debs3759 wrote on 2022-02-08, 21:11:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-08, 18:37:

debs3759 wrote on 2022-02-08, 18:31:

I use a thin knife to get pins mostly straightened, then blunt tipped syringe needles of various sizes (depending on size of pins) to finish the straightening if needed

Credit Cards works nicely too, the only pins I hate trying to straighten are LGA socket pins ...need a loupe and micro tweezers for them.

I had to straighten a few pins on an 1150 board. Used a loupe (40x magnification) and the tip of a very sharp knife (so a pointy razor, in effect). Horrible job, but it looks OK. Yet to test it though 😀

Hope you have a sacrifice ready for the test .. I like using a junky i3 or a really dumpster trash i5.

I've occasionally been known to use an actual comb on the first pass, when the whole lot are bent over and you don't know where to start. i.e. they're not mashed flat but are bent enough that you get a dependency chain of which one to straighten first because they're all in each others way. You can get them all standing to under 15 degrees bent over like that.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-08, 21:17:

debs3759 wrote on 2022-02-08, 21:11:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-08, 18:37:

Credit Cards works nicely too, the only pins I hate trying to straighten are LGA socket pins ...need a loupe and micro tweezers for them.

I had to straighten a few pins on an 1150 board. Used a loupe (40x magnification) and the tip of a very sharp knife (so a pointy razor, in effect). Horrible job, but it looks OK. Yet to test it though 😀

Hope you have a sacrifice ready for the test .. I like using a junky i3 or a really dumpster trash i5.

I'll be using a couple of Pentium to test. Always have cheap crap to test with.

I have this strange urge to replace my 386SX25 PC with a 286-16, but that will require some kind of XT-IDE solution. I went online to look at what options I have, and came back completely confused. Anyone want to recommend me an open source, preferrably AIO XT-CF project that is through hole?

appiah4 wrote on 2022-02-09, 12:24:

I have this strange urge to replace my 386SX25 PC with a 286-16, but that will require some kind of XT-IDE solution. I went online to look at what options I have, and came back completely confused. Anyone want to recommend me an open source, preferrably AIO XT-CF project that is through hole?

Why do you need XT-IDE, for big HDD support? I think part of the fun of having 286 is dealing with the BIOS limitations. For real feel you can install pre-3.31 DOS with its 32MiB partition size limit.
And if what you need is merely an adapter to plug the ROM into the system then the best solution is a decent ISA network card with ROM socket. Not only it'll host XT-IDE, you can actually do networking with it as well. TCP/IP stack for DOS is not exactly great but FTP works, so that's already a big plus.

EDIT: I recoommend 3Com cards simply because these are decent and usually easy to obtain in reasonable prices. Something like 3C590 for example.

I had a spare 2x USB + Mini Firewire Expansion Slot header cable laying around, since I remembered the motherboard in my DOS rig has a USB header I thought I'd install it in there just for fun. The motherboard (Soltek SL-54U5) had a proprietary USB header (2x8 pin Dupont) since it predates the standard USB header connector (which is 2x5 pin Dupont with one pin blocked for keying), so I had to rewire the USB header to match the motherboard's pinout which luckily was included in its user's manual. As for the Firewire header, I've removed that from the bracket and covered its spot with a piece of aluminum foil held on with electrical tape.

I currently have no practical use for the USB since it's currently dual-booting MS-DOS and Windows NT, so this was mostly just a fun project to possibly future-proof this computer in the event I install a newer OS that supports USB (or use the Ultimate Boot CD to transfer files from a USB drive).

Here's the pinout for anyone else who has a similar motherboard:

I didn't have a 16-pin (2x8) Dupont connector, so I wired the USB header onto an 8-pin Dupont connector for the odd-numbered pins and made a jumper wire on another 8-pin connector for the even-numbered pins to ground them as described.

Inspired by both the threads on the new 486 motherboard and on the guy who made his own tower faceplate....Took my first dive into Google Sketchup and designed a couple faceplates for home-built XT/AT/ATX compatible retro-PC chassis of my own. Mostly reproducing some systems I have owned. So far I have an XT-clone faceplate and a GEM 386 DX-20 style plate up in the works. It was surprisingly easy. Thinking about cloning a DeskPro 286/8086 style and an AT next.

Based kinda on these...

Did some diagnostics on the newly acquired 400CDT laptop: corrosion on the board and it'll either need repairs or a swap with a working board (got a spare that I can use in the system or to use as a canvas to use my multimeter to find the areas to patch on the corroded board.

PSA: before storing a laptop, take the CMOS/RTC and wake batteries out, including the main battery, even if it's a Li-Ion.

creepingnet wrote on 2022-02-11, 17:31:

Inspired by both the threads on the new 486 motherboard and on the guy who made his own tower faceplate....[...]

Something went wrong with your pics there.

I've upgraded my Asus P2B-S from a 500MHZ Katmai to a 900MHz Coppermine with a Slocket adapter.

The performance difference is very noticeable. No One Lives Forever was a slideshow before and UT99 was barely playable over 800x600 resolution.
Now I can run both games at 1600x1200 resolution.

Did not expect that! 😁

As a bonus, my Voodoo II finally works reliably. I had it in an Abit VH6T before and there were always some problems with the Voodoo.

schmatzler wrote on 2022-02-12, 11:23:

I've upgraded my Asus P2B-S from a 500MHZ Katmai to a 900MHz Coppermine with a Slocket adapter. […]
Show full quote

I've upgraded my Asus P2B-S from a 500MHZ Katmai to a 900MHz Coppermine with a Slocket adapter.

The performance difference is very noticeable. No One Lives Forever was a slideshow before and UT99 was barely playable over 800x600 resolution.
Now I can run both games at 1600x1200 resolution.

Did not expect that! 😁

As a bonus, my Voodoo II finally works reliably. I had it in an Abit VH6T before and there were always some problems with the Voodoo.

It's like magic happening 😀
Sometimes I (used to) install windows with the worst cpu to see the difference with top of the line.

A screenless Dell Latitude CPi D266XT has arrived in the mail today, so I took the time to fully disassemble it and my Dell Latitude CP M166ST for a restoration project. The palmrest on my M166ST had its lower screw posts broken and the clips that held it onto the bottom were broken, so I ended up disassembling both laptops and rebuilding the M166ST with the casing from the D266XT, which was in better condition. I gotta say this was one of the easiest laptops to work on in my experience.

When disassembling the D266XT, I've noticed a burnt transistor on its processor board, which explains why it wouldn't turn on when I tested it. That laptop now serves as a spare parts unit for my M166ST.

Also, I got around to testing my two spare PCI Ethernet cards (a 3Com 3C905B-TXNM and a Realtek RTL-8110) with my Dell Dimension 4600. While the 3Com card worked in PartedMagic, the Realtek card would not detect a network connection on that Live CD. I was able to test the Realtek card on a Debian 8.0 Live CD and it worked on there.

I've had this Wang PC361 386SX box for several years but had only one set of drive rails. These rails are made for this proprietary case and are meant to snap into a cutout on the side. I decided I would finally figure out how to design a facsimile on Tinkercad and print it out on my 3D printer. The original rail is on top. I downloaded a model from Thingiverse and altered it in Tinkercad. It took a while to get the measurements right (prototypes on the bottom), but I finally got it right, and now I can snap in a 5.25" floppy drive as the B: drive.

boxpressed wrote on 2022-02-13, 07:47:

I've had this Wang PC361 386SX box for several years but had only one set of drive rails. These rails are made for this proprietary case and are meant to snap into a cutout on the side. I decided I would finally figure out how to design a facsimile on Tinkercad and print it out on my 3D printer. The original rail is on top. I downloaded a model from Thingiverse and altered it in Tinkercad. It took a while to get the measurements right (prototypes on the bottom), but I finally got it right, and now I can snap in a 5.25" floppy drive as the B: drive.

Good job !
Only vintage thing I did was look thru my old games collections, cannot find a few of the original CD's but stumbled on a 2010 full archive from lucas-abandonware.fr from 2010 and am surprised the website is still up.....

I spent last night replacing the capacitors on an ASUS M2N61-AX motherboard that I got from a friend who was downsizing. This was the first time I've recapped a motherboard (and it won't be my last). Unfortunately, the board still wouldn't post afterwards, what happened was the CPU fan sped itself up to a high speed and the PC speaker kept beeping. I'll be sending this board out to recycling the next time I go to RE-PC. At least I got a free AMD Athlon X2 Socket AM2 CPU of some sort and a heatsink to go with it. In the future, I think I'll put together an AM2 build using that CPU (with a working motherboard). I still have a working Dell OEM Socket AM3 board that I'd like to use in a build, I need to test it thoroughly since I scraped a bit of the silkscreen off when trying to remove its CPU heatsink bracket for my LGA775 C2D XP Gaming build.

Look for broken traces or missing SMD capacitors. This is the most common failure of vintage computer parts if it's not a busted capacitor.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-02-13, 20:37:

Look for broken traces or missing SMD capacitors. This is the most common failure of vintage computer parts if it's not a busted capacitor.

There are no SMD capacitors on that motherboard. Though it's possible that I messed up the traces when I was soldering some of the capacitors, I was having a difficult time opening up one of the capacitor pads to the point where I felt like I might have broken its trace. I was doing the recap in two different times on different parts of the board. First I've replaced the capacitors that were known to be bad (most of them were bulged) a few days ago, didn't fix it. Then I've replaced every capacitor of the same brand last night (this was when I was having trouble opening up one of the pads), still didn't make a difference. I think this was a dead motherboard to begin with.

In the last 2 weeks, I finished up a RGB2HDMI unit, which is a pi zero hat that can take in oldschool rgb (you can also solder dedicate it for analog video signals) and output HDMI. I followed Adrian's digital basement footsteps to set this all up with a Macintosh Classic 1.

This week, I got a cheapo USB hdmi capture device (that can reach 1920x1080p @ 30 Hz) which is more than sufficient for capturing gameplay, but not playing off of, so I got...

a powered HDMI 1in2out splitter so that the feed also goes in real time on a 2nd monitor.

I thus have a direct video + audio feed STRAIGHT from the BARE METAL of a Mac Classic, which I could be using for streaming.

I revamped a youtube channel which I call:

'1Bit Fever Dreams'

heh.

I took a few recording snippets:

Dark Castle part 1 (I have the shield, getting the fireballs, attempting the last section):

https://youtu.be/XoniJ9ftmoA

Shufflepuck Café (Biff destroys me)

https://youtu.be/3yZB6Woe1kU

More ShufflePuck Café (Eneg destroys me)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IiDuwjxtT8

Déjà Vu from Rubicon Publishing (not to be confused with the adventure game from ICOM simulations)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGeQf3Ilzu0

Crystal Quest (reached a new high score!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR1sfqhJMdE

Tested the 4 outlets: 2 in my bedroom (both work) and 2 in the bathroom (open ground) since the hallway, bathroom, basement (stairs), and my room lights are flickering constantly.

Going to look in the switch areas and the outlets to look for any breaks in the connections (I turned the fuse off for safety reasons) and get that issue fixed.

First 3D-printed spare part I've ever made 😀 Repair part for my IBM monitor control door hinge. I only replaced left side, but right side might need some attention too. It is cracked, but still hanging in there, so I left it alone this time.

Glued in place.

Overview. I think the door lines up quite nicely. Gaps are even.

Door open. I considered painting the part, but decided not to. It would just get scratched and look worse.