OldCat wrote:

I have soldered cables for my Tandon Hercules build to connect 0 and +5V to IDE-CF adapter. Not the greatest achievement of humanity, but hey, a year ago I did not know how to solder.

I've assembled the computer with the adapter and - lo and behold - it works fine. Boots out of CF image, no problems there. Means I've soldered it well enough. Achievement unlocked!

Of course, it was not the end of the story. As I looked closer, it turned out that BIOS battery has spilled:

It's too late to do it right now, but next task is to cut it out and clean the mainboard. Argh! A couple questions to people who are more experienced:

• what should I replace it with? In newer computers I use CR2032, but this one is different.
• how to clean what has already spilled (and possibly neutralise it, in order to avoid further damage/corrosion)?

xjas wrote:

Getting some oldschool dev tools up & running. I'll let you guys figure out what I'm doing with this. 😉

CameraZOOM-20180616125448791.jpg

THINKPAD MASTER RACE!

xjas wrote:

You can actually play audio CDs while it's off, you just pop one in the drive and use the front panel controls. There's even a dedicated power switch there to turn the CD player function (only) on & off. Haven't seen that on any other laptop.

My HP Pavilion N3350 has that feature, and I think my dad's old Compaq Armada E500s had that as well.

OldCat wrote:

Of course, it was not the end of the story. As I looked closer, it turned out that BIOS battery has spilled:

this_cant_be_good.jpg

It's too late to do it right now, but next task is to cut it out and clean the mainboard.

So I had to disassemble my Tandon AT further in order to get to the mainboard. It was not easy, but finally made it. Desoldered old battery (well, it is more of an accumulator), cleaned the board, reassembled, tested, it works. Now I need to find Ni-MH acu in its place, assemble monitor and board and off we go on our merry way.

Messing around with SCSI on VLB (two VLB-Cards) 40mhz FSB....

Finally traced down the ultimate ISA video card:

Now that I have it I am thinking about where to use it. Probably an overkill for a 386 system. For 486/Pentium systems
VLB/PCI cards are suited better... This is a misfit.

😕

Use it in your i7 8700K gaming rig

I got this 386 DX33 a little while ago, I finally got a chance to play with it. It was running very slow, I figured it out in the end, de-turbo was fixed wired on. It’s running very average now. 🤣

xjas wrote:

You can actually play audio CDs while it's off, you just pop one in the drive and use the front panel controls. There's even a dedicated power switch there to turn the CD player function (only) on & off. Haven't seen that on any other laptop.

My Compaq Presario 2100 desktop has that feature, but it only works if the CD drive has two or more buttons on the front (I believe the extra button is a play/pause button?), the only IDE CD drive I have with more than one button is the original 8x Wearnes drive which doesn't work, so right now I can't test that function.

Played some more with my VLB-Scsi card. Tested all of my IBM 10.000-rpm drives in this picture below.
I must have forgotten how loud these things are. Especially the 4gb drives (the 3 black ones)
And they get hot. Like really hot within minutes... Played with FDISK and Speedsys on them.

mpe wrote:

Finally traced down the ultimate ISA video card: […]
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Finally traced down the ultimate ISA video card:

m64.jpg

Now that I have it I am thinking about where to use it. Probably an overkill for a 386 system. For 486/Pentium systems
VLB/PCI cards are suited better... This is a misfit.

😕

There are 486 boards with no VLB or PCI slots. I would personally be very happy to have one of these for my U5SX system using this board:

Currently using it with a 256K Cirrus Logic CL-GD5401.. So yeah..

Two things.

One, added the same StarTech 5.25" 3.5" drive bay into my Pentium 3 machine, just like I did with my P4 machine.

Two, "installed" SoftMPU (i.e. copy the executable file) onto that same machine and created simple batch files to "run" SoftMPU for either my MT-32 Rev.0 or SC-88 (haven't tested the MT-32 with any DOS games on that PC yet, but I know it works with my modern PC playing Dune II via Dune Dynasty 😀 ). Have a really short look at the SC-88 (in SC-55 mapped mode) playing MIDI music in Doom and Doom 2.

https://youtu.be/7CA-TM8-IG8
https://youtu.be/lmavhOe_VIo

The resulting MIDI music is sent from the SC-88 into an audio switch, and then from there into the "line in" port of the AWE64 Value in the system.

Also, question: Does Doom 2 support the SC-88 (with all of its extra sounds), or does it only support the SC-55?

OldCat wrote:

Of course, it was not the end of the story. As I looked closer, it turned out that BIOS battery has spilled: […]
Show full quote

revive.jpg

Of course, it was not the end of the story. As I looked closer, it turned out that BIOS battery has spilled:

this_cant_be_good.jpg

It's too late to do it right now, but next task is to cut it out and clean the mainboard. Argh! A couple questions to people who are more experienced:

• what should I replace it with? In newer computers I use CR2032, but this one is different.
• how to clean what has already spilled (and possibly neutralise it, in order to avoid further damage/corrosion)?

If it was me, I would just buy the same 6V Ni/Cd battery, then remote mount it somewhere else in the case so it doesn't corrode on the board again. I've done this with several servers at work, as well as VME chassis cards. The old one can be removed by desoldering it. If it has glue, you can rock it gently back and forth to unstick it, or very carefully use a razor blade to cut underneath it.. but don't slip and cut the board. I use a a razor blade cutting tool that was made for arts/crafts since they have all sorts of various shaped blades with a nice handle on them for precision cutting. But, your battery looks to be in a difficult spot to cut underneath, so I probably wouldn't use a razor blade in your situation.

Today I got my Pentium III rig cleaned up a little better.. but it still isn't looking how I want it to interior-wise. I need to rework the wire management better, probably with a different power supply and new fans. I also got the front USB ports working since the motherboard has a USB header, but I had to completely re-wire the case-side connector since the motherboard uses a non-standard pin configuration.

Specs:
Apevia X-Master-BK/500 Case
Abit VT6X4 Motherboard
Pentium III 550MHz
256MB Apacer PC133 CL3 SDRAM
Creative 3D Blaster Banshee AGP CT6750
Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600
Linksys LNE100TX v2.0 PCI NIC
Gotek Floppy Emulator
Memorex Ultraspeed 52x/32x/52x CD-RW Drive
Databridge 5.25" Bay Mobile Rack Caddy
IDE to CF adapter with 128GB Sandisk Extreme UDMA7
Running Windows 98SE

Will swapping not burn out the CF card, when running Win9x and up?
As I understand it, there are really only talk about it. Can anyone confirm this by some kind of hard data?

Not really sure of the write endurance of this CF drive, but I'm not concerned. If it dies, I'll just buy another and re-image it. It's better IMO than dealing with dozens of bad sectors on old IDE HDD's.

Finally got everything working, and found software for my BusLogic BT-445s VLB SCSI controller. And I created a MS-Dos 6.22 bootdisk for setting up a simple HDD+CDrom setup. Created a ZIP file with instructions on how to recreate the bootdisk, and uploaded it to Vogons Drivers.

Then I uploaded the complete ASPI suite, for the Controller to Vogons drivers.

Finally. I have found a copy of the manual for this controller. Uploaded it to Vogons drivers as well.

I know that there are at least one other Vogon user, that have this card. So there might be other who have this card as well.
Total Hardware 99 is useable for setting up hardware, yet a scan of the original manual are much better.

wiretap wrote:

If it was me, I would just buy the same 6V Ni/Cd battery, then remote mount it somewhere else in the case so it doesn't corrode on the board again.

No chance in hell I'm using Ni-Cd again. Ni-MH all the way, they don't spill like that.

NiMH are good, but I'd still remote mount it low in the case.

OldCat wrote:

wiretap wrote:

If it was me, I would just buy the same 6V Ni/Cd battery, then remote mount it somewhere else in the case so it doesn't corrode on the board again.

No chance in hell I'm using Ni-Cd again. Ni-MH all the way, they don't spill like that.

From my experience, it usually takes about 15 years for a NiCd battery to start corroding. That's a pretty long time, and with it being remote mounted, it would be similar to replacing it with a NiMH battery. But, NiMH batteries still can get leaking and corrosion. Either way, a newly manufactured NiCd or NiMH battery shouldn't be as susceptible to leaking as early generation batteries that we see on older motherboards. I've replaced quite a few NiCd and NiMH batteries at work on a 10-year PM cycle, and none have exhibited leaking problems.