For the past few days I've been straightening pins on my 25 or so Cyrix 5x86 cpus to finally test them for functionality and maybe find a few that work fine at 133MHz. It's been a tedious work as some had heavily bent pins. After testing all of them work. Most of them even boot at 133 and 5-6 of them are pretty stable. About half are revision 05 and the rest are 13. I've used Feipoas settings for tuning the cpu registers. Will post photos in another thread... now it will be even more tedious work to straighten all the pins on AMD 5x86-133 cpus... around 50 of them and try to find a 200MHz one 😉

Been fighting with my new CRT monitor, that since I got it, has a nasty tendency to whine loud after a while and only stops if you move it or tilt it in a peculiar position, or if you move the power connector in the socket. It's surely something loose in the power supply area, but I just don't know if it's the power socket, a capacitor or a loose coil in the transformer. What I'm sure is that it doesn't come from the flyback transformer. That is annoying considering the monitor is pretty much new-old-stock and works great, if it wasn't for this excessive whine.

On the other hand, I've been experimenting with the pagefile, and it seems that making another page file on the data HDD, makes the system more responsive. Previously, I used to keep the page file only on the data HDD, but now I'm keeping it both on the HDD and the SSD.

Got my IBM AT motherboard going again, which had suddenly crapped out at the beginning of the year. It's been retrofitted with the AMI 286 BIOS which was working previously, but then it started giving the message "CMOS INOPERATIONAL SYSTEM HALTED" and refusing to boot. Fresh battery didn't help, nor did swapping ISA cards or memory chips. I disassembled the BIOS and it looked like $20 would be the last diagnostic code to appear before that message is displayed, but never figured out exactly how the test was failing. Guessed that it had something to do with the NMI, so I put a scope on the NMI pin, where I saw no activity. I was considering doing a hacked BIOS to bypass the CMOS check but in the end I just desoldered the 146818, put in a socket, and fitted a new chip. And presto! It works now, so I guess that error message is pretty accurate at least. I found that desoldering goes fairly quick when holding a spring-loaded solder sucker on the bottom side of the board while heating the joint with an iron from the top side.

Fixed the Reset & Pause buttons on my Sega Master System I. The buttons were pretty worn inside, so I just modified the case buttons slightly and it's working great again. I can now play Alex Kidd in Miracle World properly. 🤣

Also added a new flip top door to my NES, which was missing its original one. The colours are slightly mismatched, but it looks cool and so much neater.

Aside from that, was also playing some Atari 2600 games on my TV Boy II clone.

Going to work on my 486 computer builds this weekend.

kixs wrote:

For the past few days I've been straightening pins on my 25 or so Cyrix 5x86 cpus to finally test them for functionality and maybe find a few that work fine at 133MHz. It's been a tedious work as some had heavily bent pins. After testing all of them work. Most of them even boot at 133 and 5-6 of them are pretty stable. About half are revision 05 and the rest are 13. I've used Feipoas settings for tuning the cpu registers. Will post photos in another thread... now it will be even more tedious work to straighten all the pins on AMD 5x86-133 cpus... around 50 of them and try to find a 200MHz one 😉

Well, at least I now know where they all went!

I just washed keyboards today. Got a nice Keytronic with the wrong layout (the AT of course), a Gateway with the right layout (FINALLY), and a Mitsuko with a bunch of missing keys (sad trombone). I forgot to wash the HP PS/2 with the right layout (also finally).

I see them plenty on eBay 😉

Tested a lot of stuff..

The Voodoo 3 3000 AGP I repaired a while back amazingly enough turned out to work.

Unfortunately the ATI Rage Fury MAXX AGP and ATI Radeon 9250 PCI I got in the mail were duds. The 9250 may be salvagable, but the Fury MAXX is trashed.

Testing the Fury MAXX messed up the Windows Me install on my Tualatin rig so I will have to reinstall it, or more likely install Windows 98SE on it.

I tested a 386SX motherboard and it did not POST. Still trying to resolve why.

Overall, a frustrating and disappointing two days.

Another old console dug out of storage, cleaned up & repaired. The oldest games console that I own.

I remember back to the early 1990s and begging my parents to buy me a Sega or Nintendo. Imagine my joy when they told me they were getting me a games console, only to discover it was THIS thing. The joy was very shortlived. 😠

But I kept it and it's been gathering lots and lots of dust over the past 20-25 years. Took it out today, cleaned it all up and repaired the controllers. Sprayed some contact cleaner into both controllers and had to splice & rejoin the cable on the Right Player controller. All now working good once again.

Ugh. Sold someone a babyAT tower last week. Shipped it out on Thursday, packed on all sides with official air cushion stuff. Gave the box reinforcing duct tape girdles. That thing should have been able to survive anyting. Then DHL gave the status update: "Sorted incorrectly, delayed because of resorting"

"Sorted incorrectly" meant that the box had apparently been dropped from considerable height onto a blunt object roughly in the middle of one of the sides. The air cushions actually survived, but the impact was hard enough to bend the case metal, damage the plastic front and chip one of the corners 🙁

Thanks DHL...

On my breadbin 250407, the SID chip was defect. One voice channel did have sound, yet it was totally off and distorted. So I desoldered the chip, soldered in a socket and inserted a SID that I got for cheap. Now my 250407 board is up and running perfectly again, after a total recap. The next thing I want to do is eighter to get a non-gold capped 12volt VIC-II or create a new and lower sitting 12-to-5 volt socket adaptor.

Anyway... Pic's or it did not happen. (so they say)

Some days are just not your days.. After trying the ATI Rage Fury MAXX in my P3 build, WinMe started hanging on startup so I completely wiped and reinstalled WinMe only to find out that my GF3Ti started artifacting once I installed the nVidia drivers.. So I don't know what happened either the Maxx card damaged the motherboard which damaged the GF3, or in a string of unfortunate coincidences I got a bad card in the mail and the card that was in the PC I used to test it also died wile removing and reinstalling it.

Fuck it. I will swap the dead GF3 with a GF4 Ti 4200 tomorrow, but for today I'm done, enough failures for one day. I just want to drink a beer and brood..

appiah4 wrote:

Some days are just not your days.. After trying the ATI Rage Fury MAXX in my P3 build, WinMe started hanging on startup so I completely wiped and reinstalled WinMe only to find out that my GF3Ti started artifacting once I installed the nVidia drivers.. So I don't know what happened either the Maxx card damaged the motherboard which damaged the GF3, or in a string of unfortunate coincidences I got a bad card in the mail and the card that was in the PC I used to test it also died wile removing and reinstalling it.

Fuck it. I will swap the dead GF3 with a GF4 Ti 4200 tomorrow, but for today I'm done, enough failures for one day. I just want to drink a beer and brood..

Was it a TI-500?

brostenen wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Some days are just not your days.. After trying the ATI Rage Fury MAXX in my P3 build, WinMe started hanging on startup so I completely wiped and reinstalled WinMe only to find out that my GF3Ti started artifacting once I installed the nVidia drivers.. So I don't know what happened either the Maxx card damaged the motherboard which damaged the GF3, or in a string of unfortunate coincidences I got a bad card in the mail and the card that was in the PC I used to test it also died wile removing and reinstalling it.

Fuck it. I will swap the dead GF3 with a GF4 Ti 4200 tomorrow, but for today I'm done, enough failures for one day. I just want to drink a beer and brood..

Was it a TI-500?

No a Ti 200 so nothing incredibly rare but it was passively cooled which is I assume the reason it failed eventually. When I took it out of the system, not only the heatsink, but the entire card, including the AGP connector, was so hot to handle that I couldn't hold it for almost a minute.

appiah4 wrote:

Fuck it. I will swap the dead GF3 with a GF4 Ti 4200 tomorrow, but for today I'm done, enough failures for one day. I just want to drink a beer and brood..

Hang in there buddy 😀 We all have such bad days when retro stuff doesn't work as it should.

appiah4 wrote:

No a Ti 200

Good. 😀 Then it a nice GF4-ti4200 is a good replacement.

dionb wrote:

Ugh. Sold someone a babyAT tower last week. Shipped it out on Thursday, packed on all sides with official air cushion stuff. Gave the box reinforcing duct tape girdles. That thing should have been able to survive anyting. Then DHL gave the status update: "Sorted incorrectly, delayed because of resorting"

"Sorted incorrectly" meant that the box had apparently been dropped from considerable height onto a blunt object roughly in the middle of one of the sides. The air cushions actually survived, but the impact was hard enough to bend the case metal, damage the plastic front and chip one of the corners 🙁

Thanks DHL...

Some shipper should come up with a "do not destroy this item" option, they could make bank.

I tested 22 laptops today. I have 3 that my "universal power adapter" can't power because of oddball connectors. The PSU worked great though, and came with 34 connectors, and could power everything from a Toshiba Pentium MMX laptop to a Dell Inspiron i7 with various HPs, Compaqs, Acers, Sonys and Lenovos inbetween.

I am trying to catalog a lot of stuff I got over the winter and I'm now forgetting what I have. Not looking forward to doing the less mobile machines, a whole lot of heavy to move around.

I'm kind of cringing because I lost track of component testing so I have a ton of ISA and PCI cards to test, though I think I'm good on video cards and RAM (with the exception of SIPP as I have 2 SIPP mobos and both need recaps / trace repair.

Testing a GeodeNX 1500+ CPU that I recieved in the mail some time ago. I can't really tell by the feel and how it is operating, if this was a fast P3 system or an low speed Athlon. One thing is clearly noticeable, and that is the lack of heat produced by the low power consuming CPU. It never reaches above 32 degree Celcius when I run something, reboot and check temperature in the BIOS. And the cooler just seems cold all the time. In idle, it is running at 27 degree celcius and reaches 28 within 20 minutes after powered on. And this is when I set the cooler for running at lowest RPM.

Test setup:
- Asrock K7S41 (not the GX version, wich sucks compared to K7S41)
- GeodeNX 1500+
- 512mb Ram
- NorthQ all copper CPU Cooler. (with a manual RPM dongle)
- Some non interresting Radeon9600se Card.
- Floppy. DVD-Drive and 40gb ATA-133 HDD.
- Windows98se as the OS.

oeuvre wrote:

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chkdsk out

Bah! Waiting on the Win 3.1 link! 😵

Attached a new plug to one of my old C64 joysticks. I used one of those extension cables as the donor plug, but that was no easy task as all the wire colours were different. So I had to saw into the plug at the other end of the cable to find the correct pinout, then open up the joystick to find it's pinout by following the traces on it's circuit board. Extremely tedious but I managed it and the joystick is now working great. Tested on my Amstrad CPC 464. 😎

Also received the Everdrive cartridge I ordered for my Sega Mega Drive. So for the rest of the day I've mostly been playing Mega Drive & Master System games. Almost completed Sonic Chaos, but couldn't quite make that final hit on the last boss, frustrating argh!!! 🤣