bjwil1991 wrote:

LHN91 wrote:

Pardon the awful cellphone picture - among a few other things I picked up this Socket 3 motherboard today. […]
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Pardon the awful cellphone picture - among a few other things I picked up this Socket 3 motherboard today.

IMG_20170629_200845657.jpg

Already removed the Barrel battery, but there's two issues so far - it doesn't seem to want to POST and also there is some minor corrosion from the battery. It doesn't appear to have damaged any traces but I'll need to get that neutralized and cleaned soon.

That said, when power is applied the CPU warms up and other things on the board get power (the LED outputs) so I have hope for the board.... I'm just a bit out of my element with pre-Socket 7 boards.

Definitely could use suggestions on cleaning up the corrosion, and on identifying and troubleshooting the board. It seems like a really good late 486 board, with VLB, PCI, external battery connector and support for AMD/Cyrix processors and both 3.3 and 5v processors.

Check the memory to see if they match, or replace them with SIMM-72 memory. In most cases, the memory could be mismatched with the SIMM-30 (size and speed must match), or just dusty.

The RAM was already on the board when I got it - it was already in an assembled system and looked to have been mostly untouched before I tested and then disassembled it. I'll see if I have any other SIMMs to try.

LHN91 wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

LHN91 wrote:

Pardon the awful cellphone picture - among a few other things I picked up this Socket 3 motherboard today. […]
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Pardon the awful cellphone picture - among a few other things I picked up this Socket 3 motherboard today.

IMG_20170629_200845657.jpg

Already removed the Barrel battery, but there's two issues so far - it doesn't seem to want to POST and also there is some minor corrosion from the battery. It doesn't appear to have damaged any traces but I'll need to get that neutralized and cleaned soon.

That said, when power is applied the CPU warms up and other things on the board get power (the LED outputs) so I have hope for the board.... I'm just a bit out of my element with pre-Socket 7 boards.

Definitely could use suggestions on cleaning up the corrosion, and on identifying and troubleshooting the board. It seems like a really good late 486 board, with VLB, PCI, external battery connector and support for AMD/Cyrix processors and both 3.3 and 5v processors.

Check the memory to see if they match, or replace them with SIMM-72 memory. In most cases, the memory could be mismatched with the SIMM-30 (size and speed must match), or just dusty.

The RAM was already on the board when I got it - it was already in an assembled system and looked to have been mostly untouched before I tested and then disassembled it. I'll see if I have any other SIMMs to try.

Nice board. Verify the jumpers if CPU settings are correct. Also try to disable the cache.

kanecvr wrote:

Looks good. To finish it off, leave it in a tray of cola for a few hours, then brush off the excess corrosion. I'm working on a SB16 myself (CT2290) - horrible rust on the thing, but came out great. Will have to replace the jacks tough, they are toast - and the I/O cover is rusted trough.

Cola...does it need to be Coca Cola? 🤣 OK, I will buy a bottle 😈 I also ordered some cheap CAPs yesterday and found out the type of the missing one with some photos from the internet. Also found out that the PC-speaker connector is working. Think this is already a good sign but this feature does not use much logic on the board.

What about your card? Will you post before/after pictures and tell if the card is working again? Really interested. IO cover is also a problem...huge parts are missing on mine. I think thats the source of the rust on the pcb.

In principle its not worth the effort as you can get a working card for about 40€ but its fun and I like to save this nice peace of hardware...

Predator99 wrote:

Cola...does it need to be Coca Cola? :lol: OK, I will buy a bottle :evil: I also ordered some cheap CAPs yesterday and found o […]
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kanecvr wrote:

Looks good. To finish it off, leave it in a tray of cola for a few hours, then brush off the excess corrosion. I'm working on a SB16 myself (CT2290) - horrible rust on the thing, but came out great. Will have to replace the jacks tough, they are toast - and the I/O cover is rusted trough.

Cola...does it need to be Coca Cola? 🤣 OK, I will buy a bottle 😈 I also ordered some cheap CAPs yesterday and found out the type of the missing one with some photos from the internet. Also found out that the PC-speaker connector is working. Think this is already a good sign but this feature does not use much logic on the board.

What about your card? Will you post before/after pictures and tell if the card is working again? Really interested. IO cover is also a problem...huge parts are missing on mine. I think thats the source of the rust on the pcb.

In principle its not worth the effort as you can get a working card for about 40€ but its fun and I like to save this nice peace of hardware...

Gonna say the same thing I said on the dumpster find thread. Exposing your board to anything other than proper electronics cleaning chemical is going to end very badly in the long run. Contact cleaner (De-oxit) and a toothbrush works miracles. Even the stuff at auto stores works. Just give it a scrub with that and a rinse in isopropyl alcohol.

xplus93 wrote:

Gonna say the same thing I said on the dumpster find thread. Exposing your board to anything other than proper electronics cleaning chemical is going to end very badly in the long run. Contact cleaner (De-oxit) and a toothbrush works miracles. Even the stuff at auto stores works. Just give it a scrub with that and a rinse in isopropyl alcohol.

In this case...no. when you look at the initial status the contact cleaner alone would not have done the job. As said, nothing to loose here 😉 I also see no problem in using water based cleaning agents as all components are water-tight. Only problem would be the introduction of rust when doing no proper drying afterwards.

Predator99 wrote:

xplus93 wrote:

Gonna say the same thing I said on the dumpster find thread. Exposing your board to anything other than proper electronics cleaning chemical is going to end very badly in the long run. Contact cleaner (De-oxit) and a toothbrush works miracles. Even the stuff at auto stores works. Just give it a scrub with that and a rinse in isopropyl alcohol.

In this case...no. when you look at the initial status the contact cleaner alone would not have done the job. As said, nothing to loose here 😉 I also see no problem in using water based cleaning agents as all components are water-tight. Only problem would be the introduction of rust when doing no proper drying afterwards.

That's what the toothbrush is for, that and elbow grease. Where in the world do you get the idea of components being watertight though? Any exposed metal surface is susceptible to further corrosion. Admittedly the card appears to be too far gone. But it's always good practice to treat every restoration candidate as working before even starting. Then just because, pretend you broke it while restoring when you're about to test it. Helps the ego.

A PCI GeForce MX4000 128MB, 256MB PC133 RAM and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz PCI sound card.

Shponglefan wrote:

jheronimus wrote:

Finally got a Roland MT-32 today! Cost me 160 EUR incl shipping. Came with the power supply and manuals, but no cables. I have the gameport to midi cable, but I'm not sure what kind of audio jacks this thing uses. It's an old model with no headphone output, and it doesn't have 3.5mm holes.

2017-06-29 11.17.49.jpg

Nice!

For cables, it uses standard 1/4 inch (6.35mm) jacks. You should be able to find appropriate cables at music shops, including cables with various adapters depending on what you are connecting to.

I've used a commonl AUX cable and a 3.5mm to 6.3mm stereo adapter to test the module. Plugged it into the left channel of MT-32 and into Line-in of my AWE32 and added SoftMPU to autoexec.bat. It works (although I get only left channel) in Secret of Monkey Island, Silpheed (one of my favourite MT-32 sound tracks) and Dune. Gonna order a 2 x jack to 1 x stereo mini-jack cable soon.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Arctic wrote:

No AGP Voodoo cards besides the 3dfx built-Voodoo 4 4500 AGP and the Voodoo 5 5500 AGP4x edition support 1.5V over the AGP. […]
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No AGP Voodoo cards besides the 3dfx built-Voodoo 4 4500 AGP and the Voodoo 5 5500 AGP4x edition support 1.5V over the AGP.

VSA100 is using PCI66 technology over the AGP connector. A regular AGP Voodoo runs on PCI66@AGP1x

The Voodoo 4 4500 that Bancho posted is the only production 3dfx card that can run with 1.5v AGP.
But that does not mean the card runs on AGP4x. It will still run at AGP1x, but with 1.5v over the AGP.

Not quite true. The prototype 5500 can run at 4x but not 1.5v, I had one and know from experience, and the L shape 4500 did 4x at 1.5v if I recall. I could be wrong but the STB 4500s did not do 1.5v either but do indeed run at 4x speeds. I only had one agp 4500 so maybe there not all that way.

From what I have read online after a batch of 1.5v keyed 5500s ended up on eBay a year or two ago, they did run fine at 1.5v however SLI wasn't working and the few how got lucky had no choice but to run it in a 3.3v slot to have both gpus working. Shame that I didn't have the money on time as I would have bought one myself.

nforce4max wrote:

From what I have read online after a batch of 1.5v keyed 5500s ended up on eBay a year or two ago, they did run fine at 1.5v however SLI wasn't working and the few how got lucky had no choice but to run it in a 3.3v slot to have both gpus working. Shame that I didn't have the money on time as I would have bought one myself.

That's what mine did too, I got my on a 3dfx forums a few years back for only 550$. 3dfx forums are the way to go for getting 3dfx hardware at low prices

Arctic wrote:

But that does not mean the card runs on AGP4x. It will still run at AGP1x, but with 1.5v over the AGP.

By default it runs as 1x, but you can force it to run at 4x using 3dfx tools or V.Control... like I did here http://hwbot.org/submission/2325975_havli_3dm … 4500_2668_marks

I bought a texas micro 2001A, from ebay, it should have a 10 slot ISA backplane board, and a 150W PSU, but it is probably a full 486 systems, I don't know what all is in it, the pictures only showed the front,top, and a side of the unit, the seller did say that it has components inside, I didn't not ask further questions since it took the seller two days to respond to the first question, but it looks like one of the photos was shot inside a factory, so they probably had to go out to the factory and inspect the unit to answer my first question, but my guess is that it is a full computer, they probably just removed it from service and replaced it to something newer than a 486.

Texas Micro Product page from web archive:http://web.archive.org/web/19981212033343/htt … exmicro.com:80/

Got this board on a "flea market" thing today for like 2 dollars.

It looks brand new, the power and isa ports looks new.

i installed some ram i found

and it works!

i don't have any 8 bit isa card to boot from, so that far as i can go, maybe i can install xtide on the secondary bios slot?

Is that an XT Clone, out of curiosity what would installing the XT-IDE bios on the motherboard allow you to do exactly that current bios can't, since you don't have any 8-bit ISA storage controllers?

Booting over serial?
https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?i … ot-instructions

Ok, I didn't know that, I really don't have any experience with XT Class Machines, The only thing I known you could use the XT-IDE bios for other than an XT-IDE or XT-CF adapter is to allow large HDD's to be used in old computers.

Purchased some Commodore related stuff the last few weeks.... (all sellers pictures, items not recieved yet)

First up, a C64 system board

A new Kickrom for my A600

Replacement feet for my A600

SD to IDE 44pin adaptor for A600

Finally a 4gb SD card for the adaptor

Just won an in Box Jaton? Cirrus GD5422 ISA card on eBay for less than $11/shipped,

xplus93 wrote:

Gonna say the same thing I said on the dumpster find thread. Exposing your board to anything other than proper electronics cleaning chemical is going to end very badly in the long run. [...]

Hmm yes I agree...curious if something of the card is left later or if it is completely dissolved in the Coke 😁

brostenen wrote:

Purchased some Commodore related stuff the last few weeks.... (all sellers pictures, items not recieved yet)

Replacement feet for my A600

feet.jpg

My first thought was "Ooh, nice package of aspirins!" 🤣

Looks like one of those strips where you press in one side and the pill bursts through the aluminium backing sheet...