@mallensw
This motherboard is one of the rare AT 486 board to officially support PS/2 lives, why not trying to populate the header for it ? 😁

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Anybody here have good recomendations for a soldering starter kit? I'm sick and tired of my parts crapping themselfes and not be […]
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Anybody here have good recomendations for a soldering starter kit? I'm sick and tired of my parts crapping themselfes and not being able to attempt any serious repairs. Basically I'm looking for recommendations for:

* A Soldering Iron in the $50 range that works good for electronics.
* Common cap values I should just go ahead and order to keep in stock.
* Some sort of "holding device" to hold whatever I'm working on while these meat claws of hands I'm stuck with try to fumble with tiny caps.
* Some sort of gloves, that are flexible but provide at least some burn protection. (again, meat claws for hands)

1) At $50 I think we're looking at "adequate" rather than "good," but I'm looking myself (occasionally) to figure out what I want, but I'm looking at $100+ hot air station combos, so way outside that price range. Someone mentioned the TS100 (also look at the TS80), some of the new small battery-driven irons perform fairly well.

2) It's not just values, it's types and sizes. I feel your pain with regard to cap management, though, and for some reason my eyes fog over when I start digging through Mouser's website.

3) Third hands, as mentioned above. Use that search term on eBay and you'll find a kajillion of them. Planning on building my own big enough for a motherboard, and with light and endoscope (camera) arms.

4) The only thing that comes to mind is kevlar (some types of anti-stab/cut gloves), which melt at 500 degrees Celsius, but remember that a glove will transmit less heat but hold that heat next to your skin. Maybe someone will make aerogel gloves for this purpose, I've only seen winter gloves and fingerless cycling gloves, neither of which help.

Finally, I got my IBM BL3 (alaris cougar) off of my test bench, and boxed in. I like how it looks.

I don't mind the different colors or shades, adds to the patina. 🤣

I never ever planed on owning or building such a machine, it was all sort of an accident.

The bay speakers are a nice touch. 5.25" FDD, CD-RW, 3.5" FDD, and ZIP drive (100MB, I'm guessing). Also, that toggle power switch is really neat.

Also, I read off of the EEPROM chip on my Original Xbox 1.0 system so that I can copy the soft mod game saves to the HDD from my Socket 370 system and do the complete soft mod on it and swap the HDD to a 480GB SSD after I buy the SSD and an 80-conductor IDE cable.

Went through some boxes of parts to try to find something better than this E2160 Pentium. Found a E6550, not the most amazing CPU in the world but good enough to setup Windows 10 until I find a quad core for this system. Upgraded the 250watt FSP PSU to a 350watt Bestec out of a newer HP. Found out the Acer motherboard has one of the last LGA775 chipsets VIA made. Should make for a pretty decent system for my younger cousins to play some Fortnite and Minecraft and what not on with a 750ti thrown in.

Did y'all know Compaq/HP essentially reused the same case for nearly 20 years?

Yes. And it’s a really good case, too!

Has anyone here ever heard of or used an IOS app/Windows program called iAltair by Peter Schorn? It's an emulator that either emulates a version of CP/M or MS-DOS 1.25 on a 8080/8086/Z80 CPU. Using it on your phone or tablet is kind of like having a limited version of DOSBox. 😀 Some of the emulated OSs come with a really ancient version of BASIC or Pascal which is entertaining to play around with if you're into coding. There're also a few very old games. The full version of iAltair for IOS costs a few bucks but you can download a limited version for free.

Links:
https://schorn.ch/altair.html
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ialtair/id291182085

Huh. That's interesting.

Peter Swinkels wrote:

Using it on your phone or tablet is kind of like having a limited version of DOSBox. 😀

What's the point of that when you can use a full port of DOSBox instead?

Pulled my beloved Cobalt Qube 3 Pro out of storage...

Opened it up for cleanups and whatnot...

Need to dust that board set...

And have a think on what I want to do with the chassis.

Thinking about either:
a) Setting up a Slackware based chroot jail and get it to netboot there, and then replace the current OS inside (Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS with a custom kernel 3.4 Build) with something relatively modern and slackware based.

or...

b) Replace the innards with the inside of either a Dell/Wyse dx0q/zx0q or HP t610 or t620 Plus...and then use it to drive some SSDs as a TimeCapsule replacement for the missus.

I haven't decided yet.

Nice, T5720 with PCI expansion, I'm officially envy...

derSammler wrote:

Peter Swinkels wrote:

Using it on your phone or tablet is kind of like having a limited version of DOSBox. 😀

What's the point of that when you can use a full port of DOSBox instead?

It's not really a limited version of DOSBox. The point is that if that sort of thing interests you can use a really old DOS like OS, namely CP/M. Is there a port of DOSBox for IOS unless you jailbreak your phone?

Srandista wrote:

Nice, T5720 with PCI expansion, I'm officially envy...

There's an nVidia Geforce 6200 TC inside that t5720. My wife isn't too thrilled with it (it takes up too much room) and now that I have my Thinkpads (T21/X31), and I don't really need them anymore. There's also a SiS530/Rise mP6 based thin client on the rack that I bought on impulse (with an AOpen YMF744 Cobra audio card) but never figured out what to do with. I am awaiting until my ThinkPad Dock II arrives so I can transfer the AOpen Cobra to it. Once that happens I am probably going to give away the thin clients - every time I want to do something I had to whip out the portable LCD and set it up - it's a bit of a pain.

oeuvre wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/Eo08P26l.jpg […]
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Did y'all know Compaq/HP essentially reused the same case for nearly 20 years?

"If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It"

Did some upgrades to my Compaq Deskpro 6400. Gone is the Pentium II 400 MHz, it's now a Pentium III 500 MHz (wanted to use a 650 MHz one, actually, but the board can only do 2.0V core voltage). Took longer than expected, since I had to find a heatsink, a working fan, and modify the fan connector to fit onto the header for the case fan. The Deskpro 6400 was designed for a passively cooled CPU and has no header for a CPU fan, and I did not want to use an ugly Molex adapter...

Also added a REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD decoder card.

derSammler wrote:

Did some upgrades to my Compaq Deskpro 6400. Gone is the Pentium II 400 MHz, it's now a Pentium III 500 MHz (wanted to use a 650 MHz one, actually, but the board can only do 2.0V core voltage). Took longer than expected, since I had to find a heatsink, a working fan, and modify the fan connector to fit onto the header for the case fan. The Deskpro 6400 was designed for a passively cooled CPU and has no header for a CPU fan, and I did not want to use an ugly Molex adapter...

Also added a REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD decoder card.

Was this also originally one of those designs where the PSU sucked the air in and blasted it into the general direction of the Slot CPU? For the first Slots processors that was ok. But one would have to think about reversing it later for higher end models and add more fans.

Yes, it is. The original CPU also had a heatsink twice as high as the CPU itself. 😁

Found a longer floppy drive cable and drilled new holes in the casing of my Gotek floppy emulator to install it properly into CM Elite 360 case. Mission accomplished.

derSammler wrote:

Did some upgrades to my Compaq Deskpro 6400. Gone is the Pentium II 400 MHz, it's now a Pentium III 500 MHz (wanted to use a 650 MHz one, actually, but the board can only do 2.0V core voltage). Took longer than expected, since I had to find a heatsink, a working fan, and modify the fan connector to fit onto the header for the case fan. The Deskpro 6400 was designed for a passively cooled CPU and has no header for a CPU fan, and I did not want to use an ugly Molex adapter...

Also added a REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD decoder card.

Oh, did I mention that this thing is now a Multimedia monster? 😁 😁 😁