The VIA CPU works perfectly with MS-6905 Master and Gigabyte GA-6BXC rev. 2.0. It doesn't go to 1 GHz (900 MHz is maximum for this particular CPU), but seems to be very stable at 150 MHz (3x50). Overall I'm very happy with it, seems like an ultimate DOS rig.

imi wrote on 2020-05-06, 15:24:

thank you :3
I'll keep that info in case I ever need it as I just got one of these ^^ Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Glad it help. I installed it on a 440BX rig and it went easy-peasy. Its MIDI part sounds awesome to my ears. 😉

Last week I mentioned I would do a CPU upgrade of my ASUS CUBX-E based system and yesterday I did just that. Replaced the 850 MHz Pentium III Coppermine with an 1100 MHz Pentium III Coppermine. CPU temperature looks fine, tops out around 45 degrees. But the fan on my Alpha PAL6035 cooler is a little noisy. Removed a defective harddrive from the system as well.
Installed Red Alert 2 on it and played that for a little while. Nice!

Today I finally got around to installing Windows 2000 on the Dimension 2200 like I planned to do a few days ago, and later the Optiplex GX400 will get its turn as well. Getting Win2k fully updated sure isn't a quick process.

Received a few things I'd ordered today so have been testing everything out.

First of all a spare Kempston-compatible Joystick Interface for my Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Ordered this just in case my other one breaks again. Working fine, played a bit of Manic Miner, Ghosts N Goblins & R-Type.

Then unexpectedly I received my cheap SNES Everdrive cartridge from China:

Been playing Super Nintendo games for most of the evening, as well as testing out a few Japanese NTSC games and seeing how they run on an un-modded PAL console.

The Chinese clone Everdrive suits my needs, I don't need all the bells & whistles of the newer official ones.

Had to copy my hard drives (10GB to 4.3GB) to fix the drive issues (might need to replace the HDD as the 4.3GB drive is having issues) on my 486. To get my 10GB drive to work, I had to insert my 3Com 3C509-TP ISA card with the XT-IDE Universal BIOS boot ROM and ran ghost on the 10GB drive to copy the files to the 4.3GB drive.

Upgraded my 1992 rev 2 p0rn to 1996 rev 3 p0rn. The soundtrak is much better. Just kidding, did not do a thing retro/vintage except read thru this great forum ! The last 20 or so posts make me envious of all of you with your hardware and skills. Good job !

More misadventures with the soldering iron - got some finer and fatter tips, was able to finish soldering the 2 sets of programming pins on the Gotek USB (the STM32F105 that we all know and love, and the STM32F103 that was used for the Mini-USB functionality)

Made the tactical mistake of taking off read protection on the F103 so I can backup the original firmware...which then...proceeded to wipe the content of the onboard flash. Whoops. That effectively killed the Gotek. I don’t think the original firmware is available for re-flashing anywhere.

As for using it to desolder the damned bulged cap on the t5720 board....nope. No dice. Had the fat wide tip contact the solder on the bottom, added a large ball of solder, used a liberal amount of desoldering braid, set the tip to an ungodly 372C/700F, nope - still doesn’t want to budge. If the Engineer SS-02 Solder sucker doesn’t work, well...that’s not going to do. Not sure if I want to spring for a vacuum desoldering gun, though.

Last night I was able to finally get a 12GB drive working in my WANG Alliance 750CD 386sx 25Mhz system after fighting with EZ-Drive and then finally getting a newer version named Western Digital LifeGuard Tools and having it work right off the bat. Also installed DOS 6.22 last night.

Now working on getting it set up to do some sound card testing and possibly recording.

I had forgotten how slow a 2x CDROM drive is... it is painful.

Same here, man. Reasons why I have an IDE CD-ROM drive connected to my 486 machines so that I can play some games at the speed of light. Greased and oiled the 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive and shrank the 40GB HDD to 7.8GB as the 4.3GB HDD wasn't sounding pleasant (clicked every 3 minutes), but works fine still. The 486 build is still running slow AF and I need to get a better VLB I/O card that has more drive speed options and secondary IDE.

I had to drive to work today, so I picked up a few new items that I got in the mail a few eeks ago, and an MSI KT3 Ultra2 board from storage that I needed to recap (Lots of shitty Teapo 1000uF 6.3V bulging caps..) which I may as well do these days. Otherwise, not much going on lately 🙁

Yesterday and today I have been sorting through a few things and I keep re-finding retro laptops I have purchased but have yet to have a proper look at! It's like opening a Christmas present you love, twice! 😀

Tested all my PCI video cards on my 440BX motherboard, it turns out both my PCI S3 Savage 4s work fine! They both don't like VIA and ALi motherboards at all.

Got to soldering a bunch of stuff recently:
Recapped a Slot 1 440ex motherboard, Socket A kt133 motherboard:

Also recapped a S370 motherboard and added a missing SB-Link to it and a Yamaha 724 sound card. Plus made a basic cable to connect them with.
The Socket 7 430HX motherboard had its serial port ripped up so I soldered a new one.

New caps for a Geforce3 ti200 and a Hercules PowerVR Kyro. Thermal-glued heatsinks to a 3DFX Banshee and a Voodoo3 1000:

I just re-capped the same model Kyro.

Sadly it won't post still.

dionb wrote on 2020-05-06, 18:28:

Nope. Today I managed to get it working at last. It took a BIOS update to a 2009-era beta BIOS and physically burning a DVD ISO. Upgrade from Win7 still kept failing, and no matter what I did to that USB stick with Rufus, the system refused to boot from it (where it happily starts from any Linux USB stick). But a clean install from DVD onto the SSD worked nicely with the new BIOS. Of course, the new BIOS screwed up fan control, so needed to solve that in software (Speedfan), and not upgrading meant messing around to get the install properly activated again. Joy. I suddenly remember why I vowed never to do a current Windows install again. Linux can certainly give you headaches, but this is next-level crap.

Still, I do now have a very nice little So479 board. Shame I don't really have anything sensible to do with it...

As much as I despise Win10 (it's the best version of Windows if you want to switch to Linux, or literally anything else 🤣) it's actually your board that has issues. I have a few Gigabyte LGA775 boards (including this exact one) and they all have the same issue: they refuse to boot from USB if you pick USB-HDD from the boot menu, regardless of the OS on the flash drive. You actually have to pick HDD and THEN pick your USB drive from the other menu. Gigabyte really blew that one.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-05-08, 14:51:

[...]

As much as I despise Win10 (it's the best version of Windows if you want to switch to Linux, or literally anything else 🤣) it's actually your board that has issues. I have a few Gigabyte LGA775 boards (including this exact one) and they all have the same issue: they refuse to boot from USB if you pick USB-HDD from the boot menu, regardless of the OS on the flash drive. You actually have to pick HDD and THEN pick your USB drive from the other menu. Gigabyte really blew that one.

Grr, that sounds about right. Could have saved myself a DVD. Then again, didn't have a 1909 Windows 10 DVD yet and it might just come in useful in future. Thanks for the heads-up in any case.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-05-08, 14:51:

As much as I despise Win10 (it's the best version of Windows if you want to switch to Linux, or literally anything else 🤣) it's actually your board that has issues. I have a few Gigabyte LGA775 boards (including this exact one) and they all have the same issue: they refuse to boot from USB if you pick USB-HDD from the boot menu, regardless of the OS on the flash drive. You actually have to pick HDD and THEN pick your USB drive from the other menu. Gigabyte really blew that one.

I can confirm this, some of my boards will hapily boot from any USB drive. But some of them, like my DFI LanParty NF4-SLI, will not work well with USB drives. I tried to install Windows XP with Easy2Boot recently and it kept freezing at random points during boot. I tried another USB drive, didn't work. I tried another USB ISO burning software designed for XP, didn't work.

The only way I could get Windows XP on that machine was to burn a real CD and boot from it. Ugh..

When I had to deal with systems that had no removable media drive options, and couldn't boot from USB, I would just pull the HDD, system format it from within another Windows installation, then copy Win2K/WinXP's installation packages onto it, with EMM386.EXE. Boot into DOS, run EMM386, run Windows setup. May be harder to pull off now.
Still dragging my feet on resurrecting my Asus P4S800D board. I have the capacitors on my desk, but not the motivation in my soul.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-05-08, 08:49:

Same here, man. Reasons why I have an IDE CD-ROM drive connected to my 486 machines so that I can play some games at the speed of light. Greased and oiled the 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive and shrank the 40GB HDD to 7.8GB as the 4.3GB HDD wasn't sounding pleasant (clicked every 3 minutes), but works fine still. The 486 build is still running slow AF and I need to get a better VLB I/O card that has more drive speed options and secondary IDE.

It is an IDE CD drive... just was what came with the system and I hadn't bothered to look up the model number before then to see what speed it was. It is a Sony CDU55E.

If I need to copy anything else over with a CD, I'll probably swap in a faster drive even though it will be severely limited by the ISA bus, but at least it will be loads faster than the 2x.