Opened the belly of the beast, aka, the IBM ThinkPad 380D so that I can test my 2GB CF card using the Dual CF to 44-pin IDE to make sure it works in there and it does. The HDD requires the ODD/FDD to be connected to the board in order for the HDD to get detected. Now that I know how to dismantle the laptop, I can finally order a TFT active display assembly for the laptop to replace the ghosting DSTN color display.

Has a Crystal sound chip and it does FM for DOS games very well, even though the chip is crap. I am still awaiting for the arrival of my newly purchased Toshiba Satellite Pro 410CDT and attempt to install Windows 3.11 on the CF card, then install 95 upgrade with all of the drivers and utilities.

I also found out what was causing the rattling when I was moving the laptop around and found a retaining spring and a piece of plastic that held the spring in place. I still have said parts and I am planning to find the source of where they go to. The keyboard assembly is one interesting piece. I thought the keyboard and mouse (ThinkPoint) buttons would come out of the chassis, however, it's an all in one piece, which is pretty cool and weird.

dkarguth wrote:

...

Huh, I always thought EGA had it's own address space, or that it could be mapped to a different location in order to prevent interfering with other cards.

You have six PGCs? Do you also have six monitors to go with them? How much would you want for a monitor/card, if you were to sell them? I'd be very interested, that's something on my IBM bucket list

Also, did you post something similar to this on Reddit a while back? I could have sworn I saw someone else with a triple monitor XT on there using a similar setup. If so, I was the guy who asked you about your MFM disk drives in the corner of the picture.

Replaced the drive belts in my 2 Commodore C2N Datasettes with brand new belts and now both units are working great again. Been loading a few game cassettes with them and they've both ran everything I've chucked at them, not even any head alignment or dirt issues. 😎

I'll probably not be using cassettes much with my C64, but it's nice to have them working again and for nostalgia sake I'll probably dig out my full tape collection later and give some of them a go.

TrackPoint! <3

Figured out the pinout for the FIC VA-503A! Hooray 😀

I also recapped the whole board while trying to troubleshoot some issues with running applications on this FIC VA503A motherboard:

That turned out to be pointless - the board won't work properly with the K6-2 500, but it does work nicely with the K6-III+ 450? So now I've got it stable I'm setting it up with Windows 98 😀
Every single 1000uf cap replaced with Rubycon 10v 1000uf caps with very low ESR.

Also if this helps anyone, here are the capacitors on the FIC VA-503A, only around 4 of them turned out to be actually bad:

The extra large capacitor is only what I've seen from the board version that was fitted within an oscilloscope, so I think it would help with stability?

Over the last couple days I tried to get some early emulators going on my P3, after watching Modern Vintage Gamer's video on UltraHLE. Unfortunately I didn't have a whole lot of success. I'm running a fairly similar system to the one MVG used (Dell XPS P3/500 + Win98 + Voodoo3 + basic SB PCI 128) and a good analog to the hardware these early emulators were developed on, so I'm not sure why I'm running into so much trouble.

On Original UltraHLE & a few of the pre-source hacked versions (using the Voodoo3 fix), I wasn't able to get any game to run. A few of them looked like they were going to start, but then just sat at a black screen indefinitely. Others that were supposed to be compatible just refused to start.

Using UltraHLE 2064, a later update that was made after the source was released, with an updated games INI from 2017(!), I was able to get a couple games to boot and play, but even those have problems. Doom64 has glitchy graphics, San Francisco Rush 2049 shows no textures on the cars and crashes after a minute, etc. I am aware this emulator has a pretty small compatibility list, but even though I've been sticking to the games that are "known playable", I was only able to get a tiny fraction of them to work.

Still, here's Waverace 64 on UltraHLE 2064 running at reasonably good speed. There was some slowdown but not too bad.

On the other hand, Project64 1.6 "just worked" and seems to play most games fine. I played a lot of Ridge Racer and Wipeout 64 on this emulator years ago, and I remember having a pretty good experience with it. This system is too slow to run it at full framerate though; it seems to hit around 35-40 FPS instead of 60, which I'd actually be fine with if the sound weren't chopped to all hell. It'll probably go great on my Athlon 1.4/GF3.

Next I gave ePSXe 1.80 a try, but had similar lack of success to UltraHLE. Lots of black screens, crashes, etc. Eventually when I started switching around video & sound plugins trying to get something to run, I was able to get it to boot the PSX BIOS using an early D3D renderer. (I never did get anything to display on the popular Glide plugin from back in the day.) After getting Valkyrie Profile to boot to the menu once, it just started crashing on launch - deleting the whole program and all the registry keys & reinstalling from the original archive doesn't fix this. I suspect it will never run again, and have no idea why. "Fun" times.

After finding some 80 wire IDE Cables, I decided to attempt to upgrade my Xbox to a semi-SSD via an SD-to-IDE adapter. While I managed to get the cable going, and to overwrite my TSOP with EvoX M8+, I wasn't able to get the adapter to be seen at all. So, instead of doing that, I went and cheated on the Xbox.

For whatever reason, my Fat PS2 has zero issues reading the adapter, and, well, who am I to deny that console some much needed quiet storage?

I also managed to use a Wii to copy the save off of my Pokemon Emerald cartridge. I'll probably inject all those events that are almost 15 years out of date.

BetaC wrote:

I also managed to use a Wii to copy the save off of my Pokemon Emerald cartridge. I'll probably inject all those events that are almost 15 years out of date.

I'm most interested in hearing how you pulled this off.

Going through and sorting my Commodore 64 games collection today. Only managed to find about half of my collection so far, the rest is buried somewhere in my loft, I'll have to try and find them at some point in the future.

Been having some fun going through a few of these, with at least a 90-95% success rate. I guess I stored these well enough:

Lots without covers unfortunately:

Also found a couple of copied multi-game tapes with no info, so I'm going through and seeing what games are on those for nostalgia sake alone. 🤣

If you have time, maybe check Moby Games to see if all your games are archived. You might have some rare titles that have yet to be recorded. I still run across DOS games, once in a great while, that have yet to be submitted at Moby.

I had an interesting time over the last days with my DX2-80 machine.
At one point i noticed that i had no upper memory, no matter what i did with config/autoexec. After reinstalling dos i got hangs at ramchecks and/or starting games like duke3d. I changed ram and cache. I tried to find ripplevoltage with the PSU and changed it. At one point after i reinstalled dos it seemed that there were no more errors, so i put everything back together...
Next day at one point after a reset i got crazy beepcodes and nothing worked (black). Without hdd it would boot. Well after some reinstalling and frickkeling around i thought to myself "How about starting some AV-software"... 😁

TNT Antivirus got me this: https://malware.wikia.org/wiki/Barrotes

Now i have my first floppy with a big "VIRUS" written on it...

Congratulations your first born.

Finished my Compaq Deskpro EP 6400 today. Tried to keep it mostly original. Pentium II 400 MHz with passive cooling (original), Matrox G450 (was: G200), 128 MB RAM (was: 1x 64 MB; added another one), ESS 1868 sound card (original). Also added a Voodoo 2, a Terratec Cinergy TV/AV capture card, and an SSI 2001 clone to listen to the HVSC using a real SID. 😁 (also for the game port)

Nice thing about this machine is that it has a very powerful internal speaker, which sound absolutely great and makes external speakers obsolete.

Running Windows ME because I like it. 😉

Scouting the local action and come across this https://www.trademe.co.nz/computers/vintage/l … 25bd9299fef-007

Not working.

I have ZERO interest in Amiga, but golly, that case is amazing. I LOVE IT.

"Does it go? No, but that's not to say it couldn't be resuscitated :-) " == "The battery leaked all over the board and it's irreparable, but I'm hoping one of you suckers is desperate enough to give me $1000 for it anyway :-) "

I'm still kicking myself for not buying a WORKING one of those for $375 shortly after I moved to this area. I'd probably have sold it by now, but I would've made bank.

I used to have a love affair with Amiga back in the day, but emulation is so incredibly good now. Not to mention how easy it is to switch back and forth between the different models for games I just could never go back to the real hardware.

I've got a couple of A600s I bought at less than the market value at the time. I like The form factor of the little things. A home system with a pre-emptive 32-bit OS with Gui was quite a feat back then. I'm a closet Acorn fan because of the ARM aspect of it.

FAMICOMASTER wrote:

BetaC wrote:

I also managed to use a Wii to copy the save off of my Pokemon Emerald cartridge. I'll probably inject all those events that are almost 15 years out of date.

I'm most interested in hearing how you pulled this off.

If you have an OEM GBA Link Cable, you can use https://github.com/FIX94/gba-link-cable-dumper/releases to dump and restore saves, dump games slowly, and even grab your BIOS. It works on both the Gamecube and Wiis that have the GC ports available. All you need to do for the Wii version is grab a meta.xml file and rename it to Boot.dol.

bringing some order in my setup... the bottom slot is going to be fitted with a custom midi thru/audio switcher/power supply box so the MT32 is going to sit one unit higher up and I still need to remove the feet off the MU50 and FB-01 so they sit level... also need to get rid of the slight sag somehow ^^
also bought a ton of audio/midi cables to get this all sorted 😁