That Boiler PC is pretty Fallout.

I'm making really slow progress toward documenting my collection, but it is progress. I'll get pictures of the new shelves later (my new Mobo is arriving Tuesday, and my backup XPS 8700 has flaky USB, which is not uncommon with Dells of that era).

I will get everything "old" documented before integrating the last Liqmat Haul, which is still boxed (just not in the shipped boxes), so I still have the option of doing an "unboxing" video, which will be easier with more space cleared.

The 3D Printed brackets and posterboard for shelves worked really well. I got the amount of plastic in the brackets down about 40% from the first attempt, which speeds up printing time (and extends my supply). I designed a cutter for the posterboard to speed that up, too.

The various cards fit well on the shelves, each section has one row for larger, more modern video cards, and the CPU trays I designed fit in the slots along with video, sound, controller, and other cards. I have a project started to design holders for RAM that fit in the slots, but I won't print anything for that until I've checked to see if there's anything I can buy cheap that will do just as well. I can easily design shelf sections with other sizes, the current set were designed just for expansion cards.

I need to clear enough space to move my 3D printer across the room, I *might* get that done today or not, and I need to set up a better "disposal" box for truly broken stuff as I continue sorting.

No progress on Av11 today, my thinker is deturboed with the L1 and L2 turned off.

Ppl been saying to me, "What you want for organizing your vintage PC stuff is a good old fashioned card file.." ... so I thunk, alright, I'll give it a go...

Now the first page seems okay and all but I think it's just gonna get too bulky... 😉

Caluser2000 wrote on 2021-07-11, 21:12:

fosterwj03 wrote on 2021-07-11, 18:27:

I finally got around to making a floppy-less installation CD for Windows NT 3.1 (for IDE/ATAPI optical drives) using these instructions:

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28570

The CD boots on real IDE/ATAPI hardware, but the ATAPI driver I'm using in the CD's boot sector doesn't like having two optical drives on the same channel during the text-mode phase of setup. Once I unplugged the slave drive, the installation went through as usual. Now I have a way of performing a Windows NT 3.1 clean install using the installation CD-ROM start to finish.

Thank you for sharing that link. Must give it a shot sometime....😉

No problem. A word of advice: the ATAPI drivers I've found for NT 3.1 don't work with SATA controllers (in IDE compatible mode) or SATA optical drives (even using a SATA to IDE adapter). They also don't work with any ATAPI device other than optical drives on the same channel (i.e. hard drives, tape drives, zip drives, etc.). Worst case, though, is that the driver just fails to load.

Good luck.

Today I tracked down a driver for the EDIMAX EN2000PXA ISA NIC for what I am calling "The Albatross" 386 build!
..and configured an old router to create the "old net" network at the house for all retro things.

CelGen wrote on 2021-07-11, 22:20:

Finished installing a remotely accessible DOS machine, dubbed the BoilerPC. Runs Carbon Copy Plus and hides behind the boilers in a 100 year old building. Spent the last month and a half just trying to find the appropriate furniture to match it with.

For a Good time, modem dial Extension 708. 😉

Looks pretty badass, but ... why??
Doesn't seem to be the best environment for preserving vintage hardware. Dust, dirt, maybe moisture, etc.? Do you plan to keep it there long-term or is it just a temporary setup?

I don't think there will be much moisture with those furnaces running..😉

If there natural gas,propane, or oil they produce a ton of water vapor while there runing

CelGen wrote on 2021-07-11, 22:20:

Finished installing a remotely accessible DOS machine, dubbed the BoilerPC. Runs Carbon Copy Plus and hides behind the boilers in a 100 year old building. Spent the last month and a half just trying to find the appropriate furniture to match it with.

For a Good time, modem dial Extension 708. 😉

Carbon Copy!! Wow I forgot all about that remote access software! We used it all the time in my old job in the 1990's - we'd dial up to a PC on the floor above ours to remotely check on something (the remote PC was a CC:Mail gateway and some sort of mainframe connection gateway... used PC3270 or 5250 emulation and dialled up to something I can't quite remember - EDI something or other)

I made a video of my IBM PS/2 Model 70 restoration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRNL7kthiO0

Setting up DOS 7 mode on my Compaq armada KQ5 runs with sound and mouse. need to investigate the best sound settings...

The K6-2 400 Linux box cage came out quite well...😉

CelGen wrote on 2021-07-11, 22:20:

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/a166/ballsandy/CGS_10662.JPG […]
Show full quote

It's like a screenshot of some fps / open world game, I feel compelled to save game there!

Damn! DamndamndamndamndamndamnDAMN! Got some major monitor suckery going on. So I was testing a load of PII/III boards and wondering why not one came to life, and how come the POST codes all seemed to translate to errors that should be shown on screen, no KB, no boot device, POST finished, without getting anything on screen for any of them... my 19" seemed to be "lighting" in that the backlight came on, but screen still black... when vid activated, but nothing else. So now I think to sanity check the monitor, Thinkpad 400 to 19", no signal...hmmm but it's got a linux running and unsure it's handling the hardware 100% right... Armada 1750... win98 detects the monitor, and it turns it on to backlight lit when monitor is enabled/disabled, but stays black... gah... I think this monitor is buggered. So try the eMachine/Acer 17" which is sitting there, try to wake it up first on the power button from orange standby (should go green) it goes off, and stays off, I cannot get it to come back again. FINE.. IBM E72 CRT, click, click on the switch, appears dead... I am only 90% sure it's plugged in, trouble is I've got the entire mess of what I'm working on in the way of double checking all the monitor connections.

Backstory though, there was a power outage, brief blip at 6:20ish AM EST Monday... the surge protector that those monitors are plugged into popped, but nothing else in the house seemed affected, apart from clocks on appliances resetting. I dunno if I had a big surge that killed them, a little surge that the breaker saved them but then the CRT discharging into the power bar killed the LCDs... or whether the CRT suddenly decided to brick itself, nuking the LCDs and glitching power in the whole house, blowing the surge and causing the whole incident. I'm gonna leave them all unplugged for a few days, maybe they got their digital brains scrambled and one or two of them work again.

Anyway, seems like I wasted the whole of yesterday on board testing without the monitor being functional (Worked fine a week ago)

Needed some new felt filters for my antique Unger desoldering gun.

Only place I could find anything that looked like they might work was like $10 for 5 little pieces of felt.

Got to thinking about it and decided to try making my own filters out of felt strips from a chalkboard eraser.

Went to Hobby Lobby and picked up a $1.99 eraser.

Out of 1 strip I can make about 18 filters. The eraser has 4 strips that are wide enough to make the filters. I probably won't have to buy any more filter material for as long as this desoldering gun lasts.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-13, 18:48:

Damn! DamndamndamndamndamndamnDAMN! Got some major monitor suckery going on....

Bummer. We have also had a lot of thunder storm in Sweden. Now that I'm on vacation (with my Compaq armada 1750), I pulled the cord to my retro machines. I don't trust those small lightning guard things you put on sockets, after speaking to an electrician a long time ago.

Hope the screens start to behave again after a time out. 😜

Mounted the front fascia to cleaned up chassis cage of my K6-2 400 Linux box. Fitted a DVD r/w drive and combo 3.5" fdd/card reader scalped from a horrible plastic case multi media system that had serious cracks and other damage to it.

Just checking on the springs/hinge of a Psion Revo Plus I got last week and glad I did - the battery is not in a good way! I also have lots of tiny bits of plastic I'm not sure how to glue back in place...

Just ordered two AAA with solder tabs to repair this.

Yah, dis what I wanted to see.... AV11 recap project alive, PCChips M717 alive, 2 outa 4 ain't bad, the others I dunno what's going on throw different codes all the time. Gonna try a different PSU on them in case they seriously object to not having -5V or something. Might be hope for 19" monitor, there's a problem with the cable, where it was I just had to yoink it, and swap another in.

Spent today working on my 286, beginning to set it up as a proper EGA-era gaming machine (albeit with a VGA graphics card).

I added a 2nd hard drive - a 104MB IDE HDD to compliment the 213MB IDE HDD already installed. Hey, I've had these puny working drives sitting in a box unloved, might as well use them. 🤣

The setup isn't ideal at the moment, the BIOS is pretty limited and so I was using the Ontrack DDO to get around the HDD size limitations. Ideally XTIDE would be preferable for this task, but it means I'd have to reinstall DOS and set everything back up - so this is a project for a later date. For now, I'll stick with Ontrack and just have to deal with Ontrack's RAM usage.

finally got those glued on heatsinks off my Pentium 166 and Pentium MMX 166.