Not quite computer related, but still vintage, was disassembling my dim early 1W star LED generic flashlight was purchased in around 2004 or so, and found out has real dc to dc converter inside, the inductor core snapped off so I glued it back on correctly and swap out for nice neutral white or warm white star LED by CREE.

I'm partial to thumb button near head not the tail switch (not easy to actuate).

Cheers,

Donated two AHA-2940AU cards to a local artist who was still using some SCSI scanner for his projects, when his AHA-2940AU died on him. He was only looking for one, but I have at least three of those (as well as a mix of other PCI (not to mention ISA, VLB and EISA) SCSI adapters, so deceided to clear up a bit and give him a spare so he's sorted for longer than the probably lifespan of the scanner 😉

Cloudschatze wrote on 2021-02-03, 16:55:

https://www.symphoniae.com/misc/vogons/wip_s.jpg Another work-in-progress reconfiguration. Hooray. […]
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Another work-in-progress reconfiguration. Hooray.

so that's where all the rolands are hiding x3

Replaced 27 caps.
Even my soldering iron hurts. 😀
Than played Doom. I deserved it.

I took apart my Celeron 1300 mATX DOS/Win9x PC; I will be rebuilding it as an Core2Duo E4600 mATX PC dual booting Win9x and a secondary OS (not sure which yet though, WinXP, Win7 or some kind of Linux/BSD are the most likely candidates..)

Rebuilt the OS on the Compaq n600c .

A) Cloned the working disk image from the Dell C600.
B) Deleted the C600 specific Win98 install (delete c:\windows).
C) Rebuilt Win98 from install files on c:\win98
D) Spent the entire night battling HQ/Compaq’s shitheap of a Softpaq library - wondering why HP still uses a central repo for all drivers even up to today...and they still have crap dating back to the old P3 Xeon Proliant servers (now with HPe). They might have dropped search results for the old hardware but the softpaqs for the drivers are still extant...and poorly archived. Had to pull some software archeological tricks to figure out where things lived.

So...the n600c.
- Compaq never released ESS Allegro VxD drivers with DOS emulation support specifically for it? (Might have to find ESS Allegro compliant VxD drivers amongst its HP Omnibook cousins and dig up its driver SoftPaq)
- The default BIOS is...spartan and didn’t seem to support PC-PCI and DDMA, so the ESS DOS driver just trips all over it via TDMA?

- Their odd little software environment actually requires you to download a setvid utility and specify the machine as undocked, or else the Radeon Win98 drivers will not set video resolution correctly?

I recapped an CT4520 AWE64 card yesterday, because it "sounded funny" to my ears - hissy, unequal loudness etc....
After recap, it all looked good, sounded good - for a while.
Then the card got crazy - pops, hiss, buzz, cracks and bangs from the output (line out and spk out both), errors on loading drivers on Win98 startup - it all seemed wrong.
PCM sounded garbled, tinny, garbled, but curiously MIDI sounded ok but very quiet when compared to PCM, at least when it worked.

I seriously thought I damaged or killed the card (not a cleanest recap job, admittedly) so I troubleshot (is that a even a word?)

Now, after mounting the card to different ISA slot on the mainboard and after re-installing the drivers, I works seemingly fine and sounds as good as new, but I need some long-term testing to do,

It is a headscratcher...part of a reason why I like this hobby though

Maybe the other ISA port is to blame ?

Possibly dirty contacts or voltage loss is my guess.

Got my cheap Voodoo 5 5500 yesterday. It came with no fans, so I think I'll do a cooler mod to this one. I popped the heatsinks off this morning to clean the thermal glue off. Man, that was painful. The glue is more like cement. I first soaked it in WD-40, scraped off a good amount of glue, then soaked it in isopropyl alcohol and scraped the rest off. Some glue is still on the edge of the right BGA GPU chip, but there are very fine traces there and I don't want to risk damaging one, so I'll leave that glue there since it doesn't impact the surface flatness any when I put on an aftermarket heatsink.

I used this for scraping, which worked pretty awesome: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XKDXKDR/

Pics:

wiretap wrote on 2021-02-04, 12:42:

Got my cheap Voodoo 5 5500 yesterday. It came with no fans, so I think I'll do a cooler mod to this one. I popped the heatsinks […]
Show full quote

Got my cheap Voodoo 5 5500 yesterday. It came with no fans, so I think I'll do a cooler mod to this one. I popped the heatsinks off this morning to clean the thermal glue off. Man, that was painful. The glue is more like cement. I first soaked it in WD-40, scraped off a good amount of glue, then soaked it in isopropyl alcohol and scraped the rest off. Some glue is still on the edge of the right BGA GPU chip, but there are very fine traces there and I don't want to risk damaging one, so I'll leave that glue there since it doesn't impact the surface flatness any when I put on an aftermarket heatsink.

I used this for scraping, which worked pretty awesome: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XKDXKDR/

Pics:

Scary - I wouldn't use a scraper to get that stuff off. I used ice spray successfully and IPA to clean it up.

Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

CMB75 wrote on 2021-02-04, 14:36:

wiretap wrote on 2021-02-04, 12:42:

Got my cheap Voodoo 5 5500 yesterday. It came with no fans, so I think I'll do a cooler mod to this one. I popped the heatsinks […]
Show full quote

Got my cheap Voodoo 5 5500 yesterday. It came with no fans, so I think I'll do a cooler mod to this one. I popped the heatsinks off this morning to clean the thermal glue off. Man, that was painful. The glue is more like cement. I first soaked it in WD-40, scraped off a good amount of glue, then soaked it in isopropyl alcohol and scraped the rest off. Some glue is still on the edge of the right BGA GPU chip, but there are very fine traces there and I don't want to risk damaging one, so I'll leave that glue there since it doesn't impact the surface flatness any when I put on an aftermarket heatsink.

I used this for scraping, which worked pretty awesome: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XKDXKDR/

Pics:

Scary - I wouldn't use a scraper to get that stuff off. I used ice spray successfully and IPA to clean it up.

Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

I used Freon TF to freeze and pop off the heatsinks, but the glue was still on there. I had soaked it for quite a long time and it was still as hard as a rock. The scraping was necessary.

Well my new/old stock Sun Microsystems 16" CRT Monitor - PN17J0 CRT monitor arrived yesterday evening. I got it unwrapped, left it at room temperature for nearly 24 hours, and now up and running.

Hooked up to my Pentium II, MX440, 98SE machine. Took over an hour to have the image configured/adjusted to my liking, from 640x480 all the way to 1280x1024. I forgot about the perfect scaling of CRT, and after running a Dell 1907FPt TFT, it feels like a major upgrade. Colours are amazing, no lag, which was driving me crazy with the Dell, even at 75Hz - and oh my, the smell! It's the new PC/Monitor warm electronic smell, I haven't smelled that since 2004 with my last CRT monitor (only you guys will get it ha!).

Anyway, I'm still tinkering with it, going to keep it running a few hours, with it essentially not ever being switched on, and it was manufactured on 2002. I've attached some photos, some obligatory Doom and Alien Breed running in DOS. Can't wait to fire up some Doom 3, F.E.A.R, Deus Ex on my XP rig as well.

That is a beautiful monitor and that picture quality is just fantastic. That was seriously an amazing find.

As a retired Solaris admin, my wife approves with your endeavors. 🤣 Very nice!

What a sweet pickup! Been looking for a NOS crt for months, but to no avail so far. Ebay prices are maxed out and you take a chance on it
arriving in pieces.

Yep, just spur of the moment check on ebay, saw it with a starting amount of £50.00, put in bid, maxed to £100.00, no further bids, so got it cheap; was pure luck. I've already got a CRT television for console gaming, so my wife was hesitant on having another CRT, especially with a possible used one, full of dust, old/dirt haha, but justified this one easily with it being new, and she's partial to a bit of Doom.

Ebay is chock full of scammers nowadays.

wiretap wrote on 2021-02-04, 12:42:

Got my cheap Voodoo 5 5500 yesterday. It came with no fans, so I think I'll do a cooler mod to this one. I popped the heatsinks off this morning to clean the thermal glue off. Man, that was painful. The glue is more like cement. I first soaked it in WD-40, scraped off a good amount of glue, then soaked it in isopropyl alcohol and scraped the rest off. Some glue is still on the edge of the right BGA GPU chip, but there are very fine traces there and I don't want to risk damaging one, so I'll leave that glue there since it doesn't impact the surface flatness any when I put on an aftermarket heatsink.

I used this for scraping, which worked pretty awesome: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XKDXKDR/

Nice job! I have a Velocity 100 (8MB Voodoo 3 AGP) which had the heatsink fall off and left behind that "cement".

What a nightmare that stuff is. I think anything that would dissolve it would dissolve the plastic on the 3dfx chip or at least take off the lettering.

After trying a couple things (freezer for weeks, solvents, etc.), I gave up on it and now it just sits in a baggy. I've thought of just getting more thermal epoxy and slathering it on there to fill the gaps and just reattaching it. Probably a lot safer.

Goo Gone, iso. alcohol, maybe some acetone, and a lot of q-tips will remove that cement pretty well. Just takes a long time to do so.

I've also noticed using Goo Gone and immediately afterwards some iso. alcohol works pretty well with most things.