dionb wrote:

Compared to plain styrofoam a woolen jumper woundn't even sound too bad. But why BS? The job of antistatic bags is to avoid any […]
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luckybob wrote:

dionb wrote:

Actually newspaper is pretty good - its electrical characteristics are almost exactly the same as antistatic bags (i.e. it conducts very, very badly, but nonzero - so ESD-safe) and a few layers of it give better mechanical protection than a bag.

Compared to some of the other packaging I sometimes see, newspaper is one of my favorites.

I'm gonna call bs on this. But i'd wager is is better than plain styrofoam (not much of a competition there, bth)

Compared to plain styrofoam a woolen jumper woundn't even sound too bad. But why BS? The job of antistatic bags is to avoid any static charge buildup by (very slowly) leaking charge, and at the same time equalizing charges by conducting at least something. That's not rocket science, it's just a very high but very much not infinite resistance. Essentially antistatic bags are just reliably, reproducibly conducting through their material, while slowly leaking charge to ensure that whatever potential is present inside is the same as outside.

Newspaper isn't reliable or reproducible, but it essentially does the same. It beats any form of (non-conductive) plastic packaging, which unfortunately seems the norm.

I tell non-business shippers to use aluminum foil. 100% sure to short all pins together, thus preventing esd from penetrating the chip.

Assuming the aluminium foil doesn't tear. But yes, full conductivity - so essentially a faraday cage - is another approach that can work.

Edit:
Got my new toys working today

Puretek PT-2037, aka UMC UM85C418F-GP VLB board. Replaces my crappy UM85C408AF ISA VGA board in my UMC build. So far so good, it improves 3DBench scoers from 26.3 to 37.0. No FDD though, so I still need my multi-I/O card for that.

Nice, can you list all your UMC parts ? Or do you have a thread on this build ?

I don't own any SB AWE 32, but now i have got this one.
It has also the EMU8000...

Some other recent acquisitiions; a new in the box serial Artec 3-button mouse and an old xt-era PC joystick in very good condition.

melbar wrote:

I don't own any SB AWE 32, but now i have got this one. It has also the EMU8000... […]
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I don't own any SB AWE 32, but now i have got this one.
It has also the EMU8000...

What a strange little card. Is that a mini jack on the back?

liqmat wrote:

melbar wrote:

I don't own any SB AWE 32, but now i have got this one. It has also the EMU8000... […]
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I don't own any SB AWE 32, but now i have got this one.
It has also the EMU8000...

What a strange little card. Is that a mini jack on the back?

Its the Wavetable half of the AWE32. Its supposed to go alongside an SB16, like the GUS ACE.

I see. Never have seen that specific card before. Thanks.

liqmat wrote:

I see. Never have seen that specific card before. Thanks.

CT1920 AWE32 Upgrade, Music volume

http://www.amoretro.de/2012/11/creative-sound … ard-ct1920.html

Not in my possesion yet, but on the way... Aopen AX64 + Pentium3 1.0ghz/133 slot1 = wholesome goodness.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

[...]

Nice, can you list all your UMC parts ? Or do you have a thread on this build ?

Not yet, but intend to do so when I have time (and when I've managed to get at least one of my UMC-based NICs to work under DOS...)

What I did have time for today was a quick pickup run to a neigbouring town for this:

I already had the SGI 1600SW monitor, but now I can hook it up to any PC thanks to the Multilink adapter. It converts either digital DVI or analog (via DVI connetor) to SGI's OpenLVDS for the 1600x1024 beauty.

And it was my lucky day - the seller wanted to dump more SGI stuff and had a Bigfoot Granite keyboard. It was in a bit of a bad state, with broken keystem on the '2' key, messed-up space bar and a few internal supports strapped off - but with a bit of superglue and a lot of patience I've gotten it working again - Alps SKCM Cream Damped goodness 😀

+2 Cards to my collection

This was a great week for me in terms of pickups. I obtained a extremely cool and extremely tall Pentium Pro system via eBay. It is a Shuttle HOT-613 single CPU w/ 128 megs of RAM equipped with two ST15150N hard drives that are now running MSDOS 6.22 as a RAID0 array. It originally came with 2 tape drives but I removed one and added a Teac 5.25. Worst case scenario, I can live inside the tower.

Saturday afternoon I decided to check out a estate sale and I'm glad I did. I found a tower lying on its side on the floor in the corner of a room with a VCR on top of it. I threw out a fair price with the assumption it would be a box of rocks and maybe one working thing and they accepted it.

When I took it home to take a look inside, I was pretty surprised with what was in there. In the expansion slots were a SoundBlaster 32 (CT3930), a VLB Diamond Stealth video card, and a VLB Acculogic sIDE multi IO card. Even more surprising to me was the CPU wasn't a Socket 3 processor but rather a NexGen P80 CPU with the NexGen FPU chipset accompanying it. I have never heard of NexGen before and I had initially assumed the badge on the front of the tower was a local computer shop.

Tested everything out, the NexGen tower needs a new battery and the cdrom drive tray is stuck but other than that everything is working great.

You sir just struck gold, no platinum!

That NxVL isn't the FPU (if you'd found a NexGen board with socketed FPU you could probably give up your day job - but would have to hire a security detail too 😜 ) it's the motherboard chipset. This VLB version isn't as fast as the PCI one, but it is probably the most beautiful motherboard chipset out there.

Enjoy that board, and whatever you do, even if it is stone cold dead, DON'T throw it away. These things are rare and some very capable enthousiast may well be able to resurrect it.

dionb wrote:

Not yet, but intend to do so when I have time (and when I've managed to get at least one of my UMC-based NICs to work under DOS. […]
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Intel486dx33 wrote:

[...]

Nice, can you list all your UMC parts ? Or do you have a thread on this build ?

Not yet, but intend to do so when I have time (and when I've managed to get at least one of my UMC-based NICs to work under DOS...)

What I did have time for today was a quick pickup run to a neigbouring town for this:

I already had the SGI 1600SW monitor, but now I can hook it up to any PC thanks to the Multilink adapter. It converts either digital DVI or analog (via DVI connetor) to SGI's OpenLVDS for the 1600x1024 beauty.

And it was my lucky day - the seller wanted to dump more SGI stuff and had a Bigfoot Granite keyboard. It was in a bit of a bad state, with broken keystem on the '2' key, messed-up space bar and a few internal supports strapped off - but with a bit of superglue and a lot of patience I've gotten it working again - Alps SKCM Cream Damped goodness 😀

I use to have a hacked Video card that could run Sun Microsystems displays on a Windows PC.
I think it was an S3 Savage 4. I think it was AGP and it had a green heat sink.
“Mirage Illusionist 3D AGP”

dionb wrote:

You sir just struck gold, no platinum!

That NxVL isn't the FPU (if you'd found a NexGen board with socketed FPU you could probably give up your day job - but would have to hire a security detail too 😜 ) it's the motherboard chipset. This VLB version isn't as fast as the PCI one, but it is probably the most beautiful motherboard chipset out there.

Enjoy that board, and whatever you do, even if it is stone cold dead, DON'T throw it away. These things are rare and some very capable enthousiast may well be able to resurrect it.

Good catch, thank you! Just edited my post to reflect that. Will be enjoying the board for sure, even more once I replace the battery so I don't have to reconfigure everything every time it boots.

Dragon Caesar wrote:

dionb wrote:

You sir just struck gold, no platinum!

That NxVL isn't the FPU (if you'd found a NexGen board with socketed FPU you could probably give up your day job - but would have to hire a security detail too 😜 ) it's the motherboard chipset. This VLB version isn't as fast as the PCI one, but it is probably the most beautiful motherboard chipset out there.

Enjoy that board, and whatever you do, even if it is stone cold dead, DON'T throw it away. These things are rare and some very capable enthousiast may well be able to resurrect it.

Good catch, thank you! Just edited my post to reflect that. Will be enjoying the board for sure, even more once I replace the battery so I don't have to reconfigure everything every time it boots.

I would like to read up on this computer if you would like to place a review in “System” forum category.
Take some nice photos and benchmarks. System specs and stuff. It’s a really neat looking computer.
Envious for sure.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

dionb wrote:

Not yet, but intend to do so when I have time (and when I've managed to get at least one of my UMC-based NICs to work under DOS. […]
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Intel486dx33 wrote:

[...]

Nice, can you list all your UMC parts ? Or do you have a thread on this build ?

Not yet, but intend to do so when I have time (and when I've managed to get at least one of my UMC-based NICs to work under DOS...)

What I did have time for today was a quick pickup run to a neigbouring town for this:

I already had the SGI 1600SW monitor, but now I can hook it up to any PC thanks to the Multilink adapter. It converts either digital DVI or analog (via DVI connetor) to SGI's OpenLVDS for the 1600x1024 beauty.

And it was my lucky day - the seller wanted to dump more SGI stuff and had a Bigfoot Granite keyboard. It was in a bit of a bad state, with broken keystem on the '2' key, messed-up space bar and a few internal supports strapped off - but with a bit of superglue and a lot of patience I've gotten it working again - Alps SKCM Cream Damped goodness 😀

I use to have a hacked Video card that could run Sun Microsystems displays on a Windows PC.
I think it was an Nvidia Riva TNT2. I think it was AGP and it had a green heat sink.

See that other monitor on my photo? That's a Sun LSA800 and it works just fine with the same - VGA - output I used for the 1600SW+Multilink 😉

Most later Sun monitors were simple multisync devices that could run on unmodified PC hardware (at least, if you had DE15->13W3 cables/adapters). You probably had an earlier single-frequency monitor. They would need some driver hacking to work under windows, that's most likely what you did.

This card for Sun / SGI displays. Back in the early 2000’s there where allot of SUN and SGI displays for sale on eBay but they sold for dirt cheap because everyone was using Windows computers so no one want to buy these proprietary displays. So someone hacked this card to work.

dionb wrote:

Edit: Got my new toys working today https://tweakers.net/ext/f/dour551yetUAUFoJOK9bmXg8/full.jpg […]
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Edit:
Got my new toys working today

Puretek PT-2037, aka UMC UM85C418F-GP VLB board. Replaces my crappy UM85C408AF ISA VGA board in my UMC build. So far so good, it improves 3DBench scoers from 26.3 to 37.0. No FDD though, so I still need my multi-I/O card for that.

Ohh, nice! Can the U5S CPU do 40MHz FSB?

appiah4 wrote:

[...]

Ohh, nice! Can the U5S CPU do 40MHz FSB?

Not tested (yet). Will put on to-do list though 😀

Might take a while as I'm getting guests over on Thursday, then heading with them to a reunion lasting all weekend. Until Thursday I'm tidying up to make sure they have somewhere to sleep that doesn't have PCBs or - worse - screws sticking out at them, then away till Monday, and probably hung over until the weekend after. Spent 4h this evening getting the first bit done, not even had time to seriously play with my SGI screen yet 😵

It seems the power supply I bought last week had arrived early, because I received it just yesterday. It's a 250W power supply for the retro rig I'm working on, as I said last time.