VOGONS


Reply 12520 of 27185, by Mister Xiado

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Ten seconds with no major load, and remaining painfully hot for that long? That's definitely worrisome. I'd see about putting a proper cooling block on it before using it again. Perhaps a copper sink, and a good fan, and maybe just for the heck of it, adhesive mini-sinks for the RAM chips? Check the board over for any possible grit or gunk that could be shorting pins or leads, too.

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Reply 12521 of 27185, by imi

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well I just plugged the system in again, and it quickly warmed up, I did not even turn it on, the card gets hot even when the system is not powered on... it's a SS7 board with ATX and AT power connectors so there's definitely something odd going on there ^^ ... I haven't played around with retro hardware in years, but I sure don't remember that being normal 🤣

Last edited by imi on 2019-08-11, 20:15. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 12522 of 27185, by SpectriaForce

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I've collected some old hardware just 5km away from me today. The lot included three tired pc's that I have disassembled, saved some good parts including two good Asus PIII Coppermine motherboards, various AGP graphics cards, memory, CPU's etc. Unfortunately the included Diamond Voodoo card is damaged and will be recycled together with the remains of the pc's. Oh and the front panel of the crappy Packard Bell enclosure was useful to beat a wasp to death 😵

Apart from that I have experimented with overclocking a PIII 866MHz. It worked stable at 150MHz FSB at standard VCore, good for a clock speed of 975MHz. Not bad 😊 but I have set it back to a mild overclock of 139MHz in order to spare all the components.

Reply 12523 of 27185, by imi

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SpectriaForce wrote:

Unfortunately the included Diamond Voodoo card is damaged and will be recycled together with the remains of the pc's.

I'm sure someone would have use for the remains...

speaking of damaged voodoo cards... I just cleaned the second banshee from the same scrap box that looked a lot nicer at first glance, no scratches... but then I noticed this:

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😵

the left two pins seem to be 5V? which seem to be connected to the voltage regulator on the left...
one of the pads is still connected, but the left one is broken, is this the main card power? that would be concerning, those are the only 5V pins on the agp connector apparently.

the track on the right is also broken, that seems to be a 3.3V pin, but there are plenty more that seem to be connected.
there is also some soldermask missing above one of the pads on the back.

what happened to this card?

I still tested it and it is giving me a picture as well, doesn't seem to get hot as quickly as the first one... but that might be due to a different heatsink (clipped on instead of thermal adhesive).

Reply 12524 of 27185, by bjwil1991

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Fixed the exhaust and low coolant false negative issues on my 2001 Oldsmobile Intrigue. The car is running quieter and the low coolant light hasn't turned on yet (will be doing some more driving tomorrow). Also got new struts, tire for the driver's side, and an alignment as I blew the tire from a blown coil spring on the driver's side front strut. Bit over 120,000 miles and it still runs.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 12525 of 27185, by henryVK

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Still messing around with the TFT screen for my portable PC, however, I think I might have bricked either the screen or the driver board.

Somehow the screen started having trouble scaling the standard DOS resolution/frequency, because a narrow vertical line started appearing randomly on bootup but disappears in VGA mode games and Windows desktop (800x600, which is also the screen's native resolution). Then I was messing around with different graphic drivers for the Trio64V+ and -- boom -- on rebooting the screen first whites out and then reds out on the boot/POST screens. Windows was still being displayed correctly for couple of bootups but now all I get is mostly black screen with a thin horizontal line at the top.

Very odd. It's definitely not the computer because it displays just fine on my CRT. I'll fiddle some more with the screen. I did handle it a bit rough a couple of times so it might have just been one to many pokes. I did recap the driver board, could this be a symptom of more bad caps or bad solder joints on the caps?

Wlel, not the end of the world in any case because it was a cheap screen and I can get a new one within a couple of days.

Reply 12526 of 27185, by Viper87

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Hi
Im trying to revive old 386/486 pc and i have a problem because i found everything in pieces and i cant turn it on. Anyone can tell me what mb is this ?I assume some jupmers are missing so how to set it up correctly ?

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Reply 12527 of 27185, by Cyrix200+

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Viper87 wrote:

Hi
Im trying to revive old 386/486 pc and i have a problem because i found everything in pieces and i cant turn it on. Anyone can tell me what mb is this ?I assume some jupmers are missing so how to set it up correctly ?

It might be best to open a separate topic for this.

Yes it looks like you are missing jumpers.

Is there any text beween the ISA slots? The angle of your picture might hide it.

You should remove the barrel battery to keep it from damaging the motherboard.

1982 to 2001

Reply 12528 of 27185, by Viper87

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Cyrix200+ wrote:
It might be best to open a separate topic for this. […]
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Viper87 wrote:

Hi
Im trying to revive old 386/486 pc and i have a problem because i found everything in pieces and i cant turn it on. Anyone can tell me what mb is this ?I assume some jupmers are missing so how to set it up correctly ?

It might be best to open a separate topic for this.

Yes it looks like you are missing jumpers.

Is there any text beween the ISA slots? The angle of your picture might hide it.

You should remove the barrel battery to keep it from damaging the motherboard.

i think it is OPTI-495SX
http://www.elhvb.com/webhq/models/486vlb1/mb495sx.htm

Reply 12530 of 27185, by looking4awayout

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My Retro Daily Driver: Pentium !!!-S 1.7GHz | 3GB PC166 ECC SDRAM | Geforce 6800 Ultra 256MB | 128GB Lite-On SSD + 500GB WD Blue SSD | ESS Allegro PCI | Windows XP Professional SP3

Reply 12531 of 27185, by dionb

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Spent the whole evening scouring electronics sites and auction sites for all the bits and pieces needed for three little projects:

- Lo-tech ISA-CF adapter 2b (because spinning disks belong in Alive or Dead video clips, not computers)
- Lo-tech 1MB memory card (because 640k is not enough for me)
- upgrading a Weames Beethoven ADSP-16 sound card with MIDI wavetable ROM (will still be crap card, and it'll never earn back the investment if I sell it, but sod it, BECAUSE I CAN 😜 )

Reply 12532 of 27185, by MrNadix

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I spent this day changing some capacitors in my MSI 865GM2 MS-6743 478 Socket Motherboard 😀

I don't have any good photo of the process 🙁

I hope this time any of the old ones (The processor VRM ones) blow up.

Reply 12533 of 27185, by Mister Xiado

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dionb wrote:

BECAUSE I CAN 😜

Whenever you don't think you have a need or a reason to do something, this refutes those doubts.

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Reply 12534 of 27185, by JonathonWyble

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dionb wrote:

- upgrading a Weames Beethoven ADSP-16 sound card with MIDI wavetable ROM (will still be crap card, and it'll never earn back the investment if I sell it, but sod it, BECAUSE I CAN 😜 )

Sometimes reasons like "because I can" are quite doubtful in certain situations. But it looks like that was what you wanted to do, so I guess that was your reason for why you sod your sound card 😜 Other than that, that was a cool accomplishment, I guess.

1998 Pentium II build

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Reply 12535 of 27185, by Bruninho

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Just played Spycraft: The Great Game and completed the missions perfectly. The "Me" of 2019 finished it in two days, quicker than the "Me" of 1996/97, I think I took weeks if my memory serves me right.

Too bad the game didn't have subtitles, like Indy (Atlantis), Full Throttle and Sam & Max had. For a deaf gamer, it's a big problem, but I went through it with some bit of lip reading and with what I could remember of the game.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 12536 of 27185, by mothergoose729

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I got my Aureal Vortex 2, Audigy 2 ZS, and Yamaha YM744 all to work on my windows 98 machine. I created 3 device manager profiles so I could switch through them at boot, and so far it is working great.

Going to try DOS tomorrow. I don't have SB link, so I am tempering my expectations. I am really just hoping to get most of my late DOS games going.

Reply 12537 of 27185, by Cyrix200+

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kaputnik wrote:
Cyrix200+ wrote:

I had been reverse engineering the jumper settings for a MHz display in one of my cases, but I could not get one of the segments to work. I had concluded that the segment must be defective 🙁

Today I desoldered it from the PCB (nice first job for my new desoldering station), and tested it. The segments LED is indeed not working 🙁 Unfortunately it's the middle horizontal one, so I can only make a 1 or a 7 now 🙁

I wonder if I can find a replacement. Finding the data sheet for the display unit was surprisingly easy (and very helpful).

Those 7 segment displays are usually standard off the shelf stuff. Shouldn't be hard or expensive to find a replacement 😀

If you can't find a 2 digit one, I'd guess two 1 digit ones would be fine too. The pin configuration on those displays seems to be pretty standardized.

I have been looking for a replacement last night, the pinout seems standard, and so does the voltage (if I pick the same color). Now finding one (or two) for a decent price (including shipping) is a bit harder. Replacing it with two 1 digit displays seems impossible, it has 2x 9 pins. Will continue the search today.

1982 to 2001

Reply 12538 of 27185, by henryVK

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Replaced the little 40mm fan in a shuttle ATX PSU with my first Noctua fan.

Boy, if that wasn't the best 12 Euros I spent on that machine so far! Barely can hear the damn thing now.

Reply 12539 of 27185, by imi

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be careful replacing PSU fans with more silent (and often slower) variants, they might not provide enough airflow for adequate cooling and might kill the PSU if it doesn't have good thermal protections, always compare the airflow of the stock fan with the one you replace it with.

It's probably a non-issue if the PSU isn't under constant heavy load, but it is definitely a thing to consider.