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Bought these (retro) hardware today

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Reply 26600 of 52340, by luckybob

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I have that tseng card, its a pretty beast. Looks like yours needs the option rom to enable cga support. I have the bios image for the rom if you want it.

Thats a scsi card? Jebus thats a big one, pics?

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 26601 of 52340, by liqmat

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Last, but not least. I find this advanced for its time. A modular power supply in an old system like this.

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That's it for now... oh wait... and I even found a gift for my wife who was a Sun Solaris admin for many years.

Two brand spanking new unused Sun three button meeses. (sic)

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UPDATE: The Micropolis 1624 SCSI HDD is dead. Motor not even attempting to spin. Probably why this system was finally turned in for scrap. Also, the Micronics motherboard is an EISA motherboard which I did not notice at first.

Reply 26602 of 52340, by liqmat

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SW-SSG wrote:

Oooo, "Full AT" bigtower... in black! With matching SCSI HDD bay and dual-floppy!

I wonder why the owner put a floppy disk label on that HDD...

Good question. I can't see a reason. It says on that label in pencil either "Part" or "Port" Disk #1.

Reply 26604 of 52340, by yawetaG

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Hit the BIN on a Zoom RT-323 drum machine.

I wonder if I can use its MIDI out and velocity-sensitive drum pads to trigger GM drum kits on GM modules...

Reply 26606 of 52340, by Predator99

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liqmat wrote:
A huge find for me today, literally. This black tower of power has all the bells and whistles for its time. I will be cleaning t […]
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A huge find for me today, literally. This black tower of power has all the bells and whistles for its time. I will be cleaning this sweetheart up over the next couple of weeks piece by piece. A physicist from a university used to own this beast, I was told, and I found it in an old hardware shop. I wont say what I paid, but it wasn't cheap nor was it too expensive either. Once I have it all cleaned up this will be my main software imaging system and software archive box.

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Initial turn on reveals the A: drive (3½") pulls up just fine, but B: (5¼") doesn't seem to want to cooperate. Haven't had a chance to play around too much though.

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Very nice! Is there another Harddisk in it? The 3rd from top looks like the old Seagte MFM drives?

Reply 26607 of 52340, by canthearu

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Bancho wrote:
Received this Gold coloured Sound Blaster 2.0 this morning. Doesn't have any Creative or Sound Blaster stamping but the FCC ID p […]
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Received this Gold coloured Sound Blaster 2.0 this morning. Doesn't have any Creative or Sound Blaster stamping but the FCC ID points to it being a creative card.

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Yep, there was more than one brand of cards of the SB 2.0 design. The most common were creative branded cards. Mine is a "sound magic" card.

Reply 26608 of 52340, by arncht

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Very nice big tower... what was the original cpu? Did you find any date stamp? From the chips - it is from 92.

My little retro computer world
Overdoze of the demoscene

Reply 26609 of 52340, by luckybob

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To answer some questions for liqmat:

The drives are scsi. There are 2, one isn't happy, and isn't working. But the 2nd did and by a magic stroke of luck, seemed to have the EISA config utility on it.

Earliest date code I saw was for 51st week 1990.

Very early system.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 26610 of 52340, by arncht

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The case is oem, and it was typical from 92. Same family:

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They sold it in 1992, and later upgraded the cpu, hdd, etc.

My little retro computer world
Overdoze of the demoscene

Reply 26611 of 52340, by MMaximus

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liqmat wrote:

Initial turn on reveals the A: drive (3½") pulls up just fine, but B: (5¼") doesn't seem to want to cooperate. Haven't had a chance to play around too much though.

Nice looking system. I have one of these dual drives as well, and I've never been able to make the 5.25" drive work. If you figure it out eventually, please let me know 😀

Hard Disk Sounds

Reply 26612 of 52340, by tayyare

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luckybob wrote:
To answer some questions for liqmat: […]
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To answer some questions for liqmat:

The drives are scsi. There are 2, one isn't happy, and isn't working. But the 2nd did and by a magic stroke of luck, seemed to have the EISA config utility on it.

Earliest date code I saw was for 51st week 1990.

Very early system.

Wow!

It has two multi I/O cards for some reason (4 serial, 2 parallel and 2 game ports). It also has a hook at the back to fasten it into some place against robbery, which probably mean it came from a shared area like a laboratory or something. That kind of a beast would be from 1992 I think. EISA, Weitek, SCSI, top of the line VGA, very uncommon PSU, and 64MB of RAM? In 1992? Who could have afforded it, if not a university or something?

And man, was "black" even a thing back in 1992?

Wow!

GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000

Reply 26613 of 52340, by dr.ido

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liqmat wrote:

A nice mammoth full length EISA SCSI controller and a row of 16 4MB memory sticks for a whopping 64MB of RAM.

Looks like a DPT smart cache - I could never get the one I found working - It will supposedly emulate an adaptec 1542 if your OS of choice for this beast doesn't have DPT drivers.

Your black tower is probably a Number Smasher 486 B2T. Microway always targeted the scientific high performance market - hence the Weitek copro. Other options would have been an Intel 860 based copro card.

I found a couple of these high end 486s when I cleared some stuff from a research lab, though mine were DEC and AST - Huge full towers, SCSI drives, unheard-of-in-486 amounts of ram (well at least for us who had 8MB if we were lucky), copro cards and weird CAD video cards. Unfortunately, where these came from they were handed down to the office when the engineers moved onto something bigger and faster - so none of the software for the esoteric cards was left intact on the hard drives - all the remained was Win 3.11 and office...

Reply 26615 of 52340, by Predator99

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Received some "challanges"

486 with "Symphony" chipset - never heard of that.

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ISA386U30 - looks like ASUS?

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interesting 80286:

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486 with VLB and PCI:

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Think they will get a bath first...

Reply 26616 of 52340, by jesolo

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Predator99 wrote:
Received some "challanges" […]
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Received some "challanges"

486 with "Symphony" chipset - never heard of that.

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ISA386U30 - looks like ASUS?

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interesting 80286:

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486 with VLB and PCI:

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Think they will get a bath first...

That ISA386U30 is definitely Asus.
The 486 with VLB & PCI is a nice one, since it has on-board floppy & IDE and also appears to have a PS/2 header next to the keyboard connector.
Looks like you're missing a BIOS chip and some cache memory chips.

Reply 26617 of 52340, by Predator99

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jesolo wrote:

The 486 with VLB & PCI is a nice one, since it has on-board floppy & IDE and also appears to have a PS/2 header next to the keyboard connector.
Looks like you're missing a BIOS chip and some cache memory chips.

This should be solvable, but also 1 crystal missing (bright spot in the middle) and the corrosion looks rather heavy...not much hope for this one at the moment.

Reply 26618 of 52340, by liqmat

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Predator99 wrote:

Very nice! Is there another Harddisk in it? The 3rd from top looks like the old Seagte MFM drives?

That is a Micropolis 1624 5¼" SCSI HDD. Unfortunately, it seems the motor has seized up and wont spin. I am trying some old methods I've learned over the years to get it spinning, but not looking good. Luckily that was not the boot drive as I got that booting (Fujitsu M2684SAU) AND it still had DOS 5.0 on it with all the data. The EISA configuration utility and other drivers and setup software is still on there lucky for me. Windows (probably a Windows 3.1 class OS) is there as well, but only a few support OS files. What I am guessing is Windows was installed on the Micropolis and as I said, that data may be lost. This system apparently had an external SCSI HDD as well from what one of the front labels on the case indicates and the resistor/termination packs were missing on the EISA SCSI card. Luckily the resistor packs were in a small baggie taped to the machine.

arncht wrote:

Very nice big tower... what was the original cpu? Did you find any date stamp? From the chips - it is from 92.

Most of the date stamps indicate 1991 on the cards and motherboard, but a few have 1992.

luckybob wrote:
To answer some questions for liqmat: […]
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To answer some questions for liqmat:

The drives are scsi. There are 2, one isn't happy, and isn't working. But the 2nd did and by a magic stroke of luck, seemed to have the EISA config utility on it.

Earliest date code I saw was for 51st week 1990.

Very early system.

Yes, Luckybob and I, like two old guys on "This Old House", linked up via Discord video to discuss this machine. We were both impressed with that EISA full length SCSI controller, but Luckybob noticed the resistor packs were missing on the back of the card. Luckily, the previous owner had taped those missing resistors to the computer case. Luckybob had dealt with an old SCSI controller like this one before and I had a hard time finding which direction that they plug in. I saw that each resistor had a small dot on the top to indicate pin 1, but nothing on the SCSI controller to show where pin 1 should face. Luckybob asked me to look for a resistor nearby that might have a notch or groove in it, since there were none with a similar dot. Sure enough there was a resistor that had that notch in it and that told me which direction to put the other three resistors.

The controller.

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The dot.

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The notch.

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Success.

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arncht wrote:

The case is oem, and it was typical from 92. Same family:

They sold it in 1992, and later upgraded the cpu, hdd, etc.

Very familiar with this case design actually as I was a computer bench tech back in the early 1990s, but I rarely saw this model come along in black. They just weren't as common.

MMaximus wrote:

Nice looking system. I have one of these dual drives as well, and I've never been able to make the 5.25" drive work. If you figure it out eventually, please let me know 😀

I finally did get it working. The system has a pair of dead Dallas chips inside. Reset the BIOS to 3½" A: 1.44MB and 5¼" B: 1.2MB and rebooted. Works perfect. The 5¼" drive kept defaulting to a 360K drive in the beginning.

tayyare wrote:
Wow! […]
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Wow!

It has two multi I/O cards for some reason (4 serial, 2 parallel and 2 game ports). It also has a hook at the back to fasten it into some place against robbery, which probably mean it came from a shared area like a laboratory or something. That kind of a beast would be from 1992 I think. EISA, Weitek, SCSI, top of the line VGA, very uncommon PSU, and 64MB of RAM? In 1992? Who could have afforded it, if not a university or something?

And man, was "black" even a thing back in 1992?

Wow!

Like I said above, black was very uncommon in the tech shop I worked at in 1993 so I am guessing the same was true in 92 as we went went through dozens of machines a day and very rarely came across a black PC chassis.

As for the fastener screw on the back, you're completely correct, the previous owner included the security wire with the machine. It was in a baggie taped to the case.

dr.ido wrote:

Looks like a DPT smart cache - I could never get the one I found working - It will supposedly emulate an adaptec 1542 if your OS of choice for this beast doesn't have DPT drivers.

Your black tower is probably a Number Smasher 486 B2T. Microway always targeted the scientific high performance market - hence the Weitek copro. Other options would have been an Intel 860 based copro card.

I found a couple of these high end 486s when I cleared some stuff from a research lab, though mine were DEC and AST - Huge full towers, SCSI drives, unheard-of-in-486 amounts of ram (well at least for us who had 8MB if we were lucky), copro cards and weird CAD video cards. Unfortunately, where these came from they were handed down to the office when the engineers moved onto something bigger and faster - so none of the software for the esoteric cards was left intact on the hard drives - all the remained was Win 3.11 and office...

Brother, you are right on the money about the SCSI controller. It has 4.5MB of cache memory which was just amazing in 1991-92. The controller has a date stamp of 1991.

I have a question about that Weitek coprocessor. So all my utility software picks up the Kingston Turbochip as an AMD 5x86 133MHz which I don't have a lot of experience with. Does that not have a mathco on it already? Where does the Weitek fit into that? Also, I noticed in all the benchmarks I run the AMD 5x86 133 performs slower than a 486 DX4-100. Luckybob thinks it might have to do with the older motherboard chipset/FSB which is running at 33MHz.

Last edited by liqmat on 2018-12-29, 18:02. Edited 4 times in total.

Reply 26619 of 52340, by yawetaG

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liqmat wrote:

I have a question about that Weitek coprocessor. So all my utility software picks up the Kingston Turbochip as an AMD 5x86 133MHz which I don't have a lot of experience with. Does that not have a mathco on it already? Where does the Weitek fit into that?

I vaguely remember that there were CAD packages back in the day that used special accelerator hardware or co-processors for calculations (wish I still had the mid-1990s PC magazines that sometimes showed such specialized hardware in the ads in the back...).