dionb wrote on 2021-01-26, 10:26:

Nuance: this is Europe and as there is a centralized civil registry per country, things like SSN and passport data are far less easily abused than in places like US where that isn't the case. Still, I wouldn't leave mine out in the street regardless...

Yeah, If I sell a hard drive or PC other than retro stuff (I don't keep anything sensitive on those), I always properly wipe them. First making a full disc encryption with several times overwriting the data than format the drive. My portables are encrypted anyway.

After a year and a half of use, I thoroughly cleaned my lovely Model M keyboard today. What an awesome daily driver on my main PC...

Started putting Humpty Dumpty back together - Humpty Dumpty is my 1993 NEC Ultralite Versa 25C that's currently....well....cracked up. Currently I'm poking around the motherboard figuring out why it's ticking when charging a battery, refusing to throw any sign of life onto the status LCD (found out how to get that to happen today), or why it's not powering on (other than a crystal oscillator that looks like a WWII era can of Spam left in the swamp for 100 years).

Here's the shortform rundown of all I found out about this thing since I started working on it
- plastic has shattered, leaving me a Jigsaw puzzle, but I might be able to BSSG (Baking Soda + SuperGlue) my way outta this one with some help from J.B. Weld and Guitar String ends
- Screen is totally shot but the controller boards will be good to reuse on my NL6448AC30-10 - I need to put some FFC connectors on the panel board sides and get some 30 pin FFCs for that
- Might be able to get around not having a screen casing by using the M/75 Touch Screen casing I have - and making it touch in lieu of a Trackball (the original Ultralite Versa had no pointing device)
- Original power supply (huge brick thing) is also shot, looks to be leaky caps, or whatever spill damage that did this thing in got the PSU too, Fuse is good
- Original Motherboard started to show signs of life with some poking around, but I'm going to need to desolder the power boards off and assess the damage underneath. Might need a few components replaced.
- There's a Toyocom 1.8MHz Can that rusted out on the bottom of the motherboard - no damage to the board itself, but that component....something liquid got to it
- Keyboard is badly yellowed, did this guy smoke a doobie an hour?
- 100MB HDD is still good - who in the heck put Windows 95 on a 25MHz 486 SL though is beyond me....it looks like Windows 3.0 may have been the original version (with DOS 5) given the Chess Wallpaper
- I've already removed the logos from the screen and retained them

Holy cow... there is so much wrong with that computer.

If you restore it and get it working, that would definitely deserve it's own thread.

Finally today the 775 CPUs I had ordered arrived.
Of these five CPUs, only one was used for NewPC-Linux.
The CPUs are Pentium DUAL-CORE E2140 and E2160, CORE2 DUO 4300 and 4400 and 6320.
The 4400 went to the place of a P.D.C. E2180, on an ECS P4M890T-M2 motherboard with 2GB DDR2 RAM, the chipset is VIA.
Together with the CPUs, 3 SATA cables have arrived, I need them to connect various drives.

Trying out some harddrives for my next build 😀

Can anyone guess what its going to be?

I see 72pin RAM and VLB cards, so I'm guessing 486?

Also, those hard drives sitting atop that PSU, CD and floppy tower just makes me think one of them is going to throw themselves over the side, base-jump style.

486 SCSI file server?

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-01-27, 19:57:

I see 72pin RAM and VLB cards, so I'm guessing 486?

Also, those hard drives sitting atop that PSU, CD and floppy tower just makes me think one of them is going to throw themselves over the side, base-jump style.

Thats just to make it more interesting to change floppys 😀

I only had one 50pin scsi drive that was working so my original plan had to change a bit. A 486 is correct and its going to be a little bit more special then it was 25 years ago when my grandfather bought it.

That's one hell of a precarious hardware tower..

Was trying to get a P4EE 3.2GHz to work in my old Toshiba Satellite P25 DTR laptop. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work.

The laptop shipped with a 3.4GHz Northwood, which is why I was hoping it'd take a 3.2 Gallatin, but I guess there's just no BIOS support. Oh well. Had it worked, I probably wouldn't have kept it in there for more than a couple of hours for benchmarking. The EE chip is definitely more at home in the massive Dimension XPS it came from.

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-01-27, 19:27:

Finally today the 775 CPUs I had ordered arrived. Of these five CPUs, only one was used for NewPC-Linux. The CPUs are Pentium DU […]
Show full quote

Finally today the 775 CPUs I had ordered arrived.
Of these five CPUs, only one was used for NewPC-Linux.
The CPUs are Pentium DUAL-CORE E2140 and E2160, CORE2 DUO 4300 and 4400 and 6320.
The 4400 went to the place of a P.D.C. E2180, on an ECS P4M890T-M2 motherboard with 2GB DDR2 RAM, the chipset is VIA.
Together with the CPUs, 3 SATA cables have arrived, I need them to connect various drives.

If you can try running the 800FSB CPUs at 1066. All of yours will very likely overclock to 1066 very easily and at stock voltage for a considerable speed boost. In fact, I ran a E4500 (2200/800) at 2933/1066 with less voltage than stock (1.2something vs 1.325 specified I seem to recall)

Any Atari fans here? I managed to nab thid Atari 520ST when I noticed it was being sold locally on eBay Canada.

(original seller photo)

Not that I really have the hobby money to split on another type of retro computer (I need one of those Atari diskdrives, and the mice are hella expensive!). I mean i just sold my TI 99/4a for that exact reason, but I couldn't help myself I guess. This is as close as il probably get to owning an Amiga 😜

Over the weekend, I added the native PS/2 mouse mod to this 386SX ISA SBC, which shares the keyboard PS/2 port so I can use a standard splitter to use both 😀

Today and yesterday I've been having fun with the MT32-pi, which is at this point, quite a ready to use project!
All I had to do was edit some plaintext items in the mt32-pi.cfg file, following their now easy-ish to use MT32-Pi Wiki
I added a DAC, screen, MIDI in optocoupler and rotary encoder to the pi 3b. The wiring is a tad messy but it sounds awesome with the DAC and through this Bose speaker that I'm fond of, because its standard EQ makes FM sound fantastic.

There are some pi hats around already that people have made for this to simplify it but they use the oled screen, I like this 20x2 screen, I might still go that route potentially . I'm wondering if I should try designing up a casing for this so its less messy, but it might need a PCB since the wiring is such a hassle.

Really cool project though, I'm surprised there isn't a dedicated thread on here given its utility and how much MT-32s cost now.

andrea wrote on 2021-01-04, 22:07:

I just repaired (again) a Frankenstein laptop that was bad when it was new and still is today. The issue was that the network ca […]
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I just repaired (again) a Frankenstein laptop that was bad when it was new and still is today.
The issue was that the network card would only connect if manually set to 10Mbps. Auto and 100Mbps wouldn't negotiate a link. In the past I tried replacing the jack (MagJack) hoping it was just a dodgy transformer but it made no change. I then ordered a replacement crab from China and today it finally arrived.

Looks the same to me

Replaced

Did it work?

Spoiler

For those interested, here follows the story of this piece of shite impressive artifact of computing history.

Spoiler

It started its life in my hands as part of a eBay lot of junk computer parts. It was a Fujitsu (not Siemens, only Fujitsu) Lifebook N3010, with amazing specs such as:

• A desktop P4 2.66
• 512 MB of DDR266 (in the form of very useful 256MB SODIMMs)
• SiS Chipset
• Mobility Radeon 9000 64MB 128Bit (why bother with a mobility when you already have like 70W of NetBurst nonsense?)
• A broken Toshiba 40GB HDD (as all Toshiba drives from that time do)
• A broken Toshiba DVDminusRW (as all early DVD burners do)
• 2 broken hinges, that managed to:
  • Mangle the plastic
  • Short the CCFL wires killing the inverter
  • Crack the panel, with was the only good thing about this machine (1400*1050 IPS)

Interestingly it had an Acer keyboard installed, so someone messed with it already. It worked 99% fine with the Fujitsu BIOS except that N typed < and viceversa (I can't recall)
Instead of maybe pulling the CPU and junk the rest, I set it aside

Some months later I bought 20€ worth of a cannibalised Acer Aspire 1600, whose GPU baked itself. I got a shell with screen, inverter and keyboard, but not any memory, CD or caddies and bottom covers. Whoever had it before even took the modem.
These two computer were essentially the same, based off two slightly different flavours of the same Wistron design. The big ones were:

• GPU: Also a Mobility 9000 64MB, but with a 64Bit memory bus.
• A missing MiniPCI slot (the board was routed for it, but no connector)
• Different connector for the power/lid switches (no dedicated wireless toggle on the Acer)
• Power management, will come to this later
• Screen is 1024*768 TN
• P4 2.6/400FSB

In the end after some messing about and swearing and more swearing I got a working Acer with the motherboard from the Fujitsu and the DC board from the Acer, flashed with a modified Acer BIOS that deleted the PXE Boot ROM to make space and used the 128 bit Fujitsu VBIOS. (Side note: Phoenix's Phlash is particularly stubborn when it comes to flashing the "wrong" bios, in the end I had to pull the chip, install a PLCC socket and flash it externally.) Keyboard works fine, but power management is flaky. When it's plugged in everything is fine, charge light is on when charging and off when charged, Windows tells you it's plugged in and charging. But on battery the hardware realizes it has switched (screen dims, charge light goes off) but Windows still reports as plugged in. However, if you open up the battery properties it will show the dropping battery percentage. Weird. I do not care. Well, it annoys me but not enough to do something.

Specs now:

• Acer Aspire 1600 Chassis/Display/Keyboard... (except for the covers, caddy and antennas that came from the Fujitsu so it looks a bit Michael Jackson now)
• Fujitsu/Acer hybrid motherboard
• P4 2.4/533 (I moved the 2.66 to a better system, and considering how much bandwidth starved Netburst is I feel like 2.4/533 is as fast if not faster than 2.6/400.
• 2 GB of mismatched chinese RAM
• Original drive from the Acer, it even had the recovery partition intact. As were all the partitions. FFS Dban your drives before disposal, 40GB 5400rpm.
• Circa-1998 24x Teac CD from a crumbling Clevo
• Broadcom "Almost-G" Wifi card. It works but after seeing its "performance" and driver compatibility I understand why it was pulled.

In the end, why did I bother? I don't know.
It's heavy, it's loud overheats in femtoseconds, doesn't have legacy ports (one of the big saving graces of old laptops in my opinion), if you need XP there are much better choices and, despite all the drivers existing it won't run 9x because of ACPI issues (and the bios support for APM-mode it's so broken that's not funny, not even soft off works).

FFS it died again.
Put away working now it's stuck in a reset loop.

Maybe I didn't clean the flux properly and it's behaving like a capacitor?

andrea wrote on 2021-01-27, 20:58:

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-01-27, 19:27:

Finally today the 775 CPUs I had ordered arrived. Of these five CPUs, only one was used for NewPC-Linux. The CPUs are Pentium DU […]
Show full quote

Finally today the 775 CPUs I had ordered arrived.
Of these five CPUs, only one was used for NewPC-Linux.
The CPUs are Pentium DUAL-CORE E2140 and E2160, CORE2 DUO 4300 and 4400 and 6320.
The 4400 went to the place of a P.D.C. E2180, on an ECS P4M890T-M2 motherboard with 2GB DDR2 RAM, the chipset is VIA.
Together with the CPUs, 3 SATA cables have arrived, I need them to connect various drives.

If you can try running the 800FSB CPUs at 1066. All of yours will very likely overclock to 1066 very easily and at stock voltage for a considerable speed boost. In fact, I ran a E4500 (2200/800) at 2933/1066 with less voltage than stock (1.2something vs 1.325 specified I seem to recall)

Yes, I think it can be done without problems, the E21X0 can be overclocked until almost doubling the FSB, and without overvolt.
Currently the 4400 has been slightly overclocked by taking the FSB from 800 to 920, the frequency rises from 2.0GHz to 2.3GHz.
An E4600 that I ordered should arrive in a while.
Unfortunately the MB ECS has video built in, and I wouldn't want to cause problems by raising the FSB too much (up to 1066).

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-01-27, 22:15:

Yes, I think it can be done without problems, the E21X0 can be overclocked until almost doubling the FSB, and without overvolt. […]
Show full quote

andrea wrote on 2021-01-27, 20:58:

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-01-27, 19:27:

Finally today the 775 CPUs I had ordered arrived. Of these five CPUs, only one was used for NewPC-Linux. The CPUs are Pentium DU […]
Show full quote

Finally today the 775 CPUs I had ordered arrived.
Of these five CPUs, only one was used for NewPC-Linux.
The CPUs are Pentium DUAL-CORE E2140 and E2160, CORE2 DUO 4300 and 4400 and 6320.
The 4400 went to the place of a P.D.C. E2180, on an ECS P4M890T-M2 motherboard with 2GB DDR2 RAM, the chipset is VIA.
Together with the CPUs, 3 SATA cables have arrived, I need them to connect various drives.

If you can try running the 800FSB CPUs at 1066. All of yours will very likely overclock to 1066 very easily and at stock voltage for a considerable speed boost. In fact, I ran a E4500 (2200/800) at 2933/1066 with less voltage than stock (1.2something vs 1.325 specified I seem to recall)

Yes, I think it can be done without problems, the E21X0 can be overclocked until almost doubling the FSB, and without overvolt.
Currently the 4400 has been slightly overclocked by taking the FSB from 800 to 920, the frequency rises from 2.0GHz to 2.3GHz.
An E4600 that I ordered should arrive in a while.
Unfortunately the MB ECS has video built in, and I wouldn't want to cause problems by raising the FSB too much (up to 1066).

Try doing the BSEL mod with aluminium tape. That way the CPU will present itself to the board as if it were a genuine 1066 chip and all timings and dividers will be in spec.

Testing out my new RetroTink 2x Mini with my Commodore64 breadbin (rev 250407).
Composit are good. S-Video cable are AWESOMME.... I will post some pictures tomorrow.

brostenen wrote on 2021-01-27, 23:23:

Testing out my new RetroTink 2x Mini with my Commodore64 breadbin (rev 250407).
Composit are good. S-Video cable are AWESOMME.... I will post some pictures tomorrow.

I got one of these over the holidays. S Video out of a PlayStation looked AMAZING! Iv been told component is even better, but pricey.

On the flipside: My Megadrive's composit looked like utter trash. Even though a 32x. Iv been told that's normal unfortunately 🙁

MDs don't do S-video natively, time to shell out for those retrovision cables 😭

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2021-01-27, 23:53:

I got one of these over the holidays. S Video indeed looks AMAZING! Iv been told component is even better, but pricey. […]
Show full quote

brostenen wrote on 2021-01-27, 23:23:

Testing out my new RetroTink 2x Mini with my Commodore64 breadbin (rev 250407).
Composit are good. S-Video cable are AWESOMME.... I will post some pictures tomorrow.

I got one of these over the holidays. S Video indeed looks AMAZING! Iv been told component is even better, but pricey.

On the flipside: My Megadrive's composit looked like utter trash. Even though a 32x. Iv been told that's normal unfortunately 🙁

Time to shell out for those retrovision cables 😭

Just skip those cables on the MD and go straight to RGB scart in to an OSSC and HDMI out. Glorious.