Not much retro related activities this weekend as I spent most of it frantically searching the house for 1 of my Super Socket 7 motherboards, to no avail. I checked through my specs document and noticed there was also a Socket 478 motherboard missing. This jogged my memory as I recall the 2 missing boards being stored together somewhere, very frustrating - but my own fault, I need to store this stuff in a more orderly fashion! I'll have to venture back up into my loft again this week and try to dig out the missing boards. 😠

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-02, 17:20:

BenQ makes OLED monitors?

My bad, that's a LED monitor, not OLED.

The widescreen stretch doesn't bother me at all. If I want pixel-perfect, I have DOSBox with pixel-perfect and/or CRT like GL shaders.
Maybe it's possible indeed. The buttons on the side are stiff as hell, so I don't use them. Why did they make so hard ?!

wiretap wrote on 2020-08-01, 03:17:

so I should be able to see if it powers on.. if not, I'll be ordering a new PCB.

I thought you already did? ^^

anyways, great job on the repair!

Trying to restore the functions of my oldest calculator. Right now the sled and the crank/winder are jammed… sorry, maybe a little of topic

Dug through my loft again today, pulled loads of things out etc and still couldn't find the missing motherboards I'd been looking for. It's now day 3 and I was about to give up, when I decided to look in the place I'd declared "it would never be" and right there on the top there it was, could have found it in 2 minutes flat if I'd looked there earlier! Aaaargh.

So my Super Socket 7 rebuild commences:

Asus P5A-B (rev 1.04)
128MB RAM
AMD K6-2 500MHz
Voodoo 3 16MB AGP Graphics
Aureal Vortex 2 AU8830A2 PCI Sound
DEC 21140 PCI 100Mb Ethernet

Not sure on HDD size yet, but will run Windows 98SE. I might even throw in an additional ISA sound card for better DOS support.

Slightly off-topic retro activity: found an old loud speaker from the late 1960s whilst I was searching for the motherboard. Looked it up and spotted recent ended/sold eBay auctions, where they sold for hundreds. It works great too, just needs a bit of cleaning up. A nice find indeed! 😎

Continued to refurnish my man cave... some IKEA furniture (lack rack FTW 🤣), got rid of really old and ugly bookstand/wall unit... I still need more storage room as the ones on the photos are already filles with ISA/EISA/PCI/AGP cards (tightly packed too) and motherboards fill the another unit behind me (not visible on the photo) and/or I also need to fit a single 15" CRT VGA, I may move the hp LCD 4:3 back to my main desk leaving the small one for building and repairing stuff.

I really like that setup

The desktop cases with inbuilt speakers are rad.

HanJammer wrote on 2020-08-03, 20:56:

Continued to refurnish my man cave... some IKEA furniture (lack rack FTW 🤣), got rid of really old and ugly bookstand/wall unit... I still need more storage room as the ones on the photos are already filles with ISA/EISA/PCI/AGP cards (tightly packed too) and motherboards fill the another unit behind me (not visible on the photo) and/or I also need to fit a single 15" CRT VGA, I may move the hp LCD 4:3 back to my main desk leaving the small one for building and repairing stuff.

Is that an IKEA table too? Iv been looking for something like that to fit in my small room.

Looks prime for some Woodgrain ;p

Sweet setup HanJammer! I really like the 80's neon.

RE desks, I got myself one of these bad boys recently and really like it. Nice and stable, thin top so you can get nice and close to it, and being able to adjust it to the perfect height was so nice after my last setup which was always a bit too high for me:

https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/bekant-desk-blac … lack-s49282593/

Over the weekend, I powered on the Toshiba T4800CT notebook computer and decided to disassemble the system and inspected for any damage to any trace and found some paint or something on the contact pins on one of the ICs and the capacitor, which didn't short anything, but wanted to make sure the contacts were still working. I then connected the 24x PCMCIA CD-ROM drive to the laptop and got the PCMCIA drivers setup for both the chipset and the CD-ROM drive. Apparently, the CD drive gets detected once the drive is set to DC power mode and back to PC power mode and only on the first PCMCIA slot at the top right corner and if it's set to PC power mode, the system hangs at Card Services Release 2.10 driver if the drive is set to PC power mode and I'm not sure what's going on here and I believe it could be a resource conflict somewhere, but I'm not seeing any conflicts at all. I tested the rechargeable Lithium coin cell 2430 and that holds a charge quite nicely and the Ni-MH resume battery didn't leak and looks new, plus, it holds a charge. The main battery is the exact opposite. It shows the battery has 15.5VDC instead of 12VDC, which is overkill and might be the cells are done for.

My future plans, once I start working again are going to be getting a Panasonic KXL-D745 Quad-Speed CD-ROM drive + Sound Blaster/Adlib compatibility (ES1688) or find an audio board from a dead T4850CT and swap the cards around since the audio board on the T4850CT has the YMF-262M chip integrated, which is icing on the cake, but IRQ5 cannot be assigned, which is painful in of itself.

SodaSuccubus wrote on 2020-08-04, 01:11:

HanJammer wrote on 2020-08-03, 20:56:

Continued to refurnish my man cave... some IKEA furniture (lack rack FTW 🤣), got rid of really old and ugly bookstand/wall unit... I still need more storage room as the ones on the photos are already filles with ISA/EISA/PCI/AGP cards (tightly packed too) and motherboards fill the another unit behind me (not visible on the photo) and/or I also need to fit a single 15" CRT VGA, I may move the hp LCD 4:3 back to my main desk leaving the small one for building and repairing stuff.

Is that an IKEA table too? Iv been looking for something like that to fit in my small room.

Looks prime for some Woodgrain ;p

Yeah, the famous IKEA Lack.

Continued to rebuild my Super Socket 7 PC.

I found a spare Hitachi 82GB IDE HDD, which the BIOS would not recognise unless jumpered to 32GB. So I programmed an EEPROM chip with the later 1011 Beta 005 BIOS for the ASUS P5A-B and that worked a treat, HDD now detected properly, full capacity. I could have simply flashed the original EEPROM on the board, but decided to keep the original chip as a backup.

Also picked out a random temporary 3.5" floppy drive from storage to assist with the setup, which wasn't working at first. So I opened it up and cleaned the heads with a touch of Isopropyl Alcohol, which did the trick. It's only "temporary" as I'm going to swap it with another drive that matches the case colour better.

Finally installed Windows 98 SE & some drivers and that's all for today, I'll start installing games this week.

Nice. Which cpu are you running ?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-08-04, 17:21:

Nice. Which cpu are you running ?

K6-2 450MHz at the moment. But I'm going to see if the K6-2 500MHz CPU I have will work and swap it, as it's currently being wasted in another Socket 7 system where I have to have it underclocked to 300MHz. An extra 50MHz can't hurt. 🤣

Finally got everything back together after installing a replacement board into the 486, now installing Windows 3.11 so I can play some Stars!

Upgraded my Compaq Deskpro EN SFF with a Tualatin 1400 with built-in interposer from Korea. Of course the chip runs at 1050MHz, being that it's on a 100MHz FSB board. It started out with a Katmai 550 and as an intermediary upgrade I went for a Coppermine Celeron 1000. The Tualatin isn't always 2x as fast as the Katmai, even though the clock speed is basically twice as high - must be that 100MHz FSB. However in some benchmarks that use the cache just right it's extremely fast, as in 5x as fast.

All works fine with the board's VRM, MOSFETs already had heatsink and that doesn't get warm, and its BIOS doesn't complain (though it shows the wrong speed) either.

Listed some NuBus cards for sale, video digitizing cards. Totally useless to me (even if I scrounged around to buy a NuBus expansion for my perhaps non functional PM 6100), so I'm excited to have them listed.

If you feel like seeing them:

Powered up the SCSI hard drive (120MB - Maxtor 7120SR) on the GVP HC+8 in my Amiga 2000 -- it works and boots to workbench! I found some more SIMM memory in a box in the basement, installed it, and I now have 8MB of RAM. I also did the motherboard mod to enable 1MB of chip memory. This is going to be an awesome machine. I have a TF534 I'll be installing once my parts arrive to build it. But yea, there's a lot of cool stuff on the hard drive from the previous owner, including some games and lots of graphics art tools.

The mouse pointer is some weird green bird sitting on a branch, 🤣 -- it doesn't fully show up because I still am waiting on the transistors to fix the green output of my 1084S-D2 monitor.

hwh wrote on 2020-08-05, 07:05:

Listed some NuBus cards for sale, video digitizing cards. Totally useless to me (even if I scrounged around to buy a NuBus expansion for my perhaps non functional PM 6100), so I'm excited to have them listed.

If you feel like seeing them:

Please do not post links to ebay.