Put my Dimension 8200 back in storage as I was trying to justify keeping where it was and couldn't and then Me farted out.

Didn't want to reinstall it as that's a PITA and I already have a 98 rig I'm happy with.

So into storage it went.

I've successfully installed an ISA FORMOSA MPB-000007 sound card. I don't know if that is the exact name of the card, but after some googling, I found working DOS drivers in Phil's web site for OPTi 82C929A ISA sound card. Since the card has a Yamaha OPL chip, it sounds great. I wish I had more knowledge about such similar cards (with OPL chip) a few years ago, instead I bought ISA Creative sound cards with Yamaha chip for a greater amount of money (although, I'm not sorry I bought them).

OPTi cards are underrated. Solid SBPro compatibility, genuine OPL3 (or a 1:1 copy sometimes), WSS mode for crystal clear 16-bit sound and drivers that are super easy to use and configure.

Whenever you run into a game that supports Windows Sound System (a.k.a. Microsoft Sound System), use that instead of SBPro for improved sound quality. You can switch between the two modes at any time using SNDINIT.EXE. No reboot required.

Took my old PC out of the box it had been in for several years, cleaned off some of the dust and cobwebs, put it together, but could not get it to work.

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-07-20, 09:53:

I've successfully installed an ISA FORMOSA MPB-000007 sound card. I don't know if that is the exact name of the card, but after some googling, I found working DOS drivers in Phil's web site for OPTi 82C929A ISA sound card. Since the card has a Yamaha OPL chip, it sounds great. I wish I had more knowledge about such similar cards (with OPL chip) a few years ago, instead I bought ISA Creative sound cards with Yamaha chip for a greater amount of money (although, I'm not sorry I bought them).

I have a near identical 82C929+YMF262(Clone) card in my collection and after some testing I found it to be not a great choice: It's SB Pro compatibility isn't reliable, sometimes only works well as SB2.0. It's also kind of noisy in older systems, and unless I had some bad luck it's also speed sensitive?

appiah4 wrote on 2020-07-20, 13:50:

I have a near identical 82C929+YMF262(Clone) card in my collection and after some testing I found it to be not a great choice: It's SB Pro compatibility isn't reliable, sometimes only works well as SB2.0. It's also kind of noisy in older systems, and unless I had some bad luck it's also speed sensitive?

I have a slightly newer 82c930 model and it generally works fine in SBPro mode, except with Epic Megagames releases e.g. Jazz Jackrabbit, Epic Pinball, One Must Fall etc.

OPTi did release some fixes for that, and also for some other games which use older versions of HMI drivers. Look for EPICFIX.ZIP and HMIGAME.ZIP in the driver archive attached here.

Repaired a 9800 Pro. Had two Radeons 9800 Pro's each missing an inductor. Had nothing to lose, so took an inductor off the card with artefacts and soldered onto radeon card which stalls when 3d apps load. Got it working, happy! Stress tested and is stable so managed to save a 9800 pro

About two months ago, I got a Commodore PC20-III. It was the system and the monitor, in their original boxes.

This week I finally had time to have a good look, and to do something important...

Oh no, an unbroken warranty sticker! Still, I need to continue...

There she is... A barrel of death. Worse than an exploding barrel in DOOM.

Cleaned up, and had to bridge one corroded trace (and a via). I added pin headers so I can connect a battery later, but that probably won't happen.

Put it all back together, and she seems to work fine! I had to jiggle the motor axle of the HDD a bit to get it going, but it seems to work now. It's an XTA harddrive (8-bit predecessor to IDE/ATA). Quite nice to have it working.

(double post because of 5 attachment limit)

Also sort-of-retro, since it seems I will be working at home for quite some time, I had to upgrade my home office/retro man cave a bit. I moved my work desk to a different corner in the room, and found an IKEA Jerker desk as a new work bench for the old stuff. I zip-tied a lot of power extension boards overhead, and installed a LED light bar overhead. Finally a decent workspace. The challenge will be to keep it neat and tidy...

IKEA Jerker desks were designed in the CRT era, so they have a lot of room, and are virtually indestructible.

Got some blue arrow keys (Desk Candy) for my Siig MiniTouch and put them on. Looks pretty neat. There's so many odd size Alps keys on this board, I'll never come across a full set of keycaps for this unless I have them custom made by Signature Plastics, so this will do for now.

Cleared out some hard drive space on the 4.3GB drive in my 386 as some games were too darn slow for the system anyway and I have about 1/2 the storage left, altered the CMS.DRV files for Sierra On-Line games, minus the VGA variants (added CMS.DRV 210 in the resource.cfg and resource.pq1 under soundDrv) and changed the batch file for Secret of Monkey Island and changed the HW address for the 3Com network card and soon the Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro (non-16) so that all of my games will work with the sound card this time.

Ah, crap. Had to perform some emergency triage on my IBM Thinkpad T21 - looks like leaving it on AC for the weekend to charge the batteries might've given it the infamous blink of death. Let's see if it comes back up to life within a day or 2 - if not, it might be time for a new motherboard.

Received an SN74LS158N chip that I ordered and decided to finally upgrade the RAM in my IBM XT/8088 build to 640KB. Following this guide: http://mail.minuszerodegrees.net/5160/motherb … ard_to_640k.pdf

My motherboard was a 64-256K board and had 256KB RAM installed, so I needed that chip first of all to install into U84.

I decided not to permanently modify the motherboard by soldering in a jumper, so did the quick jumper wire trick on U44 instead, which is easily reversible -

Then finally the RAM. I had a 2MB ISA "Parity RAM" card which I got for my 286 but could never get it to work - either the card had issues or more likely the motherboard wasn't supported (card was aimed at IBM 5170). So rather than let it go to waste, I stole 1 of it's banks of 18x 256K chips for my XT -

All working great, system now has 640KB RAM. Since I already had the RAM chips, this whole upgrade only cost about £3 including postage - bargain!

The old 64K RAM chips I'll put back onto the non-working RAM card for safe keeping.

256KB was limiting what I could run on this PC, now with 640KB I should be good to run anything that supports 4.77MHz & CGA. Going to start installing more games & software. Might even install Windows 1.0 for fun (could never get it to run on 256KB, even though it claimed to support it).

Also installed an Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II ISA Sound Card that I wasn't using. It's the only 8-bit ISA sound card I have and I thought I'd give that a try mostly for it's Game Port as I was previously using a 16-Bit I/O card just for it's Game Port, which was a bit of a waste as I can reuse that in a future 486 build instead.

I have been busy the last many weeks, moving in and getting everything set up. Today I finally had a chance of starting to build up my computing area. Nothing is hooked up, and I will most likely have to move stuff around. Anyway... One days work.

Looking good. How's the new place treating you so far?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-07-22, 20:06:

Looking good. How's the new place treating you so far?

Thanks. The new place is good for me so far. It is liberating to be on my own again. However I have not had any time to do any vintage or retro activity as such so far. All the ordinaery stuff had to be put into place first.

You'll have the time for all your retro fun one the house is set up. I'm glad to hear all is well

brostenen wrote on 2020-07-22, 20:01:

I have been busy the last many weeks, moving in and getting everything set up. Today I finally had a chance of starting to build up my computing area. Nothing is hooked up, and I will most likely have to move stuff around. Anyway... One days work.

Looking very neat, goob job.

This evening I've been getting this PS/2 to serial converter working but on a breadboard: http://trolsoft.ru/en/sch/mouse-ps2-to-serial

It's actually working 😀 I'm just testing with a Serial to USB adapter and my Windows 7 machine, but if it works here it should work on my 386.

Now maybe I'll put it together with solder. In the background, you can see Matze79's Ps/2 to serial adapter, which I haven't got working yet, I think it's the cheapy TTL>Serial converter boards I bought that don't work.

Not been very active with Vintage computers up until a few days ago because our lunatic neighbor lady finally moved away....so I've been spending over a few months dealing with that and chasing rental houses which amidst COVID-19 has been a royal pain in the rear....looks like the urgency to move is no longer here (don't ask why....that lady was a nightmare).

Since her leaving....I've got a NEC Versa M75 on the way with some weirdo parallel port thing called a Commpac Words+ System 2000. It looks like it has the typical Versa issue of cracking plastic (easily disguised by JB Weld and prevented with a healthy cleaning and dose of STP Axle grease to the hinge). The whole point of me picking it up though is I've been dabbling in Official Hamster Republic RPG Creation Engine and wanting to use it for MIDI. It also means I get another 220MB HDD.....might be fun to put OS/2 2.1 with Win OS/2 and Multimedia Extensions on after I backup all the stuff.

I've almost completely reverse engineered the NEC Versa OP-570-4401 and OP-570-4001 NiMH 3800mah battery packs. I've gotten two of them to charge, though one is bulding now so I'm stopping use until I get some new replacement "A" 1.2v NiMH cells to re-populate. I've blown up 3 cells thus far.

The basic design...as best as I can describe without ripping one apart....is this....

4 Contacts (Left to Right, label side up): - back cells, - front cells, charge sense, + (both packs)

The pack consists of 12 "A" NiMH cells at 1.2v each, and they are packed into 6 "sticks" (turquoise cardboard casings with rubber short protectors on the + end)

The electrical flow goes - terminal, to negative of the first 2 cells, then the postive for the first two cells goes through a Thermal cutoff set for 90 degrees, into the next 2 cells negative terminal, which then exits the positive terminals into a Thermostat for I thikn 100 degrees (Isuzu branded), then into the last pair of cells, which exits to the positive terminal on the battery that powers the laptop computer - there are 2 sets like this sharing a common positive. (remember, electricity flows from negative to positive).

The original pack for the 40EC somewhat works, I find if I turn the brightness down I get about 5 minutes of battery life out of it. However, the other pack I think I messed something up on and probably will need to replace the power board (again) in the 40 EC because the working battery is beign errant now and saying it's full when it's not when the laptop is powered on. Luckily I can find one.

The one component I'm still trying to figure out is the doodad in the picture that measures 10K ohms, at first I thought it was a resistor, but I think that MIGHT have been what killed the other pack.....

The other pack had that part burned up in it, like burned up so much it no longer exists, so the battery would not address when attached. So I crossed my fingers, soldered in a 10K ohm resistor, and it seemed to do the trick. Under both batteries I got about 10 minutes of battery life with the contrast fully down. Seemed like I was on the right track.

However, the next monrning, both batteries had self-discharged from a full charge, and I found the one I fixed the night before after putting it in the laptop again....started making weird noises....so I took it out....it started fizzing, then I heard a loud "POP" while I was in the other room......then I heard it fizzing some more, escalating fast, then another loud "POP!!!" and the case split open...and STILL fizzing, so I threw a washcloth over it and grabbed it with BBQ tongs, and left it outside on the pavement all day while I was at work.

So I came home and replaced the two cells that had popped rather violently with the best ones from another pack. Well.....I started running and charging that battery pack again...still with the 10K ohm resistor. I found it WILL behave in the laptop properly as far as charging and showing proper status, but I also stopped using it immediatley because the non-exchanged cells started to expand toward the ends....and the last thing I want to do is damage more plastic on the Versa from another venting NiMH cell.

But yeah, if anyone knows what the circled component is I'd love to know. My other pack also got it's burned during this stuff (tried a full discharge and it fried it). I'm going to replace the power board beforehand. The reason I thought it was a resistor is because the part in the other pack seemes to be some hair-thin wire attached to an SMD component of some kind that measures at 10K ohms resistance. So either those cells in that battery are so old they are popping under load or charge, the resistor is the wrong part and they are getting over-charged, or both.

I'm not doing this with the M75 when it comes in though.....that one I think uses the "Smart Batteries" anyway. My plans for both batteries are to get all the right components, properly rebuild them with new cells, and then use them that way. Then when I'm done, I plan to see if I can come up with a newer, easy-replace battery version with no soldering involved that will be safe.

After the Versa stuff is all sorted out, I'm breaking out the Tandy 1000 AGain and working on my light pen some more. I just picked up a AMF Barcode Scanner that was mis-represented as a "light pen" and I rewired the end using a breadboard and a spade connected ATari 2600 controller cable to be properly powered by the Tandy's Light pen Port. I'm thinking I might even be able to hack this into a dual purpose Light Pen/Barcode Scanner combo unit. That'd be cool. But that's for another day.