appiah4 wrote on 2020-01-24, 20:59:

Repaired cyanoacrylate residue and a broken resistor on a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5401 ISA card. Not a piece of gear anyone will be rejoiced to hear is functional again, but 8-bit compatible VGA cards will become fairly handy and rare in the future I think..

If it means someone can avoid a Realtek vid card, you're fighting the good fight.

Noticed that my Creative SBS35 speakers have a lead fracture yesterday. Instead of fixing the permanently attached flimsy cables, I decided to add proper connectors. One speaker done, one more to go.

Neither retro, nor modern...

I have never seen so much DDR1 memory in use in one machine, let alone done it myself.
First I thought the sticks were incompatible, as there is a 23 second (!) period of nothingness after hitting the power button. Screen stays black, you think the board is not posting or memory is incompatible or GPU is broken or smth else... Then all of a sudden... BEEP

Essentially a quad core (2x dual core) paired with 32GB memory. Still going strong today.

Today I fitted new microswitches into a Cruiser Joystick, to replace old/worn ones.

I've been testing out various Commodore 64 games with it for most of the day and it's now working great. The ability to alter the stiffness of the stick is quite handy for different games, ie. the loosest setting would be ideal for games such as Winter Games and the like, whereas the middle setting probably best suits most platformers.

Also today I completed a quick & simple reversible mod on my Acorn Electron, adding a 3.5mm jack socket for audio output. The speaker remains inside, just disconnected in place of this socket.

The result looks ok when everything is connected up -

Yesterday was cleaning up around the house, going through some boxes since our last move (almost a year ago, yeah we're those people), and finally found the box with my Monster 3D Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 5 5500 GPUs!! I've been sweating bullets lately because I've been wanting to continue building my retro rigs and I had no idea where those were. I was scared to death I lost them somehow during the move, and the 5500 ain't cheap or easy to replace. So now I'm going to test a bunch of Voodoo cards, make sure they all work.

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-24, 14:39:

Started restoring a 486 VLB board by QDI that has some battery-leak damage. After cleaning and investigating, it seems I only have to replace the socket for the keyboard controller.

Nice ! Got any pictures ? Am amazed at how you and some of the others here have resurrected some badly damaged boards.

Sure, can post some later this day.

Still waiting for the new socket to arrive, so apart from cleaning, not much work has been done so far.

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-25, 09:19:

Noticed that my Creative SBS35 speakers have a lead fracture yesterday. Instead of fixing the permanently attached flimsy cables, I decided to add proper connectors. One speaker done, one more to go.

The second speaker was quite a bit harder to do, with two connectors to add and the large pcb inside. But I can't complain about the result. 😁

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-26, 14:27:

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-25, 09:19:

Noticed that my Creative SBS35 speakers have a lead fracture yesterday. Instead of fixing the permanently attached flimsy cables, I decided to add proper connectors. One speaker done, one more to go.

The second speaker was quite a bit harder to do, with two connectors to add and the large pcb inside. But I can't complain about the result. 😁

At least it's 9VDC and not 9VAC, what Creative used on their much later speakers, which are atrocities...

Too bad, the speakers are still not working correctly. One channel is much quieter and sometimes get louder when moving or rotating the speaker. But I can rule out broken cables now, also volume knob etc. are tested and good. Resoldered the amplifier chip too with no change. I guess I need to reflow all solder joints and re-cap the pcb. Or maybe the amplifier chip is bad, since there's also a slight channel leak.

Recent retro activities:

1. Fired up the Gigabyte GA-5AA Super Socket 7 mainboard I found in the "Voodoo 5 scrap lot" the other day. Pleased to find out that it does not only POST, but already has the latest BIOS installed for K6-2+ support. Guess I have to build another SS7 box then. *shrug*

2. Tested the Voodoo 3 3000 that I got for cheap, seems to be dead. Meh.

3. Played around with the Pentium MMX 200 laptop that I recently bought.
The good:
- Relatively good overall condition
- Everything that came with it seems to work fine (more or less)
The bad:
- What I thoght was a missing battery turned out to be a missing HDD tray and HDD. Completely proprietary, of course. So unless I get another one of these machines, I probably won't be able to install a HDD.
- No optical drive either, but I knew that before

So I am basically left with a 3.5" floppy drive and a CF to PCMCIA adapter I had in the drawer. But the laptop won't support booting from CF card, so I had to figure out other ways.
Tried to boot Plop boot manager with pcmica support --> no support for PCMCIA to CF adapters.
Tried to boot Plop boot manager + PCMCIA USB 2.0 card + USB thumb drive --> not recognized by Plop
I ended up using the APSoft ATA enabler for DOS and a DOS boot floppy and somehow managed to get through the Win95 install routine. But starting Win95 from a DOS environment afterwards yields all sorts of errors and this is where I gave up for now.
Since I really like the machine, I might end up buying a second one just for the HDD tray.

4. Took out my dual Socket A board (Asus A7M266-D) just to confirm that it is dead. Fans start spinning as soon as I plug in the power supply, but that's it. Apart from two slightly bulged caps the board looks good, maybe I'll replace them some day and see if that changes anything...

I wonder if this is the right part to connect the HDD on your Highscreen Lebook advance laptop? https://razborka-pc.prom.ua/p714484229-plata- … a-shlejfom.html

I finally found a beige DVD rewriter for my K6-3 Time Machine. I had a couple of them go bad on me and was reduced to using a black model.

The case has yellowed to the point that the beige still stands out, but it's still better. Plus, this new NEC drive is absolutely silent. I need this period incorrect component to burn disk images onto DVD-Rs.

Maeslin wrote on 2014-07-12, 19:14:

How 'retro' are we talking about here? 😁

Carpentry, with no power tools. Rebuilding an already very reinforced fence that got snapped right in half during the last hurricane. Hammer, chisel and pencil to make mortise and tenon joints in 4x4"s.

What no hand saw ? 🤣. There is a certain joy that comes from working with wood products that is hard to compare to anything else.

added: sorry just had to necro-reply

Tested a smll box of 30 pin simms today, about 150Mb worth. Found a set of four 4Mb 80nS that were in the box that did not know about. Also found four AST 64pin 4MB simms that went with an old Bravo (?) board that died years ago. Anyone need AST 64pin simms can PM me and you can have them free (but you have to prove you have a board for them, 🤣). Used a good old Opti 386/486 board to test them with.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2020-01-27, 01:03:

I wonder if this is the right part to connect the HDD on your Highscreen Lebook advance laptop? https://razborka-pc.prom.ua/p714484229-plata- … a-shlejfom.html

Wow, that could actually fit. The "Highscreen LeBook Advance" was in fact a relabelled Chicony MP975.
BTW, a copy of the parts list is still available on archive.org, but it didn't help me so far: https://web.archive.org/web/19980213163820fw_ … .com/mp/975.htm

The connector seems to match and the part number in that Russian Ukrainian shop has a "975" in it, so chances should be pretty good that this is the right part.
Man, they even have the CD-ROM drive listed that my unit lacks. And the parts seem to be really cheap, too. At least if Google translate didn't fail on me. 50 rubles for the adapter, 40 for the CD-ROM drive, that's about 1.30€ total. Plus shipping, obviously.

-- Edit: Prices seem to be in Ukranian Hryvnia, not Russian Rubles. Still cheap, though.

Now I just have to figure out how on earth I can place an order without knowing a single word in Russian. Gonna pass these guys an email. 😉
Thank you Thermalwrong!

Updated my collection gallery with Graphics Cards. Next up I will post my Sound Card photos up and my collection will be completely online 😀

Today I modified the RGB Scart cable for my Acorn Electron to include a 3.5mm jack cable for audio input. This then connects to the 3.5mm jack output I added to the Electron and conveniently sends all Video & Audio through the 1 single Scart connection. Much better than an internal speaker with no volume control. Also a totally reversible mod on the Electron side, so I'm happy with it.

Finally found some time to follow up on the Voodoo 5 5500.

See:
How I found it - Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
First POST - Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
What it currently looks like - Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

So I set up a test bed with my ECS P6S5AT, Intel Pentium III-S 1400 MHz (hail to the king!) and 512 MB of DDR RAM, running Windows 98 SE.
(BTW, there's an excellent thread about this board over here: SiS 635T (ECS P6S5AT) – Hail to the King)

Happy to report that the card indeed seems to be in perfect working order, at least it did finish 3DMark2000 with no visible image defects at all.
The 1024 x 768 x 16bit default benchmark gave me 5177 3D Marks, which seems to be about what you'd expect from this setup.
(-- Edit: VooDooMan reached 5307 3DMarks with this setup, see this thread about half way down the first page.)
Configuration was basically a plain Win 98 SE install, SiS AGP, Sound and IDE drivers, Voodoo 5 5500 reference drivers and DirectX 8.1. I'd guess that with a bit of tweaking the results could be further improved, but I didn't have time for that (yet).

My retro activity of the day: watching Apollo 13 movie, straight from the year 1995.