Unboxed, booted, troubleshot, and played with my eBay 486. No rehersing, f**K it we're doing it live. I think it went decently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNLR7bIt-GQ

The format is what it is , my first time going live with a 720p webcam taped to my hot air return. But I'm excited to release something after almost a year. 😁

I had 8 people at peak, even a question! More than what I was expecting at 12:30AM on a work night.

I recently bought a 19 older games in bundle. Most of them are scratched. I don't know what people do to their disks. They use them as drink coasters after they finished gaming?
All the games I bought brand new still look like they've never been in a drive after 15 or 20 years while buying used ones, regardless of the price, they all come in horrible condition. Except those I order from Japan. They know how to look after their stuff.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-03-16, 11:05:

I recently bought a 19 older games in bundle. Most of them are scratched. I don't know what people do to their disks. They use them as drink coasters after they finished gaming?

I tested some on my P4 build.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted - This was the reason I picked up the whole bundle. A little scratched up, but after a little cleaning it installs and plays without issues. It's an EA Classics release, I'd prefer the earlier 4CD version, but this is a rare game to find as is.

GTA: San Andreas - Not particularly a fan of this entry, but having an offline playable non-updated version of a classic game is always nice. This was in the worst condition. Very scratched and there is a crack in the middle. It installs, but I'll super glue it otherwise I'd be far too concerned about putting it in faster drives. Maybe I'll pick another one in better condition later.

Mass Effect - An early version in decent condition. I already own one so I'll probably just sell it.

GTA IV - Alright condition with the manual and poster included, but as far as I know it can't install and play offline. It would be sort-of nice if optimization wasn't abysmal.

Star Wars: X-Wing Collectors Series - Didn't really care, but I lack games from before 1995 so I accept it. It's one of the better ones regarding it's condition.

The Settlers: Heritage of Kings - Also just some random game I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. It has a reading error on disc-2. Maybe I'll give it another chance after some cleaning.

Games I haven't tested, but looks to be in decent condition:

True Crime: Streets of LA - All I know about it that it's a fairly early GTA clone from around the time of Vice City and San Andreas.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent - I don't really care about entries of the series released after Chaos Theory.

Split/Second: Velocity and Legendary - I have a soft spot for these and I'm not unhappy about having them.

Demigod - Some kind of early MOBA according to Wikipedia. Never heard of it, but the box looks good.

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper - I assume it's some adventure game. Maybe I'll try it when I have nothing better to do.

King of the Road - I've always seen this on a sale when I was a teen. Sometimes played with the thought of buying it, but there was no hype around it so I just skipped.

Spider-Man 3 - I vaguely remember this game either being one of the better or one of the worse Spider-Man games.

Paraworld - Also never heard of it. Seems to be some German RTS. Back then when it released I was really into the genre, I don't know how It went under my radar.

GTI Racing - Looks like a commercial-game ordered by VW. Probably mediocre like these normally are.

Spore: Creepy & Cute - I don't have the base game. Funny thing, probably the previous owner didn't have either. This is the only game in the bundle in genuinely flawless condition.

Splinter Cell - The first episode, no reason to waste time on it. Only disc-3 in the box and I already own a copy.

Overspeed - Looks like an Eastern European Need for Speed knock-off released by the infamous City Interactive. I had the misfortune of playing some of its kin (RPM Tuning and Road to Fame). I don't know if I just bin it or what.

psychz wrote on 2021-03-15, 11:54:

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

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:

Nice...
I saw the post on Reddit. It is an awesomme machine now. Congrats.

My new toy are finally working as new. I have had the systemboard to recap and there are now new organic polymer caps on it and then I bought a new keyboard membrane. I am still missing a new floppy drive, so I have borrowed the drive that are normally in my Amiga600 for testing. It ran perfect through every test in the program called Systest, and then I played half an hour of Cannon Fodder in AGA resolution. Works perfect. I have so far payed some 123 euro for membrane and recap and the machine it self was bought for 200 euro. The good thing, is that there will be no more leaking caps, and the machine will stop working the day one chip gives up and not because of leaking caps.

My plans for this machine in the future, is to get some kind of accelerator with around 32 or 64 megabyte of ram. Possible up to 128, however that seems like overkill. I just want an 68030 and FPU on this machine. Then upgrade the Kickstart to 3.1.4. I will need a scandoubler of some sort, internally that is. And then have one of those angled IDE-CF adaptors that have an 44pin IDE connector on it, for running a slave drive. The machine will be used for a writing tool, playing around with pictures, listening to MOD files and be an ADF to Floppy writing machine. No WHD-Loader, as I will be installing a Gotek solution. The ADF writing will be done on an external drive. I almost forgot to mention, that I will be getting one of those new cases that are being produced. Then retrobrighting will only be keycaps. That makes it all a bit easier, than having to deal with a full case.

Got some parts ready for my standalone Greaseweazle micro-tower.

Is 2005 retro activity enough?

I was reminded of a shooting game i made myself on 2005, when i was 14 years old. The webpage is in Estonian, but it's easy enough to navigate: https://webzone.ee/mispos/
The game file was renamed and download didn't work, but i was able to recover my password to that ugly free hosting that is still working and restore everything to work in order again.

Quite a nostalgia.

This game was written in GameMaker 5.3A. Whoever cares enough, then you can decompile this game from exe back to gmk and open it in GameMaker 5.3A. 😜

GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-03-16, 21:48:

Is 2005 retro activity enough?

It is retro for you, if you have personal nostagic attachments to hardware from that year. For me, it will never be, as computers were something i build for a living, and never used for fun. I think I only used computers for email, reading news and home banking in 2005. Besides building between 12 and 15 WinXP machines each day that year. (plus repair and taking all phone and email support in that company). To be honest, I was fed up with computers when I became a mailman in 2006. I did not want to play Windows games or anything like that, before around 2009 when I saw Minecraft for the first time.

EDIT:
I did play computer games in 2005.... I had an Amiga1200 with 68030 that I played games on, once every second or third month.

Toshiba Portege 7220CTe, 650Mhz versus the Thinkpad T21, 850Mhz - the Portege has the ESS Maestro 2e with Sensaura support in UT’99. The Thinkpad has the Crystal CS4264. Both are 440 chipset machines, Coppermine based with 8MB S3 SavageIX GPUs, which is okay for DirectX 6 but hopeless for later API revisions. Difference when running at 1024x768x32 in S3 MeTal mode? 2 FPS.
The 7220 CTe is also a bit larger than originally assumed, nearly the size of an Evo n600c or Retina MBP13 while undocked.

Note: on the S3 SavageIX, stick to 800x600x16bpp and Direct3D for playable frame rates.

Got the Thinkpad 240 running off a 30w USB-PD power bank. It doesn’t draw enough power to be a danger to the electronics onboard. Having the ability to play games again while mobile? Definitely worth the hassle.

Detailed my Compaq Portable 1 system some more by using baking soda and soapy water to rid of the stains (most of them, will need a magic eraser to rid of the other stains) and fixed a few more keys since they took a few presses to get them to work.

Not quite today, but last week I finally built up the courage to desolder the CPU socket from my (completely working) ECS P6S5AT motherboard.
The retention "noses" on one side of the socket had broken off because the seller had decided to ship the board with a heavy copper cooler still mounted... Replacing the socket seemed to be the only viable option for a permanent repair.

First I removed as much solder as possible with my desoldering station and a hand desoldering pump, then heated up the board with a hot air gun until I could finally remove the socket. Seems that the board has survived the whole procedure without physical damage.
I then bought a pair of new sockets on eBay US, because I couldn't find any other seller in the world that still had 370-pin sockets in stock. The sockets themselves were inexpensive, but shipping included they cost me almost 20€.
Fingers crossed that soldering the new socket in place works just as well.

While I was at it, I thought it might look cool to replace the white PCI slots with black ones, but I haven't been able to find a part number, let alone a store where I could buy them. Salvaging from dead motherboards would probably work, but I don't have any with black slots at hand. (Edit: Sullins RBB60DHRN-S578, but they are 14€ a piece)

Finished up the NEC Versa laptops last night, now all are working. The only future plans are power supplies, hard drives, bags, and other boring stuff. I MAY do a project where I modify the battery to utilize USB LiIon batteries like those you plug into your phone - the charge output looks to be, per digital multimeter, almost 100% dead on. Definatley something for me to look at.

Did electronics wizardry to the M/75 and upgraded the screen from a 640x480 to 800x600. The input board in the screen hinge cover had an unpopulated SMD resistor place above one of the IC's that is present in my Versa P/75, so I copied that with regular resistors - it's a 1.5K Ohm - and BINGO, the N.O.S. 800x600 panel came right up nice and bright. The backlight was a little "yellow" so I put in the backlight from the dead NL6448AC30-09 and it's really nice now. I still kept the other CCFL backlights from my other dead/damaged screens so if I need one, I've got plenty of spares on hand, at least 4.

The 40EC was put back together with the 16MB card I bought 3 years ago and it's original NL6448AC30-06 screen. Booted right up and it's happy now. So now all four work, have working screens, setup HDD, and I have one working battery ATM....maybe two since I plan to try the USB pack experiment on the 40EC (that one has always been my guinea pig).

Picked up the dual processor card with 8 slot memory for a Proliant 1500 and would not boot with that card. Swapped back to working processor card then upgraded the bios firmware using E12 version 1998 version and tried again, now working great!

Cheers,

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-03-16, 19:54:

Overspeed - Looks like an Eastern European Need for Speed knock-off released by the infamous City Interactive. I had the misfortune of playing some of its kin (RPM Tuning and Road to Fame). I don't know if I just bin it or what.

Bin it? I hear you can use it as a drinks coaster 😀

Ahhh how nice to figure out completely on this Proliant 1500! The documentation pdf online is wrong for dip switches. Luckily the configuration disk set has diagram of dip switch and fixed it.

And some head scratching on 1611 fan error because I knew about this, decades ago I picked up the compaq fan which is pre-tach signal era, which is same way as dell's 3 pin fan design which is pull low for good, floating high - failed fan. Signal pin is pulled low through the fan. If there's problem with fan, motherboard internal 5v pull up comes to 5V and give error error. Missed the correct fan connector that gave signal error. Once I figured out and made a test plug with 10 ohm resistor for safety pulls the error signal low on correct fan connector.

Finally Proliant 1500 configured correctly, booted DOS 6.22 without touching the keyboard. 😀

Yay!

Details:
onboard scsi disabled, onboard video disabled (GD5420 512K) and EISA not in use.
Cirrus Logic GD5430 2MB PCI video card.
Bootable firm ware on a 3ware SATA 4 port PCI-X card using one port of four, and a Samsung 160GB SATA.
Dual processor processor card, one Pentium CPU installed at 133MHz.

Note: If anyone have Proliant 1500 or 1500R not working with dual processor card, update the ROMpaq firmware to E12 first.

Also another modified single processor card using Pentium 200 also working as well.

Cheers,

creepingnet wrote on 2021-03-17, 16:00:

Finished up the NEC Versa laptops last night, now all are working. The only future plans are power supplies, hard drives, bags, and other boring stuff. I MAY do a project where I modify the battery to utilize USB LiIon batteries like those you plug into your phone - the charge output looks to be, per digital multimeter, almost 100% dead on. Definatley something for me to look at.

Did electronics wizardry to the M/75 and upgraded the screen from a 640x480 to 800x600. The input board in the screen hinge cover had an unpopulated SMD resistor place above one of the IC's that is present in my Versa P/75, so I copied that with regular resistors - it's a 1.5K Ohm - and BINGO, the N.O.S. 800x600 panel came right up nice and bright. The backlight was a little "yellow" so I put in the backlight from the dead NL6448AC30-09 and it's really nice now. I still kept the other CCFL backlights from my other dead/damaged screens so if I need one, I've got plenty of spares on hand, at least 4.

The 40EC was put back together with the 16MB card I bought 3 years ago and it's original NL6448AC30-06 screen. Booted right up and it's happy now. So now all four work, have working screens, setup HDD, and I have one working battery ATM....maybe two since I plan to try the USB pack experiment on the 40EC (that one has always been my guinea pig).

That is amazing.

Which sound card does the M/75 have? I'm eyeing on one on eBay (cannot post the link since it's an active auction) and it's in great shape for its age.

The last few nights I've been wrestling with trying to get an Intel D845 motherboard / Pentium 4 2.4ghz / Geforce 4 / Vortex 2 system up and running to build a fairly fast W98 PC but the main focus is DOS gaming at high resolutions in software render. Build games, Descent in high res, Quake, Terminator Future Shock, System Shock, Nascar/IndyCar, Screamer etc.

At first on Monday night I couldn't get anything to POST - I moved the Pentium 4 chip and put it in another S478 board and got no POST on that either. I found a guy selling 18 different clocked P4 chips on facebook a suburb away so I went around Tuesday night and got another 2.4ghz P4 off him as well as a 2.6ghz Celeron just for laughs. Straightened up the pins, set it all up and then we had action.

Still a few more issues I faced - couldn't get any AGP card to load drivers, the PCI video card I tested would only output black and white at 320x200 resolution (wtf?) but give full color in Windows. I tested out duke3d and blood at 640x480, framerates were really good. The Vortex 2's soundblaster pro compatibility was working great as well as the dreamblaster x2. Progress!

I wasn't too happy about the black and white output so I had another go at everything last night and found the culprit - a 1GB ddr stick of ram (i thought it was 2x 512 not 2x1gb that came with the board!). I swapped it out for 2x256mb and then immediately the GF4 booted up into windows and drivers installed perfectly. Bingo! It's weird that the PCI cards still worked even with 1GB of RAM. This is the first time I've run into the 512mb limit wall of w9x.

Tested out a bunch more games and performance is looking great. I think I need a lot less RAM tho because I was getting weird memory related crashes when trying to start System Shock (Cd version or normal version). I want to do some benchmarking tonight to compare with the other PC i've been using for dos games (P2 400).

Anyone aware of the max HDD size for this motherboard? 845 chipset, ICH4.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-03-17, 22:06:

creepingnet wrote on 2021-03-17, 16:00:

Finished up the NEC Versa laptops last night, now all are working. The only future plans are power supplies, hard drives, bags, and other boring stuff. I MAY do a project where I modify the battery to utilize USB LiIon batteries like those you plug into your phone - the charge output looks to be, per digital multimeter, almost 100% dead on. Definatley something for me to look at.

Did electronics wizardry to the M/75 and upgraded the screen from a 640x480 to 800x600. The input board in the screen hinge cover had an unpopulated SMD resistor place above one of the IC's that is present in my Versa P/75, so I copied that with regular resistors - it's a 1.5K Ohm - and BINGO, the N.O.S. 800x600 panel came right up nice and bright. The backlight was a little "yellow" so I put in the backlight from the dead NL6448AC30-09 and it's really nice now. I still kept the other CCFL backlights from my other dead/damaged screens so if I need one, I've got plenty of spares on hand, at least 4.

The 40EC was put back together with the 16MB card I bought 3 years ago and it's original NL6448AC30-06 screen. Booted right up and it's happy now. So now all four work, have working screens, setup HDD, and I have one working battery ATM....maybe two since I plan to try the USB pack experiment on the 40EC (that one has always been my guinea pig).

That is amazing.

Which sound card does the M/75 have? I'm eyeing on one on eBay (cannot post the link since it's an active auction) and it's in great shape for its age.

The NEC Versa M/75 has a Crystal CS-4231-KQ WSS Compatible chipset and no OPL/MIDI. It can emulate digital audio SoundBlaster in games compatible with WSS or via Windows using SB Emulation Layer/Windows Sound System SB Emulation.

Man, I was hoping for an ES688F and a YMF-262M. On the plus side, I have an EXP CD-ROM + SoundNote that I can install on the system.

Haven't posted anything in awhile, did some minor stuff today for a few different computers.

First up, I had the itch to build a late 2004 system floating around in the back of my mind, with early Socket 775 and first gen PCIe.

While doing some extensive physical media backups (scans and CD/Floppy dumps) in the last couple of weeks, I re-discovered the advertisement inserts inside the original World of Warcraft Collector's Edition box, singing the virtues of the well-loved Pentium 4, the cherished Intel 925X Chipset platform, and absolutely adored Nvidia 6000 Series cards. So I thought "hey, why not just build a system using whatever these advertisements tell me to?"

Got my hands on some good parts for it - Asus P5AD2 Premium (as seen in the Maximum PC Dream PC 2004) complete with all accessories, a Pentium 4 640 that I permanently borrowed from some Dell office machine will eventually replaced with a P4 560 or 570 when I can get one at a good price, 2GB of 533MHz DDR2 that I had laying around, an Audigy2 ZS Platinum for sound, an Antec P160W for the chassis, two NOS 2008-dated 250GB SATA HDDs, and a Corsair RM550X for power. There's also a Thermaltake Pipe 101 CPU cooler that I'm not going to install until I get the right CPU.

For the graphics I wanted a 6800GT PCIe since 6800 Ultra is unrealistically priced and scarce. It turned out that the 6800 GT PCIe aren't easy or cheap to come by either, since people are asking 6800 AGP prices for the PCIe cards. I compromised and picked up a Quadro FX 3450 for next to nothing - they're cheaper than no-brand S3 ViRGE cards these days which I can't complain about. Building for a period that is not in fashion at all has its upsides after all!

It is equivalent to a 6800GS, and performs near identical to a 6800GT at stock. It overclocks like a beast too, but I'm only keeping minor overclocking on it. If I can get some more cheap ones I will push it a bit further. Seems like the perfect stop-gap card until I find the real deal at a price I'd be willing to pay.

However, the Quadro fan shroud was bothering me even though I couldn't see it. The mere presence of that ugly, plastic, cheap black corporate soul-sucking, fun destroying shroud was ruining my uber l33t 2004 gamer rig.

To remedy this I ordered some new old stock Nvidia Reference design 6800 fan & accompanying shrouds (feat. Nalu) to put onto the Quadro.

I know it's still a Quadro as etched onto the chip, but just having "6 Series" on the shroud instead of the Quadro logo makes me feel better until I can get the real thing. With RivaTuner & some BIOS modding, the cosmetic appearance both physically and in-software is there.

I went ahead and set up XP Pro SP2 without issues, installed all the drivers and went back to the good ol' days of community modded ForceWare drivers. I figured it's right in the perfect hardware time period to play with them once again. After tossing up between DriverHeaven Zer0point, Omega and NGO, I settled on the DH drivers for now.

A few more important pieces of software later - SpeedFan, X-Setup, NVHardPage, some era appropriate games and other miscellaneous tweaks, the system is ready to go. There's no cable management done yet since I want to wait for everything to be finalised other than the GPU - so two more hard drives, a non-Noctua rear fan, the CPU and so forth before I go to the effort as it'd all have to be undone to add any of those after the fact.

Secondly, some minor work on the long-neglected ABIT TH7II-RAID.

While ordering the aforementioned 6 Series shroud & fan, I picked up some Socket 478 retention clips to mount my old Australian Made Silverprop socket 478 CPU water block to the board (I've been hunting this for about 10 years and finally got one about 6 months ago!), so I installed that today. Luckily it was spot on and it holds very securely! I still have to recap the board and do a whole lot of other stuff, but it's a very low priority project. Baby steps.

Finally, some blank EPROMs for XTIDE BIOS for my main project at the moment. Only verified they work and aren't fake. Was able to successfully blank check, write to one and read it back, so it's all good!

Picked a 27C128 series to use the larger version with menus and whatnot after padding.