulled out of my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus that was upgraded to a Solid State Drive setup (CompactFlash card and CF to IDE adapter) for faster load times, and the old Seagate HDD still lives on, without any bad or derogatory marks in the SMART test within Ubuntu on another desktop.

Played around with a matsonic motherboard, its a 440lx slot 1 AT board. Modded the bios to support 100mhz cpu's and latter Celeron's
The VRM does not like the Celeron cpu I have in it, I'll try a 450mhz Pii next.

Its a very odd board, they used good parts for the most part, but they way they made it is cheap. Defiantly will not be able to over clock anything here, for safety that is, even the chokes run super hot.

Rescued these from being recycled, currently working on restoring the Classic II since it at least seems to show a hope of working.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Rescued these from being recycled, currently working on restoring the Classic II since it at least seems to show a hope of worki […]
Show full quote

Rescued these from being recycled, currently working on restoring the Classic II since it at least seems to show a hope of working.

What issues does the Classic ][ have? If it's lines, remove everything off of the board and soak it in soapy water, rinse it off, wait about a week or so, and place everything back on the board. Check for corrosion on the board since those lithium batteries do leak it will corrode the motherboard's key components.

bjwil1991 wrote:

King_Corduroy wrote:

Rescued these from being recycled, currently working on restoring the Classic II since it at least seems to show a hope of worki […]
Show full quote

Rescued these from being recycled, currently working on restoring the Classic II since it at least seems to show a hope of working.

What issues does the Classic ][ have? If it's lines, remove everything off of the board and soak it in soapy water, rinse it off, wait about a week or so, and place everything back on the board. Check for corrosion on the board since those lithium batteries do leak it will corrode the motherboard's key components.

Why does everybody here recommend soaking boards? That's never a good idea in the long term unless you are using proper chemicals. Use contact cleaner (De-oxit) and a toothbrush and rinse afterwards with isopropyl alcohol. I've been doing electronics restoration for a while now and I couldn't imagine doing anything else without spending lots of money on equipment and chemicals.

Sorry for double posting, but another activity I'm doing is diagnosing my $10 external DVD burner. Before hand, it would try to burn a DVD, but it failed, so I tried cleaning the interior, and later on, it decided to eject every discs (pre-recorded, recorded on, blank, audio, movies, etc.), so I cleaned every spot on the I/O board (IDE cable, Master/Slave/CS/DMA connection) and the laser board as well with contact cleaner and lubricator that is plastic-safe, and it started to work, but I get a different error when trying to write to a disc with Disk Utility for Mac OS X Tiger:

1Unable to burn "file.dmg" 
2The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media.

It does verify and write the checksum of/from the DMG file without issues, just won't burn. It would go from:

1Checksumming whole disk (Apple_HFS : 0)...

To this:

1Writing Track...
25 seconds later
3Finalizing

And:

1Unable to burn "file.dmg" 
2The device failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media.

Should I use isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab to clean the laser, or would it be another issue, like the cable for the laser board isn't on tightly?

On the plus side, it does read written or manufactured CDs and DVDs (some of the CDs or DVDs I burned on my Windows PC doesn't seem to work on my iMac G3/600 anymore, but it tries to read the disks).

xplus93 wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

King_Corduroy wrote:

Rescued these from being recycled, currently working on restoring the Classic II since it at least seems to show a hope of worki […]
Show full quote

Rescued these from being recycled, currently working on restoring the Classic II since it at least seems to show a hope of working.

What issues does the Classic ][ have? If it's lines, remove everything off of the board and soak it in soapy water, rinse it off, wait about a week or so, and place everything back on the board. Check for corrosion on the board since those lithium batteries do leak it will corrode the motherboard's key components.

Why does everybody here recommend soaking boards? That's never a good idea in the long term unless you are using proper chemicals. Use contact cleaner (De-oxit) and a toothbrush and rinse afterwards with isopropyl alcohol. I've been doing electronics restoration for a while now and I couldn't imagine doing anything else without spending lots of money on equipment and chemicals.

You're right. Soaking the board with soap and water will cause issues. Didn't think about the deoxidizing method will work on electronics, PCB boards, and other fun stuff... I need to do research on that topic some more.

Been deeply buried in my Amiga600 these past few days. I had it completely dismanteled and cleaned a lot of rust off the RF shield. What I used was one of those steel spunges that comes with some hefty white soap. Cleaned it all up and used some mild hand dishwasher soap to get the white film off. Came out beautifully and only stains from the rust are left. I proceeded with the plastic parts of the case, and used that mild soap, a brush and a damp cloth to rinse it all up. Finished it all by removing leftovers from a sticker, using alcohol and some paper towels. So far so good.

For the actual parts inside. The mainboard are in cosmetic beautifull shape. Though the caps need a replacement, and as an Amiga600 is an expensive machine, I do not dare solder on it. So I called up one of those experts that have been fixing radio's and tv's since the 70's. He is talking about some 76 US Dollars plus/minus 10, to make a total recap. Need to do some upgrades in the future too. Like more memory, scandoubler and so on. Perhaps an accelerator card. Who knows... Then I did a complete installation of the Amiga's harddrive on my Linux computer, using FS-UAE.

The way to do it, is to connect the harddrive as a usb storage device. Set permission to the entire drive as the user I am logged in as. Then I mounted the usb device as a harddrive in FS-UAE setup. Mounted the workbench installation ADF files as amiga floppy disks in the emulator and installed it on the physical drive with the correct Amiga filesystem. Copied the workbench ADF files to the harddrive, using a folder on my Linux machine, mounted as an Amiga harddrive, and the ADF2DISK tool. Installed the harddrive in my Amiga and wrote out the Workbench files on fresh formatted floppy disks. Easy and nice.

It is beginning to turn out, to be a fun project.

Finally got my PIII mobo, so I started assembly of the computer. Ran into a few minor problems during assembly.... Realised I didn't have anymore thermal paste so will have to get new paste tomorrow. I was also fresh out of pc-133 ram, only had 128 mb left. Finally the internal USB connector had a different pinout:
5V (red), usb - (white), usb + (green), not connected, ground (black)
ground (black), not connected, usb + (green), usb - (white), 5v (red)
Had to make a small hole to fit the 5V on the pin1 row, which ofcourse broke in the process so I had to glue it back....
Ordered some pins which I will solder for a f_audio connector later.
Hopefully I can start testing tomorrow

edit: 1 trip to my local computer supplier later
got everything together so started testing, assembled the case but have similar problems as my athlon and more. Whenever I touch my radiator while I am touching my computer (turned off but power connected), I can feel the voltage leaking away from the computer, could this be related to a poor soldering job or reassembly of the parts? This concerns my partially recapped antec and fully recapped hiper.
and the following is something I never experienced before when building a computer, I accidently touched the case and i saw a spark and the computer shutdown but restarted right away. This could be a poor grounding from the mobo but I used proper stand-offs, rings and proper screws for mounting, any ideas on this electrical engineering just isn't my forté 😢
anyhow I got my computer working properly and sucessfully installed my dual boot on it (got in a few NoS sealed Pata HD's yesterday)

Jade Falcon wrote:

Played around with a matsonic motherboard, its a 440lx slot 1 AT board. Modded the bios to support 100mhz cpu's and latter Celeron's
The VRM does not like the Celeron cpu I have in it, I'll try a 450mhz Pii next.

Its a very odd board, they used good parts for the most part, but they way they made it is cheap. Defiantly will not be able to over clock anything here, for safety that is, even the chokes run super hot.

Funny how you take a 66fsb board, tweak/mod it to run at 100fsb and then say it will not overclock? You are running it 50% overclocked already with a 450 pII..... Most 44LX board do not go beyond 83mhz fsb as far as i know.

He said that he modded the bios to support 100MHz CPUs, not to run them at that speed. Though maybe this is still what he did

Decided to MacGyver (or rednecked) my external DVD burner since the original drive quit working, and I have a dual screen setup on my iMac G3/600 Graphite.

I'm impressed after I replaced the DVD Burner that it actually works (several trial and errors regarding the Cable Select cabling between the board and DVD Burner).

This isn't exactly retro activity, more bloody frustrating actually. A family friends computer, older LGA1156 i3-540 machine that worked ok but only without video drivers installed.
After lots of messing around with drivers, etc, I finally thought I'd take a look inside at the motherboard. I guess what's retro related here is that this
is normally a problem on computers from late 90's to mid 2000's.

Imperious wrote:

This isn't exactly retro activity, more bloody frustrating actually. A family friends computer, older LGA1156 i3-540 machine that worked ok but only without video drivers installed.
After lots of messing around with drivers, etc, I finally thought I'd take a look inside at the motherboard. I guess what's retro related here is that this
is normally a problem on computers from late 90's to mid 2000's.

How did rust get in there? Possibly the caps spewed underneath?

Got a 32MB simm in the mail today for my LC 575. Now I just need to get an full 68040 and a clock battery, and maybe a 2GB HD. I got pretty lucky finding it. This thing is going to save a lot of space and headache compared to a full apple II system and a quadra.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Imperious wrote:

This isn't exactly retro activity, more bloody frustrating actually. A family friends computer, older LGA1156 i3-540 machine that worked ok but only without video drivers installed.
After lots of messing around with drivers, etc, I finally thought I'd take a look inside at the motherboard. I guess what's retro related here is that this
is normally a problem on computers from late 90's to mid 2000's.

How did rust get in there? Possibly the caps spewed underneath?

Yeah, those don't have the pressure relief cuts in the top like the others do.

building a pc104 to isa adapter cable, at this point only 8 bit cards works so its something, need to finish the last set of cables.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Imperious wrote:

This isn't exactly retro activity, more bloody frustrating actually. A family friends computer, older LGA1156 i3-540 machine that worked ok but only without video drivers installed.
After lots of messing around with drivers, etc, I finally thought I'd take a look inside at the motherboard. I guess what's retro related here is that this
is normally a problem on computers from late 90's to mid 2000's.

How did rust get in there? Possibly the caps spewed underneath?

Is that rust? It looks like electrolytic leakage due to the capacitors rupturing from the bottom?

I was thinking I found ideal laptop for my MS-DOS gaming needs : Compaq Armada 100s..
After some cleaning ,CPU fan replacement and non-compaq power supply modification it was ready to go.
It is really nice machine with K6-2+ in it, which allows to change multiplier using K6Speed and also cache (L1 and L2) could be disabled.
BUT after many looong hours I realized sound is a problem, it's no way to use integrated CS4299 chip for DOS games.
So, I'm searching again..

IBM NetVista MASTER RACE!

http://imgur.com/a/KRyCR

All it needs is more RAM.

oeuvre wrote:

IBM NetVista MASTER RACE!

http://imgur.com/a/KRyCR

All it needs is more RAM.

Not an IBM Cultist myself but that's a beautiful machine all the same? What is the base model?

Anywho, on to what I've been doing. I've been using a 48x IDE CD-ROM on my main to archive all of my older CD ROM based games. I think this drive might give up the ghost before I'm done. I'm 20 disks in and it's already sounding like it's having issues maintaining high speeds. The front also gets hot to the touch. I'm really only focusing on my disks that are loose inside mass CD binders or are jewel case only. My boxed games are kept on a shelf and are reasonably well protected plus I don't like taking them off the shelf and opening them very often as so much as one dent severely degrades a box in my opinion. Good drive though while it lasts, it's maintaining 25-35x read speeds where as my DVD-RW SATA drive never brings CDs up above 22x or so for some reason.