Pulled apart an old portable 386 to cut the battery out...alas no battery to be found 🙁

That monster ISA card appears to be an x25 modem. Time capsule.

See the Dallas thingy on the bottom?? That's the clock battery man :3

Smoke tested my little piece of the great pentium pro haul pie, EliteGroup P6FX1-A with a PPRO 200mhz/512 with a sexy ALR heatsink, and then played a little commander keen.. (only had a floppy drive going) and 16mb ram installed. Going to upgrade it to 256mb and put 9x on it. Haven't decided on a video card though, was going to use my old s3-virge 4mb but it's not working, I think the clock crystal took some damage in storage.

I recorded the whole event so I'll be attempting to make a YouTube video about it in the coming weeks, I have a bit of a learning curve on that yet.

Thanks to liqmat for hooking me up, and also thanks to luckybob for the YouTube video I used to figure out the CPU orientation and how to rewire the ALR heatsinks power extension 😊

BTW the dallas battery held my bios settings thus far after unplugging and moving the board, and it's socketed too so no hassle to replace 😎 , also curious if this board is capable of running a 1mb cache model.

Mister Xiado wrote:

You're a saint. When the machines rise, you will be given a VR paradise of your own. […]
Show full quote

You're a saint. When the machines rise, you will be given a VR paradise of your own.

See if you can determine the theme of this set.

Really getting burned out.

Nice site, I will definitely be transferring some background pics to my 386 and 486 machines 😉

Rodoko wrote:

See the Dallas thingy on the bottom?? That's the clock battery man :3

Really? What kind of battery is it? The leaking kind? Looks like a desolder job 😒

Jed118 wrote:

Nice site, I will definitely be transferring some background pics to my 386 and 486 machines 😉

Thank you. Shame and a half that Cloudflare blocks old browsers, or you'd be able to download them directly.

doaks80 wrote:

Really? What kind of battery is it? The leaking kind? Looks like a desolder job 😒

It won't (?) leak, but it is a pain to deal with. I'm waiting on equipment to do this... to at least two systems. I do not look forward to the task.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdlSfqto_0o

Mister Xiado wrote:

It won't (?) leak, but it is a pain to deal with. I'm waiting on equipment to do this... to at least two systems. I do not look forward to the task.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdlSfqto_0o

That is an insane hack. You just got a new subscriber 😀

I will try this one day...thankfully i have two identical portables to work with. Do you reckon it would be possible without desoldering the rtc?

Not me, not my video, not my channel. I don't advise doing this without removing the chip, as one slip will kill the motherboard. You can always buy Dallas chips, but old motherboards are worth their weight in gold, these days. This is the dumb kind of crap I do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-smU84Y8Rpw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTMtNTlBZH0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig_gXAqSJU0

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Smoke tested my little piece of the great pentium pro haul pie, EliteGroup P6FX1-A with a PPRO 200mhz/512 with a sexy ALR heatsi […]
Show full quote

Smoke tested my little piece of the great pentium pro haul pie, EliteGroup P6FX1-A with a PPRO 200mhz/512 with a sexy ALR heatsink, and then played a little commander keen.. (only had a floppy drive going) and 16mb ram installed. Going to upgrade it to 256mb and put 9x on it. Haven't decided on a video card though, was going to use my old s3-virge 4mb but it's not working, I think the clock crystal took some damage in storage.

I recorded the whole event so I'll be attempting to make a YouTube video about it in the coming weeks, I have a bit of a learning curve on that yet.

Thanks to liqmat for hooking me up, and also thanks to luckybob for the YouTube video I used to figure out the CPU orientation and how to rewire the ALR heatsinks power extension 😊

IMG_20181223_145054.jpg

BTW the dallas battery held my bios settings thus far after unplugging and moving the board, and it's socketed too so no hassle to replace 😎 , also curious if this board is capable of running a 1mb cache model.

Nice catch - looking forward to a video!

Just for kicks, I tested my g6-266 gateway with an xp home sp2 installation. It was so slow to install it was almost painful, but so far it runs well for what it is. It's fun just to tinker and 'what if' build. I may go win98se or ME or 2000 pro some time in the future, I just don't know yet.

I have done three things this morning so far.

One, I created some Dupont extension cables for this PII machine of mine for the power and IDE LEDs, so that I could connect them to the Asus P3B-F motherboard I threw into the machine. They seem to work just fine, which is good. 😀

I can now finally say the machine is finally complete. I'm probs going to add one of the three Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Values I have stored away into the machine, and I might throw it a better GPU, but for now the machine is fine, and works, and since I don't really plan to use it much, it doesn't really matter. I'm just happy I found a way to keep the case and PSU (I still feel bad about screwing up the motherboard that came with this system originally).

Next up, after getting that done, I addressed this problem with the ATI Rage IIC:

the_ultra_code wrote:

I then tested an ATI Rage IIC I bought from a VOGONS's user (you know who you are; thanks again! :) ). https://i.imgur.com/msEVQ […]
Show full quote

I then tested an ATI Rage IIC I bought from a VOGONS's user (you know who you are; thanks again! 😀 ).

I installed the card, installed the driver from the driver CD it came with, and it worked just fine, running 3DMark99 just fine (I mean, at single-digit and fractions of frames per seconds, but still, fine, unlike the S3 Virge card 😀 ). However, I did notice that the ATI driver did this to my start menu:

So, I went ahead, power-butttoned off the PC, booted into Safe Mode, uninstalled the driver, then used Driver Cleaner to completely remove any ATI software, like I did with the S3 card, got the latest driver for the card off of AMD's website (it's amazing to me how AMD still hosts drivers for the GPU-company-they-bought-out's first products ever, and yet Nvidia can't even do that with their FX cards and before), went to install that, and... it locked up the system during installation. 😐

It was simple, actually. I ran Driver Cleaner again, to remove what the installer had already installed before the machine locked up, and removed all GPU and display listings in the Device Manager (the S3 Virge card was still listed there!). Now I have a driver for the Rage IIC which doesn't ruin the Start Menu. 🤣

Finally, I took apart my Samsung SyncMaster 710N 4:3 LCD VGA monitor that I had, to check to see if anything was amiss with the internals. I notice that whenever I turn on the monitor and have it begin displaying screens and such, it will flicker rapidly for a few minutes until it "warms up", at which point it stops and the monitor works just fine. I thought it could be the result of bad capacitors (something which the beginner at soldering that is me can replace).

Turns out, none of the capacitors are showing any signs of damage or bulging.

So, my question is this: Is it a capacitor problem, one that could be fixed if, say, I replaced all of the electrolytic capacitors with new polymer ones, or is it something else? Again, this issue doesn't affect the performance or function of the monitor, but it is surely annoying.

^^^ I have some of those IKEA chairs ^^^ cheap and easy to assemble in a pinch

and BTW... I freakin love that mini tower case

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Smoke tested my little piece of the great pentium pro haul pie, EliteGroup P6FX1-A with a PPRO 200mhz/512 with a sexy ALR heatsi […]
Show full quote

Smoke tested my little piece of the great pentium pro haul pie, EliteGroup P6FX1-A with a PPRO 200mhz/512 with a sexy ALR heatsink, and then played a little commander keen.. (only had a floppy drive going) and 16mb ram installed. Going to upgrade it to 256mb and put 9x on it. Haven't decided on a video card though, was going to use my old s3-virge 4mb but it's not working, I think the clock crystal took some damage in storage.

I recorded the whole event so I'll be attempting to make a YouTube video about it in the coming weeks, I have a bit of a learning curve on that yet.

Thanks to liqmat for hooking me up, and also thanks to luckybob for the YouTube video I used to figure out the CPU orientation and how to rewire the ALR heatsinks power extension 😊

IMG_20181223_145054.jpg

BTW the dallas battery held my bios settings thus far after unplugging and moving the board, and it's socketed too so no hassle to replace 😎 , also curious if this board is capable of running a 1mb cache model.

I am keeping a couple of those Elitegroup boards so I will test a 1MB CPU for you and let you know.

@the_ultra_code

The symptoms you described are classic bad caps. They don't need to be misshapen leaking messes to be bad. They can, and do often dry out slowly.

liqmat wrote:

^^^ I have some of those IKEA chairs ^^^ cheap and easy to assemble in a pinch

and BTW... I freakin love that mini tower case

Cheap chairs indeed. Good, but not the most comfortable things in the world. Pretty good back support, though. 😀

And yes, that case sure does look nice in a retro way. The only two things I hate are the weird, upside-down layout and the fact that you have to remove the PSU every time you want to access the CPU or RAM. Other than that, it's not half bad of a case.

luckybob wrote:

@the_ultra_code

The symptoms you described are classic bad caps. They don't need to be misshapen leaking messes to be bad. They can, and do often dry out slowly.

That's good. It's an easy fix. 😀

Question, though: Out of all of the selections listed in the attached image file for replacements for that huge electrolytic cap on that PCB shown above, which one would you recommend? I know that PCL said in this video that, at least with polymer caps, you want to get those with "low ESR and high ripple current", but I think that applies to electrolytic as well, no?

Cobra42898 wrote:

Just for kicks, I tested my g6-266 gateway with an xp home sp2 installation. It was so slow to install it was almost painful, but so far it runs well for what it is. It's fun just to tinker and 'what if' build. I may go win98se or ME or 2000 pro some time in the future, I just don't know yet.

For quite a while my younger sisters used an early Celeron (a 300 or maybe a 366) with 64 MB of RAM and XP SP2 as their computer for homework and the like. Slow, but ultimately usable.

This was likely comparable. A little more in a Celeron mhz wise makes up for the cache, though I think ultimately the 128mb of ram I have in it right now tips it slightly in my favor overall.

I have more sticks but I wanted to get the system running first. Then I can memtest each stick individually and verify each isn't junk moving forward. These are great playtoys. In 98, these were 2000+ dollar computers. Now I can pick them up for pocket change.

Attended at the annual X-Mass dinner party, at my girlfriends parents place. Not computer related, though still retro.

Just finished something that started out simple, then turned into an irritatingly large project, but I think will save me some pain in the long run. See, I had a rack-mountable KVM without rack ears. I pulled it out to mount a set of generic ears on, but then I found some parts for a 3U module & realized I could put a shelf at the bottom to hold the inevitable knot of cables. So I built this thing:

Once installed, it tidied things up nicely from the front:

Not as much from the back, but a little better:

The extra organization gave me room to install a patch bay. I wouldn't mind a 1U or 2U audio mixer for this spot, but this will do for now. I can patch the outputs of a bunch of different machines & synths into the front or rear speakers through this thing, just by moving a few RCA leads around from my chair. No need to reach around behind. This means I can easily get quadrophonic sound from a couple PCs in my setup that support it. 😎

Edit: see previous page for part 1 of this post. Stupid 5 pic limit...

It looks better from the front, but still kind of bad from behind:

Fortunately I have a shelving unit I push up against this side, so most of this is hidden. This is after I pulled at least 10 "orphaned" audio and power cables out of this mess.

Anyway, with that done, I took an audio interface I'm no longer using out of the upper rack, which gave me room to install my new hotness TX802:

Finally I made some new sticky labels for the main mixer. Still have one open set of channels for something (my synths are on their own mixer that connects up to this, or to one of the PCs for recording.)

With all that done, I should be good for a while. It was a buttload of work, but something I did also got rid of a persistent buzz I was noticing out of my right monitor, so bonus.