The M240 comes with a 8086 so I could go for a V30 which I won't do for now.
Didn't check for coprocessor yet. There is no mention in the diagnostics screen too.The mainboard is on the bottom side of the tray when you open the case. Those Italiaans...I'll need to look up how to disassemble it.

I don't know if the noise is normal since I only have 2 systems with mfm drives and they don't produce this sound. Yesterday the HD didn't show up,today it did, tomorrow....?
Maybe they didn't park it a few times or the last time of use
Maybe it wants to retire? Maybe dried bearings? Or a combination.

At least I parked the heads now.

Now I finally have a VLB motherboard I'm happy with I decided to quickly benchmark my various VGA cards in DOS:

Some results unsurprising, others rather more so. The cards are ordered by age. With one prominent exception, performance basically improves over time. Also the best ISA (ET4000AX, 90C31) and VLB (1000VL and UM85C418) are basically bottlenecking on their respective buses - DOS performance ends up being little more than a measure of how fast you can get raw pixels onto the screen. But hang on a minute - UM85C418??? Yes, it performs almost identically to the Ark 1000VL (2662 realtics where the Ark needed 2610) and outperforms both CL-GD5424 and S3 928 - that was unexpected, particularly given the known awful performance of the older 85C408.

Downside: no native VESA support on the UM85C418. But for pure 320x240 VGA in DOS, this low-end weirdo (the card also has an IDE interface onboard...) can give the fastest card out there a decent run for its money.

Makes me want to find a UM85C419, might be even faster 😜

The S3 928 result also puts the "Windows decelerator" into perspective. Yes, this 1993 VLB card with VRAM is beaten by similar though newer cards with DRAM, but it makes good use of the VLB bandwidth and beats the pants off any ISA card.

Now I feel the urge to install Win3.11 and see if I can do benchmarks there...

Murugan wrote:

The M240 comes with a 8086 so I could go for a V30 which I won't do for now. Didn't check for coprocessor yet. There is no menti […]
Show full quote

The M240 comes with a 8086 so I could go for a V30 which I won't do for now.
Didn't check for coprocessor yet. There is no mention in the diagnostics screen too.The mainboard is on the bottom side of the tray when you open the case. Those Italians...I'll need to look up how to disassemble it.

I don't know if the noise is normal since I only have 2 systems with mfm drives and they don't produce this sound. Yesterday the HD didn't show up,today it did, tomorrow....?
Maybe they didn't park it a few times or the last time of use
Maybe it wants to retire? Maybe dried bearings? Or a combination.

At least I parked the heads now.

Ooo, super XT! I think a V30 or some sort of 286 upgrade might be cool to see. Don't see many super XTs, usually just running at 8MHz.

Coprocessor doesn't matter all that much honestly, but it might be nice if you want to soup it up someday. If the BIOS doesn't mention it, you could always use CPUID or SYSINFO and check that way.

Huh, what a strange way to assemble a machine, take some pictures so we can see how it all goes together.

Some MFM drives automatically park their heads on shutdown (Seagate ST-251, Seagate ST2-77R, most voice coil drives like Seagate ST-4038, -4096, Micropolis 1325, 1333, IBM type 0665 series, etc), and some auto park their heads after a period of inactivity (Miniscribe 3012, 3650 for example), but it's still probably a good idea to park them when you shut the machine off whenever you can to help the longevity of the drive.

Have you tried to run SpeedStor, Scandisk, SpinRite II, or HDAT yet? I would highly suggest downloading SpeedStor and running the seek tests, or SpinRite II and doing a drive exercise to make sure the mechanism is healthy. Post the seek times from SRII if you choose!

Do you know the make / model of the hard drive or the controller? It's always a toss up between the drive being dead and the controller just being wonky. Most of my MFM / RLL drives work no problem, only the Microscience, Micropolis, and a couple Seagate drives have ever failed me. Try a different controller, if you can.

This is a site with some pics of the layout (but different specs):

https://fdiskformat.wordpress.com/vig-iii-vig … /olivetti-m240/

My free time is scarce lately so the Olivetti is the last one to tackle thoroughly. Other stuff on my to do list is waiting for a long time now. I will try to give Speedstor or SRII a download though this week :p
Controller is WD but don't remember the type. Haven't removed the HD to check it.
First my IBM 51xx's need some drive maintenance and I still need to test my 5161.

The M24 is similar: It's a motherboard on the bottom, an 'ISA backplane' on top, joined by the video card. I like it because it's weird. Als has the advantage that the leaking battery will not leak a lot on the PCB but on the case!

Source: https://www.vecchicomputer.com/2017/07/olivetti-m24-1984/

dionb wrote:

Now I finally have a VLB motherboard I'm happy with I decided to quickly benchmark my various VGA cards in DOS: […]
Show full quote

Now I finally have a VLB motherboard I'm happy with I decided to quickly benchmark my various VGA cards in DOS:

Some results unsurprising, others rather more so. The cards are ordered by age. With one prominent exception, performance basically improves over time. Also the best ISA (ET4000AX, 90C31) and VLB (1000VL and UM85C418) are basically bottlenecking on their respective buses - DOS performance ends up being little more than a measure of how fast you can get raw pixels onto the screen. But hang on a minute - UM85C418??? Yes, it performs almost identically to the Ark 1000VL (2662 realtics where the Ark needed 2610) and outperforms both CL-GD5424 and S3 928 - that was unexpected, particularly given the known awful performance of the older 85C408.

Downside: no native VESA support on the UM85C418. But for pure 320x240 VGA in DOS, this low-end weirdo (the card also has an IDE interface onboard...) can give the fastest card out there a decent run for its money.

Makes me want to find a UM85C419, might be even faster 😜

The S3 928 result also puts the "Windows decelerator" into perspective. Yes, this 1993 VLB card with VRAM is beaten by similar though newer cards with DRAM, but it makes good use of the VLB bandwidth and beats the pants off any ISA card.

Now I feel the urge to install Win3.11 and see if I can do benchmarks there...

ARK1000, the fantastic little card I am lucky to have in my collection but have no use for because capturing from it would be too expensive so I will will use a Rage Pro AIW instead.. 😵

I tried to get my slot A Gigabyte GA-7IXE motherboard going, but it seems the board is dead.
I get no beeps on the internal speaker and on the pci diagnostics card always the cod D4/D3 is displayed.
Even without RAM or Videocard in the motherboard I get this error..

Switched the bios battery, tried with RAM until I discovered it even hangs here without RAM. All ram tested in another system to work without problems.
Cleaned contacts on the cpu, on the bios chip and the Videocard, no damaged components to be seen on the board for the rest.
Tried 3 different working PSU's and not a single difference..

For now I am going to put the board in my "dead" stock and I have to dig my Aopen AK72 motherboard out and try if that one still works.

Nvm1 wrote:

I tried to get my slot A Gigabyte GA-7IXE motherboard going, but it seems the board is dead. I get no beeps on the internal spea […]
Show full quote

I tried to get my slot A Gigabyte GA-7IXE motherboard going, but it seems the board is dead.
I get no beeps on the internal speaker and on the pci diagnostics card always the cod D4/D3 is displayed.
Even without RAM or Videocard in the motherboard I get this error..

Switched the bios battery, tried with RAM until I discovered it even hangs here without RAM. All ram tested in another system to work without problems.
Cleaned contacts on the cpu, on the bios chip and the Videocard, no damaged components to be seen on the board for the rest.
Tried 3 different working PSU's and not a single difference..

For now I am going to put the board in my "dead" stock and I have to dig my Aopen AK72 motherboard out and try if that one still works.

Might be the caps. They might look okay but still be broken.

Thinking about starting again from zero my dosbox VM. Instead of WFWG 3.11, I could use the Win 3.1 (I have the floppies), because thats what I used when I was a kid. Never really used the WFWG version.

Also, I didnt have internet back in early 90s (only around 1996, with Windows 95). I am disappointed because whe I tried WFWG on dosbox-x, it was nice to be able to connect to the internet, but it is pretty useless. I can use mirc, but internet browsing is unusable and outlook 5.0 only works if I set a stunnel on host machine. Plus NE2000 only works over ethernet and I am on a laptop. I’d like to have more flexibility by using wifi. However, I have another exact same machine in an iPad (running DOSPad 2), but it only connects if I set another machine to bridge the connection with some scripts and winsock on windows 3.11. I don’t want to depend of some other machine to be able to connect from my “replica of my childhood machine”, especially when I travel; so I am considering a downgrade...

I really wish we had more progress on dosbox connectivity and NE2000. But I understand the focus is in gaming.

Nvm1 wrote:

I tried to get my slot A Gigabyte GA-7IXE motherboard going, but it seems the board is dead.
I get no beeps on the internal speaker and on the pci diagnostics card always the cod D4/D3 is displayed.
Even without RAM or Videocard in the motherboard I get this error..

Try with different speed / sizes of memory modules? Make sure they're good with another machine if you can.

I think it could also be the capacitor plague dooming this board for now. You can get some incredibly strange behavior if that's the case - Even if you get it working, you might have disk drive problems next. Or random CMOS corruption. Or the video card might not be detected. Etc, etc etc. It's best to either throw the board out or replace the caps if they're going bad.

Unfortunately, there's no good way to test them while they're on the board. All you can do is look at the tops for bulging capacitors and around the bases for any residue.

Tried to fix one of my Voodoo 2, some pins are un-soldered.
Managed to break one 😀
Will see tomorrow ...
Those pins are small !!!

Cyrix200+ wrote:

The M24 is similar: It's a motherboard on the bottom, an 'ISA backplane' on top, joined by the video card. I like it because it' […]
Show full quote

The M24 is similar: It's a motherboard on the bottom, an 'ISA backplane' on top, joined by the video card. I like it because it's weird. Als has the advantage that the leaking battery will not leak a lot on the PCB but on the case!

Source: https://www.vecchicomputer.com/2017/07/olivetti-m24-1984/

That looks very familiar.

We had an M24 in the house when I grew up. I was born and raised in the Netherlands and my dad used to work for the bank (ABN, later ABN-AMRO) and in the late 80's they "modernised" the bank and employees were able to buy a computer through work for use at home. So, in I think it was 1987, we got the M24. No hard drive. Two 5.25" disk drives. A CGA color display. It was an 8086 running at 8Mhz. I spend a lot of time with that thing. My first computer. 😀

I think years later, when I had upgraded to another "better" PC, my parents tossed it. 🙁

Getting frustrated at multiple points.
Tried to get two 3.5" drives to work with my cpc 464 (i know, it's not x86), with no result other than burning myself.
My dx2-80 seems to have suddenly decided to get on my nerves. Installation problems, sudden hangs...Stupid thing knows i don't have an axe...

Received an "untested" ATI Mach 32 2MB VLB card today.

Noticed it was missing the IRQ jumper but tried it anyway. Just no video beeps.

Put a jumper on the IRQ block and tried again. No video.

Took it out to take a closer look and noticed that the legs on the one side of the Mach 32 chip had some corrosion on them.

Cleaned the whole card with dish soap and water and then cleaned the affected area with vinegar.

Dried the card off with my air compressor spray nozzle and then cleaned the edge connectors with a pencil eraser.

The card now works! 😀

Started work on archiving old home videos from the 90s. Got my parents' combo VCR out of the basement and teased it back to life after about 15 years - first it wouldn't accept a tape, then it wouldn't eject the tape. Eventually it worked fine, probably once the lubricant got spread around the mechanism.

Didn't get any meaningful work done though, because I somehow have an excess of SCART cables but no component cables. 😕

Set up the front panel speed display of my 386SX to 25/12, which turned out to be more mind bending than I thought it would be (or I'm just less clever than I think I am). It's done though.

While at it I've also tested a couple of ISA VGA cards. All worked with the exception of a GD5401/AVGA1 VGA that has absolutely no red in the signal, all text appears as Cyan. I checked the connector and the VGA cable it has continuity with the solder on the mounting hole so it's not a contact or corrosion issue. I haven't been able to troubleshoot the reason so far..

Did some cleaning and testing on Tyan S1590S last night. Board was fairly filthy but nothing a few minutes of brushing with cleaning solution couldn't fix. Wrote a K6-3+ capable BIOS, stuck a single stick 256 MB SDRAM on the board, set the board for 450 MHz operation, and everything was fine, at least through POST. Tested my brand new AGP Rage Pro Turbo and it displayed just fine as well. I need to do a little more testing to confirm it assigns the voltage settings correctly, but after that I think I can start to benchmark it and see if Throttle or FDAPM work without a problem.

Heard good things about the IBM KB-7953 so I gave this a chance, cost about $3 but it was filthy (hair, nut peels and dust galore), and had some unremovable stains or yellowed spots near the spacebar, kinda like measles 😅 gave it a clean and the keys feel very stiff, perhaps needs some lubing... or the membrane is not as good as before? does not seem to feel very good unfortunately. On the plus side, it's nice to take a look inside and see the heavy metal plate 😁

Yeah a lot of 90s IBM keyboards, even the rubber dome ones, had metal plates. They were sturdy!

The modern Lenovo preferred pro keyboards are some of the best OEM budget keyboards around these days.

FAMICOMASTER wrote:

Try with different speed / sizes of memory modules? Make sure they're good with another machine if you can. […]
Show full quote

Nvm1 wrote:

I tried to get my slot A Gigabyte GA-7IXE motherboard going, but it seems the board is dead.
I get no beeps on the internal speaker and on the pci diagnostics card always the cod D4/D3 is displayed.
Even without RAM or Videocard in the motherboard I get this error..

Try with different speed / sizes of memory modules? Make sure they're good with another machine if you can.

I think it could also be the capacitor plague dooming this board for now. You can get some incredibly strange behavior if that's the case - Even if you get it working, you might have disk drive problems next. Or random CMOS corruption. Or the video card might not be detected. Etc, etc etc. It's best to either throw the board out or replace the caps if they're going bad.

Unfortunately, there's no good way to test them while they're on the board. All you can do is look at the tops for bulging capacitors and around the bases for any residue.

Well, I tried with 6 different sticks, all working in my other motherboards.
But.. I tried a older diagnostics ISA card and interesting enough alot of the expected codes are not shown.. the card always jumps either to D4/D1 or to D4/D3.
My conclusion (and also from the person with the older diagnostics card) is that the bios is broken. The board never beeps, not even with all RAM removed or a known dead AGP card in the slot so it is highly likely the chip or the bios rom in the chip is bad.
Now I need to find someone who wants to help me out by burning the last known Bios Rom to a new bios chip.. 😳