VOGONS


Reply 17900 of 27190, by pan069

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-01-19, 15:32:

Just got my first CF to IDE adapter and I used it to set up a DOS 6.22 install. Remarkable how little noise these retro rigs produce when you get rid of old IDE hard drives.

Also, I put a NOS Speeze copper core cooler into my AthlonXP system. It's much quieter than its stock AMD counterpart which I was using so far.

Yes, and a CF/IDE adapter combined with a quiet ATX power supply, it's an enjoyable experience. I'm using it for my 286, 386 and 486 setups. It's amazing, the noise we used to put up with. I'm not sure how we did it...

Reply 17901 of 27190, by Thermalwrong

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Yesterday, I got my 386 SX 25 motherboard to have working PS/2 mouse using this thread, with the PCB design and Rio444's utility: Native PS/2 mouse implementation for 386/486 boards using the keyboard controller
It works with this board, but it didn't work with the original keyboard controller, so I used this P8042AHP from another board that unfortunately stopped working.

Aaalso, several months ago I bought parts from Mouser to build up a Snark Barker / CT1320 card. Because it's lockdown time again, I started putting together a card. I've already got one, but another sound blaster 1.5 is never bad. This one was built with all new parts from Mouser, except the TEA2025B because I forgot to buy those. Oh well, those are bought now. Put it together and the card works perfectly 1st time 😁 It sounds a lot nicer than the Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II, much clearer and punchier sound.

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Reply 17902 of 27190, by Duouk2000

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Messing around with my MU440EX motherboard. I've got a PII 233MHz CPU, Soundblaster 16 and Voodoo 1 in it. I'm going for a late DOS/Early Windows machine. I couldn't help but try running something a little advanced with Half Life though, which runs predictably bad. I really like how it looks in software mode, it's got a chunky look I find quite appealing.

Reply 17903 of 27190, by TheAbandonwareGuy

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Drove 200 miles round trip yesterday to pickup a gem: a 1991 Sony Trinitron KV-27TS20
It's been a minute since I've seen a non-flat glass Trini up for offer, and I had just changed out the plugs and coils on my Grand Marquis so it was a good chance to put some highway miles under them and let the computer redo its adjustments since I had to disconnect the battery. Paid $0.00 too.

Cyb3rst0rms Retro Hardware Warzone: https://discord.gg/jK8uvR4c
I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction

Reply 17904 of 27190, by Jed118

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bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-01-19, 22:22:

That has to hurt.

Haven't done anything retro in a while, except I changed the oil on my car and used penetrating fluid on the power steering bearing as it squeaks and chirps because it's misaligned when I reinstalled the pulley on the new pump. Does working on a 20 year old car count as retro activity?

I would say so, judging by the reactions I got when I posted pictures of my purchase of a 33 year old Hyundai last October 😉

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 17905 of 27190, by Jed118

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Finished the mouse-house MDG restoration -

wBoqnUVh.jpg

bJMnpAxh.jpg

Nice machine actually. It took me WAY too long to find and install drivers on it. I gave up on the integrated graphics and stuck a GForce4 MX 440 in it instead. Now I have to find a moment to run the LAN to the living room and server closet, install drops, drill through the subfloor, install more drops, connect both those machines, load the pictures to my editing machine, edit, and upload. Haha, so, video will be out by spring 🤣.

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 17906 of 27190, by creepingnet

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Got the M/75 in last night, ended up being the perfect purchase. The entire chassis is in the nicest shape of any of these laptops I've picked up. There are no cracks - in anything. It looks like NEC did a complete redesign of the 9.4" 640x480 LCD casing, adopting the hinge attachment method from the touch screen (far more sturdy and robust), and a new hinge. So very neat. Also got a different variant of the NL6448AC30 screen that has heavy industrial sheilding in back.

Issues - dead motherboard (the power board is FUSED to it - weird), apparently someone spilled something sticky on it, the screen panel has a short that causes it to cause the machine not to boot. But that's fine, I just put the guts of my other M/75 (the AAC) one in there, and it's running great, used the original CPU board though. It has a newer BIOS revision I can't find on the FTP that's Y2K Compliant - so I have one that recognizes 2021 - hehehe. Also, the rubber rollers inside the VersaTrak (Trackball) were split in half and rotting away, so I took some parts from the P/75's original Trackball and fixed that problem. It was a little jittery at first but it's starting to work better the more I use the laptop. Put Windows For Workgroups 3.11 on the original hard drive this morning. Came with 2 PCMCIA cards that work - one an NEC SCSI card, the other a V34 modem - no dongles for either, a 540MB HDD (the biggest on this series) and an official NEC 8MB memory card (so 16MB out of the box - I might swap with the 40EC). It also has the original battery - which I'll probably be replacing or putting new cells in.

Next up will be the NEC Ultralite PC-410 - a 25MHz 486 from the original run that has a screen and casing that's utterly destroyed. That comes in on Friday. No trackball, yellowed keyboard. My plan on that one is the 4MB Memory Card + one of the smaller HDD with FreeDOS on it. I might be using the M/75 screen housing on this one with the older hardware, and either find the short in the one panel, or replace the circuit boards in the other panel to get a working display.

~The Creeping Network~
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Reply 17907 of 27190, by brostenen

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After having recieved and tested the Amiga500 RGB-to-HDMI Version2 adaptor for my Amiga500 ECS chipset. Then I needed to have a permanent installed HDMI-Port. So today I case modded my Amiga500-ECS machines case, to have that port permanently attached. It is not the most beautifull, and I need to file it a tiny bit more to have it straight.

For this casemod, I used a 50 centimeter flat-cable with male HDMI-Mini for the RaspberryPI-Zero, and a female standard size installed in the back of the case.
It will be so sweet to have it closed up and now it is future proved, in regards to monitor choices. 😜

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Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 17908 of 27190, by Standard Def Steve

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I finally got an AC3 demodulator for my laserdisc player. Only took me 25 years. 😜
I can't wait to try it out on Friday. It'll be interesting to hear how lossy 5.1 encodes from the mid-90s measure up against stereo PCM tracks upmixed via Dolby Surround.

P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
Tualatin: PIII-S @ 1628MHz | QDI Advance 12T | 2GB DDR-310 | 6800GT | X-Fi | 500GB HDD | 3DMark01: 14,059
Dothan: PM @ 2.9GHz | MSI Speedster FA4 | 2GB DDR2-580 | GTX 750Ti | X-Fi | 500GB SSD | 3DMark01: 43,190

Reply 17909 of 27190, by Nexxen

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Cleaned a bunch of floppy drive heads.
Started to repair a 5.25" broken knob. And it's going to take a long long time...

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K

Reply 17910 of 27190, by RetroLizard

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Got a CL-GD5428 VLB card in today, and am excited to try it out.

Also been looking for AT form-factor PSUs, and haven't had much luck on settling on one. I've gotten a few suggestions in the past, but I'm wondering if there any definitively good brands/etc to go for?

Reply 17911 of 27190, by bjwil1991

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The CL-GD5428 is a really good video card. My Packard Bell has one integrated and it's pretty good.

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Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
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Reply 17912 of 27190, by dionb

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Started building a system around my Pentium VLB board. Found a case with a compatible Turbo button + LED - but of course the PSU was dead. No big surprise as it was one I found at the rubbish bins outside my house, and the motherboard was completely shorted out. Good I checked before hooking up the nice board...

Bit of a dilemma now is which VGA and I/O to use - I have two VLB slots and four PCI slots. Obviously I want to use both VLB (otherwise I might as well use a regular Pentium motherboard), and I have enough VLB cards - multi-I/O, VGA and SCSI in various combinations (even VGA+IDE combo cards). Right now I'm thinking of four approaches:
- aesthetics, go for cards that best match the golden brown PCB of the motherboard (SCSI and VGA on VLB then)
- go for highest DOS performance (IDE and VGA on VLB - nice WD90C33 card, but SCSI on PCI)
- go for highest Windows performance (IDE and SCSI on VLB, some fast PCI VGA with lots of RAM)
- go for most eccentric build (SCSI and VGA+IDE combo on VLB)
- go for best compatibility

Then there's also the issue of storage - real HDD? If so SCSI or IDE? Or just a quiet, fast CF card...

Underlying question I need to answer: what do I even want to do with this system? 😉

First World Problems 😜

Reply 17913 of 27190, by Nexxen

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dionb wrote on 2021-01-21, 11:16:
Started building a system around my Pentium VLB board. Found a case with a compatible Turbo button + LED - but of course the PS […]
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Started building a system around my Pentium VLB board. Found a case with a compatible Turbo button + LED - but of course the PSU was dead. No big surprise as it was one I found at the rubbish bins outside my house, and the motherboard was completely shorted out. Good I checked before hooking up the nice board...

Bit of a dilemma now is which VGA and I/O to use - I have two VLB slots and four PCI slots. Obviously I want to use both VLB (otherwise I might as well use a regular Pentium motherboard), and I have enough VLB cards - multi-I/O, VGA and SCSI in various combinations (even VGA+IDE combo cards). Right now I'm thinking of four approaches:
- aesthetics, go for cards that best match the golden brown PCB of the motherboard (SCSI and VGA on VLB then)
- go for highest DOS performance (IDE and VGA on VLB - nice WD90C33 card, but SCSI on PCI)
- go for highest Windows performance (IDE and SCSI on VLB, some fast PCI VGA with lots of RAM)
- go for most eccentric build (SCSI and VGA+IDE combo on VLB)
- go for best compatibility

Then there's also the issue of storage - real HDD? If so SCSI or IDE? Or just a quiet, fast CF card...

Underlying question I need to answer: what do I even want to do with this system? 😉

First World Problems 😜

Looks like you are going to have a weekend full of wonders.

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K

Reply 17914 of 27190, by creepingnet

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Fixed the original LCD Panel for the new M/75 - cold solder joint and a short caused by a piece of gold foil tape. This one is a weird one, it looks like it came from a different factor than the rest, the plastic is darker gray, the panel housing is thicker to accomodate an actual industrial version of the NL6448 panel, and it seems incredibly less prone to cracking. The screen seems very nice and bright, especially considering that I LOWERED the CFL voltage. I do need to make some adjustments (vertical and whatnot).

Then had to go to bed. I took the second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine. I feel like crap. Probably will have to wait until the weekend before I can really dig into those other two panels (one has washed out colors and flickering, the other was my best 640 panel, it now just shows pure white, which is what the M/75 screen was originally doing, so probably another bad solder joint).

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 17916 of 27190, by debs3759

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creepingnet wrote on 2021-01-21, 16:10:

Then had to go to bed. I took the second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine. I feel like crap.

I hope that is just a temporary side effect, and that you can get back to your testing soon.

See my graphics card database at www.gpuzoo.com
Constantly being worked on. Feel free to message me with any corrections or details of cards you would like me to research and add.

Reply 17917 of 27190, by gex85

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Today I started testing some of the hardware that I received over the last few days, starting with this lot: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

While testing the M396F 386 motherboard, one of my old power supplies blew up, but luckily nothing else got damaged and the 386 seems to work like a charm.
So while I was at it, I tested some of the 30 pin SIMM modules that I have kicking around, mainly just to see which capacity they are. Turned out most of them are 256 KB or 1 MB. But I also found two 4 MB sticks that will stay in the M396F for now.

The ET4000 unfortunately doesn't output any video, I might have to have a look at the jumper and dip switch settings...

My retro computers

Reply 17918 of 27190, by liqmat

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creepingnet wrote on 2021-01-21, 16:10:

Then had to go to bed. I took the second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine. I feel like crap. Probably will have to wait until the weekend...

I read the second dose is what makes everyone feel like crap. I hope they can refine that a little better in the future.

Reply 17919 of 27190, by pan069

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RetroLizard wrote on 2021-01-21, 16:16:

Are DTK power supplies (AT form) any good?

When you say "AT" what exactly do you mean?

I believe AT PSUs come in two different form factors, full size AT and baby AT. Where baby AT is similar/same/interchangeable with ATX.