the_ultra_code wrote on 2021-02-04, 20:47:

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.

I think that's exactly the combination I tried. I must not have left it sit long enough. It was still like trying to chisel away at a piece of hard plastic without damaging the surface it is attached to.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2021-02-02, 23:17:

That thing looks great :) Re-using an existing case is really cool. Just a heads up, from my testing, the MT32-Pi just uses 0.5a […]
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vutt wrote on 2021-01-30, 17:51:

Did you know that Motorola had MT32 compatible sound module back in days? ;) […]
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Did you know that Motorola had MT32 compatible sound module back in days? 😉

motorola.jpg

My little MT32-pi in old TV set-top box project is shaping up nicely.
Now I need to fit that rats nest into case and figure out how much cooling Pi 4 in closed case needs. Will went holes drilling be sufficient or I need to add active cooling.

That thing looks great 😀 Re-using an existing case is really cool. Just a heads up, from my testing, the MT32-Pi just uses 0.5a so cooling isn't super important I think.

I've been putting together one for myself too, many thanks to Dopefish on these forums for making the mt32-pi image/project and making the wiki so clear.

I just tamed the rats nest on my MT32-pi with a strip board, which turned out nice and tidy. I'm wondering at this point if I should put together my own super basic MT32-pi hat and make a case around it. There are others, but all I want is a midi in, some buttons/a wheel and a cheap-but-good DAC. The geometry of the MT32 isn't exactly complex and mine just has a screen and a wheel. Though having used buttons 1&2, to switch roms and switch to soundfont mode, I'm thinking it should have buttons too.

Since I'm working without a schematic, I labelled it this evening with my little label maker, and put some insulation on the conductive side of the PCB.

Awesome! I'm glad you found the documentation alright, I've worked pretty hard to try and make it as clear as possible and it's not easy 😀
Thanks for trying it out! 😀

Pulled out an old p4 build from the closet, slapped in a 80GB SATA hard drive, and installed XP SP3. So far I just got drivers installed, changed to wallpaper to one of the sample wallpapers, and switched to the silver theme (like any xp user would've done back then). I may or may not install the unofficial SP4 and unironically try to do some web browsing. Mostly though I'm going to just use it for older games.

While I still don't have my DB-15 to VGA adapter in, I at least managed to get this baby up to the point of giving me a happy little chime.

All it took was a complete recap of the logic board and power supply, and swapping out the slot RAM for some spares I have of currently unknown size. I will be booting it tomorrow in the sketchiest of ways, using a separate computer's PSU to give power to the HDD so I can see if there's anything on there/if it even works. After that, I sit and wait until I can get a SCSI2SD and maybe even a floppyemu if It's worth it, and figure out if there's a fan that will actually work.

Played around with cache on my Spring Circle SF586 board last night. There's just about no documentation out there on the board. Through trial an error I managed to figure out how to set cache jumpers for 256kB and 512kB (with 16x 256k chips). Now I tried the same with a pile of 512kb (64kx8) chips off eBay. Kept the same 32kx8 tag, as that should be enough up to 2MB. Frustrating time...

- chips are clearly relabeled, all have exactly the same (to the last character) codes on the top suggesting UMC 15ns, but codes and indeed manufacturer vary on the bottom. I've been able to identify some as Allied Semiconductor 15ns SRAM chips, so specs do seem correct on those at least.
- legs are the worst I've ever encountered. DIPs are fiddly at the best of times, but out of 16 sockets I need to fill I've had three chips with legs breaking off entirely and several more where they just fold up instead of pushing into the socket...
- once I managed to get 16 chips with all their legs into the sockets, the board started misbehaving badly.

With unchanged jumper settings I'd expect cache to show up as 512kB, and it does - but system RAM is reported as 640k only, no extended RAM over 1MB. Unsurprisingly, OS also fails to boot in that state. Fiddling with jumpers alternated between 512kB and system RAM missing, or actually refusing to boot (I'm assuming I found the 2MB setting for 1024kb chips there...). So best guess is that multiple chips, including at least one in the first bank of 8, are dead, specced too low for the system or simply not what they were sold as. Having multiple unknowns here (both board settings and chips) isn't helping, so this evening I'm returning the board to 512kB of known-good 256kb chips, and moving on to a different board that I do have documentation for to test the cache chips - if I can remove them safely and get them in there without breaking all their weak little legs.

Shot a video of my whole collection + plans and whatnot.

Changed my NEC dock setup to include the Words+ and copied the Words+ Applications to the NEC Versa M/75's 80GB HDD. I'm going to be using the Voice Synth a bit more since the success of it's first outing on Wednesday.

Been working on my Amiga 2500 mostly. Replaced the pico-fuse so now I have mouse function again. Still trying to figure out the problem I have with this system not being stable with a TF534, but something else happened which I think has been a major Aha! moment. Recently 1.5MB of fast ram vanishes from the total amount of ram I have in the system. It doesn't matter which combination of RAM I put into the machine TF534, 8Up Ram Board, or 2091 HD controller, they all lose 1.5MB of ram.

When I look at sysinfo I can see the correct amount of ram on those boards but I also see some additional unrecognizable devices which show phantom ram that doesn't exist. So I recently ordered an ACE2 chipram expander to replace Fat Agnus with. It 's my belief and hope that Agnus is going bad and replacing it will not only give me 2MB of Chipram but also solve my stability problems. If it's not Agnus than it could be Gary which serves as the BUS master, which if my Agnus replacement doesn't work will be the next target. It's possible that its not a fault with any chip and the problem is somewhere on the board itself but I'm hoping not.

I should also mention this system use to run stable with the default 68000 CPU installed but now that exhibits the same problems as the TF534 as well as the new disappearing ram issue, so I think the 030 just exposed an issue which has since gotten worse. Wish me luck!

If anyone has any theories let me know...

Some more playing around with CD-ROM on my Amiga 1200 today.

A rather inelegant setup, but it works (gonna replace the ATX PSU with a more suitable 5V/12V Molex DC adapter):

Had some issues with IDEFix 97, so uninstalled and reinstalled. Reconfigured and it's all working properly now, including Audio CD playback functionality.

Then I installed CDBoot to the internal CF card, to automatically boot from any inserted CD in the drive upon power up or reset. Which lets me automatically boot into most CDTV & CD32 games. Found 1 game so far that didn't like to boot this way - Trivial Pursuit CD32 Edition, so I used the IDEFix "CD32 Emulator" boot floppy disk for that game instead, where simply setting the language to English rather than "Auto" seems to get it working, weird!

So I've been playing some CD32 & CDTV games to test it all out. Currently missing CD Audio tracks, as I need to use a drive with a headphone jack to output it, which I'll hopefully be doing this weekend when I pull one out of storage.

For a laugh, been playing the Commodore CDTV game - The Town With No Name. 🤣

I have done some re-arrangement of my monitor setup. I have found the best solution and combination for getting a Commodore64 onto a modern display. My solution is a RetroTink 2X Mini and a Samsung MultiSync T22A300 television. For Amiga, I have my Dell 2001FP, that do accept 15khz signal, however is awesomme when using one of the RGBtoHDMI adaptors and a HDMI-DVI cable. And the Dell is a great monitor for vintage PC's as well. I have it running with a box, that prevents any monitor to go into sleep mode. Something that I have had issues with, when dealing with really old ISA VGA cards. Yup, even a few VLB and PCI cards as well. Anyway.... I can now use my setup for old 8bit computers, Amiga's and Dos computers. This entire setup, is the result of 6 years of fine tuning and testing tons of different adaptors, converters, upscalers and monitors. And I have my wonderfull Logitech speakers on the side of the monitors as well..... I will hang on to my other LCD monitors, and my trusty old Dennon CRT television. Just in case I need stuff for testing and repair.

Today I tried to get a cheap new ATX Power supply from Amazon.de (TooQ TQEP-500SSE) that claimed to offer 5v @ 30amp.

However, I had no luck with my P2B-S, P3 T-Celeron 1300Mhz /w an NVIDIA 5900XT, 5v dropped to 4.6v and
would trip the NVIDIA voltage sentinel in the Win98SE driver. Even tried bridging 5v from spare pins on the ATX20+4 connector,
but no luck, I guess it must be the cross regulation or just a bullshit spec!

Does work OK with a much smaller & fan-less NVIDIA FX 5200.

As this system is mostly for DOS games at the moment (specifically, a new to me FCS/WCS/TCS & the DOS/V version of Strike Commander), quieter is better!

Today I made some further tweaks to my Amiga 1200 CD-ROM setup.

Modified/cut/spliced an analog audio line out cable (the type you'd otherwise use internally to a PC sound card) to attach phono plugs to 1 end, allowing the CD Audio to output much neater from the back of the now-external IDE drive and thus not requiring a drive with a headphone socket. I just need to get a cheap external mixer, to more properly mix the Amiga + CD Audio sounds, as I don't want to be modding anything internally on the Amiga.

Also removed the CDBoot software and installed Surf Squirrel instead - it's CDTV/CD32 emulation is much better than both CDBoot & IDEFix's CD32 emulator. Now I can just put a CDTV/CD32 disc into the drive and boot/reboot the Amiga straight into the game, with full CD Audio support. Took a lot of web searching & forum reading to figure this all out, but well worth it.

More importantly, since the reinstall of IDEFix + proper configuration, when the DVD drive is switched off and/or disconnected I don't get any errors or notifications in Workbench. This is great, as I won't necessarily always want the drive permanently connected!

I've decided to stick with an IDE DVD-ROM drive, simply because I currently have a bunch of spare DVD-RW discs that I'm finding extremely useful for transferring files between PC & Amiga. Transfer the files, erase and reuse. 😎

More goodies came in today!

First an Atari 520 ST. I gave it a good scrubbing inside and out because fucking yikes, the keyboard was disgusting when it arrived. Now it looks nearly mint, minus 2 missing plungers on the numpad.

Next up, this nice Soyo VLB board. Soyo was suppose to be good quality I think? The seller claimed to have re soldered a new barrel battery into the socket. Looks fresh to me but probably should still be removed.

Finally, I took apart my only AT case to give the inners a fresh paint job and protect against more rust. Not the most even or tidy paintjob, but it's not gonna be seen once it's back inside the case anyway. It does its job.

I gotta find some good beige paint and do the same to my PC98ce2 because, god, that one is disgusting with all the rust 🙁

I have this CT4520 AWE64 ISA sound card that was giving me headaches for the past few days. After recapping it (noticed bad, uneven sound) it was behaving erratic.
I tried three different systems, two different OSs, and several various driver versions, but it did not work.
Finally today, I took a good look at it, especially around the main chip, and noticed some gunk, perhaps conductive, in between couple of pins - IPA cleaned it well.
After that, I noticed several loose pins, so fixed those, plugged it in and now it works!
PCM and MIDI sounds, and all...I am properly happy that I managed to fix it (fix a problem that obviously I caused at some time in the past) 😁

assasincz wrote on 2021-02-06, 23:22:

I have this CT4520 AWE64 ISA sound card that was giving me headaches for the past few days. After recapping it (noticed bad, une […]
Show full quote

I have this CT4520 AWE64 ISA sound card that was giving me headaches for the past few days. After recapping it (noticed bad, uneven sound) it was behaving erratic.
I tried three different systems, two different OSs, and several various driver versions, but it did not work.
Finally today, I took a good look at it, especially around the main chip, and noticed some gunk, perhaps conductive, in between couple of pins - IPA cleaned it well.
After that, I noticed several loose pins, so fixed those, plugged it in and now it works!
PCM and MIDI sounds, and all...I am properly happy that I managed to fix it (fix a problem that obviously I caused at some time in the past) 😁

awe.jpg

Nice job! I've found that bent or damaged legs on chips like those are the most common cause of issues with non-working devices I from the 90s.

Tested my Jetway 3/486 board after replacing the rotten IC socket and Transceiver and it doesn't POST or beep. My POST card shows that there's no 3.3V and no IRDY or acts erratic at times. Is it because of the missing 3.3V that the system won't turn on? Continuity checks out and erratic traces were patched with 30 AWG wire.

I completely disassembled my MDD G4 earlier so that I could clean up the plastic a bit, and I was forced to remove the motherboard to do so. Because of this, I had an incentive to clean the crap out of the rest of the system and to re-paste both CPUs, which ended up giving me both 10 less degrees while running geekbench, but also some slightly higher scores.

dionb wrote on 2021-02-05, 15:16:

Played around with cache on my Spring Circle SF586 board last night. There's just about no documentation out there on the board. […]
Show full quote

Played around with cache on my Spring Circle SF586 board last night. There's just about no documentation out there on the board. Through trial an error I managed to figure out how to set cache jumpers for 256kB and 512kB (with 16x 256k chips). Now I tried the same with a pile of 512kb (64kx8) chips off eBay. Kept the same 32kx8 tag, as that should be enough up to 2MB. Frustrating time...

- chips are clearly relabeled, all have exactly the same (to the last character) codes on the top suggesting UMC 15ns, but codes and indeed manufacturer vary on the bottom. I've been able to identify some as Allied Semiconductor 15ns SRAM chips, so specs do seem correct on those at least.
- legs are the worst I've ever encountered. DIPs are fiddly at the best of times, but out of 16 sockets I need to fill I've had three chips with legs breaking off entirely and several more where they just fold up instead of pushing into the socket...
- once I managed to get 16 chips with all their legs into the sockets, the board started misbehaving badly.

With unchanged jumper settings I'd expect cache to show up as 512kB, and it does - but system RAM is reported as 640k only, no extended RAM over 1MB. Unsurprisingly, OS also fails to boot in that state. Fiddling with jumpers alternated between 512kB and system RAM missing, or actually refusing to boot (I'm assuming I found the 2MB setting for 1024kb chips there...). So best guess is that multiple chips, including at least one in the first bank of 8, are dead, specced too low for the system or simply not what they were sold as. Having multiple unknowns here (both board settings and chips) isn't helping, so this evening I'm returning the board to 512kB of known-good 256kb chips, and moving on to a different board that I do have documentation for to test the cache chips - if I can remove them safely and get them in there without breaking all their weak little legs.

Turns out the chips are actually good, I just missed one more broken-off pin. I was planning on ripping out the 512kb chips, but as luck would have it, the first one I pulled was the bad one. Replaced it with a spare. Broke a pin on that too - these pins are __BAAAD__ - but managed it with the second spare. And hey presto, 1024kB cache working.

Now having BIOS fun. Am building a SCSI system around this board (with a huge AHA-2840A VLB SCSI adapter of course), but if I try to add an IDE drive (eg a CF card to transfer files), everything goes to pot - the SCSI BIOS sets the SCSI drive to D:, so the system tries to boot from CF (only A:/C: options), but worse, the SCSI drive doesn't show up even if you stick in a bootable CF card. Even worse: for some reason the SCSI drive won't boot after this happened, even if you remove the IDE drive. It only recovers after booting from floppy and doing fdisk -mbr. Oddly, it doesn't show this behaviour on an AHA-2940AU - but I still can't get IDE and SCSI drive accessible at the same time.

Reason for going SCSI was because of 2GB IDE BIOS limit, am now reconsidering the choice. Then again, that AHA-2840A needs a system like this. Probably will give up on CF, see if I can get SCSI stable on the 2840A, then just transfer files over network - just hope that packet drivers for the 3Com PCI card fit on a (Gotek) floppy (image)...

Is sorting a ton of old Lego’s retro enough? My neighbor’s son had some 25-30 year old stuff lying around. I have seen knight and pirate figures. There is are also castle and soccer stadium parts. Which is nice because I didn’t have much of that kind of stuff before.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2021-02-08, 08:07:

Is sorting a ton of old Lego’s retro enough? My neighbor’s son had some 25-30 year old stuff lying around. I have seen knight and pirate figures. There is are also castle and soccer stadium parts. Which is nice because I didn’t have much of that kind of stuff before.

Knight and Pirate stuff must have been after my youth - all of my Lego sets (this would have been very early 80's) were the original Space sets; with the grey lunar base plates. Went straight from Space Lego to Lego Technic.

Think I still have a bucket of the original stuff somewhere....

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-02-08, 08:27:

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2021-02-08, 08:07:

Is sorting a ton of old Lego’s retro enough? My neighbor’s son had some 25-30 year old stuff lying around. I have seen knight and pirate figures. There is are also castle and soccer stadium parts. Which is nice because I didn’t have much of that kind of stuff before.

Knight and Pirate stuff must have been after my youth - all of my Lego sets (this would have been very early 80's) were the original Space sets; with the grey lunar base plates. Went straight from Space Lego to Lego Technic.

Think I still have a bucket of the original stuff somewhere....

Ooh, do tell? I have a ton of old Lego space sets!