TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Wait until fall or winter. You'd be surprised. My thirifting adventures has been slim for a while and some don't take credit car […]
Show full quote

Wait until fall or winter. You'd be surprised. My thirifting adventures has been slim for a while and some don't take credit cards or their credit card machines are still broken since December. Got a huge haul of computers (2 of them disassembled and in my parts dresser drawer) that needed major work (RAM upgrade, new HDD, new CD-ROM drive), or just minor work (new clock battery, or just a fresh OS install on a perfectly running HDD). PCs I bought at thrift stores (including bidding sites) from 2016-Present:

1) IBM ThinkPad R40 2682 (now has 1GB RAM), Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit
2) HP Pavilion N3350 (goodwill bidding site), no OS presently (HDD is in my Socket 7 machine using the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE kit)
3) Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus, MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 95C (only needed a new battery, and installed/upgraded parts)
4) Dell Dimension 4550 (4 bulged up caps, still works), no OS presently
5) Dell Dimension E510 (had Windows 7 Ultimate, DBAN'd the drive, now has linux)
6) iMac G3/600 (HDD went south as well as the CD drive), replaced the HDD with a 200GB one, slim SuperDrive kit, RAM upgraded to 768MB, and replaced PRAM battery, running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Lubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
7) HP Pavilion 7955 (parted)*
8 ) 2 Commodore 64 (one needs a new RF modulator or logic board for the A/V out only, the other works great and has an aftermarket case)
9) 2 Dell Inspiron 600m laptops (one has issues, no OS due to HDD issues, the other works without problems, running XP Pro SP3) that need better wireless cards (802.11b isn't functioning any longer)
10) iMac G4/800 (re-installed Mac OS X)
11) HP Pavilion A706N (parted)*

* Kept the internals (motherboard, RAM, CPU, I/O backplane, expansion slot covers, internal cards (modems, wireless cards, USB/FireWire cards), HDD, CD-ROM drives, ribbon cables, PSUs)

Why on earth would you part out working OEM systems? Those aren't customs builds, they are unique designs that will someday be either uncommon or in the case of alot of obscure models entirely gone. I think HP Pavilions are some of the better looking machines that were produced too.

The cases were in rough shape, but, I do have the parts in case someone needs them, or if I want to swap boards for my Windows 98SE machine build. On top of that, the boards were getting a little too close to the bare metal of the case.

Ported an ancient version of Eliza written in BASIC at some point in about July/August 1977 (according to the magazine I found the source code in) to PASCAL on my Linux box. Not much fun as the original has GOTO statements within FOR/NEXT loops. Yes, inside some FOR/NEXT loops I found it had IF X THEN GOTO Y, where Y is the line containing the NEXT statement. I hate trying to unravel that kind of insanity.

Added fun thanks to declared but never used arrays and single letter variable names (some of which match the never used array names .. ARGH!). By fun I mean hair loss inducing frustration.

I had flashbacks to my school days when our computer studies teacher told us if we did such things we would be failed on the spot.

Not really retro hardware - but was working on a 2010 laptop, setting it up as a portable Gaming & Emulation system. Specs: Intel Celeron Dual-Core T3300, 6GB DDR3 RAM, 250GB HDD.

I was previously using a Pentium III 897MHz laptop for these purposes, but whilst it was nice to use more retro hardware for the task, the system couldn't really handle DOS well (no native Sound support and too slow for either VDMSound or DOSBox).

Added a few Windows 7 updates and installed some Windows games: Quake II, Quake III Arena, Call of Duty 2 & Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Also setup XPadder & installed the Windows 7 drivers & associated updates for the Xbox One Controller. Now it's ready for some drunken LAN gaming tomorrow night. 🤣

Thanks to oeuvre for his advice on what paint he uses for his case restorations. I narrowed it down to these two for that classic 1980s-90s beige.

They were both very close. but Chalked Chiffon Cream ended up the ultimate winner and after multiple layers it's looking fantastic on my Pentium 100 metal case.

Well, it's been a wait, and I've had to save pennies before being able to make purchases (as we all do), but I'm finally getting things together.

I'm awaiting memory being delivered but basically two desktop machines are going to be put together in the next week or so, an ATX Socket 754 3700+ on a GA-KV8M running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, this one will run an AHA 2940U2W card using 32bit driver (so fingers crossed!!!), and an AT Super Socket 7 K6 300 on a J-542B running Windows XP SP3, I'm also awaiting RAM for an IBM Thinkpad 600E P2 366MHz that will also be running Windows XP.

I am almost ready to construct an AT Super Socket 7 K6-2 550MHz on a J-530BF, and an AT Super Socket 7 K6-III 450MHz on another J-530BF, along with an AT Socket 7 running a Socket 5 PR166 on a PCChips generic Mobo, and an ATX Socket 452 Athlon XP 3200+ on a AZ11E, all these will run XP SP3, except the PR166 as that will run 98SE.

There will also be a couple of GA-K7N400 Pro2 boards with XP 3200+ fitted, these will also run XP SP3, mainly due to drivers not being available for later OSes, but I have no plans to put these in cases yet.

All Desktops will be setup and then carefully stacked/stored, the P90 Laptop finally repaired, as I need to finish my 20ft x 10ft Shack to accommodate everything, including two 10 Home and a 7 Pro Desktops, and the following laptops that will run Amateur Radio:

Compaq 1110 95OSR2.5 Packet Radio 4m FM Band
IBM Thinkpad 600E XP SP3 APRS + Weather Station 2m FM Band
Dell Latitude C640 XP SP3 PC-ALE NVIS RAYNET Emercomms 160m - 40m +2m USB Bands
Dell Latitude D820 XP SP3/7 Pro MultiPSK HF DX 20m - 6m USB Bands
Dell Inspiron 2200 XP SP3 Amateur Television

Need to panel it out, build new worksurfaces, fit shelving, lighting, mains sockets, triple glazing, connect to the Home Network via fibre optics, erect a 20ft tower for my 20ft AGL Dipole plus rotator cage, and various VHF/UHF antennas, erect a Butternut Vertical for HF DX, set up a Fixed Weather Satellite Dish, plus Powered Polar Mount Satellite Dish.

I'm going to be a busy lad.

Been working on that Amiga 4000 a bit more, making sure everything works... and I realized that something was very, very off once I started testing some games.

Setting up Protracker quickly revealed why: channels 1 and 4 play through both left and right RCA jacks, channels 2 and 3 aren't audible at all.

From what I understand of the Amiga's sound capabilities, there's two PCM channels on the left jack, two more PCM channels on the right jack. With that in mind, why are both RCA jacks playing the same channels? I'd understand if one of them was dead and thus taking two of the channels with it, but no, this is basically double mono with half the channels.

This is gonna be a tricky one to diagnose. Already desoldered a bunch of the caps that I replaced around the audio circuit to get a better idea of what's going on there.

Also, on the 1080 monitor, it shows these sorta bright wipes now and then, almost as if the RGB video signal's lacking some filtering somewhere. Neither of the Amiga 500s I have here do that. Maybe there's a way to fix that while I'm at it.

And speaking of the A500s, one of them seems to work fine - until you attempt to insert a disk. Won't boot off of anything 90% of the time, has read errors 10% of the time, and this is after cleaning the drive heads. Problem is, this also happens with my Gotek floppy emulator, which is a known good drive, so something fishy is happening with the floppy drive interface at the board level. It'd be easier to diagnose if I had some kind of A500 hard drive interface, but all these A2000 Zorro II SCSI cards for me to pick from won't do me any good without an adapter.

ssokolow wrote:

Also, I found another nostalgic, elegant, and useful shell extension in my old DVD+R backups and uploaded it: Something to add the Registry as one of the namespaces in My Computer.

Registry access in "My Computer" folder? 1.5mb zipped? Elegant? Really? 😕
Anyway, icon is good for simple regedit.exe link.

aleksej wrote:

Registry access in "My Computer" folder? 1.5mb zipped? Elegant? Really? 😕
Anyway, icon is good for simple regedit.exe link.

I focus on UX and UI design. I think it's elegant to have the registry show up in the same place as Control Panel, Printers, and Scheduled Tasks and to browse both hierarchical key-value stores (the filesystem and the registry) using the same UI.

That said, I do wish the author had cooked up an icon more in line with Control Panel and Printers, putting a 16x16 registry icon on a folder.

(Also, it's actually a little under a megabyte compressed. The author just used Zip as a way to bundle up a CD-ROM-era copy of InstallShield into a single file and the InstallShield stuff takes over half a megabyte.)

Decided to try and give my Mac Mini G4 1.25GHz some purpose, so I installed Mac OS 9.2.2 onto it via the custom setup CD that's available.

Wow, Mac OS 9 positively flies on this thing! 😲

It's now my fastest classic Mac OS system. Only running on the stock 512MB RAM too, which appears to be more than enough for OS 9.

This Mac Mini is the only G4 Mac I own, as such I've never experienced Mac OS 9 running on G4 hardware before, so it feels insanely fast to me, especially when compared with the OS that originally came with it - Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

Now to start installing & playing some games. In the past it was never particularly great for playing classic Mac OS games, as it's limited hardware was compounded by the limitations of Classic Environment in Mac OS X. Running OS 9 natively is so much nicer and should make this Mini a lot more fun to use.

liqmat wrote:

Thanks to oeuvre for his advice on what paint he uses for his case restorations. I narrowed it down to these two for that classi […]
Show full quote

Thanks to oeuvre for his advice on what paint he uses for his case restorations. I narrowed it down to these two for that classic 1980s-90s beige.

They were both very close. but Chalked Chiffon Cream ended up the ultimate winner and after multiple layers it's looking fantastic on my Pentium 100 metal case.

2x.JPG

chalked.JPG

Pictures of how it came out?

My son, age 7, helped me fix an external Amiga-Floppy-Diskdrive.
We took it apart, cleaned it, and gave it a new Amiga compatible drive mechanism.
I know it is just a "standard" drive, it is just, that saying "Gave the drive a new drive",
sounds so strange and a bit crazy.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Been working on that Amiga 4000 a bit more, making sure everything works... and I realized that something was very, very off onc […]
Show full quote

Been working on that Amiga 4000 a bit more, making sure everything works... and I realized that something was very, very off once I started testing some games.

Setting up Protracker quickly revealed why: channels 1 and 4 play through both left and right RCA jacks, channels 2 and 3 aren't audible at all.

From what I understand of the Amiga's sound capabilities, there's two PCM channels on the left jack, two more PCM channels on the right jack. With that in mind, why are both RCA jacks playing the same channels? I'd understand if one of them was dead and thus taking two of the channels with it, but no, this is basically double mono with half the channels.

This is gonna be a tricky one to diagnose. Already desoldered a bunch of the caps that I replaced around the audio circuit to get a better idea of what's going on there.

Also, on the 1080 monitor, it shows these sorta bright wipes now and then, almost as if the RGB video signal's lacking some filtering somewhere. Neither of the Amiga 500s I have here do that. Maybe there's a way to fix that while I'm at it.

And speaking of the A500s, one of them seems to work fine - until you attempt to insert a disk. Won't boot off of anything 90% of the time, has read errors 10% of the time, and this is after cleaning the drive heads. Problem is, this also happens with my Gotek floppy emulator, which is a known good drive, so something fishy is happening with the floppy drive interface at the board level. It'd be easier to diagnose if I had some kind of A500 hard drive interface, but all these A2000 Zorro II SCSI cards for me to pick from won't do me any good without an adapter.

If the 4000 has the same circuit as an 1200, when dealing with the sound. Then I know there are a fix-it-up video on YouTube, featuring a 1200, with nearly the same symptoms that you describe. Perhaps it is worth having a look at that video.

oeuvre wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Thanks to oeuvre for his advice on what paint he uses for his case restorations. I narrowed it down to these two for that classi […]
Show full quote

Thanks to oeuvre for his advice on what paint he uses for his case restorations. I narrowed it down to these two for that classic 1980s-90s beige.

They were both very close. but Chalked Chiffon Cream ended up the ultimate winner and after multiple layers it's looking fantastic on my Pentium 100 metal case.

2x.JPG

chalked.JPG

Pictures of how it came out?

Still in process, but before and after coming in a few days.

Tested the newly flashed XT-IDE Universal BIOS EEPROM chip on my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus on the 3Com EtherLink III ISA card after enabling the boot ROM feature on there and it works (had to set the Primary HDD as none in the BIOS)!

PTherapist wrote:

Decided to try and give my Mac Mini G4 1.25GHz some purpose, so I installed Mac OS 9.2.2 onto it via the custom setup CD that's […]
Show full quote

Decided to try and give my Mac Mini G4 1.25GHz some purpose, so I installed Mac OS 9.2.2 onto it via the custom setup CD that's available.

Wow, Mac OS 9 positively flies on this thing! 😲

It's now my fastest classic Mac OS system. Only running on the stock 512MB RAM too, which appears to be more than enough for OS 9.

This Mac Mini is the only G4 Mac I own, as such I've never experienced Mac OS 9 running on G4 hardware before, so it feels insanely fast to me, especially when compared with the OS that originally came with it - Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

Now to start installing & playing some games. In the past it was never particularly great for playing classic Mac OS games, as it's limited hardware was compounded by the limitations of Classic Environment in Mac OS X. Running OS 9 natively is so much nicer and should make this Mini a lot more fun to use.

I didn't think the Mac Mini G4 could natively boot Mac OS 9, I thought they were OS X-only machines. I wonder if it would be worth a shot to try that out on mine, then again I leave the OS 9 usage to my Power Mac G4 so I don't know if it would be worth the effort to try to load OS 9 onto my Mini.

I've spent all day trying to play GTA III.

I put together a PC with a 2.8GHz P4 and ATI X1650 but it kept crashing; just doing a black screen immediate reboot. This was pretty much straight after a clean install. No drivers installed even, but was fine during the Windows XP install. I even swapped out the 'new' 2.8 to the 'old faithful' 2.4B GHz but it kept doing it. MEMTEST86 reported no errors and HDTune told me the HDD had no errors and benchmarked reasonably.

I then pulled out the P4 kit and put in my Slot A 800MHz CPU - after all, the GTA III requirements are for a 450MHz CPU - with a Radeon 9500Pro. This was going fine until I reached some white space (I think it was the W98 splash screen) where I noticed the artifacting- over the whole screen. I installed the drivers and turned the PC off, re-inserted the card and VGA cable but the problem persisted and the drive threw up an error. FINE! swapped it for a MX440, but this wouldn't get 3D acceleration at all. I assume some kind of driver conflict even though I had uninstalled the ATI drivers.

So another fresh install was done (throwing my toys out the pram and everything) for the Slot A /MX440 / 398MB SDR RAM build and here I am at 12.20AM having had quite a few beers and finally with a working PC and GTAIII! Don't drink and build :p!

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

I didn't think the Mac Mini G4 could natively boot Mac OS 9, I thought they were OS X-only machines. I wonder if it would be worth a shot to try that out on mine, then again I leave the OS 9 usage to my Power Mac G4 so I don't know if it would be worth the effort to try to load OS 9 onto my Mini.

The Mini can't normally natively boot OS 9, it was indeed OS X only. The Mini requires a hacked custom boot CD from macos9lives.com in order to install and run Mac OS 9.2.2 natively. It's not without it's bugs either - occasionally the mouse will freeze at boot, meaning a force power off/on to get it working again and there's also no support for the internal speaker and no volume control ability for the headphone socket.

But other than that, everything else seems to work fine.

Last night, I made a backup of my P3 and P4 systems' hard drives using ddrescue under Linux Mint 18.3. Have the raw images saved to a Western Digital Elements 2TB external hard drive. And, sure enough, they can be opened and viewed just like if I had hooked up those systems' hard drive externally to my PC. Thanks to Dracolich for suggesting ddrescue over here ( I'm Looking for a List of Software That Can Make a Full Disk Backup of Windows 98 SE and XP that Runs on Modern OSes ). Now, to try making backups with HDD Raw Copy...

Also (while not now) I am going to upgrade all of the fans in my P4 system. With the introduction of a Pentium 4 3.4GHz SL8K4, even with a Thermalright XP-90 CPU cooler (non-copper version), the CPU runs around 55 C degrees at idle. I guess having the pre-installed rear fan, the Arctic F12 Silent up front, and the Noctua NF-A9 FLX on the CPU cooler weren't enough. Sigh, why does it feel like these systems are money drains?

Oh, and even before I can do that work, I'm going to have to "disassemble" this setup just so I can get the P4 system (the white one) out from there and open her up. 🙁

the_ultra_code wrote:

Last night, I made a backup of my P3 and P4 systems' hard drives using ddrescue under Linux Mint 18.3. Have the raw images saved […]
Show full quote

Last night, I made a backup of my P3 and P4 systems' hard drives using ddrescue under Linux Mint 18.3. Have the raw images saved to a Western Digital Elements 2TB external hard drive. And, sure enough, they can be opened and viewed just like if I had hooked up those systems' hard drive externally to my PC. Thanks to Dracolich for suggesting ddrescue over here ( I'm Looking for a List of Software That Can Make a Full Disk Backup of Windows 98 SE and XP that Runs on Modern OSes ). Now, to try making backups with HDD Raw Copy...

Also (while not now) I am going to upgrade all of the fans in my P4 system. With the introduction of a Pentium 4 3.4GHz SL8K4, even with a Thermalright XP-90 CPU cooler (non-copper version), the CPU runs around 55 C degrees at idle. I guess having the pre-installed rear fan, the Arctic F12 Silent up front, and the Noctua NF-A9 FLX on the CPU cooler weren't enough. Sigh, why does it feel like these systems are money drains?

Oh, and even before I can do that work, I'm going to have to "disassemble" this setup just so I can get the P4 system (the white one) out from there and open her up. 🙁

They are money drains. I see classic computers like classic cars. The money you put into them you will never ever get back out.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

They are money drains. I see classic computers like classic cars. The money you put into them you will never ever get back out.

Sigh, sadly. I have spent around $400 on my P4 system, and probably reaching $500 on my P3, and that doesn't include the MT-32 and SC-88 - those total over $300. And, of course, that doesn't include costs such as extension cables, switches, etc., etc., or the days I've spent working on them. :{

But hey, at least you get some entertainment out of them when you aren't working on them, right?