Well my Dell 2007FPb 20" 4:3 LCD does, in fact, correctly handle vintage composite signals. The Free C64 works perfectly (still need to test the drives), the Apple II+ is a little funky but I think that may be the Apple II+. The good news is that this is now my new Test Bench monitor because with a few adapters it handles almost anything (it even has a speaker bar).

I have a backup 2007FPb, too, I got two with that haul late last year. Didn't get it tested until now, dang time flies.

BTW I'm torn as to what to do with the Apple. I'm probably going to tinker a bit and see if I can clear up the video signal and get the keyboard working (it may work and it's the motherboard, basically boots to a logo and stops). It is my oldest computer though, slightly older than the Kaypro. On the other hand, it's a money sink as I don't have disk drives for it.

I'm trying to rebuild my catalog of systems and parts but it's slow going, I let it lapse over the winter and I had a huge influx of stuff. Set up a bunch of new excel files to copy stuff over into. Need to dig through all my new sound and video cards, oy vey.

Will probably be another week or two until I'm ready to pull the trigger on the Desktop Case thread to go with the Tower Case thread. Been collecting representative case pictures from old computer magazines. Not going to post everything but a few from each year and maybe a post just for early AIO computers like the ubiquitous pre-PC desktops that look like terminals.

Not having much luck with older systems lately. My 286 keeps freezing. Spent 4 hrs trying to sort it out. I'm at that stage where I might just strip what I can from it and toss the rest. I'll keep an eye out for a generic 286 mobo.The 386dx25s hdd or controller is playing up but that is not so bad it's generic so should be easy to sort out.

Yes, that's right, Twitter - except it's RetroZilla, and it's Windows 98, on an IBM Thinkpad 600E! Bwahahaha!

Posting from said machine now.

Trying to find any drivers whatsoever for ISA sound card Audio Plus 6400 AV309.

I've successfully used CS4232 drivers from Turtle Beach, although I don't really care about the 3d function of the CS4289 companion chip. Also, IMO the FM reproduction of the companion chip is absolutely nasty.

gdjacobs wrote:

I've successfully used CS4232 drivers from Turtle Beach, although I don't really care about the 3d function of the CS4289 companion chip. Also, IMO the FM reproduction of the companion chip is absolutely nasty.

You want nasty? I'll show you nasty. One of the noisiest sound cards I've ever worked with. Almost complete junk, but it does make sound.

Is the ALS4000 fundamentally that bad or does it vary considerably with the card design?

gdjacobs wrote:

Is the ALS4000 fundamentally that bad or does it vary considerably with the card design?

I bet it is bad card design, or maybe fake ALS4000.

I have an ESS Solo-1 card I bought off ebay a couple years back from a cheap chinese manufacturer. It sounded about as good as the amount I paid for it. It's cheap and nasty onboard amplifier added more noise than anything else. By contrast, a genuine Solo-1 built back in the day that I got out of a roadside pickup computer actually provides reasonable output quality, with much less amplification, but also a heap better SNR output.

canthearu wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Is the ALS4000 fundamentally that bad or does it vary considerably with the card design?

I bet it is bad card design, or maybe fake ALS4000.

I have an ESS Solo-1 card I bought off ebay a couple years back from a cheap chinese manufacturer. It sounded about as good as the amount I paid for it. It's cheap and nasty onboard amplifier added more noise than anything else. By contrast, a genuine Solo-1 built back in the day that I got out of a roadside pickup computer actually provides reasonable output quality, with much less amplification, but also a heap better SNR output.

Probably true. Considering the damn thing hisses and has white noise the moment it gets power. Total crap. I keep it as a worse case scenario specimen. 🤣

Turbo -> wrote:

Trying to find any drivers whatsoever for ISA sound card Audio Plus 6400 AV309.

I have the exact same card, it's a Crystal CS4232, use Crystal's latest drivers and it will work perfectly fine.

gdjacobs wrote:

Is the ALS4000 fundamentally that bad or does it vary considerably with the card design?

Somehow the FM part of the card makes a lot of noise, disabling it makes it more silent.

The ALS4000 is one of the few PCI chips that emulates Sound Blaster 16.

Last week I took my Armada to the cottage and reconfigured Arkanoid to work with a mouse (delete the CFG file, basically) and with my Logitech mouse, I completely killed my previous high score. The game is MUCH more playable with a good mouse!

The artifacting is due to a failed matrix line in the LCD, nothing I can do about it.

Then, for the hell of it, I did the same thing on my 386:

This computer also has a tremendously good mouse (Microsoft BUS mouse, connected to the ATI VGA wonder card) - playing it on a Mono (in EGA mode, somehow) has a drawback - the permanent bricks are indistinguishable from the 2, 5, or 10 hit "gray" bricks on this screen.

Also, when I played on the Armada, I had a metric shit ton of "P" pills, leading me to have 10+ lives. When I played on the 386 (I played a few times), I didn't get a single "P" pill. Maybe they do fall, but the mono monitor can't see them? I'll investigate that later when I dual-screen the 386 (found a mono card in another 386 I am building, score!) Either way, it was getting late so I killed myself on level 30 with three lives left. Shame really. I would have kept playing but the computer itself is very noisy and the PC speaker cannot be muted or adjusted, and the rest of my family wanted to sleep.

Either way, this game basically requires a good mouse. Keyboard controls are iffy, and a mediocre mouse is even worse.

Got these printed..

appiah4 wrote:

Turbo -> wrote:

Trying to find any drivers whatsoever for ISA sound card Audio Plus 6400 AV309.

I have the exact same card, it's a Crystal CS4232, use Crystal's latest drivers and it will work perfectly fine.

I encountered some minor issues with the newer driver package. I think I had trouble using settings other than default, although I can't recall definitively. I chose to go with a set that came from a Turtle Beach Tropez (based on the documentation) which didn't have any issues. S23 drivers will be fine as well, and probably some newer versions, but YMMV.

I retrobighted this 92' K208 Monterey keyboard over the course of the weekend, lubricated the sliders with dry PTFE and added a badge to top-left corner. I find it is surprisingly silent - sure, its a rubber-dome with sliders, but the sliders have kind of dampeners to silent the up-stroke which is nice, will be using it as my daily driver at work in our open office...

I also got a small keyboard:

kawaii, which one is that?

keenmaster486 wrote:

A small update:

I am liking the Thinkpad 600E.

The battery rebuild has been fully successful so far. I ran it down to 10%, after it had sat on the table for about 30-40 hours not charging. It had only lost 4% of its charge sitting there. I ran it on full screen brightness and power settings, and doing a bunch of file copies over the WiFi, and although I wasn't really keeping track, it lasted quite a while. At least an hour and a half I'd say, and that's with constant battery-draining activity.

That's brilliant 😀 did you take any pictures, or is there a page that had some details on it?

The last couple of days I've been testing and throwing out some dead electronics because my flat is full of unwanted junk right now - the office clearout, relatives house being cleared out, broken parts from laptops I've been piecing back together and I've ended up with a lot of things I don't want.

I got some *more* laptop size LS120 superdisk drives (LKM-FH33-5), which might be LS240 drives? I've been watching a person on ebay clearing out their entire Toughbook repair stock - I was going to buy the lot but didn't really want to (and couldn't get there), then they listed up the lot as individual parts 😀
In total, 2 completely dead drives, one that can't read superdisks, which is a shame because that one was supposed to be new. But the other two new drives worked. I really really need to put together a slim SuperDisk drive to IDE adapter, I would like to make use of these drives, but right now, the only way I can use them is by dismantling a compaq LS120 drive and fitting that into the compaq multibay to USB2 adapter, which I nearly threw away 😳

Not sure if this counts as retro or modern. However, I cleaned a sticky DVDO Edge that I bought while thrifting on Friday evening last night and tested it by hooking up my Sega Genesis Model 1 with the composite A/V cable (not good picture quality with composite and upscaling composite is crap). Soon, I'm going to build a board with 3x 75 Ohm for Red, Green, Blue, and 470 Ohm for Sync, 4x 220µF caps, different colored RCA jacks and a headphone jack for the front headphone jack for stereo sound, wires for every jack, as well as ground, 8-pin 262 DIN, and a case for the board to prevent shorts.

The DVDO Edge's component connections not only support YPbPr, but, they support RGBs and RGBHV prospectively, which is nice.

Tested four ISA sound cards tonight on my tech bench Slot 1 motherboard. The top two ESS Audiodrive cards both have a high pitch whine to them in Windows 98SE and are rather noisy (white noise) over headphones. The third ESS Audiodrive card is so noisy with hiss and white noise it is almost unusable. On that third card there is jumper block JP3 and JP4, but I don't have a clue what their settings are. All three have noise artifacts coming from other devices hooked into the motherboard such as hard drive access noise, mouse movement noise, etc. The fourth card is actually my favorite. It has a Crystal chipset and if you look closely towards the rear of the card that's a Crystal CS9236-CL wavetable chip which actually sounds rather incredible with MIDI tunes. It also is the least noisy of the four cards. I vaguely remember ISA sound cards having a slight hiss to them, but some more than others it appears.