Scali wrote:

Finally managed to finish my blog on the fantastic DreamBlaster S2P: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2019/03/09/dreamblaster-s2p/

BTW, thanks for your blog post on 8088MPH and the emu it works on. I gave up a while ago trying to get it to run without real hardware. Still amazing to watch.

Cleaning day! Gave this recently aquired case and a bunch of other components a bath.

I cannot post in the "Buy" thread but I need to vent.
Fleamarket today. A guy had some 486 chips and an IBM/Cyrix 6x86. He actually wanted around 15 euros for a piece. I was willing to pay 3. Things are getting out of hand here as well.

canthearu wrote:

Repairing a Packard Bell 800AU today. […]
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Repairing a Packard Bell 800AU today.

Specs:
Pentium 3 Coppermine - 800mhz
MS-6168 V2 motherboard
128meg (shipped size 64meg, but upgraded)
Onboard Voodoo 3-2000 8meg graphics.
20gig hard drive
PCI modem (winmodem anyone)
1.44meg floppy drive
CD-RW drive.

Repairs done:

* Popped off the old heatsink and fan off the voodoo 3 chip ... they always go. Put a slightly larger passive heatsink on it ... going to see if it runs ok like this.

Another MS6168 board, hooray 😁 I guess yours is the newer one if it can run a coppermine, I've just got a Katmai 550 connected up to my one.

How did you get the Voodoo 3's heatsink off safely? It appears to be glued? It doesn't look very effective but I'm worried about damaging the chip if I try to pry it off, it's unlikely I'd find another for what I paid. At the moment, I've removed the 40mm fan and ther's a big 120mm fan cooling both the cpu and the voodoo 3 (with some stick on heatsinks stuck onto the standard heatsink)

The last couple of days, I've been making new bezels for things, as part of a larger project.

My LS120 drives, the ones that came from external caddies, they have the button and the cover flap but of course since the bezel is part of the caddy, they've been left faceless for a while.
I made up a replacement for it, which accomodates the external caddy version's larger eject button in fusion 360:

I copied the design from a regular 3.5" internal LS120 drive so now they all have faces 😁

They just snap into place, maybe I'll make the LED cover in fusion 360 once I've got some transparent filament:

Usually my designs take 3 or more tries to actually fit the object they're meant to fit onto, but these snapped into place first time, wonderful 😁

NEAT!

canthearu wrote:

Repairing a Packard Bell 800AU today. […]
Show full quote

Repairing a Packard Bell 800AU today.

Specs:
Pentium 3 Coppermine - 800mhz
MS-6168 V2 motherboard
128meg (shipped size 64meg, but upgraded)
Onboard Voodoo 3-2000 8meg graphics.
20gig hard drive
PCI modem (winmodem anyone)
1.44meg floppy drive
CD-RW drive.

Repairs done:

* The entire case/motherboard/cards washed/dried completely. Was extremely dusty and dirty.
* Inspected PSU, has the normal arrangement of extremely dodgy capacitors, but they looked ok, so I just oiled the fan (it was rattling and noisy on original testing.
* Replaced 2 faulty capacitors on the motherboard, the big ones next to the power connector. Replaced a 10V 1500uF capacitor with nichicon 10V 2200uF capacitor, and 6.3V 2700uF capacitor with nichicon 6.3V 3300uF capacitor.
* Popped off the old heatsink and fan off the voodoo 3 chip ... they always go. Put a slightly larger passive heatsink on it ... going to see if it runs ok like this.
* The maxtor 20gig hard drive, it would have been cool to keep this, but being a maxtor drive, it is both noisy and dying, so I just can't use it 🙁

Repairs to be done.
* Will put in a seagate 250gig hard drive, as the only quiet drives I have that are large enough. Otherwise I'd have to put in a smaller quantum drive, and they all sound as bad as the maxtor.
* Glue new heatsink onto the voodoo 3 chip, once I have tested that the one I have selected will work ok.
* Put everything into case.
* Change the 2x64meg SDRAM chips with a single 128meg SDRAM chip. I can use the smaller ram chips on pentium motherboards!

Finished the repairs on this board, and the results are glorious.

* The CPU fan died after a few hours, so that got replaced too.
* Changed the BIOS to the retail MS-6168 version using Award BIOS. Lets me change more settings.

The restore CDs did not work with the large hard drive, so I had to restore to a small quantum fireball then xcopy it to the big drive.

The results were well worth the pain. Fast, clean, stable and quiet.

Have you used Norton Ghost 7.5 to copy all of the files from the Quantum HDD to the 250GB HDD? I didn't realize that Packard Bell had the VooDoo3 2000 Integrated into their Pentium 3 systems (in other countries since Packard Bell ceased operations in the US in the late 1990's). Also, is this Windows 98SE or Windows 2000/XP that was installed on there previously? Remember: Windows 98SE had a hard drive limit set to 137GB and some BIOSes (motherboard manufacturer and chipset dependent) had limits as well on the storage size. Windows NT 4 w/ SP4 and higher (2000, XP, and so on) can get installed on the full hard drive capacity. Learnt that the easy way when I installed MS-DOS 7.10 and XP on the same 120GB SATA HDD that was in a laptop that I gutted out due to issues, which was connected to my Syba SATA PCI controller card. I was surprised that the OS worked without issues on my Socket 7 machine, however, 256MB SD-RAM was the limit and SP3 isn't fond of the lower amount of RAM (requires at least 512MB RAM, and the maximum of the amount supported per chipset and motherboard for optimal performance (1GB preferred RAM)).

No, I was lazy and just used xcopy32 from within windows 98 to copy everything across

I forgot that command existed. I remember copying everything from the main HDD to a backup drive that was installed in my Windows 98SE machine (should probably do that, but, I figure the Windows Backup utility can backup the hard drive, however, the program itself has a 4GB size limit for the backups, and I have over 32GB of games, files, and other items on that drive since 2015 that was copied from the 200GB HDD that has the 32GB limit set since the BIOS complains about it in my Socket 7 board that has the Intel i430TX chipset).

Does reading count as a retro activity?

Today I found a copy of Zen and the Art of the Internet in my old files https://www.ou.edu/research/electron/internet/zen-toc.htm. I downloaded this back in 92 when I dialed up to an Internet access number listed in our local BBS list. It wasn't a BBS, it was a UNIX system. But not that 3D Jurassic Park stuff. 😀 I ended up paging the SYSOP and we chatted using the talk command. I had thought that I would be able to use the Internet to make free long distance calls using the telnet command. He guided me to the Zen and the Art of the Internet.

All I wanted to do is dial into long distance BBSes and gain "elite access," and I didn't want to do any phreaking and PBX stuff like the other kids did. I remember having lots of fun scanning the Archie server and Veronica Gopher search looking for warez. I don't recall ever gaining access to any of those FTP sites.

Good times.

TheeRaccoon wrote:

Played Half-Life and Unreal on my Quantum3D Mercury brick (8 Voodoo 2's in SLI, 2 Voodoo 2 chipsets in SLI on each 200SBi board)

Congrats on the HardOCP front page post!

Attempted to change the motherboard in my Windows 98SE machine from the Socket 370 to the Socket 754 (FIC K8M-800M) motherboard with issues. It gets to the BIOS/POST screen, detects all 5 drives (1x FDD, 2x HDD, and 2x ODD), and it simply won't boot. The original CMOS battery was dead and the settings were reset when the battery was dead. I checked the capacitors for any leaks and didn't find any bulging or leaking caps. The board was pulled out of an eMachines T3116. Should I junk the board and buy a non-OEM board, such as an ASUS K8N-E?

Gave one of my Model F's a clean; Damn it was necessary.
Finished another build:

* Mobo: MB-586TXA1
* CPU: Cyrix PR166
* RAM: 128MB
* GPU: Matrox 708-01 Rev.a (Millennium 2) + Creative Voodoo2
* HD: Caviar something something (+/- 2GB)
* Sound: onboard Sound Pro (CMI8330)
* Drives: 1x CD-ROM + 1X CDRW + 3,5" floppy drive
* OS: Win98SE
* Case: the top one 😀

This is perhaps the wrong place to post this, but I didn't see any other proper place to post it.

I got this in the mail today, and had no idea it was even a thing:

Very interesting. I put my Socket 370 setup back in so I can diagnose the FIX K8M-800M motherboard (eMachines T3116). The board did power on, and it just wouldn't go past the BIOS/POST screen. There was a Windows 95 with Plus! and USB support at one point in time as well. Saves you from finding a disk that doesn't have the CD Key or scratches over it.

RetroLizard wrote:

... had no idea it was even a thing: https://puu.sh/CYGZt/387dc3e671.png […]
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... had no idea it was even a thing:

Hope you got the COA with it... else the disk is of no use.

Did two Windows installs today in parallel.
W98SE onto a P3 1200 and W10 Enterprise 2016 LTSB onto a HP Z400.
Former took a while, latter went quickly.

But the network cable was plugged in when I installed W10.
Big mistake!

Even with W10 LTSB you need to install first with network cable unplugged.
After it is installed, you need to go to the control panel and turn off autoupdate and automatic installation of new features.
W10 immediately after installation downloaded some features and poof, BSOD.
What a crap. Will nees to reinstall...
.

retardware wrote:

RetroLizard wrote:

... had no idea it was even a thing: https://puu.sh/CYGZt/387dc3e671.png […]
Show full quote

... had no idea it was even a thing:

Hope you got the COA with it... else the disk is of no use.

Yeah, I got the COA with it. 😀

RetroLizard wrote:

Yeah, I got the COA with it. 😀.

Fine! At least at the local ebay many sellers try to sell Windows CDs without COA.
Similar to that scam of only selling the box, but not the contents.

Apropos scam, I had to find out that the D-Link DGE-528T (Gbit ethernet PCI card) which allegedly offers DOS drivers, actually has only Novell drivers 🙁
So there seems indeed no way around Intel network card for my upcoming AT class IBM style playstation build. I ordered a Pro/1000 GT, lets see when it arrives.

retardware wrote:

RetroLizard wrote:

Yeah, I got the COA with it. 😀.

Fine! At least at the local ebay many sellers try to sell Windows CDs without COA.
Similar to that scam of only selling the box, but not the contents.

I didn't actually get the OS from an eBay seller. I got it from somebody on OfferUp.