the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-11-06, 08:03:

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-11-06, 06:58:

Here

Again, nutty. Did you modify "modern" drivers to work on XP or did someone else do it?

Someone else, Think it was Daniel K and the folks at the Win-Raid forums.

That is just awesome nice work my friend. I wonder if it'll work for XP pro 64 to make use of 8 or 16 gigs of RAM. I know that would be way overkill for XP but it would just be awesome none the less.

Today I made this:

A proprietary loop cable for the Miro Hiscore 3D Voodoo card that I bought the other day.
Soldering this 9-pin mini DIN connector was a bit of a PITA, but the result seems to be OK, now I have to set up a test system to actually test the card.

Apart from that, I continued to install Windows 98, updates, games and other software onto my newly acquired childhood PC, the 1999 Medion MT26, Pentium II 400 MHz.

Excellent job on that cable it looks factory made.

Ordered a pair of EIDE ISA cards from Anatek/Alltronics to see if one will sort out my 486 not liking CDROM drives. The second card is for the 486 tower I have that is all but bereft of expansion cards, and has no IDE support on the motherboard, though I will likely have to acquire more cards, since having a solitary hard drive (and requisite CDROM drive) in a system feels strange to me these days. I still need to re-DALLAS that 486 tower, as it's the worst-off of my two afflicted systems.
I've still done nothing with my first computer (AMD K6-2 300), though it could probably use a controller card in PCI form, as it hates drives larger than 20(?) GB, and most of my spares are 80GB or larger.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-11-06, 12:26:

That is just awesome nice work my friend. I wonder if it'll work for XP pro 64 to make use of 8 or 16 gigs of RAM. I know that would be way overkill for XP but it would just be awesome none the less.

I don't think overkill is something foreign to us 🤣

This is true there's something fun about it.

I swapped out the mini itx board I was using for a B450 matx board, threw in a Audigy RX and it runs just like a Audigy 4 would. Very happy.

Salient wrote on 2020-11-03, 20:18:

Fired up the Amiga 1200 after years of neglect.

Still works like a charm!

Nice.... Just smell it. Please. If it has the slightest smell of fish, then recap ASAP. Commodore used cheap Chinese caps in the 1990's.
If they leak, you can quickly find yourself in a situation were the machine needs an extreme makeover (if you get my drift).
Better let the old lady age with beauty, than fixing her up with some makeup, because she had skin damage.

Spent a few hours last night working on my ThinkPads -

A) Tried to install BeOS R5 on the 560E - no dice, the machine does not seem to boot off PCMCIA ATAPI, and the boot floppy does not seem to support PCMCIA CDROMs - have to find an alternative way to get the machine to boot.

B) Tried to install OpenStep 4.2 on the machine - also no dice. The drivers support PCMCIA SCSI but not ATAPI, so that’s a no-go with the CDROM drive.

C) Looks like the ThinkPad T21 developed the BoD/blink of death issue (known fault on the machines). I think I’ll need to take it apart and check the ADP3421 power regulator chip to see if the power-good pin (pin 16?) is coming in within spec. *ugh* - time to look into SMD component level repair with a hot air pencil setup.

Just received a couple blank ATX shields and I had to use the dremel to make the AT keyboard and PS/2 mouse holes for the ports. I still have to find a way to make the holes for the parallel and serial ports.

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-11-07, 14:53:

Spent a few hours last night working on my ThinkPads -

A) Tried to install BeOS R5 on the 560E - no dice, the machine does not seem to boot off PCMCIA ATAPI, and the boot floppy does not seem to support PCMCIA CDROMs - have to find an alternative way to get the machine to boot.

You can try with BeWrite from http://euc.jp/beos/beware.en.html, or using the Personal Edition would also make it easy to install BeOS.

Today I've been playing around more with my recently revived 8088 motherboard. It's fully functional now, after being a dead motherboard for about 22 years.

So I've just been playing some 80s DOS games on it to put it through it's paces. The 10MHz Siemens 8088 CPU handles stuff like After Burner II & Prince of Persia (just 2 random late 80s titles I tried) quite well and turbos down happily to 4.77MHz for earlier speed sensitive titles.

Pretty much the only issue I had was getting my CGA card working, which won't output colour. There is what looks like a potentiometer on the motherboard, but alas I don't have anything small enough to fit into it at present. I'll probably stick with VGA on this board though and leave the CGA card in my IBM XT 5160 build.

Today I have been servicing a couple of 17" Acer Pentium 4 Laptops (a beast of a laptop with a built-in sub-woofer and no less than 3 fans for the CPU and GPU)!

I mixed and matched parts to get one fully working and nice looking laptop and the other one has a few scratches on the lid but no sound so needs a replacement motherboard when I get around to it.

Windows XP now installed (along with the drivers), just copying WSUS Offline to a memory stick so I can install Windows/Microsoft Updates on the laptop as the official Microsoft site (just the other week) finally stopped working - luckily I saw this coming to got WSUS Offline a few months ago 😀

Just played a bit with my QEMU VMs to tidy them up for my Mac after the iPad Pro debacle. I've set up a mitmproxy from homebrew to let macOS 9.2.1 Classilla browser access some sites that require TLS > 1.1.

Now I am fighting with a slow OS X Leopard VM to bring it up too with mitmproxy.

After finding out the FPM chips from china for my cirrus logic 5436 is fake so I knew I had some other chips hiding in the bins of my video cards so searched for them long time and found 8 pieces of real deal at 50ns from other seller, not chinese so I'll solder them on at 2MB configuration.

Cheers,

Swapped a 9v power supply on my KVM cuz I thought the current one died. Turns out it was likely wrong polarity! The new one works fine with positive center, but not other way round. But the weird thing is the old one (some random Roland model) workes for years even though center-negative, and only stopped working last week!

kolderman wrote on 2020-11-08, 04:48:

Swapped a 9v power supply on my KVM cuz I thought the current one died. Turns out it was likely wrong polarity! The new one works fine with positive center, but not other way round. But the weird thing is the old one (some random Roland model) workes for years even though center-negative, and only stopped working last week!

Maybe the KVM works with AC, like the american NES?

aha2940 wrote on 2020-11-08, 05:05:

kolderman wrote on 2020-11-08, 04:48:

Swapped a 9v power supply on my KVM cuz I thought the current one died. Turns out it was likely wrong polarity! The new one works fine with positive center, but not other way round. But the weird thing is the old one (some random Roland model) workes for years even though center-negative, and only stopped working last week!

Maybe the KVM works with AC, like the american NES?

Mmm I think it's DC cuz it says so on the box and can also be ps2 port powered ... just no mention of polarity. I don't think I even considered it originally which was silly of me. Anyway it's working fine now 😀

Finally installed the Dell Dimension 3000 into my "lab" gaming area. So now I can kick back in the chair and play retro-games on the TV. Uses the VGA to composite converter I have to connect to the TV. Runs at 800x600 - not too bad really.