Tried out a CMI3738 sound board I found kicking around my storage. I think I originally bought it cheap 20 years ago.

At the time, I was disgusted with it because it wasn't amplified output, so plugging in a headphone resulted in terrible output.

So this time, I used my headphone amplifier to give it a fighting chance. Unfortunately, it was still not very good, with some sound distortion. Not a big loss. Will have to go hunting for a decent implemetation of this chip.

Also couldn't get dos support working on my 815EP board. I'll blame the motherboard for now, although it works fine for my SBlive and dos support.

Tested my 286-SBCs...
Bought these (retro) hardware today
...in a "temporary" backplane. Both seem to be working, but I dont have a real use for them.

installing windows 95 on my newly acquired 486. It would be more suited to dos but I know my way around windows much better.
Took a while to get the boot disk to see my CD drive. Had to set both devices to cable select.

Predator99 wrote on 2020-02-16, 11:09:

Tested my 286-SBCs... Bought these (retro) hardware today ...in a "temporary" backplane. Both seem to be working, but I dont hav […]
Show full quote

Tested my 286-SBCs...
Bought these (retro) hardware today
...in a "temporary" backplane. Both seem to be working, but I dont have a real use for them.
IMG_0141.JPG
IMG_0135.JPG
IMG_0137.JPG

Nice ! What brand is your ISA/PCI diagnostic card ?

Doing a partial refurb on the SIIG Suntouch I recently purchased. Unfortunately the plate is rusting, but I am not going to desolder every switch to fix it. The interior was completely full of food.. everything from potato chips to peanut shells. I cleaned it out as best I could. Then I took apart a few of the Alps switches that were not as clicky and fixed the tension to make them clicky again. One slider is broke ("S" key), but I have a few Alps white switches coming in the mail that I can salvage parts from to fix it. In the process of removing all the keycaps, the D key, G key and quote mark key stems broke.. nothing I did wrong as I was using a proper keycap puller -- just the age and wear on the caps. I ordered those Alps keycaps to match. Then I cleaned the exterior case and keycaps.. it was filthy before. Scrubbed them down with a toothbrush and some Dawn dish soap. Once I get the spare parts and put it back together, it should look almost new.

Horun wrote on 2020-02-16, 17:55:

Predator99 wrote on 2020-02-16, 11:09:

Tested my 286-SBCs... Bought these (retro) hardware today ...in a "temporary" backplane. Both seem to be working, but I dont hav […]
Show full quote

Tested my 286-SBCs...
Bought these (retro) hardware today
...in a "temporary" backplane. Both seem to be working, but I dont have a real use for them.
IMG_0141.JPG
IMG_0135.JPG
IMG_0137.JPG

Nice ! What brand is your ISA/PCI diagnostic card ?

Its the cheapest one from China I could find 😉
PC Motherboard Diagnostic Card 4-Digit PCI/ISA POST Code Analyzer L4H3

Tested again just to boot up in POST screen only on video cards that I had no luck using Micronics M55HI HX chipset based motherboard. I got AN430TX Intel motherboard in the mail few days ago so re-did the PCI video cards that I have no luck booting up did work, all of them including TNT2 M64 and FX 5200 (128bit kind). 😀

AN430TX does allow me to jumper multi from 1.5X to 3.5X on both two mmx, 200 and 233, also regular pentium 200 which can do 100, and both pentium and also two mmx processors can do 133 as well.

And tested AN430TX to see if I can disable L2 cache (512K) and that L2 disable does works.

Will a utility that can disable L1 cache with these mentioned CPUs and this AN430TX motherboard? This is for DOS and some heavy games that 233mmx can handle?

Palette snooping turned on results in no post with S3 864 video card, had to switch back to another PCI video card and get in and disable palette snooping.

Cheers,

Been tinkering with FreeDOS as a quasi daily driver on my 486s. The laptop is setup identical to it's 6.22 setup but with 80GB of space and no windows. The desktop is running on 40GB so far really digging Links as a web browser and looking into using AutoTrax 1.61 as a PCB developer.

I also discovered when I repaired the NEC Versa at onset I inadvertantly put in a better graphics RAM equipped motherboard (1mb instead of 512k) - which explains why some later software runs unusually well for a 40 MHz int 25 MHz bus 486 DX 2.

Thinking about trying a 32,MB RAM upgrade card in it, and hunting around for one of the Panasonic PCMCIA sound cards for it

Last night I missed out on an auction I'd followed all week, and I only missed it because I was playing Mass Effect and not paying attention to the time. Now I'm grumpy and I am talking myself out of impluse buying retro kit (I've got the itch to get something new!)

I know that feeling all too well ^^

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2020-02-17, 09:01:

Last night I missed out on an auction I'd followed all week, and I only missed it because I was playing Mass Effect and not paying attention to the time. Now I'm grumpy and I am talking myself out of impluse buying retro kit (I've got the itch to get something new!)

Been there, done that. I've missed out on a few goodies because I forgot about the auction. Now, anytime I'm watching something I'm seriously considering bidding on, I set a phone alarm every time for a few minutes before to remind me. Haven't missed any since.

Out of curiosity, what auction did you miss?

For the price of dusting the ever loving hell out of the case, I managed to snag an HP xw4600 from the dumpster near work. In it was an C2D E8600, and I have moved my 7900GTX build in to it now.

I know that it's not the best GPU pairing with the "Best" C2D variant, but it's running quieter and less hot now, and I no longer have to worry about the tiny case I used to be using for the very same build. At some point, I will also install Vista, and probably some sort of 9XXX card as a secondary boot option, but that's gonna be something to do later. The only headache, as well, is that I actually have to use disks to install the OS, thanks to HP only wanting HP USB sticks, and having to put my SATA stuff in to IDE Emulation mode to make XP happy.

A colleague of mine at one of our other engineering departments turned up at work last week with a fairly original (late 1970s clone) Pong game. Primitive but great fun - and amazing what purely analog circuitry can do.

But of course I'm not going to get outdone here, and neither is our department, so had a quick poll of fellow team members and we quickly came to the conclusion that the best answer to 1970s Pong is 1980s EGA Arkanoid. So I got to it this evening. I have a miniscule 486SLC board in a 5cm high case with just enough room for two ISA slots, one on either side of a riser. Unfortunately no onboard I/O, so one slot gets eaten by that. Oh well, no sound card then. I was intending to stick the EGA card from an Olivetti M240 in the other one, but whatever Olivetti have done in terms of customization, I can't get it to give me any sort of image here, so instead I've used an Ara Tseng ET3000AX card in EGA mode. Not exactly elegant, but gets the job done. Unfortunately I don't have any TTL monitors, so I'm using an IBM 8513 (of PS/2 fame) with my MCE2VGA.

Software is the clever bit. I've only hooked up a Gotek to the system as despite adding a new battery pack to replace the Varta monster that leaked over half the board it keeps losing settings. Ironically I think the battery traces are the only ones damages. Anyway, Gotek... basically I've just made a bunch of bootable floppy images and added games to them: Arkanoid Revenge of Doh (because much better than original on PC), Prince of Persia, Duke Nukum, Lemmings, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. So all you need to do is to select 0-5 on the Gotek at boot and you get the game. Even my manager should be able to manage that 😉

Will take some pics once it's all installed tomorrow. Just getting it there will be fun. I've appropriated my partner's shopping trolley and duct taped the monitor and case to it. That should be good for some odd looks in the metro 😜

Was mass-creating CF bootable with DOS 6.22 from one SSD already created with DOS 6.22 after fdisk and format C:/u/s to create each and copied all to each CF. To get bootable again each CF, I booted from dos disk and made each partition active with fdisk, rebooted then did a sys :c on each. Resulted in less time and 3 sets of CF cards. All done on Intel D815EEA2 board.
LBA is disabled.

All of these CF does have /DOS folder with all the files created as well via xcopy command.

Will test again on AN430TX as well by booting any of these CF I created later.

Boot fine of these three cards I have:
Lexar Platinum II 512MB 80x, Transcend 2GB 266x and WD 512MB silicondrive. Tried Sandisk 8GB extreme III 45MB/s does not boot even everything is created properly.

Cheers,

I set the Secret of Monkey Island theme (CMS version no less) as my ringtone. I feel the CMS has a ringtone-y feel to it!

Brawndo wrote on 2020-02-17, 21:12:

Been there, done that. I've missed out on a few goodies because I forgot about the auction. Now, anytime I'm watching something I'm seriously considering bidding on, I set a phone alarm every time for a few minutes before to remind me. Haven't missed any since.

Out of curiosity, what auction did you miss?

It was an AM2 itx / shuttle PC. Had some sort of dedicated GPU in there too and 4gb of ddr2. Nothing mind-blowing but it would have been neat to tinker around with as I like small PCs. It went for £5 🙁

Yesterday and today I have (retro computing wise) I have mainly been wiping and testing old IDE 2.5" HDDs from 351MB to 120GB - approx 50 in total! All ready to use on the many laptops I have that dont have them.

Today I received an Everdrive cartridge for the Sega Master System.

I was previously put off by the high price of the official Master Everdrive, especially since I can play Master System games on my Mega Drive anyway. But I was browsing AliExpress and noticed the Chinese Master System Everdrive clones were now available, so last week I ordered one. The official Everdrive is more feature-rich, but for under £24 delivered I couldn't resist the cheap clone card.

It gives my old scuffed & battered Master System console some purpose now and as a bonus allows me to play Sega SG-1000 games too!

Happily the card is working great and I've been playing a few games to test it out. I'd forgotten how much easier the Master System version of Rainbow Islands is compared with other versions. I was just messing about with it and half an hour later I was halfway through the game. 🤣

The first game test didn't go amazingly well though, as the crappy original Master System controller decided to stop working properly. Had to open it up and reseat the wires, there's a broken connection in there somewhere. Got it fixed though and resumed playing. The original controller is pretty terrible, but a nice gimmick to have one of them in working order.

Is this the Everdrive clone you bought?

That price is certainly more affordable. I take it that it doesn't have save states? I'd like them for Wonderboy 3 in Monsterland, just so I don't have to manage the save codes. 😳

I would like to get an Everdrive for my SMS. There are a couple of games I want, that would cost more if I bought them on cart. I own 32 games now.

I bought a Sega Genesis Mini last fall and hacked it, so now it has SMS games along with my favorite Genesis games, but I still would like to play the SMS games on real hardware on my 13" CRT.

I have 2 SMS gamepads and 4 of the horrible Sega Control sticks. All of them work, but they are all terrible. 😀 I ended up buying the officially licensed 6 button Genesis controller from Retrobit to use on my SMS. I know there are a couple of games that will not work with this controller, but for the games I've been playing it's so much better than the original options.

Fixed the Atari 1050 floppy disk drive for my 800XL and installed a Mini-Speedy. 😀