flupke11 wrote on 2020-03-02, 20:55:

Finally started on removing all green ( and busted) 1500 mF 6,3V caps from my ECS P6S5AT. Not sure if I'll be able to ressurect it. I am but an amateur in this department.

Ah, ECS...I've seen so many purple P4 boards rife with utterly toasted caps. Glad the Intel board in my Gateway and the MSI AMD board in my Compaq only have a handful of bad ones.

I added a new piece of hardware to my Amiga600 today. Tested it this evening.

The CF2IDE+ adaptor that I ordered some time ago. Arived in the mail today, and I have installed it. Amazing little space saving thing. The best thing is that it is a tight solution, and nothing rattle around. I am going to use a 4gb Microdrive with it.

I modified two hinged cases of this size back in the day, by drilling new mounting hole layout for standard large AT boards form factor and modified the L shaped PSUs by cutting away then rebend the metal sheet to clear the board's edge and extend out the AC socket input with pair of wide spacers made on lathe and two longer screws.

Do not use hand chipper tool to cut away PSU case, it is made of hard steel. 😀

Other way current time (2020) now that cost of PSU is not a problem, use a baby AT PSU or ATX PSU with adapter cable. And adapter plate made to mount the PSU to the original opening.

Worked so good. Only problem with these is drive cage is too limited to hold many drives.

Reason for this: cost was a factor and liked small computer case.

Cheers,

Tested some of the shit I've bought over the past 3 or 4 months. So far the results are:

Gigabyte AM2+ Board: Working
2004 vintage 500W SLI certified Power Supply: Dead (Causes whatever its connected to to spin its fans and shit but not post. Probably browned out on one or more lines)
Dell OEM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660: Dead (No post)
XFX NVIDIA GeForce 7900GS: Dead (Artifacts)

Evidently its one of THOSE days. 1 out of 4 bodes ill. I still have like 8 motherboards in a box (bought them all together. Like 5 P4 era boards, a SS7 board, and a NOS 386 board), and a FM2/A6 6700k combo I need to test. After near total defeat I'm just not feeling the cards are in my favor tonight.

Fixed a PS2 Slim up as the laser wasn't moving (was stuck). Opened the system up, used my flat tipped screwdriver to push the laser assembly free, grease up the rails, track, and gear teeth with white lithium grease, buttoned it back up, put in a disc, and it works. The PS2 Slim itself was $5 (was $20, but it was 75% off on Leap Day).

Bancho wrote on 2020-03-02, 10:38:

Off work today, so have taken the opportunity to start recapping a motherboard I've been meaning to do for a good while now. Boa […]
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Off work today, so have taken the opportunity to start recapping a motherboard I've been meaning to do for a good while now. Board in question is a Abit BX133-Raid which i want to use for my 1400-S Tualatin.

Caps in question - 2000 era junk Jackon Caps!
5 mins later - Caps be gone!

30 mins later - New Panasonic Caps in. I need to do the top 3 which i will do this afternoon so the whole power phase is nice and refreshed! Will do the rest of the caps when time permits and i have the correct caps.

Quite happy with the result and should mean the board will continue to operate long into the future!

Good Job ! Really nice work.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-03-03, 02:02:

Fixed a PS2 Slim up as the laser wasn't moving (was stuck). Opened the system up, used my flat tipped screwdriver to push the laser assembly free, grease up the rails, track, and gear teeth with white lithium grease, buttoned it back up, put in a disc, and it works. The PS2 Slim itself was $5 (was $20, but it was 75% off on Leap Day).

What ? Where ? I never get that kind of discount 🙁

The thrift store I normally go to on Saturdays is Grace Centers of Hope in my city. The whole month of February is 50% off or up to 75% off (Leap Day), or normally on Monday's, 50% off. The cord that was connected to the power brick was "patched," but I ended up using a good cord to prevent fires.

Actually, it occurred to me: I could run a game shop that can do console repairs, but I need a business degree, license, and find a spot that is vacant.

brostenen wrote on 2020-03-02, 21:33:

I added a new piece of hardware to my Amiga600 today. Tested it this evening. […]
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I added a new piece of hardware to my Amiga600 today. Tested it this evening.

The CF2IDE+ adaptor that I ordered some time ago. Arived in the mail today, and I have installed it. Amazing little space saving thing. The best thing is that it is a tight solution, and nothing rattle around. I am going to use a 4gb Microdrive with it.

CF2IDE+-01.jpg
CF2IDE+-02.jpg
CF2IDE+-03.jpg

I just got my CF2IDE in the mail today too. I haven't hooked it up yet was going to do this as a project for my extended weekend. Looking at your machine, is that a scan doubler where the HDD should be? I'm hoping that I can use this to run a CF card and my HDD, it seems like it has the connectors for that and I should be able to set all that in the boot menu. I also got my 40Mhz '030 accelerator today too and put that in my 1200. In addition I have a mount for my Gotek drive to replace df0, but I've also got an external adapter to see if I'd rather run it external and transfer ADFs to actual disks to run them if they need to be on DF0. It's been a long time, over 25 years, since I've messed with my Amiga but I'm getting into the spirit again having conquered all the PC vintage machines I need for the most part.

I'm going to send my 1200 MB to a guy to check out and recap, I don't see any leakage at all but I want to make sure this thing is good to go for the next 25 years =).

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-03-03, 04:48:

The thrift store I normally go to on Saturdays is Grace Centers of Hope in my city. The whole month of February is 50% off or up to 75% off (Leap Day), or normally on Monday's, 50% off. The cord that was connected to the power brick was "patched," but I ended up using a good cord to prevent fires.

Actually, it occurred to me: I could run a game shop that can do console repairs, but I need a business degree, license, and find a spot that is vacant.

Ahh OK. like St. Vincent DePaul used to be in my area (but they closed most of the stores in my state). We still have a Teen Challenge that is similar but rarely gets any electronics.
Good for you to help out with the local charities !
Think GoodWill is what has slowly ruined the other Thrift store business around here. They have marble palaces in comparison and buy up land just to build new stores when it suits them.

I fixed a Amptron dx9600 aka PcChip m912 rev 1.7 today. Fixed the cache 🤣 and made sure the chips I used had logo's that were appropriate hehhee.
Cache works and passes tests, yes ram speed is slow but was using slow 30pin.

I need to get my 486 board fixed that has integrated I/O. The issue is puzzling me and I think the board needs a recap or finding another board cheap that has AMI BIOS over Award (not Y2K compliant, and I know some early AMI BIOSes were not Y2K compliant either) and I already have a VLB I/O card, but I need to fix my current board as there is no -12VDC or +12VDC for that matter and shorts (no Puff the Magic Dragon smoke, thankfully)

If it has Tantalum caps they seem to short more than Electrolytic of the 486 era. Yes have seen some AMI from 1994 that were Y2K where Award waited until much later.

Shagittarius wrote on 2020-03-03, 04:55:

brostenen wrote on 2020-03-02, 21:33:

I added a new piece of hardware to my Amiga600 today. Tested it this evening. […]
Show full quote

I added a new piece of hardware to my Amiga600 today. Tested it this evening.

The CF2IDE+ adaptor that I ordered some time ago. Arived in the mail today, and I have installed it. Amazing little space saving thing. The best thing is that it is a tight solution, and nothing rattle around. I am going to use a 4gb Microdrive with it.

CF2IDE+-01.jpg
CF2IDE+-02.jpg
CF2IDE+-03.jpg

I just got my CF2IDE in the mail today too. I haven't hooked it up yet was going to do this as a project for my extended weekend. Looking at your machine, is that a scan doubler where the HDD should be? I'm hoping that I can use this to run a CF card and my HDD, it seems like it has the connectors for that and I should be able to set all that in the boot menu. I also got my 40Mhz '030 accelerator today too and put that in my 1200. In addition I have a mount for my Gotek drive to replace df0, but I've also got an external adapter to see if I'd rather run it external and transfer ADFs to actual disks to run them if they need to be on DF0. It's been a long time, over 25 years, since I've messed with my Amiga but I'm getting into the spirit again having conquered all the PC vintage machines I need for the most part.

I'm going to send my 1200 MB to a guy to check out and recap, I don't see any leakage at all but I want to make sure this thing is good to go for the next 25 years =).

That is a lot of stuff you are going to upgrade your machine with. It will be a nice 1200 you end up with. Congrats. 😀

The red board is an accelerator. It is a Furia-020 as it is called. Revision 3. It provides 020, FPU, 9.5 mb FastRam and have features such as shadowrom, IDE-Boost and it can load a Kickrom from the HDD. I can also disable the FPU by software for stuff that do not like it. The scandoubler is mounted on top of an ChipRam expansion in the trapdoor bay. I have a post about this machine in my blog. If you are interested in more pictures.

This weekend I replaced the keyboard controller on a 486 motherboard. When I bought it, years ago, I found that it would always stop POST because of keyboard error. I've basically just put it aside and not fixed it until now.
Because I don't have a proper desolder station, it took quite some time to remove the old VIA keyboard controller, but now that it has a new one, the board works just fine.
It's a VLB board (Iston Corp. whatever the heck kind of manufacturer that is) using the SiS471 chipset. I only had OPTi 895 VLB boards working before, and I was curious to see if the rumors that SiS471 is faster, are actually true.
So far, it doesn't seem like it. 😁
I did some benchmarking yesterday, and I'll be doing some more benchmarking today. I need to see of the "Optimised" BIOS settings in the AMI WinBIOS are actually optimised. And I'll have to test my other OPTi board as well to see how that compares.

I added some extra shelves to my study, and extended KVM cables so that a Powermac G4 and an SGI O2 could sit on them. The O2 (running NetBSD) is a pain, because due to a crappy PS/2 controller prone to key repeats it needs a USB card, a PS/2 to USB converter, and then also a PS/2 emulator connected to the PS/2 ports because if it's configured for glass console rather than serial it won't boot without a keyboard connected..

Today I finally figured out how to get my IDE CD-ROM drive working connected to an Opti 82C930 Sound Card on my 486.

I was battling with it for a couple of hours, trying a variety of different drivers & MSCDEX etc combinations. Nothing worked and those drivers that did detect & install the drive, wouldn't allow me to actually browse the contents of a CD.

So as a last ditch resort and having not bothered to do a thorough search for documentation for this sound card, I noticed there were jumper pins on the card with no markings as to what it was supposed to do. So to experiment and see what it would do, I added a jumper to the pins and tried the CD-ROM again... and would you believe it, it now works!

Tested out the CD version of Fifa International Soccer and it worked a dream, full CD audio etc. Also installed Office 95 from CD.

Did the first blog post on my retro website for this year. I should really post more updates... 😉

Finished the majority of caps on the BX-133. Now time to get it set up!

Very nice board, Bancho! Abit was quite the maverick manufacturer, good job on the caps.

My new Panasonic caps are on their way. Here I spent half an hour assorting EDO and FP-simms, a job that needed doing for a long time.

I upgraded the CPU in my DOS/Win95/OS2W3 Socket 7 PC from K5-PR166 to 6x86MX-PR233. Gains were noticable, Quake 320x200 went from 27,4fps to 34,1fps (+24,5%) and Doom went from 74,6fps to 85,4fps (+14,4%). Obviously nowhere near the +40% you'd expect from the PR ratings, but to be honest it has more to do with Cyrix's inaccurate PR rating than AMD's. Also, disabling the L1 cache using SETMUL seems to take the system down to about DX2-50 speeds or thereabouts, making it quite a nice system to play Ultima VII games on too.