Put aftermarket coolers on FX5900 XT and X1650 Pro:

Disassembled and cleaned Athlon 550 slot-A:

How easy/hard are Slot A cartridges to open up? I also have one I want to service and clean..

Harder then Slot-1 Pentium IIs 😉. Was actually having a help from a friend who recently serviced the pair of his PIIs.
You basically need to detach outer pins (2 on every side) from the plastic shroud. Preheat shroud with hair dryer, put in old credit card in-between PCB and shroud and use bigger flat-head screwdriver to pry it off as gently as you can. After removing shroud you have inner 4 pins to deal with to remove heatsink plate from PCB. We actually managed to destroy steel latches holding inner pins, so I plan to use M2/M3 screws instead of pins. This should also make it easier to service it in the future. Will attach new pics.

They don't build them like they used to...

A while back I picked up an AT bigtower system in a sorry state on a hunch there might be something interesting inside. Not what I expected (486-era high-end system), instead low-end Pentium 1. Still the sound card was on my 'wanted' list so I was happy. But the rest... the PSU had blown, badly. The HDD was riddled with bad sectors. The CD-Rom drive dead (doesn't even try to spin the motor, I guess the electronics are shot). And then the motherboard... a BCM SQ559, late 1996 bottom scraping thing with SiS 5511 chipset and an onboard 6205 VGA chip doing UMA (first PC chipset to allow that), halving the already paltry memory performance of the 5511. This makes an i430NX look fast when using the UMA VGA. That aside, the board was badly abused, with almost every header bent and damaged and some slots filthy, and of course it had been hooked up when the PSU blew.

But...

After bending everything back into place, cleaning slots as well as I could and hooking up a good PSU (with the ATX2AT smart converter, just in case of shorts), it happily booted and everything that looked dodgy just worked too. Slow as hell, but in retrocomputing that's not always a bad thing 😉

So happy with it I used it to test other stuff in my to-do pile, mainly some AHA-2940AU SCSI adapters and two Quantum Atlas IV 10k U160 SCSI drives I got with them (slight mismatch in specs there, but SCSI is SCSI and with the correct adapters they all worked together). Oh, and the sound card worked too - an Aztech MMSN847 3rd gen with onboard Samsung 1MB Wavetable. Pretty crappy wavetable, but now I can compare it with its better older brother (MMSN826 with ICS wavetable). This one 'just works', no drivers or init needed, any GM on the MIDI out gets played. Unfortunately the mixer lets it down - it mixes wavetable together with FM, so if you want to shut up the wavetable to use external MIDI, you lose AdLib too. The MMSN826 is more cumbersome with TSR needed, but at least there you can turn it off if you don't want it.

Got the Toshiba Satellite Pro T2150CDT setup with the appropriate OSes: MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with all of the drivers, utilities, and only 1 game to test out the sound chip.

It'll get an SSD (CF or SD to IDE) since the current drive is making a clicking noise every 5-10 seconds.

stef80 wrote on 2021-08-02, 12:29:

Harder then Slot-1 Pentium IIs 😉. Was actually having a help from a friend who recently serviced the pair of his PIIs.
You basically need to detach outer pins (2 on every side) from the plastic shroud. Preheat shroud with hair dryer, put in old credit card in-between PCB and shroud and use bigger flat-head screwdriver to pry it off as gently as you can. After removing shroud you have inner 4 pins to deal with to remove heatsink plate from PCB. We actually managed to destroy steel latches holding inner pins, so I plan to use M2/M3 screws instead of pins. This should also make it easier to service it in the future. Will attach new pics.

Too much trouble for me.. Thanks though.

Swapped the 12 volt VIC-II with a 5 volt VIC-II on my ATX64 board. Now it has near emulator quality video signal, still with the analog feel to it. No artifacts of any kind on S-Video.

The only retro things I've done today is update my Daggerfall Unity install and probe ebay for MIDI daughterboards, seeing what was made and what's available, cause I never looked into it before or really knew anything about them until recently, as they were not advertised/promoted/readily available back in the 80's and 90's, when I was originally PC gaming. Looking at the prices, I think it might be a waste to chase down anything, given what I can get from Serdaco, but one never knows what is out there until one looks hard and deep. Back when I got into computer games, you got a soundcard and that was it, with no additional stuff except one of those fabled MIDI hardware units that you read about, but never saw in stores. I have honestly never seen a MIDI module - in person - outside of what's built into the GS/XG keyboards that I've seen at the music stores and whatnot, because they were not something that was commonly seen, outside of catalogs back when they were available. They were not at Radio Shack, Babbages, Software Etc., CompUSA, or anywhere else that I ever bought computer stuff from.

Well, selling some excess inventory ain't happening for now! Reported PayPal to the BBB, for some reason they have been lying, kinniving jackasses for a year and a half where I've been trying to regain access to my account. They can suck a big one. They say it's fixed - it's not. Sure, the BBB won't do much, but at least I can lend my voice to the chorus of anger aimed at PP. Looks like I should find another avenue, or better yet, one where I can do trades and just use E-bay to buy. Maybe AMIBAY or VCFED.

That said I tried ripping floppies, got to wonder if the floppy drive in the 486 desktop is having issues since I had to do weirdness ripping images of floppies, also creepy is that it looks like Wing Commander II is totally shot. I'll try it on the 286 and see if that fixes that problem though, my TEAC has always been the better drive. I'll leave the 360K's to the Tandy.

Still need to reformat the Pentium and P4.

Next pay period after the bills, I'm starting on what I hope are the final motherboard replacements for the NEC Versa older laptops. I'm still keeping the old ones to fix them and figure out what's gone wrong on them though. Also tempted to pick up some silicone mold mix and Alumalite and start making a clone of the P/75 chassis for my second working P/75 motherboard.

Gave my VIA EPIA ML5000EA board a home today. I had to use a "universal IO shield" (which was a pain to cut and looks very janky up close) since the board never came with one when I originally purchased it over a decade ago and finding a replacement (or compatible) IO shield for it is near impossible. In the single PCI slot is an ALS4000 sound card for SB2.0, SB16, and real OPL3 goodness in DOS.

Realized I hadn't pulled out some of my retro Macs in quite a while (like 3-4 years for some of them) and also hadn't checked the PRAM batteries in that long....

Thankfully, looks like the PRAM batteries are holding up, they were all fresh ones I installed when I bought them all from the recycler, about 4 years ago. 4 of the 6 Macs work well - for the other two, one Power Mac needs a SCSI hard drive and the LC needs a power supply (I think). All of the beige ones are suffering from brittle plastics, to various degrees.

Spent some time looking at what I think might be my most interesting and yet least used of my Macs, a Quadra 950.

Pretty sure this was owned originally by someone in advertising or print media. 24MB of RAM, RasterOps PaintBoard Turbo, System 7.1. I had received an Apple LaserWriter & Scanner (Pretty sure I ended up letting the LaserWriter go, didn't have space to store it... and I'm not sure where the scanner ended up after a couple moves), and external SCSI CD drive (missing the caddy, unfortunately) along with this machine. It seems to have 2 SCSI hard drives in it, only one seems to work but all the files and programs seem to be accessible and working on the one drive that is still working. Illustrator, PhotoShop, QuarkXpress, some other software, as well as the utilities for the RasterOps Card.

I'd really like to archive this machine's drive while it's still working, but I'm not entirely sure how just yet..... no RJ45 Ethernet installed, I don't think I have any compatible cards in any of my other Macs (I have an LC630 and G3 Desktop with working Ethernet, at least).... could maybe do it piecemeal to floppies? I'm a bit out of my element with some of these machines, and honestly my budget to spend on them is pretty minimal - basically just whatever extra side cash I make doing random computer repair jobs. Could definitely use some advice on this one.

My thoughts would turn to firing up a linux box with a SCSI card in it, plugging and imaging the drive through that... but SCSI on linux can be all kinds of FFFFffffun. ... if you have a more capable Apple with better removable storage options, can you not network them through appletalk/applebus?? I barely know anything either though.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-04, 03:34:

My thoughts would turn to firing up a linux box with a SCSI card in it, plugging and imaging the drive through that... but SCSI on linux can be all kinds of FFFFffffun. ... if you have a more capable Apple with better removable storage options, can you not network them through appletalk/applebus?? I barely know anything either though.

AppleTalk might work..... don't think I have a cable at the moment. The other slight issue is that I've only got one Mac Video to VGA adapter... might be able to get around that by just swapping back & forth. Basically I could maybe AppleTalk the files to my G3 Desktop or LC630, and then get it to my G4 tower over Ethernet where I should be able to get it to a flash drive via OSX?

Edit: Now that I'm doing some more digging, I think I do have a compatible cable. Pretty sure the standard printer serial cable will work for a localtalk network. I need to take a stab at this, that might work great.

Just pulling stuff off the old HP 200mmx mobo for the hell of it with my cheapy soldering iron...

So like I said in ( Bought these (retro) hardware today ) I wanted to get a Geforce 3 Ti 200 and took a look around Ebay. I found one that got my eye, an Asus V8200 Deluxe which the seller described as Asus V8200 Deluxe - Geforce 3 Ti 200.

After cleaning the card, changing the thermal paste, and cleaning the heatsink I fired up my trusty old P4 and realized it was a Geforce 3 200/460 Mhz and not a Ti 200 175/400 Mhz. So I have to thank the GPU Gods for this.

Here is a 3DMARK01

Old_Jelly wrote on 2021-08-04, 07:37:

After cleaning the card, changing the thermal paste, and cleaning the heatsink I fired up my trusty old P4 and realized it was a Geforce 3 200/460 Mhz and not a Ti 200 175/400 Mhz. So I have to thank the GPU Gods for this.

its great when a 'variance' works out in your favor! the stats speak for themselves, nice setup

I finished another build, based on PCChips M590 (SiS 5591/5595) with onboard SiS 6326 8MB and CMI 8330 audio (the lightest point of the combination). Fake fsb at 100 MHz (but 83 is rock stable, fortunately) and ISA sound, marked as PCI on chip, are already known to scam PCChips. As a CPU, I only have the AMD K6-2 300, which after setting fsb to 83 MHz x 4.5 multiplier gives about 380 MHz. The VGA onboard is as fast as a snail, with FPS units in 3DM99 as well as 640x480 resolution (default 800x600 refuses to run with reference to lack of graphics memory).
The currently installed Voodoo3 2000 is far too good for such a weak CPU that can't load it, so I'm wondering what to put in there to make it fine-tuned for later DOS and early W9x games. Only the sound card has brilliant compatibility with DOS and almost identical OPL-3 sound, the best component on the board.
ATA cabling is hell to order on this board thanks to the placement of connectors. I can't do it any better.

LHN91 wrote on 2021-08-04, 03:18:

I'd really like to archive this machine's drive while it's still working, but I'm not entirely sure how just yet..... no RJ45 Ethernet installed, I don't think I have any compatible cards in any of my other Macs (I have an LC630 and G3 Desktop with working Ethernet, at least).... could maybe do it piecemeal to floppies? I'm a bit out of my element with some of these machines, and honestly my budget to spend on them is pretty minimal - basically just whatever extra side cash I make doing random computer repair jobs. Could definitely use some advice on this one.

The Quadra 950 has a AAUI-port where you can connect a RJ45 tranceiver to. Apple M0437 for example. You don't need a network card

Ydee wrote on 2021-08-04, 09:50:

Only the sound card has brilliant compatibility with DOS and almost identical OPL-3 sound, the best component on the board.

Yeah, the CMI8330 chip is somewhat unique since it offers SB16, SBPro and WSS functionality. And as you say, its FM synth capabilities are also quite good. It lacks ADPCM, but that only matters in a few games.

Interestingly, that chip also supports some form of HRTF under Win9x, possibly A3D 1.0. I tried it briefly in Thief: The Dark Project and it seemed to work ok.

Yes, the compatibility with SB is excellent as you write - (16/Pro and 2.0) and the OPL3 clone sounds faithful too, and surprisingly noiseless as I feared.