Had a really good game of Solitaire on my new favourite 486 laptop, the NEC Versa S/33 (DSTN colour) - all the other colour ones I've got:
a - have broken or failing screens
b - have a fan
I mean, the Toughbook CF41 is the best 486 laptop I have, with an active matrix and sound with a crazy integrated CD-rom drive under the keyboard, but the fan is a real nuisance.
The DSTN VGA screen on this NEC is really nice, quite good contrast and colours for a DSTN panel, refreshing compared to the Toshiba DSTN laptops 😀

I must be avoiding doing something, just made a pointer cap for the libretto:

Nicer than the rather used ones I have, prints up in TPU but it's pushing the limits of FDM printing:

Right now, I'm digging deeper into SoundFonts, so I can find the best ones to use with my old Sierra MIDI files and playing Daggerfall Unity and other games. I had been using the Fluid3 and Real GM fonts for a long time and have tried some others, with varying degrees of success. Crisis sounds good in many instances of orchestral MIDI, but goes horribly astray from time to time, resulting in notes and sound that is just wrong. The Roland SC fonts I've gotten from here are also hit and miss in that way. The XG font I got is pretty spot-on, from what I can remember of my time with the SYXG softsynths. I also downloaded a massive 8GB pack of stuff that I have yet to go through.

I think that's about what I found about a couple of decades back when I first got an AWE32, no perfect soundfont, they went from awesome in one thing to grating in another, and I got fed up messing around and settled for the average onboard defaults.

Yeah, I initially got excited with my AWE32 and AWE64 cards, only to be disappointed in the end. Then I moved on to the Yamaha XG SoftSynth that came with the Final Fantasy 7 and 8 games and things were a bit better, but I had no real knowledge about SoundFonts for the most part, until I started using FluidSynth, with VLC player.

Not really "retro" but old activity - today I continued putting together a cheap frankenstein LGA1155 Sandy Bridge PC. Bought a low-cost Intel Desktop Board from eBay, to use instead of the Intel Server Board I was previously tinkering with. The Intel Server board had some quirks which made it less suitable for a family desktop PC, the Desktop Board is much better.

Plus, I wasn't happy with how the Server Board now works after I had an unfortunate absent-minded mishap:
See, I've been working on a lot of retro computers recently and suddenly jumping out of my comfort zone into LGA territory I forgot 1 vitally important detail until it was too late - take care with the CPU socket... and don't accidentally grip hold of it with great force whilst trying to remove the backplate. Bent several pins, snapped off 2. I straightened all bent pins, but now only 2 out of 4 DIMM slots are functional so no more dual channel on this board. 🙁

Doing a bit more tidying up moving stuff I'm not working on from the lounge out to the shed.

While I was out in the shed savange together a power lead,monitor, ps/2 keyboard and mouse together to attach to the NEC PowerMate VT. Fired it up, no error messages and right in to Xandros Linux 2.5with my customised XFCE4 desktop (default is KDE) using Debian Sarge archives in less than half a minute. Xwindows is really is slow...you know. And by golly gosh look at those windows with rounded corners. How cool is that? They were very innovative back in the mid 2000s.....😉 On an old fashion computer operating system as well. Whowoldathunk?

Got the 1GB CF card installed on my T2150CDT since the 527MB drive was on its last legs and had a hard time with the Industrial CF cards (either not POSTing or locks up at the memory count), so the 1GB I found under my 410CDT works after I formatted it and copied all of the files from the HDD image onto the CF card.

Silent and runs better than before.

I cleared comfy/chillax capable desk space yesterday morning, and my brain has been locked up arguing with itself for 36 hours about exactly what system to put there. Mainly it's between a modernish system with full whack of emulators and a fast but more retro system with native late 98 early XP capabilities and slow dosbox. ... or maybe just leave it swappable space to run any of 5 laptops of varying eras on... or maybe build something "special" for which there are probably over 125,000 permutations of case, motherboard, cpu, vid... 10x again for soundcard choice and so on... maybe though... rack laptops, use KVM.. then I could add in a desktop over yon... dammit

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-17, 03:06:

I cleared comfy/chillax capable desk space yesterday morning, and my brain has been locked up arguing with itself for 36 hours about exactly what system to put there. Mainly it's between a modernish system with full whack of emulators and a fast but more retro system with native late 98 early XP capabilities and slow dosbox. ... or maybe just leave it swappable space to run any of 5 laptops of varying eras on... or maybe build something "special" for which there are probably over 125,000 permutations of case, motherboard, cpu, vid... 10x again for soundcard choice and so on... maybe though... rack laptops, use KVM.. then I could add in a desktop over yon... dammit

Isn't it absolutely terrible to have choices........?

Surely you could come up with the ultimate, mega giga, fantastical ultra blimmin mighty hyper system to play pong on?

So lately I finally started soldering. I have a pair of motherboards I've been wanting to recap. One that was seemingly totally dead, and one that still worked mostly fine, albeit with some instability.

So the totally dead one was a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939. So a socket 939 Athlon 64 motherboard with AGP. This was my practice board before I did the one I really cared about. I had the caps ordered and everything, and went to get a baseline of it's life, and low and behold, it actually POSTed. Horribly leaky caps and all! Didn't do this the first time I tried. Then again that first time it had just arrived in the frigid cold of Dec 2019, so maybe that had something to do with it. Either way it had life now.

Problem was the chipset cooler was blocking the AGP slot. I looked it up and the original chipset cooler was low profile and did not. As some point it's fan died, and dude who owned it just took the fan out, left the heatsink it was embedded in, and slapped a big chungus on top. So I removed that. Except I did it like a total idiot and damaged several of the traces around the chipset.

Look, I was 3 fingers into a glass of whiskey after a long day potty training and cleaning up poop off the floor. Mistakes were made. It was glued on. I didn't want to rip it off chip and all, so I tried dental floss. That didn't work. I tried a heat gun to gently loosen the glue. That didn't work. Then, like a total fool, instead of using a plastic spudge or something, I used a screwdriver to pry it off.

Anyways, I spent the last several days, as my very first motherboard repair, replacing the caps like I planned, and also fixing the traces. 7 were damaged in all. They appeared to cause the system to fail to detect any graphics cards. Now, low and behold, after much muddling around, it POSTs!

Currently installing Win2K on it, then drivers and 3DMark03 to see if it actually fully works, or works just barely well enough to not totally shit the bed immediately.

Wanted to throw something together real quick just to type up some spread sheets and inventory management and use for the radio and what not, with usb and a cdrom drive as a desired bonus. Main goal was something with a nice keyboard. Found this, forgot it had a fresh install if 98se setup on it, and tracked down all the drivers from the Dell support site.

Inspiron 7000 300gt, Toshiba 8.4gb HDD, 255mb of ram, 300mhz mobile P2, ESS Maestro audio, and a Rage Pro LT on a discrete card. The keyboard is really nice, and I cant wait to check out some old games on it.

After building a sketchy cable out of a Generic 9V 3A wall wart and a figure-of-8 cable from amazon, I finally got my VIC-20 running. I'm still missing keys, and have absolutely nothing to run on it, but hey, I'm only like $25 in to this system, $5 of which was the system alone.

I am aware that the image is dull coming out of my VIC, I have a package of capacitors that are just waiting for my brother in law to learn how to solder with.

BetaC wrote on 2021-08-17, 08:21:

After building a sketchy cable out of a Generic 9V 3A wall wart and a figure-of-8 cable from amazon, I finally got my VIC-20 running. I'm still missing keys, and have absolutely nothing to run on it, but hey, I'm only like $25 in to this system, $5 of which was the system alone.
image0.jpg
I am aware that the image is dull coming out of my VIC, I have a package of capacitors that are just waiting for my brother in law to learn how to solder with.

Welcome to the money pit 🤣. Very well worth it though.

The biggest problem you're probably going to have is regarding the keyboard. It may work out more cost effective to simply purchase a 2nd VIC-20, working or otherwise, to scavenge it's keyboard as opposed to trying to source the missing keys or keyboard on their own.

Problem with Vic-20 keyboards, is that a youtuber (8bitguy?) turned up a warehouse full, well a quantity of, vic-20s from a custom manufacturer, where they were modded for some kind of control system, and nearly all of them had all but a half dozen keys pulled off and a plate over the keyboard. So there is some quantity of keyboardless vic-20s around at the moment, meaning loose keyboards, or bad machines with good keyboards are going to be at a premium.

Therefore, I'd start thinking about fixes, like 3D printing keycaps or something, sooner rather than later.

edit: here we go, 3:45 or so... https://youtu.be/0fk-JpPpL7A?t=225

Also, do not clean those keys (VIC20/C64) with rubbing alcohol or anything like it. The characters on the front side of the keys are inked on and will start smudging and dissolving upon contact. Unfortunately, I speak from experience.

Edit: If you ever have time and money definitely invest in a SD card drive emulator (SD2IEC) and a ram expansion cart. The homebrew scene for the VIC-20 is quite good.

Frogger is an excellent example. The original looks like poop, but the 07 version looks rather nice considering the VIC's very limited gfx.

Got my PayPal fixed - finally, thanks to the BBB, so now I'm able to sell again, so the purge or stuff I don't really use at all is back on. Hoping to save some to fund both buying a house (along with what I'm saving of my paychecks as I got a nice promotion), and put a portion into finishing fixing up the Versas....and that Ultralite I see keeps dropping so I might nab that one now for the full five. There's a part of me almost tempted to go full laptop.

Got the old 486 Desktop all setup and running well now. NOt sure what to put in the other two drive caddies.....maybe 98-lited 98 SE and Windows 2000....but we'll see. Enjoying the 17" CRT monitor though, the S3 in 1024x768x256 on it looks BEAUTIFUL. I also figured out how to push files from the Linux box to the 486 using Samba by editing smb.conf....now has me thinking there MIGHT be a way to setup a share for the old machines on my Plex server (I've got plenty of space for it). Been also playing with the Wavetable editor and MIDI Synth on the AWE64.....I'm thinking the 486 DX4 Desktop will be my new Synth since I sold my Roland Juno Di.

Still figuring out what's broken on the V/50 motherboard. Based on the videos I'm watching it might be a Mosfet or a open or short in a capacitor somewhere. I may just bite the bullet and replace it to get that one going again. I really wish I had another Versa CPU board for the V/E series so I could test and fix the other boards I have. If I can really build my SMD soldering and troubleshooting skillset on these things, I might start repairing and flipping "Dead" 8086-Pentium II laptops off E-bay to boost our pool of options a bit more - I'm talking way more than the NEC Versa....I have a lot of potentials I've been watching for awhile.

PTherapist wrote on 2021-08-17, 09:51:

BetaC wrote on 2021-08-17, 08:21:

After building a sketchy cable out of a Generic 9V 3A wall wart and a figure-of-8 cable from amazon, I finally got my VIC-20 running. I'm still missing keys, and have absolutely nothing to run on it, but hey, I'm only like $25 in to this system, $5 of which was the system alone.
image0.jpg
I am aware that the image is dull coming out of my VIC, I have a package of capacitors that are just waiting for my brother in law to learn how to solder with.

Welcome to the money pit 🤣. Very well worth it though.

The biggest problem you're probably going to have is regarding the keyboard. It may work out more cost effective to simply purchase a 2nd VIC-20, working or otherwise, to scavenge it's keyboard as opposed to trying to source the missing keys or keyboard on their own.

Yeah, a dumb part of me is holding out hope that a C64 appears somewhere in town so that I can both try to get one of those working, and potentially get myself a working keyboard for two systems. Lucky for me, I have all the rubber domes thanks to it having a full set of stems, albeit the missing keys had broken stems that were basically unusable. And come on, the VIC-20 isn't that bad of a money pit. It's about as bad as the TI-99/4A (if you don't count trying to fix a mylar keyboard) from what I've seen.

liqmat wrote on 2021-08-17, 13:27:

Also, do not clean those keys (VIC20/C64) with rubbing alcohol or anything like it. The characters on the front side of the keys […]
Show full quote

Also, do not clean those keys (VIC20/C64) with rubbing alcohol or anything like it. The characters on the front side of the keys are inked on and will start smudging and dissolving upon contact. Unfortunately, I speak from experience.

Edit: If you ever have time and money definitely invest in a SD card drive emulator (SD2IEC) and a ram expansion cart. The homebrew scene for the VIC-20 is quite good.

Frogger is an excellent example. The original looks like poop, but the 07 version looks rather nice considering the VIC's very limited gfx.

vic20frogger_oldnew.png

I have already cleaned them, the stems, and the domes with a long soak in dish-soapy water. The entire case also got hosed, as there was 30 years of dirt in there.

BetaC wrote on 2021-08-17, 19:08:

I have already cleaned them, the stems, and the domes with a long soak in dish-soapy water. The entire case also got hosed, as there was 30 years of dirt in there.

Excellent. It's my very least favorite thing to do with vintage hardware. Disassemble and clean keyboards. Feels so good afterwards though. My OCD monster grins with contentment.

liqmat wrote on 2021-08-18, 12:57:

BetaC wrote on 2021-08-17, 19:08:

I have already cleaned them, the stems, and the domes with a long soak in dish-soapy water. The entire case also got hosed, as there was 30 years of dirt in there.

Excellent. It's my very least favorite thing to do with vintage hardware. Disassemble and clean keyboards. Feels so good afterwards though. My OCD monster grins with contentment.

Mm yeah I don't like it either, partly because those old things made of 0.2 mm thick plastic breaks easily.. not that easy to repair..

During covid I tried to find as much info on S370 to Slot1 slotket adapters as possible and combine the info in a somewhat comprehensible format. The resulting PDF file can be downloaded here by people who are interested:
edit - link removed