GigAHerZ wrote:

Surprisingly snappy! (CF card, 256kB cache with writeback)

Is the cache interleaved, also? Because I might want the model# so I can bask in such awesomeness!

If it's the PC-Chips M321, I have one that's flaking out and also has the tag RAM soldered on, which is annoying because that's the barrier to going from 128K to 256K.

And CF cards really improve the feel of such old systems. Those 9-10ms access times add up quickly!

Today's "retro" activity: Helped someone with a LISTSERV. That's SO '87! Well, '94 at least since it's the L-Soft commercial version.

@AlaricD, i have also the M321 board. It also had soldered cache and soldered wires instead of pins. I desoldered all of that, placed full set of sockets and missing decoupling capacitors and upgraded it this way to 256kB of cache.

About interleaving, what or how can i check?

Mister Xiado, tried that, still. Works fine with an ISA drive controller on the same motherboard. I'm limited by PCI slots on the motherboard, I can always scrap the printer port. I have another identical board, but it's already complete in a case running fine. But I'm thinking of putting a socket 5 motherboard with 4 PCI slots, also so that it can better utilise the Voodoo card.

SpectriaForce, have a look at the photo below.

The alloy piece is from a hardware store, aluminium flat bar, 40mm by as much as you need long, by 3mm thick. Cut it to 15.4mm and remove the burrs. I guesstimated where the keyboard hole goes, even when I measure it, I still get it off by a few mm's. I use 6mm drill bit to pilot the hole then get it to 22mm with the special bit. Works great and doesn't leave any burrs. As for the bracket (blank i/o plate on eBay), I use a 22mm hole saw and finish it off with a round file. Scuff the surfaces where the glue will go, leave it in the vice for a day for it to cure. Originally, the alloy piece was for safety, then I noticed it actually looked really nice.

I should make a video one day...

My early 2000's Windows 98SE machine running on an Intel Celeron 1.4GHz (Socket 370) wouldn't detect the 60GB HDD somehow. Got it working, and I might clone the HDD to the 80GB HDD, so in case the HDD goes out, at least the 80GB HDD will be used to boot into the OS.

Also in the middle of build a late 1990's, early 2000's machine using the Slot 1 board and CPU I bought recently. Might install the GF2 MX400 card, but, I think the TNT2 M64 AGP card is better and I'll be using a Sound Blaster 16 ISA card over the PCI card for DOS gaming, and possibly a PCI card for Windows gaming, or just the ISA sound card would suffice. I currently have the Celeron 400 with the redneck heatsink/fan combo, 256MB SD-RAM, 1.44MB FDD, and TNT2 M64 AGP card installed at the moment and going to install either a 40GB HDD or less for period correctness and a DVD drive (currently cleaning said drive as it doesn't read anything anymore).

I decided to take part in the Reddit /r/RetroBattleStations Singalong contest: Let your retro machine sing (via speech synthesizer) along a MIDI file. I chose my 386 with Windows 3.1, Winspeech 3.0 and MT32: Kraftwerk - Computer Love. It's horrible! Enjoy!

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/ … ek_a_38625_mhz/

Looked at the SMART data on some HDDs. My laptop has a 40GB Hitachi with 7,987 power ups, 13,968 start/stops, 15,315 hours running time, and 487,509 load/unloads.

The funny thing is a 500GB WD-green that I just got two years ago has roughly double those numbers! No wonder it was cheap...

Interesting read. http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/07/feng_shui_ … otherboard.html

Most of my work has been on the NEC Versa 40EC 486 DX2-40 laptop.

What's done
- hinge fixed with JB Weld and working great, the J.B. weld matches the case a bit

- autopsy before wipe showed it belonged to a Ford engineer....that's awesome, I love my 90s Ford...so only fitting I have a "Ford" laptop too. Might need a classy blue Oval, 🤣.

- wiped ALL data off per my own ethics, original 250MB HDD is in amazing shape, no bad sectors. Still running the original OS like ad though - MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 for NEC Devices....but reset to a "clean" state and tuned for my own electronic engineering on guitar pedals and maybe Amps with Circuitmaker 6.1.

- game Dev apps added (GameMaker, AGS, Graf-X II, CIA)

- only my favorite games installed (Monkey Island 1&2, Ultima 6, Tank Wars, Mario & Luigi, Microlink Yahtzee, Wolfenstein 3d, and sharedata Game Show games + NESticle and some choice RPGs).

- Ultima 6 got corrupted during transfer using mTCP FTP ( probably have something wrong in the config file) using my 486 desktop and a 44 pin to 40 pin IDE adapter. So I "spoon fed" the entire working install from my 486 DTs SSD to the laptop...works great.

Things to do...
- new CR2430 CMOS battery
- new suspend battery
- new main battery + rebuild old
- PCMCIA wifi (Orinoco gold I think)
- wfwg 311 upgrade
- 8GB SSD upgrade for upgraded config and reliability in the future

A pic as it is now....

Green MOBO
No BIOSes (F*ck u PacardBell/Gigabyte) , no bus fixation, locked (trying unlock) FSB

Black MOBO
no bus fixation, No BIOSes (F*ck u Aopen)

Green MOBO (AssRock)
no bus fixation, BUT nice "stock" results (6.6k points on VooDoo 3-3000 in 99mrk)

(its all SIS 651/650/650)

Find ASUS TX mobo and buy some SDR samsung mem

Spent about 12hours trying to sort a 386 mobo out. Refused to boot from any hdd including scsi. Try a Promise EIDE card and a myriad of other ide controllers as well as xt-ide on a nic but no joy. Ram was fine, cache was fine, settings in the bios were all correct. Finally gave up and started testing a 486vlb board. Everything is running perfectly, all controllers including the Promise EIDE. I'll never get that time back but am now proficient at pulling chips without bending legs 😀

Currently attempting assessments of the Slot 1 system I built recently. I don't have a POST card, but I connected my PC speaker from another case and no beeps. Reseated the CPU, RAM, and GPU after spraying contact cleaner in there. When I inserted the ROM back into the system after reading off of the old contents, I inserted it in backwards and got warm and didn't smoke (turned the system off after a couple of seconds). I made a new BIOS ROM with a spare 2Mb (256KB x 😎 32-pin PDIP I have and flashed it successfully. I'm thinking of 3 culprits I'm thinking that's causing issues: ROM socket overheated and the solder points are probably cracked, the CPU that doesn't stay in place, and the RAM slots are probably acting strange. My money is on the ROM slot, and I bought a few of them a while back because I thought my Panasonic CR-563-B CD-ROM drive's EPROM wasn't socketed and it is (good idea to have spare parts). I'm planning on buying new caps and a POST PCI/ISA card to see what it could be. The CPU gets warm, which is getting power, the AGP and PCI slots are getting power (I see lights on the network card and the heatsink fan on my GeForce2 MX400 spins up, which is a good sign), and the RAM gets warm as well, which indicates that there's something wrong with the ROM itself or the socket for it got damaged somehow and a spare one will be installed and soldered onto. This is an ASUS P2B-F that can support Celerons or Pentium III (either Slot 1 or ASUS Sloket 370) up to 800MHz, and Pentium II up to 450MHz. I'll post an update in the future after I get the new socket for the ROM installed and hope for the best. If it still doesn't work, a recap would suffice.

Although, the caps are still in great shape and not leaking, which is a good sign.

Updated (upgraded?) the motherboard on my 486 from a quirky ECS 486UL-P101 to a Chicony CH-471A and the difference is night and day. It also has LBA support so I can use CF cards without overlay software. That means I will have to wipe the current CF off and reinstall everything, fun times.

Question: Is there a way to read data from a CF with an overlay software (OnTrack specifically) on a modern computer without an IDE interface but only a CF-Reader? I want to back up the hard drive and copy the data back over once I reformat it. Or do I need to do this on the computer itself using a second IDE-CF adapter?

appiah4 wrote:

Is there a way to read data from a CF with an overlay software (OnTrack specifically) on a modern computer without an IDE interface but only a CF-Reader?

No idea about how OnTrack works, but for EZ-Drive, it just adds LBA addressing mode via code injected to the MBR, so such a card will work fine in any card reader, since it uses LBA addressing anyway.

I've used both OnTrack and EzDrive and at least the primary partition is available through memory card reader. With EzDrive, extended partions look as if formatted in unknown format. With OnTrack, i don't remember, maybe extended partions did work.

But the classic C: drive is accessible on both cases.

Card readers normally only show one partition anyway (since drive letters for the card slots are pre-assigned). You need an USB-to-IDE adapter to access all partitions. At least that's my experience so far.

Thanks, I will have to do this locally on the PC itself then. I hope I have an extra CF-IDE adapter lying about.. Fun times.

creepingnet wrote:

Most of my work has been on the NEC Versa 40EC 486 DX2-40 laptop.

Very cool looking machine!

How's the trackball? I like me a built-in trackball, but the one on my Siemens PCD-4ND tends to clog up with dust and grime pretty quickly and needs cleaning pretty much every couple hours. I use one of those old Logitech Trackman clip-ons (https://i.imgur.com/MQh86oz.jpg not my picture) which works pretty well.

gotohell wrote:

https://i.ibb.co/g9qf3nd/photo-2019-08-22-00-22-26.jpg https://i.ibb.co/YcSpG3X/photo-2019-08-22-00-22-25-2.jpg https://i.ibb.co […]
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Green MOBO
No BIOSes (F*ck u PacardBell/Gigabyte) , no bus fixation, locked (trying unlock) FSB

Black MOBO
no bus fixation, No BIOSes (F*ck u Aopen)

Green MOBO (AssRock)
no bus fixation, BUT nice "stock" results (6.6k points on VooDoo 3-3000 in 99mrk)

(its all SIS 651/650/650)

Find ASUS TX mobo and buy some SDR samsung mem

Green board is a Gigabyte GA-8SIML, and there is a stock GB BIOS.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8SIML-rev-1x#ov

The Aopen board also has BIOS:
http://www.elhvb.com/supportbios.info/Archive … 46U2/index.html

Green board is a Gigabyte GA-8SIML, and there is a stock GB BIOS.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8SIML-rev-1x#ov

Almost, its SIS651 mobo, OEM for PB. SIML-NF11Ai

The Aopen board also has BIOS:
http://www.elhvb.com/supportbios.info/Archive … 46U2/index.html

10tx! Ill try that.

gotohell wrote:

Green board is a Gigabyte GA-8SIML, and there is a stock GB BIOS.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-8SIML-rev-1x#ov

Almost, its SIS651 mobo, OEM for PB. SIML-NF11Ai

8SIML bios should work.
If you're skeptical, just take the PLCC bios chip from a scrap board, flash it with the stock 8SIML using flashrom and test it on the 8SIMLNF. You have a removable BIOS socket, which should take care of not being able to recover in case the new flashed BIOS chip doesn't play with the board.