Oh that's beautiful.

liqmat wrote:

detritus olentus wrote:

Am I allowed to post media in the hardware acquisitions? Found a good haul of media and software at the goodwill outlet.

That pink floppy on the very left has a date of 07, so whoever had these were using floppies pretty late in the game. Pretty unusual for a Goodwill to have used floppies like this. In my experience, they just throw those things away. So nice find. I can't say I would get too excited about that one disk labeled "Applied Hydrogeology, 3rd Edition". That sounds like a disk full of weekend fun!

It was a goodwill outlet where everything is dumped into bins and they charge you for junk by the pound.

rick6 wrote:

Got this Tyan S2460 motherboard along with cpus and coolers for 25€. I was told it works, i sure hope so it does!

i had something similar, not sure if this model; anyway the memory access was so slow that even my single cpu board with the same cpu was running ut4 visibly faster than this; would You share 1-2 synthetic benchies?

detritus olentus wrote:

liqmat wrote:

detritus olentus wrote:

Am I allowed to post media in the hardware acquisitions? Found a good haul of media and software at the goodwill outlet.

That pink floppy on the very left has a date of 07, so whoever had these were using floppies pretty late in the game. Pretty unusual for a Goodwill to have used floppies like this. In my experience, they just throw those things away. So nice find. I can't say I would get too excited about that one disk labeled "Applied Hydrogeology, 3rd Edition". That sounds like a disk full of weekend fun!

It was a goodwill outlet where everything is dumped into bins and they charge you for junk by the pound.

Please tell me that CSI disk was blank?

Another addition to my collection of wavetable boards arrived from Hungary yesterday! It's a Genius Sound Maker Wave, a board that I have never seen before. I have not had the time to test it yet, but it appears to be in good condition.

Nice avatar.

nice one Chiel , but I predict it will be mediocre in quality 😐

Received my 'mystery box' I bought based on nothing more than the description "Shitec 486SX with CPU and VGA missing". This was an exercise in "how not to ship stuff" - the case was dumped loose in a large box it could (and did) bounce around in. To make matters worse the top wasn't even screwed on so came loose in the box and one corner ended up very badly bent. To add insult to injury the postman left it outside in the rain yesterday.

Fortunately it is incredibly well-build and I could bend back the thick steel top so it at least fit again. This was the result:

Not a minitower as I sort of expected, but an LPX desktop. At first sight no sign of a CPU so I stuck in a Trident VGA card and a 486DX and after setting a few documented jumpers and a lucky guess on an unldocumented one, it worked! Then I disassembled everything to clean it and saw this:

Yep, a big soldered i486SX-25 that had been hiding under the drive bay. I've since removed the DX and set the jumpers back (that undocumented JP6 turns out to select onboard vs socketed CPU). Pretty remarkable board with 12 30p SIMM slots - which were all filled with 1MB parity SIMMs - 128kB of cache and a "Vtech" chipset. Also no identifying features other than that "702496C". Now, googling that doesn't find me anything, but that "496C" sounds suspiciously like a SiS chipset name, so I sort of suspect this is a Vtech board with relabeled SiS chipset. Given that everything works, I'm not hugely worried about not having documentation, but it would be nice to know what all those jumpers around the Winbond I/O section do...

IS that the same "VTech" that sold (and still sells) educational electronics via toy stores in the Netherlands? Apparently up to somewhere halfway the 1990s their products were pretty decent, if about one to two generations behind then-current stuff (i.e. they sold 486-based systems in the P2 era...).

yawetaG wrote:

IS that the same "VTech" that sold (and still sells) educational electronics via toy stores in the Netherlands? Apparently up to somewhere halfway the 1990s their products were pretty decent, if about one to two generations behind then-current stuff (i.e. they sold 486-based systems in the P2 era...).

Yes, it is. A lot of their So7/Slot 1 stuff was sold under the brand "PCPartner", but it was all the same company.

keropi wrote:

nice one Chiel , but I predict it will be mediocre in quality 😐

Yes, I do not have high hopes for this one. But a boxed board that is hardly ever seen is nice to have in my collection.

yo that case is awesome

The 'hidden' 486SX was just the start of the surprises in this case. The PSU was showing odd behaviour, basically turning on as soon as I hooked up a live power cable. My guess was that the switch - on the back of the PSU itself - was broken or stuck. So I opened it up, and found this:

Some previous owner got creative. There should be wires connecting the loop-through to live and neutral, but they're gone - and the leads that should be connected to the far end of the switch are just soldered to the near end. No wonder this system ignored the switch.

My multimeter confirms why they might have done this: resistance between the neutral poles of the switch stays ~infinite regardless of what you do - it is dead. Now: murphy's law - of course I just placed a major order for electronics yesterday. Hrrmph...

liqmat wrote:

Please tell me that CSI disk was blank?

Even better! They're full of Certified Structural Inspections 😵

CHiLL72 wrote:

Another addition to my collection of wavetable boards arrived from Hungary yesterday! It's a Genius Sound Maker Wave, a board that I have never seen before. I have not had the time to test it yet, but it appears to be in good condition.

I have a very similar item which is the Genius Sound Maker 3D Pro. Basically an ESS sound card with that wavetable on it. It's not that bad except my card has pretty bad noise. At least with yours you can put it on a card with better filtering.

dionb wrote:

yawetaG wrote:

IS that the same "VTech" that sold (and still sells) educational electronics via toy stores in the Netherlands? Apparently up to somewhere halfway the 1990s their products were pretty decent, if about one to two generations behind then-current stuff (i.e. they sold 486-based systems in the P2 era...).

Yes, it is. A lot of their So7/Slot 1 stuff was sold under the brand "PCPartner", but it was all the same company.

Interesting. PC Partner is Zotac as well as doing OEM work for others (including, I believe, Sapphire).

detritus olentus wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Please tell me that CSI disk was blank?

Even better! They're full of Certified Structural Inspections 😵

Oh! haha... good, not criminal cases. Phew!

McBierle wrote:

Just open the newest box (have to go a bit more slow from now on):

WP_20190124_002.jpg

Too bad this isn't a 2.88MB floppy drive. The IBM ones with the blue buttons used to be all over the place.

mrau wrote:

rick6 wrote:

Got this Tyan S2460 motherboard along with cpus and coolers for 25€. I was told it works, i sure hope so it does!

i had something similar, not sure if this model; anyway the memory access was so slow that even my single cpu board with the same cpu was running ut4 visibly faster than this; would You share 1-2 synthetic benchies?

There you have some Passmark tests done, and a few other systems to compare it to.
This was a pain to install windows, mostly because the IDE controller is remarkably picky with the harddrive and cd\dvdrom combination. And when it was all set and done, by simply adding a realtek 100Mbps ethernet pci card, all IDE drives would disappear from the bios. Gladly i was able to find a good match. This reminds me of the hassle that setting a dual pentium 3 coppermine also was...

Now i wonder if adding a Voodoo 5 5500 and Windows 2000 would be a good idea..

Bought a couple of Thin Clients today on eBay. Something I'd been itching to do for some time - to buy a Thin Client and use it as a low powered PC setup for diagnostics and retro gaming. But when I bought the first one, I got inspired to look for something a little older and hopefully DOS compatible too. Hence I ended up buying 2. Why not, as they seem to be going fairly cheaply at the moment. 🤣 I see a lot of people have taken up the idea of converting them into retro gaming systems too.

My biggest priority and the original reason I decided to get a Thin Client, was that I needed a Serial port so I can share disk images across to my XTIDE Universal BIOS equipped systems. My main PC doesn't have any Serial ports (plus, I had trouble getting a USB to Serial adapter working properly) and it'd be inconvenient to use another PC, so a Thin Client is ideal!

Not my pictures, as they obviously haven't arrived yet, but -

First one:-

Specs:

VIA Nano U3400 800MHz (or could be the upgraded 1GHz model, won't know until it arrives)
1GB DDR2 RAM
1GB CompactFlash Storage (Plus it has a 44-pin IDE slot in addition to the CF slot)
VIA Chrome9 Onboard Graphics
VIA VT8251 HDA Audio (no idea if this model will have SoundBlaster emulation, probably not)
Onboard Gigabit Ethernet

I've ordered a 32GB CF card for this and will dual boot Windows 98 SE & Windows XP.

Second one:-

Specs:

VIA C7 1.0GHz
128MB DDR RAM (I have spare RAM to upgrade this with)
128MB IDE DOM Storage (Will replace with an IDE to CF adapter and install a 1GB CF card)
VIA UniChrome Pro Onboard Graphics
VIA AC'97 Audio
Onboard Ethernet

I think this might be running Windows XP Embedded. Not sure. When I've replaced the DOM I'll probably install Windows 98 SE.

Though I might experiment with installing Windows 95B onto the 128MB DOM and then use a USB External HDD for storage and for booting into DOS. With the use of Disk Compression, it should just about leave 95B with enough room to breathe.