Klaatu wrote on 2021-03-13, 11:50:

Just cleaned up and plasticoted an old chassis (feel free to flame away!)
Spent some time in the old 98 fdisk util - ah the nostalgia and excitement 😀 , installed 98/xp, and spent the rest of day rebooting and poking around in control panel/bios trying to get the thing working properly !#$@!

That looks good. I want to do that to my PS/1000 😁

I got this today-

Now waiting on the two Cyrix DX2/66s and the 486 I bought off eBay to do the mass-comparison (from SX-25 through to 5x86 133) 😁

Edit- I also did some in-car retrobrighting as it was super windy and this little part was going to blow away. My wife asked me what attacked her when she moved from a red light up hill 🤣.

Found this board in my bookshelf like a year ago and got to testing it just now. It's a Chaintech 486SPM with support for 128MB ram and 1MB cache.

It was however completely dead, so I went over it with a magnifying glass. It seems someone has replaced the 85C496chip. And behind the legs under the chip I could spy solderbridges. So a bunch of flux and hotair later its up and running. Very nice board. 😀

And earlier today I welded up the last critical rustdamage on this thing.

First time out on the road in over 10 years. And first wash too.

Vegge wrote on 2021-03-14, 01:47:

Found this board in my bookshelf like a year ago and got to testing it just now. It's a Chaintech 486SPM with support for 128MB […]
Show full quote

Found this board in my bookshelf like a year ago and got to testing it just now. It's a Chaintech 486SPM with support for 128MB ram and 1MB cache.
IMG_6464s.jpg
It was however completely dead, so I went over it with a magnifying glass. It seems someone has replaced the 85C496chip. And behind the legs under the chip I could spy solderbridges. So a bunch of flux and hotair later its up and running. Very nice board. 😀

And earlier today I welded up the last critical rustdamage on this thing.
IMG_6463s.jpg
First time out on the road in over 10 years. And first wash too.

I'm getting ready to take out two classics myself in the late spring. One will need a fuel tank flush, cleaned lines, and probably a carburettor (the one on it is shot) or perhaps a rebuild. One hasn't been legally driven in over 10 years, so I'm excited to bring it back after a full restoration (and a much more powerful engine 😀 )

I also got a eMachines Monster PIII 500 almost completely set up - the CDRW needs a band on the ejector motor and some drivers need loading on 98SE and she'll be ready for sale.

Today I had a bit of a clear out of dead motherboards and I'm now down to one 478, one 775, one 939, one FM2, one 386 and one 486, one VIA ITX thing, one 1156 (which gives me blue screens at stock clocks), one 1155. OK that sounds like quite a lot but I now have loads of space for more retro stuff!

I also completely changed my "retro station" so that it now has a 19" DVI + VGA screen instead of 17" VGA only. I can now have two PCs and I've got the VIA ITX with a SB Live on DOS and early Windows 98 duties and an FM2 7860K PC on Everything Else duties. They share a wireless USB keyboard but have a wired mouse each as I couldn't get Cutemouse to recognise the wireless mouse.

Jed118 wrote on 2021-03-14, 05:16:

Vegge wrote on 2021-03-14, 01:47:

Found this board in my bookshelf like a year ago and got to testing it just now. It's a Chaintech 486SPM with support for 128MB […]
Show full quote

Found this board in my bookshelf like a year ago and got to testing it just now. It's a Chaintech 486SPM with support for 128MB ram and 1MB cache.
IMG_6464s.jpg
It was however completely dead, so I went over it with a magnifying glass. It seems someone has replaced the 85C496chip. And behind the legs under the chip I could spy solderbridges. So a bunch of flux and hotair later its up and running. Very nice board. 😀

And earlier today I welded up the last critical rustdamage on this thing.
IMG_6463s.jpg
First time out on the road in over 10 years. And first wash too.

I'm getting ready to take out two classics myself in the late spring. One will need a fuel tank flush, cleaned lines, and probably a carburettor (the one on it is shot) or perhaps a rebuild. One hasn't been legally driven in over 10 years, so I'm excited to bring it back after a full restoration (and a much more powerful engine 😀 )

I also got a eMachines Monster PIII 500 almost completely set up - the CDRW needs a band on the ejector motor and some drivers need loading on 98SE and she'll be ready for sale.

This is meant to be a winterdriven daily. My other classics are only used during the dry months. More engine is always fun, but also a curse, you'll always want more 😁

Jed118 wrote on 2021-03-13, 21:26:

That looks good. I want to do that to my PS/1000 :D […]
Show full quote

Klaatu wrote on 2021-03-13, 11:50:

Just cleaned up and plasticoted an old chassis (feel free to flame away!)
Spent some time in the old 98 fdisk util - ah the nostalgia and excitement 😀 , installed 98/xp, and spent the rest of day rebooting and poking around in control panel/bios trying to get the thing working properly !#$@!

That looks good. I want to do that to my PS/1000 😁

I got this today-

Now waiting on the two Cyrix DX2/66s and the 486 I bought off eBay to do the mass-comparison (from SX-25 through to 5x86 133) 😁

Edit- I also did some in-car retrobrighting as it was super windy and this little part was going to blow away. My wife asked me what attacked her when she moved from a red light up hill 🤣.

Thanks! it's just plasticote from rattle can... cant believe how smooth it went on. I wouldn't use any other spray brand for that.

Chassis had quite a bit of corrosion so just brushed off, treated and sprayed. Might be a bit delicate but pleased with results!

Nice cpu man brings back memories... I had 386dx for 1st pc back in the day! I take it you have a board for that to drop into?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-03-13, 13:44:

Klaatu wrote on 2021-03-13, 11:50:

Just cleaned up and plasticoted an old chassis (feel free to flame away!)
Spent some time in the old 98 fdisk util - ah the nostalgia and excitement 😀 , installed 98/xp, and spent the rest of day rebooting and poking around in control panel/bios trying to get the thing working properly !#$@!

That case came out great. You got a really nice and smooth finish with the plastidip.

Thanks! Not sure it's the done thing really but chassis was pretty corroded and has missing side panel so not much to loose.

I'm now thinking about getting piece of acrylic cut to fit and maybe making some trim out of sheet metal... a bit tricky but hopefully will come up with something!

Found a couple of old bits in my stash...

P5 sx950 66mhz and some wierd old risc based hp processor board with 3x gold topped procs on it. A nice bit of bling but Ive nothing to plug them into!

I've been spending the last few days rebuilding one of my systems.
I've had a Pentium 233MMX running, with Windows 95 on it, but seeing as I feel it overlaps a bit too much with my K6-3 500 with Windows 98se, I've taken the whole thing apart.
The current configuration is K5 100MHz, a CPU I never really knew about back when it was relevant, 32MB RAM, 3GB HDD, Matrox Millennium II and a very nice Guillemot Maxi Sound 64 Home Studio.
It was really the sound card that was the main purpose of this system, as well as being a fast MS-DOS/Windows for Workgroups 3.11 system, as this sound card has the Dream SAM9407 chip, meaning it's capable of running the hardware accelerated version of Mod4win and play back modules with nearly 0 CPU load. I remember reading a review in around '96 or '97 of the Terratec EWS64, where they pointed out that I could play modules with no CPU load, and since I was into the tracker scene back then, I thought this sounded like a totally awesome feature, and it's something I've wanted to try out ever since. It's been really good fun testing it out.

Decided to add little bit bling to my MT-32 Pi project.
My attempt to put LCD bleeding light into good use. Well it's more like POC atm.
"Artsy" free hand exacto knife work it is indeed 😁
Original:

"improved"

I have two GTX570's here and want to do something with them.

So I spent an awful lot of time today researching what I would need to run them in SLI - just for fun.
Turns out that the official way is getting an nForce motherboard, but the chipsets are supposed to be buggy garbage and running very hot.

So I've settled on getting an X38 motherboard (because they have two PCIe x16 slots) and using FreeSLI to hack Nvidia's drivers.
This will be an interesting project for next month. Let's hope it actually works.

schmatzler wrote on 2021-03-14, 18:13:

I have two GTX570's here and want to do something with them. […]
Show full quote

I have two GTX570's here and want to do something with them.

So I spent an awful lot of time today researching what I would need to run them in SLI - just for fun.
Turns out that the official way is getting an nForce motherboard, but the chipsets are supposed to be buggy garbage and running very hot.

So I've settled on getting an X38 motherboard (because they have two PCIe x16 slots) and using FreeSLI to hack Nvidia's drivers.
This will be an interesting project for next month. Let's hope it actually works.

You should be able to run 2 cards in SLI on pretty much any board with two x16 slots without having to hack the drivers. nForce might be recommended because it's an NVidia chipset, but it certainly isn't needed.

schmatzler wrote on 2021-03-14, 18:13:

I have two GTX570's here and want to do something with them. […]
Show full quote

I have two GTX570's here and want to do something with them.

So I spent an awful lot of time today researching what I would need to run them in SLI - just for fun.
Turns out that the official way is getting an nForce motherboard, but the chipsets are supposed to be buggy garbage and running very hot.

So I've settled on getting an X38 motherboard (because they have two PCIe x16 slots) and using FreeSLI to hack Nvidia's drivers.
This will be an interesting project for next month. Let's hope it actually works.

You can get a nforce 680i or a nforce 7 series quite cheap and they're great platforms. My daily driver system is a EVGA Nforce 680i based system and it's been solid since 07. My wife's computer is based on the same motherboard and it's been solid as well. The earlier chipsets were touchy.

Vegge wrote on 2021-03-14, 11:59:

This is meant to be a winterdriven daily. My other classics are only used during the dry months. More engine is always fun, but also a curse, you'll always want more 😁

Oh I know, last January, I drove 1400KM round trip to get a 4G63 DOHC engine that I someday plan on making into a 2.3L 4G64 hybrid stroker that runs on 2x DCOE carbs 😁. It's still on the shop floor, right were I left it 14 months ago 😉

Klaatu wrote on 2021-03-14, 12:16:

Nice cpu man brings back memories... I had 386dx for 1st pc back in the day! I take it you have a board for that to drop into?

I have one coming from eBay, and another AST I'm waiting on the cache to be fixed before I pick it up. It'll probably go into one of those, as they're both 33 MHz systems

I've been throwing a lot of old graphics card at my PC setup.
Bench marking them and playing some old games.
Got scared about the state some of them are in. My Geforce 256 apparently has a lot of ghosting on screen and some artifacts when running in D3d.
My Viper V770 Ultra's fan is about to die, making a hellish rattling and squeaking sound.
The 256 was giving some driver errors after some benchmarks and after that, when I went to the Nvidia control panel, the text disappeared everywhere I pointed my mouse cursor. Panic shutdown.
I was surprised about how well the VD3 3000 performed against the V4 4500 (about the same or even better).
Noted the results in a nice Excel sheet which I will fully post on this forum somewhere when I am finished.
Graphics cards: VD1, Banshee, VD2 and SLI, VD3 3000, VD4 4500, VD5 5500, TNT2 M64 16 and 32MB, TNT2 Ultra, Geforce 256, Intel I740 and more to find out (Some matrox cards etc.)

badmojo wrote on 2021-03-13, 10:33:

Amazing and happy making, but where is the Midi General??

Opposite corner...

Jed118 wrote on 2021-03-13, 14:12:

How much power does all that draw?

With everything in the entire room powered-on (including the Tandy setup against the back wall that isn't represented in the recent photos), the draw is just under 12 amps.

I got EISA configured on my HINT CAESAR. So far it booted from a floppy with a C:\ (unbootable - no system files on it from the outset) mounted by way of an SCSI2SD card. I can see the drive and run progs off it. There's more work to be done, inquiring about an EISA video card now for the build, and then benchmarking. And DX2/66 upgrade.

DataExpert EISA/VLB info & utils needed

As the final step of these posts, and after recapping the motherboard and fitting a few more parts, I closed the A500's box.

This rev.6a now has:

• Gotek with keirf's awesome FlashFloppy firmware
• Vampire 500 V2+ on a CPU relocator (so that I could fit a...)
• Individual Computers ACE2b 2MB chip ram expansion
• ECS Hires Denise
• 512KB memory expansion w/ RTC
• SD-to-IDE as a hard drive
• New 50W power supply
• ENC28J60 ethernet module

I also got a Roadshow licence (it's a great TCP stack with DHCP, even though there are other free or abandonware alternatives) and an external floppy drive adapter to write ADFs back to floppy, for my other Amigas. A cheap HDMI/SCART-to-HDMI upscaler handles the video output of both Denise and Vampire for now, and I still use the tank mouse until a matching beige PS/2 mouse is found, to use with a DB9 adapter. The ACE2b has an NTSC Agnus, but TUDE in startup-sequence handles this. The rev. 5 mentioned in the first post was upgraded with the 1MB Agnus removed from the above setup, and fitted with an ACA500+. It's near-stock compatibility-wise, and the ACA is detachable at any time as it connects to the left-side expansion port, but has IDE, Action Replay and provides an easy way to boot any Kickstart and toggle between 512KB/1MB chip ram.

So this Amiga is now closed. Very excited to have a WHDLoad-capable A500 with not only IDE but also 2MB chip, LAN and RTG! The next steps are to repair the rev5's keyboard, finish recapping the A1200 and fit it with 3.1 ROMs, maybe maintain their original PSUs too and get a housing for the ACA500+. I plan to keep these two near-stock, if not for some quality-of-life improvements.

Photos of the expanded A500 follow:

Today I fixed an i430VX S.7 MB, it is a 586-IV2 with 512KB L2 cache.
I replaced a TIP110A, and CR2032 battery.
To test it I put a Pentium 166MMX CPU, then I put a 200MHz one.
I have 2 DIMMs of 32MB each, so I have 64MB in total.
As VGA I put a 2MB S3Trio64V2 / DX, HD Conner CFS1275A of about 1.3GB, where Win95 and Plus! Are installed.
In the next few days I will add an ISA sound card, and do some benching.