Yeah, lots of empty space, it's how it goes when you mix an AT board with an ATX case.
Even rebuilding a computer feels like building a "brand new" one, thats for sure.
I also got a ps/2 port that i could use instead of the 9-pin serial port i have, but the pinout on the cable and on the motherboard is different. I want to change the pinout, but i'm not sure what's the easiest way to do it.
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
If you can see little silver bits on the sides of the motherboard connector, those are the latches that hold the pins into it, which if you push on with a jewelers screwdriver, or similar, will allow you to pull them out. Then you can put them back in different holes.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
The last owner knew this very well, so it got equipped with a 3DFX Voodoo2, a card I've been looking for for a while now, and a Sound Blaster 32 CT3670 ISA Sound Card, not the greatest but still, it's a Creative card! 😁
Other than these it has a Pentium II 300mhz processor, an S3 Trio64V2/DX video card, a Compaq SCSI controller card (yes, this machine has 2 4gb scsi drives), a usb card which i've installed for the comfort of copying files and drivers to the system.
It had some screwed up bios problems which I was able to solve with creating a Compaq BIOS diskette, then using it to set the machine's RAM properly. It only showed 16mb's instead of 64. Let's hope the battery is not dead, or it will be a PAIN to replace it since it is soldered to the board. 😒
But man, feels good to have such a nice machine. 😀
Last edited by Czeky on 2021-12-15, 07:48. Edited 1 time in total.
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
What is an AT only Io shield? Is it to use at motherboards in ATX cases? (I did not know they existed.)
Yes. They're very hard to find though. I managed to find one in a job lot of 10 I/O shields on eBay after searching through literally thousands of listings.
The "ATX Form Card" (with the USB and PS/2 mouse port) is also pretty hard to come by.
Indeed, a really awesome card to have in this Pentium II Compaq. 😀
After screwing around with the USB card I've plopped in, I've managed to install every driver, and thankfully all the cards are working, but I'll be removing the USB card because Windows 95 is not really happy with it, and just going to use some rewritable CD's. I just wanted to try if it is possible to use USB on 95, and it is somewhat.
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
Yes. They're very hard to find though. I managed to find one in a job lot of 10 I/O shields on eBay after searching through literally thousands of listings.
NOW that's clean. 😊
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
By the way, I'm wondering if I can use an IDE hard drive with the machine, because if I can, I won't use the SCSI drives. They are old and also a bit slow. But gonna keep them because they are rarities.
Nice, I do like the Compaq business range. good quality and a bit different.
Don't really know the Prosignia range myself. Only ever got as far as the DeskPro's myself.
Can't see why you cant use IDE. Other searches have people using a standard IDE drive.
I have best luck with adapters that have the Master/Slave jumper.
Although for a PC this "new" I prefer the IDE to SATA adapter route if you don't have any old IDE drives spare.
This is the first Prosignia line computer I've owned, and I have learned some about it while discovering it (not really online, its really obscure there as I saw).
I'm really fond of Compaq's, my first computer was a Deskpro 2000 with a Pentium MMX 233 processor and Windows 98. Good times.
Well yeah, figured the same, but who knows what does the BIOS or the motherboard hold secretly that might prevent me from using IDE Hard Drives. Anyway, I'll definitely going to try it.
I'd go with an SD to IDE adapter, really handy and makes file copying a lot easier, and makes the machine a bit more silent.
Until I get one, I'll be using the SCSI drives just to have a bit of fun with them. 🙂
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
Tried it and after setting it up with the BIOS floppy it worked flawlessly.
Used a 160gb samsung IDE drive that i like to use for tests, while it was not been able to get the proper size (only detected 8gb), it was able to boot from it, so yeah, next thing to get is an SD2IDE adapter and an 8gb SD card.
And i also removed the scsi card and scsi drives, made a lot of conflicts with other cards, so it needed to go. Hopefully everything will be fine with the other cards.
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
Minor update:
While I still did not find any IDE hard drive, I have determined that the s3 trio64 it had has some graphical glitches, and no, it has no additional vram, so that's out of the question.
So I've bought an S3 Virge, which while is not suitable for 3D games, it is awesome for DOS games and GUI stuff.
Since i have no HDD i've tested the s3 with Damn Small Linux, which can be run from a cd. And thankfully it worked, and also noticed that the motherboard has a LAN connector, which I've mistaken for a Modem connector. That being said, I've connected my LAN cable to the computer and voilá, Google on a Pentium II system:
I thought finding a replacement would be impossible, but no, Ebay had one up for sale, bought it before someone else did.
Since I dont have the skill to replace the caps at the momment, this is the best thing i could do. If I'll start to get into capacitor types and getting better at soldering, i might repair this board.
The more I look at this machine's guts, the more issues I find, but hopefully this is all the issues it has. Might make a video about this machine after it works the way it should, and document all the things I did to it.
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
I have returned! 😀
Decided to start building a nice 486 machine, but I also wanted to make it pretty unique in that regard. The main goal was to get parts that are a little bit off from the standard, but still legit.
So I've got some parts recently, dont have every part yet, but the ones I've got I think are pretty good for a start.
First up, the CPU is a Cyrix DX2 66Mhz CPU with IBM Blue Lightning branding (couldn't pass this one after I've saw it 😀 ). I believe 66Mhz will be plenty for my 486 needs.
The videocard is quite a good one, at least from what I've read here, this is a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 with VLB support, I originally wanted to go with an S3, but after research I've decided to just go with a better card. It's pretty long, I gotta say. 😁
And the last item I got is the case, a pretty standard era appropiate 486 case, has some minor yellowing on the front (its on the sun for a week now), and a little bump on the left side of the case.
Pretty satisfied with my findings for now, but still need to get a good 486 motherboard.
Tips and ideas are welcome, I'm not familiar with 486 at all. ^^"
Last edited by Czeky on 2022-06-27, 08:54. Edited 1 time in total.
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
Nice collection that you're growing there. Got any benchmarks on that Socket7/Voodoo1 build?
Unfortunately, I dont have that machine anymore, the board died from who knows what, and now it doesnt want to start up anymore, even tried an AT power supply, same thing, no power.
So I've decided to build an actual GOOD socket 7 machine. I don't have many parts yet, but I've got a motherboard recently that works perfectly, and has enough things for my needs.
It's a Zida Tomato TX98-3D, a pretty small Baby AT motherboard, and is pretty capable from what I've read and saw on Ultimate Retro.
It came with a Cyrix MII 300GP, but I wont be using that given how weak the FPU is in Cyrix CPU's, and ordered an AMD k6-2 333mhz from ebay.
The 486 PC is coming together nicely, got a pretty interesting board which has fake cache, its a little bummer, but I know someone who can replace it with legit cache chips, because it is soldered onto the board.
I also got a controller card, but it seems like the card has an issue with reading the floppy disk, when it starts reading it, it hangs up the whole system, not even ctrl alt delete does anything, only the reset button and power switch has effect on it. And I know that the floppy drives are working fine, i've tested them before.
Thankfully at least it reads the HDD fine, so i was able to test DOOM on it, and it runs nicely, the turbo button also works really nicely! 😀
I'm pretty glad that the 486 PC is already at a working state, albeit without a 100% working controller card, but nothing is perfect. Still, going to look out for an VLB controller card, might make a change for the better.
Also i'm not really that heavy on benchmarks yet, but I'd like to change this in the future.
Also, big sorry for the late answer, I dont really look up to this site often, so apologies for that.
So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse.
