blurks wrote:

SpectriaForce wrote:

With that query you will eventually miss out on some interesting AGP (and maybe a few PCI) graphics cards. On what website do you use this?

Query doesn't suppress PCI/AGP graphics card that are of interest to me.

MSI and XFX both used to make some of the better NVIDIA boards. Not sure why you would exclude them.

I collect graphics cards with release date up until around 2001-2002. I don't care about modern Geforce FX generation and upwards.

what about retro cards like the GTX1080Ti?

Tested a bunch of cards, among them Matrox Millenium II, a few TNTs(1/2) and a DSystems Papilio P9100.
Latter is a beauty with a super crisp picture but totally out of place in a "vga oriented" system.
It would have made a perfect Doom card but unfortunately doesn't cut the 35fps mark... close but no cigar.

Did something I haven't done in a long time, bought a game for my ZX Spectrum - California Games. It arrived from eBay today.

To be honest, it was extremely cheap & mostly just to test out the built-in cassette deck on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2. I replaced the belt on it last year, but couldn't find any of my Spectrum games in storage. As fate would have it, I ended up finding 3 other Spectrum tapes in my loft - Tank, Ramparts & a "Your Sinclair The Magnficent 7" magazine cover tape, with several games & demos which I plan to try out tomorrow.

The cassette deck wasn't loading any games at first, but a quick adjustment of the head alignment screw solved that and I was up and running.

I mostly use my Spectrum with one of those Cassette Adapters connected to a Tablet to load the tape files from my LAN storage. But it's nice to also have actual tapes to play, for nostalgia value. 🤣

PTherapist wrote:

Did something I haven't done in a long time, bought a game for my ZX Spectrum - California Games. It arrived from eBay today. […]
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Did something I haven't done in a long time, bought a game for my ZX Spectrum - California Games. It arrived from eBay today.

To be honest, it was extremely cheap & mostly just to test out the built-in cassette deck on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2. I replaced the belt on it last year, but couldn't find any of my Spectrum games in storage. As fate would have it, I ended up finding 3 other Spectrum tapes in my loft - Tank, Ramparts & a "Your Sinclair The Magnficent 7" magazine cover tape, with several games & demos which I plan to try out tomorrow.

The cassette deck wasn't loading any games at first, but a quick adjustment of the head alignment screw solved that and I was up and running.

I mostly use my Spectrum with one of those Cassette Adapters connected to a Tablet to load the tape files from my LAN storage. But it's nice to also have actual tapes to play, for nostalgia value. 🤣

Indie Retro News follows new games in development for the ZX. It really is incredible how many games are still being developed for the ZX Spectrum platform.

http://www.indieretronews.com/

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Started a 386 build in a case I recently traded. All good so far! […]
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Started a 386 build in a case I recently traded. All good so far!

Motherboard is a PC Chips M-326 I bought years ago
CPU is an AMD Am386 DX 33MHz I bought last week
Memory is something I grabbed from the bin. Turned out to be 4x 1MB. This is apparently also all the 30 pin ram I have 🙁 I thought I had more...

Lost some time with a defective (must DDx) VGA card and this board hangs in POST if there is no interface card installed (or is this common in 386 systems?)

POST cards are a blessing!

that Sony is heavy and if it ever falls it can really hurt you or something..... please sell it to me.

Katmai500 wrote:

All cleaned up!

IMG_1647.JPG

Kudos on the restoration. I also have one which needs a good clean but haven't got round to it yet.

meljor wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Started a 386 build in a case I recently traded. All good so far! […]
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Started a 386 build in a case I recently traded. All good so far!

Motherboard is a PC Chips M-326 I bought years ago
CPU is an AMD Am386 DX 33MHz I bought last week
Memory is something I grabbed from the bin. Turned out to be 4x 1MB. This is apparently also all the 30 pin ram I have 🙁 I thought I had more...

Lost some time with a defective (must DDx) VGA card and this board hangs in POST if there is no interface card installed (or is this common in 386 systems?)

POST cards are a blessing!

<snip>

that Sony is heavy and if it ever falls it can really hurt you or something..... please sell it to me.

I'm sorry, I can't let you do that, it's too dangerous! I will keep it here to minimize the risks;)

Courtesy of liqmat:

Dat DTK logo tho...

You can barely see Amok on that LCD to the right, and you can't see the PS/2 MouseMan I hadn't tested yet (works great). This beast is SWEET and was only lost in shipping for three days (yikes). Great packing job BTW.

I will probably get some more pictures later I'm finally working on my "generations" series starting with a 286. Well really starting with the Kaypro IV but that's another story. I have 2 PIIs now so who knows how that will work out, but I have a flaky 286, a good 386 and a couple bad ones, a few 486s, a P1, 2 PIIs 2 PPros, K6s, PIII, P4, various athlons, and a number of more modern machines. Making my own little museum (as so many of us are).

I need to see what CPUs this mobo supports because I have this PII-450 leering at me from the corner.

This displaced my U-Tron 486 from the workbench, but I'm just stripping it to clean the case anyway (light corrosion).

Merovign wrote:

You can barely see Amok on that LCD to the right...

I really enjoy playing Amok. Such a fun little DOS shooter.

Finally managed to get the dallas mod working on this MS5129. I used a power drill with a forstner bit and a flat screwdriver. It still took me about 30 minutes because my aim was somewhat off and having filed down the center point of the forstner drill made it difficult to stay on target.

Then the first battery holder I got off eBay turned out to be too crap to work and the second one I got had it's legs bent and one had broken off (however the mailman managed that through a bubblewrap envelobe).

Now I will probably just mount the battery holder somewhere out of the way.
My soldering is terrible and I'm very ready to be done with this 😀

henryVK wrote:

It's muh plucky little clone portable :happy: […]
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OldCat wrote:

Out of curiosity, which luggable would that be? I seem to have missed it.

It's muh plucky little clone portable 😀

It doesn't really have a name yet.

Are there any naming conventions when it comes to "real" computers? Fictional computers seem to be overwhelmingly male or neutral, thought there are some "girls" like HAL's twin SAL from the space oddysee books.

I recently sold a Belkin 286 like this! Does the CGA monitor work?

MMaximus wrote:

Katmai500 wrote:

All cleaned up!

IMG_1647.JPG

Kudos on the restoration. I also have one which needs a good clean but haven't got round to it yet.

I cleaned mine up too!

Then it stopped working - pressing anything on the home row causes the displaying of the adjacent/below key.

Pressing D for example yields DC, F = FV, G = GB, etc.

No idea what caused it but I am never cleaning another model M again.

Today I tried to install Apple System 8.1 (or named macOS 8.1) through BasiliskII emulation. Install succeeded, got to the desktop, but BasiliskII kept crashing on me for no reason, so I gave up.

Does it count as an retro activity for me today? 🤣

EDIT: Some months ago me and my dad found our first ever notebook - an Acer Extensa 710T. It was totally broken, but still turned on. Our mistake was not to clean it up before turn on - but frankly, we couldn't clean it since it was totally broken. Any touch on it would break even the borders of the screen. But it did turn on and it did BOOT to DOS. Then a few minutes later, the screen died. We then hooked up a VGA monitor and it was still there. After that - it definitely died minutes later and never came back. It was in a so bad condition that it would never come back. RIP Acer Extensa 710T 😐

liqmat wrote:

Indie Retro News follows new games in development for the ZX. It really is incredible how many games are still being developed for the ZX Spectrum platform.

http://www.indieretronews.com/

I hadn't thought about looking for new games, so that site certainly has piqued my interest. I'm a little limited in certain respects with the actual hardware, a lot of the newer games are TR-DOS disk images and all I can really do is play bog standard TAP/TZX files through the cassette deck. Never owned any disk drives for this and the weird 3" floppy format always put me off. There are still quite a few new games in tape format though, so I'll have to explore. 😎

Back to retro activity today:

Still playing with my Spectrum at the moment. The app on my phone to load TZX/TAP files was playing up, so I decided to make use of my recently acquired Thin Client PC to load the games from there instead.

Accessing the Thin Client via Remote Desktop to choose the TZX/TAP file of a game I want to play, dragging it into the Tape2WAV window and then playing the resulting WAV in MPC-HC. Once I'd got the volume settings right, all this = happy Spectrum and my day off filled with classic Spectrum gaming. 🤣

Also received today the RGB Scart Cable I ordered for it. I was previously stuck with lousy RF, this is certainly a major improvement!

Finished setting up my P133 and moved it to storage. Now I have the option of a) Upgrading my Slot1/P3-700 system to a Socket370/P3-1200 b) putting together my 486 system c) Troubleshooting, upgrading and setting up my GX110-LP and Despro EN-SFF OEMs. Tough choice.

PTherapist wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Indie Retro News follows new games in development for the ZX. It really is incredible how many games are still being developed for the ZX Spectrum platform.

http://www.indieretronews.com/

I hadn't thought about looking for new games, so that site certainly has piqued my interest. I'm a little limited in certain respects with the actual hardware, a lot of the newer games are TR-DOS disk images and all I can really do is play bog standard TAP/TZX files through the cassette deck. Never owned any disk drives for this and the weird 3" floppy format always put me off. There are still quite a few new games in tape format though, so I'll have to explore. 😎

You'll find quite a few of the new releases that come out for the ZX have a tap file as well.

Jed118 wrote:

I recently sold a Belkin 286 like this! Does the CGA monitor work?

The display itself works but I couldn't really test it because the video card has some issue where all the characters are garbled.

Right now I'm waiting for the replacement (colour) display.

Have had some fun playing Crysis 2 at 1440p, all settings on ultra and with v-sync on (because my monitor can only refresh at 60hz). Very playable with my recent pc, but I need to experiment a bit with v-sync to see what gives the best visual experience with my setup.