I have been working today on what possible is the Worst designed case EVER! Its piss boiling frustrating to work in.

Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the £5 Lian Li PC-35!

I saw this on Ebay for £5 and i took a punt on it and won it for £5. May i make it clear I feel a bit disappointed I spent £5 on it. It is the fucking fuckiest case I've ever had to work in. I originally was going to attempt to put my KT7A Raid build in it but that won't fucking fit. No cooler will fit adequate enough to cool the CPU due to the over hanging PSU. Look at the fucking space for expansion cards! Fucking NONE!!!

I didn't want to be defeated though and wanted to use the case as its well a Lian Li! I remembered I had a Dual Socket 370 board with 2 Tualatin 1400's in it so i decided to put that in. I've chose the Radeon 9700 pro as its the only decent card short enough to fit in the fucking thing. I'm going to remove that brace bracket as i want to make use of the ISA slot.

I've had to come away from it as it was driving me mad. I left it at this

Fuck this case!

Sorry, but that thing is just ugly.

Bancho wrote:

I have been working today on what possible is the Worst designed case EVER! Its piss boiling frustrating to work in.

Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the £5 Lian Li PC-35!

Nice, Is it suppose to lay side ways like a Desktop ?

Picked up a cheap case to put the KT7 in.

The PSU isn't strong enough for it really, it wont even post with a newer card than the ATi Rage but at least it's all in there now. I'm pretty sure I have a Corsair PSU at my parents that should (hopefully?) do the job. This whole 5v rail business caught me off guard tbh but I did have a pre-built machine in the early 2000s and wasn't aware. It's been interesting reading up on all the quirks of motherboards from that time at any rate 😀

Bancho wrote:

It is the fucking fuckiest case I've ever had to work in. I originally was going to attempt to put my KT7A Raid build in it but that won't fucking fit. No cooler will fit adequate enough to cool the CPU due to the over hanging PSU. Look at the fucking space for expansion cards! Fucking NONE!!!

...

Fuck this case!

Those comments made my day. That is one ugly case. 🤣

Not computer-related, but fixed the shutter button of a Mavica FD91 today. Wasn't working at all because of cold solder joints.

@derSammler: excellent repair on that camera.

Since this is page 486, might as well add a photo of a 486 processor.

Replaced the optical drive in my Alienware Area 51m 766 with a working one and put a copper shim in place of the thermal pad on the GeForce Go Fx5700. Doing that dropped GPU temps by 10c, I had hoped for better but it's enough (down to 77c max from 87c max).

If shipping wasn't such a bitch, I'd love to take that case off your hands!

I successfully recapped my Abit VH6T motherboard with 51 new caps.
A task that was a little bit frightening, since I had to replace some of the caps with polymer capacitors and I wasn't sure if their specs were correct.

But no worries now - this thing runs extremely stable! Much more stable than my Gigabyte 6VXC7-4X.

It even recognizes my Tualatin 1.4GHz with an on-chip FC-PGA adapter. 😎

bjwil1991 wrote:

@derSammler: excellent repair on that camera.

Since this is page 486, might as well add a photo of a 486 processor.

IMG_20171221_161515.jpg

And here I thought I was the only person who noticed that. 😁

Tested some OPL hardware. Here is the same track rendered by different FM synth chips. The capture was done with an external USB sound card on a modern computer. Tracks were played in pure DOS with the appropriate drivers using AdLib Tracker II (used the special LPT edition of the tracker for the last one). Didn't take the time to normalize the tracks in Audacity so the volume is different.

1. CS4236 chip in Thinkpad 380ED laptop:
https://soundcloud.com/user-827772994/tp380ed … cs4236-meltdown

2. CS4280 chip in Thinkpad 570 laptop
https://soundcloud.com/user-827772994/tp570-meltdown-cs4280

3. Real Yamaha OPL3 on OPL3LPT adapter on parallel port; host machine same Thinkpad 570 as above
https://soundcloud.com/user-827772994/opl3lpt-meltdown-tp570

stamasd wrote:

Tested some OPL hardware. Here is the same track rendered by different FM synth chips. The capture was done with an external USB […]
Show full quote

Tested some OPL hardware. Here is the same track rendered by different FM synth chips. The capture was done with an external USB sound card on a modern computer. Tracks were played in pure DOS with the appropriate drivers using AdLib Tracker II (used the special LPT edition of the tracker for the last one). Didn't take the time to normalize the tracks in Audacity so the volume is different.

1. CS4236 chip in Thinkpad 380ED laptop:
https://soundcloud.com/user-827772994/tp380ed … cs4236-meltdown

2. CS4280 chip in Thinkpad 570 laptop
https://soundcloud.com/user-827772994/tp570-meltdown-cs4280

3. Real Yamaha OPL3 on OPL3LPT adapter on parallel port; host machine same Thinkpad 570 as above
https://soundcloud.com/user-827772994/opl3lpt-meltdown-tp570

I wish I had suitable capture gear. My P133 retro-PC currently has one of the late-model SoundBlaster 16s with Yamaha's surface-mount variant of the OPL3 populated and I also have a Thinkpad 380ED to provide a comparison point. (And various other stuff, such as a Yamaha-branded ISA card, an NEC 90MHz Pentium laptop, and various ISA and PCI sound cards.)

Oh well. Maybe something fun to do on a rainy day.

Well, since it's 486 day:

Hailing from:

Mostly I've ben working on a 386, though:

Who has a hard drive that's at least problematic (I have at least one other working compatible one), and whose backlight won't come on - so far I *think* the CCFL is okay (but I want to be 100% sure of the voltage before I test it, but if I had a proper variable bench supply I could probably ramp it up), and I think it's the inverter board (yeah they always fail, it's probably caps but there's an 800ma axial fuse that looks a bit dodgy as well. The power board is producing power but it's not getting to the CCFL. I need to see if I can test the signal wire from the motherboard without shorting anything with my gargantuan probes (it seems, comparied to that tiny 4-pin connector), OR I could replace the fuse and the 3 caps on the board and hope for the best.

I could maybe sort of kinda replace the CCFL with an LED strip, but I'd probably have to make a new inverter board to fit the space, it's actually inside the screen panel. The screen has a ton of SMD components buried in it and I'm hoping none of that is bad.

With a flashlight, you can see the screen fine. I'm thinking LEDs would make for a brighter screen (and less power, maybe), but I'm not sure how it would look in the end (would need to account for the brightness control as well).

I already had to remake the cable from the power supply, which was chewed by rats. The only pinout guide I found online was *completely* wrong, when I'm done I'll document everything and find somewhere here to post it so it can be found. It's an 8-pin DIN with pairs of 2.5V, 16.6V, and 23V pins (and the shield appears not to be connected to ground, the other two wires are the ground).

I think I have a 387 around here somewhere that will fit. Maybe.

I'm not generally a sentimental collector in a literal sense, but I have my Dad's first office computer (Kaypro IV) and this Zeos was his first "real" laptop computer. I also have his 300MHz Sony Vaio, but it's in kind of rough shape. The Zeos is a beauty but the documentation was left somewhere damp. I need to take pics and, well, they're probably not salvageable.

I also will eventually get a pic of the Row Of Computers, but I think we have a thread for that elswhere.

ssokolow wrote:

stamasd wrote:

Tested some OPL hardware. Here is the same track rendered by different FM synth chips. The capture was done with an external USB sound card on a modern computer.

I wish I had suitable capture gear. My P133 retro-PC currently has one of the late-model SoundBlaster 16s with Yamaha's surface-mount variant of the OPL3 populated and I also have a Thinkpad 380ED to provide a comparison point. (And various other stuff, such as a Yamaha-branded ISA card, an NEC 90MHz Pentium laptop, and various ISA and PCI sound cards.)

Oh well. Maybe something fun to do on a rainy day.

For recording I use a Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD external USB sound card connected to my daily laptop. I chose that card because it also provides MIDI in and out, it's the cheapest model they make that has this capability. There are cheaper models if you don't need the MIDI, such as the U-Phoria UM2 which is around $30 (the one with MIDI is $80). As a cheaper alternative, if you have a machine with line-in that should work as well - but laptops have typically only mic in these days and that's not very good for recording.
The software I used for recording is Audacity which is free https://www.audacityteam.org/ I captured as 44100Hz 32-bit float then exported as plain WAV, which I then converted to FLAC with http://flacfrontend.sourceforge.net/ (Audacity has an option to export directly to FLAC but I did it that way because I wanted to keep the intermediate WAV as well).

bjwil1991 wrote:

@derSammler: excellent repair on that camera.

Such a classic deserves it. Works fine now, btw. 😁

ssokolow wrote:

OldCat wrote:

ssokolow wrote:

Used some leftover scraps I'd saved from building my SNES/PSP game shelf

Pray, do tell. Or do show, rather.

As requested.

Ah, I see you're man of culture as well. I don't have exactly the same titles, but our collections do overlap in good part: Lumines I and II, both Capcom Collections, Daxter, Persona... I also have a couple of Neo Geo classics and would highly recommend Persona 3 Portable and Tactics Ogre: Let's Cling Together. These days I tend to play most PSP titles on PS Vita (OLED screen FTW), but some titles are UMD-only, hence I keep my old PSP stashed in the cupboard in the basement too.

Well if it's 486 day lets have a pic of the best one 😀 at least as IPC is concerned anyway!

Read an article wich were about bad service (rotten apples) and the right to repair...
And decided to do the retro-thing of creating a meme with my initial thoughts.

Are Apple bad with repairs now? I've only every used them once when I had an iPhone and the service was impressively good. it's a shame if they've gone downhill.

Picked up an old PC from my parents, harvested the PSU for my Win98 build. Hooked it all up along with my 6800GT and Voodoo 2s and everything seems to be working well. Just reinstalling Windows 98SE now.