the_ultra_code wrote on 2021-06-30, 16:50:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-06-29, 23:38:

Watching the demo of Kiloblaster in DosBox on my P200mmx linux box..😉

What distro of Linux is that?

Devuan Jessie...

I solved the problems I had on the 386DX-40, the first was very simple to solve, missing the Turbo switch I put a jumper on the jumpers, the PC now goes to 40MHz (while before it went to 20) and also the RAM count has sped up.
Unfortunately I was unable to get the 128MB CF from SanDisk (put in place of HD) to work, other CF cards work, currently not having a similar capacity I used an 8MB from Canon, installing DOS 4.01 and if I can also Win1 .03 (free space permitting).
I loaded everything through some 1.44MB floppies, the one of DOS 4.01 I had made as a backup of the PC almost 30 years ago, fortunately it is still readable, unfortunately I cannot find those of DOS 3.3, but I think they were on 5.25 floppies which unfortunately I do not have anymore.
I also loaded a couple of DOS programs and utilities, with the latter I did some bench as you can see from the images, the results I think are normal considering that the PC is not yet configured at best, unfortunately I lost a sheet where I had written the settings optimal for the BIOS (voice by voice), there are not many options, but for example there should be the one that shows the MHz of the CPU when the BIOS starts, and others that maybe can speed up the results of the bench by a few tenths of a point .

Starting to run tests on the V/50's 27 year old battery. My experiment is to let the battery fully charge, then run it down entirely, and see if I can get increased runtimes by running several charge cycles on it. Right now I'm up to 7 minutes, which is more than the 2-3min since I gave the old NiMH Battery the shock treatment 2 days ago.

I also might try this on the two old Versa M75/P75 packs that I have too. I'll just pull the old "Smart Module" since it seems the battery application from BTTR software I'm using crashes on my VErsa M and Versa P when I try to run a status on it.

Heck, I might end up with all 4 mobile by the end of the summer if things keep going like this.....patio DOOM Tourniment!

Awesome job resurrecting those old batteries. Are you planning to recell them in the future?

Panel beating some dents out of my old win98 box PC300GL cover made by me when I was a bit clumsy.

Unfortunately that happens more often these day...😉

Fixed my non-booting SGI Indigo 2 workstation. It has been in storage since about 2010 and yesterday was the first time I powered it on since then (it has a dedicated place to live under my workbench now).

Unfortunately it wouldn't boot and I got loads of SCSI timeouts and the video subsystem take ages and ages to come up - the screen would stay blank for more than 5 minutes!

Turns out the cable on the disk sled had been catching on the slot it is inserted into and had finally frayed.

Fortunately I had a second disk sled and swapped the drives over:

I actually wrote my final year undergraduate project on this very machine in the late 90's, so I'm glad it was 'just' something trivial to resolve.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-06-30, 21:46:

Awesome job resurrecting those old batteries. Are you planning to recell them in the future?

Thx, and yes, I'll probably be putting new cells in them in the future, esp those that don't pan out. Newer NiMH Cells are way better than the old ones and tend to pack quite a bit more wallop and life than the older cells from the 90's do. I think that HiCharge battery my M/75 uses is a much newer battery because all I had to do was hit it with 20vdc and it was giving me ife between 30 min to 2 hours per charge when I started using it after that. It's also 4400 mAH instead of 3400 mAH. This is also the battery that has me thinking about using some of those more oddball battery sites online because it looks exactly like the battery in those pictures. Seems to be a pretty decent quality product.

So you're increasing the capacity at the same time, you must be a value added re-celler.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-06-30, 11:55:

ODwilly wrote on 2021-06-30, 04:30:

Here are a couple pictures of the "retrofitted" Dimension 4600 Phenom ii sleeper build. WIP

Glad that fitted okay. Some Dells of the P4 era have their PSUs too close to the usual PS/2 keyboard socket position so regular mATX boards won't fit by a few mm.

Unfortunately I had a larger than standard 750watt Dell PSU I got for free that was supposedly "working with a noisy fan". Nope the noise was the PSU screaming in dead agony.
So. . . . I cut the back out an inch below the PSU to fit the PSU in before testing the Dell PSU. Lesson learned. The good news is without the little shelf blocking the bottom of the PSU airflow is much better with a modern standard ATX PSU.

I decided to increase the screen resolution on the P200mmx. X --configure had put in the wrong video driver Mach64. I knew my Xandros 3 OCR hdd was better so copied it's xorg.conf file to a usb stick so I could compare to compare the Xandros xorg.conf with the Davuan Jessie xorg.conf with theP200mmx and this one. Once I'd ID the problem I edit the driver from "Mach64" to "ati" saved it and rebooted the P200mmx. It booted up slim, logged in to XFCE4, opened the menu then select Settings-Display I could select 1024x768 and the display change the resolution/size and ask if this was OK. I selected yes and it saved the settings.

Wow! Xwindows is difficult to set up..😉

ODwilly wrote on 2021-07-01, 02:16:

Unfortunately I had a larger than standard 750watt Dell PSU I got for free that was supposedly "working with a noisy fan". Nope the noise was the PSU screaming in dead agony.
So. . . . I cut the back out an inch below the PSU to fit the PSU in before testing the Dell PSU. Lesson learned. The good news is without the little shelf blocking the bottom of the PSU airflow is much better with a modern standard ATX PSU.

Gah, ah well, as long as you got it how you like it now... Just been thinking about the dell case banished to a corner though, if I stuck in a micro ATX PSU, dangling from the top two holes, it should clear a standard board then, not sure if I have a crossmember/shelf to chop too, been a few years since I was in there. I believe I had a fairly grunty micro I was using as a testing PSU a while back, because it wasn't needed anywhere "normal". It's a 5 volter though, so maybe an Athlon board.

Well, kinda modern, but kinda vintage. Got my Paypal squared away after having to fight with them for TWO YEARS. So that means I can get back to selling things again via e-bay. Which may include rebuilt laptops and vintage computers at some point.

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-05-20, 06:47:

At work we have a really old system for which we don't have manager PC for years (even before I started there).
Now we want to replace that old system with a modern one, but we want to look into it to see if there is anything left that wasn't migrated to other systems.
In one of our storage rooms I found an old Siemens Nixdorf D6 PC. No RAM, dead hard drive, but otherwise seems to work. I fixed it up a little and started installing Windows 98 SE for the management software. Then in the middle of that the optical drive suddenly developed a mechanical issue and I ended up with a drive that can't stay shut and a corrupted Windows installation. I didn't have my retro-fix-up tools at hand so I guess I know what retro activity will I get up to tomorrow.

At the end it didn't really work out. I'll work on it later, but today I dug up the storage rooms again and found a Dell E1 (almost exactly like this) with a Celeron 333, 32MB RAM and an integrated Ati Rage with 2MB SGRAM. It seems to be more cooperative so far. Probably the Siemens has some hardware issues. It was pretty beaten when I found it.

Received a Kung Fu Flash cartridge for my Commodore 64 today, so I've been playing around with that for most of the day. Loading up a bunch of .CRT & .PRG files to a microSD card and testing stuff out. This is quite a nice cartridge and a good price too.

I already have an EasyFlash 3 cartridge, but the Kung Fu Flash makes loading CRT files so much easier and quicker. I'll keep the EasyFlash 3 around for JiffyDOS + my Pi1541 and use the Kung Fu Flash primarily for running CRT & PRG. I know the KFF has limited D64/D81 etc support, but I don't really need that when I have the Pi1541 which runs pretty much all of those perfectly.

Today was my last day of work and now I have 3 weeks of vacation.
First step: removing the home office workplace to make room for a CRT on the desk 😁

vad4r wrote on 2021-07-02, 18:46:

Today was my last day of work and now I have 3 weeks of vacation.
First step: removing the home office workplace to make room for a CRT on the desk 😁

That is a retro activity in more than one way! I hope you'll have a nice vacation, I have week left of pretending to be productive. 😉

Found a stack of freeware/shareware CDs I got bundled with a Compaq AIO P75 system a decade or so back. Thought I'd put the contents in the /DOS directory I use a the C: drive in DosBox on my P200mmx Linux box and have a gander at the software:

Recorded the Duke3d intro on my BTC 1859 with ESS Wavetable synth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNfitJhl74Y&a … nel=LJRRetroPCs

Here it is on my SW60XG for comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNCXYg0tf5U&a … nel=LJRRetroPCs

Joakim wrote on 2021-07-02, 18:52:

vad4r wrote on 2021-07-02, 18:46:

Today was my last day of work and now I have 3 weeks of vacation.
First step: removing the home office workplace to make room for a CRT on the desk 😁

That is a retro activity in more than one way! I hope you'll have a nice vacation, I have week left of pretending to be productive. 😉

That is great ! Don't get vacations since my Dad died in 2017, was 88 and promised to take care of my mom before he went so all my vacation and weekend time is fulfilling that promise. Wish he was still here !

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-02, 19:52:

Found a stack of freeware/shareware CDs I got bundled with a Compaq AIO P75 system a decade or so back. Thought I'd put the contents in the /DOS directory I use a the C: drive in DosBox on my P200mmx Linux box and have a gander at the software:

Nice ! I have a bunch of old Shareware and Bundled software would like to do the with.

Horun wrote on 2021-07-03, 01:02:

That is great ! Don't get vacations since my Dad died in 2017, was 88 and promised to take care of my mom before he went so all my vacation and weekend time is fulfilling that promise. Wish he was still here !

That's sad. Just in case you weren't aware, stuff like this exists.... https://www.silvertraveladvisor.com/blog/acce … ty-requirements where some provide full service with carers so you could send her off on a break while you go somewhere else, or there's some that give cut rates for carers, so you could go with her and at least get out of the house. Or there's a sort of roll your own option, since you can get senior residences that take people for a week or two respite care, either use one near home and go away, or make arrangement with one near a destination you can drive to, and you take a hotel or camp or whatever, and take her out for the day a few times and do your own thing the rest.