So, I had told myself to slowdown with buying stuff. But I'm such a sucker for dual cpu rigs.
This ugly machine was advertised as an Dual PIII 500E with some matrox card for ~95bucks.
Msi 694D Master with built in U160 SCSI. Dual Coppermine 1000 (with aluminium fans 😎 ), Radeon 9550 256mb, Soundblaster Live 5.1 digital, 2 nics, adaptec SCSI card and (removed from before booting, almost shorting against the radeon) an Hauppauge WinTV card.
Booted up to win2000pro with a bunch of games installed. A nice bonus was the Halo CD in the drive 😀
Also got the box for the motherboard with manual, stickers and the bundled SCSI cables. And a bunch of PCI nics (no picture needed I guess) one o which was a 3com gigabit PCI-x card 😀
Also got delivery today of two Aopen HX45 chassis I bought for 15bucks. (ATX cases with mounting holes for AT)
Holy shit talk about a haul! I knew Quantum made SCSI Fireballs but I've never seen them in the wild!
(man I like that lil' conner in the corner 😜)
Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]
Hi, I acquired these sound cards recently, could someone help me identify the ESS 1868, it seems to have an internal wavetable:
The CT2290 is in a pretty bad shape, it is covered with mud, but the good thing is that it still works and costed 3 EUR. One component is reportedly missing from the lower right part of the board, maybe someone in possession of this card could help me find out what the missing component is?Thanks!
Very nice finds 😀 ISA soundcards with wavetable seem to be far less common to spot these days.
I've got a CT2290 SB16 card - I just checked with the multimeter and the L5 that's missing on your board appears to be just a link - maybe it's a fusible link? So it gives 0 resistance and doesn't appear to have any capacitance. You should be able to safely just bridge it with wire. For reference, that part looks the same as L7 and L8 slightly above it.
stalk3r wrote:Hi, I acquired these sound cards recently, could someone help me identify the ESS 1868, it seems to have an internal wavetable:
[…] Show full quote
Hi, I acquired these sound cards recently, could someone help me identify the ESS 1868, it seems to have an internal wavetable:
It is a card that was made by Labway, as evidenced by the LWHA prefix in the FCC ID of LWHA111800.
Regular old ESS 1868 drivers will work fine for it.
The problems with them are all different, but they all come down to not booting up.
Looks like I got lucky with my junk bin board. Honestly, I think that my local PC recycling shop just puts Socket A, 939, and AM2 in the "as-is, untested, for parts" (junk) bin because nobody wants them. I bought 4 working boards out of that bin.
The only thing I bought recently is an SB AWE64 for my Pentium MMX (sort of) dream build. Basically the last piece I needed.
However a coworker dumped on me some of his cards. Mostly they are not particularly rare or interesting cards. An ATi Rage, S3 Trio3D, S3 ViRGE, Matrox G450.
BUT there was a Creative Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600, this one as I see goes for some insane prices on eBay.
I also picked up an early XP era case (more of that in What retro activiti did you get up to today), which had an Abit SA7 motherboard with a 1.6GHz Northwood Pentium.
I haven't decided yet what to do with this. If they work I'll probably just sell them after a little bit of testing.
I also picked up an older SCSI CD drive, a PCI network card and a SCSI controller card.
Looks like it is able to turn on, but none of my pre-installed windows (windowses?) were able to boot up.
Generally the Win 2000 do and I can run at least some tests, but I was unlucky with this one. I'll return to it later.
PcBytes wrote:
That ABIT SA7 is actually a rebranded ECS L4S5A/DX. Some of ABIT's boards were rebranded ECS from when ABIT had some financial trouble during 2005.
Today I went to the garage, where I keep my retro car (IROC-Z). There was a guy there cleaning his garage and I've seen this PC under a ton of garbage. I asked if he want to get rid of it, but he wasn't convinced "I wanted to build a modern PC using this case" so I said I will pay him, and he asked how much. I said let's see what's inside and he opened the case. So I offered ~100USD - that immediately made him think sober again and he said OK, and even lowered the price a bit. Computer won't start (which was expected), PSU is shot for sure (some sort electrical crackling noise when powered on). HDD won't start either (again it was expected). I'm yet to test this multi-io (which is pretty interesting) and MFM controller, and XT-clone motherboard... Anyway, I think it's rather good find.
Today I went to the garage, where I keep my retro car (IROC-Z). There was a guy there cleaning his garage and I've seen this PC under a ton of garbage. I asked if he want to get rid of it, but he wasn't convinced "I wanted to build a modern PC using this case" so I said I will pay him, and he asked how much. I said let's see what's inside and he opened the case. So I offered ~100USD - that immediately made him think sober again and he said OK, and even lowered the price a bit. Computer won't start (which was expected), PSU is shot for sure (some sort electrical crackling noise when powered on). HDD won't start either (again it was expected). I'm yet to test this multi-io (which is pretty interesting) and MFM controller, and XT-clone motherboard... Anyway, I think it's rather good find.
I posted awhile back, but I got lucky and found almost an identical machine at a storage unit in Florida from a Craigslist listing. After a bit of cleaning I turned it on and everything worked. Not even a bad sector on the MFM drive. Got lucky. Either way, these old AT cases are wonderful.
Nice find!
I probably can repair PSU (replacing caps and transistors maybe). Has hinged upper cover which is pretty cool (I always liked cases that could be opened like that), the trim around buttons/leds is missing though, but I think I can figure something out...
^ lucky you that PSU was not stripped out of the case after all these years, I got mine for free, but w/o PSU @bottom. Probabaly I'll have to CNC case for it out of aluminium as no PSU would fit that IBM AT clone-case.
congrats @HanJammer and @liqmat! These cases have become hard to come by...
Bought some stuff for my 486 too:
ISA 16650 serial card, which can use high interrupts (to get smooth mouse movement)
1-chip HGC
This variant has much headroom for overclocking to VGA-compatible frequencies.
Just need to make some VGA adapter, unless I happen to find an Eizo 4051 (highly improbable to find that mid-1980s 24kHz B/W monitor nowadays though).
*Sorry picture quality - potato smartphone, ruined my digicam last week....
Got this beauty:
Now I have a 40, 80, and 120 Mb version of this drive. All era correct, waiting for a home.
They all sound the same upon startup. No bad sectors.
Next, a sacrificial lamb for my AWE32 rebuild. I need the joystick port and the I/O shield. I will be relentlessly heat-gunning that joystick port off whatever insignificant PCI card that provides it.
Lastly, I got an NEC Multisync A700+
Dear Lord, how I am reminded of the Samsung 3Ne that I sold with the predecessor of this DX2/66 computer. So sharp. Love it. Best $20 spent this week.
Saw the NEC and I fell in love. A pretty unique case. I tested it a bit ago and it works but the seller removed the hard drives to everything and he didn't leave the rails to anything. 😜 I should have a replacement and can get it going. It does post and has already been upgraded to 96mb of ram and a 200mhz socket 7.
The HP is some amd 3200x2 and I scraped it.
The Dell is a 4th gen I3 and has 8gb of ram. I'm keeping it around for a bit. Its kinda new (even has usb 3) so its the newest computer that I've gotten so cheap.
I'm thinking of dropping some nice hardware into the NEC and reselling it.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
