Acquired this beauty yesterday.

Gabriel-LG wrote on 2021-02-20, 20:19:

Hail to the king, baby :D GoldenOrb1.png […]
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Hail to the king, baby 😁
GoldenOrb1.png

I never thought I'd find a Golden Orb, let alone NOS. I am so happy 😀
GoldenOrb2.png

On a side note, I always thought that the Titan Majesty-IV was a Golden Orb rip-off (I was happy to find one nonetheless). However, before installing, I saw that it has Thermaltake stamped on the heatsink... It just makes me wonder why.

I have the same cooler in a box. Didn't realise I had the sought after Golden Orb, as have so many unstarted projects that I hadn't opened the box.

yawetaG wrote on 2021-02-21, 10:38:

CMB75 wrote on 2021-02-20, 11:10:

Edit: This one came a little late to the party. It was loosely packed in an envelope... welcome test candidate 1 for 50MHz FSB.

CPU-486DX50.jpg

Don't expect much stability or being able to run 3 VLB cards at once...

I don’t. I’ve got two VLB cards certified and tested working at 50Mhz and I don’t need more than those two cards. Known to work without wait states. The only culprit could be the mainboard as I’m not in possession of an Superboard VLB... but I have a generic Opti895 coming my way.

Almost the setup I had in ‘93.

Got these today for $20. Green one is dead, but the gold one has passed all tests.

Bancho wrote on 2021-02-19, 21:09:

Wolfus wrote on 2021-02-19, 18:48:

Bancho wrote on 2021-02-17, 10:16:

Picked up a very cheap boxed Boss DR-330 "Dr.Synth" midi module with manual today. Battery had started to leak but I removed it and there is no damage. Unit works great

Any chance you bought it from Austria? Along with Roland keys?

No, I bought this off UK eBay.

I was overran by somebody few days ago. Anyway, how do you like DR-330?

crvs wrote on 2021-02-21, 17:48:

Got these today for $20. Green one is dead, but the gold one has passed all tests.

The green one may only work in the pc chips m919 motherboard. IIRC pcchips liked to use non-standard pinouts for some of the COAST slots on their motherboards.

ODwilly wrote on 2021-02-22, 07:04:

crvs wrote on 2021-02-21, 17:48:

Got these today for $20. Green one is dead, but the gold one has passed all tests.

The green one may only work in the pc chips m919 motherboard. IIRC pcchips liked to use non-standard pinouts for some of the COAST slots on their motherboards.

They are both for m919. That's all the fun 😀

dulu wrote on 2021-02-20, 23:06:

In which place? I had titan orb but didn`t notice thermaltake logo.

debs3759 wrote on 2021-02-21, 12:46:

I have the same cooler in a box. Didn't realise I had the sought after Golden Orb, as have so many unstarted projects that I hadn't opened the box.

It is on the front, on the motherboard side. When the CPU is installed the inscription cannot be seen:

Back in the day, I discovered one of low quality memory SIMMs had open vias.

You might want to check your non-working pc-chips M919 modules for this.

Cheers,

Just won an auction for an Atari 800XL. I'm more excited about that than anything I've bought in a long time.
I never had an Atari computer as a kid but I think it would have been perfect, and I've been admiring them for years.
Finally I took the plunge and bought one. It doesn't come with a PSU, and then I'll find out if it's faulty in any other way, but I think it won't be too hard to get going.

I have taken to scrapping thrift store PCs when looking for optical drives as its much cheaper than ordering them off eBay. First one I scrapped was a beat up P4 Dell circa 2003. Only useful things I got out of it were the DVD drive and some slow DDR 266 RAM. The motherboard had bulging caps, the CD drive was extremely slow and loud, and the GPU was a dirty Matrox G400 that I couldn't get a signal out of on a working machine (3.3v agp maybe?)

Yesterday I scrapped an Athlon 64 HP circa 2005 in much better condition. This has an interesting motherboard, the Asus K8S-LA, which is a SiS 760 board that looks very similar to the K8S-MX. Paired with an Athlon 64 3300+, it makes for a very speedy but compatible Win 98 machine! Funny enough, the CD drive on this system worked, but the DVD drive was busted. It was also missing RAM and had no external GPU, but obviously I had some RAM lying around, and the thrift store had a FX 5200 in a MX440 box for a couple bucks. I now have a second fully functional Athlon 64 system xD. Not sure what I'll do with it other than use it as a part/software tester (although that in itself will be nice to keep my primary Athlon 64 FX build pristine). I will probably rehome it in a new case as I absolutely HATE the fat plasticky bezel look of those mid 00s OEM systems.

Bought the following from TexElec's site:

1) Foam contact pads for the Compaq Portable
2) CF-IDE adapter

From eBay (screenshot):
1) 360KB internal FDD for writing 360KB diskettes
2) 256MB industrial CF card for the Compaq Portable
3) CT1350B w/ the CMS upgrade and comes with manuals and diskettes (for a Sound Blaster Pro and others)

draetheus wrote on 2021-02-22, 23:39:

I have taken to scrapping thrift store PCs when looking for optical drives as its much cheaper than ordering them off eBay. First one I scrapped was a beat up P4 Dell circa 2003. Only useful things I got out of it were the DVD drive and some slow DDR 266 RAM. The motherboard had bulging caps, the CD drive was extremely slow and loud, and the GPU was a dirty Matrox G400 that I couldn't get a signal out of on a working machine (3.3v agp maybe?)

I've had issues back in the days with both G400 as well as G100 where card's BIOS has been corrupted. It didn't show any picture while in text mode, but as soon as it booted into Windows, it worked fine, including running 3dmark etc. Both could be fixed using an automated BIOS flashing floppy. Might be worth a shot?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2021-02-23, 04:16:

draetheus wrote on 2021-02-22, 23:39:

I have taken to scrapping thrift store PCs when looking for optical drives as its much cheaper than ordering them off eBay. First one I scrapped was a beat up P4 Dell circa 2003. Only useful things I got out of it were the DVD drive and some slow DDR 266 RAM. The motherboard had bulging caps, the CD drive was extremely slow and loud, and the GPU was a dirty Matrox G400 that I couldn't get a signal out of on a working machine (3.3v agp maybe?)

I've had issues back in the days with both G400 as well as G100 where card's BIOS has been corrupted. It didn't show any picture while in text mode, but as soon as it booted into Windows, it worked fine, including running 3dmark etc. Both could be fixed using an automated BIOS flashing floppy. Might be worth a shot?

Interesting, I'll give it a try with windows preinstalled and see if that works.

I was never one to seek out boxed hardware, but I couldn't pass up this opportunity.

Cirrus Logic CL GD5434 2MB ISA VGA card, manufactured in 1998... manufactured for who exactly, I have no idea! Can't imagine there was much of a demand for high performance video on the ISA bus at that point.

When I got it it was 100% brand new, unused, aside from the box being opened and a little beat up. The card and books are pristine. One of the disks looked a little warped but thankfully all three of them were able to be read, so I made raw disk images of them with rawwrite. The images are attached below. Feel free to upload them to the vogons library. 😀

I'm looking forward to doing a mass benchmarking of ISA and VLB cards, now that I finally have a CL GD5434 to cover the top end of ISA. This one will almost certainly take the crown in most benchmarks, though I imagine the ISA bus is the bottleneck in 90% of them. I'd like to run benchmarks in DOS, 3.11 and Windows 95 to get the full spectrum of performance and GUI acceleration. Not sure what board and CPU I'll use just yet. Some kind of fast 586 or overdrive most likely. Maybe both in some benchmarks... or a 386 just for kicks? 😀

I bought a NOS MS basic optical mouse in box,

a NOS Orchid Fahrenheit 64 VLB and

a generic 486 VLB mainboard with the Opti 895 chipset. I found several brands selling mainboards with an identical layout. Maybe the BIOS string will point me to the actual make.

It's a Jetway J-403TG VLB.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-02-23, 09:53:

It's a Jetway J-403TG VLB.

It probably is. Thanks.

Love it or hate it. It's a matter of taste. Shipping was a killer but all in all for such a rare and unique case I was happy to get it for what i paid.

Feast your eyes on the Asus Vento 3600, a rare and beautiful case from circa 2005.

Spotted this Asus Geforce 4 Ti4400 for £9 Shipped so snapped it up. It arrived in a thin Jiffy envelope and no anti-static bag, the bracket was bent and the cooler was hanging off! I thought it was doomed but it cleaned up really well and works great. Put it through a good few runs of 3DMark 2000SE without a hitch.