Versa V is all done and setup other than the hinge and CMOS battery. Getting a CMOS battery tonight....but otherwise, I don't have anything else to do to it that does not involve ordering PCMCIA cards. I probably won't be doing much this weekend though since it's Valentine's Day and in two weeks - a wedding on my wife's birthday. Happy wife, happy life. Admittedly, my retro-activities make a good cloak for her gifts though, 🤣. She just thinks I'm messing with computers......does not realize I'm wrapping gifts and doing shopping for her now, 🤣.

The Amiga 2000 issue saga continues. I got my ACE2 Chip RAM extender board in and installed it so now I have a super fat agnus 2MB, but it made no difference to the missing fast ram. So the last thing I can think of is Gary going bad. Other than that I don't know what would cause 1.5MB of Fast ram to disappear even though sysinfo shows the boards full amount. Still hoping someone out there might see this and have a better idea than me what could be the problem.

This board didnt always have this problem but it did have a problem with memory errors when running WHDLOAD UNTIL the fastram dissappeared. So I think the issue was always there just different symptoms. Anyone got any ideas? Must be Gary right?

Had an evening free to test & fix stuff at last.

- Got my second Spring Circle SF586 So5 VLB board working. One of the cache chips was bad, replaced it and it was happy.
- Tried to test my Micronics 80486 ASIC EISA 50MHz. Actually managed to get to POST screen once with a DX-33, but when it says "50MHz" it really means 50MHz, there's a 50MHz oscillator soldered to the board and no way to set a divider. Also no support for 3.3/3.45V CPUs, so I need a 486DX-50 to get further with this one...
- Gave up on the IBM dual Slot 1 44LX board. Can't figure out what POST code 7A means and nothing I can do can get it to show anything (like one of IBM's very well documented error codes) on-screen. Also no serial output I'm able to discern.
- Compaq OEM Matrox Mystique is dead.
- K6-3 400 is working perfectly.
- I somehow managed to twist an ankle and pull a neck muscle while messing around with this stuff. Srsly... I'm not getting any younger.

Set everything up to test that pile of CPUs I received recently tomorrow. If my neck allows.

Got an old original Mac Pro 1,1 up to running El Capitan, put in a Radeon HD 6450 1GB, a 500GB WD Velociraptor 10k drive and took the system RAM up to 16GB - I just KNEW one day old HP server RAM would come in useful!! 😁

Getting the firmware updated and supporting the latest (unsupported) OS and latest patches all proved challenging but got there in the end!

It means a 15 year old computer is running the latest Chrome pretty well though!

Cloudschatze wrote on 2021-02-12, 05:03:

https://www.symphoniae.com/misc/vogons/ripsl_s.jpg BBSing in style with the PiModem. […]
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BBSing in style with the PiModem.

Hey, it's an odd question, but could you check the angle of the MT-32's front bezel for me? I couldn't find any details about it online but I'm wondering if it's 45 degrees or another angle, for the MT32-pi case I'm designing. (not for mass production or anything, though I might share it on thingiverse)
I've got my MT-100 for real MT-32 sound, but having the actual screen is nice and the MT100 is gigantic compared to how I like my setups to be.

De-Teapo-fied my ABIT ST6.
It was working just fine but I could'nt stand having those ticking timebombs on "my precious".

Only 2 caps was actually leaking (probably a record?) and most were still roughly in spec.
Still, new Panasonics with something like an order of magnitude lower ESR.
The system actually benches slightly higher after the swap.

Yea that's rust.
Probably had a rough life previously =)

That is a fantastic motherboard excellent work saving it and extending it's life.

SteveC wrote on 2021-02-13, 00:37:

Got an old original Mac Pro 1,1 up to running El Capitan, put in a Radeon HD 6450 1GB, a 500GB WD Velociraptor 10k drive and took the system RAM up to 16GB - I just KNEW one day old HP server RAM would come in useful!! 😁

Getting the firmware updated and supporting the latest (unsupported) OS and latest patches all proved challenging but got there in the end!

It means a 15 year old computer is running the latest Chrome pretty well though!

I applaud your work... do you have plans on using one of the big sur patchers to run Big Sur?

Does anybody know how to copy and run the MS-DOS 6.22 installation files on the hard drive? Everytime I try to run setup.exe, it keeps trying to run setup from A:.

Any way to bypass this?

Make sure the SET PATH=A:\; isn't listed in the autoexec.bat file.

There's no SET PATH=A:\ in autoexec.bat

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2021-02-13, 22:57:

De-Teapo-fied my ABIT ST6. It was working just fine but I could'nt stand having those ticking timebombs on "my precious". […]
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De-Teapo-fied my ABIT ST6.
It was working just fine but I could'nt stand having those ticking timebombs on "my precious".

Only 2 caps was actually leaking (probably a record?) and most were still roughly in spec.
Still, new Panasonics with something like an order of magnitude lower ESR.
The system actually benches slightly higher after the swap.

Yea that's rust.
Probably had a rough life previously =)

Nice job! Just curious... what method and tools do you use for removing and replacing caps on "modern" boards like that? And would you consider posting pictures of the solder joints on the back?

When I work on any boards made after the late 90s (likely because of lead-free solder being more common), it's always a pain and I'm never 100% happy with how it looks, even if everything works fine afterward. Interested to see and hear about someone else's experience. 😀

Had some quality time with my son (8) starting his first soldering project, a digital clock.

While he was messing around with bits I used the soldering iron to recap another MSI MS-6168. It's alive again. Haven't tested the onboard Voodoo3 beyond conjuring up a 1024x768 desktop, but it handles that well enough. Next step see if the board is stable at 133MHz FSB, and whether it will run my Tualatin 1400S on a slocket. Failing that I have nice Coppermine P3 1000EB, and Celeron 1000 to fall back on. I now have three working MS-6168 boards, so high time for a shootout as to which is the best.

Tested today the dishwasher + water cleaning method on a few of my cards with excellent results. The cards are shining like new!

Also made a SLI bridge from a floppy cable to test a voodoo2 SLI setup I want to build with:
ASUS P2B-LS
PII450 or PII333 @500
Geforce 256 SDR 32 Mb
Voodoo2 SLI(still waiting for the 2nd 12 Mb voodoo2, now I have one 8 Mb and one 12 Mb)
Creative SB live!
256 Mb ECC RAM
So I'm one step closer to my '98 dream build 😁

Today I worked on a PCChips M549, I added the PS2 Port adapting that of another MB, starting the PC the mouse works, and I started the CPU-Z 1.03 W9X bench.
I installed in a 512MB CF W95, using an IDE-CF adapter, the PC works but only by deactivating the L2 cache, when active the PC crashes at boot, as soon as the Energy logo disappears.

Reflowed the RAM on my Intergraph Intense 3D VooDoo card since it didn't look pretty and still have leftover flux on the card that needs to be cleaned off with flux remover (tried alcohol and that didn't work out too well).

I didnt know there was a vintage version of CPU-Z... nice

PC@LIVE wrote on 2021-02-14, 21:14:

Today I worked on a PCChips M549, I added the PS2 Port adapting that of another MB, starting the PC the mouse works, and I started the CPU-Z 1.03 W9X bench.
I installed in a 512MB CF W95, using an IDE-CF adapter, the PC works but only by deactivating the L2 cache, when active the PC crashes at boot, as soon as the Energy logo disappears.

Planning to replace the cache module or replace this soldered cache chip or two?

Cheers,

Ordered a new 400W OK-ish quality PSU by Aerocool for my LGA775. I was using a 15 year old OEM model built by FSP, but it had bulging caps. Yesterday it started making crackling noises, and then while running 3DMark the system just shut down. The PSU had bulging caps in it, so I guess that's probably the issue (though I don't know if that would cause crackling noises..) so I will try recapping it at some point.

I put new thermal paste (MX2) on my MSI FX5900XT